Battlefield Arctica

As they say in The Wire: “The game the same. It just gone more fierce.”

And the hustle is for the final source of untapped fossil fuels, more potently addictive than any laboratory magic ever invented, there´s not a single soul who´s not directly hooked on the highs it brings to the table. The cornerboys of this drama are the drill-operators up to the lobbyist pushing their heart out to keep selling you the dream; they´re just on different streetcorners, in different parts of the nittygritty.

The Big Kahunas are not the corporate suits, it´s the guy with the Texan drawl dallying on into the office with a hawaii-shirt and a stetson hat and a harem of russian mailorder brides- no he´s not a polygamist, rules don´t apply to him, he´s bigger than life.

The Big Kahunas isn´t the CEO of some mesely bank making a hundred million a year- they scoff at him at their weekly Freemason gatherings- it´s the hedge fund broker making a billion. So there´s your players.

I read some excerpts of an interview done with a representative of The Stockholm think-tank. Renowned for their take on issues concerning the future of High North, the rep didn´t seem too worried about the scenario of military presence crowding around the multinationals.

He based his conclusions on the same merits that made some top dogs back in the day proclaim the 20:th century as the era of peace: just a few years prior to World War One. They deemed conflict between the leading nations virtually extinct since everybody had money and hands in eachothers pockets.

Now we´ve gone a couple of hundred degrees more globalized since, but I think there´s a danger in underestimating the deep roots of patriotism, its near primal functions, it´s not only an opium for the masses but cuts through social layers all the way to the top.

In a tense environment of a dog-eat-dog scramble for resources, the intertwinement of nations in oil and gas-companies isn´t like antibiotics to chlamydia. And a gut-reaction of torned patriotic pride could in pressing circumstances snowball all over the diluted hope we put in political common sense.

But I agree that we´ve evolved into a species were greed has got the upper hand on almost anything else, so fingers crossed, the thirst for that gooey black gold will keep any military dealings at a low-intensity cold war level, just as a show of potential force; nuclear submarines under a variety of flags navigating below the surface through a thick forest of oil rig pillars cemented deep into the sea-bed.

After a shift the captains of said submarines can share a beer in some harbour boomtown on Greenland, bragging on who´s sitting on most megatons, giving away government secrets at closing time after rounding it all up with a tray of tequila-slams.