In case you wonder how our politics fell into such a
slough of despond, the answer is pretty simple. Neither main political party,
or their trains of experts, specialists, and mouthpieces, can construct a
coherent story about what is happening in this country — and the result is a
roaring wave of recursive objurgation and wrath that loops purposelessly
towards gathering darkness.
What’s happening is a slow-motion collapse of the
economy. Neither Democrats or Republicans know why it is so remorselessly
underway. A tiny number of well-positioned scavengers thrive on the debris
cast off by the process of disintegration, but they don’t really understand
the process either — the lobbyists, lawyers, bankers, contractors, feeders at
the troughs of government could not be more cynical or clueless.
The nation suffers desperately from an absence of
leadership and perhaps even more from the loss of faith that leadership is
even possible after years without it. Perhaps that’s why so much hostility is
aimed at Mr. Putin of Russia, a person who appears to know where his country
stands in history, and who enjoys ample support among his countrymen. How
that must gall the empty vessels like Lindsey Graham, Rubio, Schumer,
Feinstein, Ryan, et. al.
So along came the dazzling, zany Trump, who was able to
communicate a vague sense-memory of what had been lost in our time of
American life, whose sheer bluster resembled something like conviction as
projected via the cartoonizing medium of television, and who entered a
paralysis of intention the moment he stepped into the oval office, where he
proved to be even less authentic than the Wizard of Oz. Turned out he didn’t
really understand the economic collapse underway either; he just remembered
an America of 1962 and thought somehow the national clock might be turned
back.
The industrial triumph of America in the 19th
and 20th century was really something to behold. But like all
stories, it had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and we’re closer to the
end of that story than the middle. It doesn’t mean the end of civilization
but it means we have to start a new story that provides some outline of a
life worth living on a planet worth caring about.
For the moment the fragmentary stories of redemption
revolve around technological rescue remedies, chiefly the idea that electric
cars will save the nation. This dumb narrative alone ought to inform you just
how lost we are, because the story assumes that our prime objective is to
remain car-dependent at all costs — when one of the main features in the
story of our future is the absolute end of car dependency and all its furnishings
and accessories. We can’t imagine going there. (How would you, without a
car?)
The economy is collapsing because it was based on cheap
oil, which is no longer cheap to pull out of the ground — despite what you
might pay for it at the pump these days. The public is understandably
confounded by this. But their mystification does nothing to allay the
disappearance of jobs, incomes, prospects, or purpose. They retreat from the
pain of loss into a fog of manufactured melodrama featuring superheros and supervillains
and supernatural doings.
Donald Trump could never be a Franklin Roosevelt or a
Lincoln. These were figures who, if nothing else, could articulate the terms
that reality had laid on America’s table in their particular moments of
history. Mr. Trump can barely speak English and his notions about history
amount to a kind of funny papers of the mind. A sinister host of adversaries
who ought to understand what is happening in this country, but don’t, or
can’t, or won’t, are coming after him, and they are going to get rid of him
one way or another. They have to. They must. And they will.
And then what?
Now Live on Amazon! JHK’s new book
“Simply the best novel of the 1960s.”
Read the first chapter here (click) on Patreon
Buy the book at Amazon or click on the cover below
or get autographed copies from Battenkill Books
Other Books by JHK
