The Firesign Theater once created a character who was "high on gasoline and a shoeshine". Well, shoe shines may be out, but Americans are higher than ever on gasoline.

The oil companies don't appear to care much whose stuff they're pushing--"Texas tea" (who says you can't learn anything from watching quality television like The Beverly Hillbillies?) or Saudi Arabian Hose Candy, it's all the same to them. They just want their cut. So, they have a strong interest in seeing that the addicts (all of us) stay dependent on the pushers (all of them)-not whether there might be more benign alternatives (no methadone for them). Like the tobacco company managers before them, not only won't they accept that their product develops, shall we say, a certain neediness on the part of users, they won't even admit that maybe, just maybe, their product isn't that good for us: whether it's the hole in the ozone layer, or global warming, or the amount of environmental risk at ANWAR-they don't believe it. Yeah, and heroin builds strong bones and healthy bodies.

Now, I think progressives should always base their arguments on facts and reason. But here, it is almost beside the point. Does anyone out there believe that Americans don't need an energy policy that gets us off this stuff? I almost don't care what it takes: arguments about global warming or that draining the earth of its fossil remains will lead to a gravitational imbalance that will cause the planet to spin off its axis (could happen)-we should be less dependent on Middle Eastern oil.

And why, whenever there are arguments about the cost of alternatives, does no one throw in the defense budget. Oil isn't cheap-especially when we have to be diplomatically and/or militarily involved with nearly every country with an oil field. Even if we don't militarily engage because of oil, certainly we would have more credibility with the "Arab street" (and the rest of the world) if we weren't dependent on their crude

Meanwhile, the average Arab on the street is only helped so much by having the biggest junkie in history dependent on their leaders: could there be more compelling evidence as to how extractive industries distort economies-and the people who depend upon them: Would the typical Middle Easterner have a higher standard of living from a more diversified economy if their economies weren't so dependent on our addiction? They also might be too busy working for a living to spend the time creating yet another Jihad.

So, we need to accept a mission-one equivalent to the Manhattan Project that developed the A-bomb or President Kennedy's effort to get us to the moon--aimed at a simple goal: no Middle Eastern oil imports in 10 years. Maybe that's impossible. Maybe we'll fail. So what: We're bound to come up with some technologies that enable us to become less dependent on this stuff-and that's good. Meanwhile, I gotta run. I gotta get a fix, er.fill-up.whatever.

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