ExxonMobile Advert, Gen X, Changing of the Guard and Rant

Head's Up, people.

I'm good at noticing Things That Are Rediculous, so please, you do not have to smack me with them while I'm watching TV (though, that is where you keep a lot of these Things).

I'm watching the news last night. An ad comes on for ExxonMobile. (disclosure: my grandpa retired from Mobile as one of their gazillions of VPs, which means he worked for you, which means I owe you nothing). Calm, expert sounding, warm-faced people are waxing imaginative and ecologically conscious about the future of our energy needs and working to solve them. The shots are all Traditional Bust of Authority Figure portraits, from mid-chest up. It's all very reassuring in tone (and schmaltzy). And then, gradually (it's a looooooong, expensive ad) all they're talking about is OIL and new, expensive widgets for getting at it, and how much investment all that is going to take. Don't worry, the ad means, there's plenty of oil, we don't need to change energy sources, we're using our Value of the Whole Roman Empire Profits to invest in widgets and exploration and extraction, and never you mind the impending eco-collapse and deaths of billions of people, land and water wars, having to learn to raise and butcher your own meat, weave your own cloth.....

Now, we know they're nervous, Oil Companies, about how much $$$$ they have and how we want to know what in the world they're doing with it. I want them nervous. I don't want their schmaltzy-assed propaganda. I want them and their cadre to get the Memo From the Planet.

It reads: Work with me here, or I will decimate you. --- Love, Kali.

Like the love and reproductive capabilities of women, the planet is exhaustible.

I want them to produce solar panels and home-batteries so cheap that we can buy them at Wal-Mart, put them on roofs all over the world (except for religious and historical buildings), get off the grid, and power up our small, cute, electric cars in order to commute to our local, recently dispersed, centers of corporate work. See, the internets literally mean that we don't have to be In The Office in order to be in the office. Build more trains for long distance travel. Power those with wind and solar electricity too. That host of Living Smaller ideas whack-o hippies and tree huggers have been suggesting for freaking decades.

Everything we to know and do is already thought, half-built, or so obviously suggesting itself that it's not like we can claim we have no idea.

For one: Put gobs of the remaining oil energy into creating the new energy infrastructure so that we can stop burning carbon and killing ourselves. Dammit. That is the message of peak oil, and don't pretend that you don't know that and don't just refuse to play nicely.

This is what has always pissed me off about much of the Greatest Generation and mainstream Boomers (and the uber-wealthy, and lots of patriarchal history): We have a new idea! --- It's the same old idea! Ta-da!

Like, oh, say: dumping economic risk down scale. This was the economic logic of which political system we threw off in the revolution and the New Deal? Come on. You know the answer. That's right: Aristocracy and Robber Baron-ism. The new idea was called NeoLiberalism, but it's just an old idea. The people are a resource, kind of like a coal mine, let's get all we can out of them, ha-ha, another glass of sherry my man? Besides, if we drain them now, they won't be able to afford the costs of these necessary changes, and we win!! No?, then cognac?

(To those of you of that class who are working for good, I do not mean you. I thank you. Cuz, dude/ttes I do not have the scratch you do to leverage.)

A book I came across recently: X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking. Which pretty much sums up my sense of the last 40 or so years of American social, political, and cultural history (backlash, etc.). Since about age 14 my running question has been: How did you people fuck you-name-it up this badly?

You see, there was "America" as I was taught it, and there was America as I was living it. They do not jive.

Which sense of betrayal and outrage and dark astonishment is why I'm jazzed about Obama and the Jonesin Generation (as in jonesin to get things done). I do not think he is the messiah, I do not think he can Fix It All For Me. (My only problem with the Amazingly Strong Hillary was not even really about her, it was just that the past is not where I want to go. Which is totally emotional, and not really fair, and insufficiently feminist of me, but there it was.) I think he, and lots of folk in that generation and mine, have evolved different assumptions and and can create structures so that We can Implement Really New Ideas and Save Souls from Torment and Trouble Here On Earth.

Because, duh, History is the accumulated evidence and force of Decisions People Make and Accede To.

What's happening here,

in our political moment, underneath the gender and race (class, civil rights, respect for peoples of the world, and all that) issues we notice still need our sustained and fierce attention (and some scathing pressure on talking heads to get the hell with it, man),

is...

A Changing of the Guard.

Not just "change" like changing your pants. A shift. Like chaning your self. Gradual, needing some foundation laying, rewarding, enhancing, and totally possible.

It's pretty clear to me that lots of the Greats and Boomers in power (econ, politic) simply don't know or really care (both of which are marks of shame) to clean up the messes they made.

So, get out of the damn way and let us and the Yers and Millennials and Indigos do it. (And you Xers who are driving your two kids to soccer and commuting 40 min each way in an SUV, cut that kind of shit right out. If you're acting like the Me Generation (many Boomers), Stop It. It's just embarassing.)

We will need to consult you, we will need your help, but your deep-structure-level SOP is not working and you can't seem to learn any other tricks.

Note: To those in the G and B generations who are working for the new ideas and the cleaning up, I do not mean you. I am, however, very sad that you are not in charge. Also, for the insanely hard work of getting this country through the middle of the last century, my hat's off, I bow, I sing your praises.

It's just that running our history and the planet right out to the end of its tether is not going to be pretty. See, y'all also just assume that there's enough. And there's not. Not of the material stuff we need to live and improving living for those for whom it sucks. And as for privatization, neo-con, neoliberal thang ya'll have going on and voted for Twice, that's death. Death. The monoculture of consumerism and corporate life --- death.

There's plenty of death for all us. We don't need to make more. Hence my occasional maunderings about what the phrase "culture of life" really means. Hence, this post.

ExxonMobile, stop it with the obviously fake concern for planetary and human well being. It's just insulting the way you did that.

Everybody else: the problems we face are Collective problems. All the individual responsibility and pluck and ingenuity in the world cannot address Collective problems. I mean, it's necessary but not sufficient. We will have to start working and playing together much better than ever.

That's all for now,
PRSC