In this early stage of the convulsion rocking the western world, especially here in the USA, a peaceful ambience rules. That is because a game is being played. We played the game in 1968. It goes like this. You get people to turn out in the streets. The idea is to promote the right of public assembly as much as to make any particular point. (In fact, banners advocating all sorts of gripes appear.) Eventually, you get a lot of people in the streets. Feelings of happy anarchy sweep the crowd, a feeling that something special is underway, that the usual rules of everyday conduct have been suspended, in a good way. The crowd basks in the sunny glow of its own mass, happy solidarity. Everybody is behaving splendidly – more to feel good about.

      After a while that gets boring, especially for young males with a lot of testosterone surging from loin to brain. They want to do more than bask in the radiance of their own righteous wonderfulness. They want to engage their large muscles, even if in the service of an idea, for instance the idea that they have been swindled. It is at first a vague idea, but large.  But pretty soon it coheres emergently: swindled out of our future! Yes, it is so. Thousands of demon-like beings upstairs in the curtain-wall towers around Zuccotti Park, people wearing neckties and cultured pearls in warm offices with cappuccino machines down the hall, are at this very moment setting loose trading algorithms that will swindle us out of our future! You can see them up there at their evil, glowing screens!

     That’s when the yoga acrobatics and the hat crocheting are put aside and the street people – their ranks swollen into a horde-like meta-organism – start to express things beyond the right of public assembly. Something unseen goes through them, perhaps like the pheromone that transforms a field full of grasshoppers into a ravening swarm of locusts. Being people, they cannot take wing. But they can press forward and up against things, and they can surely break the glass in those sleek curtain-wall buildings (so much for “transparency”) beyond which the bankers sit cringing in their expensive clothing.

     Surely we are heading toward a moment like that. The bank employees upstairs must be getting a little nervous, anyway, just glancing out the windows at the moiling mob below. This is apart from the tensions internally roiling the banks themselves, not to mention the entire networked system of global banking, with all its fissures and cracks, as the merry-go-round of debt flies apart under the centrifugal force of insolvency. Come to think of it, these events could not have correlated more perfectly. Just as a horrific accident in finance is about to happen, a ready-made revolutionary mob is conveniently parked outside the pilot-houses of the world’s great money vessels, so as to receive the crews directly into their open arms after the smash up.

     President Obama could have changed the outcome if he had actually believed in change. He could have told his attorney general to enforce the securities law. He could have replaced the zombies at the SEC and told the new ones to apply all existing regulations. Before last year’s election, he could have used his legislative majorities to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and reinstate the Glass-Steagall act. He could have initiated the process of deconstructing the giant banks back into their separate functions – so that banking once again worked as a utility rather than a launching pad for colossal frauds and swindles. Not only did he fail to do any of these things, he didn’t even talk about it, or try.

     Obama has a lot of nerve claiming to support the Occupy Wall Street movement. He should be one of the objects of its ire. I’m not even sure Obama will get to finish out his term of office. 2012 looks like a complete horror show in the making. The way world money matters are lining up this fall, some kind of debacle seems unavoidable, much worse than the 2008 fiasco. The normal political channels are clogged and sclerotic. Our institutions are failing us. The cast of “candidate” characters across the political spectrum convinces nobody that they can manage this republic.

     The weather may determine the mood of the OWS crowd. If they don’t go apeshit in the next two weeks, my guess is that the nation will hunker down into a dire, melancholy holiday season followed by a desperate winter leading to a raucous spring of political transformation – not necessarily of the best kind.

     For the moment, we seem to be waiting for the proverbial first broken window.

7 Comments on "Kunstler: Going Apeshit"

Plantagenet on Mon, 17th Oct 2011 11:34 pm 



More trenchant insights from Kunstler. His vision of the Occupy Wall Street Movement containing the seeds of a violent mob like those we’ve seen battling police in similar demonstrations in Greece, Italy and France seems all too likely to come to pass.

Mike on Tue, 18th Oct 2011 8:39 am 



Kunstler continues off the deep end. Yet another tiresome conflation of his minimal participation in the deleterious 60’s shenanigans with the inconsequential OWS movement. His writing now openly laments his own stupidity in latching on to the annual flavor of kumbaya (not a Cajun dish). His enthusiastic vote for Obama haunts his pretentious intellect…

“Yes, James, you are an idiot…”

Kenz300 on Tue, 18th Oct 2011 3:04 pm 



The Republican House and the filibuster rules of the Senate allow the minority to obstruct the will of the majority.

Republicans blocked any meaningful campaign disclosure or reform laws.

The Republicans called the OWS protesters a MOB.
The Republicans called the tea party patriots.

hhhmmmmm.

People need to organize, register and VOTE.

The apathetic public has finally woke up.

Terry Stuart on Tue, 18th Oct 2011 9:11 pm 



The movement will become franchised, there will be power hungry self serving step up to the plate and make a business out of the protest. Many are there because it is something to do, some are angry, others are principled. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd need to be brought before the crowds to answer for their legislative sins, and the idiot whose hubris sank AIG, needs to be deported back to the USA from the UK to face the music. Basically, I am very leery of mobs that are against greed, as they think about greed a little too much for me to believe their protests are not about their greedy self interest.

tubaplayer on Tue, 18th Oct 2011 9:38 pm 



@Mike

You know Mike, I just re-read JHK’s “The Long Emergency” It struck me as astonishing just how accurately he called the financial crisis in 2008.

JHK an idiot? Mmmmmm – don’t think so!

SOS on Tue, 18th Oct 2011 10:46 pm 



Very much on target. It should be added it was the government that made the banks lower their lending standards and give away mortgages. It should also be pointed out the crowds are mobs, asssembled without permit and being tolerated to deny them the opportunity to be oppressed. In New York, they are on the property of a union owned bank. Besides the plublic didnt just “woke” up. The public has been awake since the Tea Party ignited and started demanding fiscal responsibility by the government.

Mike on Thu, 20th Oct 2011 10:21 am 



Tubaplayer,

You need to read more. TLE was already old hat by the time Kunstler wrote – some of it by three decades. Kunstler is at his best when he drops the whiny, Seinfeld-wannabe, cynical political commentary and focuses on his strength – which is a sharp critique on the tragedy of suburbia.