The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
by Jim Kunstler
July 11, 2005
The glamorous Maria Bartiromo was just on CNBC talking globalism (and China in particular) with two Wall Street cretins. China is a great play said Cretin No. 1 because they have 300 million potential middle class customers for America's manufacturers. Excuse me, what do we still make that the Chinese either can't make themselves or can't copy five minutes from now?
As Cretin No. 2 waxed effulgent over China's fabulous prospects for growth, CNBC flashed a bunch of American brand logos across the screen, including Pepsi Cola and Exxon-Mobil. These companies are going to so clean up over there, Cretin No. 1 chimed in, or the shareholders are going to want to know the reason why.
Yeah, soda pop is really hard to make. They'll have to buy it from us. You thought computers were hard? There are four ingredients in soda pop (water, sugar, favoring, coloring ) and you have to get the proportions just right or it don't come out good!
As for Exxon Mobil, they're going to have enough trouble getting oil to their US customers five years from now -- leading us to the central fallacy of all the current cheerleading for the global economy: there isn't enough oil available worldwide to permit the industrialized nations to continue to expand. In fact, the industrial nations of the world will soon be competing desperately, perhaps even fighting over, the world's remaining oil, while all our economies contract remorselessly.
The public discussion over the global economy is symptomatic of America's new pandemic of brainlessness, the mainstream media especially. The head cheerleader, of course, has been Tom Friedman of the New York Times, author of The World Is Flat. Friedman and the rest of the cheerleading squad believe that that the global economy is a permanent institution. Now that it is established, we can only expect more of it. More and better. Forever.
What all these cretins seem to miss is the cold hard fact that today's transient global economic relations are a product of very special transient circumstances, namely, relative world peace and absolutely reliable supplies of cheap energy. Subtract either of these elements from the equation and you will see globalism evaporate so quickly it will suck the air out of your lungs.
Also, it must be obvious that relative world peace depends on equitable distribution of cheap energy. If the industrial nations don't get the oil and gas they need at a tolerable price, they are going to get very cranky, and when nations get cranky, peace itself is in short supply..
Three quarters of the world's oil is in the eastern hemisphere -- two-thirds of the total is in the Middle east alone. Guess what? All of it is a lot closer to China than it is to us. Some of it they can walk to. Do you have any idea how desperate for oil both China and America are going to be in five years? Do you have a clue how tapped out America's WalMart shoppers are going to be as jobs vanish and the value of a dollar craters in the face of runaway energy prices?
Globalism is yesterday's tomorrow. The future is about living locally on a much smaller scale. Pepsi Cola and Exxon-Mobil are exactly the kind of gigantic enterprises that are going to wither and die over the next decade. China is not tomorrow's geopolitical colossus, it's a geopolitical super train wreck waiting to collide with the reality of its environmental devastation, population overshoot, and energy starvation. Americans will be lucky if they can do each other's laundry ten years from now, let alone sell massive amounts of soda pop to people twelve thousand miles away.
Is it an accident that there is so much Realty TV in America when, in fact, there is so little reality?
July 5, 2005
(Posting off schedule again due to holiday)
This Fourth of July, watching fireworks over an Adirondack lake, with the rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air (and the motorboats finally at rest after a day of cuisinarting through the loons and mergansers), I was moved to reflect on the extraordinary level of violence in American society today. It's so pervasive that I think we fail to register it.
Have you ever gotten out of your car for any reason in the shoulder lane of an interstate highway? All the comfort and security of being inside immediately dissolves and your muscles contract at the violent noise of cars and trucks passing at seventy miles per hour, not to mention the inescapable sense of danger at being so close to them passing by. Inside and back on the road again, we quickly forget how much violence we are were exposed to -- and now we contribute to it as our journey continues.
The everyday world of America is a ceaseless assult on human neurology (and certainly the neurology of other beings) from a din of numberless motors: air conditioners, lawn mowers, weed-whackers, ventilation blowers, fry-o-later hoods, airplanes, as well as the constant background roar of car traffic.
Our entertainments are saturated with violence. Hollywood has completely forgotten how to make stories based on the predicaments of human character and emotion. The only emotions they understand are bluster, threat, and murderous aggression with overtones of sexual excitement (because this is the way show business professionals act among themselves, and it is the only behavior they understand). Is it any wonder that rogue maniacs drive around the nation snatching children in order to torture and kill them? Or that the Cable News stations are now utterly preoccupied with covering the exploits of murderous maniacs, to the exclusion of everything else going on in the world?
Millions of red-blooded red staters spend their leisure hours moiling at the Nascar tracks. Do you have any idea how unpleasant it is to be a spectator at a car race? How saturated with violence the atmosphere around the track is? I have been to several races as a journalist. The noise alone is supernatural. Then there is the fans' unspoken sadistic voyeurism in anticipating a crash to liven up the boredom of watching cars roar for hours around the oval. Nascar fans will surely deny it, because it reveals the necrophilia at the heart of their so-called "sport," but crashes are part of the excitement. Dale Ehrnhardt surely died for their sins, and when the next driver kills himself on the track there will be new heaps of teddy bears to take the focus away from the crocodile tears shed in the stands and TV rooms of the Raleigh-Durham metroplex.
Finally, thousands of miles away, there's the war in Iraq and Afghanistan -- it's all one war, by the way. It's being fought to fuel up all those Nascars, and power the interstate highways, and to keep the weed-whackers and fry-o-later hoods humming, and keep the suburban housing industry chugging along so more Americans can drive to the video store to get violently stupid movies about quasi-humans with great destructive powers. We are watching ourselves become monsters.
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