If we've learned anything during the Bush Years, it's that we're not
safe, and nothing is sacred. But we've also learned that there's no such
thing as paranoia — that, if anything, we haven't been paranoid enough,
as even the most terrible events turned out to be mere portents of more
terrible events to come. We've learned, in other words, learned in our
bones, that It Can Get Worse. But the question remains: Can we?
Can we get worse? Have we hit bottom yet, as a people? I mean, look to
the future: It's not simply that there is such a variety of apocalyptic
scenarios looming on the horizon, from the economic to the
environmental, from Peak Oil to Peak Water to Peak Food; it's that our
Peak Lifestyle is implicated in just about all of them, and we know that
our Peak Lifestyle is the one thing we're not going to give up without a
fight.
And so give this to global warming: It's another test
case. Because over the last eight years — since our president rejected
the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001 — what we've done with global warming
is what we've done with the war on terror and the war in Iraq and the
authorization and outsourcing of torture and the creation of a security
state and the creation of an insecurity state, in terms of the
marketplace: We've lived with it. We've gotten really good at living
with things during the Bush Years, at tolerating the intolerable. And
while this may sound like another tip of the hat to the incredible
resilience of the American people, it's not: Resilience, after all, is
not what's required in crisis when the crisis is partly of your own
making. Responsibility is. We have heard of the Tech Bubble of the
Clinton Years, the Housing Bubble of George W. Bush. Well, the bubble
that we're living in now — still — is the bubble that's all our own.
It's the Moral Bubble, and it will not be pricked until we take
responsibility not just for the forty-third president's actions but for
our inaction — for all the agreements we've made without
awareness, for all the awareness we've come to without vigilance, for
all the times we've touched the easy, insulating button of our assent.
- Tom Junod, Esquire, February 2009
descensus Averno facilis est