A nybody truly interested in government, and therefore politics, should be
cognizant above all that ours have already entered systemic failure. The
management of societal affairs is on an arc to become more inept and
ineffectual, no matter how either of the current major parties pretends to
control things. Instead of Big Brother, government in our time turns out to
be Autistic Brother. It makes weird noises and flaps its appendages, but can
barely tie its own shoelaces.
The one thing it does exceedingly well is drain the remaining capital from
endeavors that might contribute to the greater good. This includes
intellectual capital, by the way, which, under better circumstances, might
gird the political will to reform the sub-systems that civilized life depends
on. These include: food production (industrial agri-business), commerce (the
WalMart model), transportation (Happy Motoring), school (a matrix of
rackets), medicine (ditto with the patient as hostage), and banking (a matrix
of fraud and swindling).
All of these systems have something in common: they’ve exceeded their
fragility threshold and crossed into the frontier of criticality. They have
nowhere to go except failure. It would be nice if we could construct leaner
and more local systems to replace these monsters, but there is too much
vested interest in them. For instance, the voters slapped down virtually
every major ballot proposition to invest in light rail and public transit
around the country. The likely explanation is that they’ve bought the story that
shale oil will allow them to drive to WalMart forever.
That story is false, by the way. The politicos put it over because they
believe the Wall Street fraudsters who are pimping a junk finance racket in
shale oil for short-term, high-yield returns. The politicos want desperately
to believe the story because the background reality is too difficult to
contemplate: an American living arrangement with no future.
The public, of course, is eager to believe the same story for the same
reasons, but at some point they’ll flip and blame the story-tellers, and
their wrath could truly wreck what remains of this polity. When it is really
too late to fix any of these things, they’ll beg someone to tell them what to
do, and the job-description for that position is dictator.
It’s certainly remarkable that the years since the troubles of 2008 have
been so seemingly placid and uneventful, at least here in the USA — not so
much if you live in the Middle East or Ukraine, or in the decaying economies
of southern Euroland, or the septic failed states of Africa. The many
formerly-middle-class Americans living in economic ruin apparently blame
themselves when, for instance, they’re billed tens of thousands of dollars
for some routine surgery performed “out of network” by a bureaucratic
happenstance. They must be punch-drunk with cable news, or over-medicated.
Don’t expect this national mood of paralysis and surrender to last
indefinitely.
What troubles me at the moment is that when that mood snaps, it will be
for a bad reason in the wrong way. Ferguson, Mo., is still sitting there like
an unattended back-pack on the courthouse steps. Before Christmas, some kind
of grand jury decision is going to come down. All the reality-based chatter
points to the probable exoneration of Darren Wilson, the policeman who shot
teenager Michael Brown. I expect the trouble arising out of that to be a lot
worse than most people currently suppose, and then we’ll literally be off to
the races. If that happens, it will be a huge and tragic diversion from the
things that really matter to keep the project of civilized life going. In a
way, it will be the true beginning of the end. The end of what? Of pretending
that the people in authority know what they are doing.
If you think that President Obama is lonely and bereft now, just wait.
Some excuse will be found to try an impeach him and then the nation will
spend another two years conducting a three-ring circus while the shale oil
“miracle” crashes and burns and the banking system melts away to nothing.
It’s been fun watching Mitch McConnell get ready to preside over all of this.
History could not have found a less sympathetic patsy.
