Jimmy seems to be in particularly sour mood this morning.
Not So Smart
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 25, 2013 9:34 AM
on February 25, 2013 9:34 AM
“The Fed can afford to lose money because it can simply print more.”
–The New York Times
One striking but little discussed element about the new Netflix Washington political drama series, House of Cards, is that every time a character picks up a cell phone, something bad happens. The character’s phones shadow them at every turn like evil twins, giving the impression that the US government, and everything in its orbit, is run not by human beings but by cell phones. The people attached are merely puppets of the phones.
I don’t think this is a sign of the rumored “singularity,” the point at which human and machine intelligence supposedly meld into a shimmering synthesis of silicon masturbation fantasies. Rather it’s just another demonstration of the diminishing returns of technology — or how thinking you’re so smart actually makes you stupider. Surely we are a stupider nation politically than we were before the age of texting, drones, and high frequency trading.
I have no predictions about what exact effects the so-called Sequester might bring about when its dreaded hammer rings down on Friday. But something that works as a bitch-slap upside this nation’s tattooed head is apt to be salutary, if only to demonstrate to the apathetic masses and its grifter leaders that anything which can’t go on forever, eventually won’t.
What disturbs me, a non-right-winger politically, is that the US government should not try to replace a functioning real economy of volitional exchanges, especially if necessity compels that economy to change. That is what our government has been attempting by stealthy increments for decades and now with reckless abandon in the new era of a permanent contraction that no political figure can fathom. Lately, this trend has been ramped up under the wishful hypothesis that some magical new technology or financial “secret sauce,” will eventually bring back a return to the nirvana of techno-industrial boom times, if only we can be “smart” enough. The wishing is evident in such con-jobs as the shale gas bubble (“We’ll soon be energy independent”) and the idea that a few new Apple fabrication factories, staffed largely by robots, will save the remnant American blue collar class from their fate as tattooed convenience store layabouts.
Of course there is plenty of real work to do around the USA in transitioning to the next phase of history, but we’re not interested because it might violate our narrow comfort zone. We need more people to start working at local farming. When agri-biz fails it will happen hard and fast because of its seasonal nature, and the familiar distribution networks (supermarkets) will fail with it. American political leadership won’t inform its citizen-subjects about this beforehand, or shift policy supports away from their ag-industrial client-patrons. To be fair, American citizens can’t see themselves working in the crop rows, either. They will choose to starve rather than do what they’ve seen Mexican migrants do for a couple of generations — and they will starve, eventually, too, even with The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills playing on the flat screen in the background.
If we weren’t such a stupid people in thrall to our “smart” phones, we’d be rebuilding the US passenger railroad system for the day, not far off, when the grand entitlement of Happy Motoring rather suddenly vaporizes for a significant chunk of the population. The lack of interest in that project is really something to behold. Politicians who systematically “de-fund” the rail corridors, which is the case here in the Northeast, do it because they are as clueless as their constituents about what’s really coming down. Rather, both the politicians and the public place their bets on “self-driving cars” powered by an as-yet-to-be announced sovereign replacement for liquid hydrocarbon fuel. The net effect of that stupidity is that your children and grandchildren will lead lives in which they rarely travel more than ten miles from home.
What also gets me about the aptly-named tele-drama House of Cards is the way all the leading politician characters are seamlessly conveyed around Washington D.C. by chauffeured limousines, even two-bit congressmen from states where people don’t eat with knives and forks. Cossetted in their air-cooled back seats, they relentlessly romance their smart phones, making more trouble for themselves and for everyone in this sad-ass feckless country. What a tragic conceit for the nation of dunces we have actually made of ourselves.
Eddie says:
It’s ironic that Texas gave virtually every bit of its public land to the railroads to get them to build infrastructure here in the second half of the 19th Century…and that now we have no decent train service, other than bulk freight carriers.
And it’s even more ironic that practically nobody even remembers this bit of ancient history. The railroad barons are all dead and the only thing to commemorate them is the public parks and hospitals named in their honor, like Brackenridge Park in San Antonio, and Brackenridge Hospital here in Austin.
The last morsel of George Brackenridge’s personal estate is a nice public golf course here in the city, but the land belongs to UT…and they want to develop it.
The spoils of their Victorian Age political and economic coups have long been split up and parceled off for the most part. Today, newcomers wonder how a State so big could have so little public land.
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25th February 2013 at 1:59 pm
treemagnet says:
Yup, gotta agree – somebody’s not happy. He probably talked to my father-in-law – that’d do it.
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25th February 2013 at 2:02 pm
Chicago999444 says:
The death of the railroads was NOT a result of “free market” operations, but was the result of quite deliberate policy decisions made by our leaders at the end of WW2. These were policies promulgated by the Roosevelt administration but that could not be implemented until the prosperous “high” of the post-war era. They were designed specifically to murder the railroads by regulatory strangulation and punitive taxation, while promoting and heavily subsidizing auto transit and oil production and consumption.
This is why I choke when I hear people idealize the 50s, which was the era of Big Government, Big Regulation, and Big Unions. Our fabled “prosperity” and high wages were given us by the defense industry and other government created boondoggles. Our so-called “middle class” was enabled in buying their own houses in suburbs far removed from the city by billions shoveled into various direct and indirect subsidies, such as our interestate highway system, as well as by the FHA and GSEs, who “redlined” perfectly intact city neighborhoods.
And then, by 1964, nearly every passenger railroad was failing and our cities were emptying out and being left to the urban poor, and we just couldn’t figure out for the life of us how this was happening. The whole post-WW2 era was an essay in unintended consequences.
As it stands at the moment, the remaining railroads will not invest in passenger rail because the same punitive regulations apply, and they are up against massively subsidized competition, mainly the airlines, which would not be profitable at all and now STILL can scarcely stay aloft in spite of billions in direct and indirect subsidies. Unwind the regulatory strangulation and stop subsidizing the railroads’ competition so lavishly, and they will blossom again, quickly. But as matters stand at the moment, there is no more sense in investing in passenger rail than there is in opening a mom-and-pop store selling the same crap Walmart sells, only for higher prices, while paying taxes to subsidize Walmart and its ilk.
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25th February 2013 at 3:17 pm
Dorkus Maximus says:
I’m glad to see someone else irritated by this chauffeured limousine crap – even if it’s just a TV depiction. These people are acting like aristocracy – probably because they are. The average feckless fool can’t even see it. That includes many, many highly educated fools.
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25th February 2013 at 3:26 pm
Stucky says:
I sometimes think I am the most negative sad sack fucker in America.
Then, along comes Kunstler ….
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25th February 2013 at 4:29 pm
AWD says:
“the rumored “singularity,” the point at which human and machine intelligence supposedly meld into a shimmering synthesis of silicon masturbation fantasies”
That pretty well explains the “smart phone” imbeciles out there. A bunch of dipshit zombies that should do themselves a favor and walk in front of a semi while updating their Facebook status to “dismembered”.
Kunstler’s liberalism is dying a horrible death, as are many of the shit-for-brain liberals that voted for Obama and now severely regret it. The hope and change are like tapeworms eating the inside of their intestinal system out. I don’t know what the fuck people expect. The government has paid $17 trillion dollars over the decades for 100 million people that won’t work or get educated to reproduce.
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25th February 2013 at 4:39 pm
Eddie says:
Chicago999444
Not to disagree with you completely, because you make some good points….and I would add that GM, Ford, and Goodyear all lobbied heavily to kill the railroads. The Teamsters probably had a hand in it too.
But…nearly all the passenger rail in this country (with a few notable exceptions) is provided by AMTRAK, which is a public-private partnership ( read pork barrel) that has received roughly. 40 billion dollars in taxpayer money since its inception in 1970. I call that a subsidy.
I’m a believer in the value of rail and mass transit. I desperately wish we could have the kind of system in Texas that exists in Chicago and the NE Corridor. But people here won’t support it as long as they can somehow charge one more tank of gas for their SUV.
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25th February 2013 at 4:50 pm
ThePessimisticChemist says:
@Eddie -
I’d kill to have some sort of a lightrail in my area. Why KC doesn’t have one, I’ll never know.
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25th February 2013 at 5:09 pm
Chicago999444 says:
KC has super-low population density and no public interest in transit, is most likely the reason. The development pattern within the city limits there almost guarantees zilch ridership for transit. Light rail is for high density areas.
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25th February 2013 at 7:39 pm
Thunderbird says:
As the economy continues to contract and the price of gasoline goes up I won’t be surprised to see the horse and buggy come back as the cities begin to empty out. I am waiting to see all the empty corporate outlets as the small business mom and pop outlets make their comeback. We could be eating locally grown and processed food along with drinking locally made whiskey and beer.
The name of the new game is locally grown, locally manufactured by local business and labor.
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25th February 2013 at 7:46 pm
Eddie says:
On that point you and I and even Kunstler agree. It can’t happen fast enough to suit me.
Except….to build that world, this one has to crater…and my kind of Mom and Pop business probably will crater along with it if the current system collapses. It creates certain challenges.
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25th February 2013 at 7:59 pm
Eddie says:
Forward thinking people here are desperately trying to build light rail,in the face of what amounts to public opposition. There is plenty of population density, especially since the compact city initiatives of 20 years ago are now being played out. But I think they made a mistake not to offer service from downtown to the airport in the first phase.
However, the existing rail runs far out the Northwest growth corridor, within about a twenty minute drive of my country place. I look forward to someday doing a park and ride into downtown, if I ever move out there for good. That would be sweet. And sustainable, as much as any electric train can be.
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25th February 2013 at 8:08 pm
Thunderbird says:
The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex would be a great place for small business to revive. One of the major observation I made after returning to the mainland 3 years ago is the lack of fruit trees. When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s everyone had fruit trees. With the new sub-divisions, worthless trees with no fruit production seem to be the norm. How did this happen?
With the population so dependent on corporate production of food these days it does not give me a warm fuzzy feeling. I think we better re-evaluate our precarious situation with food and do something about it. The planting of fruit trees, even if we have to rip all those worthless trees out, would be a good first step.
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25th February 2013 at 8:27 pm
Der Scheisskerl says:
My prediction: No choo-choo trains for Mr. Kunstler, unless you count the cattle wagons shipping people to FEMA camps.
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25th February 2013 at 2:54 pm