The New Urbanists held their big annual meet-up for four days last week and I stomped a big carbon footprint flying down to West Palm Beach for the doings. I don't know who exactly picked West Palm, but it was at once peculiar, disheartening, instructive, and exhausting.

   The Congress for the New Urbanism has been throwing this yearly fandango since its founding in 1993 as a fire-eating reform movement dedicated to transforming the horrifying and toxic human habitat of America. Hopes were lofty in the early days that the US public would recognize the self-evident benefits of ditching suburban sprawl for walkable towns, but it didn't quite work out that way. The last frantic phase of sprawl-building commenced exactly the same time, jacked on easy lending steroids, and upping 

the stakes of the battle. That story ended in the baleful collapse of the housing bubble and the sad particulars need not be rehearsed here.

     During the boom of the 90s and aughties, about 99.5 percent of the new real estate development was done by the conventional schlock sprawl-builders and the New Urbanists did much of the remaining .5 - which was enough to get their point across. Some of their projects (e.g. Seaside, Fla.) are now iconic examples of excellence in urban design artistry. Many others were botched by compromises made in the planning board battles, and another bunch were either half-assed from the get-go or plain fakes. These traditional neighborhood developments were almost always built on greenfield sites, provoking controversy that could not be briskly dismissed.

   At the same time, quite a bit of New Urbanist work was done in re-making existing town centers and in retrofits of sclerotic older suburban parcels, and their influence was later seen in the many big city streetscape redesigns from Times Square to Santa Monica. Their laborious work in reforming the intricate idiocies of zoning law made possible better development outcomes in towns all over the land which adopted so-called Smart Codes. 

     The housing bubble bust massacred the New Urbanists. Many of the firms had tied their fortunes to the production house builders and the commercial real estate developers doing large projects, often hundreds of acres, and when the market imploded around 2007 their work dried up. Now there is very little new real estate development of any kind going on around the country. Many talents languish while the nation broods over the fate of its obsolete suburban dream and fails to recognize that we have to make drastically new arrangements for inhabiting the landscape.

     But the mood at the 2012 CNU was still buoyant, considering. For all their vocational anguish, the New Urbanists are still about the only intellectual cohort in the USA with a coherent vision of what has gone wrong in our society -- our ruinous investments in futureless infrastructure -- and what can be done about it -- the reconstruction of traditional human habitat as the armature for enduring economies. Compared with the brainless religious zealotry and sexual hysteria of the right wing and the ruinous social services pandering of the left, the New Urbanists look like the only organized group of adults in the nation who have not completely lost their minds. So it was a pleasure to spend four days among them. They are a valiant band of cultural warriors.

     Events are now in the driver's seat. The long battle against the continuation of suburban sprawl is over, despite the happy-talk noises made by what's left of the real estate industry. Half a decade of absolutely flat oil production -- propaganda to the contrary -- guarantees that the suburban project is finished. We're done building things that way (even if we don't quite realize it yet) so the New Urbanists have won the argument by default. 

     Quite a few non-New Urbanist "pundits" such as Ed Glaeser, the asinine Joel Kotkin, and dashing Richard Florida predict that the action has shifted to the big cities, and that may appear to be the case for this deceptive moment. But the mega-cities are in for a tsunami of troubles all their own in the form of vanishing wealth, fiscal disorder, sclerotic infrastructure failures, service interruptions, and ethnic turf battles as the effects of the epochal economic contraction bite deeper and harder. The inescapable downscaling of America means that we are heading toward a new disposition of things on the landscape in just the way the New Urbanists have prescribed: a declension of ecologies ranging from dense, walkable human-dominated urban habitats in the form of traditional towns and cities through a range of rural conditions running from farmland to wilderness necessary to support the health of the planet.

      Time and nature will help take care of the accumulated suburban dreck on the ground. Humans are very skillful sorters of things and the disassembly of salvaged materials will be a big industry in a world taking a "time out" from industrial progress. The timeless principles that the New Urbanists revived will be the common sense of whatever we build in the future, even when the planning board battles of recent years are long forgotten. We will almost certainly return to social conditions in which nobody will dare put up a building devoid of conscious artistry. There's a lot to like in this quadrant of the long emergency.

   The 20th reunion of old CNU friends was a little disenchanted by the conference site. West Palm Beach contains one of their showpiece projects, the nightlife and shopping district called City Place that was created out of a bombed out neighborhood. Casual observers crack on City Place as an "urban mall," but it's really just Rosemary Street rebuilt of new traditionally-scaled buildings with shops and bistros programmed in. A lot of it is generic chain business. Another sad element is the cartoonish, low quality finish of the buildings - sprayed on stucco and ornaments with no conviction. Both of these failures of quality represent the fast buck mentality of the big commercial developers and the larger vulgar so-called consumer culture they served. But City Place does include some pretty well composed public space in the form of a central plaza and a palm court running off it, and it was full of people enjoying themselves in the cafes those nights, and the ensemble managed to incorporate a very nice Beaux Arts church-turned-theater (the Harriet Himmel) in the Spanish neo-classical manner.

     The trouble was when you strayed a block off Rosemary Street the fabric of the city fell apart. Some of it was just vacant land. Further east between Olive Street and the intercostal waterway stood a swath of oversized giant condo towers that represented the worst of the lamented housing bubble. Many were "see-through" buildings of empty, unsold units. The streets along these behemoths were as dead as any neighborhood on a Zombie planet, and traversing them to get anywhere was hugely depressing. The convention center, where the CNU meeting actually took place, stood off in its own twilight zone of separation, cut off from the beginning of City Place by the ghastly ten-lane Okeechobee Boulevard. The five-block walk (of very large super-blocks) to and fro from my hotel was like unto reenacting the Bataan Death March under that brutal Floridian sun.

     Things are changing fast now though. The New Urbanists still standing are the strongest and most nimble. They are also the ones most deeply engaged in the trenches of architectural education, and they are as certain to win the ideology battles still raging in that realm as they won the battle over suburban sprawl.

     Most of all, though, I'm glad to be home in my quiet backwater of this poor floundering nation.

     Europe may soon be choking on that plat du jour of government a la Hollandaise with the side of chopped Greek salad. The whole world, in fact, has got something like a giant hairball stuck in its craw. The hairball is composed of filaments of lies wound over a core of supernatural indebtedness. The lies are promises that the debt will be paid back.

     For two months the financial markets have gone sideways on a cushion of the European Central Bank's Long Term Refinancing Operations and the hot air of austerity chatter. The illusion of remaining airborne may dissolve now with the Hollandaise denunciation of Franco-German team spirit while a centripetal vortex of unpaid obligations sucks notional wealth through the event horizon of massive deflation.

      Things are heating up, in other words. Wake up, sleepyheads! Welcome to the rest of the year 2012.

      Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, is so amusing this morning. I, too, almost upchucked my "Paleo" diet breakfast of salmon hash with four eggs (pas de Hollandaise). Krugman writes in his column:

    What an excellent misrepresentation of reality by one of the official molders of public opinion and policy in this exceptional land. I would attempt to debate his statement above that spending less government money is proposed to encourage consumers, blah blah. It is proposed because government doesn't have the money to spend and has run out of the ability to borrow more money due to the bad odor now wafting off the world's compost heap of sovereign bond paper. Everyone is going broke simultaneously, including putative lenders, i.e. buyers of bonds, who are the same ones selling them.

     I like the way Krugman avers offhandedly to the concept of "depression." I believe this is a new thing for him to admit a certain absence of "green shoots" on the spring economic scene. Heretofore his halftime act between two presidential terms has been sheer cheerleading, but I guess he forgot to bring his pompoms to the office yesterday. I would refer to the situation as something more severe than a "depression," which merely suggests a valley between peaks. I would say that we are instead out on the arid buzzard flats beside the deep blue sea where modernity is shortly to drown itself in a fugue of suicidal bad faith.

     All of which is to say the pretense that has reigned since 2008 (viz: "recovery") may not float through the rest of 2012. Surely in the USA, we are approaching a dark inflection point where the fall elections collide with the broken promises now gathering into the shitstorm vulgarly called "Taxmageddon." The event horizon for that extravaganza of financial lightning strikes is officially January 1, but the effects will be felt long before that as households, businesses, pension funds, municipal governments, and various branches of the US military prepare to roll over and die.

      Enjoy the European sideshow for now because the roustabouts are still setting the props for act in the center ring. When the clown cars pull into the political conventions this summer, I would like to see these circus troupes greeted by large and lively mobs of furious citizens hurling objurgations at the likes of Barack Obama and Willard "Mitt" Romney. This is probably the least we can do to register some objection to the two useless parties' way of running things. Also, by the way, I would wonder what the generals over in the Pentagon will think (or might do!) as they see their country fall to tatters. 

     A few weeks ago I flew to Chicago, hopped into a rent-a-car, and navigated my way on the tangle of interstate highways to the now mostly former industrial region in the northwest corner of Indiana just off lowest Lake Michigan between the towns of Whiting and Gary. The desolation of human endeavor lay across the land like nausea made visible, but more impressive was how rapid the rise and fall of it all had been. 

     Not much more than 150 years ago this was a region of marshes, dunes, swales, laurel slicks, and little backwater ponds of the huge lake. The forbidding flat emptiness of the terrain made it perfect for running railroad track, and before long much of the heavy industry that epitomized the modern interval opened for business there, downwind from the pulsating new organism called Chicago. The storied steel mills of Gary are gone, and the numberless small shops and sheds that turned out useful widgets exist now, if at all, as ghostly brick and concrete shells along the stupendous grid of highways. 

     The one gigantic enterprise still going was the BP oil refinery, originally the Standard Oil operation, a demonic jumble of pipes, retorts, and exhaust stacks that sprawled over hundreds of acres, with flared off plumes of leaping orange flame from gas too cheap to sell lurid against the Great Lakes sunset in a lower key of rose and salmon pink. The refinery was there to support the only other visible activity in region, which was motoring.

     In a place so desolate it was hard to tell where everybody was going in such numbers on the endless four-laners. Between the ghostly remnants of factories stood a score of small cities and  neighborhoods where the immigrants settled five generations ago. A lot of it was foreclosed and shuttered. They were places of such stunning, relentless dreariness that you felt depressed just imagining how depressed the remaning denizens of these endless blocks of run-down shoebox houses must feel. Judging from the frequency of taquerias in the 1950s-vintage strip-malls, one inferred that the old Eastern European population had been lately supplanted by a new wave of Mexicans. They had inherited an infrastructure for daily life that was utterly devoid of conscious artistry when it was new, and now had the special patina of supernatural rot over it that only comes from materials not found in nature disintegrating in surprising and unexpected ways, sometimes even sublimely, like the sheen of an oil slick on water at a certain angle to the sun. There was a Chernobyl-like grandeur to it, as of the longed-for end of something enormous that hadn't worked out well.

      Yet people were coming and going in their cars from the welfare ruins of East Chicago to the even more spectacular tatters of Gary, where the old front porches are disappearing into prairie grass and the 20th century retreats into the mists of mythology. For a while, I suppose, people were interested that the Michael Jackson nativity occurred there, but that, too, is a shred of history now merging with the fabled wendigo of the Wyandots and the fate of the North American mastodon. You might draw the conclusion that driving cars is the only activity left in certain parts of the USA. Many of the ones I saw in this forsaken corner of the Midwest were classic beaters occupied by young men in pairs searching, searching, searching. It takes a certain special kind of mental bearing to persist in searching such a place for something that is not there.

     I was never so glad to get out of a place than those hundred-odd square miles of soured American dreamland. I was driving too, along with everybody else, on the Dan Ryan Expressway (US I-94), and for about 20 miles or so, from Pullman to the West Loop, the traffic barely pulsed along, like the contents in the terminal portion of the human gastrointestinal tract. This is what remains out in the Heartland of our country: a place so dire that you want to race shrieking from it and forget what you saw there. I have a feeling that its agonizing return to nature - or what's left of nature - will not be mitigated by anything Barack Obama or Mitt Romney might propose to do. I wouldn't want to be around when the driving stops.

     A few weeks ago I flew to Chicago, hopped into a rent-a-car, and navigated my way on the tangle of interstate highways to the now mostly former industrial region in the northwest corner of Indiana just off lowest Lake Michigan between the towns of Whiting and Gary. The desolation of human endeavor lay across the land like nausea made visible, but more impressive was how rapid the rise and fall of it all had been. 

     Not much more than 150 years ago this was a region of marshes, dunes, swales, laurel slicks, and little backwater ponds of the huge lake. The forbidding flat emptiness of the terrain made it perfect for running railroad track, and before long much of the heavy industry that epitomized the modern interval opened for business there, downwind from the pulsating new organism called Chicago. The storied steel mills of Gary are gone, and the numberless small shops and sheds that turned out useful widgets exist now, if at all, as ghostly brick and concrete shells along the stupendous grid of highways. 

     The one gigantic enterprise still going was the BP oil refinery, originally the Standard Oil operation, a demonic jumble of pipes, retorts, and exhaust stacks that sprawled over hundreds of acres, with flared off plumes of leaping orange flame from gas too cheap to sell lurid against the Great Lakes sunset in a lower key of rose and salmon pink. The refinery was there to support the only other visible activity in region, which was motoring.

     In a place so desolate it was hard to tell where everybody was going in such numbers on the endless four-laners. Between the ghostly remnants of factories stood a score of small cities and  neighborhoods where the immigrants settled five generations ago. A lot of it was foreclosed and shuttered. They were places of such stunning, relentless dreariness that you felt depressed just imagining how depressed the remaning denizens of these endless blocks of run-down shoebox houses must feel. Judging from the frequency of taquerias in the 1950s-vintage strip-malls, one inferred that the old Eastern European population had been lately supplanted by a new wave of Mexicans. They had inherited an infrastructure for daily life that was utterly devoid of conscious artistry when it was new, and now had the special patina of supernatural rot over it that only comes from materials not found in nature disintegrating in surprising and unexpected ways, sometimes even sublimely, like the sheen of an oil slick on water at a certain angle to the sun. There was a Chernobyl-like grandeur to it, as of the longed-for end of something enormous that hadn't worked out well.

      Yet people were coming and going in their cars from the welfare ruins of East Chicago to the even more spectacular tatters of Gary, where the old front porches are disappearing into prairie grass and the 20th century retreats into the mists of mythology. For a while, I suppose, people were interested that the Michael Jackson nativity occurred there, but that, too, is a shred of history now merging with the fabled wendigo of the Wyandots and the fate of the North American mastodon. You might draw the conclusion that driving cars is the only activity left in certain parts of the USA. Many of the ones I saw in this forsaken corner of the Midwest were classic beaters occupied by young men in pairs searching, searching, searching. It takes a certain special kind of mental bearing to persist in searching such a place for something that is not there.

     I was never so glad to get out of a place than those hundred-odd square miles of soured American dreamland. I was driving too, along with everybody else, on the Dan Ryan Expressway (US I-94), and for about 20 miles or so, from Pullman to the West Loop, the traffic barely pulsed along, like the contents in the terminal portion of the human gastrointestinal tract. This is what remains out in the Heartland of our country: a place so dire that you want to race shrieking from it and forget what you saw there. I have a feeling that its agonizing return to nature - or what's left of nature - will not be mitigated by anything Barack Obama or Mitt Romney might propose to do. I wouldn't want to be around when the driving stops.

     The world gave the appearance of doing nothing and going nowhere over the past month - apart from the sensational liaison of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, which, some believe, augurs a dazzling speed-up of the much prayed-for economic recovery, return to full employment, $2.50 gasoline by summer, and the selection of Jesus Christ as VP running mate by Mitt Romney - but, in fact, so much trouble is roiling under the surface all over the world that it makes you feel seasick on dry land.

    It is true that the European financial fiasco is a story of such fantastic mystifying complexity that the public can't possibly be expected to follow each twist of the plotline. But the fact is that nothing was fixed for Greece or after Greece and the hazard of evermore profound wreckage is assured. The only question is how many months before the appearance of normality in financial matters yields to fighting in the streets of supposedly civilized countries.

      Spain, it was revealed this week, has turned to a form of finance that could only have been designed by M.C. Escher.

      The plan for stabilizing Spain's hemorrhaging insolvency position works as follows: Spain's big banks borrow billions from the European Central Bank (ECB); the Spanish banks then turn around and lend the Spanish government the money to fund a bailout operation for the Spanish banks; the Spanish banks then use the bailout money to buy Spanish sovereign bonds, that is, lend money to the government. The world received news of this dangerous idiocy with a yawn. You'd at least expect a few Germans to choke on a bratwurst here and there. 

      The idea that shenanigans like this can continue must amuse the historians looking on. But three weeks into April so far nothing has penetrated the stupendous wall of illusion that separates money matters from reality like the one-way mirror in the interrogation chamber of a police precinct where every last officer of the law is on the take.

     The lesson in the first quarter of 2012 is that when anything goes, nothing matters. Jon Corzine, chief of the fraudster operation MF Global is still at large how many months after his firm pulled an abracadabra disappearing act on $1.2 billion of segregated customer accounts, many belonging to farmers and ranchers engaged in the normal options trade in commodities prices necessary to their business? Nobody has been fired at the Chicago Mercantile exchange or the Commodities Futures Trading Commission for this, either. No newsman has asked President Obama about any of these things, or how come Jon Corzine is still listed by the re-election campaign as a continuing major contributor. The New York Times, for one, is much more focused on major bullshit propaganda operations, such as its recent giant spread on how America will soon be an energy independent oil exporting nation.

     No one in the American media is paying attention to the unfolding tragedy of Japan - and by this I refer not only to the unfinished Fukushima saga, but the parallel story of Japan closing down virtually its entire nuclear power industry necessitating gigantic additional imports of oil and gas to generate electric power - all of which points to the likelihood that Japan will become the first advanced industrial nation to bid sayonara to modernity and return to a neo-medieval socio-economic model of daily life.

      The Middle West and North Africa still smolder away like giant root fires. Nothing has been settled politically and the prospects are excellent that Islamic maniacs will shortly be in charge of Egypt and Libya, not to mention Syria, or even America's trillion-dollar battleground of Afghanistan where, after ten years of persistent struggle, we can't control either the terrain or the behavior of the people who dwell on it. Meanwhile, half of Sudan's oil production was blown up over the weekend. And King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is not getting any younger at 88. Saudi spare oil capacity won't matter so much when the kingdom is up in flames.

     What I wonder is how long the American public will remain in its Kardashian trance. At this torpid moment no one believes that any theoretical political cohort in this land - tea-partiers, swindled youth, professional lefties (or what's left of them), or the fugitive thinking centrists (wherever they are) - might bestir themselves to bust up a nominating convention or march on one of many debauched institutions in the nation's capital, from the SEC to the wax museum formally known as the Department of Justice. I think differently, though. I think this grim interval of crisis consolidation is drawing to a close and, like the buds swelling on every tree in New England, events will soon burst into astounding efflorescence. 

     In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, the excellent Bill Moyers hosted political activist Angela Glover Blackwell on his weekly interview show, Moyers & Company (April 13; "An Activist for Our Times") and in the course of things (12:18 in the program) Ms. Blackwell said, "America does not want to talk about race." In point of fact, we'll talk about it all the live-long day, just not very honestly.

      The Trayvon Martin incident certainly provoked a broad media conversation about race all over the cable TV networks and the Internet. It's been an inconclusive discussion because the facts of the case are so muddled and the truth may never be known, or may not satisfy anyone if it becomes known. Mostly, the talk followed predictable patterns of grievance, accusation, and especially hand-wringing - the latter well represented by Bill Moyers, the embodiment of 1960s-vintage idealist Democratic liberalism, who came on the scene as a close aide to President Lyndon Johnson at the height of the civil rights struggle.

      The reason the race conversation remains so constricted in America is because the central question makes everyone so uncomfortable. That question is: what accounts for the failure to thrive of such a large percentage of black America? It is uncomfortable for whites (especially Progressives) because it implies a failure of the social justice movement itself, and in particular the watershed civil rights struggles of the 1960s. It's uncomfortable for blacks because it stirs up immense anxiety over the stigma of racial inferiority.

     The crucial moment in this recent history of race relations, it seems to me, must be located in the events between 1966 and 1970. This was the historical moment that followed the deconstruction of legal race codes with the passage into law of the Public Accommodations Act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These two legislative milestones, promoted and signed by Lyndon Johnson, were supposed to conclude the unfinished business of the Civil War and emancipation, which had festered so long in the Jim Crow inurement.

      The expectation was that the removal of legal obstacles to full citizenship would hasten economic justice and cultural equality, but just then something curious happened: the youth revolt of the late 1960s was underway and young black America immediately opted for separatism. Opposition to anything and everything was the motif for my generation back then. A few years after the 1964 Public Accommodations Act passed, the black students at my college demanded (and were given) their own separate student union building. During the riots that followed the Kent State shootings in the Spring of 1971, somebody burned the building down - a mystery never solved.

     I believe the black separatist movement of that time derived largely from anxiety around the issues of cultural assimilation - that is, of black and white America forming a true and complete common culture. In any case, it was at this moment of history that the multicultural movement presented itself as an "out" for white America. Multiculturalism allowed white America to pretend that common culture was not important. It also promoted the unfortunate idea that we could have a functioning civil society with different standards of behavior for different ethnic groups. It has left the nation with the unanswered question of black America's self-evident failure to thrive, and an enormous body of narrative affecting to explain it away as "structural racism."

     Bill Moyers did not even attempt to address the failure to thrive question in his interview with Angela Glover Blackwell. Both of these people are about as well-intentioned as anyone in the country where race relations are concerned, but neither of them were able to honestly confront the issue. My own opinion is that it's about behavior at least as much as its about race and probably more, and we continue to make tragic decisions in this country about what behavior is okay and what's not. Are there proportionately more black men in prison than members of other races in America? Yes there are, and most of them behaved badly enough to get locked up, whether our drug laws are stupid or not. Is something preventing black children from learning in school? Probably a number of things, but I would begin absolutely with the duty to teach them to speak English intelligibly - something that nobody expresses any interest in, especially white Progressives. Do white people fear black males who affect to act as if they are dangerous? Maybe black men should stop trying to scare people. Are these "racist" observations or exercises in reality-testing?

     I doubt even that question can be settled conclusively in our time. The truth is that white America is too uncomfortable with the discomfort of black America and white America will do anything, and will bend any view of reality, in order to avoid the most frightening outcome of all, which is the possibility of race war. Well it's hard not to sympathize with that, but it still leaves us with the burden of all the tragic choices we made since those heady days of 1964 and 1965 when Bill Moyers could stand behind President Johnson signing those landmark civil rights bills, basking in the broad-based belief that real human progress was being made.

     I don't know for sure what Trayvon Martin was doing in the moments before George Zimmerman shot him in the Florida condo cluster. The public may never learn what really went on, even after Mr. Zimmerman's trial. People don't get shot for no reason, though sometimes it is not a good reason, or one we want to talk about.

     Is there a Baby Boomer so dim in this land of rackets and swindles who thinks that he or she will escape the wrath of the Millennials rising? The developing story is so obvious that only an academic economist could fail to notice. Here's how it will go: some months from now, as the financial unwind worsens, and the mirage of gainful employment shimmers away to nothing, and the technocrats of Europe meet nervously by some Swiss lakeside (and are seen glumly shaking their heads), and Romney and Obama try to out-do each other peddling miracle cures for the tanking national self-esteem - a dangerous meme will go forth across the internet, and this meme will say: Millennials, renounce your college loans and set yourselves free!

     And then something truly marvelous will happen. They will at once disempower the swindling generation of their fathers, teachers, loan officers, and overlords and quite possibly bring on, at long last, the epochal collision of pervasive American control fraud with the hard hand of reality.

     I think this will happen, and I would venture even to set the meme loose here and now and watch it go viral. The college loan racket has been an even more cynical enterprise than the mortgage racket was because so many people who ought to have known better, people of supposed intelligence such as college deans, cabinet secretaries, and think-tank Yodas, all colluded to support the false promise that the gigantic cargo cult of higher ed would keep churning out fresh careers forever - when the truth was that the entire groaning vessel of hopes and dreams was already under water and sinking into the eternal darkness.

      And is there a Millennial so dim who believes that the promised package of lifetime goodies once called "a job with benefits" waits like a liveried servant to conduct them without friction through the ceremonies of career and family according to premises and promises of an obsolete American Dream? Dreams do die hard. As dreams go it was a pretty good one while it lasted, but like all dreams, it has vanished in the mists of a new morning leaving the dreamers half-sick, anxious, and drained. They have nothing to lose but their fears of the re-po man and the simulated dudgeon of telephone robot debt-collectors.

     This idea should catch on as the election season heats up. Like the anti-war youth of August, 1968, burning their draft cards in the streets of Chicago, the Millennials should flock to Charlotte and Tampa this summer and fill the parking lots (there are no streets in these places) with the smoke of their burning loan contracts - and then proceed with the loud repudiation of party politics in its two current useless, lying, craven, feckless factions. The effrontery of these rogues, promising a hundred years of shale gas, and jobs, jobs, jobs, and a personal relationship with Jesus! Send them packing into the bowels of history, then go home and make it work locally, where it will have to happen in any case because the arc of events has a velocity of its own now and that is our certain destination.

     The colleges themselves will, of course, implode shortly, along with everything else currently organized on the super-gigantic scale. They are no more prepared for what is about to happen to them than the chiselers in government, banking, medicine, and global corporate enterprise. We will wonder in retrospect how they ever managed to winkle 50-grand a year for their absurd promises, and how we permitted young people with undeveloped powers of judgment to sign their financial lives away on terms even more stringent than their parents' mortgages. When the universities do go down, tossing their employees overboard in the process, it will be interesting to see the former faculty chairpersons and distinguished professors of econometric modeling learn how to plant kale and care for chickens side-by-side with their formerly-indentured students. I can imagine a period of turmoil in America even harsher than, say, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China where officials, professors, and authorities of all kinds were paraded through the angry mobs wearing dunce caps. Weird things happen history.

     The college loan money will not be paid back anyway, so Millennial youth ought to seize the golden opportunity to make the deliberate point that the years of swindling are officially over now. This strange jubilee could, and should, change everything.

     Is there a Baby Boomer so dim in this land of rackets and swindles who thinks that he or she will escape the wrath of the Millennials rising? The developing story is so obvious that only an academic economist could fail to notice. Here's how it will go: some months from now, as the financial unwind worsens, and the mirage of gainful employment shimmers away to nothing, and the technocrats of Europe meet nervously by some Swiss lakeside (and are seen glumly shaking their heads), and Romney and Obama try to out-do each other peddling miracle cures for the tanking national self-esteem - a dangerous meme will go forth across the internet, and this meme will say: Millennials, renounce your college loans and set yourselves free!

     And then something truly marvelous will happen. They will at once disempower the swindling generation of their fathers, teachers, loan officers, and overlords and quite possibly bring on, at long last, the epochal collision of pervasive American control fraud with the hard hand of reality.

     I think this will happen, and I would venture even to set the meme loose here and now and watch it go viral. The college loan racket has been an even more cynical enterprise than the mortgage racket was because so many people who ought to have known better, people of supposed intelligence such as college deans, cabinet secretaries, and think-tank Yodas, all colluded to support the false promise that the gigantic cargo cult of higher ed would keep churning out fresh careers forever - when the truth was that the entire groaning vessel of hopes and dreams was already under water and sinking into the eternal darkness.

      And is there a Millennial so dim who believes that the promised package of lifetime goodies once called "a job with benefits" waits like a liveried servant to conduct them without friction through the ceremonies of career and family according to premises and promises of an obsolete American Dream? Dreams do die hard. As dreams go it was a pretty good one while it lasted, but like all dreams, it has vanished in the mists of a new morning leaving the dreamers half-sick, anxious, and drained. They have nothing to lose but their fears of the re-po man and the simulated dudgeon of telephone robot debt-collectors.

     This idea should catch on as the election season heats up. Like the anti-war youth of August, 1968, burning their draft cards in the streets of Chicago, the Millennials should flock to Charlotte and Tampa this summer and fill the parking lots (there are no streets in these places) with the smoke of their burning loan contracts - and then proceed with the loud repudiation of party politics in its two current useless, lying, craven, feckless factions. The effrontery of these rogues, promising a hundred years of shale gas, and jobs, jobs, jobs, and a personal relationship with Jesus! Send them packing into the bowels of history, then go home and make it work locally, where it will have to happen in any case because the arc of events has a velocity of its own now and that is our certain destination.

     The colleges themselves will, of course, implode shortly, along with everything else currently organized on the super-gigantic scale. They are no more prepared for what is about to happen to them than the chiselers in government, banking, medicine, and global corporate enterprise. We will wonder in retrospect how they ever managed to winkle 50-grand a year for their absurd promises, and how we permitted young people with undeveloped powers of judgment to sign their financial lives away on terms even more stringent than their parents' mortgages. When the universities do go down, tossing their employees overboard in the process, it will be interesting to see the former faculty chairpersons and distinguished professors of econometric modeling learn how to plant kale and care for chickens side-by-side with their formerly-indentured students. I can imagine a period of turmoil in America even harsher than, say, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China where officials, professors, and authorities of all kinds were paraded through the angry mobs wearing dunce caps. Weird things happen history.

     The college loan money will not be paid back anyway, so Millennial youth ought to seize the golden opportunity to make the deliberate point that the years of swindling are officially over now. This strange jubilee could, and should, change everything.

     In the drunken, drug-crazed twilight of its run as Leader of the Free World, America's collective imagination swerves from one breakdown lane to the other while the highway patrol throws a donuts-and-porn party down at headquarters and the news media searches the gutter on hands-and-knees looking for the spot where it dropped its brains. 

     The other day, Larry Kudlow, the king popinjay at CNBC, told viewers that the US has over a trillion barrels of oil waiting to be drill-drill-drilled on our way to "energy independence." This is the kind of malarkey that America thrives on these days, the way yeasts thrive on sugary mash. It's a complete falsehood, of course, but the working dead over at The New York Times said substantially the same thing in a front-page story the week before. The Timespersons have only one source for their stories: Daniel Yergin, chief public relations pimp for the oil industry, because he makes it so easy for them by providing all the information they will ever need. The oil and gas companies would like to direct the fire-hose of loose and easy money out there into their stock prices - building to the magic moment when, Mozillo-like, the executives can dump shares, cut, and run for the far hills where no SEC officer or DOJ attorney will ever think to look. This is just another racket in an all-rackets society.

     The fantasy of energy independence therefore takes shape as a "settled matter" as we lurch toward elections. The arch-moron Mitt Romney will inveigh against Obama for holding the oil dogs back while Obama pretends to spank the oil companies for gouging the public on that alleged Niagara flow of new oil. None of them understands the true situation, which is that the USA is enjoying one last gulp of a very expensive oil cocktail with the last few dollars it can prestidigitate out of the central bank's magic box, and then there is no more even notional surplus wealth to blow on more drinks. 

     And it isn't even much of a gulp. US production of "all liquids" - which includes methane gas drippings, ethanol, etc - went from 7.2 million barrels a day in 2004 to about 7.7 in 2011. We use about 19 million barrels a day, down about a million from peak US consumption before the financial crash of 2008. The reason it's down: Americans are going broke, one household and one small business at a time. Shale oil production is approaching half a million barrels a day. That's about 45 minutes of daily go-power. It might go up to an hour-and-a-half before production of shale oil permanently crashes on the combination of fast-depleting wells and a lack of capital to keep drilling new ones at $8 million per well.

    The story for shale gas is similar, except that initial production was so exorbitant that it drove the price down to nearly nothing (the $2 range), and the bust from that Ponzi will be even more spectacular than the shale oil. Everyone from Mr. Obama to the chiselers who run Citigroup maintain that there is a one hundred year supply of gas in the USA. They are going to be very disappointed. The public, on the other hand, will not even remember what they said as they burn down the cornfields in anguish.

     I met a guy at the pumps last week who was filling up a pickup truck at least twice the size of mine a few yards away. I asked him how things were going fuel-wise with that monster Ram-Charger he was feeding. At more than $100 a fill-up, it was killing him he said. His line-of-work required him to drive all over the county incessantly. His reality was a bit different from the oil company execs promising limitless horizons of oil to CNBC-watching retirees desperate for some "yield" on investment in the face of ZIRP bond rates. The price of oil (and gasoline) may well crash again, but when it does, there will be fewer business reasons for anyone to drive around the county all the live-long day, and that guy's Ram-Charger could fall into the hands of the re-po goon squad. He may never be able to get another one, either. No more money for truck loans. Capital shortage. Sorry.

     This oil and gas thing cuts so many ways that the public will feel like it is gargling Gillette blue blades. Just add up the total tonnage of steel necessary to keep this Ponzi going and you would reach a discouraging conclusion: this thing has nowhere to go but swift and implacable contraction. The ultimate destination of "energy independence" will be a nation with no cars and trucks to run. We'll get there, you'll see. But that is speaking the unthinkable.

*

     Thanks to all readers for sending many kind and thoughtful letters about cholesterol, diet, statins, doctors, and the medical racket in response to my two previous blogs on those subjects.

___________________________

     

     So, last Friday I think my doctor fired me. 

     I came in for a routine checkup of my cholesterol levels because about six months ago I stopped taking the 40 milligrams of Crestor Dr. X prescribed and he was concerned about where my numbers were going. I kicked off the conversation, which took place, of course, in a windowless, closet-like, steel-and-linoleum-lined examination room that must be designed to induce maximum dread saturation in the human psyche. I told Dr. X that I had embarked on a high-fat, butter-meat-cheese-crème-fraîche diet and ditched the ultra-low-fat, grains-and-tofu program that I followed for about five years. Dr. X paused dramatically after I finished and then stated bloodlessly that my cholesterol had gone up from 220 to 260 since my previous blood test three months earlier. Yes, well... I told him I had started eating shitloads of meat, butter, and eggs three days before my latest blood test. Chagrin transformed his face like a mask.

    I then explained that I thought the combination of statin drugs and a low-fat, high carb diet had damaged my system. The mask of chagrin on Dr. X's face was transforming slowly into something you might see in the Rite-Aid around Halloween. Apparently he thought I was blaming him, since he had put me on the drug and approved of the Ornish/Essylsten diet I'd put myself on. In point of fact, blame was not on my agenda. I was simply trying to describe my version of reality in the interest of improving my health. For about a year, I'd developed a range of alarming symptoms: peripheral neuropathy (tingling and numbness in my hands and feet), striking memory loss, poor balance, atrophying muscles, intractable insomnia and I attributed it to side effects of Crestor (yes, go fuck yourself Astra Zenica, makers of Crestor), combined with a lack of vital nutrients that my body needed to make routine repairs for five years. 

     Then I commenced a discussion about a possible Vitamin B-12 deficiency, since this is a not unusual outcome for someone who gets insufficient nutrition from animal-based foods. Dr. X said they could run a simple blood test for it. He had now turned his attention completely to the screen of the laptop computer that had become a prosthetic extension of his persona. I suspected he had lost interest in the conversation. I wondered out loud if the results of the test might be skewed, since I had also recently put myself on a dose of B-12 sub-lingual supplements. This is where Dr. X lost it. He stood up abruptly and said, "I'm not a boutique physician! Other people are waiting out there to see me!" Then he pointed at me and said, "You are going to die of a heart attack or a stroke!" That was possible, I thought, but then something was going to get Dr. X, too, eventually, unless he managed to funnel himself into Ray Kurzweil's cyborg singularity rapture.

    I thought further: my doctor is a most intemperate fellow.

    Then I trotted obediently down the hall to the phlebotomy parlor (another windowless closet), and gave more blood for the B-12 test. Dr. X appeared briefly in the doorway and handed me a slip of paper with the name of a osteopath-naturopath in town who might better entertain my particular health concerns. One thing I didn't mention to Dr. X during this incident - nor did I mention it in last week's blog - was the fact that my girlfriend (a professional librarian and crack researcher) had discovered a website that disclosed payments from pharmaceutical companies to doctors. Dr. X, evidently, had scored about $200,000 total over a recent 18-month period, including about 20-K from Astra Zenica. I didn't bring it up with Dr X in the exam room because I did not want to turn the office visit into an adversarial event, and there's no question he would have gone batshit. But there you have it, now, like so much meat flopped out in the table.

     This personal anecdote is only a tiny sample of the quackery and corruption at large in this segment of society. Of course it extends into the many branches of the nutritional sector, too, including the matrix of rackets in the food, farming, and policy realms that have left the American public in a daze of metabolic syndrome from eating a diet based almost entirely on processed corn byproducts.

     I'm five foot nine and a half and I weighed in on Friday at 164.5 After about two weeks back on butter-meat-cheese-crème-fraîche, my hands are still tingling. They seem even worse today after the first pretty good night's sleep I've gotten in months. That kind of damage is sometimes permanent. I'll have a pity-party for myself and then maybe I'll get on with my day. But I'll let you know how I'm doing over time. And if you know of a good physician in the Washington-Warren-Saratoga County region of New York, drop me a line (jhkunstler at mac.com).

    Meanwhile, please be assured that I will get back to commentary on national and international issues. I will say it's ironic that the big event of the week is the Supreme Court's review of the Obama Health Care Reform Act, a cherry on one of the biggest clusterfuck cakes that the world ever baked. Mark my words: health care in the USA is unreformable. Like a lot of other things in Racket Nation, it simply has to implode to transform itself into something better.

     

This still moment on the verge of spring equinox, industrial civilization is taking a rest from its travails of finance and economy. The creaking and groaning vehicle of world banking lurches forward with its latest patch, the Greek fix, but the explosive resignation last week of a Goldman Sachs executive director Greg Smith, posted as an op-ed essay in no less than the New York Times, afforded a glimpse into the dark place where American values crawled off to die, like turning over a rock in a meadow to find the white slithering things that dwell there, and asserting a broad and anguished truth at the heart of our culture: all is swindle.

      In the still moment, the nation is digesting this discovery, and I think it will represent a turning point in the arduous plotline of the crime story that banking has become. It's also the moment of reawakening for the Occupy movement as it now struggles with what it is to become. I doubt that it can avoid turning angrily and maybe viciously political as it focuses its energies on occupying this summer's looming political conventions.

     But in this still moment I want to take a break from purely public issues for a second week and discuss some personal things: nutrition and medicine. I hope it will be of interest to some of you. Last week, after a four year misadventure on an ultra low-fat vegan diet (no meat, no cheese, no eggs), I turned around 180 degrees and resumed eating all those verboten things again. I had been feeling shitty for a long time, in particular with muscle pain, muscle weakness, penetrating fatigue, and some weird neurological symptoms and I decided to take drastic measures.

    This personal misadventure started about four and half years ago when my doctor read me the riot act on my cholesterol numbers. The total was around 290. I forget exactly what the LDL ("bad" cholesterol) was, but it wasn't good, and ditto the HDL ("good" cholesterol) and the triglycerides (oy vay). The upshot was that my doctor put me on a whopping dose of the most powerful statin drug, Crestor 40mg (made by AstraZenica). I left his office feeling like my identity was transformed from a healthy normal person to a prisoner on death row. 

     I thought I had been leading a healthy life. Being self-employed, and master of my own schedule, I was able to work in a lot of exercise. For twenty-five years I was a runner. A hip replacement put an end to that. During that same period, I also swam a mile a day in the local YMCA lap pool. After hip surgery, I walked daily instead of running, kept swimming, and also did at least four weekly sessions in the weight room (including the cardio machines such as the elliptical trainer, easy on the joints). During the temperate months, I also biked many days of the week. Because I got so much exercise, I thought I could eat anything I wanted to, and did. I was a capable cook, having worked in many restaurant jobs during my starving bohemian years, and I could competently put together everything from a butterflied leg of lamb to a flourless chocolate cake.

    After receiving my "death sentence" from the doc, I went straight to the cardio diet bookshelf and found works by two of the chief authorities on the subject: Dr. Dean Ornish, the popular TV celebrity, and Dr. Caldwell Essylsten, a less public but also renowned nutrition guru from the Cleveland Clinic. Both of them promoted ultra low-fat essentially vegan diets. I used them as a guide for learning how to cook for myself in a new way. This largely revolved around vegetables braised in stocks rather than oil-fried in a wok, lots of brown rice and other whole grains (oats, especially), and the substitution of plant (soy) based protein foods like tofu, tempeh, and the various veggie "burger" products for actual meat. Plenty of salads, of course, and fruit. Of the two diet docs, Essylsten was the most severe. You were barely allowed to eat a nut. However, in defiance I ate the same lunch every day for all those years: peanut butter on one slice of our local Rock Hill 8-grain bread. Otherwise I was pretty strict with myself.

     Over the next several years I lost about 20 pounds (from 188 to 168 - I am 5' 10"). By 2011, my cholesterol was down to 110 total (about equal LDLs and HDLs), but I was feeling shitty all the time as described above: lack of stamina, muscle pains, cramps, etc. I was aware that I was getting old, over 60, but I suspected that these were not necessarily natural aging issues. I was having trouble remembering things, names especially, and at times felt like my brain was fogged. I developed neuropathies (tingling and numbness) in my hands and feet. I grew suspicious that these things were connected with the whopping dose of Crestor that I was on. There is, of course,  a body of anecdotal chat on the Web about the evils of Crestor and other statin drugs, and in July of 2011 I decided to taper down and get off the stuff. By September it was out of my system.  My doctor was rather cross with me. He assured me that an LDL level above 70 was a death sentence, should I get back there.

     Over the next six months, the brain fog and the name-forgetting went away, but the muscle issues and fatigue-and-stamina problems persisted. I was still on my nearly fat-free vegan diet. My theory was to see how far up my cholesterol would go on diet alone. In November it clocked in at 220 total and I forget the LDL number because my doctor was shaking his head and making clucking sounds as he reported it, along with his now-standard empirical warning that I was back in the death zone.

    So, all winter I staggered on feeling shitty and eating low-fat vegan. There is for sure a large body of counter-argument on the whole cholesterol issue, led by the author-journalist Gary Taubes (a supernaturally fit-looking dude). This argument states that fat is actually a critical and essential component of human diet, and animal fat in particular, which is crucial for the continual process of cell renewal and the processing of many other nutrients, especially many vitamins. There is also a range of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, that you can only get from animal foods. All of these things have a bearing on muscle performance and the health of nerve tissue, in which fats are an indispensible component.

     Frankly, I knew about these counter-arguments, but the authority of medicine these days militates the opposite way, and in these nearly five years I allowed the authority of my doctor to persuade me to drive down my cholesterol by all means available. I now regard this as a mistake, perhaps even a personal fiasco. I think I have done a lot of damage to my system and that it will take a long time to repair. But I am back in the realm of meat, cheese, and eggs. And, yes, I do eat a lot of vegetables, especially green and leafy ones, and I am watching my carbohydrates (but not eschewing them).

     I've also come to a conclusion about what started this whole long melodrama. At the time I first got my high cholesterol "riot act" reading, I was also eating a lot of sugar and refined white flour in a certain form. In the evenings, after a day that included at least two episodes of strenuous exercise, I allowed myself to eat Pepperidge Farm cookies and Ben and Jerry's ice cream. I probably ran through a bag of cookies every two or three days and ditto a pint of ice cream. I now believe that my cholesterol numbers were high not so much because of the meat and cheese that I was eating, but because I regularly consumed too much sugar and refined flour. That is my current theory and narrative.

     So, I'm back to an omnivore's diet. (The first time I had real eggs scrambled in butter in nearly five years was quite a moment!) It's been about ten days. I can't say that I've noticed any marked improvements. As I said above, it will probably take a long time to undo the damage done. I'll check in again on this theme after a while and let you know how things are going. I'm scheduled to go in for another routine physical on Friday. I imagine it will be a contentious session. But I wonder if doctors are losing their legitimacy now in a way similar to the other authority figures in our culture: the political leaders, the bankers economists, the business executives. To get back to where I started this blog, all is swindle these days. And medicine, being the life-and-death racket that it is, may be the biggest swindle of them all.

     The misalignment of politics and reality threatens to scuttle both major parties, but it's especially gratifying to see the Republicans sail off the edge of their own flat earth on the winds of religious idiocy. For forty years it has not been enough for them to just be a conservative party. They had to enlist the worst elements of ignorance and reaction, and they found an endless supply of it in the boom regions of the Sunbelt with its brotherhood of TV evangelist con-artists and a population fretful with suburban angst.

     Now, in the last hours of the cheap oil economy, the forty year miracle of the Sunbelt boom dwindles and a fear of approaching darkness grips the people there like a rumor of Satan. The long boom that took them from an agricultural backwater of barefoot peasantry to a miracle world of Sonic Drive-ins, perpetual air-conditioning, WalMarts, and creation museums is turning back in the other direction and they fear losing all that comfort, convenience, and spectacle. Since they don't understand where it came from, they conclude that it was all a God-given endowment conferred upon them for their exceptional specialness as Americans, and so only the forces of evil could conspire to take it all away.

    Hence, the rise of a sanctimonious, hyper-patriotic putz such as Rick Santorum and his take-back-the-night appeal to those who sense the gathering twilight. And the awful ordeal of convictionless pander and former front-runner Mitt Romney drowning in his own bullshit as he struggles to extrude one whopper after another just to keep up with the others in this race to the bottom of the political mud-flow.

     There is an obvious dither backstage now among those who cynically thought they could manipulate and control these dark impulses of the frightened masses as the candidates all pile into a train wreck of super-PAC obloquy. Won't some level-headed adult like the governors of New Jersey and Indiana step up and volunteer? Is this finally its Whig Moment - the point where the Republican Party has offended history so gravely that it goes up in a vapor of its own absurdity? I hope so. The conservative impulse is hardly all bad. We need it in civilization. But it can't be vested in the sheer and constant repudiation of reality.

      The opposing Democrats have their own problem with reality, which is that they don't tell the truth about so many things despite knowing better, and, under Obama, they act contrary to their stated intentions often enough, and in matters of extreme importance, that they deserve to go down in flames, too. Just as there is a place for conservatism in civilized life, there is also a place for the progressive impulse, let's call it - for making bold advance in step with the mandates of reality and an interest in justice for all those along on the journey. 

     The Democrats under Obama don't want to go to that place. They want to really go to the same place as the fretful Sunbelt fundamentalists, but by a different route - and that place is yesterday, by means of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. Mr. Obama is pretending that an economic "recovery" is underway when he knows damn well that the banking system is just blowing smoke up the shredded ass of what's left of that economy. He pretends to an interest in the rule of law in money matters but he's done everything possible to prevent the Department of Justice, the SEC, and a dozen other regulatory authorities from functioning the way they were designed. He has never suggested resurrecting the Glass-Steagall act, which kept banking close to being honest for forty years. He never issued a peep of objection about the Citizens United case where the Supreme Court tossed the election process into a crocodile pit of corporate turpitude (he could have proposed a constitutional amendment redefining corporate "personhood."). He declared he'd never permit a super-PAC to be created in his name, and now he's got one. Mr. Obama represents a lot of things to a lot of people. He is mainly Progressivism's bowling trophy, its symbol of its own triumphant wonderfulness in overcoming the age old phantoms of race prejudice. Alas, that's not enough. Where exactly is the boundary between telling "folks" what they want to hear and just flat-out lying?

     Neither party can articulate the current reality, which is that we have to reorganize civilization pretty drastically. I've reviewed that agenda many times in this space and it largely amounts to rebuilding local economies at a smaller and finer scale. That is just not on the table for all current leadership, or even in the room. If neither party can frame an agenda consistent with that reality, then we'll have to get there without them, probably after a very rough period when the pretending still lingers in the air like a bad odor and no reality-based consensus is able to form, no agreement about what we should do. That's the period when a lot of things fall apart and people get hurt. These are the choices we're making right now.