I was filling in a gap in my semi-regular gorging of Jon Carroll’s archives, which pairs nicely with Mark Morford’s column, like a sedating digestif after the flaming main course struck through with pink hair dye—ineffably for the pubic region because dying the hair on your head just doesn’t cut it anymore—and Bay Area zaniness. Though really it’s not that Carroll lacks zaniness—indeed, he is rife with it even when it’s contained beneath the veneer of a compassionate and reasonable East Bay veteran of life, jack-of-all-understandings and master of none, especially not of life—but that his brand is different and provides a pleasing contrast. Carroll can say in a line or a paragraph what it may take Morford a whole article to embody in his flailing rhetoric; see their respective commentaries on the “Birthers.” Sometimes I prefer to just have it said and sometimes I favor the interpretive skydiving. Often I prefer both—a beat poetry jam with a mosh pit.

Jon Carroll was writing about local food and fine food and sustainability and Michael Pollan and stuff that any burgeoning neo-hippy with wealthy parents to float their idealism worth their salt already knows about. And then he was writing about the recession—or is it a depression now, or maybe just a cataclysm but I prefer “clusterfuck” but then I overuse that viscerally anti-erotic word anyway—and how it and the compendium of nu-food movements have collided into one big messy accident and something died in the crash. While the rescue workers are still slicing their way to the center, I’m pretty sure the victim was the innocence and good intentions of every food movement to date and maybe all but one of the future.

I say this because the whole thought process described in the two consecutive columns but particularly in the first one  is endemic to the Bay Area, being the epicenter of hip food movements that don’t require people to sacrifice or think too much or put in too much effort—like shopping at Whole Foods on a six-figure salary.

“But then this thing happened. You probably read about it. The economy tanked. People lost their savings, or a lot of their savings. People began getting worried and squinted at their credit card statements. I was one of those people. I was panicky. And I noticed, my my, we do spend an awful lot of money at those specialty markets.”

On a collective societal scale, we have asked for and received half-measures. Worse, they are half-measures that seek foremost to turn a profit and secondly to appear as a cure-all at the same time as they undercut our motivation to strive forwards. Buy a Prius and never worry about the price of gas, environment, being contentious, or your child’s college education ever again, and really don’t ever think about anything from now on because if you did you might realize we could all be driving around in sleek sexy electrical cars right now but Toyota hasn’t finished making bank on this hybrid crap yet.

This system has been built for us at the behest of our last meaningful vote—our money—and the vote was unanimous for those who could afford it. Now we each hold what little money we have left close to our chests, and when values can be shed like an extemporaneous credit card to save money, we do it—except we lose our ideal and keep the cable, the credit card, the car—because we will do anything to retain our material gains. Those who literally bought into environmentalism agreed that living a more sustainable life should cost more than living a life more in line with the American standard of rapacious consumerism, and now no one can afford it anymore because it still costs the price we were willing to pay a year ago. But we don't think about the price of lifestyles like we do the price of gas—prices lower to let demand catch up—when the American middle class that gave environmentalism practicality, credibility, and a price tag gives up that concept as unrealistic, abandoning what will surely take several years' time to rebuild if the industrial organic giants go out of business or are forced to devolve. And yet we start gulping down gas again as soon as it reaches a sweet spot in between a dollar-fifty and twenty feet of new ocean.

It is very much the epitome of being caught in a hard place. What course of action is there to advocate, after we have placed ourselves in this position, where we are willing to bail out our car companies but probably not the organic food industry? Ought we to support an industrial organic complex quickly turning soggy with all the same patterns of behavior that have ruined, oh, just about every other industry this increasingly irrelevant country has managed to hold on to in spite of every other place in the world being able to do it better, cheaper, more honestly? Or should we let the whole rotten bottom fall out and give entrepreneurs that would be otherwise quashed the chance to claw their way back up and bring with them an additional iota of compassion, ethics, genuineness—like we should have done with the banks and the auto industry? Do we suck up the cost and grudgingly—altruistically—keep intact this only marginally more sane, more sustainable future that we have just begun building for ourselves, or do we gamble it all and go back to shopping and Wal-Mart and Target and Oh why the hell not, might as well get a Hummer while we're here while we wait for the whole industry to collapse and just maybe return in a few years to something a whole lot better, more transparent, cleaner-smelling?

There is no clear answer now. What is clear is that we are all wearing Gap-issue Che Guevera shirts. We may realize it individually, but the mass is ignorant and even complicit. Indeed, like Gap-Che, the mass doesn't even really want change. The American bourgeoisie that patronizes the environmentalist movement is the empowered class in this society. Obama said it himself—the middle class is the backbone. It therefore does not desire real change. Environmentalism as we currently know it is then a red herring, a temporary cash cow for someone to make a tremendous amount of money on before it collapses and everyone looks around and wonders where all their money went—like oil, or Enron.

But don't recoil disillusioned from the idea of environmental responsibility. Know only that we are not there yet. And the crap that we are being fed is at least not the crap we had been shoveling down like it was going out of style—because it was. It is no longer cool to be wasteful in the middle class; the weight of waste as a status symbol is now reserved for the rich that can afford it and the poor that cannot. And even poor excuses for environmental conceit count; buying a hybrid for all the wrong reasons is still buying a hybrid. Even if you're going to go buy groceries at your local Whole Foods tomorrow instead of firebombing it, give the machine a sneer every once in a while—it doesn't like it when it knows you're watching.

AN AUTHORIAL NOTE: This is a piece run through with the hot spit of conjecture and hyperbole.   The "sweet spot in between a dollar-fifty and twenty feet of new ocean," really?  What the fuck is that supposed to be, do, aspire to?  The most compassion and emphatic agreement it could possibly hope to wrench out of our collective heartstrings would be an exasperated eyeroll. 

So, don't read it for coherency or take it literally, but read it for the point, the gist of the thing, covered in grist to chew on and mull over.  Come up with your own facts, statistics, opinions, points of view.  Maybe I'm trying something new, trying to escape from the doldrums of dry academic writing.  Maybe you should try something new, too.