We’re Buying Our Way To Extinction

Nothing makes me crazier than listening to a Philip Morris spokesperson defend cigarettes. Unless it’s knowing that representatives of the U.S. nuclear power industry are cold-calling the world to sell a product they know is neither safe nor cost-effective (we haven’t built a new plant in a generation).

But what really stops me short is butt glue. Butt glue, it seems, is roll-on stuff used to keep your swimsuit from crawling into the crack.

OK, now they’ve done it. I laugh. I weep. Then, in my thrashing hysterics, I attain enlightenment and see it clearly: We are rolling our way to obsolescence.

We’re going the way of Edsels, manual typewriters and dinosaurs. We’re history, future fossils halfway processed for the Alaska pipeline.

And what is putting us there, we eminently reasonable, well-heeled, educated American elite?

Well, how about something simple, like the marketplace. Or, more plainly put, by the megacapitalists.

Ohhhh, you say, Russia just disintegrated like a soggy jigsaw puzzle, and all the world wants what we have.

Yes, no doubt. Russia even has the Mafia now. Can we get above red-baiting now that there are no real reds and look squarely at what we have?

What we have is not working. We have a system of wildly misplaced priorities and obscenely concentrated power. While American families are homeless, Forbes magazine boastingly lists 400 people whose net worth must be $310 million just to make the list.

The Catholic Reporter claims that the top 1 percent of the population holds 48 percent of the wealth. This is not just money, it’s power - legislative and judicial, on university boards, in lobbies and PACs, political campaigns, in business and budget decisions.

While the net worth of billionaires goes up, the net results of their power - business, political and cultural - exact a price.

Kansas wheat fields produce a chemical froth after a hard rain - but they yield 200 percent more than the old days.

More than 600 old people died in a heat wave in Chicago, a city with trillions of square feet of air-conditioned shopping. Code Blue builds Miracle Boost jeans for your teen daughter that add up to a 1-inch lift to her backside.

You see, it just doesn’t make sense. Tush lift for teen girls is a bogus need, created to make a buck. But because investing for profit is essential and investing in children isn’t, we have tush jeans rather than abundant day care.

Einstein has come and gone, and we have yet to apply the notions of connectivity, reciprocity and interdependence to the economy. We can’t even spell community. We are in the La Brea Tar Pit of hierarchic and linear models, and sinking fast.

What it comes down to is that market-driven capitalists produce weird stuff, like cigarettes, butt glue and nuclear power plants whose carcasses must be guarded for 2,000 years.

Is it finally safe to say that this is successful for a few and toxic to the many, without arousing the screaming ghost of Joe McCarthy?

Now, the secret is that we all know this. The environmental folks know it; union members, scholars, mental health workers know; media grunts, worried parents, the 61 percent who don’t vote know it; fast-food workers, defeated farmers, undervalued school teachers, crack kids and minimum-wagers know it.

We all know because we live it. We live in a swamp on the edge of Fat City. The fact that we are mired in the muck of denial, fear and petty consumer stupor makes it hard for us to realize we are going down with Investor-Rex, cousin to T-Rex, a monster whose maniac metabolism drove him from prey to prey without rest.

Can we reform capitalism, soften it? Could we limit private profit to a certain percent, or a day of the week, say Mega Monday?

I don’t know. Could the dinosaurs have moved south, worn pants and learned to eat with a fork?

Capitalism is a system built on the ever-upward spiral. If 2 percent profit is good this year, then 3 percent is imperative next year by any means necessary, including 5-year-old Pakistani children chained to rug looms. It’s like someone continuing to take breaths, and more breaths, and more breaths, without exhaling. After a while, POP!

Once upon a time in the future, another weird life form will take over. These future species will ask - just as we ponder about Atlantis, the Mayans and the dinosaurs - why did they disappear? Could a whole civilization have died of hubris and myopia?

Naaaah. What they won’t be able to imagine is that we all put on butt glue at once, sat down to watch TV and never got up.

xxxx