The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
We had our first weekend of warm, sunny weather here in the Un-Sunbelt and it is possible to enjoy the illusion that all is well in the world. But this is a world of dynamic disequilibrium -- meaning, shit happens -- and we live in a culture that is habituated to ignoring the diminishing returns of our responses to shit happening -- meaning that probably sooner than later we will be overcome by the unanticipated consequences of our diminishing returns.
This is clearly seen in our economic relations. America has been the biggest cheerleader for universal free market capitalism. What goes unstated is that we want it to be American-style. We want all other economies to function as we do, for example externalizing the cost of doing business by destroying local economic relations and thus local communities, as WalMart has been so successful at doing, In places like France and Japan, there is a belief that small-scale local commerce has tremendous social value, so retail falls under rather rigorous regulatory and licensing systems. It's nearly impossible to open a big box discount store in Japan because the community value of an existing street of small local shops, including Mr. Yamamoto's 400 square-foot appliance store, is perceived to far exceed the equivalent nine dollars that a given customer might save on an electric rice-maker purchased at a deep discount.
This perhaps casts non-Americans in a too-innocent light, so let's take another example. America enjoys vast amounts of cheap merchandise from China. The trade between American retailers and Chinese manufacturers, ramped up especially in just the past ten years, has been the basis of American Big Box discounter's triumphalism. What a bonanza of cheap stuff: 25-foot-long garden hoses for $9.99, all-cotton shirts for $9.99, clock-radios for $9.99, stainless-steel frypans for $9.99. All made in China. You stagger out of the Target store in amazement. What we don't see is another set of cost externalities this relationship permits China to accept -- the world's most phenomenal rates of environmental destruction and pollution, and systems of factory wage-slavery so grotesque that their like has never been seen even in America darkest years of industrial adolescence. Many of these externalities will in turn be passed along by China to everybody on the planet in the form of greatly increased greenhouse effect gases and the dreadful unknown-unknowns of global warming. The social externalities of wage-slavery (and the profiteering it represents) may translate before long into political turbulence in China that could easily result in a more aggressive regime eager to both preserve order and secure resources by any means necessary.
We have entered a truly new era without any conscious awareness. We have crossed a frontier of civilizational history. We face the task of having to downscale all our activites, and to do it in a way that will not just allow the human race to survive a time of global turbulence, but to preserve what is best in our culture and institutions so that we can go on bravely, confidently, and even joyously. The downscaling of America is a project we can take up without becoming any less great a people than we take ourselves to be. Basically, it means trading quantity for quality. More on this in the weeks ahead.