The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

I doubt that there really is such a thing as "the economy." Rather there are economic relations. When commentators speak or write about "the economy," they seem to suggest that it is some extrinsic force like weather that blows hot one day and cold the next, but is otherwise separate from our everyday activities. "The economy" is up or "the economy" is down and we are its passive beneficiaries or victims.

This allows us to ignore our own cultural behavior.

Economic relations represent dynamic systems and modes of behavior. In America of 2003, our economic relations are based on incessant motoring, the servicing of motoring infrastructure, and commerce in foreign-made goods bought with hallucinated wealth. This kind of behavior necessarily has an unhappy ending, but we have been postponing it by finding ways to roll over the debt on our hallucinated wealth. This is what the hyper-heated housing market has been about (thanks to the Federal Reserve), but our ability to extend lines of credit at laughably low interest rates is nearing the end of its cycle and there is nothing else in sight that might avail to keep the credit lines open. Next stop: liquidation.

Meanwhile, Americans lead frantic lives of anxiety and depression in places that are not worth living in, with all our collective wealth invested in depreciating cars, appliances, gadgets, McHouses, and all our hard-won social capital squandered. We've indentured our work-lives to hyper-mega corporations who have little to no investment in our home places and no concern for our well-being. The social institutions and commercial relations that used to add up to more than the sum of their parts -- that is, living organisms called communities -- lie in wreckage around us under a smokescreen of distracting infotainment. The eventual result will be a race to the bottom in terms of happiness, security, and life expectancy.

Since I am not a conspiratorialist, I don't believe that these conditions were deviously imposed on us by cliques of scheming elitist villains. We're completely responsible for adopting the behaviors that put us in this predicament. We're a people who, for decades, haven't been challenged by anything more serious than what TV channel to select. At least two generations have not moved themselves to rethink the assumptions underlying our economic behavior. Is it a good thing to surrender local networks of trade, and all the occupational niches that go with them, in order to save five dollars on a hair drier? Is it a good thing to live in a place where driving is your only connection to the other organs of daily life? Is it a good thing to trash the public realm in order to optimize parking? Is it a good thing to mortgage the future to keep on living this way?

We may learn soon that the most potent weapon of mass destruction that Iraq owns is its ability to generate an oil-deprivation jihad. When that happens -- and I believe it's likely to happen -- then all of our economic behavior will be revealed as the suicidal delusion that it is. By then, it may be too late for Americans to adapt different modes of behavior. Certainly, we'll see no rush to leave suburbia, just a desperate effort to preserve its supposed entitlements.

The saddest part of all this is that there is not one American political figure with the courage to inform our citizens that its about how you live, stupid.