Kunstler

Gimme Shelter. Kunstler. Aug. 17.

“Have you all lost your mind?” Vladimir Putin replied to one of Megyn Kelly’s thrusts about alleged Russian perfidy toward the US in the gala interview that debuted her new Sunday Night star-chamber on NBC. Old Vlad put his finger on something there. His view of the late goings-on in America is like that of the proverbial detached Martian observer of strange Earthly doings, rattling his antennae and clicking his mouth-parts in mirth. 

To which retort, by the way, one would have to answer, ”Yes, absolutely.” The toils of slow economic collapse, accompanied by the ceaseless effort by various arms of the Deep State to spin “the narrative” around the voting public’s collective head, has driven the polity insane. And this, of course, is on view in the bedlam that US politics has become, Trump and all. I’m waiting for The New York Times to run the three-column headline that says Russia Racist, Misogynist, and Islamophobic to finally bring together the programmed paranoia of NeoCon / DemProg alliance with the esprit de corp of the new collegiate Red Guard. 

Mr. Putin does not have to lift a finger to detonate the groaning garbage barge of US domestic affairs. It’s already ignited and is faring toward a very peculiar species of civil war. You can be sure that the NeoCon / DemProg axis is determined to get rid of Trump at all costs. Impeachment requires some sort of high crime or misdemeanour. So far, going on a year, they haven’t come up with any evidence that the Golden Golem of Greatness acted as a Russian agent in some fashion, and that itself has got to be a little suspicious, considering the thousands of clerks in the spinning mills of those legendary seventeen Intel outfits the government runs. How could they fail to come up with a video of the Donald and Vladimir swatting each other playfully with birch switches in a Moscow banya? Five TV sitcom writers could surely come up with an angle — as long as it was a plausible entertainment. 

In the meantime, Trump prevails, the mad bull elephant of the Republican herd, majestically swinging his trunk against everything breakable in the political china shop while trumpeting “Covfefe! Covfefe!” Last week it was the Paris Climate Accords. The op-ed writers in the usual places bounced off the walls of their virtual rubber room in response. Paul Krugman had to be dragged down to hydrotherapy at the NYT after he set his hair on fire. And Rachel Maddow practically popped a carotid artery in her muscular neck from all that shrieking. 

I’m a bit more sanguine about the US withdrawal. To me, the Paris Accords were just another feel-good PR stunt enabling politicians to pretend that they could control forces that are already way out-of-hand, an international vanity project of ass-covering. The coming economic collapse will depress global industrial activity whether anybody likes it or not, and despite anyone’s pretense of good intentions — and then we will have a range of much more practical problems of everyday life to contend with. 

Of course, Trump cannot possibly see it that way, given his wish to bring back the America of humming factories and happy workers seeing the USA in their Chevrolets and all that. That fantasy will eventually fade as the inability to get anything done in Washington becomes manifest and obvious. When the “basket of deplorables” sees their hopes dribble away, they will start in with serious mischief of their own, without Trump having to prompt them. Then it will be a quixotic battle between them and the BLM / SJW proxies that the higher-up chickenshits of DemProgdom have so carefully groomed as their vanguard. There will be blood. 

Yes, Mr. P, America has lost its mind. The whole thing has turned into some kind of nonstop Kardashian tranny monster truck shit-show of manufactured melodrama and lost causes, inducing a kind of global nausea that may ultimately prove more fatal than the rising surface temperature and melting icecaps. Russia, to its credit, and whatever else you think about it, has some regard for its own survival. Our country prefers the excitement of self-destruction.

Holy Hell. Kunstler. July 14, 2017.

The abiding enigma of this tormented era remains: why has the thinking class of America abandoned thinking? The answer is: it’s the reaction to their own failure. Failure to do what? To produce the utopia that Gnostic liberalism promised — a perfect world based on altering human nature. 

The result is an essentially religious hysteria, like the witch frenzies of Medieval Europe that were sometimes provoked by ergot poisoning — a fungus with toxic psychotropic properties that grew on the harvested rye, inducing frightful hallucinations in the villagers, who then lashed out at their perceived supernatural antagonists. Trump in our time is the ergot on the bread of our politics. And Russia is the witch. 

Like other operations of the human mind, this collective fugue-state has a big subconscious module in it: the deep, poorly articulated fear that the signal notion of Progress behind progressive politics in the industrial era has reached a dead end. The world is clearly not becoming a better place, but rather reeling into disorder and ecological crisis, despite all the rational programs and politics of modern democracy, and political failure is everywhere. 

The “peace dividend” promised by the end of the cold war has degenerated into endless war. The miraculous promises of medicine have been hijacked by “health care” racketeering now institutionalized under ObamaCare. The Civil Rights campaign begun in the 1950s with the most earnest, hopeful intentions (and generous policies) has produced off-the-charts black crime rates, educational defeat, ruined cities, and epic rancor. The middle class has been left economically shipwrecked by the promises of globalism. The pledge of a happy retirement dissolves as the pension funds roll over and die. And the supposed paragon of enlightened American governance morphs into a sinister and corrupt Deep State of oligarchical corruption. 

In the background of all this are even more disturbing quandaries and prospects: population overshoot, mass migration from regions that can’t support these numbers of people, extinctions of animal species, the death of the oceans, climate instability. The practical problems of economy approach an event horizon of energy scarcity, runaway debt from trying to mitigate it, and eventual collapse of our day-to-day hyper-complex economic arrangements. These things are so scary that the thinking classes — except for a minority of nerdy scientists [MW: and nerdy non-scientists] — can’t even bear to think about them. 

Instead, we have the Gnostic drive to alter human nature, which has terminated in the preoccupation with abolishing sexual identity — the fantasy that we will (and ought to) throw off the shackles of biology and rise into a sort of “trans-human” nirvana. Just behold the amount of “ink” that The New York Times has spilled reporting on the triumphs of transexualism in the past year. 

It’s not surprising that some of the worst thinking, the most obviously tortured theological hallucinations, emanate these days from the universities — the places where young, developing intellects are supposed to be molded. Instead of free inquiry, they now offer intellectual martial law, chained to sets of ersatz metaphysics. “Victim” ideas run wild because malign supernatural powers are in play against the faculty hierophants on the elite campuses, charged with interpreting the sacred mysteries and esoteric principles of “post-structural” (reality-optional) thought. The quandaries of “minority” America have resolved in the simple superstitious idea that demonic forces of “white male privilege” and ubiquitous, implacable misogynistic racism are entirely responsible for the woes and sorrows of the world, and the failure of progress in particular. 

The failures of US-sponsored economic globalism now focus on the ur-demon (the Satan!) called Russia. Apocalyptic battle with the greatest monster of the imagination is the ultimate struggle in outbreaks of religious frenzy, and America has a ripe history of engaging with the Devil. It’s bad enough when it breaks out in a tiny colonial settlement like Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1600s. There only a few dozen people were persecuted and destroyed. It’s another matter on the global stage today when you engage a perceived “Satan” like Russia, which truly can rain holy Hell back on you if you push your hallucinated animus too far.