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America
is starting to remind me of Bette Davis in the horror movie classic What
Ever Happened to Baby Jane? America is losing its grip on reality.
America is acting like an elderly strumpet in too much pancake makeup
performing a song-and-dance on the beach while its kinfolk lie dying in the
sand.
History
is taking us in a certain direction and we don't want to hear about it. We've
got our hands clapped over our ears and we're shouting "Kittens and
puppies! Kittens and puppies!" Here are some of the things that we're
confused about:
- We tell ourselves we're in an economic recovery,
meaning we expect to return to a prior economic state, namely, a
turbo-charged "consumer" economy fueled by easy credit and
cheap energy. Fuggeddabowdit. That part of our
history is over. We've entered a contraction that will seem permanent
until we reach an economic re-set point that comports with what the
planet can actually provide for us. That re-set point is lower than we
would like to imagine. Our reality-based assignment is the intelligent
management of contraction. We don't want this assignment. We'd prefer to
think that things are still going in the other direction, the direction
of more, more, more. But they're not. Whether we like it or not, they're
going in the direction of less, less, less. Granted, this is not an easy
thing to contend with, but it is the hand that circumstance has dealt
us. Nobody
else is to blame for it.
- A particular set of economic behaviors are
over. The housing sector will never come back to what it was because
that whole living arrangement is over. We built too many houses in the
wrong places in no particular civic disposition and it only worked for a
few decades because of cheap oil, cars purchased on credit, and
foreigners lending us their money. We're done building suburbia, and
after while, when we can no longer stand the
dysfunction and inconvenience, we'll be done living in the stuff that's
already there. To complicate matters, we have no idea how over all this
is. That's why one of the main themes in this presidential election -
not even stated explicitly - is the defense of the entitlement to a
suburban lifestyle; in other words, a campaign to sustain the
unsustainable. As the suburban dynamic increasingly fails,
disappointment may turn to fury. It will be the result of leaders not
telling the public the truth for many many
years. This public fury may be very destructive. It could bring down the
government, provoke civil war, or lead us into foreign military
adventures - the result of blaming other people for our own bad choices.
If we put our effort and spirit into inhabiting our piece of the planet
differently, this might turn out differently and better. By this I mean
returning to traditional development patterns of civic places (towns)
embedded in productive rural places (the agricultural landscape).
- More higher education is not going bring back
the turbo-charged consumer economy. We will not need more office
gerbils, bond salesmen, regional deputy managers, or Gender Studies
PhDs. That's going in the opposite direction too. Though corporations
and giant institutions seem to rule our lives these days, they will soon
go extinct. Anything organized at the giant scale is going to wobble and
fall: national chain retail, trans-national companies, colossal banks,
big universities, you name it. The center of economic life in America
will be food production and other agricultural activities, not computer
gaming, big box bargain shopping, and hybrid car sales. We will need
more farmers, more people competent in agricultural management, and more
human laborers working in the fields. There will be a lot of other
practical, "hands-on" kinds of jobs, but not so many positions
in air-conditioned cubicles. You might want to check the "no"
box on those things, but reality will have her way with you anyway.
- We're real confused about our energy
predicament. Stories are flying all around the news media to the effect
that the USA will soon be an oil exporter. That's utter nonsense, by the
way. We still import more than two-thirds of the oil we use. Another
story is that the Bakken shale oil fields will
make us "energy independent." That is a complete
misunderstanding of reality. Another widely-repeated untruth is the
notion that we have "a hundred years of shale gas." These are
stories generated by the particular stage of collective grief we have
entered - the bargaining stage, where we attempt to negotiate a better
contract with reality. Good luck with that. The truth is, we're nearly
out of the good cheap oil and gas and what's left is so expensive and
difficult to extract that we may not have the capital investment
resources to get it. One byproduct of ignoring the disorders in our
banking system is that we are also failing to pay attention to the
absence of real capital formation. Meanwhile, the oil and gas companies
are propagandizing tirelessly in TV commercials in order to get
"other people's money" to sustain their Ponzi operations.
(Translation: swindling retirees who cannot get yield from
"safe" investments such as bonds.) Eventually we'll have to
face it: the fossil fuel age is ending and there are no miracle rescue
remedies waiting to come on-stage.
- We're not going to "tech" our way
through the array of mega-problems we face, in particular the energy
predicament. The American mind-space today is clogged with cargo-cult
fantasies about electric cars, nano-manufacturing,
and "information" technology that would allow the trajectory
of progress to continue just as we have known and loved it. This too,
like the end of suburbia, will lead to vast disappointment. We're
heading instead into a "time-out" from technological progress,
duration unknown, which will probably also result in the loss of some
tricks we've already learned. The leading wish-fulfillment fantasy, of
course, is that we will change out all the gasoline and diesel cars for
electric cars. This is not going to happen. We will be a far less
affluent society. There will be much less capital available to devote to
auto loans. Our towns, counties, and states are all going broke and will
not be able to keep the stupendous roadway system in repair. That's a
major reason why we have to return to living in walkable towns instead
of disaggregated suburbs, and why we desperately need to repair the
regular (not high-speed) rail system.
- We pretend that if we ignore the problems in
banking / money / capital formation they might just fade away like the
morning dew. The failure to reintroduce the rule-of-law into these
matters will destroy the system, and will probably even overtake the
destabilizing potential of the peak oil problem - in fact, will
accelerate it due to capital scarcity. President Obama is not doing
America any favors by, for instance, allowing Jon Corzine to remain at
large. If we continue this policy of pretending that nothing has gone
wrong, reality will correct our money system for us, by sweeping away
all our current arrangements and forcing us to begin over again from
scratch. I mean literally
from scratch.
It
would be nice if we could correct the disorders in the collective conversion
that we call "politics," but we are probably going to see ever
greater divergence with reality. For the moment, all leadership in America
has drunk too much Kool-aid, all of it lacks
conviction and competence, none of it wants to enter the actual future.
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