[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] A Nervous Nation

[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 (November 03 2008)


This is a nervous nation. Though I'm usually allergic to paranoia,
something makes me think that there's a back office in the US Treasury
that is buying the entire Dow Jones Industrial Index at opportune
moments - like fifteen minutes before the closing bell - at the
direction of Mr Paulson. He seems to easily spend $50 billion a day on
other dubious hand-outs. At that scale, buying the whole Dow would just
take his walking-around money. The idea behind it, my paranoid fugue
goes, is to jack up the stock market enough around election day to give
the dimmer members of the voting public the idea that the financial
fiasco is over and happy days are here again. You can't put this past
the Republican party, despite John McCain's friendly turn on Saturday
Night Live, consorting with "the enemy" for laughs.

Apart from that, McCain has run the flat-out most scurrilous campaign
I've ever seen, despite his reputation as a war hero and a sterling
fellow among the senators. He's run a campaign of malicious innuendo and
slander, seemingly aimed at voters who would have trouble qualifying for
the Special Olympics. And you have to wonder whether he actually
requested Vice-president Dick Cheney to lay that "kiss-of-death"
endorsement on him at the last moment. It could only have been better if
Mr Cheney borrowed some trick-or-treater's Darth Vadar costume for the
grand occasion.

What many people are nervous about, of course, is the chance of
shenanigans with the voting tally. Just one minor feature of the general
paralysis gripping this society has been our inability to get rid of
those mischievous Diebold computerized voting machines that leave no
paper trail. By the way, these touchscreen voting units are an example
of the diminishing returns of technology. There was nothing wrong with
the old mechanical units, but by making over-investments in complexity
we've just created more problems for ourselves. This ought to be a
warning to those in the thrall of techno-triumphalism.

People are nervous not just because Mr Obama might be swindled out of a
victory, but because John McCain might get elected. Credibility in his
judgment dissolved about eleven minutes after he picked the Bombshell
from Wasilla to be a heartbeat away from the oval office. Anyway, the
Republican Party needs to crawl off to a dark hole somewhere and either
pupate into something better or die - as the Whigs did in 1856. The
Republican Party is not through wrecking America. They have three more
months to destroy the US dollar and the economy that runs on it. And
with Mr Paulson shoving out pallet-loads of bundled dollars to the likes
of JP Morgan, so they can continue doing the very thing that provoked
this financial fiasco - lending money recklessly to anyone with a pulse
- they might just "get her done"!

Other people are afraid that Mr Obama will hand out bales of money, too,
only to a different class of people. I suppose he will. I hope he will
show restraint and apply it to public works that benefit all Americans -
such as my pet project of restoring passenger railroad service so people
don't have to drive, for instance, from Atlanta to Louisville or
Cleveland to Columbus. Even so, the new President will face not only a
tide of woes created by his predecessor, but very likely, too, an obese
and ineffectual federal bureaucracy unable to carry out even
well-intentioned programs.

He will take office in what may be the darkest economic year this
country has ever faced. 2009 shows every sign of being worse than this
one, with house foreclosures and car re-pos accelerating, companies
hemorrhaging jobs, oil prices heading back up (with shortages possible),
and a large new group of the formerly middle class growing restive and
sore in the background. It will be an historic act of governance if he
can keep the lid on all this. Many people will be worrying, of course,
whether he will even survive. The ghost of JFK and the dashed hopes he
represented (however real or illusory) still haunt this nation.

Apart from the awful debt deflation and probable rebound hyper-inflation
that will whipsaw the nation cross-eyed, the new president will face the
energy question. I hope he learns the fundamental lesson: that the only
way we can hope to become "energy independent" is to severely reform our
car-dependent living arrangements and live more locally. Anybody who
believes we're going to run the interstate highways and WalMart on
solar, wind, tar sands (which belong to Canada, by the way), oil shale,
methane gas, algae-diesel, or used fry-max® is going to be disappointed.
We'll have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently - in
traditional towns, villages, cities (scaled smaller, to a lower energy
diet), as well as a productive agricultural landscape that will require
more attention from live human beings (and maybe help from our friends,
the animals).

Much of the real work of the next president will be guiding a transition
out of obsolete habits, practices, and expectations that we must shed
whether we like it or not. The painful downscaling of the financial
sector, from a bloated twenty plus percent of the US economy back to
something more in the five percent range, is only the first of these
agonies. The transition away from suburbia - our tragic misallocation of
resources in an infrastructure for daily life with no future - will be
even more harrowing because of the psychology of previous investment,
which will provoke a misguided effort to sustain the unsustainable, and
squander our dwindling resources in the process.

I reject the label "gloom-and-doomer" where these difficult transitions
are concerned. There's a lot about the way we live now that is
disgusting, degrading, demoralizing, and socially toxic - from our
suicidal diet of processed fat, salt, and corn syrup byproducts to the
spiritually punishing everyday realm of the highway strip to the
fantastic loneliness and alienation of a people made hostage to a
TV-consumer nexus of corporate colonialism. Were done with that. We just
don't know it yet. Mr Obama may not know it, either, but he is a
trustworthy soul to hold our hands as we enter this unknown territory.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/11/a-nervous-nation.html


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