Welcome to the witching month when America’s entropy-fueled death-wish
expresses itself with as much Halloween jollity and merriment as the old
Christmas spirit of yore. The outdoor displays alone take on a Babylonian scale,
thanks to the plastic factories of China. I saw a half-life-size T-Rex
skeleton for sale at a garden shop last week surrounded by an entire crew of
moldering corpse Pirates of the Caribbean in full costume ho-ho-ho-ing among
the jack-o-lanterns. What homeowner in this sore-beset floundering economy of
three-job gig-workers can shell out four thousand bucks to decorate his lawn
like the set of a zombie movie?
The overnight news sure took on that Halloween tang as the nation woke up
to what is probably a national record for a civilian mad-shooter incident. So
far, fifty dead and two hundred wounded at the Las Vegas at the Route 91
Harvest Festival (one up in fatalities from last year’s Florida Pulse
nightclub massacre, and way more injured this time).
The incident will live in infamy for maybe a day and a half in the US
media. Stand by today as there will be calls far and wide, by personas
masquerading as political leaders, for measures to make sure something
like this never happens again. That’s rich, isn’t it? Meanwhile, the
same six a.m. headlines declared that S &P futures were up in the
overnight markets. Nothing can faze this mad bull, apparently. Except maybe
the $90 trillion combined derivatives books of CitiBank, JP Morgan, and
Goldman Sachs, who have gone back whole hog into manufacturing the
same kind of hallucinatory collateralized debt obligations (giant sacks of
non-performing loans) that gave Wall Street a heart attack in the fall of
2008.
Europe’s quaint doings must seem dull compared to the suicidal potlatch of
life in the USA, but, believe me, it’s a big deal when the Spanish
authorities start cracking the heads of Catalonian grandmothers for nothing
more than casting a ballot. The video scenes of mayhem at the Barcelona polls
looked like something out of the 1968 Prague uprising. And now that the
Catalonia secession referendum passed with a 90 percent “yes” vote, it’s hard
to imagine that a good deal more violent mischief will not follow. So far,
the European Union stands dumbly on the sidelines. (For details, read the
excellent Roel Ilargi Meijer column on today’s TheAutomaticEarth.)
Next in the cavalcade of October traumas: the USA versus the nuclear weapons
ambitions of North Korea. This has been ramping up all year, of course, but
it looks to be headed for a climax now that the Golden Golem of Greatness is
at the helm. Most astounding, though, is America’s new method for conducting
the most sensitive matters of foreign policy. The day after Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson declared that his office was in contact with North Korean
officials, the Secretary’s boss, You-Know-Who, tweeted out: “I told Rex
Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time
trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.”
Could this possibly be a cleverly orchestrated good cop / bad cop effort
to bamboozle Kim Jung-un? Or is the US government just completely
dysfunctional? Or maybe something else is afoot. Under normal circumstances,
Mr. Tillerson would just resign after such a gross insult, but we must
suppose that a patriotic sense of duty compels him to remain in office in
case the need suddenly arises in this witching month to run over Mr. Trump
with the 25th amendment — the clause in the constitution that
allows a consensus of a pretty small number of national political leaders to
toss out a sitting president on the grounds of derangement and incompetence.
Stay tuned on that one.
Finally — well, who know what else may pop up now — there is the matter of
Puerto Rico. Halloween there is not like New England, with our nippy fall
mornings, steaming mugs of hot cider, and quickening fall color. It will
remain 90-degrees-plus down there in the fetid, stinking ruins, with lots of
still-standing water, broken communications, shattered supply lines, and very
little electricity. FEMA and the US Military may be doing all they can now,
but they must be on watch for the ominous blossoming of tropical disease
epidemics. The story there is far from over. Trump travels there this week.
That may be exactly the moment that the Deep State moves to take him down.
Great Fall Reading… JHK’s new book!
“Simply the best novel about 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
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