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In
my last dream of a febrile night, I put my flat-screen TV on top of an old
house in town and watched it crash onto the street. There was nothing inside
it. The darn thing was empty. The ghost of Little Caylee wasn't even in there.
From
the news this weekend, you'd think the world was in a coma, but I swear I
heard ominous bassoon phrases through the night rain... something large
groaning out there in the dark. A great churn, coming closer. The world is in
a box, tortured with its obsolete ideas about how economies are supposed to
run, especially the money part, and the economists are clueless.
A
case in point: the eminent Vincent Reinhart at the Council of Foreign
Relations last week. (Conspiracy
theorists just shut your pie-holes):
"There are very few debt
defaults... there are a whole lot of restructurings. For most of history,
default is something the strong declare on the weak when they lose their
patience. And if you're members of the same club, you're less likely to lose your
patience. Hence you're less likely to default. Greece is in the club."
The
club he refers to - the Euro money club - is less a jolly fraternal lodge
than a funeral insurance association. The latest restructuring for Greece he
referred to is a cockamamie perpetual rollover with no redemptions allowed,
while Greece has to agree to become more like its neighbor, Albania, in
lifestyle - that is, like Borat, minus the joie de
vivre.
There's
a third option that Reinhart ignores: the Greek populace can riot in the
streets, toss out their government, install some kind of rump leadership and
hoist its middle fingers at the Euro management team, opting out of the club.
Why this does not occur to Reinhart (and many other vested poobahs) I can't say, despite the fact that there are
many places around the world (especially Europe these days) where the natives
are obviously getting restless. Besides, it's not lost on the Greek people
that they're being asked to go Albanian for the sake of a dozen banks up in
Germany, France, and Holland, not their own country's sacred honor.
The
proposed restructuring is all about the Great Fear that haunts the inner
sanctums of finance (like the ghost of Caylee
haunts America): counter-party obligations on a Burj
Dubai of side bets over things such as the soundness of bonds and the
movement of interest rates. The world of money imagines a thundering crash of
cascading defaults as the various counter-parties are revealed to be broke,
naked, and ashamed. And rightly so, because the creakings
and groanings of this tower of paper will not only
crash, but burn, too. The bankers can already smell it.
Anyway,
let's be clear that money has become a world unto itself now, a
self-referential hall-of-mirrors that only sees itself and is increasingly
confused by what it sees in that self. Outside that blinding little box there
are real economies of people trying like hell to go about their daily life,
and there is much to be fretful about. Economies are caught in the permanent
compressive contraction of fossil fuel based activities. When you hear a
politician utter the word "growth" note
that he/she is speaking out of his/her ass. Contraction is contraction, not
growth. We're done with growth of that kind because our fuel supplies are
shrinking, not growing. The vaunted "recovery" is a political
three-card-monte trick.
The
sad fact is we don't want to go where history wants to take us: to a smaller
human imprint on the planet, with all that implies. This is true especially
of the intellectual avant-garde, who can't imagine a world without the joys
of perpetual techno-narcissistic novelty, of levitating skyscraper cities
with hanging gardens and flying cars, full of girls with green nail-polish in
get-ups so fantastic mere mortals could never have dreamed them up, flaunting
hand-held gadgets so miraculous that life itself seems besides the point. Oh,
shimmering future! Oh Ray Kurzweil
and your nano-ladder to the worm-holes of forever!
This
Ancien Régime is about to be swept away on
the tsunami of its own futility.
The
failure of leadership around the world is now complete. Nobody who needs to
get it gets it. Our own money management team here in the USA is in a box
even worse than Europe's. It's not even a hall of mirrors. It's a broke-down
Winnebago with moldy upholstery and the propane line is leaking inside.
Everybody's wondering if Ben Bernanke is going to light a cigarette. What
else can he do? If he doesn't keep the QE-ZIRP racket going, the wheels will
come off the Winnebago. If he lights that American Spirit, she'll blow.
The
US banking system can easily implode, anyway, if a European nation or two
opts out of ECB-peristroika. God knows who is a
counter-party to whom in the mammoth international clusterfuck
of accounting fraud that passes for a commerce in capital. Hence, everybody
is nervous - except the fools at the Nascar oval
with Big Gulps in their fists. When the Greeks and Spain's youth corps, and
even the bleery folk of Dublin take to the central
square to express their rage, and hoist middle fingers to those who would
chisel them into debt serfdom, Americans will have no central squares to go
to. Will we take to the highway strips and burn down a Taco Bell or two?
Maybe President Obama will ask congress for a home mortgage TARP,
guaranteeing that nobody will ever buy a house again, at least not on an
installment loan. Maybe in tonight's New Hampshire "debate,"
Michele Bachman will appeal to Jesus for the release of Little Caylee from eternity's impoundment lot, and the stunt
will carry her overwhelmingly to the oval office.
By
then, America, too, will be more like Albania. You can take that to the bank,
if there's one left standing. Yesterday a little US flag appeared on every
mailbox in the neighborhood. Someone is trying to help remind us what country
this is. Most years, this is just ceremonial routine, but now I suspect a lot
of people get up and scratch their heads over it. And, believe me, just
waving that old flag is not going to furnish any kind of idea you can really
hang onto.
Out
of the current stillness in world events, a horrible churning waits. Men in
impeccable suits on Swiss terraces cannot hide their anxiety. One might even
lose it and jump a hotel maid - you never know. Bernanke, Obama, Geithner are powerless against the dark lurking churn,
though they can easily make it worse. What a summer we're in for. Get out of
the stock market.
James
Howard Kunstler
James
Howard Kunstler’s new novel of the post-oil future, World
Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.
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