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Considering that the 2016 election looks like a Dark Age
puppet show — Pantalone and La Signora smacking each other with dildos — we
forget this spectacle is serious. Rather large matters are at stake, such as
the continuity of governance, the legitimacy of the two major political
parties, the credibility of our financial arrangements, perhaps even the
durability of the nation as a united polity.
Most of the deliberate comedy comes from Donald Trump,
whose super-long dangling necktie looks like it was designed for laughs by
the Commedia dell'Arte prop department, not to mention the hair,
which I have maintained for many years is actually a wolverine living on top
of Trump’s head. Trump certainly represents a large and valid strain of
sentiment in the zeitgeist — the frustration of many ordinary citizens at
government-sponsored racketeering that is shoving them into pauperdom. But
his utterances against all that are so childish and disordered that he
de-legitimates his own mission every time he opens his mouth.
Hillary delivers her laughs mostly deadpan, for instance
her Sunday morning ABC interview with the old 1992 Clinton “War Room” hand
George Stephanopoulos, who grilled the Flying Reptile rather mercilessly over
the recent report from the State Department Inspector General that said she
was “not allowed” to use the private email server no, ifs, ands, or buts. As
she struggled to deflect the question, the “uh”s started to stipple her vapid
evasions like holes punched in a life raft. It was fun watching her sink, uh,
uh, uh, gurgle gurgle — though surely that was not the effect she was going
for.
Bernie, of course, is not so funny. He’s as serious as a
heart attack, which suggests that a pretty sizeable portion of the public is
sick of being diverted with slapstick comedy. The old bastard is determined
to give the Democratic Party poobahs some schooling in ethical procedure. I
admire the heck out of that — also, his record as a demonstrably
non-griftable public servant, and his stance against the
racketeering-as-usual status quo — though I’m not persuaded he would be an
effective president (if such a thing is even theoretically conceivable) given
his nanny government disposition. But the bigshots of the DNC still have a
lot of ‘splainin’ to do, and it looks like ole Bernie is going to beat it out
of them at Philadelphia in July. What I wonder: is he strong enough to hold
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz on his lap while he applies the rod.
The people of the United States have real grievances with
the way this country is being run. Last Friday’s job’s report was a
humdinger: only 38,000 new jobs created in a country of over 300 million,
with a whole new crop of job-seeking college grads just churned out of the
diploma mills. I guess the national shortage of waiters and bartenders has
finally come to an end.
What’s required, of course, is a pretty stout
restructuring of the US economy. And that should be understood to be a matter
of national survival. We need to step way back on every kind of giantism
currently afflicting us: giant agri-biz, giant commerce (Wal Mart etc.),
giant banking, giant war-making, and giant government — this last item being
so larded with incompetence on top of institutional entropy that it is
literally a menace to American society.
The trend on future resources and capital availability is
manifestly downward, and the obvious conclusion is the need to make this
economy smaller and finer. The finer part of the deal means many more
distributed tasks among the population, especially in farming and commerce
operations that must be done at a local level. This means more Americans
working on smaller farms and more Americans working in reconstructed Main
Street business, both wholesale and retail. This would also necessarily lead
to a shift out of the suburban clusterfuck and the rebuilding of ten thousand
forsaken American towns and smaller cities.
For the moment, many demoralized Americans may feel more
comfortable playing video games, eating on SNAP cards, and watching Trump
fulminate on TV, but the horizon on that is limited too. Sooner or later they
will have to become un-demoralized and do something else with their lives.
The main reason I am so against the Hillary and Trump, and
so ambivalent on Bernie is their inability to comprehend the scope of action
actually required to avoid sheer cultural collapse.
_____________________
As you may know, http://Kunstler.com is currently under an aggressive
Denial of Service (DoS) attack. My web and server technicians are working to
get the website and blog back up and live soon (though it's going to cost a
pretty penny). In the meantime, here is today's blog. Please share this with
any of your CFN friends so they don't miss out. Thank you for your
continued support. -- JHK
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