[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] One Lump or Two?

[Bill Totten]

by James Howard Kunstler

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

www.kunstler.com (August 30 2010)


Here come the Corn Pone Nazis!

Fox News entertainer, former drug addict, and professional weeper
Glenn Beck took center stage at the Lincoln Memorial exactly
forty-seven years to the day after Martin Luther King's "I Have a
Dream" speech for a rally dedicated to "restoring honor", which is
tea party code for the otherwise unutterable idea: get that nigger
out of the White House! (despite the attendance of a few
African-American shills on the scene).

Eighty-seven thousand disoriented citizens lined the DC Mall
reflecting pool and adjoining lawns to witness Beck overstep his
role as a television clown and don the mantle of an
evangelist-savior battling the dark forces working insidiously to
put the America of WalMart, Walt Disney World, Nascar, and Burger
King into the Collapsed Society Hall of Fame - where it's heading
anyway, due to the bad choices these self-same citizens made during
an extraordinary bonanza era of cheap oil that is now drawing to a
close whether anyone likes it or not. Naturally, Beck invoked
prayer against this prospect, which is what people resort to when
they don't understand what is happening to them.

Beck himself just seems to be following a career arc more than
really answering "a call". The emptiness of his platitudes and the
confusion of his ideas shows that he is just flexing his demagogic
muscles in a moment when weepy bluster passes for heroism. Ten
years ago he was a cringing drunk contemplating suicide. Then he
went shopping in America's Mall of Utopias for something to believe
in and found Mormonism, a "religion" dreamed up by an imaginative
young man on the agricultural frontier of western New York during
an earlier age of ferment which - guess what - coincided with a
decade of economic turbulence. (Anyone interested in the bizarre
subject is advised to read Fawn Brodie's excellent biography of
Smith, No Man Knows My History [Knoph,1945].)

Of course, what has allowed Beck to occupy center stage is the
failure of rational political figures to articulate the terms of
the convulsion that American society faces, brought about not by
communists and other John Bircher hobgoblins but by the forces of
history. The failure at the political center is a conscious one of
nerve and will, of elected officials in both major parties playing
desperately for advantage in defiance of the truth - this truth
being that the USA went broke trying to swindle itself into
prosperity. Add to this the failure of the law to go after the
swindlers, which has undermined the fundamental belief in the rule
of law that enabled this society to function as well as it did
previously.

Barack Obama personifies this failure these days, a politician
proclaiming "change" who not only managed to change nothing, but
promoted a continuation of the national self-swindling with
legislation so dazzlingly prolix and complicated that no one can
claim to have read either the Health Care Reform Act or the
Financial Regulation bill, the two hallmarks of his tenure so far,
neither of which will change anything about how we do these things.
Why Mr Obama has turned out to be such a weenie remains a mystery.
Even the former communists at Russia Today laugh at the idea that
he is a "communist" or a "socialist" and so do I. He certainly
appears to be hostage of the more malign forces in society these
days - the medical insurance racket, the too-big-to-fail banks, the
multi-national corporations. But I don't believe it's because he
wants to suck up to them, or join their country clubs when his
current job ends.

My own guess is that he's been informed that the system is so
fragile that if he dares to disturb even one teensy-weensy part of
it - for instance, by throwing some executives from Goldman Sachs,
Merrill Lynch, et cetera, into federal prison - that said system
will fly to pieces in a fortnight. So Obama's main task for a year
and a half has been to desperately apply baling wire and duct tape
to the banking system while telling fibs to the public about a
wished-for recovery to a prior state. Unfortunately that prior
state is the ecstasy of a self-swindle in the moments before it
unravels ... the sublime feeling of having gotten something
wonderful for nothing. We're beyond that now and nothing on the
age-old shelf of nostrums, spells, prayers, and miracle-cures will
avail to bring that moment back, though the public does not know
this.

This is what allows a faker like Glenn Beck to shine. The masses
still truly believe that prayer will save them from bankruptcy,
foreclosure, penury, the loss of status, and the cut-off of
precious air-conditioning, so Glenn steps onto a national monument
like an Aztec priest ascending the Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli to
soothe the angry god with worshipful incantations, and incidentally
maybe a few dozen sacrificial hearts cut out - just as the
tea-bagger right-wing glorifies the sacrifices of US soldiers blown
up by roadside bombs for the sake of American military adventuring
in lost causes like the war to turn Afghanistan into a functioning
western-style democracy.

Glenn Beck's sidekick nowadays, Sarah Palin, is exactly the kind of
corn pone Hitler that America deserves: a badly-educated,
child-like, war-mongering opportunist easily manipulated by
backstage extremist billionaires who think they don't have enough
money yet. Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012. In
the process she'll turn the sad remnants of the Republican party
into a suicide cult, but she might just get elected and you can
kiss the 230-year-long experiment in representative government
goodbye for good.

In the meantime, the financial markets are getting ready to puke,
the housing market has yet a million frauds left to unwind, the
commercial real estate and retail sectors are crashing, the
projects in Afghanistan, and Iraq, too (despite the current hype
about the end of the combat mission there), are set to suck a few
billion a day out of the system, indefinitely, and the season
leading into the holidays is taking shape as a major amplification
of all the converging clusterfucks that make these such interesting
times. The tea-bagger faction will only get more desperately crazy
as a result.

The bigger mystery in all this - if I may perhaps engage in some
nostalgia of my own - is: what happened to reasonable, rational,
educated people of purpose in this country to drive them into such
burrow of cowardice that they can't speak the truth, or act
decisively, or even defend themselves against such a host of
vicious morons in a time of troubles?

_____

A sequel to my 2008 novel of post-oil America, World Made By Hand,
will be published in September 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Press.
The title is The Witch of Hebron.

Mr Kunstler's biography is at http://kunstler.com/bio.html.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/08/one-lump-or-two.html


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