The Queasy Season (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Aug. 9, 2010 -- A scarlet tinge colors the Virginia creeper, the Canada geese grow restless out on the fairways, an ominous canapé fatigue spreads through the Hamptons, and cyclonic weather blobs march west across the Atlantic -- you know that time of the year has arrived.

Fall approaches on busy feet. The name itself suggests slippage. Though many government numbers lie, a dark reality still penetrates the fog of econometrics. Visions of tumbling indexes wither the spinal fluxes of nervous day traders praying to their little effigies of Jim Cramer that it's all just in their heads. Sometimes it seems as though the universe itself grows tired of suspense and yields to the zeitgeist. A cosmic groan fills the air from sea to shining sea as all eyes turn skyward. Was that the sound of the economy rolling over?

Peak pretending now joins peak oil, peak credit, peak rare earths, and all the other peaks visible to us humble valley dwellers. Pretending bought America two years of respite from the ravages of fraud and mismanagement, but now the true condition of this society reveals itself like the disfigured ghoul in the sewer lowering his mask. Further pretending is unnecessary now. We're even beyond the "modified limited hang-out" stance, as a long-ago presidential counselor once put his PR strategy in the face of crumbling public credulity. When nothing is believable, what's the point in even pretending?

Here are some truths which I believe to be self-evident: That the USA has been running on fumes since the beginning of the 21st century; That you can't get something for nothing, and attempts to do so always end in tears; That massive expenditures of energy produce equivalent globs of entropy -- which you can translate to "bad ju-ju" or the tendency of whatever can go wrong to go wrong; That because we're unwilling to re-scale and reform the things we do, nature is about to do it for us; That America has transformed itself from a nation of earnest, muscular, upright citizens to a land of overfed barbarous morons ruled by grifters; That what has been economics is about to turn dangerously political.

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