Life in the black

“Because after all,” Bob said, “any wealth gained by a person beyond what he can produce by his own labor must have come at the expense of nature or at the expense of another person. Look around. Look at our house, our car, our bank accounts, our clothes, our eating habits, out appliances. Could the physical labor of one family and its immediate ancestors and their one billionth of the country’s renewable resources have produced all this? It takes a long time to build a house from nothing; it takes a lot of calories to transport yourself from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Even if you’re not rich, you’re living in the red. Indebted to Malaysian textile workers and Korean circuit assemblers and Haitian sugarcane cutters who live six to a room. Indebted to a bank, indebted to the earth from which you’ve withdrawn oil and coal and natural gas that no one can ever put back. Indebted to the hundred square yards of landfill that will bear the burden of your own personal waste for ten thousand years. Indebted to the air and water, indebted by proxy to Japanese and German bond investors. Indebted to the great-grandchildren who’ll be paying for your conveniences when you’re dead: who’ll be living six to a room, contemplating their skin cancers, and knowing, like you don’t, how long it takes to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh when you’re living in the black.”

-Jonathan Franzen, Strong Motion

I’ve been thinking about this passage a lot since I first read it three weeks ago. It’s been in my head like a song lyric that you just can’t let go of. These things happen. Part of it is probably that it’s just very good writing-- the rhythm, the natural flow of it, the self-referential payoff at the end-- Franzen is a badass motherfucker. But I think also, in part, I’m struck by how similar the tone is to a lot of what I’m seeing in the news and popular counterculture of late. When Franzen wrote Strong Motion in 1992, it seemed entirely possible, and indeed very probable, that the extravagant, consumerist lifestyles of much of Western culture would not bankrupt us (in any sense) for several generations, if at all. What I’m starting to see now leads me to believe that this is not the case.

The world we know is based almost entirely on petroleum. Not just our cars, but everything, from electricity to agriculture to the clothes on our backs. It’s all oil, all of it. It’s the lifeblood of the civilization that we’ve built for ourselves. Lately I’ve been seeing more and more books with titles like The End of Oil, Twilight in the Desert, or Crossing the Rubicon. I turn on the television, and experts and non-experts alike are using terms like Hubbert’s Peak and The Long Emergency. I have, over the past several months, discussed very seriously with knowledgeable, informed people, the possibility of another Great Depression in the coming decade or two. There is talk of war. It seems very likely that we might lose. Everyone I know seems sure that the world will change in our lifetime. No one seems to know into what.

I am slowly coming to terms with the notion that we have very likely been running in the red for too long. My parents’ generation, and the generation before that, ransomed the future on the hope that the good times might never end, that we’d find some trick to make it last. But nothing lasts forever; the wells are running dry, and we’re not the only superpower anymore. The party is coming to an end, and I am very much afraid now that my generation is going to be the one to foot the bill. We were born at the end of the American Century. We are coming of age in a civilization that bears all the hallmarks of being in decline. I don’t know what happens next, and it worries me. I think that this century will be a bad one for empires.