James Howard Kunstler writes: Back in the golden age of American Flyfishing — say around 1913 –
when technical innovation in a prissy and recondite sport was joined by
a new leisure class emanating from the white glove canyons of Wall
Street, some new-minted guru of angling came up with method for
whipping up action on a trout stream when no fish would rise to the
fly. It was really lame. The idea was to artificially create the
illusion of a mayfly hatch — that moment when the larva of, for
instance, Ephemerella subvaria, the Hendrickson mayfly, swims
to the surface, molts, and dries its newly unfurled adult wings in the
brisk spring air. This is famously the moment that drives trout crazy,
and when it occurs en masse, with zillions of mayflies “hatching” off
the water, a trout feeding-frenzy can ensue. The idea with the
artificial hatch was to pitch a fake Hendrickson fly made of feathers
and fur in so many furious, rapid casts that the dumb trout lurking
below would get suckered into a feeding frenzy — and, shortly, into
the buttered frying pan, with a nice “tuxedo” of cornmeal and bacon.
In
the annals of flyfishing, this gambit has been all but discredited,
except among the mentally sub-normal who sometimes venture over from
the lumpen realm of crank-and-plug fishing in search of improved social
standing. But the tactic naturally transferred into the precincts of
finance, where it reappeared in such disparate practices as Ponzi
schemes and Keynesian “pump-priming.” Now it is being employed at a
scale never seen before, on an economy that is the equivalent of a
great dead river poisoned by the toxic effluents of the same society
that inhabits its banks (no pun intended). The dark secret of this
river is that the fish who once ran there are all dead. …
The Great Wish across America is to resume the life of comfort-and-convenience that seemed so nirvana-like just a few short years ago, when the very constellations of the heavens might have been renamed after heroic Atlanta realtors and Connecticut hedge fund warriors, and the boomer portfolios groaned with earnings, and millions of graying corporate salary mules dreamed of their approaching retirement to a satori of golf and Viagra, and the interior decorators grew so rich installing granite countertops that they could buy their own houses in the East Hampton, and every microcephalic parking valet in Las Vegas qualified for a bucket full of Ninja mortgages, and Lloyd Blankfein could dream of divorcing his wife to marry his cappuccino machine.
The choices now are stark and the kind of life on offer by the future is rather austere. The job of the current president, and the people who work with him, is to manage an epic contraction — let’s say, to land a very large, loaded defect-ridden airplane that has both run out of fuel and suffered grievous mechanical breakdown… and to bring down that vehicle in an unfamiliar country filled with angry savages. Sadly, the new president and his co-pilots just want to keep the plane up there, circling. The president’s viziers are working round-the-clock to come up with some way, some toggle-switch, that might turn off the laws of gravity (which are not unrelated to the laws of thermodynamics). But all they seem to be able to come up with are mumbled prayers that are pale imitations of the algorithms once concocted by the Wall Street engineers who designed the aircraft they’re riding in. …
I remain confident that the months ahead will introduce the American
public and our leaders to a range of horrors that will begin to
penetrate our addled collective imagination. We’re far from done with
the crisis of banking and money and the related fiasco in mortgages –
which translates into the very real situation of many people become
homeless. It remains to be seen what may happen on the food production
scene, but the current severe shortage of capital and the intense
droughts shaping up around the world will resolve into a much clearer
picture by mid-summer. The price of oil has resumed marching up and has
now re-entered a range ($50-plus) that spun the airline industry into
bankruptcy last time around. Enough carnage has already occurred on the
jobs scene that the next act among many chronically jobless may tilt
toward desperation, anger, and violence. The sporting goods shops
around the nation are already rationing ammunition.
It’s not
just the stock markets that have decoupled from reality as we enjoy the
fragrant vapors of spring — it’s the entire conscious consensus of
everybody holding the levers of power and opinion. To put it as simply
as possible, we’re still sleepwalking into the future. (05/17/09)
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