Clouds and Portents

Hmmm....four weeks about since last I posted to this most uninspired blog. Life has been pretty uninspiring outside the purely personal, meaning my wonderful grandchildren. I hope that they face a more inspiring and successful future than the one seeming to loom like a dark cloud on the distant horizon.

The political wars are sinking to new depths, led by the Democratic candidates, for a change. First John Edwards suggests that if he and Kerry are elected paraplegics, mentioning the late Christopher Reeve, will benefit so dramatically from federally-sponsored fetal stem cell research that they will arise from their wheelchairs and walk. This flamboyant claim was so self-evidently nonsense that I could just laugh at it.

Then both Edwards and Kerry raised the issue of Cheney's lesbian daughter, which ought not to be an issue anywhere but within the Cheney family. Cheap political theater does not enhance any candidate.

Going back to the world my grandchildren will inherit, here in Chattanooga there are many differences between the city now, and the city I knew growing up. I remember downtown as a smoky place with a smell that reminded me of burnt toast. Coming around the curve leading to the road downtown from Lookout Mountain, many mornings when I went to Baylor I saw a lake of dull yellow-brown smog, punctuated by fumaroles of dark coal smoke from hundreds of industries, and thousands of homes. The collapse of heavy industry in Chattanooga, following the trend within the country as a whole, combined with EPA regulations, has banished that cloud of vaporized industrial byproduct.

The natural beauty of Chattanooga is much more evident, and that is good. The departure of industry, however, has left the economic prospects for my grandchildren very much in limbo. Tourism and its attendant service businesses seem to be the prospective mainstay of Chattanooga's economy. I'm afraid that won't be enough to provide a good range of choices for my grandchildren. Even if the increasing price of oil doesn't put a drag on all tourism, Chattanooga will be a poorer, though cleaner town.

Oil. Talk about dark clouds on the horizon. The developed world is in thrall to a commodity overwhelmingly controlled by nations actively hostile to our culture, our politics, our religious diversity. Freedom is a weak word to countries where most of the population are poor in everything but xenophobia and religious bigotry. The immense wealth represented by the oil reserves in the Middle East seems to benefit only an oligarchy in each of the countries possessing the larger reserves. For the oligarchs, deflecting the discontent within these countries rests on keeping fever-hot the religious and social passions against foreigners, especially the West, especially the U.S.

The invasion of Iraq may have been intended by the Bush Administration to provide a counterweight to these forces, but I see no sign that any such result is likely. Instead, Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as a theater for Al Qaeda. From start to finish the Iraq matter has been mishandled, misunderstood by those who zealously led us there, and now our own best forecast of likely outcomes predicts civil war.

Hubris is a word I increasingly hear in my internal debates. We are mighty, but in what despair will we look on our works in the next ten or twenty years? Will my grandchildren ask me what happened to the United States of America, where did our stature and our beliefs and our will betray us?

I worry. I wish I could hope.