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A
wicked vibe rattles the mental furniture in men's minds these days. Against
the dreadful normality of American life - the morning traffic on I-495, the
mayhem awaiting in some school cafeteria or motor
vehicle office, the household awakenings to a new dawn of foreclosure here,
there, and everywhere - all this ceremony of the familiar is like a stage
backdrop that conceals the awful crush of history. Things are swaying and
crashing outside the magic theater of the normal, where we act out our
tragicomedy of "Waiting for Recovery."
I
have never lived in a time when so many false narratives competed for
supremacy of the collective mind-space. Omnipresent as it is, reality seems
to elude us, and certainly its supposed interlocutors - figures such as
presidents, his highest appointed officials, their voluble, strutting
opponents in the other party, the glamorpusses
behind the Cable TV news desks, poor dim Bill Keller at The New York Times,
and, of course, the necromancers of economics on campuses from Cambridge to
Palo Alto.
A more primitive radar would conclude that the
planet Earth is angrier than usual this year. Japan is still in a radioactive
daze from the seventeen inch shove it suffered and lots of people in Carolina
are surely shaking their heads over this weekend's visitation of wrath. Is it
possible that climate change and Jesus are one and the same? Let them figure
that out in the little cinderblock roadside chapels next Sunday before they
all trundle over to the Nascar track.
It
was heartening at least to see a few signs of life "out there" in
the karmic interstices. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan sent a memo to the
Attorney General of the US - viz: something has
been going on in Wall Street that merits your attention. As in most
seemingly crucial turnings lately, echo answered. Can someone please check to
see if Eric Holder over in the Department of Justice is leaking sawdust? He
must be stuffed something. Styrofoam would just make him look lumpy. Could he
be a computer graphic? Or is he just a simple slab of cardboard with a photo
glued on. Perhaps Senator Levin's next memo might be in the form of a
subpoena to Mr. Holder, requesting his testimony as to how many trillions of
dollars were snookered, swindled, and Ponzied out
of the US public for the benefit of about a thousand guys in and around lower
Manhattan (with branch offices in suburban Connecticut and New Jersey). (Cue:
sound of Timberwolves howling.)
Gretchen
Morganson and Louise Story over at The New York
Times put out a related query last week, asking how come nobody went to
jail for misdeeds in the banking sector after several years of incidental
revelation through things such as senate hearings, Web journalism, and a few
vagrant strolls down the Maiden Lanes of the Federal Reserve's balance sheets.
How did "the newspaper of record" come to wait so long to ask that
question? Not even the Times's Op-Ed viziers
have essayed to ask why Lloyd Blankfein is not
parked in a court of law instead of a limo. Morganson
and Story appeared to conclude that the web of turpitude in finance was too
complex for anybody in a disciplinary role to understand, and that was that.
Run up the white flag. We give up.
Last
week, Eliot Spitzer called out the US attorney general, the alphabet agency
regulators, and the secretary of the treasury on Anderson Cooper's nightly
CNN slot. Spitzer, you will recall, the New York attorney general, then
briefly governor, was discovered to have had relations with a prostitute. How
unfortunate. But consider this: it was at least an honest commercial
transaction. Of all the complaints lodged in the matter, none involved any
failure to pay the required fees. Spitzer now has his own TV show - which is
truly one of the miracles of our time (and I mean that it's a good thing). He
was joined on Cooper's slot by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, who has done the bravest and most truthful
reporting by far on our national clusterfuck. Taibbi reported last week - one of a now-long string of
pithy, revalatory articles going back a couple of
years - that two bimbo wives of Morgan Stanley executives set up a hedge fund
with $14 million in "walking around" money from their hubbies, and
parlayed it (no doubt with help) into a $200 million-plus TALF bailout drop.
Now that the story is out, will any regulators or prosecutors have a look?
Nobody in the public arena has even suggested it.
Of
course, I continue to marvel that the Hamptons have not been burned down by
an angry mob of "99ers" marching down the Sunrise Highway. Perhaps
that kind of action is yet-to-come during the summer when the Federal Reserve
will have to decide to either destroy American currency, or watch the S &
P sink to 200... when various sun struck nations
around the Mediterranean move to stiff the banks of northern Europe... when
the Tea Party ventures to prang the operations of the US government over the
debt ceiling sometime in July. Meanwhile, consider how many people will get
shot in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and other places around the center of the
World's oil production capacity. Business may be down at Walt Disney World
this coming vacation season.
To
me, the outcome of all this was clear a while ago: a
world made by hand. Incidentally, watch Japan lead
the way, as they give up on the industrial meth trip and return to a
traditional society. Readers think I'm kidding about this. We're heading
there, too. The signs are unmistakable. It's not as bad you think, either.
We'll become reacquainted with that fugitive experience, reality. Disillusion
is not the worst thing that can happen to people. We can re-direct all the
effort that we put into gaming our own asses and cast off the awful weight of
pretending to be what we no longer are.
Barack
Obama has waited a bit too long to change the national storyline using the
authority of his high office. It's not about "growth" and
"recovery." It's about managing contraction and becoming a
different sort of American society. Observers of the scene have made a
mistake about Obama. He's not "eloquent." He's merely respectable.
Being able to speak in grammatical sentences is not the same as having
anything to say. It will be a sorrowful day when he is replaced by a genuine
idiot like Michele Bachman, but it will happen because he wasn't able to set
the tone for his times with something like a straight story, or a memo to his
chief law enforcement officer.
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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