Scary People, Scary Times

Yes the scary people are coming out of the woodwork in the U.S.A., aided and abetted by right wing media. The most wild accusations about Obama, whether he was born in the U.S., whether he is a socialist, whether he is a muslim, whether he is a christian, etc., etc., all get major play. Is Obama afraid of the scary people? Peacenik thinks so. Obama is afraid to put solar panels on the roof of the White House for fear of offending the nutjobs. Obama is afraid to fight for extended unemployment benefits. Obama is afraid to fight for social security. Obama is afraid to fight for fair taxation. Obama is afraid to close Guantanamo. Obama is afraid to end the wars and bring the troops home. Yes the scary people are in charge. It is laughable that someone who has offered so little to the public discourse, such as John Boehner, can rise to be the Speaker of the House. But when the president is a scardy cat, when the supposed leader of the progressive movement is a scardy cat, this is what happens. Sarah Palin as president, becomes imaginable.

By James Howard Kunstler
on September 13, 2010 7:24 AM

In that order. The scary people have already started coming out of the woodwork. The times lately have been mostly uncertain, but soon they'll turn scary, too, as it becomes clearer that the people running things in the USA have no idea what's going on or what they're going to do about it -- and what's going on is an involuntary permanent re-set of the terms of everyday life, from a wet-dream robotic "consumer" techtopia to something more like the first chapter of Tobacco Road, with a family of half-wits reduced by hard times to fighting over a sack of turnips in a roadside ditch. That's the story-arc anyway, and lots of people won't like it. But the theme of dwindling resources is not a pretty one.
The most striking feature of the current scene is the absence of a coherent vision of our multiple related predicaments and how they add up to a valid picture of reality. To be precise, I mean our predicaments of 1.) energy resources, 2.) vanishing capital, and 3.) ecocide. This inability to decode the clear and present dangers to civilized life is a failure of leadership and authority without precedent in the American story.

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