|
Barack Obama
caught hell last week for daring to tell the truth about the ragged thing
that the American spirit has become. He said that small-town Pennsylvania voters,
bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or
antipathy to people who aren’t like them” to work out their
negative emotions. He might have added that the Pope wears a funny hat (see
for yourself this week), and that bears shit in the woods (something rural
Pennsylvanians probably know). Nevertheless, in the manner lately prescribed
for those who slip up and speak truthfully in public (and in contradiction to
the reigning delusions), Obama was pressured to
apologize for his statements.
The evermore loathsome and
odious Hillary Clinton, co-owner of a $100 million personal wealth portfolio,
seized the moment to remind voters what a normal, everyday gal she is -- who
would never look down on the small-town folk of Pennsylvania the way her
"elitist" opponent had -- forgetting, apparently, that the Clinton
family's consigliere,
James Carville, famously described the Keystone State as a kind of redneck
sandwich with Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as the bread, and Alabama as the
lunch meat in between.
As I mull over all this, I
begin to think that Hillary is exactly what the USA deserves and, that should she
manage to winkle away the nomination and get elected president, the outcome
would be instructive and salutary. For one thing, she will be buried under an
avalanche of political woe, beginning with the basic financial insolvency of
everything in the nation except the Clinton
family. Then she would proceed straight into an oil-and-gas clusterfuck that could take this society back to the
eighteenth century economically.
This would have the
positive effect of forcing the American public to look elsewhere for
governance than the usual parties in Washington,
D.C. It's time for a national
purgative, anyway. In fact, it's way overdue. Are the Democratic and
Republican parties anymore necessary than the Whigs? Neither of them can
really articulate the problems we face (and when their honchos slip up and
come close to the truth, they're persecuted for it).
A President Hillary will
also go a long way to defeating the popular delusion that a world ruled by
female humans would be heaven-on-earth. (It would be more like one of those
chaotic single-parent households in Section-8 housing, ruled by a harried and
distracted mom, with a shadowy man in the background molesting the little
ones while she was off working at the WalMart.)
I'm very sorry that Barack Obama apologized for his
remarks. It compromised his authority. They were truthful and correct. He
might have added that the anxious and bitter lower classes were also
neurotically hung-up on cars, and that his first act as president would be to
shut down the Nascar tracks by executive order in
the interest of national energy security.
It's been illuminating to see
how almost nobody has come to Obama's defense in this matter -- hardly anyone in the press, anyway.
It shows what the mainstream media's interest in the truth is (close to
zero).
In the background of these sad
and sordid campaign doings, the financial sector -- and the dog's-body
economy that the wagging financial tail used to be attached to -- is whirling
steadily down a big wide culvert, along with the rest of the debris shaken
loose by the spring rains. Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd
have been putting together mortgage rescue schemes that are gut-bustingly hilarious because they don't seem to take into
account the basic fact that nobody knows who the lending parties to all those
distressed mortgages really are. (Hint: they're not the "servicing"
companies who send out the default notices.) So when they say that the
government will "negotiate down" the principal owed on a house hemorrhaging dollar value, who exactly did they have in
mind as the negotiating partner?
These are issues that
would, in a more mentally-healthy republic, occupy center
stage of the political conversation -- not whether a cohort of Cheez Doodle addicted rural Pennsylvania morons prays out loud for God
to shoot all the Mexicans.
My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.
By :
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/
|