AS LONGTIME READERS KNOW, I’m no conspiracy theorist.
That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the behind-the-scenes leveraging of power and influence.
I just believe it doesn’t work the way the conspiracy people claim. Power in modern-day America doesn’t flow through the Knights Templar or the Bildebungen. It flows through golf-course gladhanding, alumni dinners, and especially the flow of political campaign money. You don’t need to romanticize about the Illuminati–the ugly truth about the power elite is mostly out in the harsh bright open.
This has never been as true as it is with the current Presidential administration.
George W. Bush, appointed by appointed Supreme Court justices, has no electoral mandate and knows it. His First Hundred Days (aside from an overhyped diplomatic rift with China) was entirely devoted to proposing measures to help the only three groups of people he cares about:
- The rich,
- the very rich, and
- the extremely rich.
Well, actually, that’s not exactly the case. Bush fils doesn’t even care about all the rich. He doesn’t care about manufacturing or shipping or agriculture or media or those troubled tech companies.
He only cares about the specific interest groups that funded his campaign–specifically, the oil, mining, and other extraction-based industries.
Which brings us to Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel
Underworld.
The book’s sprawling narrative encompasses many themes, but chief among them is a highly linear sense of American history. DeLillo’s trajectory follows the center of U.S. influence and money away from the Northeast (as symbolized by New York’s onetime domination of baseball) toward the inland west (as symbolized by giant chain-owned landfills).
At the time it first came out, I thought it was a kind of reverse nostalgia piece, a complaint about a trend that had already ended. The Yankees were back in dynasty mode, and finance was considered far more important than industry–especially those boring old resource industries, industries that deal in heavy-dirty things and don’t have hip urban offices with Foosball tables.
Oil was cheap, the metals markets were glutted with third-world imports, and in any event the future was going to be all about “pushing bits, not atoms,” as somebody at Wired once wrote.
I should have remembered something I always said in scoffing at linear-future sci-fi novels: Trends don’t keep going in the same direction forever. There are backlashes, and backlashes to the backlashes.
The Age of W. is such a backlash. Call it the Revenge of the Oilmen. Bush’s sponsors/beneficiaries are the executives who were left behind by yesterday’s allegedly New Economy.
He’s doing his darnedest to put his friends back on top of the power-and-money heap, even if he has to put the whole rest of the country into a recession in the process.
If he has his way, he could try to turn all of America into an economy like that of certain rural Texas counties where a few oil and ranching families own everything and everyone else struggles.
NEXT: The real reason why delivery e-tailers are failing.
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