Oil Age Poem by gershon hepner

Oil Age



The oil age is the one in which
we live. Unfortunately oil
makes kleptocrats extremely rich,
and leaves the poor who have to toil
to bring it to the surface poor,
exaggerating all the worst
proclivities that fuel its lure
in those who own it with a thirst
they cannot quench despite the wealth
that it creates, because their greed
is poison to producers’ health,
while mainly generating need
for guns, and fighter planes, and tanks,
instead of plowshares, homes and schools,
and rulers who’re above the law
so order may be kept while rules
are not, except by those who’re poor.

This is the age of oil, my friend,
and climate changes while we burn
the oil which very well may end
the paradise that we now spurn,
quite unafraid to be evicted
from planet earth without a pardon,
as when, forbidden fruit addicted,
we were expelled from Eden’s Garden.

Inspired by an article by Robert D. Kaplan in the WSJ, September 23,2009, reviewing Peter Maass’s book “Crude Oil” (A Gusher of Trouble”) :
Just as there was the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, there is now the Oil Age, and we are living through its last waning decades. Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, a former Venezuelan oil minister who came up with the idea for a cartel in the 1960s, called oil the 'devil's excrement.' Peter Maass, in 'Crude World, ' a spare, engaging work of reporting and travel writing, calls oil 'black oxygen.' It is a neat phrase because, as Mr. Maas demonstrates, oil is almost as essential to our lives as the air we breathe, yet its effect on the countries that produce it, and on the super-alpha males who run the oil industry, is quite sinister. This is a dark book, though not because Mr. Maass is a pessimist—he isn't. It's just that his itinerary (Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Russia, and other benighted locales) lends itself to deep foreboding about the human condition…. Whether Mr. Maass is in the primeval, environmentally ruined Niger Delta region of southern Nigeria, or in a Venezuelan slum where 'even the jobless are mugged, ' or in a menacing and soulless Moscow high-rise, or among wayward, spoiled-brat Saudi youth, he shows how the trail of oil leads a traveler to either grim poverty or repulsive wealth. Oil, he seems to say, exaggerates the worst human tendencies.


9/23/09

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