Black gold

Regardless of how the push for heathcare reform turns out, I wonder if we'll be looking back 10 or 20 years from now and wondering why we were so incapable of handling the even bigger issues of the 21st Century, such as the growing danger of the implosion of the oil-based global economy. Author Peter Maass has a new book out called "Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil" and it sounds pretty good; I was stuck by this passage in the New York Times review:

Maass is less interested in crunching oil-supply numbers, however, than in exposing the cruelty and soullessness of human­kind's lust for this "violence-­inducing intoxicant," as he calls it. His book teaches us an old lesson anew: that the true wealth of nations is not discovered in the ground, but created by the ingenuity and sweat of citizens. It's the same lesson the Spanish learned centuries ago when they discovered gold, the oil of their time, in the New World. They piled up bullion but squandered it on imperial fantasies and failed to build enduring prosperity, while destroying the civilizations from which they seized it.

Good thing something like that could never happen again, huh?