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Page added on January 28, 2013
Kunstler: The Master Meme
The gentlemen and ladies of the meme-o-sphere, where collective notions are birthed like sleet from clouds, have decided lately that the USA has entered a full-on broad-based bull market – a condition of general happiness and prosperity as far advanced beyond mere “recovery” as a wedge of triple-cream Saint-Andre cheese is advanced over a Cheez Doodle. It has become the master fantasy of the moment, following the birth of some junior memes such as… we have a hundred years of shale gas and the “housing sector” (i.e. the suburban sprawl-building industry) is “bouncing back.” What a sad-sack nation of credulous twits we have become.
You can be sure that when a nation is led by the reality-deficient, unhappy outcomes are a sure thing. They will systematically destroy trust in the way things actually work and beat a fast path to either tyranny (where reality doesn’t matter) or anarchy (where reality cannot be managed at all). This is what happens when nations go mad. Even when they are led by people later-determined to be “evil” (Hitler, Lenin) this sad process is allowed to happen because it just seems like a good idea at the time – which is the central political tragedy of human history. To the beaten-down Russians, Bolshevism seemed like a good-idea at the time. To the bankrupt, hopeless Germans, Naziism seemed like a good idea.
I’m not even sure what to call the current disposition of unreality in the USA, though it is clearly tinged with different colors of grandiosity ranging from the plain dopey idea of “American exceptionalism” to the wishful claim that we’re about to become “energy independent,” to the lame assertion so popular in presidential addresses that “together we can do anything.” Speaking of the inaugural, in all the Second-Coming-of-Lincoln-Meets-MLK hoopla of the grand day, with the national mall lined by gigantic flat screen TVs (an Orwellian nightmare), and the heartwarming displays of ethnic diversity, and the stridently inoffensive songs and poem, there was the genial Mr. Obama at the epicenter of the huge ceremony delivering a bouquet of platitudes so stale and trite that it could have been composed in a first-year Harvard Law School ethics skull session at a back table of Wagamama. Despite all the blather about his graying hair, and the wisdom of age, and the supposed music of his rhetoric, I couldn’t detect a single idea in Mr. Obama’s inaugural address that wasn’t either self-evident, or devised to flatter some “identity” bloc, or an imitation of old tropes out of the “Great Speeches” book.
What’s obvious to me is what I have been fearing about this country for some time now: that all the disorders of our time would prompt a campaign to defend the status quo at all costs and to sustain the unsustainable. That is really the master wish behind all the political hijinks of the day, especially the pervasive accounting fraud in all high-order money matters. We see the comforts and conveniences of modernity slipping away and we’ll do anything to try to hang onto them, including lying to ourselves to such an immersive degree about what is really happening that we suppose we can manufacture a happy counter-reality. That’s at the heart of zero interest rate policies, and Federal Reserve manipulation of markets, and statistical misreporting from all the national agencies charged with adding things up. So, the Fed pumps its $90 billion-a-month and the Standard & Poor’s index inflates like an old tire while ten thousand more families get added to the food stamp rolls, and the banks sit on enough foreclosed property to fill the state of Indiana, and another 25-year-old college loan debt serf ODs on vodka and Xanax because he finally understands that even bankruptcy will not save him from perpetual penury.
Apparently, there are moments in history when nations just get lost. I maintain that things would go a whole lot better for us if we acknowledge what is actually going on, namely: a major shift of direction into economic contraction after 200-plus thrilling years of expanding energy resources and easy-to-get material riches. It’s in the nature of this world that things cycle and pulse, and we have entered a certain phase of the cycle that demands certain responses. We have to make the scale of human activities smaller, finer, simpler, and more rooted to the local particulars of place. We have to let go of WalMart and globalism and driving cars incessantly and attempting to manage the affairs of people half a world a way… and we just can’t imagine engaging with this endeavor. That is true poverty of imagination.
10 Comments on "Kunstler: The Master Meme"
Beery on Mon, 28th Jan 2013 6:59 pm
When Kunstler writes “anarchy (where reality cannot be managed at all)”, I think he probably means ‘chaos’. A common mistake. Anarchy is the system under which many families operate, i.e. with no set laws, rulers or system of government, and I think many of them manage reality perfectly well.
Plantagenet on Mon, 28th Jan 2013 7:04 pm
Kunstler is just figuring out that Obama is an empty vessel. No new ideas are coming from the 2nd term—all we will get from this administration is more empty speeches and increasingly desperate financial schemes to prop up BAU, i.e. business-as-usual.
Ham on Mon, 28th Jan 2013 7:45 pm
A man who sanctions warfare and who has exponentially increased drones, which have in turn have killed way over 100 children, to even suggest that this is a president that can be trusted, makes a mockery of any moral standing we may aspire to.
J-Gav on Mon, 28th Jan 2013 8:46 pm
Another lucid article from JHK. I would agree with Beery though regarding a certain confusion on the question of “anarchy.” So many labored unstintingly to provide for their communities in that movement, often at the risk of life and limb, that it is painful to see them conflated with “the unmanageable,”since they were in fact the true forebears of our “Transition,” “Community-Building” etc movements much more than the Marxists ever were. Want names? Try Kropotkin, the ‘Anarchist Prince,’ Elisée Reclus, the French geographer or Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian who originally only wanted to organize “management” of a very local economy (food, water, education, etc) before being taken for target practice by the ‘liberating’ White Army in front of him and Trotsky’s Red Army shooting from behind. He certainly was no saint but his distaste for Moscow’s ignorant Commissars telling them what to do should still be understandable today.
For anyone interested in reality, Voline’s The Unknown History’ might be an interesting place to begin, though it would only be a ‘for-starters’ introduction to a vast facet of modernity which is today almost entirely left in the dark. Dmitri Orlov at his ClubOrlov website is one of the few to even indirectly broach the subject intelligently.
christian phillip on Mon, 28th Jan 2013 10:23 pm
..so slowly and orderly my Master comes to my conclusion that nothing can be done, or shall be done, or even deserves to be done in favor of all this pesty humanities….i have time to wait, as i am homeless already…but i have become suddenly interested in anarchism, apparently the new order of the future…if only they were non religious though…but there is always time for a last change of heart.
Guy Gold on Mon, 28th Jan 2013 11:27 pm
I liked the party about the 25 year old who is a debt slave to the cost of his college education-it’s long been a laughable precept that putting more kids through college is a cure to our economic problems:
http://voices.yahoo.com/government-gone-wild-unnecessary-degree-requirements-11961209.html?cat=25
Arthur on Tue, 29th Jan 2013 12:01 am
For someone of his background, he has an extremely low ‘NWO-coefficient’, I like him.
“We have to make the scale of human activities smaller, finer, simpler, and more rooted to the local particulars of place. We have to let go of WalMart and globalism”
Exactly. Devolute or secede and reconfederate. Move power from Washington to Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, etc, that’s were freedom lies, in contrast to Washington. Organize political life on a state level rather than federal. Let the Mexican majority states become officially Spanish speaking. Like Switzerland that has French and German and Italian speaking monolingual nearly complete independent provinces.
DC on Tue, 29th Jan 2013 12:26 am
While its a nice thought Arthur, amerikans are simply not mature enough to handle ‘local’ independence any better than they are able to handle being the global-thug-empire of the moment. Amerikan ‘states’ are notoriously corrupt(most of them), and not particularly more efficient than ‘Washington’ at managing there own affairs. Many US states, (lines on a map) are not particularly viable economically either, and are indistinguishable from there neighboring states in every way. Most European localities have genuine and distinct cultures, AND are able to work together.
Jared Diamond uses Montana as example of a US state that would simply not be viable w/o a larger nation to make its existence possible. Being ‘independent’ would be a disaster for it, and a great many other US states besides.
The US has a strip-mall and consume ‘culture’, and regional differences so slight to outside observer as to be meaningless. Of course, amerikans place great stock in such things as tiny differences in regional dialects (nasally drawls really), and often try to out-compete each other to be the worst educated, but that is about the extent of it.
BillT on Tue, 29th Jan 2013 3:49 am
America has regressed from the very beginning. We were born from the minds of thinking, rational, mature adults and as we aged, we did a ‘Benjamin Button’, we regressed to mental childhood. Currently we are at the stage where we want what we want and we want it now or we will throw a tantrum(start a war).
We will never be able to govern ourselves in an adult, rational level. We have been deliberately divided by propaganda to keep us busy while we were being robbed of everything we have of value including our freedoms. We are drugged and weakened by our lifestyle of prescription drugs and fast foods. I believe that suicides will be the relief of many when the SHTF.
Shaved Monkey on Tue, 29th Jan 2013 6:43 am
The US wouldn’t have become the US if it didn’t worship money over all else.
The lack of education was designed to bring compliant consumers and workers.
Fast food was designed to replace unemployment safety nets and feed the slaves on cheap slops,left over from the prime steaks that the rich ate.
To not go round destroying nationalised industry and states would shrink the market and the resource pool flowing in to sustain the middle class delusion of grandeur.