“There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.” It was the response of President Kennedy to NBC reporter Sander Vanocor at a press conference on April 21, 1961 as his way of taking responsibility for the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. Where did JFK get it? The line of descent can be traced to the movie “The Desert Fox” and before that to Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s Foreign Minister.
Why mention it? It could apply to popular manias and their failures. A fashionable idea is embedded in the imagination of a sizeable segment of the population, i.e., fathers, and once it falls out of fashion due to its real-world effects, its parentage is forgotten, i.e., an orphan. It disappears into deep space.
The paramount craze of today is “going green”. It is both science and anti-science: a blending of real science – but without cost/benefit modification – and many pop-culture phobias. They are sourced in ideological, theological, and secular-utopian notions. We are experiencing the frenzies in everything from forest management, food production, energy renewables, zero-carbon, and the eco-iconic electric vehicle. We are quickly learning unfortunately that, contra to a one-with-nature ecotopia, the reality is obsolete water projects, massive fire storms, an unreliable grid producing rolling blackouts, decaying energy infrastructure, skyrocketing energy prices, outrageously expensive grid-dependent and unreliable personal transportation, and a smaller and more costly food supply. If you haven’t noticed, some of this “future” is playing out in Sri Lanka.
In many conversations going back decades, I’ve heard people express the most fanciful beliefs. Do you remember the cliché of those fleets of oil tankers anchored of the coast during the oil embargos of the 1970’s supposedly as part of the oil companies’ conspiracy to jack up fuel prices? It’s baaaack! Or how about the Non-GMO, Whole Foods fever of today? Or the fanatical and popular in elite circles preservationist forestry policies that produced vast landscapes of dead trees in a drought-prone, dry-summer climate, just waiting for the poorly maintained electrical grid or dry lightning to spark a conflagration? Or the popular war on herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers that promises famine and economic and social collapse (once again, Sri Lanka)? Or the pricey but government-preferred electric vehicle running low on juice that’ll ensure that you can’t get out of the path of a hurricane because of the blackout from category-five winds and a monstrous sea surge? Or the huge forests of windmill towers and seas of solar panels scarring the landscape that can’t keep the lights on? “Going green” is a rediscovery of life in the Middle Ages. It’s a future of going backwards.
The Dark Ages looms as we fancy a food supply without Safeway – or Kroger, Albertsons, Walmart, General Mills, the Great Plains ocean of grain, and meat packing plants, etc. Anything produced on an industrial scale whether it be lettuce, eggs, bacon, burgers, fryers, Minute Rice, or bread is made suspect. But anything “free range” means less of it and more expensive. Ditto for Non-GMO. The world cannot be fed with farmer’s markets and Jeff Bezos’s boutique Whole Foods. The eco-stuff rots which limit its range of availability. It may taste better and be marginally healthier, but what difference does that make if you can’t get it, or is priced out of the family budget? How are barren cupboards healthier?
Do you think that the equivalent of victory gardens will make a dent? Farmers markets would collapse and quickly run out of product if the throngs who filled the parking lots of Walmart flocked to the stalls and easy-ups on a few acres off I-95. Some actually think that we ought to live on what we personally grow. To do that, everyone must have the equivalent of “40 acres and a mule”, er, tractor (Civil War Order No. 15, Gen. Wm. T. Sherman). But what eco-nut would tolerate the invasion of 330 million people scattered over their wilderness hiking paths? They’re already up in arms about people choosing to live in the land of bears and chipmunks. They even have their own arcane vocabulary for it: Wild Urban Interface (WUI). In other words, places where you oughtn’t be if they get their way. Of course, the irony is that all places at one time or another were WUI’s.
Anyway, who could afford the real estate? Let’s face it, these are the fancies of a hyper-wealthy society with a large cohort of people who can afford to live expensively. Coincidentally, small family size tracks the lifestyle: the fewer disruptive mouths to feed in the family unit, the easier it is to indulge in eccentric, pricey, and ideologically laced lifestyle choices. Speaking of fewer mouths, guess the demographic with one of the lowest fertilities. Non-Hispanic whites dredge near the bottom of all groups at 1.64 children per woman (2018). Non-Hispanic whites in the District of Columbia are even less productive at 1.012, demographic suicide levels. This element – government workers, white collar and overwhelmingly college educated – has much in common with the residents of college communities, bi-coastal exclusive developments, Silicon Valley, and other areas of like complexion. Maybe this is the reason for their enthusiasm for massive immigration, legal or illegal, since they can’t rely on their own organically produced offspring to provide the medical supports and entitlement contributions to keep them comfortable in the autumn of their lives.
So, they grow old and are free to wallow in the hang-ups of their youth. Prominent among them is the “nuclear” bogeyman. A steady diet of movies (“Them”, Godzilla, The China Syndrome, et al) and classroom atomic bomb drills in their youth nurtured nightmares of looming apocalyptic dooms. The boomers and X’ers transmitted the aversion to their sparse offspring. A nearly permanent political base against nuclear power has arrived.
“Nuclear” was a monster like Godzilla, but their depiction of it is in open conflict with the worship of the newest deity in an increasingly secular age, Gaia. Combine the fear with the climate-change hype and we have only the latest in a long line of self-negating philosophies. Don’t like nuclear power because characters played by Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda, and Michael Douglas said so in a movie (The China Syndrome)? Well, we still can’t have it even if it’s carbon-free and safe and will help address all manner of Chicken Little catastrophes that’ll befall mankind like category ten hurricanes and the oceans lapping onto the Obamas’ estate on Martha’s Vineyard, and further reinforced in another movie (An Inconvenient Truth) produced by the politician-Moses of our time, Al Gore, and followed by a steady stream of more (The Day After Tomorrow, etc.).
So, the message is no abundant and affordable energy, and we must accept less and live with more aggravation and disruption in our lives. We are told that we can’t have fossil fuels, which is plentiful in our own backyard. Thoughts of R & D in carbon capture are verboten, still born in the crib. And don’t dare build those efficient, safe, cost-effective Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s) for carbon-free and plentiful electricity. Instead, it’s small in everything from calorie intake to living space to appliances to travel distances.
With the political assault on more land for housing, we’ll be crammed into more Hell’s Kitchens, infected with crime due to DA’s who are committed to ending incarceration, infested with pandemic-level contagions, and public transportation where the filth, threats, and smells of the outside envelop you on the inside. Is this where Pete Buttigieg plans to bike to work?
Going green isn’t a better world. If we’re not careful, the DNC plans to give it to us. We may wake up one morning with the urge to escape the workers’ paradise, but the all-electric Chevy Bolt is dead because of the regular blackout from a grid connected to overburdened windmills and solar panels. Anyway, where are you going to go? The roads are unpassable because of striking road workers and less of the infrastructure money going to asphalt and more to expanding the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Department. You’ll have to invest in a Sharpie and carboard to beg your way to the expanding homeless camps on the outskirts adjacent to the lavish, walled, and secure estates of the DNC donor class.
Now, all of this assumes that you still have a job in a country governed by the fairy tale principles of Modern Monetary Theory. And if you did, would it make any difference in the chronic inflation from the fire-hosing of the country in paper money? What began as a scheme with many fathers will soon be orphaned. The parentage relegated to the misty past.
RogerG
Sources:
* “Fertility Rates In The United States By Ethnicity”, World Atlas, at https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/fertility-rates-in-the-united-states-by-ethnicity.html