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Whenever the herd mentality lines up
along a compass point leading to "permanent prosperity," or a yellow
brick road lined with green shoots, or something like that, I tend to see the
edge of a cliff up ahead. We are now completely in the grips of the deadly
diminishing returns of information technology. The more information
comes to us about How Things Are, especially from TV, the more
confused or wrong the conventional view gets it.
A broad
consensus has formed in the news media and among government mouthpieces and
even some "bearish" investors on the street that "the worst is
behind us" in this tortured economy. This view is completely
crazy. It will only lead to massive disappointment a few weeks or
months from now, and that disappointment might easily transmute to political
trouble. One even might call the situation tragic, except a closer look
at the sordid spectacle of what American culture has become -- a non-stop
circus of the seven deadly sins -- suggests that we deserve to be punished by
history.
The reason
behind this mass delusion is not hard to find: it's based on wishing,
especially the wish to retain all the comforts, conveniences, luxuries, and
leisure that had become normal in American life. These are now ebbing
away in big gobs for most of the population -- while a tiny fraction of the
well-connected pile on ever larger heaps of swag, enjoying ever more
privilege. Those in the broad bottom 95 percent were content as long as there
was a chance that they, too, could become members of the top 5 percent -- by
dint of car-dealing, or house-building, or mortgage-selling, or some other
venture enabled by easy credit and a smile. Those days and those ways
are now gone. The bottom 95 percent are now left with de-laminating
houses they can't make payments on, no prospects for gainful work, re-po men hiding in the bushes to snatch the PT Cruiser,
cut-off cable service, Kraft mac-and-cheese (if
they're lucky), and Larry Summers telling them their troubles are over. (If I
were Larry, I'd start thinking about a move to some place like the Canary
Islands.)
Too many disastrous
things are lined up in the months ahead to insure that we're entering a new
phase of history: The Long Emergency.
Government at every
level is worse than broke.
Our currency, the US dollar, is hemmorrhaging
legitimacy.
Inability to service old debt at all levels or incur
new debt.
Bad (toxic) debt lurking off balance sheets
everywhere.
The housing bubble fiasco is far from over.
Unemployment rising implaccably.
So-called "consumers" unable to consume
consumables.
Crucial energy import supply lines fragile.
Food supply subject to energy problems and climate
abnormalities.
A world full of other societies who would enjoy
watching us fail and suffer.
When The
Long Emergency was published in 2005, I said then that the greatest
danger this society faced would be its inclination to gear up a campaign to
sustain the unsustainable at all costs -- rather than face the need to
make new arrangements for daily life. That appears to be exactly what
has happened, and it didn't happen under the rule of some backward-facing,
right-wing, Jesus-haunted crypto-fascist, but rather a
"progressive" party led by a dynamically affable young man
unburdened by deep cultural allegiance to Wall Street. Barack Obama has been
sucked in and suckered. "Change you can believe in" has
morphed into "a status quo you will bend heaven and earth to hold
onto."
Whatever else you
might think or feel about Mr. Obama's performance so far, this strategy on
the broader question of where we go as a nation pulses with tragedy.
What's remarkable to me, to go a step further, is the absence of
comprehensive vision -- not just in the president, but in all the supposedly
able and intelligent people around him, and even those leaders not in government
but in business and education and science and the professions.
History is clearly
presenting us with a new set of mandates: get local, get finer, downscale,
and get going on it right away. Prepare for it now or nature will whack you
upside the head with it not too long from now. Attempting to maintain
anything on the gigantic scale will turn out to be a losing proposition,
whether it is military control of people in Central Asia, or colossal
bureaucracies run in the USA, or huge factory farms, or national chain store
retail, or hypertrophied state universities, or global energy supply
networks.
These imperatives
are so outside-the-box of ordinary experience right now, that to drag them
into the arena of politics can only evoke blank stares or nervous giggling.
But whether we like it or not, these are the things that will really matter
in the years ahead -- not whether General Motors can ever make a profit
again, or what Target Store's sales figures are next quarter, or whether the
latest high-rise condo-and-gambling complex in Las Vegas will be successfully
marketed.
Here, in
the dog days of summer, it seems to me that the situation in the USA is so
fundamentally bad, so unpromising, so booby-trapped
for failure, that I wonder if there has ever been a society so badly deluded
as ours. We're prisoners of our wishes, living in a strange dream-time,
oblivious to the forces gathering at the margins of our vision, lost in a
wilderness of our own making.
Anything can
happen now. I certainly wouldn't rule out international mischief as we
arc around into fall. The air is so full of black swans that the white
swan now seems like the exceptional thing. Whatever else happens, it sure
will be interesting to see the public's reaction to Wall Street's
announcement of Christmas bonuses. The folks at Rockefeller Center
better be thinking about getting a fireproof tree.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
Also
by James Howard Kunstler
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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