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The reason there aren’t many people on the beach on Margarita Island is that it’s hard to enjoy the beach when you have no food or water. But welcome to Venezuela. (Wikipedia Photo)
Every New Year’s Eve, there are people who travel to the easternmost promontory of whatever rock they live on, in order to be the first of their flock to experience the arrival of the New Year. I suspect a serious party deficiency in the upbringing of these people, but in every unmet need there is an opportunity for obscene profit. Thus: Now you can be among the first to experience Armageddon, aka the collapse of the industrial age, up close and personal, from the vantage point of a five star resort hotel. Hurry, this opportunity is available for a limited time only — until the mobs burn down the hotels.
The place is Margarita Island — I swear I am not making this up — a sub-Caribbean island perch for jet-setters just off the northern coast of South America. It has a population of 600,000 people who have learned to take great care of a few thousand visiting, sun-bathing, hard-drinking millionaires at a time. Its great misfortune is to be a part of Venezuela.
Venezuela is the current poster child for “a failed state not currently being bombed by the United States.” A dozen eggs, if you can find that many, cost $150. Inflation is running north of 500% per year. They’re having to print so much money, overseas of course, so fast that they can’t find enough money to pay for printing the money. People are standing in neverending lines outside empty supermarkets waiting for trucks of food that, day after day, never come. People are eating their pets. And they’re attacking each other and anyone they imagine is responsible for their plight.
But on Margarita Island, the rich and powerful (if not quite so famous) from all over the world are gathering this week at a meeting of the 120 countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, of which Venezuela is about to become the leader. No one can quite remember what the Non-Aligned Movement is not aligned with, but never mind, they give great conferences. Like Rio de Janeiro hosting the Olympics, for Margaritaville, Job Number One has been propping up enough hotels to actually function for the week of the conference.
Elsewhere on the island, where half the airline flight schedule has been cancelled and less than a third of the rooms are booked, reality has set in, and can be observed by stalwart Apocalypse-tourists from their balconies, or even closer. Most of the hotels’ swimming pools are empty and their toilets don’t flush, except every two weeks when the water is turned on. Briefly. Hotel guests are asked to bring their own sheets, towels, soap, toilet paper and if they’re smart, their own food and water (most hotels no longer have food service and some of the staff no longer have food.). Hotel staff helpfully keeps the bathrooms supplied with gallon jugs of water for, um, washing, and will happily show you how to kill and clean your own seagull for dinner.
Expeditions from the hotels to the islands’ three, count ‘em three, mega-luxury-malls are encouraged, although armed guards are recommended because of the country’s skyrocketing violence and murder rates, and calling ahead is recommended, too, because only two or three of the stores are still open.
Whether you blame the collapse of Venezuela on their Socialist history or the collapse of oil prices or old-fashioned corruption, it presents an unparalleled opportunity to see first, and at first hand, what collapse is all about.
If you have just completed your tour through the fabled Northwest Passage aboard the legendary Crystal Serenity (about which I wrote “The Luxury Cruise to the End of the World” a few weeks ago), having just participated in the befouling of some of the last pristine waters on earth, what better way to round out the summer than on Margaritaville’s beaches, before it’s off to Gstaad, or wherever you ski. If there’s any snow left.
Gad, what a great time to be a tourist.
I really appreciate your writing Tom, thank you for bothering. This one (as with most) brings to mind my favorite quote from Kafka: “There’s plenty of hope…just not for us.”
Perhaps Paris.
https://youtu.be/ju79YT_lBVI
Right Rael, and next year they’ll start coming here.
It’s going to get ugly. Real soon.
Great essay Mr. Lewis. Of course Detroit is a location one can visit in this country to see what collapse looks like, and I hear Chicago is having a bit of trouble keeping the lid on, currently. Those are the “high profile” locations. If you ever visited Appalachia, the collapse occurred a while back and the results are plain to see, but they don’t make the news.
Every day there are more horror stories of what would have been unthinkable violence a generation ago – and it’s not just directed against one another on the street. There’s so much domestic violence, government mandated poverty (like all those jobs being “allowed” to leave), hunger and desperation that it would be hard to encapsulate it in a short comment. Some of the violence is by the police, too, who’ve stopped being “Officer Friendly” and have instead become a vigilante force on steroids. They don’t even bother arresting some people – just shoot them on the spot (and not to “wing” ’em either). Mentally ill people are having a hard time dealing with this new breed of cop. But the militarized police aside, by and large the lion’s share of the violence is done to the elderly, the poor, and especially on women and children (like teens who have to resort to crime and/or prostitution just to feed themselves, see
Desperately Poor Teens In America’s Impoverished Inner Cities Are Trading Sex For Food
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/desperately-poor-teens-in-americas-impoverished-inner-cities-are-trading-sex-for-food
for one example).
The collapse of both the environment and the global economy is picking up in pace each year, and the rate will continue to increase. Violence, social degradation, starvation, neglect – it comes with the territory. When you live in a failed state (which the U.S. shows many signs of), all the norms go away and life becomes a real adventure – and a challenge to stay alive.
When I stop, and observe this existence from a first hand perspective, I can’t get past the cyclic patterns that appear everywhere.
Our very lives are heavily regulated by recurring cyclic patterns.
Archaeology would have us believe that entire civilizations arose from the unknown to flourish, age and pass back into the unknown many times across this Mother Earth.
One recurring pattern in our current “thought” process is that unlike those previous civilizations we are ready and willing to solve our problems. It never occurs to such thinkers that we exist within the same cyclic conditions as those vanished predecessors.
Civilizations always add complexity as they develop, such as a ruling class. In the early stages of development, leadership is granted to the energetic, the visionary, the explorer. This soon gives way to an entrenched group of power seekers, and this morphs into what we have today, a parasite class that prevents it’s host civilization from adapting to ongoing, much less new challenges.
Thus, the decline and transformation is assured.
Perhaps what is lacking isn’t a willingness to solve problems, but an ability to escape the octopus of parasitic control.
Venezuela is caught in this net. They cannot adapt to the new conditions, nor can they escape the lethal embrace of an ever more ravenous and ruinous global elite. Then again, neither can we…
Well said.
As long as we’re on the subject of general societal collapse, how about the US heroin epidemic which is exploding in every demographic group and region of the country (which generally hasn’t happened in previous domestic drug-addiction epidemics)?
http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/16/health/huntington-heroin/index.html
this is what the wet end of the titanic looks like… and it our future too. fortunately we are still be up on the dry end… for now.
Tom..perhaps also a vision of a future America
good point, denis
Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead
http://www.resilience.org/resource-detail/3342128-dark-age-america-climate-change-cultural
After decades of missed opportunities, the door to a sustainable future has closed, and the future we face now is one in which today’s industrial civilization unravels in the face of uncontrolled climate change and resource depletion.
What is the world going to look like when all these changes have run their course? Author John Michael Greer seeks to answer this question, and with some degree of accuracy, since civilizations tend to collapse in remarkably similar ways. [more]
[He, as per most authors, peddles hopium in the end. No one wants to be honest about this topic. It wouldn’t sell books.]
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