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Every
time I saw a car towing a motorboat this holiday weekend, I wondered what was
going through the head of the towee. Did they have a sense that darkness was falling
on their careers in motor sports? Did they have an inkling that an
oil-and-gas crisis is upon us and just not give a shit? Or were they just
going through the motions, following some implacable rote programming induced
by, say, forty-odd years of TV addiction and a diet based on corn-syrup
byproducts?
The
holiday to me was a creepy hiatus from an ever more desperate reality
overtaking the nation like a miasma. Meanwhile, the mainstream media's
ongoing narrative has gotten stuck in the moronic groove of "drill drill
drill." The belief of people like Larry Kudlow of CNBC and
uber-mega-idiot John Stossel of ABC-News is that we could go back to $1.50
gasoline if only congress would open the offshore exploration areas and the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This view is just plain erroneous. Nothing
we get out of these regions will come close to offsetting the ongoing
depletion of worldwide oil resources, or even arresting our own losses.
Larry
King had a particularly dreary debate Sunday night between Robert F. Kennedy,
Jr., and a grab bag of "drill drill drill" advocates. Kennedy took
the position that the US could achieve a sort of energy independence by
massive deployments of wind and solar equipment. It's an understandable wish,
I suppose, but not something I view as consistent with reality. The
unfortunate part of the Larry King presentation is that it gives the public
an idea that these two fantasies are the only possible responses to our
predicament. No one is interested in changing our current behavior.
In
the background of these energy conundrums is the sickening spectacle of the
nation's fatal insolvency, which remains partially disguised by the
machinations of the Federal Reserve, using the various new loan "windows"
to maintain the illusion that the major banks have not swindled themselves
out of existence -- and in doing so, caused at least $3 trillion (so far) in
capital to vanish in a black hole. This three-card-monte game has gone on for
a whole year now, and the consequences are hitting home. No more money can be
lent into existence now.
One
consequence is that other nations sitting on our exported dollars (from our
massive trade deficit) have apparently decided to spend off those dollars
rather than wait for the fullblown financial collapse of the nation issuing
them. My guess is that they are spending those dollars on oil, the primary
resource of industrial economies, and that they are prepared to outbid other
contestants (including the USA) no matter what -- because they know the
dollar is losing value, and that those losses are apt to accelerate over
time, and what else would they spend them on? I suspect this is behind the
rising price of oil more than anything else -- certainly more than the
phantom "speculators" the right wing is yelling about -- and that
behind the spending off of those exported dollars are the geological facts of
oil being a finite resource inequitably distributed around the world.
But
to get back to my prior point, things are hitting home anyway, and with
force. The US economy is crumbling because the way we conduct the activities
of daily life is insane relative to our circumstances. We've spent sixty
years ramping up a suburban living arrangement that has suddenly entered a
state of failure, and all its accessories and furnishings are failing in
concert. The far-flung McHouse tracts are becoming both useless and worthless
in the face of gasoline prices that will never be cheap again. The strip
malls and office "parks" are following the residential real estate
off a cliff. The retail tenants of all those places are hemorrhaging
customers who have maxed out every last credit card. The lack of business is
now leading to substantial layoffs. The airline industry is dying and will
probably cease to exist in its familiar form in 24 months. The trucking
industry is dying, threatening the entire just-in-time distribution system of
things that even people with little money to spend still need, like food.
These conditions will now get a lot worse, no matter whether the banks
continue to conceal their problems. All of it leads to an inflection point
that coincides with the November election. By then, I expect that quite a few
banks will be toast, job layoffs will rise spectacularly, foreclosures and
bankruptcies will be raging across the land, and homeowners north of the
magnolia belt will be shattered by the cost of staying warm this winter.
All
this hardship and woe will be blamed on the Republican party. It may actually
kill off the party. Political parties do go out-of-business in American
history, and this one deserves to die -- with its aggressive no-nothingism,
its avaricious, punitive religious extremism (the religious part often being
fake), its stunning inattention to financial malfeasance in areas under its
direct supervision, and its gross incompetent mismanagement of the nation's
strategic interests.
That
said, I will feel a little sorry for Mr. Obama if he gets to the White House.
He'll have to find a gentle way to tell the truth to the people who elected
him, people who will be suffering mightily, and who will be very sore about
their losses. He'll have to tell them that the previous "release"
of the American Dream software is obsolete, and the new version will require
a whole lot more of them in the way of earnest effort, delayed gratification,
and revised expectations.
There's
a whole lot we can do to greet the new circumstances awaiting us, but the one
thing we can't afford to do is put all our efforts into keeping the current
system running as is. Reality simply won't permit it. We would squander our
dwindling remaining resources trying to keep it all going. The next
president is going to have to lead us through the awful process of cutting
our losses. So far, the debate has been about how to avoid that.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
James Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature writer
for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone
Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.
His latest nonfiction book, "The Long
Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the
21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic
crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and
strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at
war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion
subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
You can purchase your own copy here : The Long
Emergency . You can get more from James Howard
Kunstler - including his artwork, information about his other novels, and his
blog - at his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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