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Page added on May 2, 2016
Kunstler: Send Out the Clowns
I n this decade of maximum peril, a prankish God delivers two maximally detested candidates to lead the faltering nation as events run ahead of all the convenient narratives. For instance: the idea that Republican “insiders” can block Trump’s path to the nomination. The insiders may be phantoms after all. For instance, the loathsome Koch brothers have already made their move onto Hillary’s side of the game-board. Trump won’t miss their campaign contributions for a New York minute (while Hillary might find a way to stuff the cash into some Cayman Islands lock-box of the Clinton Foundation).
Events played right into Trump’s smallish hands last week when protesters outside a Donald rally in Costa Mesa, CA, waved Mexican flags and placards calling for the reestablishment of Aztlán del Norte. Kind of proves his point about illegal immigration, don’t it? Trump also supposedly blundered in saying that Hillary had only “the women’s card” left to play in her donkey trot to the election. I’m not so sure he’s wrong about that — though the indignometer needle danced through the red-line after he said it.
Has it come to this? The women’s party against the men’s party? What kind of idiot psychodrama is this country acting out? Mom and dad mud-wrestling in an election year hog-wallow? A Reality TV show writ large from sea to shining sea? Are there no better ways of understanding the difficulties we face?
Lately Hillary has been boasting of her ability to bring Wall Street to heel, theoretically after Wall Street installs her in the White House. Voters (especially women) might want to pay attention to Hillary’s lavish praise for President Obama’s handling of the banking turpitudes still unresolved seven years after the crack-up of 2008. What did the Dodd-Frank Act (signed by “O” in 2010) accomplish except to provide more lucrative work-arounds, by Too-Complex-To-Comprehend legalese, for Too-Big-To-Fail banks. It was written by bank lobbyists and lawyers and was about 2,270 pages longer than the old Glass Steagall Act that Bill Clinton vaporized in 1999. Do you suppose that Bill and Hill might have talked about the repeal of Glass Steagall back then? Do you wonder what she thought about it at the time… being a lawyer and all?
This week attention is fixed on the Indiana primary where Devil Bat Ted Cruz desperately makes his last stand against the Trump juggernaut. It seems that former House Speaker John Boehner actually succeeded in driving a wooden stake through Cruz’s hypothetical heart by casually remarking that he was “the most miserable sonofabitch I ever worked with.” Kind of hard to explain that one away, though Ted tried by sending out his new attack dog Carly Fiorina and claiming that he never worked with the Speaker of the House — a risible claim for a national legislator in the same party.
All of this would be amusing if the USA wasn’t sliding into the twilight of what many people call “modernity” — which is code for the techno-industrial hyper-complexity we’ve been enjoying lately as a species. We have yet to comprehend the diminishing returns of heaping more complexity on what is already too complex. Exhibit A for most of the common folk must be the Affordable Care Act (also signed by “O” in 2010). Whereas the shrewd stylings of Dodd-Frank surely mystify the public, most full-functioning adults understand what it means when their health insurance premiums go up by 20 percent and the new deductible makes it unthinkable to even consider going to the emergency room.
The sad truth may be that rackets of this kind are unreformable, and that we can’t begin to do things differently until they collapse. It should be obvious, for instance, that American health care needs to move in the opposite direction from where it has been going — from giantism, as epitomized by colossal merged mega-hospital corporations, back to some kind of local clinic care in which doctors and their subalterns are not burdened by an oppressive matrix of Charge-Master grift. There may be less razzle-dazzle technology in that future model, but much more hands-on care, plus an end to the kind of financial pillage that bankrupts households for relatively routine illnesses (the $90,000 appendectomy).
Likewise in virtually all other areas of American life, the real trend as yet un-discussed in this election campaign, will be unwinding and downscaling of the onerous, toxic hyper-complexity of the age now passing and finding our way to a workable re-set of what used to be known as political-economy.
In the meantime: a clown show.
Kunstler
13 Comments on "Kunstler: Send Out the Clowns"
dave thompson on Mon, 2nd May 2016 12:54 pm
Repeat and rinse, we the people have the power to SHUT IT DOWN.
geopressure on Mon, 2nd May 2016 1:04 pm
We the people also have the power to educate ourselves & build things up rather than tear them down…
—
But, you don’t care about that, you only care about the $0.50/post that you are getting paid…
apneaman on Mon, 2nd May 2016 1:20 pm
$0.50/post? got a link so I can sign up?
PracticalMaina on Mon, 2nd May 2016 1:24 pm
Geopressure are the Kochs hiring?
Davy on Mon, 2nd May 2016 1:36 pm
He is right about the rackets. It will take a economic, social, and political collapse of some sort to redeem the people. We are in a runaway racket event that requires a reset. The reset can only be a crisis of the type that does not allow rackets at least at the level they are currently. Human nature is a racket and life itself is a racket but a racket of rackets is when we are chasing our tails in insanity.
J-Gav on Mon, 2nd May 2016 3:51 pm
In an era when absurdity and obscenity, in all their variegated outfits, are central features of the social, economic and political landscape, no reform, only collapse can bring about the ‘reset’ mentioned above.
The question remains as to whether said paradigm shift will, should or must involve violent revolt.
Here in France,I recently read a comment by a veteran of ‘social struggles’ stating that he doubted very much that anything of substance could be achieved without violence.
On the other hand, RIP Daniel Berrigan (age 94), Jesuit priest and lifelong activist against war and violence. I’m not a hierarchically, dogmatically or otherwise class-oriented person. To be frank, I’m an atheist. That doesn’t stop me from reading what believers think and write. Dostoyevsky for example, or this from Berrigan:
“Revolution is interesting to the extent that it avoids the plague that it promises to cure.”
Or this one:
“It may or may not be possible to change the world by non-violent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt – the total incapacity of violence to change anything for the better.”
What are you betting on?
J-Gav on Mon, 2nd May 2016 4:35 pm
Dave T – Yes, well, that’s Hume’s Paradox isn’t it? The people do have the power but are always dumbed down to the point where they are unable to recognize that fact.
Further,in our day and age,with the multi-pronged media/marketing/psychological juggernaut supporting an obviously failed system, the otherwise much vaunted ‘individual’ is paradoxically bound to feel powerless and estranged, isn’t she/he?
The solution to that? Get out of the ‘system.’ Much easier said than done however …
makati1 on Mon, 2nd May 2016 6:07 pm
“Clowns to the left of me. Jokers to the right. Here I am…”
The world is watching this breakdown of America with glee. Never have I seen so much mud slinging and bullshit as I have in this contest for National Teleprompter Reader, formerly known as the American President. LMAO
JuanP on Mon, 2nd May 2016 6:08 pm
The political system in the USA is broken and destroying itself and the country. This is like watching a slow motion wrecking scene in a movie with great FX. It’s horrifying, it never ends, and keeps getting worse, defying the limits of our imagination. Mind my words; if Hillary wins, she will be big, big trouble. Things will get really scary with her as US President.
makati1 on Mon, 2nd May 2016 6:43 pm
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-02/first-casualty-truth
“In the fifth century B.C., Greek dramatist Aeschylus said, “In war, truth is the first casualty.” Quite so. Whenever national leaders decide to go on the warpath for the sake of their own ambition or self-aggrandisement, it’s the citizenry that will pay the bloody price for their aspirations. Since war is rarely desired by the citizenry, it has to be sold to them. Some form of deception, exaggeration, or outright lies must be put forward to con the populace into getting on board with the idea.
War, after all, represents a monumental failure of national leaders to serve the rightful national objectives of a citizenry – peace and prosperity. Of course, in the case of an empire going to war, this represents a monumental failure on steroids – the outcome may well be world war in such a case.”
Sissyfuss on Mon, 2nd May 2016 7:41 pm
J-Gav, we will all become Raskolnikov as the denouement unfolds and the battleaxes are shouldered for action.
Harquebus on Mon, 2nd May 2016 10:49 pm
“Under every stone lurks a politician.” — Aristophanes in Thesmophoriazusae 410 BC
Apneaman on Tue, 3rd May 2016 6:56 pm
Surge in Ridership Pushes New York Subway to Limit
“Subway use, now at nearly 1.8 billion rides a year, has not been this high since 1948, when the fare was a nickel and the Dodgers were still almost a decade away from leaving Brooklyn. Today, train delays are rising, and even a hiccup like a sick passenger or a signal malfunction can inundate stations with passengers.
Delays caused by overcrowding have quadrupled since 2012 to more than 20,000 each month, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.”
“But the subway infrastructure has not kept pace, and that has left the system with a litany of needs, many of them essential to maintaining current service or accommodating the increased ridership”
“…. the last time the system had this many riders, during the Great Depression and World War II era.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/nyregion/surge-in-ridership-pushes-new-york-subway-to-limit.html?_r=0