The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

If this nation ever does come out of the coming clusterfuck, it will have to do so with an altered mental infrastructure. In his column this morning, Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley writes:

"In my post-bubble vision of the US economy, a purging of the excesses of the 1990s is vital before America can resume a more sustainable and vigorous economic expansion."

Well, yes. But instead of "expansion" or growth, how about we substitute the word "activity?" Isn't it time we detached everyday economics from the language of cancer? Our economic troubles (as well as political and ecological, not to mention spiritual) are largely the results of 100 years of turbo-hyper-growth. We're going to need a different kind of economy -- and a different brand of thinking -- to get beyond the overshoot disorders of the 21st century and resume the project of civilization. For me, of course, this implies the necessity for reorganizing our everyday activities at a much finer scale, the local scale.

What passes for "expansion" these days is something like the gruesome spectacle I saw the other day along Route 50, in Wilton, NY, two miles north of Saratoga Springs. A great convulsion of earth-moving was underway there, next to the Lowe's store, which is next to the WalMart Super Store (each store and its parking lot occupy at least 15 acres). The adjoining thirty acres (across the highway from the under-tenanted Mall) was being bulldozed for yet another power center (i.e. ensemble of Big Box stores). I'm confident that most people who motored past this landscraping operation felt sick to their stomachs -- even those on their way to the WalMart to be consumers. (That's another word we need badly to get rid of. Consumers, unlike citizens, have no obligations, duties, responsibilities to anything but their appetite for Cheez Doodles. Americans demean and confuse themselves when they call each other "consumers," especially in the news media.)

By the way, the idea that we need more Big Box retail infrastructure in the Saratoga area is a joke, but that anyone would undertake such an investment just as hyper-turbo-economy tanks is a sick joke.

Now, it may be true that under any circumstances all systems rise and fall, flow and ebb. But turbo-hyper-growth of the kind we have experienced for several generations, is naturally prone to turbo-hyper-bust, and that means economic clusterfuck. We need a new vocabulary for new circumstances. We need economic activity, but the times will soon require it to shrink in size and increase in quality. This is a huge task, but if we fail to address it, our nation is liable to dissolve in obsolescence and disorder.