Peak Stoopid.

Why not becoming a blithering pest-hole matters.

So you want another solid, principled Democratic Issue that we can run on and win?

Gotcha covered.

OK, I you’re all very smart and you all know what Peak Oil is and why you should have been reading science fiction for the last 15 years to prep your head for the Big Time Fun that’s coming. But for the drive-thru crowd (And remember, “They always fuck you at the drive-thru.”) just peeping through the shades and window shopping, let’s do a quick rundown of what Peak Oil means.

And rather that re-invent the wheel (or steal it from Apple and re-brand it “Wheels XP”), let me just hip you to two paragraphs from one of many hundreds of websites devoted to the phenomenon:

“Oil is increasingly plentiful on the upslope of the bell curve, increasingly scarce and expensive on the down slope. The peak of the curve coincides with the point at which the endowment of oil has been 50 percent depleted. Once the peak is passed, oil production begins to go down while cost begins to go up…”

“Peak Oil is also called "Hubbert's Peak," named for the Shell geologist Dr. Marion King Hubbert. In 1956, Hubbert accurately predicted that US domestic oil production would peak in 1970. He also predicted global production would peak in 1995, which it would have had the politically created oil shocks of the 1970s not delayed the peak for about 10-15 years…”

Translation: we’re running out of the stuff we need to keep everything running, and we have hit that place on the bell curve where cost is going to go up, and supply is going to go down. Which is pretty damned scary, but there it is.

Now take a breath, step back, and look at the wider Universe. A quilt first-, second- and third-world nations all propped up by mature or emerging industrial economies, globalization and power, all modulated by technology. If the car you drive now wasn’t made by robots, the car you will drive five years from now will be, beyond any doubt. It’ll be produced at a factory where mecs will do all of the musclework, and humans with a solid technology skill set will work them like my granddaddy work a swing-line during the Depression, or his father worked a mule team.

Parts for your dryer will be made in a similar way but on a smaller scale, possibly by a small company a few blocks from your house. Also the hinges for the latest generation of Pez dispenser, and the ablative shielding for the I’m-sure-soon-to-be-announced Apple iNova (“Hotter than a thousand suns; cooler than absolute zero.”)

Also the drive train on the movable solar panels that’ll be clamped to your eaves like so many satellite dishes, and the sensors in the engine of your hybrid that keep your car at the optimal fuel balance.

Now to be clear, if you can commoditize and standardize the thingie you make – and if transportation lags are no object – you can put the whole business in a FedEx envelope and ship it south of the border, or across the Pacific, but there is a price you pay for doing it; one some companies are starting to discover.

Dollar-a-day labor in a factory town somewhere in China or Mexico buys you the ability to efficiently replicate a process that was developed elsewhere, but when a company chases cheap labor, it necessarily sacrifices innovation.

Those working in wage-slavery -- and those supervising them -- have no incentive whatsoever to learn what the machine on their right or left are doing. They have no incentive to suggest improvements. They have no incentive to adapt or to be anything but order-takers. Great mass-producers, but change one variable and the whole place is thrown into chaos.

By the same token, those companies that want to stay ahead of the curve know they have to have a smart, well-trained, well-compensated workforce, and it isn’t bleeding heart liberalism that drives them in the direction of enlightened labor policy.

No, if you’re in the innovation business in any way, it’s Adam Smith invisible hand that’s got a gun to your head; pure market forces that compel capital to partner up with labor so that they can both avoid extinction.

But this isn’t a private party, the problem isn’t one of shuffling existing bodies around or better guest-worker programs, and what’s at stake is not a few jobs, or even a few thousand jobs.

What’s at stake is Western Civilization.

And the reason it’s kneeling at the block with an axe tickling its neck is what I call “Peak Stoopid” (which, as of today, is still a Googlewhack [my second!], so maybe I’ve coined another term-soon-to-be-so-cool-it’ll-superconduct-electricity.)

Because by 2010, somewhere around 79 million Americans will have retired from the labor force. People who are, by and large, relatively experienced, relatively well-educated, and baby, you can drill ANWR clear through the core of the planet, exit via Auckland and ride your tungsten-carbide-blades right on out of Earth orbit and never tap a reserve of qualified workers large enough to keep the infrastructure our country requires to sustain itself up and running.

Not even close.

And no matter what your Libertarian friends tell you, the problem cannot be solved by the marketplace. It cannot be solved by tossing vouchers around and pretending that making a once-vaunted-but-now-crippled public system compete with a private system will do anything but make the former even poorer, while the latter can pick and choose and cream as much as it wishes.

But it can be solved.

It will require a massive and sustained reinvestment in public education, and culture changes that will demand greater accountability from parents, and greater flexibility from teachers, but it can be solved.

And more than that, it must be solved. Because as the oil light begins to flicker red on the dashboard of American Society, and as it becomes ever clearer that greater innovation and human creativity are the only paths that can lead us out of the coming crisis in any way intact and free, we have to face the fact that by the middle of the next decade we are going to have vastly more important jobs for skilled workers that we have skilled workers.

We are back in the same position we were in the early-NASA days; facing a need to pack the educational pipeline with a massive number of literate, numerate and e-literate students. And not on a fucking whim -- and not because it would be a nicey-nice Liberal thing to do -- but to meet a critical, national shortage of able and educated men and women because that deficit directly affects our national security and the health and prosperity of our country.

We need well-educated, tech-literate citizens or we will perish as a nation, which is why telling the Christopaths who want to suffocate science and replace it with their inbred, Christard superstition to fuck the Hell off in the name of Jebus is not just jolly good fun, but absolutely imperative for our national survival.

And you get a Happy Fun Liberal Twofer here, because you also get to tell the anthracite-hearted Libertarian Conservatives to fuck off as well (and in the name of Adam Smith to boot!) Because the marketplace alone simply cannot deliver trained and ready people in the numbers required to meet the need and more than private armies, privately trained would ever be sufficient to meet the need of defending the nation from attack, projecting national power when necessary, and helping the nation recover from disaster.

And the ultimate, capitalist irony is this: a lot of these are pretty good jobs. Middle-class-building jobs.

And they’re also critical jobs. Pivotal jobs; not a warm-body, punch-press gig you can fill with someone recruited from the alley behind the factory. The man or woman driving the mec will need to be computer literate beyond email, IM-ing and downloading anime porn. They’ll need to understand all the bots in their “cell”. What the widget they’re creating does, how it fits into larger scheme of things, and how it can be made better.

They’ll need to understand enough Spanish and enough English to take and give instructions, plus the terms of art of their profession. They’ll need the math to understand the specs of the $300,000 machine the ride herd on well enough to clean it, fix it and test it. And then they’ll need to know enough to reset and recalibrate it to a whole different set of microscopically fine tolerances when the design team makes changes, or the market demand shifts, or some innovation that’ll save the company a nickel-per-unit that someone just like them came up with is introduced bright and early one Monday morning.

He or she will need to be able to do all of this without fucking up the machine, losing an eye or messing up the production line.

And they will make enough to have a shot at raising a middle class family, if they choose. Own property, if they choose.

Pay taxes.

Buy shit.

Tuck a little away.

Maybe start their own business

Send their kids to college.

And be mentally and educationally prepared to help build the tools and techniques that will save the world.

We are already approaching Peak Stoopid – the moment at which the number of skilled workers we required (for several different reasons) to keep the economy running begins the exceed the number of such workers that are available, anywhere, at any price. (And also Peak Stoopid in the sense that our Republican Government is run by the kind of hacks and incompetents and cronies who simply will not take the steps necessary to protect the nation from this looming disaster.)

So as it turns out, this boils down to something simple, because it really is a matter of First Principles.

Without a citizenry trained and ready to step into the jobs that are being vacated by retiring boomers – and workers supple and adaptable enough to innovate on-the-fly everywhere from the lab to the blackboard to the factory floor – we will very shortly find ourselves unable to save our country from all the other crises that are coming down the pipe.

And only with a recognition that Public Education is a Critical and Primary Virtue in an agile, market-responsive Capitalist Democracy, can come the massive and sustained reinvestment and reinvention of Public Education that we need to achieve the critical mass of smart people necessary to pilot us through the troubled waters that are dead ahead.

So you wanted another Democratic Issue we can run on that honors Liberal values but also comes with an pragmatic, market-based rationale and pedigree?

Well here ya’ go.