The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
Get ready for the grand defense of suburbia as an ongoing and increasingly weird feature of our national psychology. The catch is that the suburban living arrangement is exactly what makes this nation vulnurable to the whims of the people who control eighty percent of the world's remaining oil reserves (and roughly fifty percent of our current imports). Americans will rush to defend suburbia because it represents the American Way of Life, the American Dream, even as suburbia rapidly fails as a plausible daily environment. The picture will be confused further by the notion that cities are places where terrible things happen.
The automatic defense of suburbia will cause dreadful political problems here at home, of course, because it is a delusional enterprise. The truth is that suburbia is yesterday's tomorrow. Its time is over. The peculiar circumstances that allowed suburbia to flourish for half a century are in the process of changing drastically and radically. Circumstances will now compel Americans to change the way we live, whether we like it or not. The defense of suburbia will represent a huge and futile rear-guard action against the inevitable. But life is tragic. Nations often decide, tragically, to cherish very self-destructive beliefs. Many Americans will cherish the tragic delusion that we are entitled to live in a drive-in utopia. As it becomes increasingly impossible to sustain that way of life, some communities or regions -- I'm thinking of the Sunbelt -- will turn in desperation to extremist politicians in the hopes that they can hold back the forces of changed circumstance. They will only make things worse.
I've had an odd little fantasy lately in which Americans become so direly nostalgic for the fat years of the 1990s that they turn to Bill Clinton at some desperate moment in the future and beg him to become, in effect, emperor: Bill the First. I'm not saying this because I hate Bill Clinton (I voted for the guy twice), but because I believe that the forces of history are deeply perverse, and often bring about stunningly fantastic events.
Deprived of our accustomed flood of imported oil, anything could happen here in the USA.