The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

It's hard to escape the dogged feeling that this holiday season may be the last merry interlude in America for quite a ways ahead.

We are victorious in Afghanistan. I"ve maintained that it was imperitive to put the Taliban out of business as a matter of global political hygeine. But we stand victorious in a wretched and miserable land beset by unprecedented drought, with poor prospects for becoming a nation (at a time when forces are in motion to dissolve nations worldwide). I say this not to diss the US effort there, which I repeat, was a necessary action, but to suggest that much greater challenges and darker adversities lie ahead.

I don't know what the inner councils of our government -- Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, Rice et. al. -- may be thinking about the Middle East, but the American public is definitely unprepared for the almost certain rigors and vicissitudes ahead. We are perhaps one putsch away from a long and severe global oil market disruption. The Saud family's days are numbered and, believe it or not, a regime could replace them which takes a keener interest in punishing the United States than continuing to rake in our dollars. It is only a matter of time, anyway, before other Muslim states put pressure on whatever government rules the Arabian peninsula to cease cordial relations with the US.
The American public has no idea how fragile the surface "normality" of our national life is. What will the citizens of Atlanta and Orlando do when the oil supply chains lie broken? What will life in Houston be like without cheap air conditioning? What happens to an economy that has come to be based on recreational shopping when the party comes to an end?

It seems to me that the imminent collapse of the Argentine government and financial infrastructure will likely be the event that accelerates the American unwinding. It can only further undermine a system of abstract scams already straining under the Enron collapse and the NASDAQ fiasco that preceded it.
So what we face is both a collapse within of our hallucinated economy, the accompanying failure of our car-dependent living arrangement, and the dangers posed by a resourceful and determined set of foreign enemies who will be delighted to take advantage of American hardship.