This week's diatribe from Jim Kunstler's "Clusterfuck Nation" is particularly acidic. It's a good one and reflects my own dyspeptic views. "History is clearly presenting us with a new set of mandates: get local, get finer, downscale, and get going on it right away. Prepare for it now or nature will whack you upside the head with it not too long from now. Attempting to maintain anything on the gigantic scale will turn out to be a losing proposition... Here, in the dog days of summer, it seems to me that the situation in the USA is so fundamentally bad, so unpromising, so booby-trapped for failure, that I wonder if there has ever been a society so badly deluded as ours. We're prisoners of our wishes, living in a strange dream-time, oblivious to the forces gathering at the margins of our vision, lost in a wilderness of our own making."
The problem for visionairies lucky to be born at the moment when society, culture, and politics embrace change is that reactionairies get a jump on the action. If this were not true, America would have had a "cash for clunkers" program 35 years ago.
Hunky Dory
By James Howard Kunstler
on August 3, 2009 7:36 AM
Whenever the herd mentality lines up along a compass point leading to
"permanent prosperity," or a yellow brick road lined with green shoots, or
something like that, I tend to see the edge of a cliff up ahead. We are now
completely in the grips of the deadly diminishing returns of information
technology. The more information comes to us about How Things Are,
especially from TV, the more confused or wrong the conventional view gets
it.
A broad consensus has formed in the news media and among government
mouthpieces and even some "bearish" investors on the street that "the worst
is behind us" in this tortured economy. This view is completely crazy. It
will only lead to massive disappointment a few weeks or months from now, and
that disappointment might easily transmute to political trouble. One even
might call the situation tragic, except a closer look at the sordid
spectacle of what American culture has become -- a non-stop circus of the
seven deadly sins -- suggests that we deserve to be punished by history.
The reason behind this mass delusion is not hard to find: it's based on
wishing, especially the wish to retain all the comforts, conveniences,
luxuries, and leisure that had become normal in American life. These are
now ebbing away in big gobs for most of the population -- while a tiny
fraction of the well-connected pile on ever larger heaps of swag, enjoying
ever more privilege. Those in the broad bottom 95 percent were content as
long as there was a chance that they, too, could become members of the top 5
percent -- by dint of car-dealing, or house-building, or mortgage-selling,
or some other venture enabled by easy credit and a smile. Those days and
those ways are now gone. The bottom 95 percent are now left with
de-laminating houses they can't make payments on, no prospects for gainful
work, re-po men hiding in the bushes to snatch the PT Cruiser, cut-off cable
service, Kraft mac-and-cheese (if they're lucky), and Larry Summers telling
them their troubles are over. (If I were Larry, I'd start thinking about a
move to some place like the Canary Islands.)
Too many disastrous things are lined up in the months ahead to insure
that we're entering a new phase of history: The Long Emergency.
Government at every level is worse than broke.
Our currency, the US dollar, is hemorrhaging legitimacy.
Inability to service old debt at all levels or incur new debt.
Bad (toxic) debt lurking off balance sheets everywhere.
The housing bubble fiasco is far from over.
Commercial real estate fiasco just getting started.
Unemployment rising implacably.
So-called "consumers" unable to consume consumables.
Crucial energy import supply lines fragile.
Food supply subject to energy problems and climate abnormalities.
A world full of other societies who would enjoy watching us fail and
suffer.
When The Long Emergency was published in 2005, I said then that the
greatest danger this society faced would be its inclination to gear up a
campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs -- rather than face the
need to make new arrangements for daily life. That appears to be exactly
what has happened, and it didn't happen under the rule of some
backward-facing, right-wing, Jesus-haunted crypto-fascist, but rather a
"progressive" party led by a dynamically affable young man unburdened by
deep cultural allegiance to Wall Street. Barack Obama has been sucked in and
suckered. "Change you can believe in" has morphed into "a status quo you
will bend heaven and earth to hold onto."
Whatever else you might think or feel about Mr. Obama's performance so
far, this strategy on the broader question of where we go as a nation pulses
with tragedy. What's remarkable to me, to go a step further, is the absence
of comprehensive vision -- not just in the president, but in all the
supposedly able and intelligent people around him, and even those leaders
not in government but in business and education and science and the
professions.
History is clearly presenting us with a new set of mandates: get local,
get finer, downscale, and get going on it right away. Prepare for it now or
nature will whack you upside the head with it not too long from now.
Attempting to maintain anything on the gigantic scale will turn out to be a
losing proposition, whether it is military control of people in Central
Asia, or colossal bureaucracies run in the USA, or huge factory farms, or
national chain store retail, or hypertrophied state universities, or global
energy supply networks.
These imperatives are so outside-the-box of ordinary experience right
now, that to drag them into the arena of politics can only evoke blank
stares or nervous giggling. But whether we like it or not, these are the
things that will really matter in the years ahead -- not whether General
Motors can ever make a profit again, or what Target Store's sales figures
are next quarter, or whether the latest high-rise condo-and-gambling complex
in Las Vegas will be successfully marketed.
Here, in the dog days of summer, it seems to me that the situation in
the USA is so fundamentally bad, so unpromising, so booby-trapped for
failure, that I wonder if there has ever been a society so badly deluded as
ours. We're prisoners of our wishes, living in a strange dream-time,
oblivious to the forces gathering at the margins of our vision, lost in a
wilderness of our own making.
Anything can happen now. I certainly wouldn't rule out international
mischief as we arc around into fall. The air is so full of black swans that
the white swan now seems like the exceptional thing. Whatever else happens,
it sure will be interesting to see the public's reaction to Wall Street's
announcement of Christmas bonuses. The folks at Rockefeller Center better
be thinking about getting a fireproof tree.
____________________
My novel of America's post-oil future, WORLD MADE BY HAND, is now available
in paperback. I am at work on the sequel.
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