The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
Clusterfuck Nation launched on May 15, 2001 as “The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle: Commentary on the Flux of Events.” New entries were added to the top of a single web page. About every six months, a new web page would be created and added to while the older page would become archived. The following is the first ever entry of CFN.
What is this economy, this frantic moil of wasted motion and wasted energy in countless car trips amidst a uniformly ruined ecology? In the service of what? Evermore fried snacks and canned entertainment? The truth is that the American Dream enacts its daily wonderworks in a national automobile slum, and that the creation of this malign environment and all its morbid accessories has been an economic end in itself. The reckless project is now nearing its natural limits and we are faced with the consequences as forces loom to bring about the inevitable unravelling.
I didn't vote for the bastard, but I haven't been among the mob bawling about President George W. Bush's alleged lack of brains. For one thing, we just concluded eight years of political genius Bill Clinton, who accomplished nothing in two terms to truly reform our profligate national living arrangement. In fact, Bill was a child of it and a cheerleader for it, and the "miracle" boom economy of the 1990s, destined to become an object of nostalgia for today's youngsters, was counted by partisans as his signal achievement, though it only represented an acceleration of culturally suicidal habits and practices. I actually expected nothing much worse from Bush, though I did expect more intellectual rigor from some of the figures around him: Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, et al.
Now comes the unveiling of Bush's "energy policy," and it strikes me as a marvel of silliness. "W" was beaming out previews last week when he said in his Saturday radio talk, for instance, that energy conservation did not mean that anyone had to alter his style of living, you know, make sacrifices. In other words, no problem with the drive-in utopia, no problem with 11.5 car trips per day per household. No problem with the caesar salad that travels 3000 miles from its crop row to your table. There's plenty of oil, Bush says, and all we have to do is remove the "bottlenecks" in the market and the fuel will flow freely and cheaply for as far into the future as we can imagine.
To put it mildly, there are a lot of intelligent people even in America who do not subscribe to that view. While I have never been fond of conspiricy theories -- because people simply can't keep secrets -- I really have to wonder whether the Bush gang is trying to conceal some really bad news from the nation, namely that we are approaching peak oil production world-wide, and that this condition implies a long period ahead of chronic instability, economic uncertainty, and political stress.
Interestingly to me, the one measure absent from Bush's energy policy is an agenda for "Smart Growth" as it has come to be called, a reform of the suburban sprawl development pattern that is in the process of becoming a completely dysfunctional armature for "normal" life. Not a peep on this. I take it as a sign of serious political psychosis that our leaders believe it is even possible to continue land development in the manner of Atlanta and Phoenix. The California power crisis will probably demonstrate the gap between policy and reality before the summer is over. If it is a hot summer, the cost of air conditioning is going to shock citizens all over the nation, but in the Sun Belt, where the heat lasts longest and gets most severe, physical suffering may mutate into rage and social disorder.
In the meantime, we are seeing another effort by the Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve to ease credit and create more "money" in an effort to keep investment flowing to the developers of redundant big box discount stores, strip malls, suburban subdivisions, and all the other components of the "world's highest standard of living."
The creation of so much fictional "wealth" is in itself a very dangerous game for a complex society, and any failure of the collective hallucination sustaining it is apt to amplify the political dangers of an energy crisis.