Mencken's Napkin

We are as a nation (and culture) addicted to fossil fuels. I suppose we had to be addicted to something and it had to be cheap and it had to be abundant and we became so addicted to it, and shared that addiction around the world so that now every one has the habit and fossil fuels are no longer the former nor the latter and yet still addictive.

It wasn't until the seventies when the Arab nations exporting oil realized our dependence was so great we might succumb to the temptation to whore out our own mothers for a tankful of the good stuff for the Winnebago. I learned to drive when high test gasoline was less than forty cents a gasoline and the right to always buy it for that price was, we assumed, somewhere in the Constitution. Three and half decades later, welcome to four bucks a pop and the search for the guilty goes on.

You'd think if we're spending more now on imported oil than we were at the height of the Arab Oil Embargo, that we'd be looking to alternatives to the high costs and dicey supply availabilities we are facing and will face every day of the future as a nation. You might even be tempted to believe the people we elect to represent us in our nation's capital might have more than a passing interest in our future since they share it. But you would be wrong.

First and foremost, they're interested in their own futures and as we all know the next election is just around the corner. And when you're running for office, you're only statesmanlike between fundraising dinners on the way to the next baby-kissing contest and county fair. After a while the audience knows the candidate's stump speech as well, if not better, than s/he knows it themselves. And believes even less of it than they do.

And it must be politics that would have one of the two major parties (the more stupid of the two, in my opinion and, yes, name calling never settles anything but I like the feeling), deciding that the armed forces, in this case, the US Navy, cannot, not should not, and WILL not, purchase biofuels if the cost of bio fuels is the same as or greater than the cost of conventional fuels.

For those lacking a decoder ring-with biofuels costing and selling for about 320% more than oil, guess what the Navy is going to have to buy, despite the strategic danger we are in because we cannot produce enough oil in this country to cover 10% of our strategic reserve. Don't get me wrong-I don't grow enough corn to think biofuels are a good idea, but if my kids were named Archer and Midland, I'll bet I'd love the concept and enjoy sipping their older brother Jack after I parked the Massey-Ferguson out in the North 40 someplace..

Meanwhile the wizards of Washington, so quick to search for the guilty everywhere but in their own mirrors, remain ever vigilant in their dedication to their definition of 'the American Way' even if neither they nor us have any idea what the heqq they are talking about. And don't worry about what it all means-because it adds up to nothing written in sand and blown by the wind. We've always been at war with (insert name of your least favorite nation here) and we have the history books to prove it.

If you remember it differently, you remember it wrong and you've picked a dangerous country at a dangerous time to start remembering things wrong. These are times when politicians, finding themselves with cannibals among their constituents, promise them all missionaries for dinner. No worries then about who would say grace.  
-bill kenny