[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Hope and Fear

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

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

www.kunstler.com (January 19 2009)


Tomorrow at noon, Barack Obama steps into the shoes of Lincoln, FDR,
Millard Fillmore and forty other predecessors - this time as the
wished-for Mr Fix-it of a nation run into a ditch. Surely over the
months of transition, someone with a clear head and a fact-laden
portfolio has clued-in the new President about the reality-based
state-of-the-Union - as opposed, say, to the Las Vegas version, where
Santa Clause presides over a whoredom of something-for-nothing
economics, and all behaviors are equally okay, and consequence has been
sliced-and-diced out of the game ... where, in the immortal words of
Milan Kundera, anything goes and nothing matters.

Mr Obama deserves credit for a lot of things, but perhaps most amazingly
his ability to see "hope" in a public so demoralized by their own bad
choices that the USA scene has devolved to a non-stop Special Olympics
of everyday life, where absolutely everybody is debilitated, deluded,
challenged, or needs a leg up, or an extra buck, or a pallet on the
floor, or a gastric bypass, or a week in detox, or a head-start, or a
fourth strike, or a $150-billion bailout. There's a lot of raw material
from sea to shining sea, admittedly, but how do you re-shape it into a
population guided by a sense of earnest purpose, with reality-based
expectations, with habits of delayed gratification and impulse control,
and a sense of their own history? That will be quite a trick. Many of us
- myself included - will be pulling for Barack. Maybe the power of his
rhetoric and his sheer buff physical presence can whip this republic of
overfed clowns into shape.

He inherits a government of superficially gleaming marble edifices - all
gloriously on view tomorrow - but full of broken machinery within,
infested with weevils, termites, and rats. The USA is functionally
bankrupt. We have no money. The pixel "money" being emailed over to the
insolvent banks has no basis in reality beyond the quiver in Ben
Bernanke's voice as he announces each new injection. Yet all reports so
far indicate that President Obama is bent on continuing the process one
way or another.

Mr Obama's first task taking stage in the lonely Oval Office should be
to get right with his own credo of "change", meaning he'll have to
persuade the broad American public that the "change" required to salvage
this society runs much deeper, colder, and thicker than they'd imagine
in their initial transports over hallelujah-Bush-is-Gone. Many of the
familiar touchstones of the recent American experience have got to go.

Say goodbye to the "consumer society". We're done with that. No more
fast money and no more credit. The next stop is "yard-sale nation", in
which all the plastic crapola accumulated over the past fifty years is
sorted out for residual value and, if still working, sold for a fraction
of its original sticker price. This includes everything from Humvees to
Hello Kitty charm bracelets.

It will be a very salutary thing if we stop even referring to ourselves
as "consumers". This degrading moniker, used for decades unthinkingly by
everyone from The New York Times Nobel Prize pundits to the Econ 101
section men of the land-grant diploma mills has been such a drag on our
collective development that it has extinguished the last latent flickers
of duty, obligation, and responsibility for the greater good in a
republic of broken communities shattered by WalMarts.

The government will not have to do a thing to bring down the
chain-stores. History and inertia is already on that case, with the easy
credit racket terminated and new frictions arising over global trade,
and even Peak Oil waiting to work its hoodoo behind the scrim of
deceptively temporarily low pump prices. The larger question for
President Obama is: how can we collectively promote the reconstruction
of Main Street, including all the fine-grained layers of retail and
wholesale trade. High tech "solutions" are not likely to avail in this.

In fact, techno-grandiosity and techno-triumphalism must be be
sedulously monitored and guarded-against. They jointly amount to the
great mass psychosis of our time and culture. This array of traps - from
proposed flying cars to "renewable" motor fuels - is the ultimate
Faustian "bargain". It will be at the heart of any campaign to sustain
the unsustainable, sucking us ever more deeply into the diminishing
returns of over-investments in complexity. Hence, the last thing this
nation needs now is a stimulus plan aimed at the development of
non-gasoline-powered automobiles - married with extensive rehabilitation
of the highway system. What I incessantly refer to as the Happy Motoring
fiesta is drawing to a close as we have known it, whether we like it or
not. Cars will be around for a while, of course, but as an increasingly
elite activity. The owners of cars will be increasingly beset by
grievance and resentment on the part of those foreclosed from the Happy
Motoring life - and it could easily degenerate to vandalism and
violence, since the "right" to endless motoring was surreptitiously made
an entitlement somewhere around 1957.

The "change" we face in agriculture dwarfs even the death throes of
Happy Motoring (and is not unrelated to it either). A lot of people are
likely to starve in America if we don't get our act together pronto in
terms of how we produce the food we eat. Petro-agribusiness faces a set
of disturbances that are certain to induce food shortages. Again, the
Peak Oil specter looms in the background, for soil "inputs" and diesel
power to run that system. But all of a sudden even that problem appears
a lesser danger than the gross failure of capital finance now underway -
and petro-agriculture's chief external input is credit. Credit may be in
extremely short supply this year, and hence crops may be in short supply
as we turn the corner into spring and summer. Just as in the case of
WalMart versus Main Street, the reform of farming in America is one of
those "changes" much larger than most of us imagine. I'd go so far to
say that a large proportion of young people now in college will find
themselves not working in office cubicles, but in some way or other in
farming or the "value-added" activities connected to it.

I don't see how America can confront the "change" represented by the
stark fact that suburbia-is-toast. It is the sorest spot of all in the
corpus of a culture beset by disease and debility. The salient
manifestation of suburbia's demise is the remorseless drop of housing
values in the places most representative of that development pattern.
The worst thing the Obama team could do about this would be to attempt
to prevent the fall of inflated house prices. Their real value needs to
be clearly established before a picture emerges of which places have a
plausible future, and which places are destined to be mere ruins or
salvage yards.

Americans will have to live somewhere, of course, but the terrain of
North America faces a very comprehensive reformation. The biggest cities
will contract; the small cities and small towns will be reactivated, the
agricultural landscape will be inhabited differently, and the suburbs
will undergo an agonizing decades-long work-out of bad debt and true
asset re-valuation.  Since the loss of so much vested "wealth" is
implied by the crash of suburbia, this may be a source of revolutionary
political violence moving deeper into the Obama administration.

There's been plenty of buzz in the blogosphere about the imminent
failure of the US "social safety net", including especially the social
security program. Retirees are the biggest block of voters. They're not
liable to foment riots - that is best left to the youthful
high-testosterone cohort - but the older folks - with Baby Boomers now
coming aboard - could be so distressed by the loss of their presumed
entitlements that they will elect any maniac promising to bring back
something that looked like the 1980s. We haven't begun to hear their war
cries, and I hope they do not beat a path straight into some sort of
crypto corporate fascism - as, finally, every last failing scrap of
American life is nationalized.

Some natural processes hide in the thickets ahead. A hyper-inflation
could take this country in any weird and unappetizing direction, from
scapegoating and persecution to a new kind of corporate fascism. But I'm
inclined to see our tribulations governed more by weakness in high
places than by real power. In a world of declining capital and depleting
energy resources, the key to any successful venture will be smaller
scale. I'm not convinced that any emergency could make the US government
more effective at getting anything done. Our hopes really ought to be
vested locally, since that is where the most effective action is likely
to be in the years just ahead.

It will be stirring to watch Barack Obama's inauguration, and all the
hoopla and balls, and the radiant children, and the exemplary First Lady
dancing with the First Partner. Euphoria is a legitimate part of the
human condition, though we know it soon passes into the heavy lifting of
real life. There are many Americans of good will who would like to see
the meaning of real "change" clearly articulated in a way that comports
with reality, not just "dreams" and wishes. We'll hear a lot about
dreams this week, anyway, of course, but then reality will set in and
the heavy lifting will commence. Many Americans of good will also stand
ready to face reality, to roll up our sleeves, ditch the video games and
the Nascar and the microwaved cheese treats, and the internet porn and
all the other noxious, narcolepsy-inducing distractions of our time, and
put our shoulders to the wheel to haul this nation into a plausible
future. For the moment: a rousing cry of "Good Luck!" To President Obama
from this little outpost of Clusterfuck Nation.

_____

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

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2009/01/hope-and-fear.html

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