Puke Time (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Sept. 20, 2010 -- Our county fair put me in mind of that American classic, Moby Dick, this year.

So many white whales among the fry-pots bubbling with rendered blubber, where crews of savages from all corners of the world toiled to bring forth batter-dipped Mars bars, Pop Tarts, corn dogs, funnel cakes, and other rarities of the deep fryer... and then the whales ventured a little further down the midway where they mounted the engines of swirling cosmic death, and were flung about in the centrifugal pods of fate on the ingenious mechanical arms of innovation, until their sickened souls gave forth with a mighty spewage of corn byproducts that rained down upon the moiling innocents below....

Like most metaphors, this one limps a bit, as did Captain Ahab himself, with his whale-bone peg-leg. But when everyday life gets detached from reality, metaphor is all you've got left. And in this ridiculous, sickening culture, with its toxic stream of electronic simulacrum politics sucking all the oxygen out of the collective brain-space, the mind is left wandering numbly across a kind of wilderness where twisted sign-posts point to mutant evangelists, freakish ideologies, false prophets, deadly miracle cures, phantoms on horseback, angels with bat-wings, and the ghost of Spotted Elk lying dead in the snow with his stiffened arm beckoning the way to extinction like Melville's Ahab corded to the hump of his sounding white whale. Oh, America, pull your head out of your electronic ass while you still can! And look out below!

No place is more lost in metaphor these days than Washington D.C., the metaphor of "recovery" being the reigning hallucination. Now it's all going up in a vapor, and the credibility of all involved is going up the spout with it. The rising Tea Party movement had some good innings off this creeping disillusionment on primary day. At least they have their inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and idiocies because their opponents, the sitting-officeholders in the chambers of power, have nothing, not a shred of a clue of an idea.

What continues to amaze me is that there is no corresponding rise of an intelligent opposition. How did it come to be in our time that Harvard-Yale-Princeton-Stanford and all the other incubators of supposed statesmanship have produced no figures of conviction and good intentions to demonstrate what it means to be resolute amid this grand failure of will? How have we managed to turn out two generations of lackeys, toadies, stooges, and flunkies from these citadels of power? If there are some competent, resolute adults waiting backstage -- undistracted by phantoms related to Darwin's theories or birth control or religious doctrine of one kind or another -- they better enter the scene soon, or the fate of this country will be left in the hands of malicious, dogmatic, nincompoops beating their drums for Jesus, war, and the death of the planet.

more

http://worldnewstrust.com/all-items/item/8251-puke-time-james-howard-kunstler.html

On edit: fix typo