Clusterfuck Nation

Clusterfuck Nation

Home
Notes
Contact / Bio
Eyesore of the Month
Podcast
Paintings by JHK
Books by JHK
Forecast
Archive
About

Share this post

Clusterfuck Nation
Clusterfuck Nation
The Three Rivers of Angst
Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More
User's avatar
Discover more from Clusterfuck Nation
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.
Over 30,000 subscribers
Already have an account? Sign in

The Three Rivers of Angst

James Howard Kunstler's avatar
James Howard Kunstler
May 31, 2021

Share this post

Clusterfuck Nation
Clusterfuck Nation
The Three Rivers of Angst
Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More
Share

Does Memorial Day 2021 seem an unusually grim lull between spring and summer this year? Here in the northeast, rain pounded the lakes, ballfields, and barbeque circles all weekend with the additional insult of a steady fifty-degree chill that hardly changed from noon to midnight all weekend. Anyway, the holiday is always freighted with that hush of battlefields strewn with the dead — no smiling Santa Claus, no pastel Easter eggs, and the skeletons aren’t in the mood for dancing.

Even the military looked tarnished this year with a battle royale raging over the new imposed strictures of Critical Race Theory poisoning the ranks, and the fishy spectacle of Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier, an exemplary officer, getting drummed out of his post as Commander of the new Space Force for publishing a book about all that. His firing provoked the consciences of retired generals and admirals who denounced the Pentagon’s new tilt into Marxist political activism as an existential threat to the nation — and that didn’t seem like such an exaggeration, either, considering how an America led by transsexual gunnery sergeants might meet its future foes on the fields of war.

Memorial Day also marks one year since the sacred transfiguration of George Floyd from repeat felon to patron saint of social justice, but the remembrance of all that seemed a bit wan now that officer Derek Chauvin stands convicted of murder and the Floyd family has been elevated into the financial one-percent with a $27-million settlement for the loss of George’s earnest existence. Meanwhile, America could not fail to note the 36-percent increase in the national homicide rate since that mournful afternoon in Minneapolis.

Three rivers of angst flow out of Memorial Day 2021, and it is possible to imagine how they will meet later this year and join in a mighty flood of woe over the country. The first is the toxic stream of Wokery saturating just about every institution in the USA from the armed services, to the DOJ, to education both public and private, to organized sports, to the corporate C suites and, of course, to the transmission of current events in news and social media.

Despite the torrents of mendacious narratives and fogs of gaslight deployed in this campaign, a substantial chunk of the public resists suffocation and has finally begun to fight back, especially at the grass roots local level against the dogma-driven school boards out to cancel Western Civ. Expect this to ramp up as the spring semester closes out and the schools must set the terms for resuming classes in the fall. The kids themselves are bucking the mask mandates while the parents tangle with the more vexing problems of Woke racist curricula and insane sexual propaganda. It’s going to get ugly.

Another stream of angst is the River of Covid-19. The tide has just turned on the question of where it came from, namely, the Wuhan Lab, but it’s hard to game-out both what we might do about that concerning the CCP’s role in it — plus, the roles of Dr. Fauci and our own National Institutes of Health ­— and whether the depraved administration of China Joe Biden can even acknowledge the facts. That is to say: the whole sorry episode looks like an act-of-war but carried out with America’s foolish willing collaboration.

But then a whole raft of really deadly additional questions overrides even the quandary of who’s responsible, and I refer to the future course of the disease itself, whether another wave comes back, what new variants might emerge, and the extremely spooky issue of what the long-term effects of the experimental vaccines might be. Since the news media is so untrustworthy, and these are such troubling threats, it will be very hard to locate the truth about the medical concerns.

There’s a ton of rogue commentary on the Internet about all this, and a lot of it comes from legitimate and credible doctors. But the highest official US medical authorities are crippled for now and the public is left to sort out what’s real and what’s not on our own. An aggravating factor is that so many people have been roped into taking the vaxes that they might not want to even hear about any serious problems discovered with them. One extremely worrying narrative lately surfaced is the idea that Covid-19 itself wasn’t the prime bio-weapon deployed against the world, but rather the vaccines will deliver more death than the disease. Not saying I subscribe to that theory, but it’s out there to chew on.

The third stream of angst is the big muddy river of economy-and-finance. For the moment, it’s the one drawing the least attention because the equity markets continue levering up-up-up reassuringly on ZIRP and the gold market goes mostly sideways, and Bitcoin dances up and down like the jester it is. The unemployment numbers are still grim, along with the perverse effect of jobs going unfilled due to federal relief packages. A lot of businesses wiped out by the lockdowns just aren’t coming back, and despite all the “liquidity” sloshing around stocks and bonds, there isn’t much capital really available for people who went bankrupt and need it to start up anything again. Lurking in the background to all this is the surreal government spending of “money” created from up the Federal Reserve’s wazoo on a Ponzi scheme for the ages that shows signs of ending as all Ponzis do: in ruin. Only in this case for an entire nation. We’ll end up either with no money or plenty of worthless money. Take your pick.

These days, one can only observe that the fiscal management of the Biden admin looks like just about the most reckless and clueless of any regime in US history. All of a sudden, a $10-trillion annual budget, including all the special “rescue” plans? Come on, man…. The deluge from this river of angst might easily overtake the rising waters of the other two as we stand watching on the levee of summertime. Just offstage of all this is the quirky playing-out of 2020 election audits. Gawd knows what the nation will do when faced with genuine proof that Mr. Biden is in office less than legitimately. That’ll bring on the equivalent of a five-hundred-year flood, fer sure, when angst turns to real misery.


This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit:  Kunstler.com/vaulted


Your Spring Reading ! ! !

Click here for Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books
Click here to order from Amazon


More Great  Reading!

At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right.
“Audaciously hilarious”
$7.00 — Cheap! Buy!
(Read Excerpt)

A Christmas Orphan, a tale of pluck and salvation

A child is born… but not exactly the way he thought it happened. And now he must leave home at Christmas time. $7.50 — Cheap! Buy!

Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962.
“Rollicking fun”
$7.50 — Cheap! Buy!
(Read Excerpt)


New Paintings by JHK 2020


Other Books by JHK
The World Made By Hand Series:

Book 1:

World Made by Hand

Book 2:

The Witch of Hebron

Book 3:

A History of the Future


Book 4:

Harrows of Spring
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
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

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page


Subscribe to Clusterfuck Nation

By James Howard Kunstler · Thousands of paid subscribers
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.

Share this post

Clusterfuck Nation
Clusterfuck Nation
The Three Rivers of Angst
Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More
Share

Discussion about this post

User's avatar
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
1,062

Share this post

Clusterfuck Nation
Clusterfuck Nation
The Great 'Splainin' Cometh
Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More
725
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
825

Share this post

Clusterfuck Nation
Clusterfuck Nation
How It Worked
Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More
767
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
970

Share this post

Clusterfuck Nation
Clusterfuck Nation
Kamala Unwinding
Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More
697

Ready for more?

© 2025 James Howard Kunstler
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start writingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture

Share

Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More

Create your profile

User's avatar

Only paid subscribers can comment on this post

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in

Check your email

For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.

Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.