The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

The remarkable oscillations of the stock markets are like bouncings of a diver on the high board before his fateful plunge.

There are dependable cycles and seasons on this earth, and historic convulsions customarily get underway in the fall of the year. World War One's Guns of August were an overture for the military acts of September. Hitler stomped through Poland in September, 1939. The stock market debacles of 1929 and 1987 were both October affairs. The derivatives-and-currency meltdown of 1998 occured in late summer and fall. So here we are in late summer with all the elements lining up for an epoch-changing tipping point.

The violent impasse in Israel / Palestine and American designs on Iraq are priming the Islamic world for a concerted jihad. The Ponzi finances of all South America are unraveling faster than you can do the Macarena. Western markets are saturated. Credit cards are maxed out. House values are cresting and about to tank into a cloacal liquidity vacuum of sub-prime mortgage default.

These are ominous conditions, but the clusterfuck that they combine to produce will be aggravated terribly by our inflexible American Dream drive-in utopia living arrangements. In an expanded war between international Islam and the West, the oil markets and their supply lines will shut down, and we will not be able to compensate for that with oil from Russia. Meanwhile, our suburban metroplexes will seize up like V-8 engines trying to run on corn syrup. We are going to learn the hard way that our economy was about suburbia and little else -- building it, furnishing it, running it, and servicing it. The collapse of this living arrangement, and many of the economic relations within it, will be the back-story of the long emergency ahead.

We will be left with these questions: Where do we begin rebuilding a daily infrastructure that has a future (hint: they're called towns). How can we be good neighbors and protect our own interests (hint: find a way to be useful locally and get paid for it). What do we do about melting assests and the value of the dollar (hint: prepare for austerity). What kind of politics will this emergency provoke? (hint: think corn-pone Nazis).

Is this the last summer of Happy Motoring?