You have to feel sorry for the man who ends up in the Oval Office the next four years. He’ll preside over the singular event of the global oil production peak and all the turbulent emanations from it, including the de-stabilization of most of the complex systems that the industrial world depends on: agriculture, finance, trade, transportation, and electric power generation. Oh yes, and peace between nations, which is more a condition than a system.
      This, of course, is exactly what the American public is not hearing about from the candidates or, for that matter, what they are not putting to the candidates in any forum of public discussion, whether it is a staged debate or the editorial pages. But over the next four years the public will find out exactly what the War in Iraq has been about — not a favor for Haliburton by Bush & Cheney, but a natural consequence of the public’s own sick dependence on cars.
   I was in Dallas two weeks ago, a wilderness of eight-lane freeways and sodium vapor lamps. I had to remind myself that this is how most Americans live. The so-called “city” was a product of the late 20th century cheap oil fiesta. If you live there, driving is mandatory, and lots of it, over heroic distances. It took me half an hour (and forty bucks) to get across just the north side of the sprawling town to the airport at five-thirty in the morning when the traffic was still light. This is exactly the kind of place that is going to be in deep trouble over the next four years. There are scores of places like it all over America. The people who live in them will be full of consternation and gall when their chosen living arrangement begins to fail them. They will blame whoever is sitting in the oval office.
      “Why didn’t you tell us something awful was going to happen?”
      ”Why didn’t you ask?”
       The main pretension of the Presidential campaigns is the idea that the next President will have any ability to control the events that will most determine how we live in this country. The federal government is likely to become more impotent and therefore increasingly irrelevent.
       ”Why didn’t you do something?”
       ”We didn’t want to upset you.”
        What was the “truth” about the American condition in 2004? The truth was that we had made some bad choices about how we live and that events would soon compel us to change drastically whether we liked it or not. Nobody wanted to hear that, and no political leader dared say it.
      John Kerry has made some joking references to the immense wealth he married into, but a few years from now it will not seem very funny to a public with no jobs, steeply declining standards of living, and no way to get around. Nor will George W.Bush’s family advantages go unnoticed. Personally, I am allergic to Marxist doctrine, but I believe nonetheless that a few years from now, the American public will want to eat the rich. Some demagogue will arise out of the NASCAR mob and then the real fun will begin.

Nice watch, huh?