Our valiant Prez once again in a recent interview shared his insight with Americans that we are “addicted to oil.” The solution? Bush says the country needs to commit critical resources to drilling and oil infrastructure, and build more refineries in order to create more supply. Excellent. This kind of talk implies that Bush once again recognizes the critical need to allocate billions more in Federal funds to create even greater subsidies and tax breaks for corporations that are right now reaping record-breaking profits. What did you expect? A real attempt to develop solar, wind and other renewable energy sources?
The president (whose expertise on the subject of addiction is said to have been built upon a solid foundation of direct experience) seems to have proposed a bold strategy here to cure our ills. If we define addiction as a disease, the approach bears scrutiny to see if it can have crossover potential as a cure for other forms of this same disease.
Let’s deal with just the obvious: perhaps America’s Drug Czar should announce that the country has a drug addiction problem, but that we are taking bold steps to increase production of heroin and cocaine, with the goal of providing every addict enough substance to meet demand.
You see where I’m going with this. We’re talking Enron-style, heavyweight Republican outside-the-box stuff, like “gambling therapy” bus tours to Las Vegas casinos for gaming addicts.
Here is a news flash for Mr. Bush: This “addiction” to oil he has only recently discovered was built into our cities and suburbs, into our transportation systems, our agricultural production systems, our manufacturing systems, and our political structure as a matter of deliberate policy over decades. Millions of Americans and citizens of other industrial societies have been acutely aware for more than thirty years that there are and will continue to be huge social, economic and environmental problems associated with our increasing reliance on oil. Many serious questions, which demand real answers, have also arisen from insightful critiques on the negative effects to society of the huge accumulation of capital and political power as a result of the emergence of oil-based multinational corporate economies with near-monopoly power and nearly unlimited wealth. People have for years been questioning what effect oil depletion will have on the availability and affordability of oil as a reliable commodity into the future. These are not trivial questions, especially in light of our increasing societal dependence on the stuff for survival.
Bush, in typical fashion, wholly enabled by a conspiratorial media wind at his back, addresses none of these concerns in the slightest. Sure, we know that reducing all media presentation to its simplest intellectual level, to create powerful emotional inducements to specific behaviors, is an effective tool for disseminating propaganda and controlling perceptions. Repetitive sloganeering, gross reductionism of complex ideas into simplistic concepts, and appeals to instinct over intellect — all of these are at least peripheral characteristics of fascism. These techniques have already been routinely employed by US corporate media for decades, but they have gained in prominence in recent years. Even so, given the reductionist, paternalistic, pathetically overly simplistic “news” media world of George Bush and his handlers, the master propagandists do not look like masters of anything in this latest effort.
Whereas treatment for many addictions may require a twelve-step program, Bush’s plan reduces the number of steps to two, one of which is entirely passive. Step one: admit you are a junkie. Step 2: Get junk. End of story.
There is not even enough dynamic tension in Bush’s addiction/cure scenario to use it as the basis for the plot of a Hollywood movie. For example, look at The Days Of Wine and Roses, the classic 1962 Oscar winning film about alcoholism and its associated despair, which featured a brilliant performance by Jack Lemmon in his portrayal of a fundamentally decent man caught in the downward spiral of addiction. In that work, the writers felt it necessary that the main character should struggle against his alcoholism. I can’t help but feel the overall dramatic effect might have been diminished if, instead of producing heart-wrenching revelations of his despair in front of his Alcoholics Anonymous group, Lemmon’s character Joe Clay had stood before the group and said, “Hi I’m Joe and I’m an alcoholic. As a matter of fact, I’m headed for the liquor store right now. Who’s with me?”
No, Bush (as is most often the case) gets no credit for originality, insight or scoop when he tells us we are addicted to oil. And while his “cure” for that addiction, i.e., to feed it, would seem to score points for originality of concept in a kind of sick and corrupt way, closer inspection will reveal that there is really nothing original in this concept either. Quite the contrary, feeding America’s oil addiction has always been official policy.
But curiously, Bush does not seem saddened, reflective, sorrowful, etc. in any way by his acknowledgment of the fact that we are an entire nation of oil addicts, in much the same way he seems stoic about the million or so people that have been killed in his oil wars. Of course, GWB, by any measure, is no Jack Lemmon, and thus does not have the depth and range of emotional expression to draw from for his performances. But I have to ding him on this one, more so than usual, and that is no casual statement. If television viewers wanted to see their leader evoke powerful emotions, they would have done better to tune into his dramatic revelation of the hardships and deprivation he has endured as a result of heroically sacrificing golf in solidarity with the war propaganda effort.
As a musician and performer myself, I have learned to recognize a song and dance routine when I see one. But the emotional content in Bush’s delivery of his addiction lament, the oily tone and timbre of it, seemed all wrong. Songs about addiction and its costs, by tradition, have a plaintive, melancholic tone. The archetype for this could be Neil Young’s 1971 hit “The Needle and the Damage Done,” in which the storyteller recounts with horror his gut wrenching observations of the destructive effects of heroin on his compatriots.
Far from elegiac, Bush’s tone was more like that of a sadistic Mick Jagger in the classic Rolling Stones celebration of pride in the humiliation of others, “Under My Thumb.”