The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

CNN is frantically advertising a set of “live” debates between the presidential candidates this week — Democrats Sunday and Republicans Tuesday, with loads of “color commentary” before and after. This big media show is being staged in New Hampshire, whose once-significant early primary election has been reduced — like so much else in our national life — to merely symbolic status now that fifteen other states have crammed theirs into the super-duper primary day of February 5, 2008. Since I believe that a collective unconscious operates among groups at all levels of the social hierarchy, including the national level, this extraordinarily early staged contest says a lot about how insecure we must be about our leadership, about our place in the world, and about where we are headed.

Kunstler