The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
We have not heard the "D" word so far, but signs indicate that the fragile web-of-relations known as the global economy is sinking into a genuine depression, and the US economy with it. The chief casualty of the War Against Terror appears to be the easy movement of people and goods across international borders.
Now here's a dilemma: one of things that the US government has committed itself to do is much more careful customs inspections of shipments entering the US. Prior to 9/11/01 only two percent of shipping containers and trucks were examined at ports-of-entry and borders. The ease of offloading cheap merchandise made far far away was one of the elements that allowed discount "big box" shopping to thrive during the past two decades. (Next time you go to Wal-Mart, look at where your purchase was made. It always says somewhere on the merchandise.) What will happen now that America is obliged to actually inspect the stuff coming in?
For one, thing, I'm not convinced that we're even capable of doing better than we had been doing.
Assuming that we try to take a better look, the most obvious consequence will be a tremendous slow-up in the offloading and delivery of general merchandise. One might propose that in the event, big box retail would be "cushioned" from the supply chain slowdown by depressed business -- but all that really says is that fewer customers would come in the door and less merchandise would move off the shelf, and the whole point of big box discount merchandising is to make those razor-thin profit margins by moving vast quanitites of stuff quickly on-and-off the shelves. So there is no cure for this problem. (It also suggests that corruption might flourish as payoffs are made to speed particular favored shipments through customs -- but that ends up increasing costs and prices, too.)
Nor is the US economy prepared to reverse the major trend of the past three decades and resume manufacturing of general merchandise within American borders. The system just isn't there. The factories are gone. (There were seven paper products factories in the town next door to me which ran from about 1905 until 1970; six of them are now demolished, and the last is derelict.)
This demonstrates the provisional nature of the so-called global economy. A lot of people seem to have regarded it as a permanent institution, but it was never more than a set of temporary circumstances that allowed things to be done in a certain way. Cheap oil and relative international political stability were the chief ingredients. The latter has already been demolished by Jihad, Inc., and the former can be lost to the West at any moment, really.
The clear implication is that American life will now have to adjust to very different conditions. And lest I be accused (again) of just delivering bad news, let me outline some of the things we can and ought to do to reform our living arrangements.
-- The suburban sprawl experiment is over. Get ready for the necessary downscaling of all American activities. We must live closer to each other, closer to our work places. A lot of suburban property of all kinds is going to lose value in a severe real-estate meltdown. Be prepared for it.
-- We must reduce the amount of driving that we do. The US passenger rail system must be restored at all levels, from inter-city to inter-neighborhood.
-- We can accomplish this by repopulating American towns and cities. (I add the caveat that our cities of the 21st century need not, nor will not, look or function like the industrial behemoths of the 20th century. Among other things, the age of skyscrapers is over. It is vitally important to believe that cities and towns can be wonderful and rewarding places to live. We can make them so -- though we've gotten out of the habit for nearly 100 years. The walkable neighborhood must once again become the environmental standard.
-- Get ready for more local agriculture. The age of the 3000-mile Caesar salad is over. We will have to produce food closer to home. This includes more agricultural jobs as farming is reduced in scale and done more intensively by human labor.
-- We will have to reorganize education. Huge factory-like centralized schools served by enormous fleets of buses will become a thing of the past. Anyway, high school as currently practiced is an idiotic waste of time. In the future America will need a combination of vocational education and training (including apprenticeship) and good old liberal education for the training of minds. If this implies clearer class distinctions than we have been used to, better get used to it.
-- The consumer economy as-we-have-known-it is probably over. Mass crapola will have to be replaced by quality, in everything from the houses we live in to our nail clippers. The mall will soon be history.
-- Say goodbye to cultural relativism and aesthetic nihilism. Some things really are better than other things, and we're going to hear more about it, whether it hurts someone's self-esteem or not. I even believe that we will see a revival of classicism in the arts.