A s the Governor goblins at the Federal Reserve whistle past the graveyard
of dead Quantitative Easing, and the US dollar magically expands like a
prickly puffer fish, and Mario Drahgi does what it takes with Euro
duct tape to patch all black holes of unpayable debt from Athens to Dublin,
and Japan watches its once-wondrous economy congeal in a puddle of Abenomic
sludge (with a radioactive cherry on top), and China chokes on its
dollar-peg, and Russia waits patiently with its old friend, Winter, covering
its back — and notwithstanding the violent chaos, beheadings, and
psychopathic struggles across the old Levant, not to mention the doubling of
Ebola cases every 20 days, which the World Health Organization did not have
the nerve to project beyond 1.2 million in January (does the doubling just
stop there?) — there is enough instability around the globe for the gentlemen
of Wall Street to make one last fabulous fortune arbitraging the future
before the boomerang of consequence circles this suffering planet and finally
accomplishes what the Department of Justice under Eric Holder failed to do
for six long years.
It’s the season of witch and you should be nervous. Especially if you live
in part of the world where money is used. Pretty soon nobody will know what
any currency is really worth — at least for a while — or what anything else
is worth, for that matter. Perhaps the fishermen of India will start using
their worthless gold for sinkers. Jay-Z and Diddy will gaze down on their
bling in despair, thinking, perhaps, they should have invested in Betamax
players instead. In the time of anything-goes-and-nothing-matters, it’s
dangerous to expect anything.
Here’s what I expect: the surge of the dollar is the crest of an historic
Great Wave. A Great Wave is an awesome event, and its crest is a majestic
sight, but soon the foam spits and hisses and the wave breaks and crashes
down on the beach — say, out at the Hamptons — where hedge funders stroll to
catch the last dwindling rays of a beautiful season, and all of a sudden they
are being swept out to sea in the rip-tide that retracts all that lovely
green liquidity, and no one is even left on the beach to weep for them.
Indeed their Robert A. M. Stern shingled manor houses up behind the dunes are
swept away, too, and the tennis courts, and the potted hydrangeas, and the
Teslas, and all the temporal bric-a-brac of their uber-specialness.
And, of course, it being the season of the witch, that’s where the zombies
come out for real — the tattooed savages who all this time have been stewing
in their own rancid juices awaiting their turn to get jiggy with the nation
that left them restlessly undead. I don’t think you can overestimate the
depth of ill-feeling that the American public harbors for the cravens who
engineered their USA into the biggest booby-trap the world has ever seen. The
trouble is, they lost their humanity in the process, so when they have their
way with the feckless folks tweaking the dials, you might want to contemplate
moving to Finland.
Who can feel confident about the tending of things just now? The
diminishing returns of the Information Age are about to bite our collective
ass like an army of Orcs. The sum of all that digital magic is a nation
completely incapable of telling itself the truth or acting honorably.
Unemployment is down without employment being up. Candy Crush is making the
world safe for democracy. We have the finest health care system in the world.
ISIS is trying to compete with our homegrown videogame industry for supremacy
in porno-violence (actually, I thought we already won that) but now we will
obliterate all the bad guys in the world by remote control from the drone
bunkers of Las Vegas, and that will show them. Thank goodness the long holiday
season is almost upon us to juice the so-called economy ever-higher.
There has never been a crazier moment in history. The weeks before the
outbreak of the First World War seem like a garden party compared to the
morbid antics of these darkening days. America, you’ve been wishing fervently
for the Zombie Apocalypse. What happens when you discover you can’t just
change the channel?
