Rock Me on the Water (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Mar. 14, 2011 -- There was Japan, standing quietly offstage all these years, minding its own business, more or less -- though unwinding financially and socially at some very deep level for two decades, debt rising around everybody's ankles like a silent, insidious tsunami, population dying back, young people demoralized by the "salary-man" culture with its meager consolation of nightly drinking sprees ending in micro-hotels with rooms like funerary vaults -- Japan, who had been horrifically chastened after its mad military-industrial outburst of the last century, who shook all that off to become the world's most dependably, civilized nation.

And now, the sorrows of Job.

The world was very busy watching the Middle East/North African countries go batshit in history's center ring, but the spectacle of wreckage in Japan unfolds now like the slow-motion blossoming of some gigantic evil chrysanthemum and you get the ominous idea that this is only the start of a story that will grind on and on as more bodies are discovered and the nuclear fiasco burns deeper and Japan's finances enter a death spiral. How could you watch those videos of the sickening wall of black water that slammed through Sendai without wondering how many doomed people it carried unseen beneath the rafts of cars, and the sideways ships, and the eerily floating houses?

I tried to follow the story on American cable TV Sunday night but with the exception of stolid, dogged CNN, all the other news channels were playing one sordid and titanically stupid program after another: meth freaks, show-biz narcissists, and sex chatter without sex. What a nation of morons we are. More than 600 cable TV stations and only one that even tries to tell you what is going on in the world. How many citizens of this republic were watching a dessert chef undergo staged humiliation for the failure of a cupcake batch while two nuclear reactors melted down across the Pacific? We deserve what just happened to Japan three times over. And we might just get the equivalent at least in social and political trouble as our money follies unwind and normal living here becomes untenable on the old terms.

So many things are shaking loose now in this world-wrapped-too-tight that it is hard to track where they all overlap, but I will try today.

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