[A-List] One Lump or Two?

[Nadja Tesich]

Bill,
I am not surprised at all.
We live in a stupid country(I didn't say it first)where the main religion is money,success and fame.
Nadja

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> Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2010 17:23:11 +0900
> From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp
> To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu
> Subject: [A-List] One Lump or Two?
>
> by James Howard Kunstler
>
> Comment on current events by the author of
> The Long Emergency (2005)
>
> www.kunstler.com (August 30 2010)
>
>
> Here come the Corn Pone Nazis!
>
> Fox News entertainer, former drug addict, and professional weeper
> Glenn Beck took center stage at the Lincoln Memorial exactly
> forty-seven years to the day after Martin Luther King's "I Have a
> Dream" speech for a rally dedicated to "restoring honor", which is
> tea party code for the otherwise unutterable idea: get that nigger
> out of the White House! (despite the attendance of a few
> African-American shills on the scene).
>
> Eighty-seven thousand disoriented citizens lined the DC Mall
> reflecting pool and adjoining lawns to witness Beck overstep his
> role as a television clown and don the mantle of an
> evangelist-savior battling the dark forces working insidiously to
> put the America of WalMart, Walt Disney World, Nascar, and Burger
> King into the Collapsed Society Hall of Fame - where it's heading
> anyway, due to the bad choices these self-same citizens made during
> an extraordinary bonanza era of cheap oil that is now drawing to a
> close whether anyone likes it or not. Naturally, Beck invoked
> prayer against this prospect, which is what people resort to when
> they don't understand what is happening to them.
>
> Beck himself just seems to be following a career arc more than
> really answering "a call". The emptiness of his platitudes and the
> confusion of his ideas shows that he is just flexing his demagogic
> muscles in a moment when weepy bluster passes for heroism. Ten
> years ago he was a cringing drunk contemplating suicide. Then he
> went shopping in America's Mall of Utopias for something to believe
> in and found Mormonism, a "religion" dreamed up by an imaginative
> young man on the agricultural frontier of western New York during
> an earlier age of ferment which - guess what - coincided with a
> decade of economic turbulence. (Anyone interested in the bizarre
> subject is advised to read Fawn Brodie's excellent biography of
> Smith, No Man Knows My History [Knoph,1945].)
>
> Of course, what has allowed Beck to occupy center stage is the
> failure of rational political figures to articulate the terms of
> the convulsion that American society faces, brought about not by
> communists and other John Bircher hobgoblins but by the forces of
> history. The failure at the political center is a conscious one of
> nerve and will, of elected officials in both major parties playing
> desperately for advantage in defiance of the truth - this truth
> being that the USA went broke trying to swindle itself into
> prosperity. Add to this the failure of the law to go after the
> swindlers, which has undermined the fundamental belief in the rule
> of law that enabled this society to function as well as it did
> previously.
>
> Barack Obama personifies this failure these days, a politician
> proclaiming "change" who not only managed to change nothing, but
> promoted a continuation of the national self-swindling with
> legislation so dazzlingly prolix and complicated that no one can
> claim to have read either the Health Care Reform Act or the
> Financial Regulation bill, the two hallmarks of his tenure so far,
> neither of which will change anything about how we do these things.
> Why Mr Obama has turned out to be such a weenie remains a mystery.
> Even the former communists at Russia Today laugh at the idea that
> he is a "communist" or a "socialist" and so do I. He certainly
> appears to be hostage of the more malign forces in society these
> days - the medical insurance racket, the too-big-to-fail banks, the
> multi-national corporations. But I don't believe it's because he
> wants to suck up to them, or join their country clubs when his
> current job ends.
>
> My own guess is that he's been informed that the system is so
> fragile that if he dares to disturb even one teensy-weensy part of
> it - for instance, by throwing some executives from Goldman Sachs,
> Merrill Lynch, et cetera, into federal prison - that said system
> will fly to pieces in a fortnight. So Obama's main task for a year
> and a half has been to desperately apply baling wire and duct tape
> to the banking system while telling fibs to the public about a
> wished-for recovery to a prior state. Unfortunately that prior
> state is the ecstasy of a self-swindle in the moments before it
> unravels ... the sublime feeling of having gotten something
> wonderful for nothing. We're beyond that now and nothing on the
> age-old shelf of nostrums, spells, prayers, and miracle-cures will
> avail to bring that moment back, though the public does not know
> this.
>
> This is what allows a faker like Glenn Beck to shine. The masses
> still truly believe that prayer will save them from bankruptcy,
> foreclosure, penury, the loss of status, and the cut-off of
> precious air-conditioning, so Glenn steps onto a national monument
> like an Aztec priest ascending the Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli to
> soothe the angry god with worshipful incantations, and incidentally
> maybe a few dozen sacrificial hearts cut out - just as the
> tea-bagger right-wing glorifies the sacrifices of US soldiers blown
> up by roadside bombs for the sake of American military adventuring
> in lost causes like the war to turn Afghanistan into a functioning
> western-style democracy.
>
> Glenn Beck's sidekick nowadays, Sarah Palin, is exactly the kind of
> corn pone Hitler that America deserves: a badly-educated,
> child-like, war-mongering opportunist easily manipulated by
> backstage extremist billionaires who think they don't have enough
> money yet. Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012. In
> the process she'll turn the sad remnants of the Republican party
> into a suicide cult, but she might just get elected and you can
> kiss the 230-year-long experiment in representative government
> goodbye for good.
>
> In the meantime, the financial markets are getting ready to puke,
> the housing market has yet a million frauds left to unwind, the
> commercial real estate and retail sectors are crashing, the
> projects in Afghanistan, and Iraq, too (despite the current hype
> about the end of the combat mission there), are set to suck a few
> billion a day out of the system, indefinitely, and the season
> leading into the holidays is taking shape as a major amplification
> of all the converging clusterfucks that make these such interesting
> times. The tea-bagger faction will only get more desperately crazy
> as a result.
>
> The bigger mystery in all this - if I may perhaps engage in some
> nostalgia of my own - is: what happened to reasonable, rational,
> educated people of purpose in this country to drive them into such
> burrow of cowardice that they can't speak the truth, or act
> decisively, or even defend themselves against such a host of
> vicious morons in a time of troubles?
>
> _____
>
> 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 http://kunstler.com/bio.html.
>
> http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/08/one-lump-or-two.html
>
>
> http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
> http://www.ashisuto.co.jp
>