In just about any realm of activity this nation
does not know how to act. We don’t know what to do about our mounting
crises of economy. We don’t know what to do about our relations with other
nations in a strained global economy. We don’t know what to do about our own
culture and its traditions, the useful and the outworn. We surely don’t know
what to do about relations between men and women. And we’re baffled to the point
of paralysis about our relations with the planetary ecosystem.
To allay these vexations, we just coast along on
the momentum generated by the engines in place — the turbo-industrial
flow of products to customers without the means to buy things; the gigantic
infrastructures of transport subject to remorseless decay; the dishonest
operations of central banks undermining all the world’s pricing and cost
structures; the political ideologies based on fallacies such as growth without
limits; the cultural transgressions of thought-policing and institutional
ass-covering.
This is a society in deep danger that doesn’t
want to know it. The nostrum of an expanding GDP is just statistical
legerdemain performed to satisfy stupid news editors, gull loose money into
reckless positions, and bamboozle the voters. If we knew how to act we would
bend every effort to prepare for the end of mass motoring, but instead we
indulge in fairy tales about the “shale oil miracle” because it offers the
comforting false promise that we can drive to WalMart forever (in self-driving
cars!). Has it occurred to anyone that we no longer have the capital to repair
the vast network of roads, streets, highways, and bridges that all these cars
are supposed to run on? Or that the capital will not be there for the
installment loans Americans are accustomed to buy their cars with?
The global economy is withering quickly because it was just a
manifestation of late-stage cheap oil. Now we’re in early-stage of expensive oil
and a lot of things that seemed to work wonderfully well before, don’t work so
well now. The conveyer belt of cheap manufactured goods from
China to the WalMarts and Target stores doesn’t work so well when the American
customers lose their incomes, and have to spend their government stipends on
gasoline because they were born into a world where driving everywhere for
everything is mandatory, and because central bank meddling adds to the
horrendous inflation of food prices.
Now there’s great fanfare over a “manufacturing renaissance” in the
United States, based on the idea that the work will be done by
robots. What kind of foolish Popular Mechanics porn fantasy is
this? If human beings have only a minor administrative role in this set-up, what
do two hundred million American adults do for a livelihood? And who exactly are
the intended customers of these products? You can be sure that the people of
China, Brazil, and Korea will have enough factories of their own, making every
product imaginable. Are they going to buy our stuff now? Are they going to
completely roboticize their own factories and impoverish millions of their own
factory workers?
The lack of thought behind this dynamic is
staggering, especially because it doesn’t account for the obvious political
consequence — which is to say the potential for uprising, revolution, civic
disorder, cruelty, mayhem, and death, along with the kind of
experiments in psychopathic governance that the 20th century was a laboratory
for. Desperate populations turn to maniacs. You can be sure that scarcity beats
a fast path to mass homicide.
What preoccupies the USA now, in June of
2014? According to the current cover story Time Magazine, the triumph
of “transgender.” Isn’t it wonderful to celebrate sexual confusion as the latest
and greatest achievement of this culture? No wonder the Russians think we’re out
of our minds and want to dissociate from the West. I’ve got news for the editors
of Time Magazine: the raptures of sexual confusion are not going to carry
American civilization forward into the heart of this new century.
In fact, just the opposite. We don’t need confusion of any kind.
We need clarity and an appreciation of boundaries in every
conceivable sphere of action and thought. We don’t need more crybabies, or
excuses, or wishful thinking, or the majestic ass-covering that colors the main
stream of our national life.
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