The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
Pakistan continues to wobble.
Pakistani leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf's government may not survive its declarations of limited support to the US for mounting any military adventures in neighboring Afghanistan. The concern now is that Pakistan will implode politically and that radical Islamic factions will gain control of the government, as well as Pakistan's arsenal of about two dozen nuclear devices.
My guess is that this is the point at which we will join with India to gain control over those weapons and, incidentally, political control over the territory of Pakistan, which will then have to be reincorporated in some fashion into India, a return to status quo ante of the subcontinent before the political upheavals of the late 1940s, which split the former British colony into separate Muslim and non-Muslim nations.
Has anyone noticed that there is virtually no discussion in the newspapers, television, or radio about our dependence on the oil produced in this part of the world? Altogether, about 90 percent of the world's remaining petroleum reserves exist in west and central Asia. Even moderate disruptions to the supply lines will compel Americans to make other arrangements for daily life. Say goodbye to Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels."
There is so much to do just here at home in terms of re-ordering American life, that it will probably occupy the lifetimes of most Americans now living. It implies the re-scaling of virtually all our accustomed activities, from our egregious dependence on cars and the infrastructure of suburbia, to the repair of our existing towns and cities, to the re-invention of local smaller-scaled agriculture, to the reorganization of schools on a much smaller and far more localized basis, to the return of local and regional commercial relations when the Big Box chains lose their ability to function under the new math of austerity, to the re-orientation of a national intellectual life that has been systematically infantilized and emasculated (particularly the unviersities), to the reform of architecture, and much more.
The following suggestion may seem silly in light of the gravity of events, but here goes anyway. I urge all American corporations to give up their computer-assisted telephone answering systems and replace them with real human operators. Computer phone answering systems are doing more to defeat normal business transactions, and to demoralize ordinary citizens in their daily relations than we realize. Computerized phone answering systems have produced unintended consequences of deep diminishing returns, botching countless transactions and making life needlessly more difficult. Do what you can do persuade your company to hire real telephone operators.