Beyond 'Coming Together'

I apologize for the late start.  Scooter the cat didn't come in last night until 3a.m.

     The Iowa caucus set into motion a curious self-reinforcing feedback loop of inspiration -- that an African-American political leader could win an important primary contest in a Wonder Bread state, and that all Americans (especially white Americans) could "feel good" about living in a country where such a thing is possible. This is an understandable sentiment. Whatever else Americans have been conditioned to be lately -- blubbery, debt-crushed, tattoo-etched, Jesus-haunted, multiply-addicted TV zombies -- a residual kernel of fairness seems to persist underneath all that cellulite and avarice. Catching a glimpse of our formerly better collective selves, we seem moved to discover that it's still there, although the element of self-congratulation gets tiresome quickly.
     In any case, it was satisfying to see Barack Obama whip Hillary Clinton's entitled, presumptuous ass in Iowa last week, and by a very healthy margin. All other things aside -- like, what he actually thinks about the state of the nation -- Obama is a more reassuring figure than the Lady Macbeth-like former first lady, with her retinue of policy earls and thanes, and the creepy figure of her Mac-husband ever-grinning upstage.
     I could get behind Obama, if it comes to it, but these days another feeling dogs me -- that we live in a nation where a lot more people than just Hillary Clinton need to get their asses whipped (and then some), and I like John Edwards a bit better in the role. On the night of the Iowa caucuses, John Edwards made an appeal to the audience that just seemed more reality-based to me than Obama's platitudes about bringing people together.
     Edwards seems to recognize that there are some people -- like the health care executive he cited who retired from his job with over $100 million in the policy-holders loot -- who don't deserve to come together with anything except a grand jury. Edwards is willing to gaze past the kindergarten emotions of primary politics and see the stupendous ugliness and unfairness of a land that is being sucked dry by corporate vampires. I believe he will righteously kick their asses, and that they need to get their asses kicked, so I'm more inclined to support Edwards. I believe he means it, too.
     I was impressed that night by the TV commercial that followed Obama's speech. The commercial promoted a hydrogen car that General Motors is pretending to develop. It was very slick, of course, since GM can get the best TV production talent money can buy. It featured a light-skinned African-American man (not unlike Obama) playing a sort of Mr. Science Teacher role among a flower-strewn meadow full of schoolchildren with a modest GM sedan at the center of the picture. Mr. Science Teacher was telling the kids how this new GM wonder car would run without any nasty gasoline, and out of its tailpipe would come nothing but pure clean water, and wasn't the future-according-to-General-Motors a fabulous thing! It was all very heartwarming, except it was complete mendacious bullshit. GM will never produce a commercial line of hydrogen-powered cars, and America will never set up a supporting infrastructure of hydrogen production and retail fueling stations. And GM knows all this.
      General Motors deserves to have its ass kicked for misleading the public so shamelessly. I think Edwards is the only candidate who would kick their ass. I'm not quite sure how he would do it, or what he would say, but here's how I suggest he should frame the issue. "General Motors, can you take some of the money and human capital that you devote to misleading the public about hydrogen cars, and see if you can apply it instead to producing some decent up-to-date rolling stock for the US railroad system, which we have got to get up-and-running again -- or I WILL KICK YOUR ASS." Something like that.
     I can see Edwards dealing effectively with Wall Street, too. As president he would probably find that there are some agencies all saddled up and ready to ride, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, and certain offices within the US Department of Justice, which could be motivated to ask some of the questions that various boards of directors have overlooked for some years now -- such as. . . how come Mr. Disgraced Executive is backing up his Lincoln Navigator to the loading dock of Acme Banking and Trust, and piling in sacks of the shareholders' money (after presiding over $10 billion worth of losses in acting as counter-party to an illegal trade in his company's own engineered fraudulent securities. . . ?
      So, these are some of my own dark thoughts coming out of Iowa and heading right smack into the New Hampshire primary. I'm reasonably confident that Hillary will stagger out of the Granite State with a stake through her heart. I hope Edwards can stay on his feet long enough to make make a run going into the SuperDuper gauntlet of primaries that follows. He may even condition Obama to toughen up some and realize that bringing people together (to be chumps and saps for the ghouls who sell them Cheesburgers) is not the sovereign remedy for what ails Clusterfuck Nation.
     I don't much care for the moment what happens among the Republicans. Their party is doomed. They're the Whigs of the 21st Century, and their grandees will be remembered in the same way that we revere William Henry Harrison and Millard Fillmore (whose birthday is tomorrow, by the way -- NY State employees take note!). It's been fun following the adventures of Huckabee, but only in the way that it was fun following Elmer Fudd as a six-year-old.
   

 

 

Comments

[LaughingAsRomeWasBurningDown]

In the meantime, an addition for the CFN soundtrack, Ether by Gang of Four:

Trapped in heaven life style (locked in Long Kesh)
New looking out for pleasure (H-block torture)
It's at the end of the rainbow (White noise in)
The happy ever after (a white room)

Dirt behind the daydream
Dirt behind the daydream
The happy ever after
Is at the end of the rainbow

Dig at the root of the problem (Fly the flag on foreign soil)
It breaks your new dreams daily (H-block Long Kesh)
Fathers contradictions (Censor six counties news)
And breaks your new dreams daily (each day more deaths)

Dirt behind the daydream
Dirt behind the daydream
The happy ever after
Is at the end of the rainbow

White noise in a white room
White noise in a white room
White noise in a white room
White noise in a white room

Trapped in heaven life style (locked in Long Kesh)
New looking out for pleasure (H-block torture)
It's at the end of the rainbow (White noise in)
The happy ever after (a white room)

Dirt behind the daydream
Dirt behind the daydream
The happy ever after
Is at the end of the rainbow

Dig at the root of the problem (Fly the flag on foreign soil)
It breaks your new dreams daily (H-block Long Kesh)
Fathers contradictions (Censor six counties news)
And breaks your new dreams daily (each day more deaths)

Dirt behind the daydream
Dirt behind the daydream
The happy ever after
Is at the end of the rainbow

There may be oil
(Now looking out for pleasure)
Under Rockall
(It's at the end of the rainbow)
There may be oil
(The happy ever after)
Under Rockall
(It's corked up with the ether)
There may be oil
(It's corked up with the ether)
Under Rockall
(It's corked up with the ether)
There may be oil

[Riddick]

Looking forward to it as always.

[Matt Savinar]

Jim,

As you are no longer taking emails, I submit the following to you as signs "the end is DAMN nigh"

New Television Show: "Operation Repo"
http://www.peakoilstore.com/forum/index.php/topic,10364.0.html

Americans Outsourcing Wombs to India
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/outsourced-wombs/?ref=opinion

Tupperware Taser Parties
http://www.peakoilstore.com/forum/index.php/topic,10547.0.html

[Stream]

You know those spot shortages you were talking about? The entire island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia pretty much ran out of heating oil about a week before Christmas. That’s about 135,000 people with about 70 % of those living in what is sometimes called “Industrial Cape Breton” in the Sydney area; a once thriving coal and steel city. The population has been declining here for years now but seems to have accelerated more recently as industry after industry shuts down and people chase the energy production bucks raining down in and around Alberta. I’m sure there are lots of threadbare places like this in the US as well, where the scary reality is starting to show under our worn out coats of comfort. That we’ve been eating and sleeping in a nice cozy back eddy of energy flow; and that we’re about to enter the actual stream again.

I feel fortunate that we’ve been able to make the move to a small farm where we grow most of our own food and heat with our own wood. Some of the folks around us and most of those living in small towns around the island don’t have that ability any more. I think this problem may manifest at first in a way where the energy poor may be thought of in the same way as society now considers homeless people; that their situation is somehow their fault and that it’s really too bad and we feel sad about them, but we really don’t want to talk about it. Who knows how long it will take society at large to realize how pervasive energy dependence is and that the majority of us will no longer be able to afford as much of what it offers.

The two links below to the short CBC News stories tell of the day the island ran out and of how many people now have to cope with not being able to afford the minimum amounts of heating oil that the trucks will deliver.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/nova-scotia/story/2007/12/18/cb-imperial.html

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/nova-scotia/story/2008/01/03/heating-ns.html

[Rudi]

Threaded (unofficial) discussion, filtered URL lists by year and author, Wiki, and Google indexing are available at

http://spectacularpolicy.org/

Everybody on CFN should sign up and participate. Our discussions here (mostly) do not show up in Google indexes so are almost invisible to the outside world. I would like to ask your help creating wiki content and forum discussion that reformulates the issues JK and the commenter crew have discussed over the last four years.

[Dave]

rudi,

gwarh? i done unnerstand.

you want us (me also?) to post again at another site? don't unnerstan.

[Rudi]

No, I want to move discussion over there. It's threaded and indexed. No need to copy comments. Just post new stuff over there. It's searchable etc. And I've got the URL's organized by user and year.

[LaughingAsRomeWasBurningDown]

google groups, yuck. Comments not being searchable is not worth the hassle.

[LaughingAsRomeWasBurningDown]

I should have said: Making comments searchable is not worth the hassle.

[Rudi]

That is not the point. The point is for this discussion to be read by non-CFN regulars. I have already contacted a public policy major who I went to school with ten years ago and she has agreed to check out whatever discussions ensue. If the people at CFN have an interest in potentially seeing their ideas implemented, I think it makes sense to try publishing them in a way that is not blocked by technical errors.

[LaughingAsRomeWasBurningDown]

Well, since you are here already, can't you send your school friend our ideas to implement? Just saying google groups just isn't worth the hassle for me, and since I'm in America, most of the ideas aren't going to be implemented anyway, at least not until too late probabably...

[Rudi]

Well, there are a number of other advantages. For what's it's worth, I agree with you Laughing, and I am also in America. I'm sorry for the hassle of signing up to google groups. I just didn't have enough time on the weekend to do any better.

[Rudi]

BTW it is not just one friend. It's a whole gaggle of influential scientists and engineers who are hoping something useful can come out of this, quick. Many of them already promote peak oil stuff. I felt there was not enough dialog between the politically aware and the science set.

[Dave]

rudi,

seriously, i have absolutely no ideas that i want to see implemented. that's kind of a stone headed way of thinking in my book. it's much better to watch, anticipate and react accordingly.

[Dave]

influential people usually (often?)(well as often as anybody else) have the worst ideas. please tell them i'm not interested.

[Dave]

no, seriously, this is the clusterfuck. that has beauty in it's own right. no, no, what you want to do is very bad.

[Dave]

this is just a haphazard conversation, thus mimicing life in general. only it gets to start over every monday morning. what you want is bad.

[Dave]

really, i think that every US citizen should be issued a H3 and an escalade. this would keep people busy until they get too hungry and burn up oil at the same time. this could work.

[Dave]

just say no. preserve the clusterfuck.

[Dave]

i don't want to dialog with either the politcally aware or the science set. preserve the clusterfuck, that's my motto.

[Rudi]

i can dig it.

[Dave]

no, seriously rudi, there must be at least a dozen differnt blogs and message boards that deal with these same issues, and that take themselves wayway too seriously. you feel the need to start another? comeon, clusterfuck baby, get with the program.

[Dave]

rudi, you all right in my book. but please, clusterfuck is the word.

[Dave]

rudi g. will be the next president, mark my words. and just remember, i have nothing to lose.

[can you see it?]

What about Kucinich? He tried for over an hour to "KICK SOME ASS" as he argued on the house floor for impeachment. The main stream media has kept him out for a good reason.

He gets it: http://www.dennis4president.com/go/issues/a-sustainable-future/

"With the peak of U.S. oil production some decades in the past and the world facing inevitable shortages in the near future, a continuation of our present energy policies is a prescription for unending conflicts. No candidate understands the precarious environmental perch man sits on more than Dennis Kucinich... "