Monday, June 25, 2012

The Way It Was Ain't the Way

Here is James Kuntsler today in a weekly blog I never miss. He is referring to the Aspen Institute here.
    It's a very odd mix of hard-headed science and the most dismaying sort of crypto-religious faith in happy endings, tinged with overtones of corporate log-rolling and government propaganda. The basic message is: the world is hopelessly fucked up but thank God for technology. There is not even a dim apprehension that many of the aforementioned vexations originate in technology itself, and its blowbacks. Alas, this is about the best that the American intelligentsia can do right now, collectively, and it explains why we have such uniformly impotent and clueless leadership across the board in America, from the White House to the CEO offices to the diploma mills to the news media and every other realm of endeavor where thinking realistically about the future might be considered valuable. 

Let me observe that I've noticed the same thing about this "impotent and clueless leadership" in America. Indeed, the more you compare and contrast it with leaders around the rest of the world, the more clueless it does appear. As if everything is just going to be just like it was once we get the "recovery" to where it should be, that is, just like it once was.

Does it strike you as odd that in the face of completely obvious problems such as global warming, overpopulation, runaway militarism, creeping police-state, rampant poverty and unemployment, gross disparity of wealth distribution, crumbling infrastructure, a sick educational system, corporatism taking over everything, etc. that the best thing our leaders can tell us is everything will be fine just as soon as we get everything back the way it was? Isn't the way it was what got us here?

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