James Kunstler -- Clusterfuck Nation
-- While it's gratifying to watch Hillary Clinton melt
back into her senate seat -- in the process foiling the ascent of
Emperor Bill the 1st -- one can't help but feel that that the contest
for president is taking place in a different "world-line" (shall we
say) than the melt-down of the U.S. financial sector, and with it, the U.S. economy.
Whoever wins Nov. 5 will wake up to preside
over a different America than the schematic one he was debating about
during the primaries and the election. The long campaign will beat a
path straight into the long emergency. The new president will inherit a
wrecked banking system, an economy in freefall, a wobbling world oil
market, and an American public extremely ticked off by its startling,
sudden impoverishment. (This is apart from whatever melodramas spool
out on the geopolitical scene.)
The president-elect will quickly realize that the number-one
problem is not that Americans can't afford health care -- it's that
they can't afford anything, because their income is evaporating in
terms of both lost jobs and a dollar that is racing toward
worthlessness. They'll be hard put to pay for food and gasoline,
nevermind Grandma's emphysema treatments. They will be walking away
from home ownership -- or yanked kicking and screaming by
default-and-repo -- and any government scheme devised to abridge their
mortgage contracts will only undermine basic contract law that has made
mortgage lending a credible thing in the first place. And that too, of
course, would redound straight to a real estate sector already in price
free-fall, with no one willing or able to think about buying a house.
As Obama and McCain go at it through the next eight months, they
will likely focus on our situation in Iraq. (Calling it a "war" now is
imprecise.) As merely one commentator among thousands, I'm not
satisfied that either one of the contenders has defined his position on
this coherently. Obama is disposed to get the U.S. military out of there
as quickly as possible. He's right that the sheer awful cost of the
adventure is one big factor in wrecking U.S. finances while it erodes our standing in
the world. But with our Iraq garrison shut down, he'd better be
prepared for a further breakdown in Middle East stability and the oil markets
that depend on it -- meaning, the basis of American life for four
generations, dependable oil imports, will sharply end. That would
accelerate the disorderly abandonment of our massive misinvestment in
suburban living, and also ramp up the anger and resentment of the
public grieving over its lost entitlements.
McCain's contrasting hundred-year plan does not take into account
the severe impoverishment and exhaustion of the military itself, not to
mention the overall purpose of the adventure -- to keep suburban life
and all its accessories running in the homeland -- which is an exercise
in futility under any terms. McCain would have to confront
the terrible paradoxes of the war, namely that thousands of legs have
been blown off for the sake of WalMart, which company will be
hemorrhaging customers anyway, as incomes wilt, at the same time that
WalMart's own operating system -- the "warehouse on wheels" --
surrenders to the reality of five or six dollar-a-gallon diesel fuel.
In any case, the implosion of the U.S. economy during the next eight
months will overshadow whatever we decide to do in Iraq, and that
cratering will be laid directly at the feet of the Republican party. If
the party survives that, which I doubt, it would a long time before
anybody trusted it again.
Whoever wakes up as the next president Nov. 5 will have to
preside over the comprehensive reorganization of American life. The big
question is whether he can persuade the public to let go of its sunk
costs, and all the sheer stuff that represents, and move ahead in a
unified way that doesn't end up tearing the nation apart. The danger is
that the public will want to mount a kind of last stand effort to
defend a way of life that has no future under any circumstances, and
they will ask the president to lead that last stand.
To avoid that deadly outcome, the new president will have to be
equipped with a realistic vision of what this society can actually do
to survive the discontinuities that circumstances present. This will
require him to confront the prevailing delusion that the United States can become
"energy independent" in the sense that we can run WalMart on something
other than oil from foreign lands. The new president would have to
carefully restate American expectations and goals -- for instance, not
to keep all the cars running at all costs, but to get us living in
places where driving is not mandatory. I'm concerned that the American
people will hate the new president if he tells them the truth: that an
old way of life is over and a new one has to begin now. We're about to
find out how much "change" the public can really stand.
LINK & COMMENTS: Clusterfuck Nation