It has been about 200 years since our great American expansion picked up enough steam to really get going full throttle.
From Maine to Miami, from Seattle to San Diego and everywhere in between, in our humongous exploitive thrust westward, southward, and every whichaway you can think of— we went bustin’ through the Adirondacks, the Appalachians, across the wide prairies, over Big Muddy, up the Missoura and all the way down to the Rio Grande, through Sierras out to Pacific shores, even leaping oceanward and skyward to Hawaii.
Back in the day, when we got into the thick of that vast continental expedition, we moved over and through rolling virgin landscapes of living green.
Green were the great evergreens of the North. Green were the hardwood forests on coastal plains, on Appalachian slopes, on heartland grasslands. Green were the piney woods of the South. Green were the grains of the far-stretching prairies.
And the certificates by which we assigned value to our works—these too were green.
Dollars—we designed them in green.
So, green were the dollars that transacted our nation through thousands of ventures, millions of contracts, compelling trillions of working hands that were capitalized by investing hands, then driven upward in value by speculating hands and traded cleverly by arbitraging wallstreet whizzes.
Some newly-immigrating Americans moved independently, others collectively, across the continent. All along the way they cultivated green crops and earned green dollars wherever they settled, digging, mining, organizing co-ops, forming companies, building roads and bridges, collaborating, accumulating capital, incorporating, expanding, growing, thriving, burgeoning and burdening.
Burdening the earth. Extracting to the max all along the way. Tow that line; tote that bale. Milk it for all its worth.
By the time mid-20th century rolled around, ole mother earth was bursting at the seams, displaying scarred hillsides, scraped-out open-pit mines, hollowed-out insides, chemicalized sores, oozing green slime. . . but enabling us thereby to whiz along on continent-wide interstate rides. Hey, let's pull over for a song break:
We grew up with stock-green scenery whizzing by outside the windows at 65 miles per hour— seemingly insignificant landscape sliding through the view on our way to wherever our best-laid plans of mice and men might propel us.
At ramping exits we egress to fill-up on the American dream, then cruise control at 78 mph in our lean dream transportation machines. Green, green is just a tucked-away scene behind the gas station.
Still yet are the the dollars green, but only in our minds, because now we’ve digitized them so we don’t actually lay eyes on them $$ any more.
And then, lo and behold, a new thing happened. Motivations morphed. The politics that drives our nation states began to turn green.
Whereas, before, red, white, and blue were the colors that motivated us.
Now we find that the ole faithful red, white and blue of Liberty has run its course through world history. Those other nation-states that had followed our galavanting, capitalizing lead. . . now they have fueled their engines with our money-green currency, and they did park billions of our little federal reserve notes into every marketplace and bank vault across the globe. . .
But what goes around, comes around, and when it recycles, it morphs as something different.
Alas, so now what new Green through yonder Continent breaks?
Turns out that some Keynesizing technocrats have devised a means to turn the whole financialized world around so that the new motive—the re-greening of earth—becomes society’s great purpose and goal. On the old economic scenario of Supply and Demand, Sustainability arises as the new Remand.
Instead of the profit motive! Instead of Go West Young Man, now we find a new clarion call: Go Green Young Band!
Will it work?
