Over the last ten days, somebody shot the "Green Shoots" narrative in the head. There is no way the American economy can re-expand.
James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust
July 6, 2009 -- I was out on a big Adirondack lake this weekend while the American economy was dying -- but you wouldn't have known it for the fleets of giant power boats dragging children back and forth across the water on rubber tubes, and the giant camping vehicles crammed into every bare spot.
How do people pay for these things, I wondered. For not a few, installment loans, no doubt -- though that still begs the question. The sheer programming of American life runs wide and deep. We are, apparently, a people born to drag children behind 150-horsepower two-stroke engines, so that's what we do, no matter what is really going on in the world. Alas, mindless programming is the sort of thing that kills societies.
Watching the summer panorama on an Adirondack lake is like reading a history of the post World War Two decades, because almost nothing on view there now existed before 1945 and we'll be stunned to see how swiftly it all terminates. The fantastic prosperity of these postwar decades killed the wildness of these once-remote lakes. Fortunes were made -- like everywhere else in the USA -- carving up the landscape and deploying graceless houses made of cheap, fabricated materials. All the diabolical genius brought to engineering the New Jersey and Long Island suburbs was eventually turned loose on the Adirondack wilderness, with predictable results. The lakes themselves, stuffed with all those sleek plastic power boats, are like the Long Island Expressway minus the painted lanes.
The American victory over manifest evil in World War Two was so total that there was no one else left on earth to compete with in making and selling useful articles, at least for a while. And it produced a middle class so well-paid that it could express itself in a vast spewage of plastic and leisure across the land. The human race will look back on this society with wonder and nausea for whatever remains of its time on Earth. For at least twenty years, though, this way of life has been running on fumes, inertia, and promissory notes. The amazing thing is that these life-extension strategies worked, especially the past ten years when there was really nothing left besides a Ponzi structure of interlocked swindles and rackets.
When the time comes when we do look back to understand what went wrong, I think we'll see that the Woodstock generation went off the rails in 1980, with the election of the actor Ronald Reagan, who really established the idea that a society could benefit hugely just by lying to itself, or simply pretending. It wasn't "morning in America," of course. It was more like eleven-thirty at night, and the rest of the world had eaten our breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and we decided that inflating our national self-esteem was more important than paying attention to reality. That was when we became a something-for-nothing society -- and, incidentally, it was also the take-off point for legalized gambling all over America (an "industry" based on the worship of unearned riches). And that was, coincidentally, the moment when we became a nation of dupes, grifters, marks, and suckers.
Now, when I look around that Adirondack lake, I can easily imagine the time -- not far off -- when the motors cease to ring, and the big, white plastic ridiculous power boats vanish from the scene, and the houses along the shore de-laminate, or are plundered for their materials, and the sites they occupy return to nature, and the aroma of roasting hot dogs no longer wafts on the summer air, and the pastures and orchards run back from the shoreline up the slopes, with people laboring earnestly in them -- rather than dragging children on plastic tubes around the water behind a boat that gets four miles to the gallon of gasoline.
For those still capable of paying attention to our national predicament, the questions are: what happens from here... and how does it happen?
Over the last ten days, somebody shot the "Green Shoots" narrative in the head. There is no way the American economy can re-expand. This is a debt deflation like unto nothing the world has ever seen before. We've entered the really painful zone of the "work-out" where insolvency can no longer be denied. Things will be heard crashing every day -- enterprises, households, assets, institutions, prospects, deals. No amount of simulus, first, second, or beyond, will avail to stop this process.
President Obama had better turn his efforts from pretending to re-start the revolving credit rackets to overseeing the comprehensive re-simplifying of American life. I think he has a few weeks to turn his rhetoric around before the political mischief begins for real, and the aggrieved classes start shooting things up and burning things down. These classes really do need something to hope for, and something to work at, and something to occupy their attention besides their grief over the massive losses in their lives. But none of that energy will be focused beneficially unless they hear the truth... that there really is no going back to what was before.
It's also vitally important to commence public hearings and official investigations of those who committed real crimes and malfeasances. Bernie Madoff has been salted away for two and a half lifetimes, but Henry Paulson is still at large after overseeing the creation of the biggest heap of fraudulent securities the world has ever known -- and then betting against them in the swaps market, in effect shorting his own swindle -- not to mention his misdeeds at the U.S. Deparftment of the Treasury. Why are those other Wall Street smoothies still enjoying their Hamptons villas while the foreclosed set up tents in the Sacramento Delta? Why are the government officials who failed so miserably at regulation still enjoying their salaries, perqs, and pensions while those not employed by a bloated government struggle to stay alive another week. And how many more weeks will go by before Michael Jackson is buried in the ground?
***
James Howard Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of Nowhere, "Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work."
Home From Nowhere was a continuation of that discussion with an emphasis on the remedies. A portion of it appeared as the cover story in the September 1996 Atlantic Monthly.
His next book in the series, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, published by Simon & Schuster / Free Press, is a look a wide-ranging look at cities here and abroad, an inquiry into what makes them great (or miserable), and in particular what America is going to do with it's mutilated cities.
His latest book, The Long Emergency, published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in 2005, is about the challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate change, and other "converging catastrophes of the 21st Century."
The Atlantic Monthly Press also published his novel, Maggie Darling, in 2004.
Mr. Kunstler is also the author of eight other novels including The Halloween Ball, An Embarrassment of Riches. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic issues.
Mr. Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He moved to the Long Island suburbs in 1954 and returned to the city in 1957 where he spent most of his childhood. He graduated from the State Univerity of New York, Brockport campus, worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. He has no formal training in architecture or the related design fields.
He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, RPI, the University of Virginia and many other colleges, and he has appeared before many professional organizations such as the AIA , the APA., and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
He lives in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York.