Whirling Whirling by James Howard Kunstler

It begins to look like The USA will litigate itself into Civil War Two with the first battle being half the lawyers in the Department of Justice prosecuting the other half until Anthropogenic Global Warming puts the DC Swamp completely underwater and all parties concerned scuttle off into the deep blue sea.

It was rather a shock to see the photo lineup of all those familiar faces — Comey, Hillary, McCabe, Loretta Lynch et. al. — in the criminal referral “matters” sent over to the DOJ by congress on Wednesday, as if they were some mob of goombahs caught running a waste management kickback racket in the Hackensack mud-flats. But the evidence trail has been in plain sight for more than a year that Justice Department officials of various ranks and stripes colluded to bring off a legalistic coup d’etat against the loathed and despised winner of the 2016 election — with a little help from (of all things and personae) Russia, as in that political smallpox blanket known as the Steele Dossier.

Mixed metaphors aside, it looks like all the clones of Ricky Ricardo and Lucy engineered in some CIA black lab will never satisfy the amount of ’splainin’ that needs to be done, and that the ensuing trials may last longer than the lifetimes of millennials still struggling on campus with their gender presentation. There may be even more line-ups to come. I’m thinking players like Susan Rice, the Podesta brothers, Huma Abedin, John Brennan, James Clapper, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and perhaps the gentleman who preceded the Golden Golem of Greatness in the oval office. This melodrama will make The Lord of the Rings look like a knock-knock joke.

Meanwhile, the Republic actually whirls around the drain, both as a legitimate polity between Montauk Point and the Farallon Islands, and as an actor on the world stage. The Washington bureaucracy is not the only swamp that needs to be drained. There’s also the reeking Okeefenokee wasteland known as the US economy, led by its financial avatars on Wall Street who engineered the orgy of asset-stripping that chewed through the industrial states like some flesh-eating bacteria.

There is nothing left in Flyover-land. I drove through part of it yesterday on a book-reporting chore: the “quiet corner” of northeastern Connecticut south of Worcester, Mass, a valley of decrepitating mill towns and opiate addiction, like some place out of H.P. Lovecraft’s demon-haunted imagination, where the sun comes up twenty minutes later than anywhere else, and a dwindling population of malevolent diseased imbeciles shriek their lonesome agonies of failure and destitution to a God that never returned from lunchbreak one day in 1985. Their parting shot to an unjust world was voting for Donald Trump. Next time, they won’t even be around.

Anyway, Trump may emerge briefly from his triumph over the Swamp-led coup-d’etat only to find himself in his fated other role as designated bag-holder for the next crack-up of the banking system. At least he’ll be in his natural element: bankruptcy, presiding over the biggest ruined casino the world has ever seen. Who will bail America out then? Hint: the Federal Reserve is out of tricks — except maybe turning the US Greenback into a Bazooka Joe comic. That act of this national Grand Guignol awaits in the second half of 2018.

Meantime, my head is still reeling from the shenanigans in Syria last week. How many of our missiles were shot down exactly? I’m not too confident we’ll ever get a straight answer about that from the generals. Nor why they decided to blow up a suspected chemical weapons factory which, you’d think, would disperse a residue cloud of chemical weapons all over the Syrian landscape — and since that didn’t happen, was it actually a chemical weapons factory at all? And what of the shockingly credible claims from many quarters that there was no chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians in any case? Judging by the front-page of The New York Times today, that nearly world-ending incident has already been shoved down the memory-hole.

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New Paintings by JHK 2016 — 2017