Hairshirts or energy?

Great, yes; but not very American: The only Americans saddled with it are a few specimen domiciled in academia, the media and the government bureaucracy. Producers rarely suffer from the affliction; and not even all drivelers do.

The cause of the phenomenon, we submit, is simple: The affluent, overeducated, stylish American consciousness-raiser is possessed of a horrendous guilt complex because he is horrendously guilty.

Not, of course, of the crimes he self-flagellatingly confesses to: He is merely copping a plea and pleading guilty to a lesser charge.

"Woe betide us selfish sinners," he wails to the high heavens as he denies upward mobility to those on the lower rungs of the social ladder in an energy-short society, "for we are denying the snail darter a living!"

"Woe unto us racists who have polluted the developing countries with industry," wail the sensitive, aware and societally relevant. "Let us repent by providing them with wheelbarrows and appropriate technology!"

"Ours is a society of profit-greedy, power-crazed exploiters," wail the radical ideologues as they strangle the production of wealth and rip off the taxpayer to finance useless projects in an obese bureaucracy. "We have sinned by not legislating what is good for the common people."

"There is no way in which I can justify my failure to help sound the alarm over these activities [in nuclear power] many years sooner than I did," wails Dr John Gofman as at least 37,000 Americans die every year from far less safe power sources; guilty of helping to obstruct their replacement by a safer technology that would reduce this large number of real deaths, he pleads guilty to not having wailed loudly enough about a far smaller number of hypothetical deaths; and in proportion to the true guilt to be covered up, his wail rises to a shrill crescendo:

For this outsized guilt complex, obliquely rooted in outsized guilt, the great American pseudo-penitent has a cure of outsized insolence: He wants the rest of us to wear outsized hairshirts.