Is Insanity Reversible?

Can we talk about Iran, Donald Trump, the Strait of Hormuz, and the murky future of Planet Earth?

From 1908 through 1927, Henry Ford’s company sold 15 million of his Model T. It made Ford insanely rich and turned the United States into a country of paved roads, gas stations, and remarkably independent individuals. Yet it failed in its promise.

The T was a flex-fuel car. It could run on gasoline or ethanol. Ford himself, famously declaring that fuel could be made from any fermented plant material, fully expected the country’s farmers —a third of the population lived on farms in 1910 — to grow their own fuel, as well as their food.

It never happened, owing, not to John D. Rockefeller, as many seem to believe, but to a complicated series of government decisions, mostly on taxes, that suited the oil barons nicely, because the market intervention rendered ethanol unable to compete with petroleum products as a principal internal-combustion fuel.

Even earlier, in 1899, a fellow named Baker started producing a fairly popular electric car. It was gone by 1914, a victim of short battery life, the issue that still plagues a modern revival of the idea.

I am no great supporter of ethanol as a fuel, or of electric cars, but if we used a lot of either, we wouldn’t be faced with the economically crippling effects of $4 gasoline today. In fact, pretty nearly anything other than petroleum would have been a better choice for us. And here’s the thing. It’s still possible to change our choices unless, like your president, people think “we can make a lot of money” by seizing Iran’s oil resources and continuing to poison the planet and trap greenhouse gases in our fragile atmosphere. A little aside on that: by “we” he doesn’t mean riffraff like me.

We might have avoided all this, and perhaps have led the way in averting planetary disaster, but we didn’t. Why not? Because of entrenched financial interests and unbounded greed, accompanied by a Supreme Court, its majority members promoted by those interests, that equates free speech and money. There is not another explanation.

Because giving up is not an option — and because it really might not be quite too late -- I’m willing to argue that it’s not too late to reverse course on global warming and, at a stroke, withdraw our wager on the stability of the least stable region of the world for purposes of energy security. I mean, does it make sense that by plugging up a six-mile-wide choke point for ships, a country provoked to do so can send gasoline prices spiraling into inflation that threatens a global recession? Isn’t there another way? There certain was. Is there now?

The only way to find out if it’s too late or not is to change immediately. And the only way to do that, quite frankly, is to elect Democrats. That’s the truth of the matter, because Republicans have proven themselves incapable of responsible legislation. They deny climate change, think the murder in Iran is justified, albeit on no particular ground, and will not rein in a president who is certifiably a lunatic.

I’ll agreeably concede that this has turned into an angry, almost despairing rant. That’s what we’re reduced to in the face of today’s imbecilic, money-driven politics. I’m sorry.