|
I drove the eight miles from Cambridge
to Greenwich, New York, around eight o'clock and the night was bell-jar
clear. A scrim of deepest blue sky backlit the landscape of tender hills and
valleys while on the ground I wended the twisting two-lane state highway 372
with my brights amplifying the yellow road signs
and the iridescent lines on the pavement, alert for deer, who can kill you.
The Talking Heads spastically warbled one of their triumphant electronic
anthems of post-modernity over the radio. It happened that I had been playing
fiddle at a contra dance.
What
a strange privilege it is to live in these perilous times. I don't mean
privilege in the sense of the college humanities departments, with all their
crybaby overtones of grievance and resentment. I mean in the sense of having
lived through a thrilling turbo-powered climactic chapter of the human
melodrama. Until a few decades ago nobody ever swooshed through these ancient
hills in a motor car, on a magnificently engineered minor country highway, and
in perhaps less than a decade no one ever will again, and at the collective
level of a culture or a nation we have no sense of this whatsoever.
We
have no sense of anything except the junk-cluttered moment, including our
junk politics and the junk ceremony of the present election. When today is a
long time ago we will wonder at the feckless cravens that modernity made of
us, in particular the absence of any sense of duty to the project of being
the only self-aware organisms (as far as anyone knows) in the universe. In
this country, anything goes and nothing matters, and that's the simple sad
truth of where we are right now.
In
all the monumental yammer of the media sages surrounding the candidates they
follow, and among the freighted legions of meticulously trained economists
who try so hard to fit their equations and models over the spilled chicken
guts of daily events, there is no sense of the transience of things. Tom
Friedman over at The New York Times still thinks that the
petroleum-saturated present he calls "the global economy" is a
permanent condition of human life, and so does virtually every elected and
appointed official in Washington, not to mention every broadcaster in
Manhattan.
We're
not paying attention, of course. Someone told all these clowns about fourteen
months ago that we will be able to keep running WalMart
on shale oil and shale gas virtually forever, and they swallowed the story
whole, and then force-fed it down the distracted public's throat. In reality
- that alternative universe to flat-screen America - all the mechanisms that
allow us to keep running this wondrous show teeter on a razor's age of
extreme fragility. We're one bomb-vest or HFT keystroke away from a possible
dark age, or at least a world made by hand. The true sense of entitlement
extends light-years beyond the peevish carpings of
the tea-bags-for-brains bunch.
The
only issue in this election contest between Pee Wee Herman and Captain
Kangaroo is how to do nothing to disturb the fantasy that we can keep living
the way we do. I am coming to detest Mr. Obama for the unforgivable feats of
doing absolutely nothing to oppose, resist, or remedy the Supreme Court's
Citizens United decision, and doing absolutely nothing to restore the
rule-of-law in banking. Mr. Romney, at this point, can only be pitied as some
kind of thought-experiment gone awry in an evil consumer product testing lab
on a planet of oafs. His fecklessness has no modern analog. Next to Romney,
Bob Dole looks Lincolnesque.
Which
brings me in a very roundabout way to my point: Lincoln emerged out of a
political age as mendacious as ours, after decades of gaming
the issue of slavery. Out of that morass of lying connected to immense human
suffering somebody had to bring the clarity of real moral duty to broad
consciousness and Lincoln was selected by the same hand of Providence that
would lodge a bullet in his brain-pan five years later -- so it is not that
hard to understand the awe of Providence that attended the terrible
convulsion of the 1860s and all its long-resounding ramifications. It took
most of the 20th century and then some for us to un-learn that life is
tragic.
In
the history that doesn't repeat but only rhymes, we're in the 1856 equivalent
of the cycle now, short of the moment when mere clowning turns to savagery. I
can barely stand to watch the antics, dogged by visions of where this is all
tending. We have achieved something that few cultures ever have before: made
ourselves unworthy even of our own low standards. There is no center left to
hold, only ragged edges around a core of darkness.
James Howard Kunstler's newest nonfiction book, TOO MUCH MAGIC, is available in stores since July 2012. The book is
available at booksellers,
large and small, online and off. To find out how you can help support local
bookstores with your purchase, CLICK HERE.
|
