In The Headlights (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Sept. 6, 2010 -- The toils of summer are bygone now. The days grow shorter and America stands in the darkling road of its own prospects like a dumb animal frozen in the blinding light of approaching fury.

The White House must be a strange place these days with the management of the USA turned over to astrologasters, alchemists, prayer-wheel spinners, fakirs, viziers, necromancers and other visitors from occult realms unaffiliated with the dominion of reality.

One of these characters, Ms. Christina Romer, at a luncheon celebrating her departure as chief of the White House Council of Economic Advisors (i.e. readers of spilled goat innards) even blurted out that she had no idea what's been going on in banking and business and how come America can't be more like it was in 1999. Don't cry for Christina. A cushy chair awaits her at the Hogwarts Berkeley outpost where she can repose in a trance of unknowing until California slides into its own tar pit of default and disintegration.

It's all a mystery in Washington. Nobody can figure out what happened to their green-eyed champion called Growth, that savior who rights all wrongs and insures our eternal exception from the sad fates of other less-blessed empires. Isn't there a book of conjures somewhere in the Harvard Business School that guarantee perpetual growth -- even if there are different tomes around the campus that describe the essential tragic nature of life, viz., that there is a beginning, a middle, and an end to everything. And while this might not be the end of the human project in North America, it is certainly the end of the cheap oil abbondanza, and everything spun off of it in the way of mass consumer luxury, with air-conditioning and a cherry on top.

My own view -- I might be wrong -- is that we are going through an epochal compressive contraction, which is the opposite of growth. Money is disappearing because debts are being welshed on in such a volume that all the digital dollars conjured out of chief wizard Ben Bernanke's magic booty box are but empty spells cast into a hurricane of broken promises. This is no Hurricane Earl, which stared into the discharge tube of Lloyd Blankfein's cappuccino machine and skidded off whimpering into the fogs of Newfoundland. This economic contraction storm has a long way to go, and it will be taking the USA on a strange journey, a trip more marvelous and hazard-fraught than the trek across the Oregon Trail -- and the destination may be a strange country where promises are taken seriously. What an idea!

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[Demeter]

1. The Americans Have Two Choices--Adapt to Reality, or Die

and knowing them, it's going to be death en masse. Between the rage and the hoarding and the stupidity....

[Moostache]

2. Since you speak as if you are non-American, a word of warning...

If you think for one second that the total disintegration of the United States is going to be a spectator sport, you have not been paying attention very much...

This nation - and its so-called leadership - is going to collectively "go postal" and pretty much attempt to take every last remaining resource on the planet, all ginned-up of course in the guise of "national security" or "war on terrorism".

The one thing that the USA has that no other fading empire ever did is an ample supply of weapons of mass destruction, and if you think that Americans are just spoiled brats (which is pretty much spot on true), just wait until the collective hissy-fit REALLY starts.

Right now the groundwork is being laid - people are being stirred up to hate Islam and Islamic peoples with bogus stories of "victory mosques" and "9/11 mosques" and "ground-zero mosques" and oh by the way, those dirty Iranians...they are going to get nuclear weapons and threaten the "peace-loving Jews in Isreal"...so, we have to stop them. The setting up of multiple "others" - people like immigrants and different religions and different skin tones and different sexual preferences - are already being demonized in the American public's notably shallow mind. You think that is coincidence or by accident? Bet you believed that Saddam had WMD then too...

Anyone who is dumb enough to believe that the full weight of the American military arsenal will not be totally discharged (INCLUDING nuclear weaponry) in the fight to take what remains of planetary resources is simply not self-aware. This is not the end of AMERICAN society or civilization....its the END PERIOD. We have already been strip-mining the planet at the point of a gun for decades...well now get ready for those guns to start firing and just try to stay out of the way (hint - that AIN'T POSSIBLE!).

When the final history books are assembled by the survivors, and when mankind goes back to the dark ages of feudalism and religious-based idiocy, the books will look back very unkindly on the American role in the destruction of civilization. We are going to be replacing the Nazis as the ultimate evil soon enough I am afraid and its gonna be ugly.

[Demeter]

3. Aside from the Fact that My Children and I Live in These United States--

I survived the Detroit riots. You probably weren't even born then.

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. That was well said and to the point.

Having just seen The Age of Stupid, I cannot disagree with you.


Damn...denial used to be so comforting.