What the current national conversation is ultimately about is our collective failure to deal adequately and realistically with the situation we find ourselves in. It's about the failure of American leadership at all levels, and especially the failure of the national political system.
No one has written about this situation more perceptively or with greater urgency than Jim Kunstler, and his once-weekly blog post this morning is better than usual. In the most concise possible way, he describes the crisis of the present: 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.
If any of our political leaders in either party have the slightest notion what's happening, and of the kind of changes the future is going to require from us, they're keeping their knowledge secret, no doubt because they realize that "the voters don't want to hear this; they won't like it." So they keep talking about "growth" and "recovery," but they clearly don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about. If they did, they'd be leading the huge effort that's going to be necessary for us to deal effectively with the changed landscape, characterized by much more expensive energy, much less available credit, and the need to salvage what's left of a livable habitat.
As above, so below, and in recent conversations I've had on this topic, I've seen the usual reluctance to even consider changing present arrangements. The response I keep getting is, "We like doing it the way we're doing it now." Unfortunately, that's not an option.
Instead of dealing with their real problems, which are coming at them like an oncoming train, the American people on the whole are childishly and unconsciously expressing their fear and uncertainty about the future by indulging in an orgy of hysterical xenophobic hatred. Instead of coping with reality, we're either scapegoating Muslims, or giving vent to thinly-disguised, blatantly racist attacks against the guy in the White House, expressed indirectly with stupid assertions about his religion or country of origin.
I have never felt such contempt and disgust for the mass of my fellow citizens as I do today. It's embarrassing, to think we're standing naked and revealed to the rest of the world possessing no more dignity or self-respect than the illiterate hicks in the novel "Tobacco Road," who occupy themselves in the first chapter of that book in a ditch fighting over a sack of turnips. Maybe we could be a little better than this, and deal with reality a little more effectively if we had any leadership at all worthy of the name.
Can't we do any better than this?
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