Kerouac Alley: PREEMPTIVE UNDERINVESTMENT REPORT--Daniel Yergin :The New Map--THE NEW GONZO--

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From the New Journalism to the New Gonzo

Incline Village, Nev. (EOC)--As genres go, especially in non-fiction, there’s a fine line to subjectivity. If that fine line cannot be found, is there a way to at least alter the paradigm to accommodate a seasoned journalist who doesn’t want to bore the reader to death with technical details and just tell the story? Possibly, and it might even be done in other than the first person. If the genre is science, undoubtedly it will be a challenge as no one is interested in genetics, only the outcome, which is race. No one is interested in virology, just whether the human race will survive the pandemic. The subject of energy is a different story entirely, part science, part economics. The first part involves real life people, those on the oil and gas platforms, onshore and offshore; the second are those in the fifty story buildings in cities such as Houston. It takes a journalist to write that story, not a scientist or economist; that journalist is Daniel Yergin.

In his new book, out last week titled “The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations,” Yergin takes a close look at the emerging boundaries due to the discovery, rather rediscovery, of oil. In six sections and 600 pages, he takes the reader on the road through several continents and the role played by the major players in the creation of that new map. His interpretation is instructive, but his style of writing in describing that new geography is in a world of its own. The first 78 pages reveal a great deal about “fracking,” the process of extracting gas and oil from shale, but also about how Yergin delivers the story;

“If you want to get to the beginning of the shale revolution, pick up Interstate 35E out of Dallas and head north forty miles and then take the turnoff for the tiny town of Ponder...Another four miles and you’re in Dish, Texas, population about 400” (Yergin, 11)

Immediately the second person, present tense denotes a rather informal rhetorical demonstrative invite to read on. Note the combined conjunctions, “and head north,” “and then take.” That was the first paragraph in the first chapter. A paragraph later, the story begins in 1901, in the past tense following the life of a rather unknown minor player in the development of fracking and jumps immediately 70 years to that person “fueled by his new environmental ethos.” (14) You are now gone from the story. Another technique used by Yergin is to, as Kolln and Gray state;

“Starting a sentence with a coordinating conjunction can provide a rhetorical punch,” (Kolln, Gray, 57)

Not just one in a row, but several provide Yergin with an opportunity to look inside the mind of an energy entrepreneur in 2007; “Or it could venture out into the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico. But it had no expertise there. Or it could go where it did have some expertise--in shale--” (24)

Adding to what might be described as a parallel conjunction triplet was the shift to the simple future tense. This technique leaves the reader examining the options as if on the board of directors while peering into the possibilities for the company.

Tense shifting exists throughout the first section of the book, which surrounds America’s gradual rise to the top of the energy hegemony heap by the end of the first decade in the new century. That rise was attributed not just to multiple rediscoveries of gas and oil hidden in shale, but to export of liquified natural gas. Whether Texas, New York or North Dakota, the style remains the same; a non-linear cause-effect topoi, conjunctions introducing sentences and tense shifting. All of it adds up to Yergin’s syntax, what about semantics?

Authorial intent is often equated to bias. Although there doesn’t appear to be any direct connection in the literature of the first 78 pages, there are indeed hidden, rather subtle references to intent;

“ ‘Getting permits to build pipelines,’ it used to be said, ’was about as exciting as watching paint dry.’ “ (56)

Written into the introduction of Chapter 6 is a theme that would prevail until the end of the section on the new American map. Yergin notes a visit by President Obama to Oklahoma promising to cut through “the red tape.” Yergin introduces protesters and climate scientists opposed to Keystone XL and the Dakota Pipeline. Yergin cites Secretary of State John Kerry’s negative assessment of Keystone XL and a 1,320 foot segment of Dakota Access halted by the Sioux in spite of a positive Army Corps of Engineers’ 1,261 page report. He ends by noting with irony that the 1,172 mile long pipeline was halted by that very 1,320 foot segment. The chapter is closed by the RICO lawsuit against Greenpeace, as Yergin characterized it, “originally used to go after the Mafia.” In addition, North Dakota was stiffed $43 million for cleanup where the protesters camped out. Clearly, authorial intent is one of negative semantics based on possibly the government’s inability to keep the pipeline projects moving forward, possibly on the efforts by climatologists and activists to derail the projects, possibly both. By the end of the American map segment, Yergin cites the Green New Deal and “banning fracking.” (76)

It might be said that syntax is vertical drilling and semantics is horizontal drilling. Further yet, if style comparisons could be made, Daniel Yergin, if not actually inventing the New Journalism school of the mid-20th century, might also be included in an outcropping of that school, Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism. Not written in the first person, present tense does not necessarily exclude him from that writing style. If “new” gonzo were invented by any other means, certainly Daniel Yergin might well be an example of it.