The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle Archive
Commentary on the Flux of Events - May 15, 2001 - Nov. 14, 2001
Clusterfuck Nation launched on May 15, 2001 as “The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle: Commentary on the Flux of Events.” New entries were added to the top of a single web page. About every six months, a new web page would be created and added to while the older page would become archived. Reproduced below are the entries from May 15, 2001 to November 14, 2001, with some typographical errors corrected. The posts are presented here in chronological order.
May 15, 2001
What is this economy, this frantic moil of wasted motion and wasted energy in countless car trips amidst a uniformly ruined ecology? In the service of what? Evermore fried snacks and canned entertainment? The truth is that the American Dream enacts its daily wonderworks in a national automobile slum, and that the creation of this malign environment and all its morbid accessories has been an economic end in itself. The reckless project is now nearing its natural limits and we are faced with the consequences as forces loom to bring about the inevitable unravelling.
I didn't vote for the bastard, but I haven't been among the mob bawling about President George W. Bush's alleged lack of brains. For one thing, we just concluded eight years of political genius Bill Clinton, who accomplished nothing in two terms to truly reform our profligate national living arrangement. In fact, Bill was a child of it and a cheerleader for it, and the "miracle" boom economy of the 1990s, destined to become an object of nostalgia for today's youngsters, was counted by partisans as his signal achievement, though it only represented an acceleration of culturally suicidal habits and practices. I actually expected nothing much worse from Bush, though I did expect more intellectual rigor from some of the figures around him: Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, et al.
Now comes the unveiling of Bush's "energy policy," and it strikes me as a marvel of silliness. "W" was beaming out previews last week when he said in his Saturday radio talk, for instance, that energy conservation did not mean that anyone had to alter his style of living, you know, make sacrifices. In other words, no problem with the drive-in utopia, no problem with 11.5 car trips per day per household. No problem with the caesar salad that travels 3000 miles from its crop row to your table. There's plenty of oil, Bush says, and all we have to do is remove the "bottlenecks" in the market and the fuel will flow freely and cheaply for as far into the future as we can imagine.
To put it mildly, there are a lot of intelligent people even in America who do not subscribe to that view. While I have never been fond of conspiracy theories -- because people simply can't keep secrets -- I really have to wonder whether the Bush gang is trying to conceal some really bad news from the nation, namely that we are approaching peak oil production world-wide, and that this condition implies a long period ahead of chronic instability, economic uncertainty, and political stress.
Interestingly to me, the one measure absent from Bush's energy policy is an agenda for "Smart Growth" as it has come to be called, a reform of the suburban sprawl development pattern that is in the process of becoming a completely dysfunctional armature for "normal" life. Not a peep on this. I take it as a sign of serious political psychosis that our leaders believe it is even possible to continue land development in the manner of Atlanta and Phoenix. The California power crisis will probably demonstrate the gap between policy and reality before the summer is over. If it is a hot summer, the cost of air conditioning is going to shock citizens all over the nation, but in the Sun Belt, where the heat lasts longest and gets most severe, physical suffering may mutate into rage and social disorder.
In the meantime, we are seeing another effort by the Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve to ease credit and create more "money" in an effort to keep investment flowing to the developers of redundant big box discount stores, strip malls, suburban subdivisions, and all the other components of the "world's highest standard of living." The creation of so much fictional "wealth" is in itself a very dangerous game for a complex society, and any failure of the collective hallucination sustaining it is apt to amplify the political dangers of an energy crisis.
May 25, 2001
I've maintained for a while that Big Box stores and national chain retail do not have a bright future in the clusterfuck economy and that they will tank with remarkable swiftness sooner rather than later.
Yesterday I popped into a Staples store by happenstance -- well, the fact is we don't have an office supply store downtown anymore. These days, that means computers, and I was in search of a universal BUS hub for mine so I could hook up a new digital camera without unhooking my zip drive. The Staples is located in a "power center" strip mall two miles north of Saratoga in what was previously the little farming township of Wilton, which has exploded, since 1975, into a spewage of strips, fried food huts, and cul-de-sac dwelling bunkers.
It was at once obvious that this store was staffed by a skeleton crew. With some difficulty I found a clerk who was free to help me find the item. He was man in his forties with -- I'm not saying this merely in hindsight -- an unbalanced gleam in his eyes. But I didn't think more of it just then, and I followed him down an aisle to the computer accessories. I was examining two different models in their plastic theft-guard trappings, trying to make out what the power supply unit amounted to, and asking the clerk questions, when he grabbed the modems away from me and more or less tossed them back onto the bottom of the rack. He seemed to do this out of impatience and consternation, as if I was taking up an unpardonable amount of his time. Then he marched away.
I was pretty amazed by this, of course. I followed him to the back of the store and asked his name. By this time, I was close enough to read his plastic name badge. It said Buzz _______." He noticed me reading it so he stepped forward, holding the badge out from his shirt so as to assist me reading it (and demonstrate his fearlessness of customer wrath). I asked him what the hell was going on. He simply said, "I'm not helping you anymore, sir. Go find someone else."
So I did, But not before I asked to see the manager ( he was at lunch), and/or the assistant manager (he wasn't coming in that day). Anyway, I ended up not buying one of their modems largely because I'd decided that I didn't want to give Staples another nickel in my lifetime. On my way back to the house, I stopped at Radio Shack to see what they had in BUS hubs. They're most recent campaign was to plant in the customers' minds the idea that they are now the place to go for computer stuff. Guess what. They didn't have a BUS hub and the clerk said they never carry them. So, I made up my mind to get the damn thing from a catelog or on-line.
The point of all this is that my dreary experience in big box land yesterday was not the exception. More and more, as the credit overhang totters, and less "money" is spent by "the consumer," these national retail operations desperately attempt to maintain profitability by cutting one of their only variable costs: store clerk salaries. They are now down below the bare minimum in staff needed to leave many customer with anything but a negative impression of being there. And, of course, this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop, because the more they cut down on service, the less business they are apt to generate, and so on.
This curious predicament may or may not be extrinsic to the other forces now gathering to drive them out of business -- and to do so mercilessly when the time comes -- it it can only hasten their demise. National chain retail is based on economies of scale that require the company to move immense amounts of stuff vast distances at very narrow profit margins. If anything changes in their business equation, those profits vanish. Right now, the two factors causing distress to the national chains are the price of gasoline for trucking and the price of natural gas for heating and electricity (i.e. air conditioning this time of year).
This should remind us that systems failure can occur when even part of a complex system fails only partially, a law which applies to virtually all the complex systems that comprise the clusterfuck economy.
The difficult part for the nation is that when the national chains go down swiftly, their places will not be as swiftly reoccupied by operators doing business at lesser scales -- that is, by local small business -- because the chains have killed off a generation of small business people and the skill and knowledge needed to do it has been lost. In the retail world of smaller locally-owned stores, this knowledge and skill was traditionally transmitted through families, as children took over their parents' business. The reorganization of retail commerce in Clusterfuck Nation is going to be a harsh and difficult assignment. Prepare for a world of less shopping.
June 15, 2001
The last few days I have found myself in one corporate clusterfuck after another, suggesting that we have entered the realm, described by historian Joseph Tainter, as the over-investment in complexity with diminishing returns that brings civilizations to their knees. Nothing works right in corporate internet America.
Somebody kindly gave me a Kodak digital camera as a gift, and I need another USB cable to connect the camera to my laptap on the road. I go to Kodak's website. Guess what the only item not listed in the "accessories" department of the page for this particular model (DX-3500)?? That's right, the cable. What's more, deeper exploration shows that it is nearly impossible to even find a phone number for the Kodak sales department on the website. I finally did, after about 67 mouse-clicks down a deep dark corner of the site. Do these people want to communicate with their customers?? I don't think so. Apparently they don't even want to sell parts.
Today, after loading my copy of MS Word onto a new laptop, Microsoft would not accept my registration by internet. Five times it failed. So, I go directly to their website in search of a telephone number. Forget it. They don't really want customers to use their products.
By the way, how many of you have been in telephone computer tree hell this week?? I know I have at least six times. Despite all the propaganda we hear on the airwaves about "communication," corporate America really doesn't want to talk to anyone (or get e-mail either -- neither Kodak or Microsoft offered any simple way to contact them by phone on their sites). Of note: NPR ran a story tonight about trying to contact Damiler-Chrysler in order to interview an executive for the show. The whole massive Daimler-Chrysler website grudged up only one phone number (in the back alleys of the site, of course), and when the NPR reporter called it, a recording said that everybody was "out to lunch." I am not making this up.
Now, despite the fact that I generally denigrate my culture as moronic, the fact is that there are plenty of clever people working for these companies. So the conclusion I must draw is that even very clever people cannot get a grip on the new technology of which they pretend to be masters. The telephone thing is even more mysterious,since these phone trees obviously drive customers ape-shit. Kunstler's secret theory is that any company that gets live human beings to answer their phones will succeed magnificently. Conversely, if companies like Microsoft, Eastman Kodak, and Daimler-Chrysler do not answer their phones, that is a sign that we are truly fucked.
July 10, 2001
Welcome to the horse latitudes of politics and economics. Nothing stirs in the hot still air. The big lake appears mirror calm. Will Americans remember this as the last golden summer before their world changed?
The frantic floating hustle we call the economy -- this tenuous network of shit service jobs, ridiculously overpaid executives, easy credit for the discreditable, discount merchandise made half a world away, mandatory commuting across a spiritually toxic landscape of cancerous real estate development -- the whole demoralizing jury-rigged vessel appears to keep chugging along on this still water. No sails required, after all. It's powered by cheap oil.
But great forces are underway beyond the horizon, like a powerful punishing storm.
Violence escalates in Israel and the Palestinian territories. This time there will be no more talk of cease fires and resumed peace negotiations. The two sides have utterly depleted their tiny funds of trust in the abstract idea of mutual good intentions. The Palestinian suicide bomb squads are finally beyond the control of the Palestinian authorities. Before long, the acts of provocation and retaliation will draw other Muslim states into the conflict. Syria, Lebenon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, perhaps Egypt, Iraq. Israel has the military capacity to fend them off, if not completely defeat all of them. But not in a way that will warm the hearts of the so-called international community. And when they are humiliated, the Muslim states will next turn their ire on Israel's chief ally, the US. "Why are you still selling them cheap oil?" the others will ask Saudi Arabia. "The best friend of our enemy is our enemy."
The US, meanwhile, will have desperately tried to stay out of the conflict, hoping that the Israelis can defend themselves, and hoping (foolishly) that events will not alter international oil market relations.
If a squeeze is put on America's oil umbilical cord to the Mideast supply points, our country will find a pretext to enter the military conflict, with the short-term goal of occupying the Arabian peninsula and controlling the oil resources there. This will be a vain enterprise for several reasons. One is that there aren't enough American troops to prevent fatal sabotage to the delicate infrastructure of oil extraction: the well-heads, the pipelines, the terminal facilities, etc. They can be blown up and crippled too easily, and there will be no shortage of volunteers to do so. Another reason is that while Saudi Arabia is of supreme importance to America's bottomless oil thirst, it is not the only source of our oil imports, and under the scenario I am drawing, other suppliers to the international oil markets will also be disrupted or disabled, including Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and the former Soviet republics deep along Asia's vast middle where many US oil companies have pinned their hopes for future extraction. The US military is not going to occupy all the lands once briefly conquered by Alexander the Great.
The catch to all this (and, like the famous Catch-22, it's some catch) is that America in its current economic and logistical configuration cannot tolerate even a minor interruption in its super-colossal oil import stream. If the scenario above were to play out, then all bets are off for the world's highest standard of living. Forget about the stock market, forget about "consumer confidence," forget about leisurely vacations to theme parks, forget about all the frozen tater tots you can cram down your craw, forget about easy credit for the unworthy, forget about normal life as it was known in that fantasy era that lasted fifty years after World War Two.
September 6, 2001
The cool snap in the late summer air is nature's reminder for us to get serious again. Events now compel our attention. It ought to be obvious, for instance, that continuing interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve will not stop the various stock markets from whirling around the drain. With price-to-earnings ratios still historically high at 27:1, you can bet that there is plenty of flubber to work out, and that the P/E ratio on the downside will most likely overshoot the historic average of 14.5:1 to something like 10:1 before the carnage is over.
The boom economy of the 1990s had some dirty secrets.
The boom was financial not economic. That is, most of the perceived gains were on paper, not in the creation of real wealth or things of enduring value.
Many of the "creative" securities and financial instruments devised to take advantage of interest differentials and high-velocity currency movements will prove to be intrinsically valueless. And they will take down large institutions, currencies, even governments, when their lack of value becomes manifest.
In the United States, the economy was about the creation of suburban sprawl, that is, massive investment in a living arrangement, and its furnishings, with poor prospects of utility in the long term. In other words, we built ourselves a national theme park, not a civilized human ecology.
Not only did American families and individuals take on unprecedented and unsustainable amounts of debt, but the entire lending system in the United States was degraded in order to maximize "consumer banking" traffic. In short, we have institutionalized massive extensions of credit to people in no position to pay back their loans, many of them unsecured.
Computerization, indeed the whole computer sector of the economy actually did nothing to improve so-called economic productivity.
So far, nearly $4 trillion of capital value has been wiped out in the telecom sector worldwide, and more than $1 trillion of bank loans and junk bonds are in jeopardy.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the level of conflict slowly and steadily escalated over the summer as the recognition dawned on even politically progressive Israelis that the Palestinians are basically not interested in peace, but rather are determined to get rid of Israel by any means necessary. The US has tried to sustain the fiction that we can tell the Israelis what to do. But the Israelis, too, will defend themselves by any means necessary, whether we like it or not.
The assassination in August of Abu Ali Mustafa, General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was intended to send two signals: One to Yasir Arafat, to let him know that a rocket with the initials Y.A. could also find its way into his window. Second to Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad to stay the fuck out of the conflict. Assad had hoped to use Abu Ali Mustafa to organize all the disparate terrorist groups in the Israeli / Palestine region and then place them under control of the Syrian high command. He had also scheduled a visit by Arafat to Syria on Sept 16 to sign a treaty of Syrian support for the Palestinians. We will now see if that takes place.
In any case, the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur holidays are almost upon us and these are traditionally times when Muslim fanatics choose to make mischief in the Middle East.
By the way, the main reason we follow these events is not out of ethnic chauvinism, but because we believe that the Middle East will be a key event in the coming disruption of global oil markets.
September 12, 2001
The dark of events of Tuesday September 11 compel us to recognize that we are at war with Jihad, the multinational campaign against western civilization. We should expect the full fury of the American military to be brought to bear, serially, on several Islamic capitals, though it is very doubtful that we could ever control the actual territory of these nations, or should wish to or hope to.
Right now, in the rush of media reports, news is scant about what the American military is actually doing.
The following seems to me to be an appropriate unfolding response to the vicious attacks on United States territory.
It would seem appropriate, first, to demand that the Taliban government of the poor and wretched nation of Afghanistan produce the terrorist Osama Bin Ladin and his assistants and place them in the hands of NATO authorities within a very brisk time frame. Failure to comply ought to result in the complete destruction of Kabul and other Taliban-controlled towns.
Second, the people of Iraq should be warned to depart their capital city, Baghdad, which should then be completely destroyed.
The nation of Israel should begin immediately the deportation of Palestinians from the West Bank to the Kingdom of Jordan. The people of Gaza Strip should be transported to Egypt, and the Gaza incorporated into the state of Israel.
The government of Syria should be notified to begin evacuations of Damascus pending its destruction within a short time frame. Ditto Tripoli, capital of Lybia.
Americans must face the harsh fact that it is now necessary to put Jihad out of business.
The events of Sept 11th will only accelerate the problems Americans face vis-a-vis our inordinate use of oil, and our hyper oil-dependent living arrangements.
Prepare for war and austerity.
September 14, 2001
It appears today, based on some news reports, that our NATO allies may not be so avid to pursue joint military action with the United States as we had hoped or believed a day ago when Secretary of State Powell commenced his global telephoning of NATO leaders.
Perhaps it was naive to suppose that the United States wouldn't have to pursue military operations alone. But in the world of realpolitik, it was, after all, us who were attacked in this instance and not the Europeans. Perhaps they believe that terrorists will let them alone in order to concentrate their malice on the Great Satan. History would seem to instruct us that Europe is enjoying a mere pause in the usual harassments they have suffered at the hands of Islamic terrorists, and when terrorist attacks resume in Europe, their mutual interest with the United States may be rekindled. For now, it may be futile to condition American military plans on the transient feelings of other nations.
Perhaps the Russians will still provide the US with forward base facilities to enter Afghanistan for the necessary but ugly job of putting Taliban out of business. The Russians, after all, have as much interest in neutralizing radical Islam on their borders as we have, separated by an ocean and half-a-hemisphere.
The Pakistanis appear to be waffling in their commitment to provide assistance for military action against the Taliban.
In any case, further reflection prompts me to advance these tactical considerations for our response to the attacks of Tuesday, Sept 11th.
Afghanistan is the poorest and most wretched state in central Asia. However, it occupies forbidding, landlocked terrain that has defeated some of the great powers of modern times, first the British empire at its height, and more recently the Soviet army. Unlike the British of the late 19th century, the U.S. has the ability to project air power into Afghanistan from thousands of miles away. Conventional wisdom states that air power alone cannot necessarily defeat even weak adversaries. That may be true even with wretched Afghanistan, but there is little meaningful infrastructure remaining in Kabul, and a modest application of air power might tip the country into the Bronze Age.
Unlike the Soviets of the 1980s, the U.S. military is not a demoralized institution. The terrain may be extremely challenging, but it is not jungle like Vietnam. It doesn't afford cover in the same way. That said, the prospects for controlling Afghan territory indefinitely would appear dubious. Yet the need to disable Taliban remains pressing.
It seems to me that there is an urgent need for the United States to gain control of the stockpiles of anthrax, smallpox, other biological and chemical agents, and nuclear experiments within the territory of Iraq. How this operation might be carried out, I cannot begin to try to describe, except to say that it would require both tremendous brute military force and delicacy of execution. But what is the alternative? To wonder what Saddam Hussein might choose to do with these materials?
September 17, 2001
America and the world wait for the other shoe to drop. The national spectacle of hand-wringing on television and in the newspapers has reached a climax and now we will be faced with the need to act. The time for candlelight vigils and teddy bear mounds is over.
Notice that there is virtually no discussion in the news about what this conflict portends for global oil markets and our imports in particular. The likelihood is disruption of markets and supplies from any angle that you view the situation, and America has got to prepare at once for major changes in our living arrangements. For only one example, it is imperative to begin right away to increase rail service for trips in the 500-mile range. These are the trips responsible for congesting American air traffic over the past decade. The railroad lines from Boston and New York to Washington and from Atlanta and Charlotte to Washington have got to be fixed, enlarged, and brought up to the highest level of service. One could make a long list of the routes needed and the cities to be connected by restored rail.
The global scene presents ominous possibilities. We probably must recognize that Pakistan is a nation on the verge of collapse and that the current crisis will likely bring on that collapse. In the event, I expect the Indian army to both protect their regional interest and to act as proxies for western interests in a weird reversal of the events of the late 1940s: that is, India will be compelled to take political control of Pakistan. India cannot afford a nuclear neighbor melting into political chaos with Islamic fundamentalists taking the lead in a civil war.
I remain convinced that the US will have to mount an aggressive action against Iraq. We are deeply concerned about "rogue" states and especially their stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. We know of at least one huge stockpile of these things, and we know that they are in Iraq. Can we afford to not neutralize it?
Many Americans, including high government officials, fear that additional terrorists at large inside the US will perpetrate more acts of violence and terror -- a release of anthrax, smallpox, Sarin nerve gas, and maybe even a nuclear device. Some of these scenarios may sound far-fetched, but seven days ago so did the idea of collapsing the twin towers of the WTC with fully-fueled commercial airliners, and striking the Pentagon at will. In the event that further acts of terrorism occur, it may become sadly necessary to resort to tactical nuclear weapons against our adversaries.
"Normal" life as we knew it before Tuesday Sept 11 is really over. We live in a new era of national emergency.
September 18, 2001
A commentator on NPR (Scott Simon, I think) took some pains to explain the "Powell Doctrine" of military engagement that has become a kind of benchmark for American thinking about armed conflict. As I understand it, the Powell Doctrine states that America should only engage an enemy when we are certain that our force is overwhelming; that we should only engage when the entry points are secure; that we should have absolutely clear goals; and that we must be certain of a safe exit.
While I certainly admire Secretary Powell, it seems to me that his doctrine applies only to the nation that we ceased to be on Sept 11. The historical truth of the matter is that nations are compelled to enter armed conflicts without the assurance that their force can overwhelm their enemy's; often with no safe and certain entry point; often with only the most general goal to defeat and disarm the enemy; and with no guaranteed outcome or exit point.
The American colonies did not engage the British empire with any notion of possessing overwhelming force; or knowing what the outcome might be. The same might be said of any war, really. In the perverse way that history often works, the Powell Doctrine only corroborated the circumstances of the Gulf War after the fact. Of course the US Military possessed overwhelming power compared to Iraq's; of course the way in was assured by other Islamic states shocked by the takeover of their neighbor Kuwait; our goal of restoring Kuwait's sovereignty was highly limited (and arguably inadequate in hindsight); and the way out was of our own choosing
Americans should not assume that things are so certain this time.
It is hard not to observe in the blizzard of commentary how America has been afflicted by decades of cultural relativism, and the systematic emasculation of our intellectual classes. Many of the voices I hear would seem to be content if we bombed Afghanistan with teddy bears in the hope that they might be hugged back to liking us more.
September 20, 2001
Pakistan continues to wobble.
Pakistani leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf's government may not survive its declarations of limited support to the US for mounting any military adventures in neighboring Afghanistan. The concern now is that Pakistan will implode politically and that radical Islamic factions will gain control of the government, as well as Pakistan's arsenal of about two dozen nuclear devices.
My guess is that this is the point at which we will join with India to gain control over those weapons and, incidentally, political control over the territory of Pakistan, which will then have to be reincorporated in some fashion into India, a return to status quo ante of the subcontinent before the political upheavals of the late 1940s, which split the former British colony into separate Muslim and non-Muslim nations.
Has anyone noticed that there is virtually no discussion in the newspapers, television, or radio about our dependence on the oil produced in this part of the world? Altogether, about 90 percent of the world's remaining petroleum reserves exist in west and central Asia. Even moderate disruptions to the supply lines will compel Americans to make other arrangements for daily life. Say goodbye to Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels."
There is so much to do just here at home in terms of re-ordering American life, that it will probably occupy the lifetimes of most Americans now living. It implies the re-scaling of virtually all our accustomed activities, from our egregious dependence on cars and the infrastructure of suburbia, to the repair of our existing towns and cities, to the re-invention of local smaller-scaled agriculture, to the reorganization of schools on a much smaller and far more localized basis, to the return of local and regional commercial relations when the Big Box chains lose their ability to function under the new math of austerity, to the re-orientation of a national intellectual life that has been systematically infantilized and emasculated (particularly the unviersities), to the reform of architecture, and much more.
The following suggestion may seem silly in light of the gravity of events, but here goes anyway. I urge all American corporations to give up their computer-assisted telephone answering systems and replace them with real human operators. Computer phone answering systems are doing more to defeat normal business transactions, and to demoralize ordinary citizens in their daily relations than we realize. Computerized phone answering systems have produced unintended consequences of deep diminishing returns, botching countless transactions and making life needlessly more difficult. Do what you can do persuade your company to hire real telephone operators.
September 21, 2001
Last night President Bush climaxed a week of national bucking-up with a rough outline for American military action and the ultimatum to Afghanistan, the poorest and wretchedest country in Asia. It appears pretty certain that we are going into their mountain redoubt and try to kick their scrawny asses. I give Bush a B for awkward delivery but an A for straight talk. Whether it is possible to kick Afghanistan's ass is a pretty ripe question.
The conventional wisdom reverberating around the media-waves says that Afghanistan has historically defeated three empires: First Alexander the Great, then the British, finally the Soviet Union. The truth, I reckon, is not so cut-and-dried. Alexander's empire was already ridiculously hyper-extended by the time he got to central Asia. Just how do you suppose he was going to administrate all that territory from back home in the Mediterranean?
We've heard many recitations of Kipling's poem about the poor redcoats slaughtered by merciless Afghani warriors this past week, but the truth is that England essentially remained in control there until the Raj was disbanded after World War II, when a bankrupted England lost its capacity for farflung colonial administration.. The Soviets were defeated by a.) their own demoralized system and the demoralized army that was propping it up, combined with b.) the forbidding Afghan terrain, and c.) ridiculous political goals.
This is not to say that America will have a satisfactory outcome in Afghanistan, but if our goals are limited to putting the chief operators of Taliban out of business, and running Osama Bin Laden into a rathole, we may succeed. It remains to be seen whether even the slightest aggression on America's part arouses a greater trans-national Jihad against us. I think it will. Despite this week's tireless diplomacy by Secretary of State Powell, the truth remains that a lot of ordinary people in that part of the world hate us rabidly.
I believe the US will go after Iraq next, perhaps even at the same time -- using Afghanistan as a diversion. Whether you believe we have a score to settle with Sadaam Hussein, or not, there remains the problem of his biological-and-nuclear weapons stockpiles, and I would be very surprised if US authorities were not terribly anxious to get them out of his hands.
Under the circumstances, events may easily ramp out of control. If the Saudi kingdom crumbles, we will have a very hard time controlling the infrastructure of oil there -- the wellheads, pipelines, and terminal facilities. There will certainly be no shortage of saboteurs, and there are not enough American soldiers to guard it all, let alone control the territory of the whole Arabian peninsula. Got knows where that may lead, but most likely to badly disrupted world oil markets.
Alan Greenspan made a great effort yesterday to declare that the American economy is undergirded by deep essential soundness, but this is complete bullshit. Our economy has been based on creating suburban sprawl and then furnishing it, and without regular absolutely dependable supplies of very cheap oil, that particular game is over. Of course, we could generate a hell of a lot of internal economic activity by retrofitting the everyday environment for a new post-cheap-oil economy -- for instance, restoring all those railroad networks between cities 500 miles apart -- but we're more apt to be stuck in the psychology of previous investment, the mindset that we're entitled to a drive-in utopia no matter what eventsin reality dictate. And then we'll be set for a fight here at home over the table scraps of the 20th century.
September 23, 2001
Something about Secretary Colin Powell's appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" show Sunday morning at nine seemed nervous, hesitant, uncomfortable. Now, perhaps, we know what's up: our "staunch" ally, Saudi Arabia may have flip-flopped on its promised cooporation and support for US military operations against terrorists. Even more ominous, the Saudi regime headed by King Fahd may be toppling. Fahd left his country last Wednesday for Switzerland, ostensibly after suffering a stroke, leaving the far more xenophobic Crown Prince Abdullah on the throne.
In the event of US strikes against any Muslim state, terror gang, or individual, we may now expect a cutoff of Saudi oil imports at any time.
September 27, 2001
I traveled to Arlington, Texas, Tuesday and Wednesday, to give a talk to the chamber of commerce. Having not ventured into the Sunbelt for a few months, I was shocked to be reminded first-hand of what self-made wastelands many Mid-Americans live in.
Arlington occupies an area that appears geographically as large as Greater London, but it is composed of little besides tilt-up drive-in pawnshops punctuated here and there by Darth Vadar Corporate towers. Its "historic downtown" looks like a bombing range. Its economy revolves around a "Six Flags" theme park and the Texas Ranger's baseball team. The chamber of commerce is struggling to come up with "a winter attraction" because they view their economy as being based on tourism.
The ballpark is a stunningly well-designed building for its monumental type, rich in exterior details -- friezes, arches, rusticated base, handsome entrance marquees -- but there is absolutely nothing around it for miles except parking and highway infrastructure. It stands amid the off-ramps and the free parking like a terrible ziggurat of a lost civilization.
I talked to many of the movers-and-shakers in the chamber of commerce and they were uniformly clueless about the predicament they faced. They can't imagine a way of life based on something other than continual driving. I told the luncheon audience that their way of life was liable to dry up and blow away unless they started immediately to change their living arrangements. They took this rather harsh message politely, but I can't say how seriously. Alas, I had to leave for the airport almost at once after finishing my spiel because of longer check-ins.
The very palpable ambience of hyper-religiosity was a disturbing counterpoint to the ghastliness of the built-upon landscape. One senses that these Americans feel that they will be excused from any foolishness as long as they are pious enough. I told them that history was indifferent to the success or failure of American civilization. I don't know how they felt about that, either.
These Americans will send their sons and daughters off to die in the desert sands half a world a way to defend a collection of off-ramps. How long will it be before those sons and daughters are demoralized by their assignment?
Northwest Airlines was operating with a skeleton crew -- only two flight attendents on any leg of the journey, out and back. Landing in Detroit, the crew had trouble hooking up with the jetway, as if they hadn't practiced it enough. No more meals on domestic flights except first class. Airport security seems only cosmetically improved.
I note today that CNN is running a piece saying that it's Americans' patriotic duty to go out and shop for the sake of the "consumer economy."
September 28, 2001
Granted, I'm an amateur economist, but I don't think the airlines are ever coming back to financial solvency or to the robust condition they enjoyed before year 2001. In his cheerleading yesterday, George Bush inadvertently revealed some sad and ugly truths about the American economy -- that it has been composed of sheer fluff like theme park attendence and other forms of tourism. In the era of austerity that we have entered, tourism will be about the last thing people are apt to spend money on, and we should be prepared for this, not continue nourishing the delusion that we can have an economy based on an endless chain of hamburgers and entertainments.
The best shot that the airlines have to avoid collapse right now is to aggressively join in an effort to ressurect a meaningful national rail service -- especially for those trips in the 500-mile range that have caused all the "congestion" in US airports. By the way, freight has got to be considered a crucial part of this. The lack of public discussion about on this subject reveals a huge failure of the American imagination.
The commercial air industry faces not only horrendous security problems, and customer confidence problems, but an even greater and probably fatal problem: the coming disruption of world oil markets. Like the national chain discount stores, airlines can only run profitably if the supply of fuel is absolutely guaranteed and reliably cheap. Disrupt that equation just a little bit and the airlines are finished as we have known them.
America has an enormous job to get on with here at home: the downscaling of our hypertrophied living arrangements. Nurturing the delusion that we can keep on visiting each other's theme parks is a disservice to the public interest.
September 30, 2001
The price of a barrel of benchmark crude oil has fallen from around $30 to around $20 since the Attacks of 9-11-01, as world business halts in a haze of anxiety, waiting for that other shoe to drop (perhaps a whole warehouse full of shoes, of many nations). The conventional theory-du-jour, as expressed for instance in today's Sunday new York Times, says that oil prices may remain depressed a long time as the so-called global economy falls into "recession." "Consumers" (as US citizens are called) will benefit, they say, from lower gas prices, etc.
More likely, I believe, is that the US may not be able to avoid a wider military engagement with the Muslim world -- in which case oil will be used as an economic weapon against us, one way or another, either by OPEC, or by individual oil-producing nations, or by extremists in the Middle East who wish to make a bad situation a whole lot worse. We ought to recognize that oil infrastucture -- well-heads, pipelines, and port facilities -- can be sabotaged easily in places such as Saudi Arabia, and that even if the US were to try to occupy the Arabian Peninsula, we would not have enough troops to protect all this equipment.
It seems to me that the American public should be prepared for disrupted oil imports and all that portends for us economically. Are the news media asleep?
October 8, 2001
Anti-Israeli / Pro-Palestinian propaganda is kicking in with remarkable potency here in upstate New York. Out for dinner last night, the day that the bombings of Afganistan began, a good friend of the female persuasion offered the standard argument that our conflict with world terrorism boiled down to America's slavishly uncritical support of Israel and the consequent oppression of the Palestinian people. Why the propaganda is effective, I shall try to address presently.
The Palestinians deserve a homeland, she said.
Perhaps they do, I said, but the catch is that the Palestinian leadership will accept nothing less than all the territory occupied by the state of Israel -- meaning, not only do the Palestinians want a homeland, but they want it to be in exactly the same space occupied by Israel, and since the laws of physics declare that two entities cannot occupy the same place at the same time, this problem has no realistic solution.
This was how the Oslo negotiations finally concluded (and fell apart). The Israeli government under Ehud Barak had negotiated for more than a year in good faith, and offered enormous consessions in real estate to the Palestinans. But in the end, forces within the Palestinian command decided that nothing less than the elimination of the state of Israel itself would do.
Of course this outcome was extremely unfortunate. By the 1980s, the Palestinian people had been integrating successfuly into the Israeli economy. Actual Palestniian citizens of Israel (and there are plenty) enjoyed civil rights greater than individuals in any Muslim nation. Conditions were approaching a point at which one could at least imagine both Muslims and Jews living peacefully in the territory that is the sovereign nation called Israel. Two things happened to scuttle that possibility. One was the Palestinian population bomb -- and extraordinary high birth-rate in the poorest of the Palestinian territories, Gaza in particular -- which has now produced a very large cohort of young men, high on testosterone, with no employment, and poor prospects, who are easily provoked to rage and reckless action by more seasoned professional extremists.
The second element is the remarkable availability of small arms to even the poorest people of the world. Five teenagers armed with AK-47s and a half dozen grenades can create world-class mayhem. And the various networks of muslim extremists and terrorists (and governments!) have done an excellent job in supplying these small arms liberally among the most hopeless classes of west and central Asia. The result, in its most complete form, is the kind of anarchy-by-attrition that we have now seen in a dozen or so third-world countries, from Liberia to Somalia to Afghanistan: the last gang left standing becomes the "government." This is what give the world monsters like Charles Taylor of Liberia, who employed 11-year-old foot soldiers and kept them high on marijuana as they shot up civilian villages and city neighborhoods in Monrovia for the sheer fun of it (kids enjoy playing "war.") This is what gave the world the monstrous Taliban regime. It was all predicted, by the way, with stunning accuracy by Robert Kaplan in his several books about global politics, especially The Coming Anarchy.
Now, why is it that Americans of the educated classes, with many Jewish friends, are suddenly expressing so much sympathy for the Palestinian cause (the desire for a homeland)? My impression is that they weren't paying attention to the Oslo process that took place over the last several years. The lady at our dinner table last night seemed surprised to hear that the Palestinians will settle for nothing less than Israel vacating all the land currently within its borders and handing it over to the Palestinians. But this is the truth of where things stand. And it is not going to happen.
October 10, 2001
Osama bin Laden is widely acknowledged as a great criminal genius. If he is so smart, can anybody explain why, in his chastising videotape shown worldwide a few days ago, he was wearing a green jungle camouflage outfit against a background of ochre desert rock?
October 12, 2001
Will the moiling Muslim masses heed the extremists' call for Jihad against America? We may not have an answer for a week or so. This has been the great goal of the al Queda network, and this is their magic moment, so to speak, and if they fail to stir those masses with their appeals for worldwide violence, we all may perhaps breathe a little more easily. Or not.
One mystery of this dark season is why al Queda and its associates have not bombed any of the oil infrastructure of the Middle East, especially the pipelines and well-heads of Saudi Arabia. The ruling Saudi royal family depends utterly on its oil exports to retain power, and Mr. bin Laden's hatred for them is exceeded only by his hatred of America. So, he could greatly injure his two greatest enemies at one stroke. I present this as a tactical consideration that we must take into account, not a helpful hint to terrorists.
Meanwhile, a surreal mood prevails in America. We desperately want normal life to resume -- those narcotic raptures of pro sports, recreational shopping, theme park visits, melted cheese snacking, and endless motoring. We had better be prepared for the necessity of living differently. All the choruses of God Bless America ever sung will not prevent the imperatives of a new reality from asserting itself. I speak of the necessary downscaling of our activities. We must live closer together, travel fewer miles to our work, revive local economies, and pay attention to the demands of a new reality. For instance, instead of singing God Bless America another time, I'd like to hear some discussion about restoring passenger rail service in this country.
I didn't vote for guy, but I thought Mr. Bush handled himself pretty well in his press conference last night.
October 16, 2001
Get ready for the grand defense of suburbia as an ongoing and increasingly weird feature of our national psychology. The catch is that the suburban living arrangement is exactly what makes this nation vulnurable to the whims of the people who control eighty percent of the world's remaining oil reserves (and roughly fifty percent of our current imports). Americans will rush to defend suburbia because it represents the American Way of Life, the American Dream, even as suburbia rapidly fails as a plausible daily environment. The picture will be confused further by the notion that cities are places where terrible things happen.
The automatic defense of suburbia will cause dreadful political problems here at home, of course, because it is a delusional enterprise. The truth is that suburbia is yesterday's tomorrow. Its time is over. The peculiar circumstances that allowed suburbia to flourish for half a century are in the process of changing drastically and radically. Circumstances will now compel Americans to change the way we live, whether we like it or not. The defense of suburbia will represent a huge and futile rear-guard action against the inevitable. But life is tragic. Nations often decide, tragically, to cherish very self-destructive beliefs. Many Americans will cherish the tragic delusion that we are entitled to live in a drive-in utopia. As it becomes increasingly impossible to sustain that way of life, some communities or regions -- I'm thinking of the Sunbelt -- will turn in desperation to extremist politicians in the hopes that they can hold back the forces of changed circumstance. They will only make things worse.
I've had an odd little fantasy lately in which Americans become so direly nostalgic for the fat years of the 1990s that they turn to Bill Clinton at some desperate moment in the future and beg him to become, in effect, emperor: Bill the First. I'm not saying this because I hate Bill Clinton (I voted for the guy twice), but because I believe that the forces of history are deeply perverse, and often bring about stunningly fantastic events.
Deprived of our accustomed flood of imported oil, anything could happen here in the USA.
October 18, 2001
Seymour Hersh writes in the Oct 18 issue of the New Yorker magazine:
"The American military response [to the Sept. 11 attacks] has triggered alarm in the international oil community and among intelligence officials who have been briefed on a still secret C.I.A. study, put together in the mid-eighties, of the vulnerability of the Saudi fields to terrorist attack. The report was "so sensitive," a former C.I.A. officer told me, "that it was put on typed paper," and not into the agency's computer system, meaning that distribution was limited to a select few. According to someone who saw the report, it concluded that with only a small amount of explosives terrorists could take the oil fields off line for two years.
"The concerns, both in America and in Saudi Arabia, about the security of the fields have become more urgent than ever since September 11th. A former high-level intelligence official depicted the Saudi rulers as nervously "sitting on a keg of dynamite"—that is, the oil reserves. "They're petrified that somebody's going to light the fuse."
"The United States is hostage to the stability of the Saudi system," a prominent Middle Eastern oil man, who did not wish to be cited by name, told me in a recent interview. "It's time to start facing the truth. The war was declared by bin Laden, but there are thousands of bin Ladens. They are setting the game—the agenda. It's a new form of war. This fabulous military machine you have is completely useless." The oil man, who has worked closely with the Saudi leadership for three decades, added, "People like me have been deceiving you. We talk about how you don't understand Islam, but it's a vanilla analysis. We try to please you, but we've been aggrieved for years."
The Saudi regime "will explode in time," he said. "It has been playing a delicate game." As for the terrorists responsible for the September 11th attacks, he said, "Now they decide the timing. If they do a similar operation in Saudi Arabia, the price of oil will go up to one hundred dollars a barrel"—more than four times what it is today.
October 22, 2001
We have not heard the "D" word so far, but signs indicate that the fragile web-of-relations known as the global economy is sinking into a genuine depression, and the US economy with it. The chief casualty of the War Against Terror appears to be the easy movement of people and goods across international borders.
Now here's a dilemma: one of things that the US government has committed itself to do is much more careful customs inspections of shipments entering the US. Prior to 9/11/01 only two percent of shipping containers and trucks were examined at ports-of-entry and borders. The ease of offloading cheap merchandise made far far away was one of the elements that allowed discount "big box" shopping to thrive during the past two decades. (Next time you go to Wal-Mart, look at where your purchase was made. It always says somewhere on the merchandise.) What will happen now that America is obliged to actually inspect the stuff coming in?
For one, thing, I'm not convinced that we're even capable of doing better than we had been doing.
Assuming that we try to take a better look, the most obvious consequence will be a tremendous slow-up in the offloading and delivery of general merchandise. One might propose that in the event, big box retail would be "cushioned" from the supply chain slowdown by depressed business -- but all that really says is that fewer customers would come in the door and less merchandise would move off the shelf, and the whole point of big box discount merchandising is to make those razor-thin profit margins by moving vast quanitites of stuff quickly on-and-off the shelves. So there is no cure for this problem. (It also suggests that corruption might flourish as payoffs are made to speed particular favored shipments through customs -- but that ends up increasing costs and prices, too.)
Nor is the US economy prepared to reverse the major trend of the past three decades and resume manufacturing of general merchandise within American borders. The system just isn't there. The factories are gone. (There were seven paper products factories in the town next door to me which ran from about 1905 until 1970; six of them are now demolished, and the last is derelict.)
This demonstrates the provisional nature of the so-called global economy. A lot of people seem to have regarded it as a permanent institution, but it was never more than a set of temporary circumstances that allowed things to be done in a certain way. Cheap oil and relative international political stability were the chief ingredients. The latter has already been demolished by Jihad, Inc., and the former can be lost to the West at any moment, really.
The clear implication is that American life will now have to adjust to very different conditions. And lest I be accused (again) of just delivering bad news, let me outline some of the things we can and ought to do to reform our living arrangements.
-- The suburban sprawl experiment is over. Get ready for the necessary downscaling of all American activities. We must live closer to each other, closer to our work places. A lot of suburban property of all kinds is going to lose value in a severe real-estate meltdown. Be prepared for it.
-- We must reduce the amount of driving that we do. The US passenger rail system must be restored at all levels, from inter-city to inter-neighborhood.
-- We can accomplish this by repopulating American towns and cities. (I add the caveat that our cities of the 21st century need not, nor will not, look or function like the industrial behemoths of the 20th century. Among other things, the age of skyscrapers is over. It is vitally important to believe that cities and towns can be wonderful and rewarding places to live. We can make them so -- though we've gotten out of the habit for nearly 100 years. The walkable neighborhood must once again become the environmental standard.
-- Get ready for more local agriculture. The age of the 3000-mile Caesar salad is over. We will have to produce food closer to home. This includes more agricultural jobs as farming is reduced in scale and done more intensively by human labor.
-- We will have to reorganize education. Huge factory-like centralized schools served by enormous fleets of buses will become a thing of the past. Anyway, high school as currently practiced is an idiotic waste of time. In the future America will need a combination of vocational education and training (including apprenticeship) and good old liberal education for the training of minds. If this implies clearer class distinctions than we have been used to, better get used to it.
-- The consumer economy as-we-have-known-it is probably over. Mass crapola will have to be replaced by quality, in everything from the houses we live in to our nail clippers. The mall will soon be history.
-- Say goodbye to cultural relativism and aesthetic nihilism. Some things really are better than other things, and we're going to hear more about it, whether it hurts someone's self-esteem or not. I even believe that we will see a revival of classicism in the arts.
October 23, 2001
The amount of money we now intend to lay out on "security" has got to be ruinous to our already overly-abstract, over-leveraged, infotainment economy.
This morning, the US Postal Service announced it was prepared to spend $1 billion on security measures, including gadgets that will irradiate mail so as to kill bacteria. Okay, now look at every other area of American life and try to imagine the sums of money that will have to be spent battening down our daily activities against deadly mischief. I can only reach two conclusions: either we will only pretend to improve security in many cases, or we will live in a severely less affluent society.
Now that I'm thinking, there's a third possibility (actually a varient of number two): that the US dollar will be quickly debased by the printing of "money" to pay for the new infrastructure of security against terrorism.
Prepare for austerity.
October 24, 2001
Just off the radar screen of Infotainment Nation, a momentous thing has happened in Israel over the past several days: the Israeli government has put the US government on notice that it is no longer disposed to follow American "suggestions" for how Israel should conduct its defense against Intifada II.
For a year, Palestinian terror forces have pressed their campaign of car bombings, pizzaria bombings, snipings, armed assaults, shootings at Israeli soldiers from behind a screen of rock-throwing children, etc, and the Israelis have responded tactically with assassinations of terrorist leaders, rocket attacks on Palestinian police stations (which happen to be command centers for Palestinian terror activities), and tank incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas of Israel.
Since the murder last week of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, the Sharon Government has decided to ramp up their response to Palestinian violence. The US knows that this is a dangerous game. As the casualties mount, in particular the Palestinian dead, one billion Muslims from West Africa to the South China Sea will become increasingly inflamed. They will blame the US, of course, and we're liable to see some of our embassies attacked in places like Indonesia and Egypt, where the enormous populations of the poor and the hopeless can overwhelm any kind of police security those nations try to put up.
I don't know whether Israel is capable militarily of suppressing the Palestinian violence. Like all modern armed forces, Israel's is geared mainly to fighting conventional battles, not civilian insurrections. But they are now sending a message to the Palestinians that a higher price will be paid for bombings and shootings and that the Sharon government will no longer be restrained by an America worried about what comes next after Anthrax-by-mail.
October 28, 2001
The Sunday news wires bring us tales of mayhem in many parts of the world -- sixteen Christians shot in a Pakistan church, three Israelis mowed down in a drive-by, at least six people killed by a bomb in a Phillipine lunch spot. Incidents like these point up one the less-appreciated predicaments of our times: there are too many small arms loose in the world. There are especially too many automatic rifles, machine carbines, grenades, and C-4-type plastic explosives. Combine this with the fact that there are enormous multitudes of people -- especially young men -- who are under-employed, poor, and angry, and you have a recipe for unending round-the-clock massacres. In fact, one could advance the theory that the world has now reached a kind of critical mass of both small arms and angry young men.
I doubt that we can diminish the supply of small arms and ammunition by any sort of deliberate campaign at any point along the supply chain. These guns, bullets, and bombs exist because there is a tremendous secondary market in military ordnance produced under contract by even respectable governments . No western nation that I know of, including the ones that rail against political violence (the US, France, Germany, UK, Italy, Spain, even Sweden), has done anything to decrease their production of armaments. What's more, the number of rifles, pistols, carbines and grenade-type bombs already in existence is so astronomical that angry young men of the world can get them virtually for free anytime they want one.
One of the grim consequences is that it takes very few young men armed with automatic weapons to carry out deadly operations that can disturb the peace and security of the whole world. One young zealot with a grenade in Saudi Arabia could put an end to a quarter of America's oil imports and pretty much send the the US economy into the toilet. We can see on CNN how a gang of virtually medieval tribesmen, the Taliban, can withstand an aerial bombardment as withering as all the bombs dropped on Germany during World War Two and still pose a threat to the most powerful war machine the world ever saw. All it takes is one Talibani with a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile (available at any bazaar from Casablanca to Tashkent) to bring down an American plane and turn US public opinion into an anti-war movement. (Are our generals worried about this? You bet.)
I imagine that US strategists at the highest level have no idea what they are going to do about the small arms problem. I surely don't. Except that it's another one of those things that makes me think this is going to be a long, hard, bitter struggle.
November 4, 2001
The Sunday New York Times business section was brimming with speculation that America has now seen the "bottom of the downturn" and that the insane Friday stock market rally of the past week (just as the highest monthly unemployment rise in 21 years was announced) indicated the markets' ineffable foreknowledge of a new boom coming next spring.
I appreciate cheerfulness and optimism as much as the next guy, but it's a little disturbing to see America's newspaper of record appear so completely out-of-touch with reality.
If they had been reading their own newspaper the past couple of weeks, the Timespeople would have discovered that the bottom fell out of the airline industry, that nobody needs to buy a new computer, that credit card defaults are now at the eight percent level, that nobody has a clue who perpetrated the Anthrax outbreak (with the implication that it could happen again any moment -- only next time it might be smallpox), that government at every level from the village fire department to the White House is facing security expenditures of such magnitude that Monopoly money may have to become our official currency, that all the might of the US Airforce cannot discommode a raggedy gang of third-world bandits, and that almost nothing but positive thinking stands between our nation's addiction to imported oil and the doomed decadant kingdom of Saudi Arabia that has been our main supplier.
This is something much worse than garden-variety denial.
November 8, 2001
The fight over the tablescraps of the Nineties Boom has not quite begun, but be prepared for it.
Suburban real estate is not a good place to be invested financially. Alas, the net worth of a tremendous percentage of our countrymen is in suburban McHomes. As unemployment rises and breadwinners fall into arears, we will move closer to the orgy of default and repossession that awaits. Compounding the problem is the predicament that even fire-sale prices for McProperty might be too much in a time when cheap and plentiful gas is no longer available and the broad infrastucture of car-dependent life becomes non-viable.
What amazes me most about the new times we've entered is the almost universal conviction that that we are bound to return to the good old times -- that as soon as we've licked this terror thing we can go back to the main event of recreational shopping on credit cards and the sideshows of infotainment and cruising for burgers.
The real news is that the United States is hemorrhaging both accumulated wealth and abstractly imagined wealth. Our military campaign in Af-stan costs $1 billion per day. Governing at home has been reduced to an unimaginably expensive security operation, with the spare change going to finance investigations. The retail sector, which had been based on uninspected mass imports of cheap goods made by wage slaves half a world away, and the extension of limitless unsecured loans to the non credit-worthy, is in the tank. The banking sector is now mesmerized by the negative infotainment medium known as the non-performing loan.
My advice for those wishing to arrange their lives for the new era is as follows:
-- Get out of the Sunbelt while you can. Places like Atlanta and Houston will be unlivable in a world of expensive air-conditioning and iffy gas.
-- Look for a traditional small town to live in, as close to the center as possible.
-- Favor places where supplies of fresh water are relatively assured.
-- Do whatever you can to reduce your car dependency.
-- Those of you who think "country life" will be a refuge from difficult times ahead had better be prepared for farming or some other rural lifeway. The end of suburbia also implies the end of urban lives lived in the rural setting.
-- Get out of debt.
-- Learn how to do some things that will make you useful to other people, and consider doing it at the scale of a small or home business.
-- Become involved in public life and community activities. In the shitstorm of political recrimination to come, there will be a great need for reasonable citizens.
-- Learn to play a musical instrument. Produce your own entertainment (your brain will thank you).
November 14, 2001
The collapse of the Taliban, now underway, is a good thing. I'm all for it. There should be no question that America has any desire to control the territory of Afganistan, but it sure is in our interest to have an other-than-totally-insane government there. Lord knows whether this will be possible, given the wretched condition of the place and its thirty year history of anarchy and war. Also, having Pakistan and Iran as next-door-neighbors is not the most propitious situation. But we are entitled to consider the eviction of the Taliban a victory.
We may now move on to some tougher questions of international relations. I don't believe for a second that radical terrorist Islam is out of business. It may have lost a key sponsor in the Taliban, and it may yet lose a key player in Osama, but there is still plenty of action awaiting us from those who hate the west's guts out of the one billion worshippers of Allah between Morocco and the South China Sea.
Coming next to a military theater near you: Saddaam Hussein and the mystery weapons stockpiles of Iraq. Do you suppose that the Pentagon strategists intend to just wait-and-see what Saddaam is going to do with whatever it is he's got? Like a Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosive device? Or a nice crop of smallpox virus. I don't think so. I don't think Paul Wolfowitz and his colleagues are that dumb. The question is, do we wait for a pretext, create a pretext, or just go in and clean the place out? One way or another, I believe we are going into Iraq next.
Meanwhile, observe the very strange relations between the clerical leadership of Iran and the secular government. The Ayatollah is calling for new campaigns against America; the President of Iran is looking for more "normal" relations with us. I would suppose that the Iranian people are good and goddam sick of religious tyranny after a generation of it, but this gang of clerics is not going down without a fight. They are capable of dragging other countries into their civil strife and leaving the region a smoldering wreck -- as they did in the 1980s, when the newly triumphant Shiite leadership of Iran went to war against the secular leadership of Iraq (Saadaam), leaving hundreds of thousands dead on both sides.
Also meanwhile, with the Taliban collapsed and Osama perhaps cornered in a mountain rat hole, who are the players remaining in Jihad, Inc? Lots, including Hamas, various Palestinian terror groups, plenty of dog soldiers in Egypt and Algeria, the roguish government of Syria, a huge supply of Pashtoon maniacs in Pakistan, Mr. Muhammar Ghadaffi of Libya, the separatists of Indonesia and even the Philippines, and innumerable freelancers whose names and organizations have not yet been fodderized by CNN.
Meanwhile America continues in its domestic coma of denial. Just yesterday it was reported that Congress will be forcing Amtrak into insolvency as a punishment for not being a money-maker -- as though the interstate highway system and the airlines were not heavily subsidized. We don't seem to get it. The last thing you would think we want to do is put ourselves at the mercy of the Saud family selling us Arabian oil so we can indulge in endless solo motoring trips from Home-to-WallMart. We need a passenger railroad system and we need it yesterday. We need to be making plans for a post-suburban America. Only we don't want to.
The Af-stan war so far, while different from the Gulf War in some ways, has also been a CNN-Video war for Americans. We inflict damage by remote control (air strikes), and get a colorful cast of medieval motherfuckers riding horses for godsake ( ! ) to act as our surrogates on the ground. No American blood is spilled, except perhaps in helicopter mishaps. So we can continue to party back here at home. As a friend remarked to me yesterday, the Nine-Eleven attacks actually didn't wake this nation up. It just changed the channel we were snoozing to from Home Shopping to America's New War.