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Now that congress
has passed a fake financial reform bill that will accomplish absolutely
nothing to correct a recently engrained culture of swindling, I want to start
my own tea party. I don't want to associate it with the other tea parties
that have already formed because I am allergic to much of the idiot ideology
they express - especially the bent for merging Christian fundamentalism with
governance.
One of the few things I agree on with the existing tea parties is that the Republicans
and Democrats have made themselves hopeless hostages of political money and
bargained away their legitimacy. In line with my general belief that American
life must downscale or die, I'm not wholly persuaded that federalism can
survive in any case - but assuming it will lumber on for a while anyway, the
two major parties cannot retain their monopoly on power. Indeed, it is in the
natural order of things that this country must periodically endure a
realignment of political ideas and political power. This tends to occur
during moments of cultural convulsion, and that is exactly the moment we are
in as the sun sets on the fossil fuel based industrial extravaganza and we
enter a crisis of intense resource austerity.
The other tea parties have been silent on the war because of the ties between
Christian fundamentalism and military chauvinism. This is due, I suspect, to
the tea parties first emanating out of Dixieland, where an old Scots-Irish
"cracker" belligerence persists in a romantic view of violence -
and where, coincidentally, there happen to be so many US military bases, and
families dependent on careers connected with them. The confusions of hellfire
Christian theology with governance form an overlayment
on this, so you end up with a political culture favoring military adventures
abroad and pushing citizens around at home on matters of social behavior
(while mouthing a lot of disingenuous nonsense about "liberty").
I
don't like that political culture and I'm not in favor of continuing our adventures
on the fringes of the Middle East. The half-assed occupation of Afghanistan
cannot be resolved in a way consistent with our fantasies and wishes. To put
it as simply as possible, we can't control the terrain there and we can't
control the behavior of the population. Our campaign to turn that remote and
impoverished land into a governable democratic state is an exercise in
futility that we can't afford. No doubt there are strategic wishes pinned to
it - mainly a wish to influence and moderate neighboring Pakistan - but that
appears to be back-firing with the minting of evermore Islamic maniacs
seeking to blow up anything that presents a target, including their own women
and children.
Iraq is a somewhat different story, but I suspect the bottom line is that we
can't afford to run a police station there forever. In the worst-case of our
leaving, Iran might attempt to step in and control the place (and its oil),
but that would only produce a bloody collision of Arab and Persian culture -
and the side effect of that might actually be to our benefit. Anyway, my tea
party would shut down that operation ahead of schedule.
My
tea party would reduce legal immigration to a tiny trickle and get serious
about enforcing sanctions against people who are here without permission. A New
York Times editorial last week expressed the Democratic-progressive view
in typically tortured style, saying of the recent Arizona law:
..it makes a crime out of being a foreigner
in the state without papers -- in most cases a civil violation of federal
law. This is an invitation to racial profiling, an impediment to effective
policing and a usurpation of federal authority....
The
fine distinction they want to apply in this matter between civil and criminal
law is the same as NPR's house style of referring to illegal immigrants as
"undocumented" - leaving the impression that the only problem for
these people is a some bureaucratic glitch rather
than a transgression of law. The truth is that neither party really wants to
do anything about the extraordinary influx of Mexican nationals because they
want to pander to a growing segment of Hispanic voters (or secondarily want
to maintain the pool of cheap labor for US businesses). My party does not
believe in unbounded multi-culturalism. My party
also views the lawlessness of the current situation to be corrosive of the
rule-of-law generally. My party views the global population overshoot problem
as a condition that requires a more rigorous defense of US territory,
sovereign resources, and even whatever remains of American common culture.
My
tea party would systematically dismantle Too-Big-To-Fail banks into smaller
units subject to real reforms that would prevent any further
"socialization" of losses by financial buccaneers. In effect, my
party would re-enact the Glass-Steagall laws - and
get rid of the 3000-page bundle of prevaricating crap in the current
"Fin-Reg" law, which has been constructed
with all the guile and mendacity of a collateralized debt obligation. My party
would seek the return of banking to its function as a utility, while letting
investment freebooters gamble with their own funds
without any government back-up. (You'll see the investment houses get small
fast that way.)
My
tea party would get the government out of the housing business. The main
effect of 70 years of federal intervention for the sake of
"affordable" housing has been to drive the price of housing up far
beyond the ability of normal people to afford a place to live. And the current
policies devised during the bubble crackup crisis have only served to prevent
the price of houses from returning to a level where people might be willing
to buy them. Of course, the whole process has also encouraged local
governments to jack up property taxes to a level that can only be described
as intolerable (in the 1776 sense of the word).
My
party would undertake a rebuilding of the US passenger railroad system - not
a flashy new "high speed" system, which we cannot afford, but the
system that is lying out there rusting in the rain waiting to be fixed. This
is imperative because we are on the verge of very disruptive problems with
our oil supply which are going to put our beloved Happy Motoring matrix
out-of-business. We also face the end of mass commercial aviation (even if
flying remains an option for the wealthy). A restored passenger rail system
will not solve all the problems connected with the demise of mass motoring,
but it will help a lot, and would be an aid to the necessary re-activation of
our small towns and cities as suburbia inevitably loses its value and
utility.
The leaders of my tea party from the president on down would make a concerted
effort to inform the public in straight talk about the real problems that we
face involving peak oil and debt. My tea party would promote reality-based
politics rather than techno-grandiose fantasies and wishful thinking. My tea
party would encourage the necessary downscaling of all the critical
activities of American daily life, including the re-localization of food
production, the rebuilding of local commercial networks, the revitalization
of the small towns and cities, and the difficult transition out of extreme
car dependency. My tea party will do everything possible to construct a
coherent consensus about what is happening to us and what we can do about it.
My tea party is based on the true spirit of 1776 - the binding together of
common interests and common culture - not the destruction of them as in the
spirit of 1861.
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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