T he authorities keep emphasizing that the nurse who caught ebola from
Thomas Eric Duncan was sealed in her haz-mat suit the whole time she cared
for the poor fellow and blah blah nobody knows how she could possibly catch
the darn thing…. But the newspapers and cable news networks are not asking:
What about all the people, ordinary civilians, that this nurse was consorting
with off-work, after she took off her haz-mat suit and, let’s say, at some
point stopped by the Kroger Store’s fabulous steam table display of take-out
goodies behind the helpful and reassuring sneeze-guard on her way back home?
It sounds like a new Netflix drama – The Fatal Mac and Cheese.
If one more person in that chain of circumstance falls ill, Rick Perry
will have to ring-fence Dallas faster than you can say Guadalupe Hidalgo and
then we’ll be off to the quarantine races in America. It will be interesting
to see who’s shorting the airline stocks a few hours from now. I’ve got to
pass through Dulles airport tomorrow myself, and then two more foreign hubs
after that, and return to freakin’ Newark International at the end of the
week when a fullblown ebola panic may be underway.
For the moment, I’m in Washington for a conference on population and
immigration. Believe it or not there are some people who want to have an
honest national conversation about these issues amid all the disingenuous
chatter about “dreamers” emanating from the Oval Office in this miserable era
of politics-as-spin-art. And along comes the galvanizing event of a really serious
disease to finally force the issue. Nothing concentrates a nation’s attention
like the specter of the people next door bleeding out through their ears and
noses.
Welcome to the diminishing returns of the global economy. They’ve been
there all along, but none previously were sufficiently vivid or horrifying as
ebola. The Chinese FoxConn workers throwing themselves out the factory
windows in despair just seemed like some kind of fraternity prank in
comparison. Now something has got loose from the Heart of Darkness like the
hissing beastie that burst out of John Hurt’s ribcage in Alien and
water-skied out of the sick bay into the bowels of the cargo ship Nostromo.
Sometimes a metaphor is just a figure of speech and sometimes it’s liable to
set your hair on fire.
The ebola melodrama has all the mojo to set the global economy’s hair on
fire. And it comes along at a very strange time: just as central bank hoodoo
approaches the brink of its own epic fail – as in, accounting fraud,
check-kiting, and public relations can only work as a place-holder for
authentic economic relations for so long before the ominous shadow of reality
sweeps in on black swan wings. The markets were already well into the puking
stage of their own hemorrhagic contagion last week. Maybe today the S & P
starts bleeding from its eyes and ears this week.
There’s certainly blood all over the overburdened back roads of the Bakken
play all of a sudden, where $88-a-barrel shale oil doesn’t even allow you to
pretend that you’ve got a profitable venture going. The shale oil fairy tale
has been at the center of a matrix of lies America has been telling itself
about its economic meth buzz. Saudi America and all that malarkey, all in the
service of America’s master wish of all wishes: please Lord, let us keep
driving to Wal Mart forever.
Speaking of dreams and dreamers, that was a pretty shabby one. But here we
are now up against one of the master facts of the day: our world faces epic,
desperate demographic shifts as regions of it are proving to be very
unfriendly to human habitation. How long do we pretend that all the refugees
are welcome to come here, bleeding from their eyes and noses, as their dreams
of laying sod for $6-an-hour or slaughtering chickens for the greater glory
of Colonel Sanders collide with the diminishing returns of yet another Elon
Musk sales pitch for the blessed denizens of Palo Alto aspiring to Godhood.
I, for one, doubt that there’s enough room for all of us in that much
dreamed-of for-profit spacecraft soon to carry us to worlds where the black
swan’s wings have never cast a shadow.
The new World Made By Hand novel
!! Is now available !!
“Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice,
bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly
provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet
devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” —
Booklist
My local indie booksellers… Battenkill Books (Autographed by the Author) … or Northshire
Books…
or Amazon…
Also: Published as an E-book for the first time!
The 20th Anniversary edition
With an entertaining new introduction by the author
Bargain Price $3.99
Amazon Kindle …or … Barnes & Noble Nook …or… Kobo
