Theory du jour: the new Star Wars movie is sucking in whatever
meager disposable lucre remains among the economically-flayed mid-to-lower
orders of America. In fact, I propose a new index showing an inverse
relationship between Star Wars box office receipts and soundness of
the financial commonweal. In other words, Star Wars is all that
remains of the US economy outside of the obscure workings of Wall Street —
and that heretofore magical realm is not looking too rosy either in this
season of the Great Rate Hike after puking up 623 points of the DJIA last
Thursday and Friday.
Here I confess: for thirty years I have hated those stupid space movies,
as much for their badly-written scripts (all mumbo-jumbo exposition of
nonsensical story-lines between explosions) as for the degenerate techno-narcissism
they promote in a society literally dying from the diminishing returns and
unintended consequences of technology.
It adds up to an ominous Yuletide. Turns out that the vehicle the Federal
Reserve’s Open Market Committee was driving in its game of “chicken” with
oncoming reality was a hearse. The occupants are ghosts, but don’t know it. A
lot of commentators around the web think that the Fed “pulled the trigger” on
interest rates to save its credibility. Uh, wrong. They had already lost
their credibility. What remains is for these ghosts to helplessly watch over
the awesome workout, which has obviously been underway for quite a while in
the crash of commodity prices (and whole national economies — e.g. Brazil,
Canada, Australia), the janky regions of the bond markets, the related death
of the shale oil industry, and the imploding hedge fund scene.
As it were, all credit these days looks shopworn and threadbare, as if the
capital markets had by stealth turned into a swap meet of previously-owned
optimism. Who believes in anything these days besides the allure of fraud?
Capital is supposedly plentiful these days — look how much has rushed into
the dollar from the nervous former go-go nations with their wobbling
ziggurats of bad loans and surfeit of production capacity — but what actually
constitutes that capital? Answer: the dwindling faith anyone will pay you
back next Tuesday for a hamburger today.
We now enter the “discovery” phase of financial collapse, where things
labeled “capital” and “credit” turn out to be mere holograms. Fed Chair Janet
Yellen herself had a sort of hologramatic look last Wednesday when she
stepped onto her Delphic platform to reveal the long-heralded interest rate
news. Perhaps Mrs. Yellen is a figment conjured by George Lucas’s Industrial
Light & Magic shop (now owned by Disney). What could be more fitting in a
smoke-and-mirrors culture? Anyway, the rude discovery that capital is not
what it has appeared to be is now underway, with the power to derail
political systems and societies.
Is there anyone who thinks the Presidential election campaign is not
completely deranged? Well, it is the analog for America’s deranged financial
polity. The graceless Mr. Trump necessarily reflects the just grievances of
the great public wad, but has anyone noticed that he is incapable of
stringing together two coherent thoughts? I suppose one thought at a time —
or maybe a percentage of one thought — is enough to satisfy the sputtering
masses, faced as they are by the arrant theft of both their patrimony and
their future. But it adds up to something like flying blind through a
shitstorm with your pilot in the throes of cerebral infarction. I don’t want
to be on that plane.
Then there’s the giant flying reptile known simply as Hillary. She will
blow up the sad and noisome remains of the Democratic party and then she will
preside over the blow-up of the USA as an advanced techno-industrial society.
That final outcome may be inevitable one way or another, but the journey
there need not be so harsh. America needs a vision of something other than
itself as a permanent demolition derby, which, by the way, will not be
“solved” by pushing everyone into a Tesla instead of a Ford F-150.
It’s not just the Federal Reserve; everything around us is backed into a
corner. Come January, when the dazzle of Star Wars fades away, you
will hear instead through the long dark nights a howl of raging animals.
Merry Christmas to all.
