January 6, 2003
      I doubt that there really is such a thing as "the economy." Rather there are economic relations. When commentators speak or write about "the economy," they seem to suggest that it is some extrinsic force like weather that blows hot one day and cold the next, but is otherwise separate from our everyday activities. "The economy" is up or "the economy" is down and we are its passive beneficiaries or victims.
      This allows us to ignore our own cultural behavior.
      Economic relations represent dynamic systems and modes of behavior. In America of 2003, our economic relations are based on incessent motoring, the servicing of motoring infrastructure, and commerce in foreign-made goods bought with hallucinated wealth. This kind of behavior necessarily has an unhappy ending, but we have been postponing it by finding ways to roll over the debt on our hallucinated wealth. This is what the hyper-heated housing market has been about (thanks to the Federal Reserve), but our ability to extend lines of credit at laughablly low interest rates is nearing the end of its cycle and there is nothing else in sight that might avail to keep the credit lines open. Next stop: liquidation.
      Meanwhile, Americans lead frantic lives of anxiety and depression in places that are not worth living in, with all our collective wealth invested in depreciating cars, appliances, gadgets, McHouses, and all our hard-won social capital squandered. We've indentured our work-lives to hyper-mega corporations who have little to no investment in our home places and no concern for our well-being. The social institutions and commercial relations that used to add up to more than the sum of their parts -- that is, living organisms called communities -- lie in wreckage around us under a smokescreen of distracting infotainment. The eventual result will be a race to the bottom in terms of happiness, security, and life expectency.
      Since I am not a conspiratorialist, I don't believe that these conditions were deviously imposed on us by cliques of scheming elitist villains. We're completely responsible for adopting the behaviors that put us in this predicament. We're a people who, for decades, haven't been challenged by anything more serious than what TV channel to select. At least two generations have not moved themselves to rethink the assumptions underlying our economic behavior. Is it a good thing to surrender local networks of trade, and all the occupational niches that go with them, in order to save five dollars on a hair drier? Is it a good thing to live in a place where driving is your only connection to the other organs of daily life? Is it a good thing to trash the public realm in order to optimize parking? Is it a good thing to mortgage the future to keep on living this way?
      We may learn soon that the most potent weapon of mass destruction that Iraq owns is its ability to generate an oil-deprivation jihad. When that happens -- and I believe it's likely to happen -- then all of our economic behavior will be revealed as the suicidal delusion that it is. By then, it may be too late for Americans to adapt different modes of behavior. Certainly, we'll see no rush to leave suburbia, just a desperate effort to preserve its supposed entitlements.
      The saddest part of all this is that there is not one American political figure with the courage to inform our citizens that its about how you live, stupid.
     

December 27, 2002
     So all of a sudden North Korea has turned into a nightmare out of an old James Bond Movie -- a dastardly gang of maniacs brandishing apocalyptic weapons -- and it's looking like the US is going to have to play Agent OO7 and put the kibosh on their evil scheme to intimidate the rest of the world. What a freakin' horror show.
     We must imagine that American diplomats are trying like mad to enlist the good offices of the Chinese and the Russians, but apparently they enjoy watching America freak out. This would seem reckless-bordering-on-moronic on the part of the Russians. Have they forgotten that they gave up being soviets a while back? Earth to Vlad Putin: North Korea is no longer your client. As a tactical matter, by doing nothing to help, the Chinese may be foolishly inserting their own tit in a wringer, because if hostilities break out, and they are seen as giving aid-and-comfort to North Korea, then the pipeline of cheap manufactured goods to WalMart that they depend on to maintain their surging economy will be shut down, and a couple of hundred million suddenly unemployed Chinese could send that nation over the edge into anarchy.
     Many Americans seem to think that Japan has no armed forces. This is not so. Japan has plenty of fighter-bombers in their "home defense force" and is fully capable of bombing the shit out of these North Korean nuclear facilities. Of course the idea of Japan undertaking such a tactical aggression must be unthinkable to practically everyone, including many Japanese themselves, but the fact is that they are North Korea's prime target. Kim Jong Il sent a couple of medium range missles across Japanese air space a few years ago in an insane act of bravado that very much caught Japan's attention. There is now the suspicion that North Korea can, or will soon, develop missiles capable of hitting the US mainland. Rocket science ain't what it used to be in the Werner Von Braun era; these days building an ICBM is easier than designing a graphics program compatible with Windows ME.
      Would Japan act as a military proxy for the US and put an end to Kim Jong Il's nuclear shenanigans? Israel did the world a favor a decade ago by just flying in and bombing Saddam Hussein's reactor. If the Japanese were induced to act for us -- returning the favor of us rebuilding their nation in the 1950s -- then the world will have truly entered a brand-new era of power relations, because from that point on, Japan could not shrink back from its responsibilities to police a portion of the Pacific. In the 21st century, there is too much dangerous technology loose in the world, and if a ridiculous and impoverished state like North Korea can develop a nuclear ICBM capability than plenty of other Asian states could fall under the sway of some maniac and do the same.
      China is in a peculiar position, enjoying both favorable and extremely unfavorable strategic prospects. In the matter of oil, which their industrial economy depends on, the Chinese are geopolitically much better positioned for the future than is America. The large oil reserves of central Asia lie a few steps over their border and they can exercise hegemony over them at will. On the other hand, the Chinese face monumental problems in respect to over-population, environmental degradation, fresh water shortages, and AIDS -- the combination of which may de-rail their project of industrial modernization and send the nation into a horrendous vortex of disorder, violence, and death. You would think that the Chinese have every reason to grab Mr. Kim Jong Il by the testicles and take away his toys.
      Anyway, I conclude that the US will probably not get any help. We have three to six months before the North Koreans are able to extract weapons-grade plutonium from their processing reactor. My sense is that we are going to have fly in there before then and blow the shit up. By the way, Tom Friedman's suggestion in the NY Times on Sunday was very astute: we should pull all American ground troops out of the Korean peninsula forthwith so as to obviate the question of any ground engagement there. It's about the nukes and the rockets now.

     On another subject, The PBS Evening Report with Jim Lehrer re-broadcast a Ray Suarez piece about suburban sprawl in Atlanta. Suerez is not a fool, but the piece sucked out loud. Suarez doesn't even halfway understand the fiasco of suburban hyper-development and what it represents as a social and civic catastrophe. Few of his interviewees had a dime's worth of insight. One was a professional city planner who had made the foolish choice of buying a McHouse in some horrendously far-flung suburb, and he seemed to think the only problem with it was that other motorists were interfering with his commuting pleasure. Suarez's fatuous report is proof that our nation is currently incapable of having an intelligent public discussion about these issues.
      

December 19, 2002
       The new round of World Trade Center reconstruction proposals are in and they are as ridiculous as the first bunch last summer. What stands out (no pun intended) is the neurotic insistance on putting back buildings as tall -- or taller ! -- than the twin towers that were destroyed on 9/11/01 -- a schoolyard mentality gesture to defy the bully terrorists by patriotically putting back what they took away.
       But what about the feelings of people expected to work on the 86th floor? And what kind of sadistic company would subject their employees to that kind of anxiety? I'll tell you what kind: one run by extreme narcissists, who insist on placing their self-importance ahead of all other considerations. (And the patriotic veneer -- "we're number one!" -- is only an extension of that narcissism ). Anyway, it seems to me that putting up juicy targets is a certain invitation to a new round of terrorist attacks. Earth to architects: there is a new kind of asymmetrical warfare at large in this world.
       The narcissism and grandiosity of some of the relatives of those who died on 9/11-- as shown on MSNBC -- is also amazing, as seen in their angry insistance that a huge proportion of the site be dedicated to a memorial. They ought to take a trip to Fifth Avenue up in the 90's where the bas relief memorial to World War One (in which more than 50,000 US soldiers died) occupies about 20 square feet.
      The actual design quality of the individual proposals induces a sensation like salmonella poisoning, led by Daniel Libeskind's frightening ensemble of skewed, warped, and tortured glass boxes that looks like a rubble-field after a war (as though expressing the avant-garde wish that the twin towers had collapsed a little more artistically !). Since Libeskind designed a holocaust memorial in Berlin, a special cloak of sanctimony has descended around him and his work. But it's just more deconstructionist crap intended to confound our expectations about gravity, spatial orientation, and civic purpose.
       The rendering of an atrium by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill looks like the main concourse of the Detroit airport blown up by two orders of magnitude, a monument to agoraphobia. The warped, torqued, crumpling and "kissing" towers by United Architects come straight out of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The people working inside would have to be drugged to stay in there. People standing on the ground nearby would feel as though the buildings were liable to fall on their heads at any moment -- and given what has already happened, they would be justified in feeling that way. Norman Foster's triangulated twin towers manage to be even uglier than the ones that Mohammad Atta & Co. took down. The proposal jointly by Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, and Steven Holl succeeds in being both frightening and boring. The dirtiest secret of all of these proposals is that they are little more than exercises in computer aided design, and what they demonstrate most strikingly are the diminishing returns of technology -- the more easily you warp, torque, and distort a building, the less civic value and meaning it has.
      The only proposal with any dignity is the one by Littenberg and Peterson, which has a traditional civic square enfronted by unskewed, unwarped, untorqued, untortured building facades following the traditional Manhattan street grid. But it, too, suffers from the compulsion to maximize the floor-to-area ratio by putting up excessively tall buildings.
      What also stands out about this process is how a tiny oligarchy of superstar architects dominate and usurp all other interests in this compelling matter of public interest. With a huge self-regarding fanfare at the ceremonies, they declared their proposals to be "innovative and creative," but the only thing they innovate are new ways to disappoint our expectations about city life, and all they create are new problems for our neurology. At public meetings for the the previous round of proposals, a citizen uproar of disgust and objection caught city officials and their companion real estate promoters by surprise. These new proposals, if anything, are worse, and one can only hope that the response is equally vehement.
      

December 6, 2002
      I have a bad feeling about where we are headed with this Iraq business.
      I can subscribe to the basic idea that it is very bad for the welfare of the world for Mr. Saddam Hussein to possess nuclear bombs and bio-bombs, and that, as a last resort, someone really ought to disarm him (meaning by default the United States military, since the rest of the civilized world doesn't really want to get involved).
      Here's what concerns me. Saddam may be a villain and he may be a fool, but he is capable of laying a trap for the US, and I believe he is doing it.
      He is putting on a show of being as accommodating as possible to the UN arms insepction team. As far as the public knows, the UN inspectors have not turned up any significant evidence yet. It's possible that their findings are impeccably secure, but I'm skeptical. I believe that if they had uncovered something really egregious by this time the world would have found out about it. So my provisional conclusion is that they have not, in fact, discovered any "smoking gun" evidence yet. And I'm not sure that they ever will.
      That shouldn't mean Saddam doesn't possess the weapons. It may just mean that he did an excellent job of moving them and hiding them. Well, shit, how hard would it be to conceal eleven cubic feet of bio-weaponry in a country the size of California? When you've got months, years, to prepare, and all the earth-moving and construction equipment necessary to do a crackerjack job.
     It seems to me that the US is determined to go into Iraq whether or not the UN inspectors find anything. (And I reiterate that this might be necessary.)
     Meanwhile, Saddam will have set up the situation perfectly so that, to the rest of the world, he looks like an innocent victim being bullied by the Great Satan. I don't have any doubt that this story will appeal wildly to many in the broad Islamic world, and that they will go absolutely apeshit when the US enters Iraq. I believe they will topple regimes (Saudi Arabia, Kuiwait), they will burn down our embassies, they will attempt to blow things up all over the world (and, of course, in the US), that the oil exporting nations will embargo the West, and, in short, that we will find ourselves in the midst of Jihad-o-rama. I believe that Saddam wants to go out as the Great Defender of Islam (whatever his qualifications or prior standing), and that the scores of millions of Jihadistas in this world are ready to follow anybody who stands up to the "Crusaders.".
      Meanwhile, I am perhaps more persuaded now than before that the secondary US agenda of securing Iraqi oil reserves is at least as important strategically to the Bush administration as the weapons of mass destruction issue. And I will repeat, perhaps tendentiously, that I don't think it will be possible for us to secure this Iraqi oil infrastructure. As soon as hostilities begin, Saddam will blow up his oil rigs, his piplines, and all the other equipment necessary to extract and transport the oil there. And I do not believe that we would necessarily be able to rebuild that equipment or defend it there over the long haul. Even if we were to successfully occupy Baghdad and install a pliable government there, I don't believe we could secure the vast hinterlands of the nation. There are too many hostile peoples at every compass point.
     All this indicates to me that we may very shortly be plunged into a sudden long-term oil crisis. The arrangements that we have depended on for twenty years are on the brink of unraveling, and I doubt that they can be stitched back together again. If we start a war with Iraq, it'll be a whole new world. There may be no way around it.
      

November 29, 2002
      Moving about the landscape this holiday, I am struck in a new way by the crummy vinyl-and-particle-board suburban houses popping up in the old pastures and cornfields outside town. It's how they fail so utterly to fulfill what is most characteristically human: to attempt to transcend the limits of a human lifetime. Life is tragic because of our consciousness that it comes to an end for us as individuals. Throughout history -- until our time, really -- people have made an attempt in their buildings to create things that will outlast them, and to endow these buildings with the signifiers of beauty to honor that process. The crap that fills the American landscape of our time is full of buildings made with no expectation that they will endure past the life of the mortgage, or, in the case of commercial buildings, the life of a lease. These buildings don't age, they just decompose. These objects that clutter up our world don't honor the human condition, they don't even acknowledge it. They represent a culture that is not good enough to be tragic, only pathetic.

November 22, 2002
       For quite a while now it's been fashionable among the environmentally-minded to decry the ownership of SUVs. It occurs to me that this reveals exactly what is wrong with the conventional thinking of the progressive / green crowd.
      Would the everyday environment in America be any better if it were full of high gas milage cars instead of honking big gas-guzzling Chevie Denalis and Ford Expeditions? I don't think it would make a damn bit of difference, really. We'd still be a car-dependent society stuck in a national automobile slum. The problem with America is not big cars, it's the fact that were always in any cars of any size so much of the time, and that cars of all sizes have such an overwhelming presence in our lives.
      The anti-SUV mantra is related in spirit to the quixotic project by Amory Lovins and his Rocky Mountain Institute to design an environmentally-friendly "hyper-car." Such a high milage, low-emissions vehicle, they say, would help usher in a sustainable way-of-life in America. What horseshit. It would do nothing to mitigate the degraded public realm of Parking Lot nation. It would not lessen commuting distances or times. It would not reduce the number of car trips per day per household. If anything, the hyper-car would only provide moral justification for continuing to live in a drive-in dystopia. It would make suburban sprawl seem normative and desirable, instead of what it is: the most destructive development pattern the world has ever seen.
      There's an interesting explanation for why they pursue this project so zealously. Environmentalists are keen on the culture of quantification. It's easy to count up the number of carbon dioxide molecules in a cubic foot of air, so reducing them makes you a moral victor in the jihad against air pollution. By the same simplistic reasoning big-cars-bad, little-cars-good.
      In the age of austerity and global strife that is coming down the pike at us, we are going to need walkable neighborhoods, towns and villages and richly multi-modal transportation systems, including public transit. In the meantime, I really don't give a fuck whether Americans drive Humvees or Toyota Celicas. All of them contribute to make my everyday world a worse place.

 

November 11, 2002
           The Democrats now find themselves cast into a Biblical wilderness, to wander in torment until supernatural powers or self-knowledge ignites in them some greater sense of purpose than the sordid patronage politics that forms their base among the ethnic and gender pleaders, social services industry, schoolteachers' unions, and senescent academistas. I am personally very glad to say goodbye to House Democrat leader Dick Gephardt, whose destitution of ideas and vision, and incapacity to inspire was emblematic of the party's torpor.
      The party could have benefited hugely from taking up the battle against the WalMartization of America -- which included the destruction of every local economic network in the nation, and the implosion of the towns, cities, and neighborhoods that were their armature, and millions of occupational niches these places contained -- but the party had no vocabulary to describe the process in order to oppose it.
       They could have opposed the hyper-suburbanization of the past twenty years -- which, incidentally, has imposed huge costs on the lower classes by making them slaves to their automobiles, and in so doing, made housing both unaffordable and disaggregated from all the other organs of civic life -- but the Democrats neither understood the insidious consequences, nor would they challenge the lumpenprole fantasy that endless motoring was the only political liberty of any value. This includes their failure to support passenger rail and other forms of public transit in anything but cosmetic form.
      The Democrats will also, sooner or later, have to deal with the poison of Political Correctness which has evolved into the only thing resembling a central credo in the vacuum of their intellectual bankrupcty. The campaigns against Western culture, against men, against eros, against excellence all have their origin in an alienated purtianism that is unworthy of civilized people.
      It occurs to me that the Democrat's position this year is a bit like the year 1856 when the only-recently dominant Whig party began its spectacularly rapid dissolution. That year, the nation moved inexorably toward the righteous convulsion of the Civil War. Now, the nation slides toward the yawning multiple catastrophes of war, global warming, financial meltdown, and the collapse of our ridiculous drive-in living arrangement (in which an economy is supposed to be an endless chain of hamburgers). All of which is to say that I don't know if the Democrats have anywhere to go from here; they may never return from the wilderness.
      The Republicans are now left to defend a nation that amounts to little more than a 3000-mile parking lot. They wanted it that way. They cheerleaded suburban hyper-development and the WalMart economy that services it. They outsourced our productive capacity to places where factory slaves get paid a dollar a day or less. They pimp for the corporate colonialism that has erased community life. They stand for the United States of Television, not the wreckage that really exists on the ground in real places. And they're going to be at the controls as it all unwinds.
     

November 3, 2002,
      The New York Times reported Saturday that car sales fell 30 percent in October, commenting that "strong auto sales this year have been a key contributor in propping up consumer spending, which in turn has been the main impetus of economic growth."
      This ought to raise several troubling issues, the most obvious one being: is that all our economy is about? Buying and selling cars? In a way, the anwer is yes. The US economy is now based on the creation and maintenance of suburban sprawl and all its furnishings and accessories. Cars happen to be major accessories. So are suburban houses (Realtors call them "homes" to try to instantly invoke an emotional connection to what is, after all, just another consumer product).
      What keeps the cycle of car-buying and house-buying going? Easy credit. Loans. Often with little-to-no collateral involved. Often to people with poor records of repaying loans.
      What happens when the pool of all potential borrowers (even the most marginal) shrinks to near zero and even deceptive gimmicks, like "zero-percent financing," fail to bring in new ones? Then there is no more economic activity in the United States because we don't do anything else here (except make movies, TV shows, and pop music and only a tiny percent of Americans can be in show biz, though practically everyone wants to be). We've outsourced the actual making of most mundane products to distant nations where people work for peanuts. Everyday retail trade is conducted through "efficient" national chain stores, not through local networks of complex, fine-grained economic relations. We subsist on Caesar salads the components of which travel an average of 3000 miles from field to table (unless you belong to that segment of the population who get by solely on chicken McNuggets, Hostess Ho-Hos, and Pepsi Cola, which travel the same truck routes as the Caesar salads).
      These elements point in the direction of a system unwinding. More tragically, as it unwinds, we will be stuck with all the unsustainable furnishings -- the farflung commodity housing, the redundant chain stores, the countless miles of blacktop in need of continual repair, the gazillion cars that we can no longer afford to replace (not to mention the unsold inventories of no-longer affordable new cars). We'll be stuck living in places that are not worth living in, and not worth caring about, with no networks of local economic interdependency, far from any food supplies.
      These are our prospects even without probablity of international military mischief, Jihad, de-stabilized oil markets, and terrorism.
      There's really only one reasonable way out of this predicament: the re-scaling of America and the reconstruction of local economies.
      We are not prepared.
      On the same page in the business section as that Times story on car sales, was another stpry about the fantastic success of the Humvee, the military super-car that has become a status symbol among the hyper-suburban rich. A marketing consultant named Dr. Clotaire Rapaille was quoted as saying: "People told me, 'I can protect my family [in a Humvee]. If someone bumps into me, they're dead.' People love this feeling."
       Now that's marketing savvy!   

October 28, 2002
       How many other registered Democrats out there feel, as I do, disgusted by their party?
       Two years ago Hillary Clinton was allowed to hijack one of our senate seats in New York. Whatever one thinks of Hillary, her coup sent the message that the party could not find a single real resident New York Democrat fit to run for that seat. What a monster of ambition she is.
      The pitiful condition of the Democratic party's soul is revealed again in this year's election, first with the selection of a political mummy, Frank Lautenberg, to stand in for the disgraced Robert Toricelli in New Jersey, and now with the insertion of former vice-president Walter Mondale to stand in for Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, killed in a plane crash Friday.
      I'm ready to sign up for a third party. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist yet, and more unfortunately, the events and circumstances combining to bring on Clusterfuck Nation are liable to produce many parties (as the discredited Democrats and Republicans splinter in feckless impotence), most of them probably odious.

October 24, 2002
      Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's vaunted "productivity feast" purportedly tells us everything we need to know about the US economy. In fact, it tells us quite the opposite: that statistical analysis conceals the truth at least as often as it informs us.
     "Productivity" is another way of describing efficiency, and efficiency is understood to be an unequivocal social benefit. But the triumph of economic "efficiency" has done more to destroy American communities than anything. WalMart is the best example. Americans love WalMart. Everything you need in life can be found there under one roof at bargain prices. WalMart's ability to move vast quantities of merchandise over huge distances and distribute it around the nation in a "warehouse on wheels" is considered the last word in retail trade efficiency. Their ability to destroy rich and complex networks of social and economic relations has also been remarkably efficient. Everywhere WalMart landed in America small business districts died, and with them died millions of occupational niches and local interdependencies that added up to communities.
     American communities at their best were not efficient. Retail trade was a multi-layered system carried out by retailers, wholesalers, warehousers, jobbers, and independent distributors, as well as manufacterers, who were participants in their communities, who employed their neighbors, who owned property locally, and took care of it, and in short composed an important strata of every community's middle class. The quixotic quest for efficiency put them out of business.
     This process of corporate colonialism, which has been implaccable and insidious, left America socially and civically impoverished and ought to be viewed as a fantastic swindle. Americans were conned into surrendering all the social, civic, and economic infrastucture of daily life just so they could save ninety cents on a giant bag of Cheez Curls. What kind of people would allow this to happen to them?
     If one follows the Greenspan view of ever-increasing efficiency, what further bargains await down the line for America? Are we going to surrender due process of law because our failing suburban environments can't support norms of decent behavior? Will we elect maniacs who promise to keep the Happy Motoring experience in operation by conducting military adventures for oil?
     The law of diminishing returns casts a dark shadow over our foolish quest for efficiency and Americans sleepwalk in its darkness.

October 18, 2002
     The report on an "astonishing" level of housing starts in the third quarter ought to be shocking for reasons beyond the ken of the conventional media. For one thing, these "housing starts" represent almost exclusively suburban tract housing. That is to say, we are destroying ever more rural land at a rapid pace, much of it prime agricultural land that we would have needed for the future. Also, since the greenfield perimeter now extends to the outer astroid belts of our towns and cities, these new houses will be the first to lose their value when there are any disturbances in the oil markets that make long-distance commuting a problem.
      The housing bubble can be attributed to extremely low interest rates plus the belief that the "hard asset" of a house is the best investment somebody can make when stock markets are grinding downward and bank interest is less than the real rate of inflation. The housing bubble is therefore also keyed to the idea that these "assets" will continue to steadily increase in value.
      I believe that these suburban houses are going to tank into an extremely hard vacuum. Their value will not increase, but rather plummet as the commuters and soccer moms who live in them find themselves cut off from their jobs and play dates. In the orgy of default and insolvency to come, these will be the hardest houses to resell. What's more, almost all of them are what's known as "production houses," meaning crappy boxes made of particle board and vinyl, with a relatively short "design life."
     To make matters worse, the methods being promoted to sell them -- interest-only mortgages, 125 percent mortgages, etc -- are reckless lending instruments that will bring both borrowers and lenders to grief.
     The "housing start" news should be read for what it really is: the recipe for an economic clusterfuck.
      

October 17, 2002
      My prediction of a stock market debacle on Monday played out in reverse -- instead of a Black Monday melt-down we got a continuation of a multi-day melt-up. But is it really any less of a debacle? The net effect is a more pronounced "speed wobble" of a system running out of control. In fact, based on the indexes for the past week, the wobble is much worse than it had been. We've become accustomed to 150-point-range Dow days in both directions. We are now into the 200 and 300-point range in either direction. We're above the red-line zone.
     It's especially ironic that Monday's market melt-up came (apparently) on the great news of Citicorp and Morgan / Chase reporting fabulous and astonishing profits. That's rich. Citicorp's derived largely from the sale of a huge Manhattan building. The background profit churn comes from their credit card operations -- meaning the promotion of hallucinated wealth -- which will only set the stage for widespread personal misery in the days ahead of deflationary depression, as former "consumers" meet the re-po reaper. Congratulations Citicorp. Morgan / Chase's "profits" derive from a different kind of hallucinated wealth: accounting tricks based on derivatives positions -- meaning casino-style bets via "creative" abstract investment vehicles so many times removed from any acts of productive activity that their relation to real value exists only as an ephemeral notion in a few people's heads.
     So, I apologize for the premature call. I hasten to add, though, that the days ahead are historically the prime ones in late October when misplaced financial hopes come to grief. When the bottom falls out of this latest suckers' rally, investor fear will be smelled from sea to shining sea and the herd will really start running.
    The US economy -- the beast behind the machinations of finance -- is a sick puppy. We're told constantly that two-thirds of "it" is composed of "consumer spending." We know that this consumption is being done on credit cards. To me this means a base of economically irresponsible citizens who spend way more money than they have, mated with a financially irresponsible banking sector that extends way too much credit to citizens with poor prospects of paying off their debts. Add to this a suburban clusterfuck living arrangement that can't be sustained, based on imported fuel supplies that could be compromised at any moment, and you will see a recipe for epochal calamity.
      

October 14, 2002
     The suburbs now have a made-to-order sniper terrorist who is underlining a point the news media have failed to register: that the public realm of suburbia is a vacuum that affords no refuge. He circulates anonymously in the democratic traffic and is an equal-opportunity murderer. I wonder whether he is actually summoned up by the anxious zeitgeist itself the way a demon of war emerges at stress thresholds among supposedly civilized nations. Or is he tremor signifying the shaky ground that our national style of living rests on, the end of the reign of suburban "normality"?
      I'm amazed that anyone dares to pump gas around Washington DC. The berms are alive with the sound of small arms fire. We make the rueful discovery that the landscaping industry (abetted by zoning laws that demand "green buffers" between every built object) has provided perfect cover for a maniac marksman. A lot of people in the DC metro area must be making a decision that they don't want to live this way anymore. Look for that red-hot real estate market to chill out pronto.

     Meanwhile, some people are making a bundle of money on the wildly oscillating stock markets. Rallies like the 500+ point leap last Thursday and Friday are the perfect set-up for short-sellers because they support the delusion that the markets are healthy, i.e. headed back up. I maintain that what we are actually seeing is a "speed wobble" as the "vehicle" approaches crash mode. I'm going so far, at 8:30 this morning, as to predict a classic black Monday on Wall Street today October 14. You heard it first here.

 

October 7, 2002
       For a real case of the free-floating heebie-jeebies, where our collective national fate is concerned, there's nothing like a trip to California. I was there over the weekend, destination the Sierra foothills, to give my talk on town planning (you laugh?). But bad signage on I-5 put me on a detour through Lodi, a poster-child for Clusterfuck Nation.
      The highway mega-strip that the town had evolved into was not materially different from 27,000 other like it across America, but there was no trace, no residue whatsover that I could see of a previous settlement pattern. It must have been there, because Lodi was a major agricultural town long before our collective decision to become a Drive-In Utopia, but it would have taken a team of archeologists to locate it.
     What you did see was a agglomeration of provisional crap in support of unsustainable economic relationships with no future. The human scale had been eradicated along with all the infrastructure of history. Most of the visible retail trade among the miles of strip malls was devoted to the production of obesity and social hypnosis (i.e., taco joints and video stores). As an environment, it gave off intimations of anxiety and depression the way new wall-to-wall carpets off-gas carcinogens. Civilization there seemed not a thin veneer but something less than a spray-on film.
     I couldn't help but wonder what will happen in Lodi when the oil markets wobble, because there is no question of whether that will happen, only when.
     I gave my talk in the village of Sutter City (predictably an "antiques mall") to a fairly receptive audience gathered up by the Sierra Business Council -- many of its members coming from ski resort towns. One could not fail to consider that in a coming age of energy austerity (and economic distress) ski resorts may not be doing a flush business. Anyway, they're still debating whether to permit accessory apartments as a way of providing affordable housing for their armies of waiters and cleaning persons. Most of their citizens are against the idea, of course.

September 30, 2002
      The war hawks are certainly banging the drum as hard as possible. I may be a war hawk myself, since it seems to me that engagement with Iraq is inevitable. Having declared our intention to dis-arm Iraq, with or without international help, it's now only a matter of when and how. Failure to engage now would have several awful consequences, not least, Mr. Saddam Hussein (with his new-found religiosity) could brag that he faced down the Great Satan and become a warrior-hero to international Jihadistas. Not to mention the abiding question of what kind of weapons he has, and in what way he might chose to deploy them.
      Unlike some other war hawks, perhaps, I admit that the consequences are likely to be unpleasant for the US, no matter what happens, war or not. Even if we manage to get forces into Iraq cleanly (i.e., without a huge battle for Baghdad), our action is likely to galvanize Jihad enthusiasts all over Asia and north Africa. It is inconceivable to me that Saddam has not pre-rigged his oil wells to blow up at the first sight of a US soldier in a bio-hazard suit. Ditto, I'm convinced that he will greet US soldiers with every nasty weapon he does have on hand, and that could mean quite a bit of diverse nastiness -- disease, radiation, nerve gas, you name it. If nothing else, he's liable to leave enormous areas of contamination on the ground for the US to clean up in the aftermath.
      The implications for our future oil supplies are therefore bleak. Even assuming we gained control of Iraqi territory, there would be huge expense in decontaminating it and getting the oil infrastructure back in operation -- and I'm not so sure we can actually control the territory there in any case (at least enough to prevent sabotage of oil wells and pipelines. The Saudi regime could cave in the aftermath of an Iraq Attack, and God knows what will be going on in Israel or between Pakistan and India. The stage would be set, in other words, for a comprehensive Asian land war which, beneath all the questions of weapons and ethnic animosity, would end up being a contest for hegemony over central Asian oil reserves. The winner: probably China, since it sits virtually next door to all that oil, and consumes more and more of the stuff as it rapidly industrializes.
      As I've observed before, the idea that the US could control territories (or oil pipelines) around the Caspian basin is patently absurd, with or without China in the picture.
      We'll be left then with a mess to clean up in Iraq, constant harrassment by saboteurs and terroristas, and expenses likely to batter the US dollar. In the background lurk some other unappetizing prospects. The obvious one is a cratering of the ridiculous "consumer economy" -- that is, an economy based on the idea that you can get something for nothing -- goods without production, wealth without labor, imports without exports, assets without wealth, et cetera. The cratering of all these expectations -- with a concurrent cratering of an oil-starved suburbia (and especially of assumed real-estate values contained in it) -- is liable to provoke a disappointed former middle-class into scapegoating, recrimination, and violence at levels not seen since Germany in the 1930s. Americans have been practicing for Civil War II for more than a decade anyhow. It's not an accident that the most popular fashion among the lumpenprole males is camouflage cloth.
     Since we are the main customer of China, economic austerity in the US could thrust that country into political turbulence which could before too long end up expressed as armed aggresive expansion.
     Finally there is the prospect of trouble with our neighbor to the south. As the American "consumer economy" tanks, Mexico will suffer by an additional order of magnitude. This will produce two daunting and related consequences: political turmoil in Mexico proper, and a flood of people escaping it across the border into the US. We will then have to choose whether to take the idea of a border seriously, or continue to celebrate diversity as the American Southwest becomes, once again, contested territory.

September 25, 2002
      Yesterday I was doing my lecture at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. During the Questions and Answers session following my spiel, a middle-aged chap of pleasant demeanor got up to remark that some civic group of his acquaintence was organizing a "Walk Your Child To School" day, and wasn't this a wonderful thing that we should all approve of and applaud. The idea here, you understand, was that children might walk to school more often if only their parents would give them a little therapeutic quality time hands-on encouragement.
     The progressive class has become so pitiful, hasn't it?
     It apparently hadn't occurred to this well-intentioned fellow that many, if not most, schools in America are sited in such remote suburban wastelands, along highway routes so dangerous and demoralizing, that even a well-intentioned politically progressive chap in the finest Birkenstocks could not walk his child to school under any circumstances.
     I had to yell at the stupid fuck in front of the whole audience. I suppose that's the last time he'll try to brown-nose a visiting lecturer.
     On the way out to South Bend, I enjoyed a four hour sojourn in the new Detroit Airport. (Apparently Northwest Airlines has merged with the Bulgarian National Airline. Every other flight is cancelled for a "mechanical" -- i.e. they scratch underbooked flights and pretend it's engine trouble). So the new Detroit airport has become the northern annex of the Bermuda Triangle. Things fly in but they don't fly out.
     South Bend, when I finally got there, looked like it had been devoured by locusts.

September 18, 2002
      A lot of people seem to think that the problem with Mr. Saddam Hussein and Iraq is a new and wholly artificial one that has been cooked up by a sinister claque of American oil hustlers. I disagree. While Iraq's considerable oil reserves may be in the background of US strategy, what we are seeing in the foreground is the culmination of a half-century of anxiety over the issue of nuclear proliferation.
      Proliferation has been an orphaned issue of international affairs (another one is world population) because neither has afforded any easy answers. There has always been a sense that little could be done about proliferation until after the fact -- until some rogue state or freelance gang of maniacs acquired weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). There has long been a sense that any solution to the coming problem would have to be an impromtu one. Well, the decades have rolled, so to speak, and we are now there, squarely face-to-face with the proliferation problem.
     President Bush's position is not unreasonable. Do we wait until Mr. Hussein uses a nuke (or a bio-bomb, or a chem-bomb)? Or, if he happens to get some working models of any of these, do we we stand by while he lends one to a terrorist group?
     This begs the question of how we then disarm Iraq. (Also the question of North Korea.)
     I believe that we most likely have to go in on and the ground and see what is there. It could be a much bigger military mess than civilian America is prepared for. Contrary to our own propaganda, the Iraqis may actually stand behind their leader and fight for him. Who knows? And if the war doesn't go his way -- which is a likely -- Saddam Hussein might use WMDs on our soldiers, or Israel, or perhaps even by some stealthy means on US soil. I'm convinced that he would blow up his oil wells and pipelines before he went down for the count.
     I do not believe that over the long run the US can unequivocally "control" any oil infrastructure that we might wish to control in that region. There will still be plenty of Iraqis (and others) left after a war who will want to sabotage our hegemony there, and oil infrastructure is easy to destroy. (Reminder: the oil and the wealth it represents would remain under Iraqi soil in any case).
     The Bush team may include a number of unsavory characters who have engaged in corporate larceny -- Vice-President Cheney and Army Secretary White, the President himself (in the Harkens affair) -- but I don't believe that necessarily means they would not try to act in the best interests of their country in the matter of weapons proliferation.
     And what about North Korea (or any other rogue state with WMDs)? I don't have a clue. That will also probably be an impromtu deal.

September 11, 2202
      It was announced yesterday that New York governor George Pataki would observe the 9/11 anniversary by reading Lincoln's Gettysburg Address at the "Ground Zero" site of the collapsed World Trade Center.
      When Lincoln set out for Gettysburg on that mournful train months after the epochal battle, he wrote his own speech, in his own words, based on his own thoughts to comemmorate the occasion. He did not read George Washington's Farewell to the Troops or Shakespeare's speech for Henry IV at Agincourt, or some other pre-cooked piece of oratory. Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg that day ran only 272 words. He was preceeded at the podium by Harvard President Edward Everett, who talked for over two hours.
       What kind of a lamebrained people have we become that our governor cannot generate a single original thought to represent us on this day?

 

September 10, 2002
     Why is President Bush wearing a flag lapel pin?  Is there any question to which country he owes his allegience? Does he think the American people are so insecure that they must be reminded he is pro-America? Or does "W" himself get confused in those woozy hours after lunch and forget what country he is in? Of course, he could always turn to the ever-nearby soldier holding his nuclear attache case and ask--
      "Say, Colonel, is this Lichtenstein? Or are we in Paraguay?"
      "Well sir, everybody around here is speaking English."
      "Yeah, but what if it's New Zealand? Where the heck is my flag lapel pin! I need to know!"

                                                                                           * * *

     The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran an astoundingly idiotic article this week titled "The Masters' Plan: Downtown Manhattan Reimagined by a Team of Architects Daring to Think Big."  The result: a post-post-Modern freak show of buildings, each one a distinct nightmare of warped planes, melting facades, fractured ramps and other semiotic devices intended to defeat anybody's expectations for how buildings ought to address the public realm.
      Especially amazing is the proposal to put up two new twin towers, only torqued instead of straight "to suggest resilience." And get this: "the towers could stand simply as monuments, empty but for a museum on the ground floor." How's that for Pharaonic aspiration?
      Another humdinger is the bid to restyle the New York Stock Exchange as a "Hall of Risk" offered by Paul Ryan, "a video artist and teacher." By generalizing, does he mean to include all risky activities from unsafe sex to hang-gliding from the parapet? The grand prize winner, as usual, comes from America's leading obscurantist / charlatan Peter Eisenman, Louis Kahn professor of architecture at Yale, whose melted, sagging office tower complex attempts to out-Gehry Frank Gehry for incomprehensible surfaces (but only shows Eisenman's envy and poor abilities at mimicry).
      Okay, I'll cut the sarcasm and bottom-line it: the World Trade Center site needs to be normalized, brought back into the regular grid of downtown streets, and occupied by buildings with a respectful attitude to the public realm and human neurology. Towers are a bad idea (haven't we learned anything?) and I'd go further to declare that buildings over ten stories are a bad idea for the 21st century, because we are entering an age of fossil fuel depletion and a requisite downscaling of human activity.
      A monument to the tragedy of 9/11 is certainly required, but it need not take up more than a quarter-acre. It would be appropriate to place such a monument in a plaza or public square, which itself need not exceed one acre.

September 2, 2002
     For many of us, September is the real start of the new year. School is beginning (and even those of us long out of it still feel the urge to buy new pens and notebooks). From the height of summer we commence a gentle slide into winter's cold and darkness. Burned into the national imagination, though, is the ominous new sense that September brings horror and tragedy. I'm not one of those in favor of rehearsing the shock over and over and over again, but I do recognize that 9/11/01 represents a defining moment in US history -- the moment when American imperial power began a steady descent toward darkness.
     What kind of darkness??
     I believe that the potential for domestic strife is huge and that it will largely grow out of the economic implosion we have invited by creating an infrastructure for daily life that can't be sustained.
    It seems likely that we will embark on some kind of war against Iraq, whether we are snookered into it by Saddam Hussein, or strike first ourselves. I'm certain that among the first things Saddam will do when American missles or troops fall upon him, is to sabotage his oil wells, pipelines, and terminals, in order to deprive us of the oil prize. Remember, the oil itself -- and all the wealth and power it represents -- will remain under Iraqi soil. But in the meantime, he will throw global oil markets into turmoil, perhaps even chaos.
      The US economy is a house-of-cards (credit cards) held up by the transient circumstance of cheap oil. This economy is already tottering from mis-investment, corporate misfeasance, mis-lending, industrial outsourcing, and over-dependence on "consumer" spending (i.e. the buying of plastic crap on credit from Big Box discounters). If oil market turbulence is added to the mix, this economy is gonna go down the tubes. When that happens, a lot of pissed-off formerly middle-class people are gonna go apeshit.
     The Sunbelt will be hit especially hard, since so much of the economy in places like Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoneix, and Charlotte has been based on nothing but suburban real estate development and the commerical crap that goes with it. The Sunbelt is also full of the descendants of bug-eyed lynch mob cretins, heavily armed with guns and a sense of righteous Christian greivance. They acquired their middle-class entitlements relatively late in the game, and they are not going to surrender them without a fight.
     I gave a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, this past spring. One of the things I said was that Americans were going to need something to identify with more meaningful than discount shopping and hamburgers. In the Q and A that followed, one dapper young chamber-of-commerce member got up and railed at me for saying that there was something wrong with bargain shopping as a national creed. For him, America was all about his right to save a buck at the WalMart. Nothing more. Apart from the stupidity this view-point represented, what do you think will happen when millions of people like him are suddenly deprived of bargain shopping as a reason for existence -- as they will be in the austere economy to come.

August 26, 2000

WASHINGTON (AP) – New-home sales shot up by 6.7 percent in July to the highest monthly level on record as low mortgage rates motivated buyers to lock in good deals. The advance propelled sales to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.02 million, an all-time monthly high, the Commerce Department reported today. The increase surprised analysts who were forecasting sales to fall around 3 percent. One of the consistent bright spots of the spotty economic recovery has been the housing market, which even performed well during last year's recession.

     The void of intelligent reflection in the news media is pretty astounding, especially in the realm of economics and finance.
     There seems to be a consensus, for instance, that the chimera of growth is being sustained for the moment by zero-percent new car financing and a residential real estate boom, especially for new suburban houses. And that this is just fine.
     I wonder whether the commentators ever ask themselves: Do we have enough fucking cars in this country? Is our collective national life being improved by subjecting more citizens to automobile dependency, to longer commutes along more congested freeways? Does every new suburban housing pod represent a net gain or a net loss in our national life? Or would we be happier living in traditional towns, cities that functioned (and were beautiful), and real rural countryside (both cultivated and wild) untrammeled by the revolting effluvia of car culture?
     The criteria used in the news media to describe the national condition -- a few stark statistics -- are like the read-outs for a hospital patient on life support. Hmm the blood pressure is at least steady, a pulse can be detected, but the brain wave is flat.
      I have proposed (in the Clusterfuck Nation Manifesto) that the only way out of America's debt-encrusted leisure-life fantasy toxic suburban hypertrophy will be the downscaling of our living arrangements and the re-localization of economic relations. What I wonder is whether we will be too exhausted to take on this huge task. Every day that we waste trying to prop up the status quo is going to deplete our collective will to act, and increase the chances that the current system will simply collapse into entropic disorder -- meaning, violence, political strife, scapegoating, extreme economic hardship, and perhaps some form of civil war.
     I don't go along with the idea, however, that the news media are merely venal in the way they cover events. Rather, I think they represent a kind of national avoidance behavior. They immerse us in familiar triviality so as to avoid the real issue of why our national living arrangement is insane. The NBC Today show (which I view daily in the YMCA weight room) opened today with nearly a half-hour coverage on the story about the remains of two long-missing girls found under a neighbor's garage slab floor in suburban Oregon. Of course this is a sad and terrible story. But what struck me is how Matt Lauer acted as though he lived in the same subdivision (along with everybody else in America) and refered to everybody by their first names, and asked outrageously sordid questions about the relatives' emotional states ("How will you feel driving past that man's house every day from now on....") as if he was their therapist. The purpose of this exercise, it seemed to me, was not really to add any information to a pretty straightforward murder story, but to give the audience a sense of being connected to these strangers, as if they were all friends of ours at the end of some cul-de-sac. In other words, it's better to find yourself in a familiar and recognizable territory-- even one where dramatically horrible things happen -- than to ask yourself why we are living in territory so psychotically devoid of civic decorum that children can just vanish into thin air.