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The eulogy for
Walter Cronkite as "the most trusted man in America" on the CBS
"Sixty Minutes" show said a lot about the condition of this nation
-- though it did not signify what CBS thought it did. It wasn't about
the death of one hugely esteemed individual; it was about the broad
institutional failure of TV news in general and the current grievous loss of
legitimacy and authority in shaping a national consensus of reality.
Watching the old clips of Cronkite delivering the evening news years ago, one
couldn't help weighing the contrast with the current spectacle of snide,
combative, overbearing idiocy acted out nightly by the likes of Kudlow, Olberman, Kneale, O'Reilly, Matthews, and Dobbs as they shout down
their invited guest commentators, pander to their demographic, and diss their rivals for ratings.
It was instructive
to notice that the program following "Sixty Minutes" -- in the
supreme weekly slot of 8p.m. Sunday -- was a childish and stupid
"reality" show called "Big Brother." This said even
more about the craven quality of the people currently running CBS. It was
also a useful lesson in the diminishing returns of technology as applied to
television, since it should now be obvious that the expansion of cable
broadcasting since the heyday of the "big three" networks has led
only to the mass replication of video garbage rather than a banquet of
culture, as first touted.
It should remind us
more generally that when a society's operations become broadly fraudulent and
unreal, authority and legitimacy wither. This is analogous to the
position Barack Obama now finds himself in. He was elected as the
politician most trusted in America to change the fraudulent and unreal
operations of the US government. Don't bother protesting that all
politics is necessarily unreal and fraudulent. If it were so, you'd have to
argue that the US Constitution was wholly a fraud, as well as Madison,
Jefferson, Hamilton and the rest. It only has strong tendencies in that
direction. (The Declaration of Independence was itself a direct strike
against the fraud and unreality of British royal governance in America.)
As president,
Barack Obama is faced with the essential fraudulence and unreality of the US
economy. Notice that, as ominous as they are, the wars in iraq and Afghanistan have generated only minimal protest
so far in the early Obama period, despite the fact that they are not
operationally different from their conduct under Bush. There is no protest
because, for now, a consensus exists that our troops are in these places for
perceived reasons -- to keep Mideast oil supply lines open... to keep Islamic
maniacs busy in their own backyard instead of on US territory... to keep Iran
in a vise... to maintain the American "empire" (take your pick).
There's something there to appeal to a broad majority of US voters. Unlike
Vietnam, Iraq and Afstan are not perceived as
out-and-out frauds.
But the economy
is. Since September of 2008, when Hank Paulson began shoveling
bail-outs to the very banks who screwed the world on fraudulent and unreal
securities, and left American society comprehensively bankrupt, the consensus
has only deepened on the perception of an historic swindle. And so far,
President Obama has positioned himself as chief enabler to further swindling.
One need look no further than the rulings this past spring of the Financial
Accounting Standards Board (FASB) as authorized by the Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC, an official government agency, created 1934), which have
allowed the biggest banks to pretend that the fraudulent paper in their
vaults does not have to be recorded as a loss on their books.
The US economy is
now dying a slow and painful death because it had become based on activities
that had nothing to do with producing real wealth. Instead, it became
dependent on rackets, that is, behavior geared to getting something for
nothing. These rackets are often summarized under the acronym FIRE (for
finance, insurance and real estate), a system set up to strip-mine profits
from the wish commonly labeled "the American Dream" -- itself
largely a product of televised advertising and propaganda. The end
product of all that was the doomed economy of suburban sprawl, an
infrastructure for daily life with no future in a world defined by fossil
fuel scarcity. The unraveling of debt at every level now is directly related
to the mis-investments made in that way of life.
By now, it's
self-evident that the "change" voted for in November's election was
too horrifying to articulate. It still is. The suburban sprawl
economy was all we had left. Now it's gone and we're stuck with all its
deleveraging after-effects -- the worst case of "buyer's remorse"
since the fall of Nazi Germany. Thus, the only "change" that
President Obama can really work for is the health care system, which is a
life-and-death matter. The sordid rackets so ostentatiously infecting the
system boil down vividly to lives ruined and bankrupted, and a system more
frightful to deal with than disease itself. Probably the baseline truth is
that health care will end up being rationed one way or another. It's another
prime symptom of population overshoot, and a reminder that life is tragic.
As another blogger
put it so nicely last week on the web (sorry, but I forget who or where),
this isn't a "recession," it's a collapse. The excellent Dmitry Orlov has outlined the process very nicely in
his book "Reinventing Collapse" about the parallels between the
demise of the Soviet Union and the prospects for demise of the US as
currently constituted. Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the Soviet
collapse. He must have been a leader of very subtle abilities. Not only
did he survive to enjoy a busy second act of life with a Nobel Prize in his
pocket, but he accomplished a nearly bloodless transition in a society
long-conditioned to bloodletting as the primary political act.
Here in the USA, where
we have had over two hundred years experience with peaceful power transitions
-- even during the convulsions of 1860-65 -- the outcome this time might not
be so appetizing. It would be one of the supreme ironies of history if it
turned out that the US was incapable of ending its most self-destructive
rackets peacefully and bloodlessly, while the Russians shucked off its Soviet
racket like an old sweater. The way I see it, Mr. Obama just doesn't
have much time before his authority and legitimacy slough off and he is left
with only his genial smile. The "hope" vested in him will end up in
a Museum of Lost Hopes, along with the integrity of TV news and the rectitude
of the medical profession. And funding for that museum will be cut by
President Sarah Palin, representing Naziism US
style -- i.e. Naziism without the brains.
Post-script:
Tom Wolfe wrote
a fabulous op-ed in the Sunday New York Times
commemorating the Apollo 11 moon landing of 1969. In it, he speculated
that the achievment itself spelled the end of the
NASA program because it lacked a philosopher corps that might have furnished
it with more meaning beyond its element of "single combat" between
the US and the Soviets in the "space race." This
meaning, he said, might have been supplied by someone like NASA's chief
engineer Wernher Von Braun, who once stated (in
effect) before a congressional committee that "...we
must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only
sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that
bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time.
We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful
life we know of.... Unfortunately, NASA couldn't present as its spokesman and
great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent."
The further trouble, of
course, is now that we sentient creatures seem to be in the process of
destroying our home planet, how might we justify our spread to other worlds?
We've fallen short both in resources and philosophy. In our current
state of evolution we seem unlikely to ever again go further afield than the
moon and not exactly worthy of making trips elsewhere anyway. Stay tuned a few hundred thousand years....
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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