Early Warning  

Last week Mrs Studebaker, our daughter, Avanti, and I went to visit the George Washington Museum in Morristown, NJ. The Museum itself was closed due to construction, but the mansion where he lived was open, and it was a very instructive and insightful display as to how people lived before petroleum. It was only a few generations after the Revolution that oil was discovered in Pennsylvania, and America was drop kicked directly front and centre into the Petroleum Age. I would argue that the age of the American Empire is almost directly coincidental to that resource. While it is true that the european invasion of North America was a rapacious disaster for the locals - starting with a mass death from smallpox, and culminating in death camps and forced migrations - that particular brand of murder and imperialism was largely limited to the North American continent, and the American Ruling Elite hadn't yet dreamt of the global hegemony it now enjoys.

The addition of oil to the mix is what made America's global empire possible, as it directly leapfrogged the coal powered weed of the British Empire. This leapfrogging was aided, in no small part, by the tiny brained tribal battles of Europe's idiotic fratricidal warfare. And before this oil fueled leapfrogging, the European immigrants lived rather dire lives in America, and the Morristown settlement was no exception. The houses were, for the most part, small hovels centered around a hearth. In Morristown, the largest house was the one that was Washington's HQ for the winter there. Even by today's standards, it was a large house, but we had driven through endless acres of McMansions that were larger. The winter Washington spent in Morristown made Valley Forge look like a picnic. Valley Forge had breaks in the cold - the winter in Morristown was one of the coldest ever on record.

The ground in Morristown is similar to much of that part of the country - thin soil on top of a hilly rocky base - not very good for farming. The winters are cold and snow is common. The Summers are hot and filled with mosquitos. Not an optimal location. Today, many thousands of people call it home, as they bask in their centrally heated and air-conditioned homes, many of which are much larger than the mansion Washington called home, and most of them much larger than the hovels the peasants lived in at the time of Washington.

During the winter, sometimes parts of the big house were left unused as they were too hard to heat. Note: this is how Washington, a member of the ruling class, lived. The servants who lived there were crowded into a few small rooms with low ceilings.

There was a book for children in the heated trailer next to the house. It talked about how different the life of a child was in the 18th century. At the age of 12, children were given adult responsibilities, and girls were often married off a few years later. Schooling was limited to the barest necessities of reading, writing, and simple arithmetic. Books were rare and expensive. The evening meal was the largest and it took much of the day to cook. People worked, all the time. Knitting was a continuous occupation, as was the carding and spinning of yarn. In fact, people would load up a spinning wheel on a horse just to go visit a friend. Women would often get together and spin thread as a social occassion.

Due to the local soil conditions, farming was hard and continuous. Because houses didn't have the luxury of fibreglas insulation, and houses were built without precision saws and tools, homes were often drafty affairs with low ceilings and small windows. Trees were cleared quickly, to make way for farms and to be used as wood. Thanks to replanting and the advent of petroleum, there are as many trees in New Jersey now than at any time since the arrival of Europeans - in fact, by 1900, much of NJ was clear-cut rolling hills of farm land. I walked back to the mansion and stood in the upper hallway looking out over the Museum grounds, and that's when I had a Syriana Moment.

I was thinking of the Matt Damon character talking to the prince of Syriana:

"You want to know what we think of you? We think that 100 years ago you people were living in tents and chopping each other's heads off, and we think that's exactly where you're going to be in another hundred years."

I looked out the window at the parking lot full of SUVs and minivans. I looked in the sky at the contrails of jets flying off to distant parts of the globe. I looked at the rocky eaten soil, and the spare grey trees. I thought that General Washington probably looked out that same window at similar trees - shivering thin midwinter sticks - and that he gazed at a similar broken land. Where the asphalt parking lot now sits filled with gas guzzling wagons of heated suburban comfort, was probably a collection of meagre frozen tents full of enlisted men and disease, huddled together against the cold.

And then I thought:

"You want to know what I think of you? I think 200 years ago you people were scratching out a miserable existence on this crappy rocky soil, and that's exactly where you're going to be in another 200 years."