[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Slip of the Tongue

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)

www.kunstler.com (April 14 2008)

My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at
all booksellers.


Barack Obama caught hell last week for daring to tell the truth about
the ragged thing that the American spirit has become. He said that
small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic
circumstances, "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who
aren't like them" to work out their negative emotions. He might have
added that the Pope wears a funny hat (see for yourself this week), and
that bears shit in the woods (something rural Pennsylvanians probably
know). Nevertheless, in the manner lately prescribed for those who slip
up and speak truthfully in public (and in contradiction to the reigning
delusions), Obama was pressured to apologize for his statements.

The evermore loathsome and odious Hillary Clinton, co-owner of a $100
million personal wealth portfolio, seized the moment to remind voters
what a normal, everyday gal she is - who would never look down on the
small-town folk of Pennsylvania the way her "elitist" opponent had -
forgetting, apparently, that the Clinton family's consigliere, James
Carville, famously described the Keystone State as a kind of redneck
sandwich with Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as the bread, and Alabama as
the lunch meat in between.

As I mull over all this, I begin to think that Hillary is exactly what
the USA deserves and, that should she manage to winkle away the
nomination and get elected president, the outcome would be instructive
and salutary. For one thing, she will be buried under an avalanche of
political woe, beginning with the basic financial insolvency of
everything in the nation except the Clinton family. Then she would
proceed straight into an oil-and-gas clusterfuck that could take this
society back to the eighteenth century economically.

This would have the positive effect of forcing the American public to
look elsewhere for governance than the usual parties in Washington, DC.
It's time for a national purgative, anyway. In fact, it's way overdue.
Are the Democratic and Republican parties anymore necessary than the
Whigs? Neither of them can really articulate the problems we face (and
when their honchos slip up and come close to the truth, they're
persecuted for it).

A President Hillary will also go a long way to defeating the popular
delusion that a world ruled by female humans would be heaven-on-earth.
(It would be more like one of those chaotic single-parent households in
Section-8 housing, ruled by a harried and distracted mom, with a shadowy
man in the background molesting the little ones while she was off
working at the WalMart.)

I'm very sorry that Barack Obama apologized for his remarks. It
compromised his authority. They were truthful and correct. He might have
added that the anxious and bitter lower classes were also neurotically
hung-up on cars, and that his first act as president would be to shut
down the Nascar tracks by executive order in the interest of national
energy security.

It's been illuminating to see how almost nobody has come to Obama's
defense in this matter - hardly anyone in the press, anyway. It shows
what the mainstream media's interest in the truth is close to zero.

In the background of these sad and sordid campaign doings, the financial
sector - and the dog's-body economy that the wagging financial tail used
to be attached to - is whirling steadily down a big wide culvert, along
with the rest of the debris shaken loose by the spring rains.
Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd have been putting
together mortgage rescue schemes that are gut-bustingly hilarious
because they don't seem to take into account the basic fact that nobody
knows who the lending parties to all those distressed mortgages really
are. (Hint: they're not the "servicing" companies who send out the
default notices.) So when they say that the government will "negotiate
down" the principal owed on a house hemorrhaging dollar value, who
exactly did they have in mind as the negotiating partner?

These are issues that would, in a more mentally-healthy republic, occupy
center stage of the political conversation - not whether a cohort of
Cheez Doodle addicted rural Pennsylvania morons prays out loud for God
to shoot all the Mexicans.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/04/slip-of-the-ton.html

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