Re: SC50

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/

Shock and Awe

September 24, 2007

...............On the deflation side is what happens after this wave collapses, and that would be a national fire-sale of plain "stuff," as desperate families from Maine to Honolulu try to liquidate all the toys they purchased over the last twenty years in order to keep a roof over their heads and some food on the table -- cars, boats, snowmobiles, flat-screen TVs, leaf-blowers, iPods, you name it. A lot of that stuff will be either unsellable -- because there will be be way more sellers for these things than buyers -- or they will be sold at extreme bargain-basement discounts. The net result is what they call a deflationary depression. Too few scraps of money seeking too many things for sale. Nobody doing any business. Jobs and incomes dissolving in the process.

All these things will be occurring against the background of an increasingly desperate energy predicament that will probably introduce many as-yet-unfactored problems into the equation -- such as, what happens as the oil export crisis gathers force and we begin to get supply-and-allocation disturbances. . . ? Or what happens when the US military starts competing with agri-business and commuters for oil? Or what happens geo-politically when the contest for dwindling oil supplies from the exporting nations begins to affect relations between the major importers, namely, China, the US, Japan, and Europe? Or what happens politically on the domestic scene as times get hard and the public looks for targets to direct their righteous wrath against?

What all this comes down to is the sense of a nation absolutely fooling itself that it can carry on in the way it is used to. I'm hardly an advocate of the US giving up and committing suicide. What I advocate is a broad recognition that reality is compelling us to change our behavior. Reality is trying to tell us that we can't run an economy based on nothing more than investment schemes without directing investment into activities that produce things of value. Reality is telling us to be very worried about living arrangements that can only function with copious imports of oil from people who are disgusted with us. Reality is telling us that we can't divert our food crops into making motor fuels without people becoming unable to afford either fuel or food. Reality is telling us to redirect our culture more toward things-we-do-with-other-people and less toward things-we-do-with-new-things. Reality is telling us to shift from avoidance behavior and denial to engaging with reality in order to lead lives that are consistent with reality.

The next several weeks are liable to be a time of great stress as these realities become increasingly undeniable. I imagine the public chatter will become increasingly delusional as the wave crests. When it it finally comes, the shock of recognition that we are a bankrupt nation will present itself at first as a great silence. The public's collective jaw will fall open, but no sound will come out. That will be the true moment of shock and awe.