Apocalipstick

Oh freakin' my. We need to keep things moving here in Arizona.

Like what "things"? Sprawl? Fake urban lakes? Substandard-of-living-wage jobs? What exactly does Arizona produce that must be moved, either within, or out-of-state to create income for us?

A few microchips, maybe. Some turquoise jewelry, I suppose. The occasional college graduate.

Anything else? No, not really.

The only thing we need to move is food, produce, and cheap plastic crap from China into our geographically fantastic state, and in return we move out our mortagages, to the same Chinese that just sold us the $10 computer keyboard, American flag, and genuine Mexican pinata.

We don't make anything much here. Goldwater Republicans, and there's little market for them.

But we consume like crazy, thanks to cheap oil and easy motoring. Isn't that what tourism is all about? How many New York and Japanese tourists hike here to visit the wonders of out state? None. They drive or fly.

"On Wednesday, at a transportation summit sponsored by the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, business and government leaders talked about the need to build freeways faster to keep our economy humming. "

Drive cars and fly planes. In a generation or two nobody will be doing much of either. So why call highway construction "planning?" It's not "planning." It's stupid. It's obsolete. It's a continuation of a great misallocation of resources at the behest of The Great American Nightmare: to own a suburban lawn that requires petrochemical sustenance and mowing regularly.

Lawns, you see, not naturally occuring on this continent, are simply a manifestation of cheap oil, which sponsors their growth with fertilizer and machine maintenance. (So is mid-plains industrial farming.) Even if you hand-mow it with a mechanical person-powered mower, the likes of which I haven't seen in 40 years, and nourish it with organic animal droppings. I bet oil had something to do with production and transport of the foods you need to feed your pets. Even the offal in the litter box is therefore beholden to cheap oil. Funny, that.

It just keeps going on and on.

We could make electric energy, with the abundant sunshine here. But we don't because the center of the earth is full of magically self-replenishing oil reserves, which unfortunately lay under the sands of Araby.