Nonlinear times

The Portland Cement Association defines progressive collapse as "a situation where local failure of a primary structural component(s) leads to the collapse of adjoining members, which in turn leads to additional collapse." This dread phenomenon in structural engineering was the immediate cause of mass casualties in the 1995 right-wing terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.*

Progressive collapse also can occur under stresses that are otherwise nominal, but produce catastrophic failure when members or materials have been under-designed or have been subject to accelerated degradation that cannot support a design peak load. [Editor's note: at this point I welcome and invite the intervention of our local mystery technical phenom, who may go by the moniker of Professor Mahatma Kane Jeeves, to correct my imprecisions or to augment my explanations if necessary, or both.] As a general matter, progressive collapse considered a nonlinear event.

Since I first began to grasp the potential magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon oilwell disaster I've felt that this event --- which would probably be containable in an alternate universe in which U.S. democracy can marshal resources to serve the public good about as effectively as it did in the 1930s and '40s --- could start a cascade of environmental, economic, and political failures that industrial age institutions just won't be able to cope with. Our institutions are already run through with stress cracks and fatigue. The human institutions, public and private, have been rotting from the head for 30 or 40 years, and now they're necrotic right through to leech-filled guts. The parasites are killing their hosts. They think it's funny, and that the chaos they create means they're smart. They don't believe the concept of extinction applies to them.

I don't like my own melodramatics any more than I like anyone else's. But just consider how a few major stresses could play out directly, and consider the feedback loops that could get started. We have one of the largest environmental catastrophes of the industrial era, but it's not only making pretty birds oily and dead but also destroying the ecological services that provide income for tens of thousands of families along the "south coast." Meanwhile, rich people will not stand for restoring personal and corporate marginal income tax rates to a level that can sustain emergency government response to natural disasters, industrial disasters, or disastrous levels of U.S. unemployment. Bigots and know-nothings blame their usual suspects. Cracker politicians and infotainment media deliberately inflame them. At this point in U.S. history it is no longer unacceptable to puke hate speech over the public airwaves or in "mainstream" political gatherings:

mass unemployment + inflamed bigotry + paranoia = mob action       Eq (1)

What if the Gulf disaster, perhaps with help from a few hurricanes, makes large portions of the coast, including New Orleans, literally uninhabitable both owing to environmental impacts and the fully played-out impacts of a collapsed regional economy. Is it possible that tens of thousands of people --- or hundreds of thousands --- might be displaced? If so, maybe it's a good thing that we have a nice surplus of (decaying) housing stock; they all can move to California, Vegas, and Florida (at least until the tarballs and dead seabirds reach the latter). And don't forget that if nothing else, the BP blowout will most certainly inflate energy prices. And also don't forget about the conversion of the U.S. banking system into a multi-level marketing plan, like Amway and Ponzi schemes.

Meanwhile, I don't understand, in any technical sense, the financial pathology afflicting the Eurozone or what China is doing to the world economy, but many reality-based people who are savvy to those kinds of things are scared about what they could do to us. North Korea and Israel have both done a great service to the cause of international instability over the past 2 weeks. Significantly, the one hot zone stresses the U.S. and China in a big way, and the other stresses the U.S. and its oil protectorates (and oil antagonists).

And no, Chauncey, the "free market" will not prevent a progressive collapse, or stop it once it begins. We don't have a user's manual or a helpdesk for this sort of thing. I've been writing about various aspects of this looming situation for several years as if each aspect is at least somewhat independent of the others. That's because I came to this point in history believing that a robust constitutional democracy and a consensus about the role of government provided all of the stability necessary to break big problems into smaller ones, and then solve them. But the black spew has got me worrying that there will be a much larger price to pay for the Reagan Revolution than crumbling infrastructure and a 3-decade white collar crime spree. It's an event that deeply stresses the economy, the environment, civic peace, and possibly geopolitics.

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* Although the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, also has been attributed --- supposedly conclusively --- to this phenomenon, I feel certain that future historians and forensic engineers (probably members of whatever superior civilization buries our own decadent one) will document something very much to the contrary.