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Fishtailing into the Future
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James Howard Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation blog is updated Mondays and Fridays. The KunstlerCast podcast and Eyesore of the Month are monthly features. Read & comment here.
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Fishtailing into the Future

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James Howard Kunstler
Oct 05, 2018

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The opening chapters of Michael Lewis’s new book, The Fifth Risk, detail the carelessness of the Trump transition team in the months leading up to his swearing-in as president. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie led the team, with its binders full of possible agency chiefs, before he was summarily canned by Steve Bannon, who would be dumped soon himself by the ascending Golden Golem of Greatness. There was, in fact, a set of rigorous protocols for managing the transition of power based on decades of cumulative practice — and anxiety over the frightening nuclear demons at the core of US power — and they were disdained, to the horror of the permanent bureaucracy waiting in place for leadership.

In those months after the election, Mr. Trump was apparently dazed and confused by his unexpected victory, and completely unprepared to actually run the country. His super-sized “stable genius” brain surveyed the scene and his field-of-view saw nothing but swamp from sea to shining sea, populated by lizards, snakes, raptors, and poisonous insects, with higher-order mammalian predators in the C-suites. When he finally caught on to the game being played, Mr. Trump rounded up his own menagerie of crispy critters and sent them forth to run operations like the Department of Energy — in that case, former Texas governor Rick Perry, who knew next-to-nothing about the department’s responsibilities, and had sworn to abolish it in the primary elections (when he remembered it existed).

The politics around these deadly serious matters are interesting enough, and Michael Lewis, as always, excels at unpacking the fraught mysteries of highly complicated systems run by comically limited humans. But something else emerges from this story, perhaps unintentionally: that the complexities of government are now hopelessly unmanageable, no matter who is in charge of them, and that the actual path of this still-growing complexity leads to criticality and collapse. If Lewis catches onto this later in the book, which I doubt, if only for his cavalier references to the dodgy business of shale oil, there’s no sign of it in the early chapters.

But this is not intended to be a book review based on a so-far partial reading. It is to say that even some of the best analytical minds of our time are missing the main thread of the story: that human affairs in the 21st century have entered a hazardous period of disorderly change largely due to that age-old pitfall of making ever-increasing investments in complexity with diminishing returns. That is exactly how societies collapse and that is where things stand in the Time of Trump. One might even theorize that Mr. Trump’s simplemindedness is a kind of virtue in the face of runaway complexity. His instinct, at least, is to repel it.

But at the macro level, this system and its subsystems are out-of-control and shaking themselves loose. Government has attempted to prop them up by schemes that amount to racketeering of one kind or another — the dishonest manipulation and representation of money — and now money itself is in revolt, as can be seen in the sudden rise of interest rates, especially the ten-year US Treasury Bond above 3.2 percent just before today’s market open

The US government can’t handle interest rates at this level, after decades of debt accumulation. Other nations can’t pay back their dollar-denominated loans either, and that has produced havoc at the so-called margins of the global economy — as currencies crash, and companies go under, and sovereign debt instruments melt down. You can be sure that this disorder will eventually spread from the margins to the center, which is the USA. It’s already up-and-running in our politics, which might be considered the early warning system of the larger picture. In my long life of three-score and ten, I’ve never seen a political fiasco as demented as the Kavanaugh confirmation process, with its harking back to Medieval social hysterias and stunning exercises in bad faith.

This riveting horror show has also distracted the nation — and a media fully invested in compounding the psychodrama — from the momentous tectonic movements in the world’s money system, now shaking apart. Among other things, it will blow up the fantasy that Mr. Trump has magically orchestrated a new miracle economy. But it will also bring to an abrupt close the pornographic machinations of his adversaries in Swamptown. And then we will get on in earnest with the true business of the long emergency — making new arrangements, however difficult — to escape the deadly clutter of our own constructed hyper-complex hyper-reality.

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Number 5 in the Jeff Greenaway Series

Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe
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“Simply the best novel about the 1960s.”

Read the first chapter here (click) on Patreon
Buy the book at Amazon or click on the cover below
or get autographed copies from Battenkill Books


Now in Paperback !
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JHK’s Three-Act Play
A log mansion in the Adirondack Mountains…
A big family on the run…
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Other Books by JHK
The World Made By Hand Series:

Book 1:

World Made by Hand

Book 2:

The Witch of Hebron
Buy World Made By Hand Signed and local from Battenkill Books
Buy World Made By Hand on Amazon
Buy World Made By Hand at Northshire Books
Buy The Witch of Hebron signed and local from Battenkill Books
Buy The Witch of Hebron on Amazon
Buy The Witch of Hebron at Northshire Books

Book 3:

A History of the Future


Book 4:

Harrows of Spring
Signed and local from Battenkill Books
Available on Amazon
Available at Northshire Books
Signed and local from Battenkill Books
Available on Amazon
Available at Northshire Books
Geography of Nowhere
The Long Emergency
Available on Kindle
Buy The Long Emergency signed and local from Battenkill Books
Buy The Long Emergency on Amazon
Buy The Long Emergency at Northshire Books

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James Howard Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation blog is updated Mondays and Fridays. The KunstlerCast podcast and Eyesore of the Month are monthly features. Read & comment here.

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The Great 'Splainin' Cometh
The meltdown has gotten so heavy liberal bureaucrats are ready to form antigovernment militias and fretting about black helicopters —Max Blumenthal
Nov 15, 2024 • 
James Howard Kunstler
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How It Worked
"They never prepared for algorithms that could map everything. For personnel pre-positioned everywhere. For a president who counts every week like it's…
Feb 7 • 
James Howard Kunstler
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Kamala Unwinding
“. . . we are facing a catastrophic collapse of governance. With democracy reduced to a tragedy or a farce (probably both things). . . ." — Ugo Bardi
Oct 11, 2024 • 
James Howard Kunstler
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