When darkness comes, who will take the fall for failure?

"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be.

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick you head out and yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

— Fictional newscaster Howard Beale in the 1976 motion picture, "Network."

I sometimes wonder what it will take for Americans to get up out of their chairs today and yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" The thought comes to mind seeing the sheer stupidity of the ongoing debate on Capitol Hill and on the presidential campaign trail concerning what should be done in response to the soaring price of gasoline at the pump and the widespread inflation it is fueling.

Let's understand one thing at the start. The world market for oil is not a free market. The law of supply and demand does not function when the supply side of the equation is manipulated by a giant cartel, in this case OPEC, and its perhaps unwitting facilitator, Big Oil. Let's call this what it really is: a deliberate attempt by America's enemies to destroy our economy and bring our nation to its knees. Yes, we are in a real war. We just haven't done a very good job of identifying who it is we should be at war with, much less how we should fight it.

A vast transfer of wealth is taking place in the world. The fruits of Western civilization, labor and ingenuity are flowing insensibly to repressive and backward regimes that by an accident of political geography sit on vast reserves of oil and natural gas. And what is Washington doing to end this senseless dependancy? Fiddling like Nero while Rome burned?

Democrats want to tax the "windfall profits" of the oil industry as if this tax would not wind up on the backs of consumers. They want to keep in place the insane ban on drilling our own proven and potential domestic oil and gas reserves. Republicans want to drill in Alaska and in our coastal waters to lessen the need for foreign imports. Where were they when they controlled for seven years the White House and the Congress? The presidential candidates support "cap and trade" legislation that almost certainly will drive energy prices in America even higher.

Doesn't anyone remember the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, shortages, long lines at the pump, Nixon's wage and price controls, Jimmy Carter's stagflation, the misery index, etc.?

If the policies of Democrats and Republicans take effect, you can bet your SUV and your $4-a-gallon gasoline (soon to be $5) that it's going to be a Yogi Berra deja vue all over again.

Only this time it will be worse. We have not built a new refinery in 30 years and must now import a substantial amount of gasoline. We've put so many regulatory roadblocks in the way of nuclear power plants (and coal-fired plants) that it takes years to go through the permitting process. How long has the not-in-my-back-yard crowd kept Yucca Mountain from becoming our much-needed national repository for nuclear waste?

Thanks to chemistry, many things that were made of wood or glass are now made of oil-derived plastics. You cannot get away from petroleum products used in packaging, preserving and transporting the things we eat, drink and use in our everyday life. We are wedded to oil for years to come, whether we like it or not.

One of our "bright" ideas is the big subsidy we pay to distillers of corn-based ethanol even though we know manufacturing ethanol requires more petroleum-fueled energy than the equivalent ethanol it produces, and that this diversion of the corn crop contributes to the explosion of food prices that is destabilizing much of the developing world.

Nutty? Crazy? You bet. And who will take the blame for the fix we are in? Not the politician who entered office on promises and came out on alibis. Not the starry-eyed idealist who will never be happy until everyone in America is commuting by golf cart or bicycle, 20 miles each way, to work.

Not the defender of the snail darter, and who knows how many other non-human life forms on this spinning planet we call home. Who will take the blame? No one. When the lights go out, when darkness comes, all will try to make the case that it didn't happen on their watch.

But it did.

R.L. Schreadley is a former Post and Courier executive editor.