Dancing Shoes

Click here to access article by James Howard Kunstler from his blog Clusterfuck Nation. (Some revising done on 7pm 5-23-12 Seattle time.)

This well-educated, and it appears, well off writer and social critic, makes some interesting observations in this short piece that suggests a world in the process of disintegration. I think this is someone who identifies with the One Percent, but likes to thumb his nose at them and their petty affairs and their ignorance about things. This, of course, makes him feel very superior. However, he has never, as far as I know, looked critically at the organizing basis of current societies, the capitalist system, that has created all the defects which he likes to criticize. Perhaps this is because he likes all the comforts and privileges that he has enjoyed from it. Thus, as a social critic I don't think we can take him too seriously. 

Still, I think he captures some realities about the world that the One Percent's system of capitalism has created. For example, his reference to Karl Rove (the man behind the throne of George Bush Jr.) who was a prime political operative of the Empire and an excellent example of all the arrogance, hubris and evil that can infect people who are drunk on power. Here is Ron Suskind on the New York Times Magazine quoting Rove in 2004: 

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

In another prescient observation he writes about the inability of "we" (I think he means the governing One Percent and a large part of the still sleeping 99 Percent) to make any constructive changes to avert all the disasters awaiting us:

That future is all about contraction. We could navigate our way into it but we don't want to. We want to stay right where we are with all our stuff and no need to make new arrangements and we are trying every last trick to do that.

And, finally there is this very entertaining lampoon of the directors of Empire all getting together at the G-8 meeting:

What do you suppose Obama and the other feckless schmucks of the G-8 were telling each other this weekend at Camp David between weenie roasts and ping-pong round robins? It must have been the emptiest dumb show of mere protocol; an exchange of tie-tacks in the national colors, the playing of many anthems and flying of flags, issuance of bland assurances and platitudes. Nobody believes any of them anymore, even poor Mr. Hollandaise, who has been on the job a few days. Angela Merkel must be good and goddam sick of even showing up at the office.