Kunstler asks the question. Can he really do any worse than what we’ve had for the last 11 years? As this Fourth Turning get more chaotic and intense by the day, the linear thinkers are incapable of seeing their world of illusions crumble around them. Things will not go back to “normal”. Normal will be swept away in a tsunami of reality.
Reality Optional Nation
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 7, 2011 9:38 AM
Before retiring to a casket packed with clods of my native soil, I tuned in the Sunday night late news to find the political struggles of Araby banished from the screen. Charlie Sheen was all over the place, his defiant chin thrust forward as if auditioning for the role as our next president. I hope the execs at Fox News were paying attention, especially now that they’ve lost half their commentary squad to the toils of campaigning. Think of it: Charlie Sheen in the White House. With a pound of pharmaceutical-grade blow. More intellect in one seat than since the night Thomas Jefferson dined with his water spaniel, Hercules. No mouthy “advisors” cluttering up the West Wing (or disrupting the laser light show of Charlie’s thoughts). And there is, of course, the memory of his dad, who a lot of prayerful Americans recall as a president, somewhere maybe between Clinton and Bush Two.
An Alzheimers fog creeps across this land, from sea to shining sea, as its intellectual class – theoretically the brains of this outfit – utterly fails to get a grip on what is transpiring in this world. The failure of leadership in America is comprehensive and deep. President Obama’s top aide, Bill Daley, floated out the notion that we might draw down America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) so that the imprudent folk who traded-in clunkers for new Ford F110 and Cadillac Escalades won’t feel any pain from four-dollar gasoline.
Harken, now – a reminder to the rest of you out there who do not have tubeworms boring tunnels through your brain-pans: there’s a reason the petroleum reserve is called “strategic.” We didn’t stockpile that oil to pretend to be the world’s “swing producer” for a month and a half, just to knock the price down twenty-seven cents a gallon so that soccer moms could feel more comfortable bidding for an Auslini Veneto crocodile leather handbag on The Shopping Channel. Strategic was meant to imply when something really really bad happens, like a national emergency, say, with military overtones.
The failure of the news media, trapped by the diminishing returns of technology, grows more epic every week. We’ve never had more media outlets in the history of this land, or been more poorly informed. Mental fossil George Will fired off a salvo last week against fixing the US railroads. He thinks it’s just a sinister ploy to snatch the people’s “individualism.” Perhaps George hasn’t noticed that other things are operating out there in the polity-space to turn the folks of this land into zombies. After all, they were long ago transformed from “citizens” into “consumers” – without a peep of complaint from anybody – so, having already surrendered their duties, obligations, and responsibilities to anything beyond their hunger for Cheez Doodles, they might now find themselves suddenly devoid of “individualism,” staggering down the highways in mobs wherever a whiff of blood emanates from a strip mall?
I’d have to guess that the Maryland DOT ran a few lanes of the Beltway through George Will’s head, perhaps so he could drag race with Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Senator Jim DeMint to see who can get America to drive off a cliff fastest. Oddly, the basic question that now thunders through North Africa and the Middle East has not been heard on the fruited plains of this-land-is-your-land – viz: who gave this cohort of morons the right to tell us what to do and think?
Which gets us to the true matter at hand: the matter that the world is suddenly exploding in an epic phase-change rearrangement of the political order, starting with the lands that own most of the world’s exportable oil. In this vein, a message to readers of George Will and other old-line “thought-leaders” of America’s commentary regime: If you think the action in the streets will be limited to these sandy outlands seven thousand miles away, then your last thoughts will not be comforting when the zombies you helped to create turn up slavering in your driveway.
By the way, this doesn’t let President Obama off the hook. His consistent failure to tell the truth about the fragility of our situation, to make the case for getting our citizens out of their car-prisons, to promote modes of living that comport with reality – the president’s apparent cluelessness in every dimension of this crisis is something that historians of the future will shake theirs heads over in wonder and nausea (if the notion of history even survives the oil age). And for the moment we’ll put aside some other rather pressing matters such as the AWOL rule-of-law in our banking operations.
One historian, Michael Klare of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass, made the trenchant point last week that oil nations which undergo political upheaval invariably end up producing far less oil, permanently, no matter whether the political outcome is better or worse than before. So, notwithstanding the media fantasy in our land to the effect that America’s founding fathers have been reincarnated in places like Egypt the past month, it is unlikely that there would be anything but an extreme downside effect on the world’s oil supply, even if the successor to Hosni Mubarak (as yet unknown) turned up in a powdered wig and waistcoat, with the Bill of Rights magically translated into Arabic in his beneficent hand.
I was a young newspaper reporter during the 1973 OPEC oil “embargo” (so-called). Whatever else history records it as having consisted of – bluffing, hoarding, fear-mongering, market manipulation – a few things are inarguable. It arose suddenly out of a political conflict (the Yom Kippur War), and it disrupted life in the USA to a degree unknown since the Second World War – or for that matter until the present day, even counting the trauma of 9/11/01. My sense of things is that we are now entering an oil crisis much more severe and very likely permanent. If production is lost through political strife in Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Iran, Iraq, or even a lesser combination of them, it will crater the global economy and change how we do everything here. George Will may even find himself having to ride a bicycle down the freeway in his head.
Smokey says:
KES
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7th March 2011 at 11:24 am
Welshman says:
George Will is one of the few MSM writers I enjoy reading.
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7th March 2011 at 11:52 am
dd says:
this article was more inane than charlie sheen, which is to say really entertaining and worth reading, but equally sad.
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7th March 2011 at 1:34 pm
Opinionated Bloviator says:
“Strategic was meant to imply when something really really bad happens” – Like a hyper inflationary “Zimbabwe” collapse brought about by endless money printing and “gorge the beast” spendulus? Give it a few months, by Christmas 2011 we will be there.
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7th March 2011 at 5:53 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Warner Bros. fires Charlie Sheen
According to a statement from Warner Bros. (which, like CNN, is owned by Time Warner) Charlie Sheen has been fired.
“After careful consideration, Warner Bros. Television has terminated Charlie Sheen’s services on “Two and a Half Men” effective immediately,” the statement reads.
As far as the future of the show itself, a CBS spokesperson tells CNN, “No decision has been made.”
Sheen has since responded with a statement to TMZ in which he calls the termination “very good news.”
“They continue to be in breach, like so many whales,” Sheen’s statement reads. “It is a big day of gladness at the Sober Valley Lodge because now I can take all of their bazillions, never have to look at whatshis[expletive] again and I never have to put on those silly shirts for as long as this warlock exists in the terrestrial dimension.”
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7th March 2011 at 7:10 pm
llpoh says:
“I never have to put on those silly shirts for as long as this warlock exists in the terrestrial dimension.” I think that may not be too long at all. I always thought Cryer was the star anyway – Sheen is an asswipe and it shines thru everywhere. Maybe his brother is available.
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7th March 2011 at 7:18 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Charlie Sheen for POTUS with Lindsay Lohan as his Running Mate! Paris Hilton for Secretary of State! Tom Cruise for Secretary of Defense! Mel Gibson for Attorney General!
You know, it sounds like Charlie is pulling all this shit intentionally to force the studio into a breach of contract.
RE
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7th March 2011 at 7:22 pm
Smokey says:
Sheen is also a die-hard Truther.
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7th March 2011 at 7:23 pm
Administrator says:
Now that he has been fired, he can concentrate on his Presidential campaign.
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7th March 2011 at 8:03 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Sheenglish
Where Charlie Sheen’s crazy words come from.
By Christopher Beam
Posted Friday, March 4, 2011, at 5:56 PM ET
Charlie Sheen
The most surprising aspect of Charlie Sheen’s suicide by camera this week—aside from the fact that he’s somehow still alive—has been learning of his gift with words. Viewers quickly seized on his curious turns of phrase. “I got magic and I got poetry at my fingertips,” Sheen said in a radio interview. Indeed, back in 1990 Sheen even wrote a book of poetry (now, sadly, out of print).
Sheen says that the words he strings together—like when he called himself a “high priest Vatican assassin warlock”—”just sound cool together.” And they do. But they’re not assembled at random. Now that Sheen has given interviews to every news organization in America, it is possible to detect patterns in his speech, to discern influences. Here’s a breakdown of Sheen’s linguistic tics, and the parts of his identity from which they may emerge.
Stoner surfer philosopher. Often, Sheen talks like a perpetually blazed Ninja Turtle. An interviewer he likes is “radical.” His publicist’s decision to ditch him is “gnarly.” His life, which he hopes his children one day learn from, is “epic.” It’s unclear how Sheen’s vocabulary stays rooted in the Point Break era while modern American usage continues to evolve, but it may say something about the last time he was fully conscious of his surroundings.
Sports commentator. Sheen’s obsession with “winning” has been widely noted. (#winning has been a trending topic on Twitter for days.) “The scoreboard doesn’t lie,” he says, referring to the way he raises his kids, his contract with CBS, and his marital life, in which he acknowledges he’s “zero for three.” Addressing his boss, Chuck Lorre, Sheen, an avid baseball fan said, “Your cleanup hitter is on the bench just waiting to spin to win and crush.” Never mind that he had, effectively, just whacked his coach with the bat.
Military buff. Sheen’s breakout role was playing a grunt in Platoon, and he’s still playing it. “Sniper team one, sniper team one, take ‘em out,” he joked, during an interview with TMZ, when he appeared to spot paparazzi. Many of his favorite metaphors are military ones. “I’m dealing with soft targets,” he said, referring to his enemies, “and it’s just strafing runs in my underwear before my first cup of coffee.” The aircraft he most identifies with? “Most of the time—and this includes naps—I’m an F-18, bro, and I will destroy you in the air, and I will deploy my ordnance to the ground.” He can be other weapons, too. “He might be Nails,” Sheen said on a radio show, referring to the center fielder Lenny Dykstra by his nickname, “but I’m frickin’ bayonets, you know? I’m battle tested, man.” Sheen’s fight with CBS over Two and a Half Men is not a mere skirmish. “We are at war,” he says. “Defeat is not an option.”
English professor. Sheen understands the limits of language. He refers to the two women in his life as “the goddesses,” but the word isn’t sufficient to describe them: “I don’t think the term is good enough,” he says. “But when you’re bound by these terrestrial descriptions, you must use the best term available.” He also urges his audience to do a little textual analysis when considering his plight and to think about authorial intent: “If people could just read behind the hieroglyphic, if they could put their freakin’ cryptology hat on, they’d realize this isn’t totally serious.”
Self-help guru. Sheen’s 12-step program has only one step: Sheer force of will. Asked about his substance abuse problems, Sheen said “I cured it with my brain, with my mind.” If there’s a method to his program, it’s channeling his anger into productive activity. “People say you have to work on your resentments,” he said. “Yeah, no, I’m gonna hang onto them and they’re gonna fuel my attack.” Like any savvy guru, he dismisses programs other than his own: “Alcoholics Anonymous reports a 5 percent success rate. My success rate is 100 percent.” He even has prime-time ready slogans. “Can’t is the cancer of happen,” he says.
Cult leader. Charisma. Inflated sense of self. Belief that one is chosen and deserving of worship. Check, check, check. There may not be a real cult of Charlie Sheen, but he’s leading it nonetheless. “I’m tired of pretending I’m not special,” he says. “I’m tired of pretending I’m not a total freaking rock star from Mars.” Other people cannot be like him, because they don’t have “tiger blood and Adonis DNA.” In fact, it would be dangerous to try: “I am on a drug,” he says. “It’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available. If you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.” But they can worship him—he has a soft spot for his “beautiful fans”—and revel in his success. “Don’t be worried,” he reassured fans. “Celebrate this movement.”
Slam poet. It’s hard to pick just one genre that captures the free-association musicality of Sheen’s words. He cajoles his audience with Saul Williams-style “wake up” messages: “So just shut your traps and put down your McDonald’s, your magazines, your TMZ and the rest of it, and focus on something that matters. But you can’t focus on things that matter if all you’ve been is asleep for 40 years. Funny how sleep rhymes with sheep.” He plays with words. Is he bipolar? He’s “bi-winning.” And anyway, so what if he was? “The earth is bipolar,” he says. He’s got a deep well of audience-pleasing quips: “It might be lonely up here,” he says, “but I sure like the view.”
Sheen’s sitcom career may be over, but his knack for language suggests he could have a bright future working with words. Time to start shopping that second volume of poetry.
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7th March 2011 at 3:47 pm