For those of us living in it, America tends to have a quality of unreality, as if the whole country were an extension of Disneyland/Anaheim's idealized and cutsiefied "Main Street." Happy suburbanites haul cornucopia loads of meat, produce, sugars, fats, and carbonated waters to their suburban McMansions from antiseptic mega-super-markets in their gigantic SAV's (suburban attack vehicles), or happily fetch piles of cheap, Chinese-made tchotchkes from Wal-Mart or one of the other big boxes. They work jobs which may or may not -- and usually don't -- support this lifestyle, but that's what credit cards and debt are for. If a few people are left out of this bright, smiley-faced, comfortable life, it's their own fault.
Other times, life in these United States has the surreal quality of a nightmare as when two rival gangs of overweight, impenetrably stupid parents duke it out on the field where their five- and six-year-old sons are playing peewee football.
Whether you're delighted or horrified by our way of life, the one thing about it that's certain is that it's not going to last, no matter whether Republicans or Democrats are at the helm of the ship. And this is the fact of life about which the overwhelming majority of Americans remain hopelessly clueless. It's the story of the century, and you can't get it from the corporate news media, which are institutionally locked into maintenance of the status quo. In order to get the real facts, you have to go to the blogs.
Despite their material opulence, Americans have been troubled and uneasy lately, especially by the interminable oil war going on in Iraq. Other, equally troubling problems are beginning to crop up, such as the fall in house prices and the consequent mortgage crunch. If we should lose access to that Mideast oil...if we end up owing more on that house than it's worth, and can't keep up the payments...
But on the horizon, we see Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats riding in to save us.
"Not so fast," says the ex-Ranger turned Marxist/feminist, Stan Goff, at his blog The Feral Scholar. Goff says of the two major parties: "(T)hey are all on the same cruise, headed for the same destination.
"That destination includes perserving American supremacy in the world, which allows us to live our profligate and completely unsustanable lifestyles here long enough to get through another business and election cycle… all at the direct expense of the poorer people in the world. Yes, I know this is an unpopular thing to say; but the manner to which we have become accustomed is paid for by a steady flow of value drained from the peripheral regions and sucked into this giant, wasteful, dangerous, and dirty technomass that will one day leave our children stranded on a toxic scrap heap wondering how we let this happen."
Goff's entire post, "The Bipartisan Ship," will appear on page three of the upcoming issue of the Los Angeles Free Press. It's a stunning indictment of both the American political system and the American way of life.
Less shrill, more analytical, but drawing the same conclusions is University of Texas at Austin journalism professor Robert Jensen, in a piece posted at Counterpunch, "Blood on the Tracks." Jensen identifies four major aspects of dysfunction in contemporary America.
"--Our deepest values concerning justice and solidarity will be undermined by the anti-human values of capitalism and empire.
"--Truly democratic politics, in which ordinary people have a meaningful role, will be subverted the concentration of wealth.
"--An increasingly fragile economy mired in self-indulgent deficit and debt, with an artificially inflated currency, will start to collapse when our military and political power are unable to keep the rest of the world in line.
"--The ability of a finite planet to sustain life as we know it will diminish dramatically in a system based on fantasies of unlimited growth marked by the glorification of domination."
Noting that "the vast majority of Democrats and virtually all Republicans avoid these realities," Jensen concludes that "If we don"t take radical action relatively soon, every ending we can imagine is likely to be brutal and violent, deadly not only for most of the world"s population but also for the non-human world. This isn"t irrational apocalypticism but a rational approach to the evidence in front of us. No one can predict how this will play out, but it will most certainly play out ugly unless we change the trajectory."
In drawing his runaway train metaphor, Jensen refers to an unattributed book title: "The Long Emergency." As it happens, no one has done better analysis of the coming train wreck than the author of that work, James Howard Kunstler, proprieter of the weekly blog "Clusterfuck Nation." I recently removed Kunstler's site from the list of recommended blogs because of his unconscionable and incoherent support of Israel's invasion and gang rape of Lebanon, but he's back to his old form and forte now, and in an essay entitled "Energy Indpendence" he reviews and synopsizes the anatomy of the coming disaster.
"The collapse of suburbia will be the Democrats chief inheritance from the 'free-market' economically neo-liberal Republicans who were too busy money grubbing at all levels to notice that there was such a thing as the future," Kunstler says, and "The tragedy of suburbia will finish off whatever is left of Reagan-Bush1-Bush2 Republicanism -- although the truth is that Bill Clinton did as much to promote this way of life, indeed, to turn suburban development into a new basis for the US economy when manufacturing crapped out.
"The nation as a whole -- however it reconfigures itself politically in the aftermath of this fiasco -- is going to have to come to grips with a lot of hard truths. One will be that 'energy independence' means a whole different scale and system for daily life, not just 'new and innovative' fuels for cars. As long as we are stuck in a foolish national wish-fest aimed at keeping all the cars running and propping up all the trappings of car-dependency, we will remain lost in a wilderness of our own making."
These blogging analysts are actually nothing more or less than what right-wing Republicans like to call themselves -- "hard-nosed realists." But the picture they draw of the present and the future is an impossibly difficult one for the vast majority of luxury-addicted Americans to comprehend, especially when you consider the degree to which they lack real political leadership or accurate information from the corporate media. My guess is a viable, progressive political movement capable of dealing with these realities will only coalesce after the hydra-headed disaster of the twenty-first century has begun.
As for what we can do right now, Robert Jensen suggests "Our political work should focus on connecting with people on common ground, and then working to shape a radically new vision of justice and sustainability. The time for that is now; the direction and speed of the train dictate that we not put it off any longer.
"This isn"t about who can be most radical for the sake of being radical -- it"s about whether we can be realistic. Such an approach cannot promise political transformation in the short-term, but I believe it is the only hope for our future."
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