We would be so much better off simply fixing up and
reactivating the normal-speed track system that is sitting out there
rusting in the rain -- and save our more grandiose visions for a later
time
James Kunstler -- World News Trust
April 20, 2009 --
People of good intentions and progressive predilection are scratching
their heads wondering just how President Barack Obama managed to turn
himself into George W. Bush Lite with sugar-on-top just twelve weeks
after that fateful walk down the U.S. Capitol's east stairway to the
waiting helicopter.
I'm hardly the first observer to note that Mr.
Obama's actions in the face of an epochal finance fiasco and economic
collapse are a mere extension of the pre-Jan. 20 policies, carried
out by much the same cast of characters.
The assumption up
until now was something about the reassuring value of continuity -- if
we could just prop up an ailing set of banks for a little while, the US
public could resume a revolving credit way-of-life within an economy
dedicated to building more suburban houses and selling all the needed
accessories from supersized "family" cars to cappuccino machines. This
would keep everyone employed at the jobs they were qualified for --
finish carpenters, realtors, pool installers, mortgage brokers,
advertising account executives, Williams-Sonoma product demonstrators,
showroom sales agents, doctors of liposuction, and so on.
This
was a dumb strategy for such a supposedly bright group of people
surrounding Mr. Obama. That old economy was dead on arrival January
20th. Even the kindest physicians don't put corpses on life support.
This particular corpse has been placed in the world's cushiest
intensive care unit, with transfusions running about a trillion dollars
a month -- not to mention hefty bonuses for the attending nurses.
Instead, a fast and furious wake might have been held, with the corpse
of the old economy laid out on a granite countertop for all to toast
and bid farewell. President Obama might have led this exercise with
some aplomb -- even while directing his new justice department warriors
to round up a host of suspects in the old economy's suspicious death.
What it comes down to, apparently, is a leadership elite across all
sectors -- politics, business, academia, media -- that is incapable of
processing the truth, and then conveying it to the broad American
public. Alas, this also appears to be a common theme in history, with a
commonly tragic outcome, which is that elites get ruthlessly dumped and
replaced by new elites, often composed of zealots, maniacs,
nincompoops, and others generally ill-disposed to the able management
of complex affairs. It's called the "circulation of elites," and in
times of crisis it tends to take on a kind of downward spiraling
flavor, with each gang of discredited leaders tossed out for a
progressively worse one until a kind of exhaustion is reached --
whereupon the archetypal man-on-a-white-horse arrives on the scene.
Mr. Obama looked to be the man-on-a-white-horse -- on the exhaustion of
Reagan-Bush Jesus-Republicanism -- but he's coming off more like
Philippe Égalité (Louis Philippe Joseph d'Orléans, duc d'Orléans) in
1793, with perhaps Newt Gingrich waiting offstage to become Robespierre
in 2012 -- and some obscure US Army captain now toiling in Kirkuk
slated to become the American Napoleon of 2015. As you've surely heard
a thousand times now, history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes. The
enormities of Wall Street today are a little like those of the French
Ancien Régime at Versailles. If America encounters the sort of
disruptions of food and energy supplies that are brewing on the
horizon, and unemployment keeps arcing up its current trajectory, civil
uproars could easily follow. Readers think I joke about the Hamptons
going up in flames. But the antics of the bankers, hedge funders, the
CEOs, the Madoffs, and even the P. Diddy's of our time, are liable to
attract murderous attention as the public mood moves from sour to
wrathful.
So, what people of good intention and progressive
predilection want to know is how come Mr. Obama doesn't just lay out
the truth, undertake the hard job of cutting the nation's losses, and
get on with setting this society on a new course. The truth is that
we're comprehensively bankrupt, and no amount of shuffling certificates
around will avail to alter that. The bad debt has to be "worked out" --
i.e. written off, subjected to liquidation of remaining assets and
collateral, reorganized under the bankruptcy statutes, and put behind
us. We have to work very hard to reconfigure the physical arrangement
of life in the USA, moving away from the losses of our suburbs,
reactivating our towns, downscaling our biggest cities, re-scaling our
farms and food production, switching out our Happy Motoring system for
public transit and walkable neighborhoods, rebuilding local networks of
commerce, and figuring out a way to make a few things of value again.
What's happened instead is what I most feared: that our politicians
would mount a massive campaign to sustain the unsustainable. That's
what all the TARP and TARF and PPIT and bailouts are about. It will all
amount to an exercise in futility and could easily end up wrecking the
USA in every sense of the term. If Mr. Obama doesn't get with a better
program, then we are going to face a Long Emergency as grueling as the
French Revolution. One very plain and straightforward example at hand
is the announcement last week of a plan to build a high speed rail
network. To be blunt about it, this is perfectly fucking stupid. It
will require a whole new track network, because high speed trains can't
run on the old rights of way with their less forgiving curve ratios and
grades. We would be so much better off simply fixing up and
reactivating the normal-speed track system that is sitting out there
rusting in the rain -- and save our more grandiose visions for a later
time.
I don't like to be misunderstood. With the airlines in
a business death spiral, and mass motoring doomed, we need a national
passenger rail system desperately. But we already have one that used to
be the envy of the world before we abandoned it. And we don't have
either the time or the resources to build a new parallel network.
But grandiosity is just another way that we lie to ourselves about
where we're at and what is really possible. Surely Mr. Obama knows that
hope fades where the light of truth doesn't shine. He is a charming
fellow. I don't especially want to see Newt Gingrich chop his head off.
My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback at all booksellers.