The eulogy for Walter Cronkite as "the most trusted man in America" on
the CBS "Sixty Minutes" show said a lot about the condition of this
nation -- though it did not signify what CBS thought it did
It was instructive to notice that the program
following "Sixty Minutes" -- in the supreme weekly slot of 8 p.m. Sunday
-- was a childish and stupid "reality" show called "Big Brother." This
said even more about the craven quality of the people currently running
CBS. It was also a useful lesson in the diminishing returns of
technology as applied to television, since it should now be obvious
that the expansion of cable broadcasting since the heyday of the "big
three" networks has led only to the mass replication of video garbage
rather than a banquet of culture, as first touted.
It should
remind us more generally that when a society's operations become
broadly fraudulent and unreal, authority and legitimacy wither. This
is analogous to the position Barack Obama now finds himself in. He was
elected as the politician most trusted in America to change the
fraudulent and unreal operations of the U.S. government. Don't bother
protesting that all politics is necessarily unreal and fraudulent. If
it were so, you'd have to argue that the U.S. Constitution was wholly a
fraud, as well as Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and the rest. It only
has strong tendencies in that direction. (The Declaration of
Independence was itself a direct strike against the fraud and unreality
of British royal governance in America.)
As president, Barack
Obama is faced with the essential fraudulence and unreality of the U.S.
economy. Notice that, as ominous as they are, the wars in iraq and
Afghanistan have generated only minimal protest so far in the early
Obama period, despite the fact that they are not operationally
different from their conduct under Bush. There is no protest because,
for now, a consensus exists that our troops are in these places for
perceived reasons -- to keep Mideast oil supply lines open... to keep
Islamic maniacs busy in their own backyard instead of on U.S.
territory... to keep Iran in a vise... to maintain the American
"empire" (take your pick). There's something there to appeal to a broad
majority of US voters. Unlike Vietnam, Iraq and Afstan are not
perceived as out-and-out frauds.
But the economy is. Since
September of 2008, when Hank Paulson began shoveling bail-outs to the
very banks who screwed the world on fraudulent and unreal securities,
and left American society comprehensively bankrupt, the consensus has
only deepened on the perception of an historic swindle. And so far,
President Obama has positioned himself as chief enabler to further
swindling. One need look no further than the rulings this past spring
of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) as authorized by the
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, an official government agency,
created 1934), which have allowed the biggest banks to pretend that the
fraudulent paper in their vaults does not have to be recorded as a loss
on their books.
The U.S. economy is now dying a slow and painful
death because it had become based on activities that had nothing to do
with producing real wealth. Instead, it became dependent on rackets,
that is, behavior geared to getting something for nothing. These
rackets are often summarized under the acronym FIRE (for finance,
insurance and real estate), a system set up to strip-mine profits from
the wish commonly labeled "the American Dream" -- itself largely a
product of televised advertising and propaganda. The end product of
all that was the doomed economy of suburban sprawl, an infrastructure
for daily life with no future in a world defined by fossil fuel
scarcity. The unraveling of debt at every level now is directly related
to the mis-investments made in that way of life.
By now, it's
self-evident that the "change" voted for in November's election was too
horrifying to articulate. It still is. The suburban sprawl economy
was all we had left. Now it's gone and we're stuck with all its
deleveraging after-effects -- the worst case of "buyer's remorse" since
the fall of Nazi Germany. Thus, the only "change" that President Obama
can really work for is the health care system, which is a
life-and-death matter. The sordid rackets so ostentatiously infecting
the system boil down vividly to lives ruined and bankrupted, and a
system more frightful to deal with than disease itself. Probably the
baseline truth is that health care will end up being rationed one way
or another. It's another prime symptom of population overshoot, and a
reminder that life is tragic.
As another blogger put it so
nicely last week on the web (sorry, but I forget who or where), this
isn't a "recession," it's a collapse. The excellent Dmitry Orlov
has outlined the process very nicely in his book "Reinventing Collapse"
about the parallels between the demise of the Soviet Union and the
prospects for demise of the United States as currently constituted. Mikhail
Gorbachev presided over the Soviet collapse. He must have been a leader
of very subtle abilities. Not only did he survive to enjoy a busy
second act of life with a Nobel Prize in his pocket, but he
accomplished a nearly bloodless transition in a society
long-conditioned to bloodletting as the primary political act.
Here in the USA, where we have had over two hundred years experience
with peaceful power transitions -- even during the convulsions of
1860-65 -- the outcome this time might not be so appetizing. It would
be one of the supreme ironies of history if it turned out that the United States
was incapable of ending its most self-destructive rackets peacefully
and bloodlessly, while the Russians shucked off its Soviet racket like
an old sweater. The way I see it, Mr. Obama just doesn't have much
time before his authority and legitimacy slough off and he is left with
only his genial smile. The "hope" vested in him will end up in a Museum
of Lost Hopes, along with the integrity of TV news and the rectitude of
the medical profession. And funding for that museum will be cut by
President Sarah Palin, representing Naziism U.S. style -- i.e. Naziism
without the brains.
Post-script:
Tom Wolfe wrote a fabulous op-ed
in the Sunday New York Times commemorating the Apollo 11 moon landing
of 1969. In it, he speculated that the achievment itself spelled the
end of the NASA program because it lacked a philosopher corps that
might have furnished it with more meaning beyond its element of "single
combat" between the United States and the Soviets in the "space race." This
meaning, he said, might have been supplied by someone like NASA's chief
engineer Wernher Von Braun, who once stated (in effect) before a
congressional committee that "... we must build a bridge to the stars,
because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the
entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We
begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail
in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we
know of.... Unfortunately, NASA couldn't present as its spokesman and
great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht
with a heavy German accent."
The further trouble, of course, is
now that we sentient creatures seem to be in the process of destroying
our home planet, how might we justify our spread to other worlds? We've
fallen short both in resources and philosophy. In our current state of
evolution we seem unlikely to ever again go further afield than the
moon and not exactly worthy of making trips elsewhere anyway. Stay
tuned a few hundred thousand years....
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