The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

For many of us, September is the real start of the new year. School is beginning (and even those of us long out of it still feel the urge to buy new pens and notebooks). From the height of summer we commence a gentle slide into winter's cold and darkness. Burned into the national imagination, though, is the ominous new sense that September brings horror and tragedy. I'm not one of those in favor of rehearsing the shock over and over and over again, but I do recognize that 9/11/01 represents a defining moment in US history -- the moment when American imperial power began a steady descent toward darkness.

What kind of darkness??

I believe that the potential for domestic strife is huge and that it will largely grow out of the economic implosion we have invited by creating an infrastructure for daily life that can't be sustained.

It seems likely that we will embark on some kind of war against Iraq, whether we are snookered into it by Saddam Hussein, or strike first ourselves. I'm certain that among the first things Saddam will do when American missiles or troops fall upon him, is to sabotage his oil wells, pipelines, and terminals, in order to deprive us of the oil prize. Remember, the oil itself -- and all the wealth and power it represents -- will remain under Iraqi soil. But in the meantime, he will throw global oil markets into turmoil, perhaps even chaos.

The US economy is a house-of-cards (credit cards) held up by the transient circumstance of cheap oil. This economy is already tottering from mis-investment, corporate misfeasance, mis-lending, industrial outsourcing, and over-dependence on "consumer" spending (i.e. the buying of plastic crap on credit from Big Box discounters). If oil market turbulence is added to the mix, this economy is gonna go down the tubes. When that happens, a lot of pissed-off formerly middle-class people are gonna go apeshit.

The Sunbelt will be hit especially hard, since so much of the economy in places like Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Charlotte has been based on nothing but suburban real estate development and the commercial crap that goes with it. The Sunbelt is also full of the descendants of bug-eyed lynch mob cretins, heavily armed with guns and a sense of righteous Christian grievance. They acquired their middle-class entitlements relatively late in the game, and they are not going to surrender them without a fight.

I gave a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, this past spring. One of the things I said was that Americans were going to need something to identify with more meaningful than discount shopping and hamburgers. In the Q and A that followed, one dapper young chamber-of-commerce member got up and railed at me for saying that there was something wrong with bargain shopping as a national creed. For him, America was all about his right to save a buck at the WalMart. Nothing more. Apart from the stupidity this view-point represented, what do you think will happen when millions of people like him are suddenly deprived of bargain shopping as a reason for existence -- as they will be in the austere economy to come.