[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Poverty of Imagination

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

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

www.kunstler.com (February 09 2009)


Venturing out each day into this land of strip malls, freeways, office
parks, and McHousing pods, one can't help but be impressed at how
America looks the same as it did a few years ago, while seemingly
overnight we have become another country. All the old mechanisms that
enabled our way of life are broken, especially endless revolving credit,
at every level, from household to business to the banks to the US Treasury.

Peak energy has combined with the diminishing returns of
over-investments in complexity to pull the "kill switch" on our vaunted
"way of life" - the set of arrangements that we won't apologize for or
negotiate. So, the big question before the nation is: do we try to
re-start the whole smoking, creaking hopeless, futureless machine? Or do
we start behaving differently?

The attempted re-start of revolving debt consumerism is an exercise in
futility. We've reached the limit of being able to create additional
debt at any level without causing further damage, additional
distortions, and new perversities of economy (and of society, too). We
can't raise credit card ceilings for people with no ability make monthly
payments. We can't promote more mortgages for people with no income. We
can't crank up a home-building industry with our massive inventory of
unsold, and over-priced houses built in the wrong places. We can't ramp
back up the blue light special shopping fiesta. We can't return to the
heyday of Happy Motoring, no matter how many bridges we fix or how many
additional ring highways we build around our already-overblown and
over-sprawled metroplexes. Mostly, we can't return to the now-complete
"growth" cycle of "economic expansion". We're done with all that.
History is done with our doing that, for now.

So far - after two weeks in office - the Obama team seems bent on a
campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs, to attempt to do all
the impossible things listed above. Mr Obama is not the only one, of
course, who is invoking the quest for renewed "growth". This is a tragic
error in collective thinking. What we really face is a comprehensive
contraction in our activities, especially the scale of our activities,
and the pressing need to readjust the systems of everyday life to a
level of decreased complexity.

For instance, the myth that we can become "energy independent" and yet
remain car-dependent is absurd. In terms of liquid fuels, we're simply
trapped. We import two-thirds of the oil we use and there is absolutely
no chance that drill-drill-drilling (or any other scheme) will change
that. The public and our leaders can not face the reality of this. The
great wish for "alternative" liquid fuels (bio fuels, algae excreta)
will never be anything more than a wish at the scales required, and the
parallel wish to keep all our cars running by other means - hydrogen
fuel cells, electric motors - is equally idle and foolish. We cannot
face the mandate of reality, which is to do everything possible to make
our living places walkable, and connect them with public transit. The
stimulus bills in congress clearly illustrate our failure to understand
the situation.

The attempt to restart "consumerism" will be equally disappointing. It
was a manifestation of the short peak energy decades of history, and now
that we're past peak energy, it's over. That seventy percent of the
economy is over, especially the part that allowed people to buy stuff
with no money. From now on people will have to buy stuff with money they
earn and save, and they will be buying a lot less stuff. For a while, a
lot of stuff will circulate through the yard sales and Craigslist, and
some resourceful people will get busy fixing broken stuff that still has
value. But the other infrastructure of shopping is toast, especially the
malls, the strip malls, the real estate investment trusts that own it
all, many of the banks that lent money to the REITs, the chain-stores
and chain eateries, of course, and, alas, the non-chain mom-and-pop
boutiques in these highway-oriented venues.

Washington is evidently seized by panic right now. I don't know anyone
who works in the White House, but I must suppose that they have learned
in two weeks that these systems are absolutely tanking, that the
previous way of life that everybody was so set on not apologizing for
has reached the end of the line. We seem to be learning a new and
interesting lesson: that even a team that promises change is actually
petrified of too much change, especially change that they can't really
control.

The argument about "change" during the election was sufficiently vague
that no one was really challenged to articulate a future that wasn't,
materially, more-of-the-same. I suppose the Obama team may have thought
they would only administer it differently than the Bush team - but
basically life in the USA would continue being about all those trips to
the mall, and the cubicle jobs to support that, and the family safaris
to visit Grandma in Lansing, and the vacations at Sea World, and
Skipper's $20,000 college loan, and Dad's yearly junket to Las Vegas,
and refinancing the house, and rolling over this loan and that loan ...
and that has all led to a very dead end in a dark place.

If this nation wants to survive without an intense political convulsion,
there's a lot we can do, but none of it is being voiced in any corner of
Washington at this time. We have to get off of petro-agriculture and
grow our food locally, at a smaller scale, with more people working on
it and fewer machines. This is an enormous project, which implies change
in everything from property allocation to farming methods to new social
relations. But if we don't focus on it right away, a lot of Americans
will end up starving, and rather soon. We have to rebuild the railroad
system in the US, and electrify it, and make it every bit as good as the
system we once had that was the envy of the world. If we don't get
started on this right away, we're screwed. We will have tremendous
trouble moving people and goods around this continent-sized nation. We
have to reactivate our small towns and cities because the metroplexes
are going to fail at their current scale of operation. We have to
prepare for manufacturing at a much smaller (and local) scale than the
scale represented by General Motors.

The political theater of the moment in Washington is not focused on any
of this, but on the illusion that we can find new ways of keeping the
old ways going. Many observers have noted lately how passive the
American public is in the face of their dreadful accelerating losses.
It's a tragic mistake to tell them that they can have it all back again.
We'll see a striking illustration of "phase change" as the public mood
goes from cow-like incomprehension to grizzly bear-like rage. Not only
will they discover the impossibility of getting back to where they were,
but they will see the panicked actions of Washington drive what remains
of our capital resources down a rat hole.

A consensus is firming up on each side of the "stimulus" question,
largely along party lines - simply those who are for it and those who
are against it, mostly by degrees. Nobody in either party - including
supposed independents such as Bernie Sanders or John McCain, not to
mention President Obama - has a position for directing public resources
and effort at any of the things I mentioned above: future food security,
future travel-and-transport security, or the future security of livable,
walkable dwelling places based on local networks of economic
interdependency. This striking poverty of imagination may lead to change
that will tear the nation to pieces.

_____

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

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2009/02/poverty-of-imagination.html


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