[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Free and the Dead

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation 

by James Howard Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (2005)
 
www.kunstler.com (July 06 2009)


I was out on a big Adirondack lake in a canoe this weekend while the
American economy was dying - but you wouldn't have known it for the fleets
of giant power boats dragging children back and forth across the water on
rubber tubes, and the giant camping vehicles crammed into every bare spot.
How do people pay for these things, I wondered. For not a few, installment
loans, no doubt - though that still begs the question. The sheer
programming of American life runs wide and deep. We are, apparently, a
people born to drag children behind hundred-and-fifty horsepower
two-stroke engines, so that's what we do, no matter what is really going
on in the world. Alas, mindless programming is the sort of thing that
kills societies.

Watching the summer panorama on an Adirondack lake is like reading a
history of the post World War Two decades, because almost nothing on view
there now existed before 1945 and we'll be stunned to see how swiftly it
all terminates. The fantastic prosperity of these postwar decades killed
the wildness of these once-remote lakes.  Fortunes were made - like
everywhere else in the USA - carving up the landscape and deploying
graceless houses made of cheap, fabricated materials.  All the diabolical
genius brought to engineering the New Jersey and Long Island suburbs was
eventually turned loose on the Adirondack wilderness, with predictable
results. The lakes themselves, stuffed with all those sleek plastic power
boats, are like the Long Island Expressway minus the painted lanes.

The American victory over manifest evil in World War Two was so total that
there was no one else left on earth to compete with in making and selling
useful articles, at least for a while. And it produced a middle class so
well-paid that it could express itself in a vast spewage of plastic and
leisure across the land.  The human race will look back on this society
with wonder and nausea for whatever remains of its time on Earth.  For at
least twenty years, though, this way of life has been running on fumes,
inertia, and promissory notes.  The amazing thing is that these
life-extension strategies worked, especially the past ten years when there
was really nothing left besides a Ponzi structure of interlocked swindles
and rackets.

When the time comes when we do look back to understand what went wrong, I
think we'll see that the Woodstock generation went off the rails in 1980,
with the election of the actor, Ronald Reagan, who really established the
idea that a society could benefit hugely just by lying to itself, or
simply pretending.  It wasn't "morning in America", of course.  It was
more like eleven-thirty at night, and the rest of the world had eaten our
breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and we decided that inflating our national
self-esteem was more important than paying attention to reality. That was
when we became a something-for-nothing society - and, incidentally, it was
also the take-off point for legalized gambling all over America (an
"industry" based on the worship of unearned riches). And that was,
coincidentally, the moment when we became a nation of dupes, grifters,
marks, and suckers.

Now, when I look around that Adirondack lake, I can easily imagine the
time - not far off - when the motors cease to ring, and the big, white
plastic ridiculous power boats vanish from the scene, and the houses along
the shore de-laminate, or are plundered for their materials, and the sites
they occupy return to nature, and the aroma of roasting hot dogs no longer
wafts on the summer air, and the pastures and orchards run back from the
shoreline up the slopes, with people laboring earnestly in them - rather
than dragging children on plastic tubes around the water behind a boat
that gets four miles to the gallon of gasoline.

For those still capable of paying attention to our national predicament,
the questions are: what happens from here ... and how does it happen?

Over the last ten days, somebody shot the "Green Shoots" narrative in the
head. There is no way the American economy can re-expand. This is a debt
deflation like unto nothing the world has ever seen before. We've entered
the really painful zone of the "work-out" where insolvency can no longer
be denied.  Things will be heard crashing every day - enterprises,
households, assets, institutions, prospects, deals.  No amount of
stimulus, first, second, or beyond, will avail to stop this process.

President Obama had better turn his efforts from pretending to re-start
the revolving credit rackets to overseeing the comprehensive
re-simplifying of American life. I think he has a few weeks to turn his
rhetoric around before the political mischief begins for real, and the
aggrieved classes start shooting things up and burning things down.  These
classes really do need something to hope for, and something to work at,
and something to occupy their attention besides their grief over the
massive losses in their lives. But none of that energy will be focused
beneficially unless they hear the truth ... that there really is no going
back to what was before.

It's also vitally important to commence public hearings and official
investigations of those who committed real crimes and malfeasances.
Bernie Madoff has been salted away for two and a half lifetimes, but Henry
Paulson is still at large after overseeing the creation of the biggest
heap of fraudulent securities the world has ever known - and then betting
against them in the swaps market, in effect shorting his own swindle - not
to mention his misdeeds at the US Department of the Treasury. Why are
those other Wall Street smoothies still enjoying their Hamptons villas
while the foreclosed set up tents in the Sacramento Delta?  Why are the
government officials who failed so miserably at regulation still enjoying
their salaries, perqs, and pensions while those not employed by a bloated
government struggle to stay alive another week.  And how many more weeks
will go by before Michael Jackson is buried in the ground? 

_____

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

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/07/the-free-and-the-dead.html


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