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November
20
2023

Leaving Blobtopia
James Howard Kunstler

“The vibe shift being witnessed is nothing more then a managerial class losing the mandate of heaven as they squander the inheritance of empire.” —Jim Sharp

A nation can only take so much corruption, crime, and unreality.  ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” said Karl Rove, veteran blobster and advisor to George W. Bush, when he uttered those fateful words. Even political junkies forget the rest of what he said:

And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Old Karl was being too polite, you understand. What he meant to say is: We’re gonna lay trip after trip on you, all of you smart-asses watching the political scene until your over-mis-educated Ivy League brains turn into something that resembles a patty-melt so that you’re lost in a fog of incoherent blabbery, parroting whatever nonsense we proffer as we asset-strip what’s left of Western Civ.

What they call “the cognitive infrastructure” of we-the-people has been twisted, crinkled, folded, looped, and twiddled until it’s nearer a state of criticality than the ten-thousand rusted-out bridges on our county roads. This week, the FCC board voted to adopt new rules to “prevent and eliminate digital discrimination.” Sounds great, huh? Reality check: I do not think that the words mean what you think they mean. They are, rather, an invitation to the rest of the US government — any malicious blob-driven agency — to meddle with the Internet, block content that they don’t like, and conduct mind-fuckery operations to their heart’s delight. Uh-oh, I think they just destroyed the Internet.

Empire is a cruel business, especially as it unwinds. But the sore-beset people of this land may be tiring of alternate realities as the absurdities mount and the immense friction of official bad faith heats up to the point of ignition. For instance, the “news” leaked late Thursday that Special Counsel Robert Hur expects to not charge anyone in connection with the “Joe Biden” documents case. How come? Reasons. Whew, that was swift justice, compared to the Chinese fire drill instigated by that same DOJ against Mr. Trump in the Mar-a-Lago document case.

The DC blob, once so sumptuously comfortable in the days of Karl Rove and Bush II, is actually fighting for its life now, hoping desperately to not be crushed under the rubble of the institutions it is so busy toppling, such as the Department of Justice. Note to blob: if you render the Internet useless, you will accelerate the trend to local autarky. Your diktats will be ignored as government-by-blob drowns in debt, chaos, and impotence. If necessary, we-the-people will return to the traditional printing press and report on what we can actually see and hear in the vicinity around us.

In the meantime, your ability to lay trips on us is losing its mojo. You couldn’t have conjured up a more preposterous front-man for your operation than “Joe Biden.” Imagine what it was like at that long table in San Francisco when the delegation led by President Xi of China sat across from this broken old grifter and his nervous minders. The look of anguish on Tony Blinken’s sagging puss told the whole story. The point of the “summit meeting” was (for our side) to pretend, for show, that we could negotiate anything with China; the point (for China) was to show the world that America is an old whipped dog.

From where they sat in Frisco, Xi’s point men could view California’s stupendously productive Central Valley and calculate how much better China could run the place. (Did Governor Newsom already sell it to Xi on his recent visit to Beijing?) Remember: North America’s civilization is about four thousand years younger than China’s — as if those conquistadors, pilgrims, and cavaliers got here virtually last night, threw the wildest party ever, trashed the joint, and then woke up after losing twenty percent of their brain cells on ketamine and vodka.

Surely you’ve noticed the two wars underway in the other hemisphere. Our special event in Ukraine is going so poorly that the very Director of the CIA, William Burns, paid a not-so-secret call on President Zelensky Wednesday. Usually, this sort of call from one polity to another is performed by diplomats. How many of you noticed that Mr. Burns is not a diplomat? Rather, he is the blob’s consigliere, the very guy you don’t want to show up at your door with a message. You might wake up tomorrow with a horse’s severed head under the sheets. Or maybe his message is, we’ve got a nice cozy villa for you down in sunny Tristan da Cunha….

That war is a lost cause, and the cause was extremely stupid in the first place. Do you even remember what it was? I’ll tell you: to prod Russia into destroying itself. Oh? But why? Because, you know . . . Russia (and Trump!). There is your blob logic. Cost us something like $150 billion, a large part of that distributed among Mr. Zelensky’s circle while he sacrificed a whole generation of his country’s young men to Russian artillery fire and leaves what’s left of his sad-ass land an economic basket-case.

America is also taking the heat for Israeli-Gaza war. The reality — for those of you interested in reality — is that Bibi is doing what Bibi needs to do whether America likes it or not: a large-scale root-canal on this troublesome region, going literally deep beneath the surface to clean the rot of Hamas out from that underground tunnel world they squandered their people’s capital building. Do you think Bibi and Company do not know that the whole world is watching how they go about this operation? And do you suppose they are trying as hard as possible to not harm Hamas’s human shields? Yes, Israel’s IDF is going about this methodically and carefully, and they are determined to get the job done, no matter how many undergraduate nose-rings scream their lungs out on the Champs Elysée.

So, at this juncture, various parties are gaming out World War Three and, let’s face it, that move just doesn’t really look good for anybody. All the clever moves — Hezbollah, Iran, Turkey — just end up in an ashtray, one way or another. This would have been true whether we sent those aircraft carrier groups or not.

Which brings us back to our land and our own troubles and our own despondent population watching everything in their lives go south. That’s the reality that can’t be switched out on command anymore. That’s the reality worth “studying.” Everybody sees something like force majeure coming at them. Bad money . . . lawlessness . . . breakdown . . . hunger . . . . You can thank the blob for all of that. It’s possible to manage our affairs plainly, justly, fairly, honestly, prudently. We’ll get there. But you have to give reality the respect it deserves, just as you would if God came before you and asked if you’d behaved decently in this life. Would you try to bullshit God?

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James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.

 

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