Energy Woes

I recently had the pleasure of finally graduating college and, even though I participated in the smaller, less guilded ceremony of August, I was surprised to find that our speaker would be Dr. Samuel Bodman, W's Secretary of Energy. Seemed like quite a high level speaker for a crowd comprised mostly of Van Wilder types who were more interested in the what bars they were headed to that night. However, I managed to stave off my own hangover long enough to notice something very interesting about Dr. Bodman's speech.

He began with a trip down memory lane, all the way back to the 1950's and the roots of his own political philosophy- the Cold War. Bodman proceeded to draw many loose parallels between the world of today and the world during the Cold War and he made it well known that many of the tactics utilized in today's energy policy were informed by Cold War experience.

So now it all makes sense. The problem with our nation's foreign policy, energy policy, and even domestic policy is not that our leaders are blind to the world around them. It has to do with their paradigm. These people see the world in black and white, good and evil, Soviet and American terms. Instead of recognizing our problems with terrorists as their own species of conflict, these leaders have chosen to swap them out for Soviets and to fight the good fight the only way they know how.

But I'll take one on the chin for my liberal friends and go ahead and denounce those naysayers to the Iraq war that call it another Vietnam. Iraq is Iraq, terrorism is terrorism, and neither of these things has the least bit to do with the Cold War, save some policy mistakes we made in the region during our stand-off with the Soviets.

The world I see is not a polarized, good and evil, Cold War world. The world I see is nuanced and difficult to explain. The lines of causality for the crises around the world are nebulous and sprawling. In truth, I imagine the people who were living during the Cold War saw it much the same way. It is only the mistake of these few remnants of Cold War era leadership to oversimplify their historical perspective and attempt to apply it to our modern world. That old saying that he who ignores history is doomed to repeat it may be true, but I would add that with the passage of time our perspective changes in such a way as to make it very dangerous to put too much stock in lessons learned from historical situations.

Solutions for modern problems need to involve logic and modern philosophies, not archaic aphorisms gleaned from a misunderstanding of the past. We need to take a long, cold look at ourselves and our environment and go forward together, with some sort of unifying principles that can apply to all people in the world if we ever expect to bring peace and stability to the forefront.