[A-List] Say What?

[Bill Totten]

by James Howard Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (2005)

www.kunstler.com (June 28 2010)


I think America missed something. It must be the time of year, what
with inhaling all those fumes from the charcoal starter ... and
fueling up the Jet-skis so as to turn a perfectly good mountain
lake into something like a Cuisinart on the guacamole setting ...
and the rousing evenings in the Nascar parking lots hitting
palmetto bugs with your wiffle bat ... and all that anxious waiting
for a 10W-40 hard rain to fall on the Gulf Coast states - but
President Obama made a very interesting remark when the financial
regulation package passed in the senate the other day. He said the
bill would make sure that "Main Street is never again held
responsible for Wall Street's mistakes".

Whoosh ...

That was the sound of something going over America's head.
Something about the size of Rodan the Flying Reptile. And frankly I
don't think the president even meant to be coy or deceptive. It
just means he doesn't get it either. Never again ...

Never again?

What the fuck?

Why even this time? Why isn't there an army of federal attorneys out
there, their teeth bristling with subpoenas, beating the bushes in
every lane and skyscraper floor of lower Manhattan (and Fairfield
County, Connecticut, not to mention a thousand office parks around
the USA) to roust out the grifters and swindlers who took Main
Street to the cleaners this time.

The audacity of cluelessness! And the hilarity of "next time".

Earth to President Obama: there isn't going to be a next time. This
time was enough to git 'er done. Wall Street - in particular the
biggest "banks" - packaged up and sold enough swindles to unwind
2500 years of western civilization. You simply cannot imagine the
amount of bad financial paper out there right now in every vault
and portfolio on the planet. Enough, really, to sink any company
even pretending to trade in things more abstract than a mud brick
or an hour of labor. What's more, the cross-collateralized
obligations between them are so vast and intricate that all the
standing timber in North America could not be fashioned into enough
pick-up sticks to represent the hideous death-dealing tangle of
frauds waiting for the wing-beat of a single black swan to come
crashing down.

Go out and get a copy of Michael Lewis's recent book The Big Short
(2010) for a close-up view on one micro-corner of the investment
world. You will discover that the people fabricating things like
synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) had no idea what
the fuck they were doing - besides deliberately creating documents
that nobody would ever understand, that would never be unraveled by
teams of law clerks or secret words or magic incantations or
prayers to some dark hirsute deity, and were guaranteed to place in
jeopardy every operation of the world economy above the barter
level. Sorry to invoke the hoary old metaphor about the horse being
out of the barn - but the larger problem is what the horse left
behind in a great steaming mound clear up to the rafters. There was
nothing to understand in all this crap, except that betting against
it was a good idea, and then only for those who placed the earliest
bets - because everybody else is going to get just as screwed as
those who stuffed their vaults and portfolios with Triple-A rated
horseshit.

What banks and governments have been doing for the past eighteen
months is a dumbshow meant to distract the public from the fact
that the world financial system has been effectively destroyed.
There isn't enough money left in the known reaches of the universe
to pay off the outstanding claims. In fact, not even close.
Everything that proceeds from this fiasco will be in service of
impoverishing most of the population and, incidentally, probably
bringing down governments and, with them, convenient social
usufructs such as due process of law and civil order. What remains
- what you're watching right now on CNN or Fox - is just a
representation of the former structures of civilized life, what Joe
Bageant refers to as "the hologram", a kind of 3-D picture you can
see around, that looks like reality, but is actually immaterial, a
collective hallucination. It's comfortable living in a hologram -
until you discover that you're in one.

In the summertime, when there are weenies to grill and Jet-skis to
commit suicide on, the public is usually having too much fun to pay
attention to anything. Maybe this is how come summertime is also
when lots of bad shit happens, or gets ready to happen. The guns of
August ... blitzkrieg ... 9-11 ... the death of Lehman Brothers ...

A few other social notes this week: Something else the public (and,
of course, the news media) missed in the General McChrystal affair.
It wasn't just that the general badmouthed his civilian superiors.
It was that he was not the other thing that an army officer should
be: a gentleman. He was a lout who reveled in everything lowest in
his own culture. He was a man so disturbed by having to spend a
night in Paris at a good restaurant with civilized people that it
seems to have driven him plumb batshit. General George Patton - a
man renowned for his own profane intemperance - would have boxed
Stanley McChrystal's ears for his sheer childishness and assigned
him to Graves Registration. When the USA falls apart in a few
years, let's hope General McChrystal doesn't ride over the horizon
on a white horse with an army of Af-stan vets flexing their neck
tattoos behind him.

Oh, and something else: notice that the Deepwater Horizon oil
gusher has vanished from the front pages of The New York Times and
even The Huffington Post. Nobody gives a shit anymore. Bring it on.

_____

A sequel to my 2008 novel of post-oil America, World Made By Hand,
will be published in September 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Press.
The title is The Witch of Hebron.

Mr Kunstler's biography is at see http://kunstler.com/bio.html.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/06/say-what.html


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