Gaming Our Own Asses (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Apr. 18, 2011 -- A wicked vibe rattles the mental furniture in men's minds these days.

Against the dreadful normality of American life -- the morning traffic on I-495, the mayhem awaiting in some school cafeteria or motor vehicle office, the household awakenings to a new dawn of foreclosure here, there, and everywhere -- all this ceremony of the familiar is like a stage backdrop that conceals the awful crush of history. Things are swaying and crashing outside the magic theater of the normal, where we act out our tragicomedy of "Waiting for Recovery."

I have never lived in a time when so many false narratives competed for supremacy of the collective mind-space. Omnipresent as it is, reality seems to elude us, and certainly its supposed interlocutors -- figures such as presidents, his highest appointed officials, their voluble, strutting opponents in the other party, the glamorpusses behind the Cable TV news desks, poor dim Bill Keller at The New York Times, and, of course, the necromancers of economics on campuses from Cambridge to Palo Alto.

A more primitive radar would conclude that the planet Earth is angrier than usual this year. Japan is still in a radioactive daze from the 17-inch shove it suffered and lots of people in Carolina are surely shaking their heads over this weekend's visitation of wrath. Is it possible that climate change and Jesus are one and the same? Let them figure that out in the little cinderblock roadside chapels next Sunday before they all trundle over to the Nascar track.

It was heartening at least to see a few signs of life "out there" in the karmic interstices. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan sent a memo to the Attorney General of the United States -- viz: something has been going on in Wall Street that merits your attention. As in most seemingly crucial turnings lately, echo answered. Can someone please check to see if Eric Holder over in the Department of Justice is leaking sawdust? He must be stuffed something. Styrofoam would just make him look lumpy. Could he be a computer graphic? Or is he just a simple slab of cardboard with a photo glued on. Perhaps Senator Levin's next memo might be in the form of a subpoena to Mr. Holder, requesting his testimony as to how many trillions of dollars were snookered, swindled, and Ponzied out of the U.S. public for the benefit of about a thousand guys in and around lower Manhattan (with branch offices in suburban Connecticut and New Jersey). (Cue: sound of Timberwolves howling.)

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[JDPriestly]

1. Well written and absolutely true.

[bhikkhu]

2. He writes some memorable things sometimes -

"I have never lived in a time when so many false narratives competed for supremacy of the collective mind-space".

Well said!

[truth2power]

3. From the article,...

"Observers of the scene have made a mistake about Obama. He's not "eloquent." He's merely respectable. Being able to speak in grammatical sentences is not the same as having anything to say. It will be a sorrowful day when he is replaced by a genuine idiot like Michele Bachman, but it will happen because he wasn't able to set the tone for his times with something like a straight story, or a memo to his chief law enforcement officer."

Spot-on!