Hope and Fear

      Tomorrow at noon, Barack Obama steps into the shoes of Lincoln, FDR, Millard Fillmore and forty other predecessors -- this time as the wished-for Mr. Fix-it of a nation run into a ditch. Surely over the months of transition, someone with a clear head and a fact-laden portfolio has clued-in the new President about the reality-based state-of-the-Union -- as opposed, say, to the Las Vegas version, where Santa Clause presides over a whoredom of something-for-nothing economics, and all behaviors are equally okay, and consequence has been sliced-and-diced out of the game. . . where, in the immortal words of Milan Kundera, anything goes and nothing matters.
      Mr. Obama deserves credit for a lot of things, but perhaps most amazingly his ability to see "hope" in a public so demoralized by their own bad choices that the USA scene has devolved to a non-stop Special Olympics of everyday life, where absolutely everybody is debilitated, deluded, challenged, or needs a leg up, or an extra buck, or a pallet on the floor, or a gastric bypass, or a week in detox, or a head-start, or a fourth strike, or a $150-billion bailout. There's a lot of raw material from sea to shining sea, admittedly, but how do you re-shape it into a population guided by a sense of earnest purpose, with reality-based expectations, with habits of delayed gratification and impulse control, and a sense of their own history? That will be quite a trick. Many of us -- myself included -- will be pulling for Barack. Maybe the power of his rhetoric and his sheer buff physical presence can whip this republic of overfed clowns into shape.
      He inherits a government of superficially gleaming marble edifices -- all gloriously on view tomorrow -- but full of broken machinery within, infested with weevils, termites, and rats. The USA is functionally bankrupt. We have no money. The pixel "money" being emailed over to the insolvent banks has no basis in reality beyond the quiver in Ben Bernanke's voice as he announces each new injection. Yet all reports so far indicate that President Obama is bent on continuing the process one way or another.
       Mr. Obama's first task taking stage in the lonely Oval Office should be to get right with his own credo of "change," meaning he'll have to persuade the broad American public that the "change" required to salvage this society runs much deeper, colder, and thicker than they'd imagine in their initial transports over hallelujah-Bush-is-Gone. Many of the familiar touchstones of the recent American experience have got to go.
      Say goodbye to the "consumer society." We're done with that. No more fast money and no more credit. The next stop is "yard-sale nation," in which all the plastic crapola accumulated over the past fifty years is sorted out for residual value and, if still working, sold for a fraction of its original sticker price. This includes everything from Humvees to Hello Kitty charm bracelets.
      It will be a very salutary thing if we stop even referring to ourselves as "consumers." This degrading moniker, used for decades unthinkingly by everyone from The New York Times Nobel Prize pundits to the Econ 101 section men of the land-grant diploma mills has been such a drag on our collective development that it has extinguished the last latent flickers of duty, obligation, and responsibility for the greater good in a republic of broken communities shattered by WalMarts.
       The government will not have to do a thing to bring down the chain-stores. History and inertia is already on that case, with the easy credit racket terminated and new frictions arising over global trade, and even Peak Oil waiting to work its hoodoo behind the scrim of deceptively temporarily low pump prices. The larger question for President Obama is: how can we collectively promote the reconstruction of Main Street, including all the fine-grained layers of retail and wholesale trade. High tech "solutions" are not likely to avail in this.
     In fact, techno-grandiosity and techno-triumphalism must be be sedulously monitored and guarded-against. They jointly amount to the great mass psychosis of our time and culture. This array of traps -- from proposed flying cars to "renewable" motor fuels -- is the ultimate Faustian "bargain." It will be at the heart of any campaign to sustain the unsustainable, sucking us ever more deeply into the diminishing returns of over-investments in complexity. Hence, the last thing this nation needs now is a stimulus plan aimed at the development of non-gasoline-powered automobiles -- married with extensive rehabilitation of the highway system. What I incessantly refer to as the Happy Motoring fiesta is drawing to a close as we have known it, whether we like it or not. Cars will be around for a while, of course, but as an increasingly elite activity. The owners of cars will be increasingly beset by grievance and resentment on the part of those foreclosed from the Happy Motoring life -- and it could easily degenerate to vandalism and violence, since the "right" to endless motoring was surreptitiously made an entitlement somewhere around 1957.
      The "change" we face in agriculture dwarfs even the death throes of Happy Motoring (and is not unrelated to it either). A lot of people are likely to starve in America if we don't get our act together pronto in terms of how we produce the food we eat. Petro-agribusiness faces a set of disturbances that are certain to induce food shortages. Again, the Peak Oil specter looms in the background, for soil "inputs" and diesel power to run that system. But all of a sudden even that problem appears a lesser danger than the gross failure of capital finance now underway -- and petro-agriculture's chief external input is credit. Credit may be in extremely short supply this year, and hence crops may be in short supply as we turn the corner into spring and summer. Just as in the case of WalMart versus Main Street, the reform of farming in America is one of those "changes" much larger than most of us imagine. I'd go so far to say that a large proportion of young people now in college will find themselves not working in office cubicles, but in some way or other in farming or the "value-added" activities connected to it.
      I don't see how America can confront the "change" represented by the stark fact that suburbia-is-toast. It is the sorest spot of all in the corpus of a culture beset by disease and debility. The salient manifestation of suburbia's demise is the remorseless drop of housing values in the places most representative of that development pattern. The worst thing the Obama team could do about this would be to attempt to prevent the fall of inflated house prices. Their real value needs to be clearly established before a picture emerges of which places have a plausible future, and which places are destined to be mere ruins or salvage yards.
     Americans will have to live somewhere, of course, but the terrain of North America faces a very comprehensive reformation. The biggest cities will contract; the small cities and small towns will be reactivated, the agricultural landscape will be inhabited differently, and the suburbs will undergo an agonizing decades-long work-out of bad debt and true asset re-valuation.  Since the loss of so much vested "wealth" is implied by the crash of suburbia, this may be a source of revolutionary political violence moving deeper into the Obama administration.
     There's been plenty of buzz in the blogosphere about the imminent failure of the US "social safety net," including especially the social security program. Retirees are the biggest block of voters. They're not liable to foment riots -- that is best left to the youthful high-testosterone cohort -- but the older folks -- with Baby Boomers now coming aboard -- could be so distressed by the loss of their presumed entitlements that they will elect any maniac promising to bring back something that looked like the 1980s. We haven't begun to hear their war cries, and I hope they do not beat a path straight into some sort of crypto corporate fascism -- as, finally, every last failing scrap of American life is nationalized.
      Some natural processes hide in the thickets ahead. A hyper-inflation could take this country in any weird and unappetizing direction, from scapegoating and persecution to a new kind of corporate fascism. But I'm inclined to see our tribulations governed more by weakness in high places than by real power. In a world of declining capital and depleting energy resources, the key to any successful venture will be smaller scale. I'm not convinced that any emergency could make the US government more effective at getting anything done. Our hopes really ought to be vested locally, since that is where the most effective action is likely to be in the years just ahead.
      It will be stirring to watch Barack Obama's inauguration, and all the hoopla and balls, and the radiant children, and the exemplary First Lady dancing with the First Partner. Euphoria is a legitimate part of the human condition, though we know it soon passes into the heavy lifting of real life. There are many Americans of good will who would like to see the meaning of real "change" clearly articulated in a way that comports with reality, not just "dreams" and wishes. We'll hear a lot about dreams this week, anyway, of course, but then reality will set in and the heavy lifting will commence. Many Americans of good will also stand ready to face reality, to roll up our sleeves, ditch the video games and the Nascar and the microwaved cheese treats, and the internet porn and all the other noxious, narcolepsy-inducing distractions of our time, and put our shoulders to the wheel to haul this nation into a plausible future. For the moment: a rousing cry of "Good Luck!" To President Obama from this little outpost of Clusterfuck Nation.

Comments

[baileyalexander]

I hope the festivities feed the local economy in DC, at the very least.

So much work to be done, but we're alive, we can still thrive; work, focus, perspective.

[Jynx]

Great post. I wish Obama well too. I hope he has the wisdom and courage to push for truly transformational change of the sort you speak of rather than then bailing out suburban homeowners, the auto industry and pissing away money repairing the freeway system. I'm divided on how this will play out -- Obama is astute... but he has only so much to work with, i.e., the American people.

[Kris]

It is time to get our acts together at the family level. There is much work to be done at the community level, and I'm all about that...but heck, we aren't even allowed clotheslines yet where I live. When I inquired about planting a garden last year, I was met with "You aren't going to grow anything like CORN are you?"

I will work on the website to gently prod locals in the right direction, but the impact is going to occur sooner than the tank of city politics can move.

Extended families are going to have to learn to live together (and that's a good thing, most of the time)...we are going to have to learn to cram as many edibles as we can into our little plots.

Foreclosures dot our subdivisions around here, but no will dare admit how the economy is affecting them. That would be so non-alpha-dog. We must all be gorgeous. Our lawns must be manicured. Hummers are still en vogue. It's going to take sooo much to turn this bus around.

Next winter will be so bleak and probably quite deadly. It's time to stock up on canned goods and order some seeds.

Kris7
Working hard at http://www.sccworlds.com

[david]

Concerning petro-agriculture, most of us are like zoo animals, getting our regular drops of food. We know (and care) about as much as the animals where it came from. Imagine what happens to the zoo when the feeders suddenly disappear.

Thanks, Jim, for being a solid, reality-based voice.

[Loveandlight]

As has been pointed out here previously regarding suburbia's housing "assets", let us not forget the fact that a great deal of these "assets" consist of extremely flimsy pressboard structures that will be deteriorating badly a mere quarter-century from when they were completed.

[Laura Louzader]

As much liking and respect as I have for Obama, I have more fear than hope, for he doesn't have any more grasp of basic economics than the bubble-creators who have led this country for the past 8 years- or really, the past 60.

The $850 Billion "stimulus" package, added to the towering public debt load created by the $5 Trillion worth of interventions of the past year and one half, is just one more attempt to keep the economy going by debt creation and asset inflation and will only kick the can down the road a few more miles while we stagger under the additional debt and our currency is worth less with every passing day. I can only hope that that famous inflation hawk, Volker, succeeds in talking sense to Obama, but I don't have any hope.

I also don't have much hope for a man who drives an SUV, which Obama drove home in on election night. His former auto, a huge Chrysler sedan he bought in 2005, is for sale on EBay.He is a very fine, intelligent man, but it is going to take a lot of re-education to wean him from the belief that you can create wealth and generate productive activity just by flooding the country with fake money, and from the techno-triumphalism that dominates the thinking of most "greens".

He has an overwhelming job to do, and needs to re-educate himself completely in a very short time. I believe he will make the effort, and I only hope that his native intelligence and fine moral sense and highly developed sense of responsibility and compassion, can get him past the huge mistakes he's already making, the harmful consequences of which might be irreversible.

But I can't help but be extremely pessimistic about a bunch of people, of whatever party affiliation, who persist in not only doing what already has proved to not work, but are doubling up their efforts. Obama is trotting around the course with blinders on, and I sense he doesn't want to see the truth any more than the rest of our leaders who promulgated the insane policies that created this situation.

[Jynx]

Outstanding post Laura! One would hope that Obama will be taking his cues from works like John Michael Greer's "The Long Descent" (which advocates for adapting to the comming nonindustrial world) rather than the Paul Krugmans of the world who believe that we can maintain the fantasy of endless economic growth and prosperity through massive government spending! But as you point out there are already some ominous signs.

[Martin]

First of all, thank god we're not talking about Israel and Palestine again. This stuff is so much more interesting and relevant.

Second, I want to point out why proper conservatives hate Bush more than progressives. Two of the most important points of this post were agriculture and housing prices. Kunstler takes a more or less conservative position on both of those issues. Pretty much everybody knows that our agro-welfare has led (not the sole contributor, but it certainly paved the way) to the consolidation of the family farm into a corporate entity. Though started by a Republican (Nixon) it has been continuously sustained by Democrats (including Obama, who used McCain's vote against the subsidies to criticize him http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122765760437258197.html). We are going to continue to use our resources to prop up this farming model without a future (all in the name of saving what it is actually destroying). The second issue, housing prices, is another issue where Democrats scare me more than Republicans. Democrats, good intentioned or otherwise, will be leading the way to help people maintain their homes, and the phony value that accompanies them.

This is where we need good conservatives to keep an eye on the reach of our government. To let house prices find their equilibrium. Allow osmosis to move people out of unsustainable areas into sustainable ones. To recognize that the heavy hand of government will shape the world, but will not allow it to grow, but they have lost all credibility, and Bush led the way. Nobody is going to listen to their belated calls for fiscal conservatism after 8 years of deficit spending, no bid contracts, and bailouts. People are right not to trust those jerks, but we all need to understand the role and limitation of government.

I'm not calling on everyone to become conservatives rather than progressives. I'm only asking that everyone understands that Bush (& Co.) are not conservatives. Take conservative ideas on their own merit and understand the difference between the demagogues that were in control of the government, and the conservative ideals they pretended to espouse.

[Flamsey]

I'd like to hear about how your local economic situations look. I am in Suffolk County, Long Island, and every "family restaurant" (TGIF, Applebees, etc) I pass is packed to the gills. It seems like the local populace is oblivious to the recession. And willing to pay good money for bad food.

[Uncle Al]

California this past Friday declared its Treasury desiccated. Welfare ends 01 February 2009 (500,000 VICTIMS! in LA County alone). State employees are suspended en masse without pay - no income but ineligible for unemployment (sparing statistics). California unemployment offices are mute by phone or in person; Web only - with months delay in processing.

12 ga. Buck shotshells vanish from shelves as stocked here. The Officially Sad fall off their golden palanquins in two weeks. Social advocacy will be returned to the income-redistributed as they repeatedly chamber their votes.

[envirosponsible]

I'm all for hope and change, but do you really think that one person (or one administration) decides the future of America?

It's not up to elected officials to get us on track. It's up to us. We're the change that we want, we just haven't matured enough to realize it.

[asoka]

Martin said: "Bush (& Co.) are not conservatives"

So historical revisionism is well underway.

I seem to remember campaigning as a "compassionate conservative" and lying with neo-conservatives for eight years of the Grover Nordquist type (shrink government, drag it to the bathroom, and drown it) and Bush managed to transfer trillions of dollars away from government until he effectively carried out Nordquist's vision.

Now all of a sudden Bush was not a conservative?

[pcnot]

Obama's already in AIPAC's pocket, so the foreign wars and aid to Israel will continue unabated till we're totally exhausted and/or the Middle East goes up in a giant fireball.

Domesticly, he will pursue exactly all the wrong Keynsian solutions till we're in need of a new currency and a new world order. Look for martial law to be instituted.

Kumbaya and shalom

[steve duncan]

I think this nation was very productive, not dependent on automobiles and not based on consumerism yet still enjoyed pornography. What's wrong with pornography, whether in print, in person or via the internet? Is every sexual pleasure limited to the missionary position with a significant other that just wants it to be over with so they can get some sleep? C'mom Jim, it's going to be a long, boring slog without a little deviancy and amyl nitrate. Grab your raincoats and charge the barricades!!!!

[Martin]

Excellent post Laura. I feel the same way about the guy. I genuinely like him, and it is certainly a relief to have a thoughtful, cautious man in the white house, but I don't think he has any intention of facing the hard truths. My only hope is that when the hard truths are undeniable (let's assume for the moment they're not yet undeniable), he can communicate it effectively to the American people.

[hooting]

Emerson taught that all words have their roots in nature. I was curious what the roots, or etymology, are for the word "inauguration".

Here's what one online dictionary says:
"1569, from Fr. inauguration "installation, consecration," from L. inaugurationem (nom. inauguratio) "consecration, installment under good omens," from inaugurare "take omens from the flight of birds, consecrate or install when such omens are favorable," from in- "on, in" + augurare "to act as an augur, predict" (see augur/browse/augur)."

I guess people used to inaugurate when the omens were favorable from watching bird flights?
Funny, last week we had a bird flight take out an airplane in New York, causing it to crash in the Hudson River. Although no one was killed, it was a very scarey and traumatic event. An omen?

[asoka]

" I don't think he has any intention of facing the hard truths."

Which hard truths? Walk the streets of southside Chicago like Obama did and I think you'll see Obama has faced hard truths.

[stvo]

Of all presidents seen in my life this one is probably earmarked for a particularly sweet honeymoon. In the American system that honeymoon period seems of great importance and often sets the tone for much of what a president's efforts at getting legislation rolling, or not. I'm expecting an Obama bounce but fear that the early goodwill may not last and then exactly what is described in this post will come on strong.

A friend-of-a-friend working in risk analysis and assessment at a major Canadian bank has called for Rodney King style riots by next fall. Homeland defence vs KKK vs mobs of unemployable graphic artists clawing open 18-wheelers at gunpoint. Food, rather than justice-in-the-ghetto will be the theme. Yeah, everybody has a theory but this fellow I quite respect and he called the housing bomb pretty accurately two years ago.

Hopefully people in favour of railway improvement have some attention in the new administration during that honeymoon. Here's a couple of articles that make specific mention of real things that can be done for the railways and so make for some nice reading:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0901.longman.html

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/02/five-steps-to-h.html

Not one item in either article is beyond the capacity of a nation that can launch aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines whenever it feels like it, however bad its addiction to cheez doodles and vinyl siding has gotten.

BTW: does anyone in here actually have JHK's direct attention? This comments section would be so much nicer if it were laid out as a horizontal forum, you know, with threads/subjects. Its just that I find after 200 or so comments this vertical secton becomes almost worthless. One-upmanship and even potty talk or worse breaks out too often. We saw problems over the Gaza/Israel post, too. A "proper" forum would be much cooler. Thomas Homer-Dixon is in a similar business as our man here and he has a forum. Just a thought.

[Martin]

Asoka, George Bush is not a conservative: Ron Paul is a conservative. If you can't understand the difference by now. I will waste no energy explaining it to you.

If you are curious why he's not a conservative just google "bush is no conservative" plenty of people have made the argument before. (I know I said I wouldn't...) Nation building is not (is Neo) conservative (which is actually a branch of Wilsonian idealism, a progressive idea), decreasing taxes while increasing spending and borrowing is not conservative, telling people to shop during a national emergency is not conservative, encouraging low interest rates and home ownership to those who can't afford it is not conservative. Increasing the federal reach on education is not conservative... This is not revisionism. People have been yelling this for 8 years, but few wanted to listen.

[Moondog]

What a refreshing departure from last week's pointless, toxic and altogether noxious exchanges on the insoluble Mid East mess, indisputably the hottest of hot button issues, as evidenced by so many hate-fueled rants.

Asoka, Thank you for your great compassion and rational thinking amidst so much bile and tripe. I have come to greatly appreciate your enlightened posts. Tashi delek.

I am guardedly pessimistic about Obama. I also wish him well, having worked for his election. But I expect he will blithely carry on the UPL agenda, and with the conflation of so many overwhelming crises [financial meltdown, PO and energy depletion, foreign wars, and so many losing jobs and housing], it is indeed a bleak picture. We will see if he will have a "coming out" as a closet realist, or if we will get merely more of the same delusional Happy Motoring politics, only with eloquence and a different hue. Is there anything he has said or anyone he has selected that would suggest otherwise? He has chosen too many good 'ol boys and not there is not an inkling of TLE awareness [apart from some vague non-committal mention of light rail].

On the other hand, we could not do any better that a Pres. Obama at this point in history. With his great intelligence and good heart, maybe he will "get it," at least to some extent. We'll soon see what he means by sacrifice and service [unintended alliteration there], and if we finally leave the miserable mentality of endless cruising and consuming.

I agree with Laura about the need for Barack's re-education. I expect, with my guarded pessimism, that we will get more of the flood of not-so-funny money with a new unhealthy dose of green techno-triumphalism.

At least I won't have to keep reminding myself that I live only 5 minutes from the Canadian border as I have for the past 8 years. But I am not retiring yet, figuring that my job is probably more secure in the long run than the NYS teachers' pension fund.

I am heartened to see the day is finally at hand:

January 20, 2009: The end of an error.

[asoka]

"...their conclusion that the White House has flown under false colors is ludicrous. In all that he has tried to do--reform education, fix Social Security, restore religion to the public square, assert American greatness, appoint good judges--Mr. Bush has proved himself a conservative. Of course, along the way, he has also proved himself hapless. The problem isn't his lack of conservatism. The problem is his lack of competence."

The Conservative Case Against Bush
http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009778&mod=RSS_Opinion_Journal&ojrss=frontpage

[Martin]

"Which hard truths? Walk the streets of southside Chicago like Obama did and I think you'll see Obama has faced hard truths."

Those are certainly hard truths, but are they the hard truths we speak of on this blog? Those are the hard truths of the 20th C. We are talking about the hard truths of the 21st. Two things: our financial infrastructure is crumbling like the house of cards that it is, and oil is a finite resource, so the status quo of cheap oil is closer to the end than it is to the beginning.

Look, I'm not an Obama hater. I voted for him, and even shed a tear or two on the night he was elected. The Republicans lost all credibility and deserved to get fired. But, from what I have seen, Obama has every intention of trying to prolong the Suburban lifestyle as well as our interventionist foreign policy, both of are unsustainable, which anybody facing the "hard truths" that I was speaking of would know. Maybe he might be able to sustain them through a term or two, and maybe that's what scares me the most.

[overeasy]

What Obama is going to have to do, and it flies in the face of all that has happened over the past 20 years or so...is be open to ideas -- no matter where they emerge from. He is also going to have to worry less about his future reelection and more about the nation's future. And, most of all, he is going to have to drag Congress down that same road.

My hope is that he will do these things, but I have worked around politicians long enough to know that it's a long shot....

And hey, are you showing your "folky" roots there Jim? "Pallet on the floor...?" :-)

OE

[Moondog]

Flamsey, as to the local scene, the same tragic comedy is salient. Here in Malone, a small town on the northernmost NY state border, nothing much seems to have changed yet [but then again Franklin County still holds the #1 claim as New York's poorest]. The local diner near where I work in Chateaugay was packed last night as I drove by. In Albany over the weekends, a crowd of 100+ consumers were at Circuit City early, awaiting the 11 a.m. opening for the huge liquidation of the bankrupt retailer [Only 10% off and the big-screens were still selling briskly]. Same old "business as usual" with the other stores and restaurants downstate [Capital region] and way up here too. There ave been many foreclosures here, but WTSHTF hasn't begun, yet. I see Americans still mindlessly staggering around the UPL, muttering the mantra of BUY BUY until reality comes crashing down and then it will be: BYE BYE.

It cannot continue for long, and wishing will not help. I am wishing for the dawn of the new old ways, the beginning of a better day with the prospect of happier humans.

Or not. However, 2009 will surely be a cataclysmic watershed moment.

[oneEyeOpen]

" a great deal of these "assets" consist of extremely flimsy pressboard structures that will be deteriorating badly a mere quarter-century from when they were completed."

Hog wash. There is nothing flimsy about pressboard. If you keep a water shedding roof on these structures they'll last as long as a home built from conventional wood.