[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Decoupling From Reality

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

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

www.kunstler.com (May 11 2009)


Back in the golden age of American Flyfishing - say around 1913 - when
technical innovation in a prissy and recondite sport was joined by a new
leisure class emanating from the white glove canyons of Wall Street,
some new-minted guru of angling came up with method for whipping up
action on a trout stream when no fish would rise to the fly. It was
really lame. The idea was to artificially create the illusion of a
mayfly hatch - that moment when the larva of, for instance, Ephemerella
subvaria, the Hendrickson mayfly, swims to the surface, molts, and dries
its newly unfurled adult wings in the brisk spring air. This is famously
the moment that drives trout crazy, and when it occurs en masse, with
zillions of mayflies "hatching" off the water, a trout feeding-frenzy
can ensue. The idea with the artificial hatch was to pitch a fake
Hendrickson fly made of feathers and fur in so many furious, rapid casts
that the dumb trout lurking below would get suckered into a feeding
frenzy - and, shortly, into the buttered frying pan, with a nice
"tuxedo" of cornmeal and bacon.

In the annals of flyfishing, this gambit has been all but discredited,
except among the mentally sub-normal who sometimes venture over from the
lumpen realm of crank-and-plug fishing in search of improved social
standing. But the tactic naturally transferred into the precincts of
finance, where it reappeared in such disparate practices as Ponzi
schemes and Keynesian "pump-priming". Now it is being employed at a
scale never seen before, on an economy that is the equivalent of a great
dead river poisoned by the toxic effluents of the same society that
inhabits its banks (no pun intended). The dark secret of this river is
that the fish who once ran there are all dead.

Much has been made in recent weeks of "animal spirits" and the
"psychology of markets" in the hopes that mere attitudes might overcome
the laws of thermodynamics. Math wizardry has now yielded to self-esteem
building, an understandable sequence of events, since trafficking in the
mutant spawn of Wall Street algorithms has ended up completely
demoralizing the United States of America. Sadly, this is a little like
subjecting a man who has just watched his house burn down to twelve
segments of Oprah shows about the triumphal secrets of weight loss.

The Great Wish across America is to resume the life of
comfort-and-convenience that seemed so nirvana-like just a few short
years ago, when the very constellations of the heavens might have been
renamed after heroic Atlanta realtors and Connecticut hedge fund
warriors, and the boomer portfolios groaned with earnings, and millions
of graying corporate salary mules dreamed of their approaching
retirement to a satori of golf and Viagra, and the interior decorators
grew so rich installing granite countertops that they could buy their
own houses in the East Hampton, and every microcephalic parking valet in
Las Vegas qualified for a bucket full of Ninja mortgages, and Lloyd
Blankfein could dream of divorcing his wife to marry his cappuccino machine.

The choices now are stark and the kind of life on offer by the future is
rather austere. The job of the current president, and the people who
work with him, is to manage an epic contraction - let's say, to land a
very large, loaded defect-ridden airplane that has both run out of fuel
and suffered grievous mechanical breakdown ... and to bring down that
vehicle in an unfamiliar country filled with angry savages. Sadly, the
new president and his co-pilots just want to keep the plane up there,
circling. The president's viziers are working round-the-clock to come up
with some way, some toggle-switch, that might turn off the laws of
gravity (which are not unrelated to the laws of thermodynamics). But all
they seem to be able to come up with are mumbled prayers that are pale
imitations of the algorithms once concocted by the Wall Street engineers
who designed the aircraft they're riding in.

Well, that's enough conceits and metaphors for today.

We've digested the so-called "stress tests" for now with nary a burp and
in a few weeks General Motors will step into the dark cave of
bankruptcy. All the ancillary businesses linked to the US car-makers
face contraction and annihilation. A couple of things occur to me which
have not even entered the national debate on these matters: (1) the US
will still need to manufacture engines and chassis for military
vehicles. Do we intend to send out to Mitsubishi for those things in the
years ahead? (2) the US will need rolling stock (that is, choo-choo cars
and engines) for a revived passenger railroad system. Do we intend to
buy all that from the quaint peoples of other lands? (While the US
workforce instead focuses on updated releases of Grand Theft Auto.)

At the moment, there is tremendous hoopla and jubilation over the
start-up of so many "shovel-ready" highway projects around America - as
if what we need most are additional circumferential freeways to enhance
the Happy Motoring lifestyle. How insane are we? Is this the only thing
we know how to do?

I remain confident that the months ahead will introduce the American
public and our leaders to a range of horrors that will begin to
penetrate our addled collective imagination. We're far from done with
the crisis of banking and money and the related fiasco in mortgages -
which translates into the very real situation of many people become
homeless. It remains to be seen what may happen on the food production
scene, but the current severe shortage of capital and the intense
droughts shaping up around the world will resolve into a much clearer
picture by mid-summer. The price of oil has resumed marching up and has
now re-entered a range ($50-plus) that spun the airline industry into
bankruptcy last time around. Enough carnage has already occurred on the
jobs scene that the next act among many chronically jobless may tilt
toward desperation, anger, and violence. The sporting goods shops around
the nation are already rationing ammunition.

It's not just the stock markets that have decoupled from reality as we
enjoy the fragrant vapors of spring - it's the entire conscious
consensus of everybody holding the levers of power and opinion. To put
it as simply as possible, we're still sleepwalking into the future.

_____

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

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2009/05/decoupling-from-reality.html


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/