[SustainableTompkins] Fw: Wake Up, America. We're Driving Toward Disaster.

[northsheep at juno.com]

Another Memorial Day piece by James Kunstler. Again, nothing new, but
effective, if sardonic prose worthy of the professional fiction writer
that he is, worth sharing around outside the choir. Also, having finished
his attempt at making the "long emergency" he describes even more vivid
by turning it into a fiction story about upstate NY* , I can recommend it
as a tool for chipping away at the denial. It has got me daydreaming
scenarios more than ever, and I even recalled one shocking scene in a
recent talk - an Albany governor sitting helpless in his office, shorn of
his resources and power by the demise of the distance economy, among
other things.

*A World Made By Hand, by James Kunstler
http://www.amazon.com/World-Made-James-Howard-Kunstler/dp/0871139782

Karl North
Northland Sheep Dairy, Freetown, New York USA
     www.geocities.com/northsheep/
"Mother Nature never farms without animals" - Albert Howard
"Pueblo que canta no morira" - Cuban saying

********

http://www.kunstler.com/index.html

May 26, 2008
Anxious Hiatus

Loveliness was everywhere this holiday weekend in upstate New 
York, and it was probably hard for many to believe that the wayward 
nation would return to the dread uncertainty of life in the crash lane 
when the barbeques were over. There was even a wan overtone to the 
late-night sports news about the Indy 500 race -- as though the 
spectacle of cars droning round and round a speed oval epitomized the 
futility of American life in this moment of our history.
I had a discussion with one guy at Sunday night party about the 
prospects for hydrogen-powered cars. We rehearsed the usual reasons why 
such a system was unlikely to get up-and-running -- and then he said, 
"...but what if we took all the money from the war and put it into 
something like the space program and... they came up with some way to 
make it happen...!"
This is certainly the golden heart of the great wish out there, as 
the empire of Happy Motoring begins to run down on $4 gasoline. It 
seems inconceivable that a society so bold as to put men on the moon 
(fer crissake) can't overcome such a prosaic problem as finding 
something other than oil byproducts to run our cars on.
>From this holy font all cognitive dissonance flows.
It seems inconceivable, but it begins to look like that's the way 
it really is, and we just can't accept it.
Of course, one of the reasons that Americans are so anxious to get 
away on a holiday weekend from the places where they live is because we 
did such a perfect job the past fifty years turning our home-places 
into utterly unrewarding, graceless nowheres, where the private realm 
of the beige houses is saturated in monotony, and the public realm has 
been reduced to the berm between the WalMart and the strip mall. Now, 
we barely have the gasoline to run all this stuff, let alone escape 
from it for a weekend.
We're at a dead end with all this and a lot of Americans are 
paralyzed with fear about what's next. This may actually be a deeper 
fear than the anxiety about money and banking in 1933, when Franklin 
Roosevelt was sworn in and tried to reassure the nation. Back then, 
despite the grave problems of capital, we still had plenty of 
everything: plenty of good productive land, plenty of manpower 
earnestly eager for hard work, plenty of ore in the ground, shining 
cities equipped with excellent streetcar systems, a railroad network 
that was the envy of the world, sturdy small towns and small cities 
fully equipped with locally-owned business, and a vast number of small 
family farms that could re-absorb family members unable to get wages in 
the cities. Most of all, we had plenty of oil in the ground, and the 
world's biggest industry for getting it out and selling it. What we 
didn't have in 1933 was cash money.
The crisis at hand now goes way beyond a crisis of capital -- 
though that is certainly part of it. Notice how many of the things we 
had in 1933 are gone now. Our cities, with a few exceptions, are 
imploded husks. Our small towns and small cities (Schenectady, home of 
G.E.!) are gutted, especially in terms of locally-owned business. Our 
passenger rail system is worse than anything a Soviet ministry might 
produce (while the airline industry that replaced it is dying of a kind 
of financial hemorrhagic fever). Our local transit hardly exists 
anymore. Family farms have all but disappeared. We have plenty of 
manpower earnestly eager to become American Idols (but certainly not 
for heavy labor). Our oil industry now supplies only a fraction of the 
world's daily supply (and not even enough for half of our own needs).
What happens now? We face not just change but convulsive change. 
The public senses the rapid unraveling of our car-centric arrangements. 
In the week before the holiday, gasoline prices went up several cents 
each day -- in upstate New York, it crossed the $4 mark and kept going 
up. The trucking system faces collapse as diesel fuel price-rises 
exceed even the rise in gasoline, and the vast number of independent 
truckers who make up the system confront the individual calamity of a 
personal business failure. American Airlines last week announced severe 
measures to keep operating through the fall of 2008. but none of the 
airlines can feasibly carry on as usual with oil prices above 
$120-a-barrel -- and the ominous message is of a business model that 
has no conceivable way to adapt to the new reality. Most likely, in a 
very few years air travel will no longer be a "consumer" enterprise.
In the background of these practical problems -- "off screen" 
during the holiday of car races and ball games -- is a crisis of 
capital orders of magnitude worse than the one faced by Franklin 
Roosevelt in 1933. For, behind the "liquidity" (i.e. insolvency) issues 
faced by the big institutions lurks the Godzilla of the derivatives 
trade, which has evolved into a black hole capable of sucking all 
notional "money" into oblivion. That "money," which represents the 
aggregate value of our society, also amounts to the emperor's new 
clothes of an empire in serious trouble. As the black hole of 
derivatives sucks away these "new clothes," America will stand naked 
against the elements of fate.
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