The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

The fight over the tablescraps of the Nineties Boom has not quite begun, but be prepared for it.

Suburban real estate is not a good place to be invested financially. Alas, the net worth of a tremendous percentage of our countrymen is in suburban McHomes. As unemployment rises and breadwinners fall into arears, we will move closer to the orgy of default and repossession that awaits. Compounding the problem is the predicament that even fire-sale prices for McProperty might be too much in a time when cheap and plentiful gas is no longer available and the broad infrastucture of car-dependent life becomes non-viable.

What amazes me most about the new times we've entered is the almost universal conviction that that we are bound to return to the good old times -- that as soon as we've licked this terror thing we can go back to the main event of recreational shopping on credit cards and the sideshows of infotainment and cruising for burgers.
The real news is that the United States is hemorrhaging both accumulated wealth and abstractly imagined wealth. Our military campaign in Af-stan costs $1 billion per day. Governing at home has been reduced to an unimaginably expensive security operation, with the spare change going to finance investigations. The retail sector, which had been based on uninspected mass imports of cheap goods made by wage slaves half a world away, and the extension of limitless unsecured loans to the non credit-worthy, is in the tank. The banking sector is now mesmerized by the negative infotainment medium known as the non-performing loan.

My advice for those wishing to arrange their lives for the new era is as follows:

-- Get out of the Sunbelt while you can. Places like Atlanta and Houston will be unlivable in a world of expensive air-conditioning and iffy gas.
-- Look for a traditional small town to live in, as close to the center as possible.
-- Favor places where supplies of fresh water are relatively assured.
-- Do whatever you can to reduce your car dependency.
-- Those of you who think "country life" will be a refuge from difficult times ahead had better be prepared for farming or some other rural lifeway. The end of suburbia also implies the end of urban lives lived in the rural setting.
-- Get out of debt.
-- Learn how to do some things that will make you useful to other people, and consider doing it at the scale of a small or home business.
-- Become involved in public life and community activities. In the shitstorm of political recrimination to come, there will be a great need for reasonable citizens.
-- Learn to play a musical instrument. Produce your own entertainment (your brain will thank you).