George Bush, The Last Penguin: Does California Need a Federal Government? Does New England?

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 12/20/07

In a historic series of government failures – Iraq, Katrina, Gitmo, habeas corpus, waterboarding, the fallen dollar – the EPA’s rejection of states’ emission efforts today will perhaps prove to be the most far-reaching. For the first time since 1865 the states – this time the Northeastern and Western states – face a crisis which sends them to oppose Constitutional convention and possibly Constitutional law to make their own way in the world. We are seeing the beginning of a new regionally-based citizenship. Perhaps we are seeing the end of federalism. Does California still need a federal government? Does New England?

In the case of California, the question should be can California survive a federal government? Ask yourself, if you were an internal country with its own unique culture and with an economy the size of France and an outside force kept reaching in to take your kids from your family and press them into military service (or national service); if it’s shamanic economic theories and actions virtually killed your housing market and sent a recovering but healthy state economy deep into debt; if its head-in-the-sand environmental policies formed and fulfilled by oil and auto lobbyists and a very few Texas oil families in cahoots with Saudi princes turned the bottom part of your state into an uninhabitable fire and dust zone, annually causing death now going into the hundreds and into the thousands, at one point you would have to ask yourself, what are my options?

At the beginning of the war on Iraq I wrote here that the country, state by state and region by region, had one choice and that choice was: Do we want to join the rest of the world; a world we created in law and in outlook since Yalta, or do we want to join the Crawford Ranch? We face the same question today.

In California, attitudes reached consensus in the second election of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger when he won the most liberal precincts in San Francisco and some of the most conservative in the state. In a landmark speech a few months back Schwarzenegger showed commitment we have not seen in our national people in his efforts to bring a cleaner environment to California. It was a prescient moment in which he said that green business and a thoughtful approach to the world around us would be the way of the future and everyone will get on board, all but “the last penguin” floating off by itself on a tiny scrap of iceberg.

It was a good metaphor; we live in a moment when animal familiars are all the rage, in movies like The Golden Compass. Surely the penguin is the totem animal for an entire generation; a horde, uniform in mind and stripe, walking together into the sunset without the political will or individual character to take the actions that need to be taken. And substituting instead the switching off of an occasion light switch or conspicuously wearing a sweater around the office. The sweater was the new initiative at Bali – I expect to see Bush the Little wearing one soon. These are denial initiatives; they remove the individual from responsibility by creating the personal illusion of “doing something.” But they are at least prelude to an environment of real action in the next generation (the non-penguin or “anti-penguin” generation), which is the new one rising.

One of Governor Schwarzenegger’s initiatives is a “hydrogen highway,” a pioneering set of way stations leading up from southern California to Sacramento north to Vancouver, so that hydrogen-fueled cars, which emit no harmful waste and can be fueled by power generated from algae farms or nuclear plants, can be driven the length. Here in the Northeast the initiative exists to continue the path from this end, much as the railroad was started at both ends and united at the middle two centuries back. It would begin in Montpelier, VT, and on to Burlington. And Quebec and the Canadian provinces in between also have the political will to post stations around Montreal and across the TransCanada highway, linking up with the California initiative in Vancouver.

So what stops this? It is the god which the visionary Aldous Huxley called Ford. Like most, it is a god with a dual nature; Ford and General Motors and as it was said at the beginning, “as goes General Motors, so goes the country.” Which has an ominous ring today.

Like so many of that century with their horde waves of futurism, fascism, communism, consumerism, deconstructivism and reconstructivism, it is a god that failed.

The tailpipe standards California adopted in 2004 oppose the car lobby and the Bush oil family and its adjutant, Dick Cheney, the Dark Penguin. It would force automakers to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2016. But under the Clean Air Act, CA needs a federal waiver to implement.

Note the language: Clean Air Act; a federal program committed to keeping the air dirty. It is the fate of all Twins that they look like, no matter how different they are. This is the language of the U.S.S.R. in the old Politburo days and the sound and syllogism which the Dark Penguin speaks today; the language that Huxley's lightly totalitarianated hordes - people without places marinated exclusively in their generational culture and with tiny telephones the size of roaches dangling from their ears, willfully on the path of Prozac and public radio - listen in. And if penguins could speak, it would be their language as well. Likewise, when the EPA rejected the advanced standards brought forth by Schwarzenegger, as in the Soviet tradition, it set up its own program; a program which brought forth actually laughter and booing at the recent climate conference in Bali.

But Arnold is not alone. 12 other states – most in the Northeast but a few in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest – are on board with him. And so is Canada and so is Europe and much of Asia and most of the world. All of those other states are now prevented from going forward by the feds.

The question for them – for us – is as it was at the beginning of the war on Iraq; do we want to join Boy George at the Crawford Ranch or do we want to join the world? But today the circumstances are different and so is the country: today we go forward with Arnold.