—the mandate of clarity requires me to ask: to what state of affairs do we expect to recover? If the answer is a return to an economy based on building ever more suburban sprawl, on credit card over-spending, on routine securitized debt shenanigans in banking, and on consistently lying to ourselves about what reality demands of us, then we are a mortally deluded nation. We’re done with that, we’re beyond that now, we’ve crossed the frontier and left that all behind, and we’d better get our heads straight about it. Forget About Recovery; Clusterfuck Nation
Is he or isn’t he? One thing is certain, Kunstler can turn a phrase on a dime, or something even smaller, neater. I dare not, as a more vague, less testosterone-driven, woman, comment on the blog itself. Naw, it’s more fun to come home and shoot off my intuitive blast caps from here. Fact is, I shy away from most any blog commenting where the guys do their Next Guy thing, where each comment is a topper to the one before. Where the commenters are “regulars” and the club is nothing but Old Boys club. Okay, I get it, it’s sport. But I am not there, I am here, where the few (mighty few) who can decipher these smarts get their virtual gold star pin—just write in.
Is Kunstler what? Right, of course. Is Obama driving us down the road to rack and ruin? Albeit sylishly and, most admit, very winningly? I am certain that in every case the writer/complainer is deceiving primarily himself, because I never, myself, underestimate the man’s genius for the pragmatic. Obama is one master politician, and at every turn, people expect a perfection of transparency as if he lacked the smarts to deceive. No. He will do whatever is not only most politic but with one eye on re-election; you don’t think all that work was for nothing? Guys like Kunstler—okay, maybe there’s nobody quite so smart at doom-saying—are taking a position. Duh, so is Obama. The web is supposed to somehow make up for the death of journalism? I’m sorry, but when the primary drive, skill and ambiition is to brand yourself, all ideas are turned to one vast mush, see?
Trust no one over thirty, or over, unless they haven’t a dog in this race. Let’s see, that would leave … me.
Our poised and charming Prez may escape personal obloquy from the quaint old-world street folk, but most of the other G-20 policy playerz take a dim view of the shell-and-pea games being played by the custodians of the world’s reserve currency, including front-end-loader bank bail-outs, the shuffling of worthless securities under TARPS and TARFS, the desperate efforts to prevent the sane re-pricing of real estate, the cannibalizing of treasuries by the Federal Reserve, the now-notorious hijacking of public “liquidity” injections by third parties like Goldman Sachs, and most generally the perceived sacrifice of everybody else’s greater good for the sake of maintaining Lloyd Blankfein’s cappuccino machine.
Smart-ass. Only that last sentence is a keeper.
Dad’s first date with Mom was at the Clusterfuck Moon dance in high school. Makes me sentimental.
I’ve found that commenting is a contact sport in most punditry blogs (like Clusterfuck Nation, or most tech opinion blogs), so I tend to stay away.
I have to confess to a sort of lurid fascination of weblogs and writers that are even more pessimistic than I am, and I enjoy sometimes reading a person who has the same level and kind of certainty as that of a evangelistic preacher.
Because a lot of what he states are just articles of faith. He’s commenting on a changing system in a situation we haven’t encountered before.
So, what’ll happen?
I don’t know, I’m not certain, I’m not sure and I worry. With issues as big and complicated as the environment and the economy any certainty, like that of Jim Kunstler, is suspect.
Unlike most of the wholesale pessimism merchants I’m fairly optimistic about the political situation in the Western World. I think at this point we can let ourselves believe, at least for a while, that Obama is smart and is doing things for good reasons. Not to take it on faith, but at least to hope that even when he’s implementing flawed plans (like the Geithner Plan), it’s because it’s the least bad option available to him and that he has a “Plan B”. Even Iceland looks to be voting in a sensible poliical establishment in a few weeks time, and that’s a western nation that goes off the scale in terms of corruption and nepotism and oligarchal favours.
Things are going to get worse, but they’re also going to get better.
The standard thing in these situations, lines from the step-by-step playbook of the intellectual, a required part of the jujitsu contact sport of show-off commenting (standard in the blood-thirsty discussions on blogs like “Clusterfuck Nation”), is to pull out a quotation; (an elegant application of the appeal to authority fallacy, that satisfies the educated person’s senses of aesthetics).
For the conflicted that would be to quote Walt Whitman, “(I am large, I contain multitudes)”; for for the pessimist, the perennial Yeats, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loose upon the world.”
Me? I prefer another few lines of Whitman’s from the same poem. Not for their relevance to an argument, or for their demonstration of some sort of superiority or status, just for the beauty of their thoughts and construction:
Bugger, messed up the blockquote. Ah, well, a necessary counterbalance to the over-indulgent cleverisms of the comment. :-D
How English. Starting a sentence with Bugger. It seems to serve so well.