The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

I've been up at our lake house in the Adirondacks for a week. It's a big lake, but it was all a'churn during the holiday heat-wave with screaming waterskiers, drag-racing jet-skiers, howling babies in tube-tows, speedboats with glass-pack exhausts, and other such watersports requiring huge motors. Hour after hour, until the angry disc of the sun slipped behind a purple majestic mountain, and the fireworks commenced in the little village a mile across the lake, the motorheads were out there grinding through the water, having fun burning gas and going as fast as possible. It being the patriotic holiday, and in the rockets red glare and all, I was moved to reflect what a nation of dangerous morons we've become.

The next day in the marina office, I encountered just such a typical specimen of my fellow citizen, filling out the papers for a motorboat rental. About fifty, with a head like a cinder block and a Sluggo haircut, he was costumed in a black T-shirt that depicted a homicidal-looking eagle clutching in its dramatically oversized talons the phrase "FREEDOM," only in big pointy gothic characters. One couldn't fail to notice how much this garment evoked the spirit of the Third Reich, if not the style, because the Nazis had different sartorial ideas.

I worry about America's lumpenprole masses slipping into a kind of corn-pone Naziism. As the clusterfuck scenario plays out, and the middle and sub-middle ranks of American society feel the pain of the new austerity, and watch their presumed entitlements to the old drive-in utopia evaporate, and all their perquisites of motorized leisure with them, they are going to get very pissed off. Their childish fascination with engines and firearms is liable to mutate into peevish armed aggression which, I believe, is just as liable to be expressed in domestic strife against their fellow-citizens as in foreign war.

We have our share of lumpenprole motorhead morons here in the snooty northeast, but in my view the Sunbelt is going to be the real epicenter of 21st century American corn-pone Naziism, because the Sunbelt is going to be crushed economically and socially by the sequence of events to come -- the meltdown of American (and global) financial institutions, the disgrace of corporate culture, the end of the easy-credit economy, the coming oil crunch, the weather anomalies of global warming, and the turbulent realignment of world power relations.

So I look at someone like that creep in the marina with his black T-shirt (the true message of which might as well be Pray for Death), and deep melancholy comes over me. If middle-aged men are sending out that message, what are young people and children thinking?