Doom and Gloom

I greatly enjoy reading Jim Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation. His pessimism and apt descriptions of the decline of American culture tickle me pink.

For example:

The fashion and body language of male youth in 2007 comes from three sources: prison, the nursery, and the pimpmobile. It's an old story now that many conventions of gangster fashion come out of the jail experience, where they take away your belt and shoelaces so you won't hang yourself... Jail being a kind of accreditation device these days, the message may be: I passed the entrance exam.

Less obvious is the contribution of the nursery. Pants that are ambiguously neither long or short, worn with XX-large T shirts, tend to make grown men look like babies. Babies have short legs and large torsos compared to grown men. They also make big awkward gestures and touch their sex organs a lot...

The pimp connection is too obvious to belabor -- meant to mock normal executive attire while signifying an existence of total leisure and the enjoyment of unearned riches. The trouble is that the worship of unearned riches -- based on the belief that it truly is possible to get something for nothing -- has now become normal at all levels in American life... The catch is that men who live by this code almost always come to a bad end. They get their throats cut with razors, or go to prison, or manage to lose all their unearned riches (and the investments of many strangers, too).

The portrait of the young American male in 2007, therefore, is of an impotent, infantalized being lost in grandiose fantasies of power and importance. It's a picture of men without real confidence, and no idea how to achieve it, who wish to project a transcendently ferocious image complete with odds-and-ends of manner taken from comic books and movies based on comic books, in order to be taken seriously.

I have not seen a better description of people, namely men, of my generation. Perhaps that's the real source of my pessimism about the fate of humanity. Those fuckers are going to be running things someday.

I do find his doom and gloom message to be somewhat tiring. Kunstler's predictions, while correctly timed, are a hundred times worse than what actually happens. Last summer, he predicted the market meltdown. Based on that prediction and my own observations, I cashed out most of my investments. And it just so happens that I cashed out at the top of the market. Of course, we still haven't hit the Depression that Kunstler predicted back then and is still predicting today.

I think we're at the beginning of a long, slow decline of the American empire, if not the American experiment in general. With energy prices soaring and no hope of sustained relief, lots of hard choices will have to be made and Americans will see a gradual shrinking of their wealth and quality of life. Nevertheless, we're not on the brink of catastrophe (yet).