Email this article

History On Full Afterburners

By Rob Schultheis

People are funny. They think they are living in one of the last years leading to the Endtime, Apocalypse, Judgement Day, whatever, when all that is going on is the usual boring routine of small bloody wars, earthquakes and tsunamis, droughts, floods and famines. Then, when the skies are close to falling apart above their heads and the whole fabric of life is being trampled to shreds, they kick back, light up a Limbaughesque Cohiba, and tell themselves that they are living in a Golden Age ad infinitum.

It all began at the end of the second World War, with a discordant convergence of seemingly benign forces. A new generation of anti-viral and anti-malarial drugs, their development hastened by the war, were wiping out or controlling ancient diseases. The accessing of untapped natural resources, coupled with mass manufacture, had opened up a cornucopia of new consumer goods. More people, more possessions, more "wealth": what could be better, right?
Well, wrong. My father used to tell an interesting and instructive story from the immediate aftermath of the war. He had spent the last three years with the 14th Air Force in China, as General Claire Chennault's intelligence guru. On his way home, the Air Force stranded him in the Philippines for a time. One day he witnessed a bizarre scene straight out of Catch-22. Our military was shutting down combat bases as fast as it could, and disposing of equipment and supplies pell-mell: my father watched as U.S. troops armed with 50 calibers held back thousands of impoverished Filiinos at gunpoint and bulldozers crushed millions of dollars of office equipment, electronics gear, furniture, medical supplies and machinery. Welcome to the Age of Wal-Mart, Target and Costco!
All through the post-World War II decades, the Fat Eisenhower Fifties through the Clinton Greed Bubble Era and the Bush Bottom-Feeding Frenzy, the pressure of a soaring global population and an ever-more-wasteful and out-of- control industrial engine (whoever said 2 percent plus annual economic growth is automatically beneficial?) was growing; but it has only started to become clear the last few years that the roller-coaster has peaked out, and the over- crowded car is screeching down, totally out of control.
Over half of the world's tropical forests gone, glaciers shrinking, fish populations plummeting, clean air and potable water disappearing (air pollution in East Asia's metropolises is now omnipresent, and the airborne plume sometimes reaches the continental United States), and it all happened almost before we knew it, in the blink of an eye, right at the apogee of what was supposed to be the Brave New World of instant communication, mass intercontinental travel, and an end to poverty, illiteracy, war and all the rest.
Now the historical process of decline and fall is pedal to the metal, and who knows where we will all crash-land in the end?

Rob Schultheis is the author of eight books. His most recent is The Devil's Teahouse.