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Nations go crazy. It's
terrifying when it happens, especially to a major nation with the ability to
project its craziness outward. We look back on the psychotic break of Germany
in 1933 and still wonder how the then-best-educated population in Europe
could fall under the sway of a sociopathic political program. We behold the
carnage and devastation left in the wake of that episode, and decades later
you still can do little more than shake your head in bewilderment.
China had a psychotic break in the 1960s in its "cultural
revolution," provoked by the mad neo-emperor Mao. He sent cadres of
Chinese baby boomer youths rampaging across the land, turned every
institution upside down, and let millions starve. Mao's China lacked the
ability then to export this mischief, but enough of his own people suffered.
Cambodia was the next humdinger of a national nervous breakdown when the
Paris-educated classic marxist Pol
Pot decided to make the world's biggest omelette by
cracking a million eggs. He took everybody wearing eyeglasses, everybody who
appeared to have a thought in his or her head, and sent them out to the bush
to be worked to death, or shot in ditches, or disposed of otherwise. The
mounds of skulls remain to tell the tale.
Lately we've had the Hutu-Tutsi genocides in Rwanda, the craziness in former
Yugoslavia, the cruelty of Darfur, the international suicide-bomber craze
(including today's blasts in Moscow). Surely, I've left a few out... but
these are minor episodes compared to what be coming next.
Am
I the only one who senses it might be America's turn to go nuts? I don't mean
a family squabble, like the Boomer-Hippie-Vietnam uproar that was essentially
an adolescent rebellion against bad parenting in the national household. I
mean a genuine descent into madness, with the very high probability of
persecution, violence, murder, and mayhem -- all more or less sponsored by
various authorities and institutions.
The Republican Party is doing a great job in provoking such a dangerous
episode by making consensual governance impossible in a time of awful
practical problems and challenges. They're in the process, right now, of
transforming themselves from the party of "no" to the party of no
decency, no common sense, no ideas, no conception of the public interest, and
no respect for the traditions that they pretend to stand for, like due
process of law. In the days since the passage of health care reform, they've
gone as far as inciting mobs to violence against their fellow congressmen and
senators -- bricks thrown through windows, death threats made, coffins placed
in the yards of their adversaries. One day soon, somebody with a gun or an
explosive device, someone with a very sketchy sense-of-self, and perhaps a
recent record of personal failure and humiliation, is going to sacrifice
himself to become the Tea Party's first martyr by shooting up a shopping mall
in some blue district.
Republican leaders' avidity to ally themselves with the followers of
hate-monger entertainers like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and the
Fox News gang is only the beginning of the process that will lead to a
political convulsion possibly worse than the one that started at Fort Sumter,
South Carolina, 1861. If it comes, it will certainly be a far more incoherent
conflict. The guerilla forces of the radical right will not know whether they
are fighting for WalMart, or the Financial Services
arm of General Electric, or against abortions, or for bigger and better
freeways, or the rights of thoracic surgeons to drive families into
bankruptcy, or against the idea of climate change, or evolution, or
Jews-in-the-media, or their neighbors having something they feel envious
about....
In
the background, of course, is an economy just barely holding together with
political baling wire and duct tape. It has very
poor prospects for continuing in the way it was designed to run, on cheap oil
and revolving debt. The upshot is an economy now destined for permanent
contraction, and nobody has a plan for managing that contraction -- which
will include awful failures in food production, in disintegrating water
systems, electric grids, roadway systems, schools...
really anything that requires ongoing public investment. It includes a
financial system that cannot come up with capital deployable for productive
purpose, or currencies that can be relied on to hold value, or markets that
function without interference.
For its part, the Democratic Party has done a poor job of clearly
articulating the realities of these things, and in actions like bailouts
they've given the false impression that the nation can somehow engineer a
return to the reckless hedonism of the late 20th century. My guess is that
the situation is so desperate now that President Obama and his supporters
can't risk telling the truth about the comprehensive contraction we face.
The health care reform act was a tortured way of dealing with some of this
indirectly. It will absolutely lead to a kind of health care
"rationing," but rationing is unavoidable in an economy where there
is less of everything that people need, and fewer resources to spread around.
The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the
Republicans would prefer to see the rationing accomplished by money-grubbing
health insurance companies denying coverage to policy-holders who get sick,
or by the bankrupting of households (i.e. losers who deserve to die anyway),
while the Democrats want to at least try to distribute what we can a little
more fairly. The larger failure of both factions to emulate better systems
running in sister societies like Canada and France is something that history
will judge.
I
was in favor of the health care reform act for the reason of that basic
difference between the Right and the Left. For all its flaws -- and perhaps
even the prospect that we are too far gone in national bankruptcy to ever get
all its provisions running -- I believe it was necessary for our national
morale to pass the bill, to prove that we could do something besides remain
stuck in paralysis and bickering indefinitely. And it was necessary to smack
down the Party of Cruelty, to inform ourselves that we are not quite ready to
go completely crazy.
Whatever his flaws, omissions, and failures, I'm impressed with President
Obama's ability to conduct himself like an adult, like a good father, in the
face of the most unseemly provocations by his red-faced adversaries John
Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, and all
the other apoplectic opportunists trying so desperately to turn the United
States into a high-definition Jesus tele-theocracy
of Perpetual NASCAR. As economic conditions worsen -- I believe they will --
I hope Mr. Obama can discipline these maniacs. I would like to see him start
by instructing his attorney general to look into the connection between
Republican officials (including staff members) and the threats of violence
and murder that were made last week around the country.
_________________
My novel, The Witch
of Hebron, a sequel to World Made By Hand, will be published in
September by The Atlantic Monthly Press.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
James Howard Kunstler’s
new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
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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