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It's
really something to live in a country that doesn't know what it is doing in a
world that doesn't know where it is going in a time when anything can happen.
I hope you can get comfortable with uncertainty.
If
there's one vibe emanating from this shadowy zeitgeist it's a sense of the
total exhaustion of culture, in particular the way the world does business.
Everything looks tired, played out, and most of all false. Governments can't
really pay for what they do. Banks have no real money. Many households surely
have no money. The human construct of money itself has become a
shape-shifting phantom. Will it vanish into the vortex of unpaid debt until
nobody has any? Or will there be plenty of worthless money that people can
spend into futility? Either way they will be broke.
The
looming fear whose name political leaders dare not speak is global
depression, but that is not what we're in for. The term suggests a temporary
sidetrack from the smooth operation of integrated advanced economies. We're
heading into something quite different, a permanent departure from the
standard conception of economic progress, the one in which there is always
sure to be more comfort and convenience for everybody, the economy of automatic
goodies.
A
big part of the automatic economy was the idea of a "job." In its
journey to the present moment, the idea became crusted with barnacles of
illusion, especially that a "job" was a sort of commodity
"produced" by large corporate enterprises or governments and
rationally distributed like any other commodity; that it came with a goodie
bag filled with guaranteed pensions, medical care to remediate bad living
habits, vacations to places of programmed entertainment, a warm, well-lighted
dwelling, and a big steel machine to travel around in. Now we witness with
helpless despair as these illusions dissolve.
The
situation at hand is not a "depression," though it may resemble the
experience of the 1930s in the early going. It's the permanent re-set and reorganization
of everyday life amidst a desperate scramble for resources. It will go on and
on until there are far fewer people competing for things while the ones who
endure construct new systems for daily living based on fewer resources used
differently.
In
North America I believe this re-set will involve the re-establishment of an
economy centered on agriculture, with a lot of other activities supporting
it, all done on a fine-grained local and regional scale. It must be
impossible for many of us to imagine such an outcome - hence the futility of
our current politics, with its hollow promises, its
laughable battles over sexual behavior, its pitiful religious boasting, its
empty statistical blather, all in the service of wishing the disintegrating
past back into existence.
This
desperation may be why our recently-acquired traditions seem especially
automatic this holiday season. Of course the "consumers" line up
outside the big box stores the day after the automatic Thanksgiving exercise
in gluttony. That is what they're supposed to do this time of year. That is
what has been on the cable TV news shows in recent
years: see the crowds cheerfully huddled in their sleeping bags outside the Wal Mart... see them trample
each other in the moment the doors open!
The
biggest news story of a weekend stuporous from
leftover turkey and ceremonial football was a $6.6 billion increase in
"Black Friday" chain-store sales. All the attention to the numbers
was a form of primitive augury to reassure superstitious economists - more
than the catatonic public - that the automatic cargo cult would be operating
normally at this crucial testing time. The larger objective is to get through
the ordeal of Christmas.
I
don't see how Europe gets through it financially. The jig is up there. Lovely
as Europe has become since the debacles of the last century - all those
adorable cities with their treasures of deliberately-created beauty - the
system running it all is bankrupt. Europe is on financial death-watch and
when the money stops flowing between its major organs, the banks, the whole region must either go dark or combust. Nobody
really knows what will happen there, except they know that something will
happen - and whatever it is portends disruption and loss for the worlds largest collective
economy. The historical record is not reassuring.
If
Europe's banks go down, many of America's will, too, maybe all of them, maybe
our whole money system. I'm not sure that we will see a normal election cycle
here in 2012. A few bank runs, bank failures... gasoline shortages here and
there... the failure of some food deliveries to supermarkets in some
region... these are the kinds of things that can bring down a political
system drained of once-ironclad legitimacy. All that is left now is the husk
of ritual - witness the failure of the senate-house
"super-committee." The wash-out was so broadly anticipated that it
was greeted with mere yawns of recognition. It would be like pointing at the
sky and saying, "air there."
This
holiday season spend a little time musing on what the re-set economy will be
like in your part of the country. Think of what you do in it as a
"role," or a "vocation," or a "trade," or a
"calling," or a "way of life," rather than a "job."
Imagine that life will surely go on, even civilized life, though it will be
organized differently. Add to this the notion that you are part of a larger
group, a society, and that societies evolve emergently according to the
circumstances that their time and place presents. Let that imagining
be your new American Dream.
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