Commitments and Obligations
Conservatives have a legitimate gripe about America's excessive
"commitments and obligations" to "unfunded liabilities" but their focus
on Medicare and social security misses the larger point: our disastrous commitment to the current national lifestyle, in particular suburban sprawl and everything it entails.
This point came across vividly in a video recently released by the usually level-headed David McAlvaney titled "The Fuse Is Lit Part 3 - an American Reckoning."
In it, the smooth and articulate McAlvaney is shown behind the wheel of
his SUV tooling across the picturesque small town in Colorado where he
lives inveighing against the public that elects politicians who deliver
the voters cash benefits. This dynamic is surely deadly, and implies
Democracy's tragic self-limiting nature. But McAlvaney suggests if we
could come to grips with the fiscal quandary of "entitlement" spending,
American life would just rock on.
This is plainly not
so, but it also reveals the tragic shortsightedness of even thoughtful
conservatives - and there are some out there, indeed we need them,
indeed one of the political tragedies of recent American history is the
surrender of conservatism to religious hysterics, professional
ignoramuses, military chauvinists, and flat-earthers. A true
conservative would recognize the land development pattern of the
millennial USA as a consequence of tragic collective choices, a living
arrangement with no future, a trap every bit as lethal as Medicare and
social security.
The catch is, we're not going to unbuild
suburbia and all its accessories. There's no way to legislate it away.
We're stuck with it. The suburban entitlement will fail even more
dramatically than the social entitlements that conservatives grouse
about because there's no way to "print" cheap oil or well-paid
livelihoods the way you can monetize public debt to support social
spending. You can "print" mortgages, of course, for people with little
chance of paying them down, but that only leads to the financial hostage
racket called too-big-to-fail banking, and we know where that's gotten
us.
Around the Internet, in the vale of financial
podcasting, you can hear voices cheerleading the "return" of the
house-building industry. Is it a good thing that real estate speculators
are banging up yet more housing subdivisions in the hills around San
Diego? I can tell you why they are doing it: because that is the
only way they know how to build anything in California. They're stuck in
the habits and practices of the 20th century, building more car
dependent stuff for a society that is already dying a slow death from
living that way.
In the collapse of all these rackets,
bad habits, and brain-dead behaviors that is sure to come, historians
will have a hard time sorting out what exactly brought down the empire.
The big element that will not be so visible is the poverty of
imagination that set the tone for it - especially among public figures
and spokespeople who should have seen and articulated these
relationships, and extra-especially among self-proclaimed conservatives.
This happens to be the day when the articulator-in-chief gets his
official new lease in office. Genial figure that he is, I don't think
President Obama has a clue where all this is heading. I suppose he'll
argue for stricter gun laws today, but that horse is already so far out
of the barn it's in the next county. We don't seem to realize that
America is now fully armed. Additional firearms are just superfluous at
this point. And to some degree the people armed themselves in direct
consequence as their government tinkered with due process, and sent
drone aircraft into the American skies, and commenced computer hacking
operations over every business transaction in the system, and voided the
rule-of-law against criminal uber-bankers who creamed off the nation's
wealth while holding the economy hostage. Since the armed public is not
ready to mount an insurrection against this impudence, the dangerous
tension is expressed in morbid and tragic episodes of mass shootings by
maniacs against the innocent. What I want to know: where is the lone
swindled rancher who waits to bushwhack Jon Corzine of MF Global in the
parking lots of Easthampton, since the law won't touch him?
I suppose we'll hear about immigration reform today. It will surely be
some cockamamie proposal to legitimize the "undocumented" by
shanghaiing them into the military (think: mercenaries), and otherwise
keeping the welcome mat down for more newcomers waiting politely at the
front door. This is insane, of course. The USA needs to reduce its
population consistent with the tremendous economic contraction underway
world-wide. There are too many people for the world to support and
shifting them into this country from regions more rapidly affected by
contraction is just dumb -- but we have our cultural myths to defend...
and voting blocs to appease.
It seems obvious to me that
in the, say, four years ahead (one presidential term), we will not come
to grips with any of the forces of reality bearing down on us. We will
lose control of the money system; we'll go broke trying to keep up our
oil supplies; the American public will get more economically desperate
and angry; and pretty soon the practical matters of daily life will
become rather harsh. And at that point faith in the system finally
evaporates and people fight over the table scraps of a failed polity.
Many of us around the country are hoping for a better outcome in the
successful downscaling and re-localizing of American life, but those
questions are just not in the arena. Hence, the arena itself will
probably have to topple and crash before life is reorganized outside of
where it used to stand.
