The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
WASHINGTON (AP) – New-home sales shot up by 6.7 percent in July to the highest monthly level on record as low mortgage rates motivated buyers to lock in good deals. The advance propelled sales to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.02 million, an all-time monthly high, the Commerce Department reported today. The increase surprised analysts who were forecasting sales to fall around 3 percent. One of the consistent bright spots of the spotty economic recovery has been the housing market, which even performed well during last year's recession.
The void of intelligent reflection in the news media is pretty astounding, especially in the realm of economics and finance.
There seems to be a consensus, for instance, that the chimera of growth is being sustained for the moment by zero-percent new car financing and a residential real estate boom, especially for new suburban houses. And that this is just fine.
I wonder whether the commentators ever ask themselves: Do we have enough fucking cars in this country? Is our collective national life being improved by subjecting more citizens to automobile dependency, to longer commutes along more congested freeways? Does every new suburban housing pod represent a net gain or a net loss in our national life? Or would we be happier living in traditional towns, cities that functioned (and were beautiful), and real rural countryside (both cultivated and wild) untrammeled by the revolting effluvia of car culture?
The criteria used in the news media to describe the national condition -- a few stark statistics -- are like the read-outs for a hospital patient on life support. Hmm the blood pressure is at least steady, a pulse can be detected, but the brain wave is flat.
I have proposed (in the Clusterfuck Nation Manifesto) that the only way out of America's debt-encrusted leisure-life fantasy toxic suburban hypertrophy will be the downscaling of our living arrangements and the re-localization of economic relations. What I wonder is whether we will be too exhausted to take on this huge task. Every day that we waste trying to prop up the status quo is going to deplete our collective will to act, and increase the chances that the current system will simply collapse into entropic disorder -- meaning, violence, political strife, scapegoating, extreme economic hardship, and perhaps some form of civil war.
I don't go along with the idea, however, that the news media are merely venal in the way they cover events. Rather, I think they represent a kind of national avoidance behavior. They immerse us in familiar triviality so as to avoid the real issue of why our national living arrangement is insane. The NBC Today show (which I view daily in the YMCA weight room) opened today with nearly a half-hour coverage on the story about the remains of two long-missing girls found under a neighbor's garage slab floor in suburban Oregon. Of course this is a sad and terrible story. But what struck me is how Matt Lauer acted as though he lived in the same subdivision (along with everybody else in America) and refered to everybody by their first names, and asked outrageously sordid questions about the relatives' emotional states ("How will you feel driving past that man's house every day from now on....") as if he was their therapist. The purpose of this exercise, it seemed to me, was not really to add any information to a pretty straightforward murder story, but to give the audience a sense of being connected to these strangers, as if they were all friends of ours at the end of some cul-de-sac. In other words, it's better to find yourself in a familiar and recognizable territory-- even one where dramatically horrible things happen -- than to ask yourself why we are living in territory so psychotically devoid of civic decorum that children can just vanish into thin air.