The Weekly Jeremiad

I don't know why it is that I find James Kuntsler so compelling every week with his blog entries to "Clusterfuck Nation." (Sorry, but that's what it's called, and I'm compelled to report accurately.) The title should give you the flavor of the overall sentiments he expresses in his blog, and expresses very well, I might add. At least I think so.

Actually, I do know why I find this guy compelling and it's because I agree with his point of view about almost everything. There are a few minor points of disagreement, but in general I find his gloomy assessment of the future of this dying empire pretty well resonates with mine. And believe me, I truly wish I didn't feel this way. I think about my three wonderful children and my pair of gorgeous grandchildren and the kind of world their short-sighted, selfish elders are leaving them to cope with. And I wish I could be sanguine about their future here. And Kuntsler, like me, does not suffer shallow mindlessness easily. The celebrity-, sports-, trivia-, and mass media-obsessed consumer culture makes him angry because he knows it's bigger than anything and beyond the hope of sweet reason to influence.

Here's what he had to say on Monday. I'll just give you a sampling from the opening.

In just about any realm of activity this nation does not know how to act. We don’t know what to do about our mounting crises of economy. We don’t know what to do about our relations with other nations in a strained global economy. We don’t know what to do about our own culture and its traditions, the useful and the outworn. We surely don’t know what to do about relations between men and women. And we’re baffled to the point of paralysis about our relations with the planetary ecosystem.

To allay these vexations, we just coast along on the momentum generated by the engines in place — the turbo-industrial flow of products to customers without the means to buy things; the gigantic infrastructures of transport subject to remorseless decay; the dishonest operations of central banks undermining all the world’s pricing and cost structures; the political ideologies based on fallacies such as growth without limits; the cultural transgressions of thought-policing and institutional ass-covering.

This is a society in deep danger that doesn’t want to know it.

 Actually I think this society in its heart of hearts does know it. It just doesn't want to think about it, or what it would take to start trying to fix it. Way too uncomfortable. Fables make you feel better. And isn't that the whole idea?