[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] In The Headlights

[Gary Crethers]

This guy has books to sell. Meanwhile I should get back to work on my own. 




________________________________
From: Bill Totten <shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp>
To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com
Sent: Wed, September 8, 2010 5:26:02 PM
Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] In The Headlights

by James Howard Kunstler

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

www.kunstler.com (September 06 2010)

The toils of summer are bygone now. The days grow shorter and America
stands in the darkling road of its own prospects like a dumb animal
frozen in the blinding light of approaching fury. The White House must
be a strange place these days with the management of the USA turned
over to astrologasters, alchemists, prayer-wheel spinners, fakirs,
viziers, necromancers and other visitors from occult realms
unaffiliated with the dominion of reality.

One of these characters, Ms Christina Romer, at a luncheon celebrating
her departure as chief of the White House Council of Economic Advisors
(that is, readers of spilled goat innards) even blurted out that she
had no idea what's been going on in banking and business and how come
America can't be more like it was in 1999. Don't cry for Christina. A
cushy chair awaits her at the Hogwarts Berkeley outpost where she can
repose in a trance of unknowing until California slides into its own
tar pit of default and disintegration.

It's all a mystery in Washington. Nobody can figure out what happened
to their green-eyed champion called Growth, that savior who rights all
wrongs and insures our eternal exception from the sad fates of other
less-blessed empires. Isn't there a book of conjures somewhere in the
Harvard Business School that guarantee perpetual growth - even if there
are different tomes around the campus that describe the essential
tragic nature of life, viz, that there is a beginning, a middle, and an
end to everything. And while this might not be the end of the human
project in North America, it is certainly the end of the cheap oil
abbondanza, and everything spun off of it in the way of mass consumer
luxury, with air-conditioning and a cherry on top.

My own view - I might be wrong - is that we are going through an
epochal compressive contraction, which is the opposite of growth. Money
is disappearing because debts are being welshed on in such a volume
that all the digital dollars conjured out of chief wizard Ben
Bernanke's magic booty box are but empty spells cast into a hurricane
of broken promises. This is no Hurricane Earl - which stared into the
discharge tube of Lloyd Blankfein's cappuccino machine and skidded off
whimpering into the fogs of Newfoundland. This economic contraction
storm has a long way to go, and it will be taking the USA on a strange
journey, a trip more marvelous and hazard-fraught than the trek across
the Oregon Trail - and the destination may be a strange country where
promises are taken seriously. What an idea!

In the meantime, the managers of US polity, Mr Barack Obama and
Company, look to continue scattering goat innards on the new carpet in
the Oval Office in their desperate seeking for a miraculous return to
the non-stop celebration that was ringing through the nation a decade
ago. Any moment now, the President will announce some new "program"
aimed at propping up house prices - in order, you understand, to allow
banks to pretend that they are still solvent. It won't do a thing for
the poor schlemiels who already paid way too much for a house, and it
won't do a thing for anyone looking to buy a house with a shrinking
income, but it's probably what he'll do, along perhaps with some other
cockamamie flim-flams, like temporarily suspending the payroll tax so
the American people can stock up on Cheez Doodles and beer for the
football festival known as Thanksgiving. I have a better idea: put a
seven-trillion-dollar tax on Lloyd Blankfein's cappuccino machine.

I voted for Barack Obama. I don't know about you, but I'm a tad
disappointed in how things turned out with him. These days he makes
Millard Fillmore look like Frederick the Great. His speech last week on
Iraq and, incidentally, economic matters, was such a puffery of hollow
platitudes that I was a little surprised he didn't go up in a vapor at
the end of it like a genie and retreat inside his desk lamp in a little
trail of steam. Nobody can figure out why he keeps the same krewe of
viziers at his elbow after all these months of failure to engage with
reality. The voters were expecting a champion and got a Labradoodle
instead.

Not that his political adversaries are any better. In fact, I wouldn't
depend on John Boehner to pull a straight furrow in three feet of dry
loam, or Mitch McConnell to tie his own shoelaces and chew gum at the
same time but its certainly reassuring to know that Sarah Palin is
waiting offstage to enter the 2012 national beauty pageant and that all
of America can stop wasting money on education now that Fox News has
installed a blackboard on Glenn Beck's soundstage.

Let me tell you exactly what is going on "out there". The so-called
developed world is watching two giant forces race each other to put an
end to business-as-usual for industrial civilization. These two forces
are the catastrophe of debt and predicament of oil supplies. They had
been running neck-and-neck for a few years, but now the catastrophe of
debt is pulling slightly ahead. But even this is an illusion because
these two forces are actually hitched in tandem, with the rickety cart
of civilization bouncing perilously behind them, and whatever one of
these forces does will affect the other. Bad debt will eventually
cripple the global oil industry's ability to perform, and the failures
of the oil industry will only amplify the killing force of debt. It's
that simple.

And the simple moral of the story is that the only sane thing America
can do is simplify itself, de-complexify its dangerously hyper-complex
organs of daily life. I've stated them before but, briefly, this means
simplifying the way we do farming, commerce, transportation, inhabiting
the landscape, schooling, medicine, and banking. Everything we do to
add additional layers of complexity to these already tottering systems
will guarantee an eventual orgy of blood and material destruction to
this land. Everything we do to prop up the unsustainable instead of
reconstructing the armatures of everyday life will make American life a
nightmare in a very few years ahead.

It must be the case that President Obama and the other denizens of high
places do not have a clue what I might mean by all this - though I am
hardly the only one advancing this set of ideas and it is not really
radical considering the alternatives. But our leaders' foolish
intransigence insures a political convulsion that will follow the onset
of an involuntary restructuring that can't be avoided anymore, because
reality has mandates of its own, and is closer to God than all the
hosts of our ridiculous politics.

_____

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 see http://kunstler.com/bio.html.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/09/in-the-headlights.html


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