Some Sunny Day
The
story behind the "fiscal cliff" melodrama and the much-memed
handwringing about the "good-for-nothing congress" is probably not quite
what it appears -- a set of problems that will eventually be overcome
by "better leadership" armed with "solutions." The story is really about
the permanent disabling of government at this scale and at this level
of complexity. In other words, the federal government will never solve
its obvious problems of mismanagement and bankruptcy and is now only in
business to pretend that it can discharge its obligations (while
employees enjoy the perqs). It's just another form of show business.
The same can be said of most of the state governments, too, of
course, except that they have a lower capacity to pretend they can take
care of anything. They can and will go bankrupt, and then they'll go
begging to the federal government to bail them out, which the federal
government will pretend to do with pretend money. By then, though, the
practical arrangements of daily life would probably be so askew that
politics would take a new, darker, and more extreme turn --among other
things, in the direction of secession and breakup.
The
wonder of it all is that there hasn't been civil disorder yet. When I go
into the supermarket, I marvel at the price of things: a single onion
for a dollar, four bucks for a jar of jam, five bucks for a box of
Cheerios, four bucks for a wedge of cheese. Is everybody except Jamie
Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, and Mark Zuckerberg living on store-brand
macaroni and ketchup? It's hard to measure the desperation of households
in this culture of rugged individualism. At social gatherings friends
rarely tell you that they are two months behind in their mortgage
payment and maxed out on their credit cards. And that's the supposed
middle class, at least the remnants of it. I can't tell you what the
tattoo-and-falling-down-pants crowd talks about in the parking lot
outside the 7-Eleven store. Perhaps they swap meth recipes.
Civil disorder would at least mean something, a consensus of
dissatisfaction about how life is lived. Instead, we only get mad
outbursts of tragic meaninglessness: the slaughter of innocent children
in school, or movie theater patrons mowed down by a lone maniac during
the coming attractions. Life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde said, and
these days television is our art. Hence the United States is now equal
parts Jersey Shore, Buck Wild, the Kardashians, and Honey Boo Boo.
That's not really a lot to work with in terms of social capital,
especially where radical politics might be called for.
Does anybody now breathing even remember radical politics? Whether you
liked them or not -- and I was not crazy about the whole "revolution" of
the late 1960s, which I lived through -- it at least represented a
level of seriousness that is now absolutely and starkly absent today,
especially in young people. Who, in the West, besides Julian Assange,
has stuck his neck out in the past ten years? And please don't tell me
Ron Paul, who had ample opportunity in congressional hearings over the
years to really call out the banksters and their government wankster
errand boys, and all he ever did was nip around their trouser legs.
So I stick to the point I made in The Long Emergency and again in
Too Much Magic: expect America's national and state governments to only
become more ineffectual and impotent. They will never recover from the
insults inflicted on themselves. Events are in the drivers seat,
including things unseen, and the people pretending to be in charge have
arranged things into such a state of fragility that accidents are sure
to happen, especially involving the basic structures of money. In case
you don't know it yet, you're on your own now. Put whatever energy you
can muster into finding a community to be a part of.
Meanwhile, reality stands by with mandates of its own. Do people like
Barack Obama and John Boehner think we're going to re-start another
round of suburban expansion (a.k.a. the housing market)? That's largely
what the old economy was based on, and what Wall Street fed off of
parasitically the past twenty years. That is so over. Do they believe
that when absolutely every task in America is computerized there will be
any gainful work outside of a sort of janitorial IT to tend all the
computers. We've already seen what happens with the telephone system:
after 30 years of techno-innovation in "communications," it's now
impossible to get a live human being on the phone and robots call you
incessantly during the dinner hour. Anyway, we don't really have the
energy resources to supply the electricity for all this crap
indefinitely, or probably even another twenty years.
All
the tendencies and trends in contemporary life are reaching their limits
at the same time, and as they do things will crack up and fall apart,
whether it involves the despotic reach of a government, or a tyrannical
corporation, or a hedge fund server farm stuffed with algo-crunching
computers sucking the life out of every honest market transaction until
the markets are zombies. The euphoria that greeted the end of the fiscal
cliff ritual has settled back into the feckless collective
state-of-mind that we call "bullish." It's all noise and the madness of
crowds now. And black swans shitting on your head some sunny day.
