Mr. Obama
should not waste another week pretending that we can keep this old
system going. The public needs to know that we will be making our
livings differently, inhabiting the landscape differently, and spending
our days and nights differently -- even while we suffer our losses.
James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust
June 8, 2009 -- Through the tangle of green shoots and sprouting mustard seeds, a
certain nervous view persists that the arc of events is taking us to
places unimaginable. The collapse of General Motors and Chrysler
signifies more than the collapse of U.S. car manufacturing. It spells
the end of the motoring era in America per se and the puerile fantasy
of personal liberation that allowed it to become such a curse to us.
Of course, many Nobel prize-winning economists would argue that it has
only been a blessing for us, but that only shows how the newspapers are
committing suicide-by-irrelevance. And if other societies, such as
China's late-entry industrial start-up, want to adopt a similar
fantasy, they will only find themselves all the sooner in history's
garage with a tailpipe in their mouths.
Here in the USA, we
will mount the most strenuous campaign to keep the motoring system
going -- in fact, we're already doing it -- but it will fail just as
surely as two (so far) of the "big three" automakers have failed. It
will fail because car-making is only one facet of a larger network of
systems that is coming undone, namely a revolving debt cheap energy
economy.
Americans will never again buy as many new cars as
they were able to do before 2008 on the terms that were normal until
then: installment loans. Our credit system is completely
broken. It choked to death on securitized debt engineered by computer
magic and business school hubris. That complex of frauds and swindles
coincided with the background force of peak oil, which meant, among
other things, that economic growth based on ever-increasing energy
resources was over, and along with it ever-increasing credit. What it
boils down to now is that we can't service our debt at any level,
personal, corporate, or government -- and that translates into
comprehensive societal bankruptcy.
The efforts of our federal
government to work around this now, to cover up the "non-performing"
debt and to generate the new lending necessary to keep the old system
going, is a tragic exercise in futility. I'm not saying this to be
"pessimistic" grandstanding doomer
pain-in-the-ass, but because I would like to see my country make more
intelligent choices that would permit us to continue being civilized,
to move into the next phase of our history without a horrible
self-destructive convulsion.
Another consequence of the debt
problem is that we won't be able to maintain the network of gold-plated
highways and lesser roads that was as necessary as the cars themselves
to make the motoring system work. The trouble is you have to keep
gold-plating it, year after year. Traffic engineers refer to this as
"level-of-service." They've learned that if the level-of-service is
less than immaculate, the highways quickly enter a spiral of
disintegration. In fact, the American Society of Civil Engineers
reported several years ago that the condition of many highway bridges
and tunnels was at the "D-minus" level, so we had already fallen far
behind on a highway system that had simply grown too large to fix even
when we thought we were wealthy enough to keep up. Right now, we're
pretending that the "stimulus" program will carry us over long enough
to resume the old method of state-and-federal spending based largely on
bonding (that is, debt).
The political dimension of the collapse of motoring is the least discussed part of problem:
as fewer and fewer citizens find themselves able to buy and run cars,
they will feel increasingly aggrieved at the system set up to make
motoring virtually mandatory for all the chores of everyday life, and
their resentments will rise against the elite that can still manage to
enjoy it. Because our car-dependency is so extreme, the reaction of
the dis-entitled classes is liable to be extreme and probably
delusional to an extreme, too.
You can already see it being
baked in the cake. Happy Motoring is so entangled in our national
identity that the loss of it is bound to cause a national identity
crisis. In places like the American south, the old Dixie states,
motoring lifted more than half the population out of the dust, and
became the basis of the New South economy. The sons and grandsons of
starving sharecroppers became Chevy dealers and developers of suburban
housing tracts, malls, and strip malls. They don't have any nostalgia
for the historical reality of hookworm and 14-hour-days of serf labor
in hundred-degree heat. Theirs is a nostalgia for the present, for
air-conditioned comfort and convenience and the groaning
all-you-can-eat Shoney's breakfast buffet off the freeway ramp. When
it is withdrawn from them by the mandate of events, they will be
furious.
Given the history of the region and the predilections
of its dominant ethnic group, one might imagine that they will want to
take out their gall and grievance on the half-African politician who
presides over the situation. Among the ever-expanding classes
dis-entitled from the so-called American Dream, the crisis is only
marginally different in other regions of the nation. Mr. Obama faces a
range of awful dilemmas, and it is painful to see them go unrecognized
and unacknowledged by his White House. It's hard to imagine that the
president and his elite advisors are blind to these equations, but as
the weeks tick by they seem stuck in a box of limited perception.
We're in a strange hiatus for now. "Hope" levitates the legitimacy
of the dollar, the stock markets, and the authority of leadership. In
the background, implosion continues, debt goes unpaid, banks ignore bad
loans to keep them off their books, jobs and incomes vanish, cars and
other things go unsold, and a tragic wishfulness strains to sustain the
unsustainable. Our expectations are inconsistent with what is happening
to us.
It will be very painful for us to walk away from the
car-centered life. Half the population faces the ugly obstacle of
being hopelessly over-invested in a suburban house and all the
life-ways associated with it. There will be no easy way out for them,
whatever they chose to do politically, whatever noise they make,
whomever they scapegoat, whatever fantasies they cultivate about what
the world owes them, or who they think they are.
Mr. Obama
should not waste another week pretending that we can keep this old
system going. The public needs to know that we will be making our
livings differently, inhabiting the landscape differently, and spending
our days and nights differently -- even while we suffer our losses.
The public needs to hear this from more figures than Mr. Obama, too,
from leaders in the state capitals, and the agencies, and business and
education and what remains of the clergy. But somebody has to set in
motion the chain of recognition, or events will soon do it for us.
____________________________________

My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback at all booksellers.
LINK: Kunstler.com