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Can't we just
drop Pee Wee Herman on Tripoli? Surely this shocking manifestation of
everything toxic in America's existential zeitgeist arsenal would send the Gadhafi corps shrieking for the blank Saharan interior -
somewhere between Murzuk and Timbuktu - where
timeless dunes shift in the eternal wind, and the cares of modern life,
armies, geopolitics, banks, bombs, and crusaders in red bowties are but
grains of sand under the uncountable stars. To recline there, outside the
tent, in the bracing chill of the desert night, against the warm backrest of
a sleeping camel, with a glass of strong tea, would bring one into communion
with the peace of Allah - don't you think?
But it appears we're going for the heavy ordnance instead, aided by
the latest and greatest in video-gaming technology, and, by Gawd (yes, that one, ours, the one Michelangelo painted
in Rome) we are going to give this cheeky Gadhafi
fellow something like a Semtex colonoscopy and few
around the wide world will shed a tear as he is translated into just another
late-night snack for the rats and scorpions.
Good gracious what an exhausting month this has been!
Most remarkable in the tsunami of events last week was the peculiar
dearth of actual reported news - as in hard, reliable information. CNN played
the same loop all weekend of brave Japanese firemen marshalling outside the
Fukushima reactors, trotting this way and that way in disciplined ranks,
while alarms went out about radioactivity showing up here and there, in milk,
spinach (did it grow overnight?), and on airline customers de-planing in the otherwise spotless reaches of Dallas,
Texas. My correspondents tell me that the radioactive scare meme is way
overblown, with the number of actual dead so far at exactly zero from the
whole reactor event- and they may be right, or not, though it is hard to
imagine no severe consequences at all over time from this disgusting mess.
More to the point perhaps is the loss of about 30 percent of Japan's electric
power. What will they do in the long agony of sorting things out there?
I have a peculiar fantasy about Japan. It burbled up in my mind even
before the earthquake-tsunami-reactor disaster, and I conceived it in
rumination upon Japan's weird twenty-year-long economic malaise, as the
nation's population shrank, and its debt climbed to astronomical heights, and
its young people lost heart, and it seemed just to go through the motions of
whatever modernity required of them - ship the cars, package the robot parts,
show up at the salaryman drinking contest, get
stuffed into another late-night commuter train. I don't claim to be a Japan
expert, but I think all this was getting to them in a deep, major way. I
think they perhaps secretly longed to get back to something like an older
traditional Japanese society - the one before car assembly plants, big steel
ships, chain reactions, and fluorescently-lighted pachinko parlors, back to
the society that blossomed and fruited in cycles of centuries on those
beautiful rocky, sea-washed islands into a culture saturated in artistry -
unencumbered by idiot religions or the bothersome neediness of other nations.
I can't shake the odd feeling that Japan was looking for a way to get
back to the 19th century, and perhaps even deeper beyond that - to the
dream-time before they made the fateful decision to industrialize. The
earthquake-tsunami-reactor moment is their chance now to begin that journey.
Frankly, I don't know what else they can do. Japan imports over 95 percent of
the fossil fuels it uses (that would be oil, coal, and natural gas). Does
anyone think they'll be able to continue that indefinitely? Sorry, I just
don't see it under any circumstances. And, anyway, the geographic region
where the bulk of the world's oil comes from is in the process of blowing up.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are like some kind of mansion where
fire has broken out simultaneously in the kitchen, the conservatory, the
media room, the master bathroom, the chauffeur's apartment over the garage,
and the pool house, and whenever the flames are doused in one spot, they
break out in another. Yesterday it was Syria and Yemen. Bahrain is under
lockdown. The Egyptians are having second thoughts about the loss of a
grinding stability, trouble is stirring up in Kuwait, Iraq is like a crazy
person in the rubber room of history, and who knows what kind of spells the vizeer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is laying out in his Kevlar sanctum. There is
just too much tension in the world and it is demanding release in the most
vexing ways.
So, I can see the Japanese people - a deeply homogenous society -
veering toward an as yet un-articulated consensus: let's just get
out of the modern world. Let's go back home. Let's don the kimono and the
hakama, get us some horses, sharpen the katana, and
kick back in the chaniwa garden with a bowl of
green tea - and forget about all that dirty, disgusting, dangerous, heavy
manufacturing-for-export (to an insane world) nonsense. History may record
their industrial adventure as a weird blip of activity in a much longer
timeline. As it will for us and everybody else, I believe. In fact, this
fantasy about the Japanese shrugging off the toils of modernity is exactly
what all the other so-called advanced nations of the world will find themselves
doing sooner rather than later as we all take the road back to a world made
by hand. The Japanese may just be the pioneering exemplars of the universal
process.
What we're seeing these days is an epochal unspooling of hypercomplexity. The world just can't take anymore of it. The world is telling us to cut it out or
it is going to kick our upright bipedal asses. Of course, America may be
absolutely the last society to get this message. We'll receive it in the
car-wash, no doubt. On our iPhones.
James
Howard Kunstler
James
Howard Kunstler’s new novel of the post-oil
future, World
Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.
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