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So many shoes are
poised to drop this week that the American scene might be confused for the
world's greatest-ever clog dancing festival, but a closer look will reveal a
circle of cavorting skeletons.
Last week's ripe moment turned out to be the
Thursday night Washington photo op when Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed
Chief Bernanke emerged from a huddle with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and just
about every other legislative eminentissimo in an attempt to reassure the
nation that its financial system had not turned into something like unto a
truckload of stinking dead carp. I don't know about you, but I got two
distinct vibes from the faces in that particular tableau: 1.) abject fear, and 2.) a
total lack of conviction that they knew what they were doing.
The product of that huddle was a cockamamie
scheme for the US treasury to absorb all the losses from a twenty-year binge
in which Wall Street created and retailed the most complex set of swindles
ever seen on this planet Earth. The background music to the tableau was the whoosh of a several trillion dollars
exiting the US financial system never to be seen again.
The next day (Friday) many particulars of that
scheme began to emerge -- such as the complete lack of oversight and review
mechanisms for Treasury's new power to monetize private business failures and
frauds -- and the stock market soared in response. Other new features of the
reformed capital landscape also resolved later that day, like a new
experiment aimed at eliminating the short sale as a way of guaranteeing that
henceforth market bets could only be placed on the upside of the table. It
will be interesting to see how that reform works out in the days ahead.
Over the weekend, all these various playerz
retreated into their gilded bunkers to negotiate the details, and by Sunday
night, among other things, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley -- the two
remaining investment giants left standing -- announced that they would
metamorphose into regular banks in order to qualify for additional truckloads
of government loans in exchange for any leftover fraudulant securities still
lurking in their vaults. Another new provision had the Treasury rescuing
swindled foreign companies, too -- in effect, saving the world, which seemed
at least, how you say, pretty ambitious.
By this morning, many new arguments had
been raised by a suddenly de-zombified congress as to whether the proposed
grand bail-out might reward recent Wall Street turpitudes and incentivize
future mis-deeds and it looks like enough objections may be lodged to gum-up
the process before it even goes into effect -- which, of course, would tend
to revert the whole reeking cargo of trouble to its original train-wreck
trajectory. I guess we'll see what happens now.
Any way you paint this grotesque
panorama, it looks like a very new chapter of history for life in the USA. Basically, we are a much poorer nation than we were even a couple of years ago, and we
have a much-reduced ability to project our will around the world, or even
among our own floundering sectors and regions. Most troubling to me is the
question of legitimacy that now hangs over the proscenium like a guillotine
blade. Factoring in the old saw that
history doesn't repeat but it rhymes, I think the situation emerging
is rather like the crisis of legitimacy that preceded the Civil War. Then, in
the 1850s, the nation's two symbiotic political parties, Whig and Democrat,
entered a zone of fatal discredit. The White House had been occupied by a
sequence of empty cravats named Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, and so much
pent-up mistrust roiled the centers of power that the nation entered a
convulsion.
At issue then was the great festering
unresolved polity of slavery. The Whig party, in its oafish, craven fecklessness,
disappeared so quickly from the scene that an embarrassed God Almighty seemed
to have hooked it off-stage in a nanosecond. Into the vacuum stepped an
awkward lawyer from Illinois -- widely mocked by the coarser elements of what
was then called the press as a figure resembling an ape in a stovepipe hat. He
accomplished one crucial thing in the process of his emergence: he deployed a potent rhetoric
that captured the essence of the crisis and clarified it for all to
understand what was at stake -- and then the convulsion commenced in earnest.
The Republican Party amounts to today's Whigs.
Their candidate for president, John McCain, is trying to run away from his
own party -- as one might shrink away from a colony of importuning lepers. I
am actually not kidding when I label the Republicans "the party that
wrecked America," because I believe that is truly how the popular strain
of history will regard them when (maybe if) the wreckage of their
ministrations ever clears. But history doesn't repeat exactly. The current
figure from Illinois, Barrack Obama, has yet to offer a truly
crisis-clarfying rhetoric, though he labors under the expectation of being
able to do so. Like his long-ago predecessor, he is mocked by the coarser
elements of what we call "the media" these days -- Fox News and the
moron-rousers of talk radio.
Some of the issues yet-to-be-clarified concern
the behavior of the American public in the broad sense. We have obdurately
resisted the reality of the energy crisis that hangs over everything we do
(as slavery hung over the 1850s), from the way we inhabit the landscape to
the way we do daily business in our 240-million-plus fleet of cars and trucks
that ply the ribbons of asphalt and the lagoons of parking that now run from
sea to shining sea where the fruited plain was replaced by the Wal Marts.
Mr. Obama isn't kidding either when he alludes
to the change America faces, though history has not yet rhymed enough for his
rhetoric to really set forth the terms of this change in its stark
particulars. And even if he is able to articulate these things, he won't
forestall the convulsion anymore than Lincoln held back a war between the
states. That prior crisis was when America learned good and hard how tragic
life could be, and it colored our national character for a century -- until
we chucked it all to become a society of overfed clowns, with God Almighty
replaced by Ronald McDonald. That pageant of happy idiocy is now ending. Like
everyone else in this fraught and nervous land, I'm standing by to see what
transpires in the days just ahead.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
James Kunstler has
worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and
finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out
to write books on a full-time basis.
His latest nonfiction
book, "The Long Emergency," describes the changes that American
society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent future of
protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive
dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the
American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of
the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller
places and eat locally grown food.
You can purchase your
own copy here : The Long Emergency . You can get
more from James Howard Kunstler - including his artwork, information about
his other novels, and his blog - at his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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