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The fog of chatter about Federal Reserve
money-printing shenanigans, currency wars, fiscal intransigence, exchange
rates, and alphabetized rescue operations conceals the central reality of the
historical moment: that all industrial economies now face epic contraction,
even rip-roaring China in its absurd and spectacular bid to become the latest
drive-in utopia. The so-called advanced nations of the world are all sliding
toward something less than they wish to be, and the so-called developing
nations will backslide further into poverty and anarchy where development
will never happen.
The implacable contraction underway is
the simple result of growing scarcity of cheap oil, the master resource.
Thus, in a world where fantasy has replaced analysis, the propaganda channels
brim with false news of America's coming "energy independence" and
the rebirth of domestic manufacturing, the coming electric car fleet, and
space tourism. There is also chatter among the paranoid that an imagined
elite has deliberately engineered American collapse for fun and profit, with
sideshows about the Department of Homeland Security promoting social upheaval
in order to make a show of putting it down. This is all bullshit concealing
the futile machinations of people so unfortunate as to hold political office
in an unraveling they can't control. Where control is no longer possible,
paranoid fantasies fill the vacuum of wishing for control.
One thing you can be sure of: the
current sociopolitical weather will change. A front will blow through and
sweep the fog away. So many circles of hazard are spinning around events that
some fast-turning object will come off its axis and start smashing all the
fantasies. When that happens, it will be every community for itself, and
where there are no real communities -- for instance, the vast matrix of
suburban noplaces that America emergently composed
itself out of in a tragic quest to become its own televised fantasy -- we'll
discover the dark side of the "liberty" that so-called
conservatives endlessly invoke, in all its screaming eagle iconography.
Not since the Civil War (1861 - 65) has
anything bad of this scale happened within the United States itself and the
public is unprepared despite our total immersion in the on-screen ersatz
heroics of avatars such as Dwayne Johnson. The terrible convulsion of the
1860s was preceded by a political time much like ours is now, with figures
(calling them leaders is inaccurate) of no conviction backpedaling furiously
toward strife.
Remember these things if you tune in to
watch President Obama move his lips on Tuesday amid the incessant applause in
the House chamber. He'll speak the words "climate change" and the
hall will rock with thunderous handclapping -- but it won't mean anything
because both the president and the people have no intention of changing the
way we live. Mr. Obama will cheerlead for economic growth and he will be
talking out of his ass. It's the nature of this contraction that economic
growth is absent. You can have plenty of economic activity -- especially if
you re-form (literally) the systems we depend on, such as farming, commerce,
medicine, and transportation -- but it won't be expressed favorably in the
GDP stats or the balance sheets of CitiGroup and
Morgan Stanley.
At the core of this contraction is the
disappearing act of real capital -- that is, accumulated wealth -- for the
excellent reason that we are squandering what remains of it in the futile
effort to keep living the way we do. But it will be vanishing fast, contrary
to the view of such fantasists as David Leonhardt,
Washington bureau chief of The New York Times -- catch him on the
current Slate Political Gabfest -- who thinks that the Growth Fairy is about to land on the south
lawn of the White House.
The State of the Union Address is
happening in a peculiar quiet moment when all the financial brushfires of the
time have been reduced temporarily to a smolder that conceals the full
involvement of the roots under the surface. Our economic system is burning
down. Nobody wants to talk about the system that will have to replace it,
which I call a world made by hand.
The fortunate few will be those who have
already established themselves in an authentic community of helping hands,
who have some tools -- and I don't mean Adobe Photoshop or the latest iPhone
app -- and laid in some bits of silver and gold.
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