If you find you're on the wrong road, turn around
On investigative journalism, the Strait of Hormuz, and the unforgiving qualities of reality in the face of people who just won't learn
In 1986, prolific author David Halberstam published “The Reckoning”, an enormous book dedicated to chronicling the then-contemporary crisis in the American automotive industry. In the course of 747 paperback pages, Halberstam names a range of individual heroes and villains. But the turning point in the story overall is the series of oil price shocks of the 1970s that rocked a domestic automotive industry that had no serious plans to pivot to cars that didn’t guzzle gas thriftlessly.
■ The real villain, it turns out, was a haughty institutional culture that refused to assess external threats, demand self-improvement, or engage with the likely consequences of its actions. Success bred complacency, and complacency poured accelerant on the flames of willful ignorance. Had the book been written later, it could have treated the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies of 2009 as natural and predictable extensions of the original story.
■ Reality doesn’t often forgive long-term, structural obstinance. The saying goes that if you find yourself on the wrong road, the first step is to turn around. The funny thing about ego is that it often keeps people from admitting to mistakes, even when those mistakes are obvious in the immediate short term. But what makes that behavior even daffier is that the longer people choose to compound their bad decisions by doubling down, the worse those mistakes end up tarnishing their legacies.
■ Certain things should be staggeringly obvious by now, because they were made obvious to everyone half a century ago. One of those obvious things is that a chronic vulnerability to the output of petroleum from the most tempestuous parts of the Middle East makes for instability in the entire economy. With on-again, off-again exchanges of fire with Iran underway and a still massively unsafe Strait of Hormuz still crippling the Persian Gulf, it should long ago have become obvious that much more than environmental interest weighs in favor of breaking the economic dependency on petroleum.
■ For certain goods and activities, there’s no substitute -- but for any role where an alternative can be found, it’s a matter of national security to break the chains to oil. Whether the nation involved is petro-rich (like the United States) or oil-dry (like Japan), the same volatility has been in the air for more than 50 years. Complacency doesn’t work.
