The onset of the long emergency · Nov 5, 04:45 PM by specialk
A response to this piece from Jim Kunstler:
from my friend Jonathan:
Very solid piece, thank you. I’ve been right there, sensing this exact scenario. My feeling is that the arrival of Ronald Reagan was the beginning of an ending, and George Bush Jr. is the end-of-it; nothing new in that feeling, but this piece takes me back to the pre-9-11 vibe, which I appreciate; a time before the Bush administration had the 9-11 Bomb…but was clearly tied-into a basic economic track-shifting operation-from a convincing, computor-driven evolutionary economy, back to the pre-or-proto-industrial commodity economy. The slow down in 2000 felt scripted and orchestrated on some level-either the market intuited what was coming or the whole slow down was engineered by Old Money and here’s a suggestion as to why.
The whole regression of the economy back to a commodity-driven one at the very start of the current administration has been troubling because it felt to me as if a great train of legitimate economic evolutions was being hi-jacked, the breaks put on and the train, switched to a different track. That was the first great unease I felt, right away, during the elections-as if the script had already been written-before Bush v Gore. The only way that old fortunes could be protected in the new economy was to destroy the new economy, both in terms of dollars and ideas.
This troubled me at the time more than anything going on in foreign affairs (because they had nothing before 9-11, just a bunch of oxygen-tanks and some very boyish oldish men with reveries of a glorioius, but twisted version of the past and vision of the future. You knew they were going to try a bunch of flash-fried ideas around military policy, but what was more scary at the time because it had already begun to roll, was the resurrection of an absurdly regressive commodity economy right at the point where the way forward was in adding a layer of value over that layer.
The commodity economy is an arch-scarcity-economy, which conservative fortunes thrive upon, on all levels, because their fortunes are pinnes, always, to controlling the tap: the economic, religious and political taps. The tap on pleasure, the tap on pain, the tap on power. The great flaw of conservative ideologies is that they preserve a wearisome illusion of scarcity that is designed to raise the material and spiritual fourtunes of a few Chosen while reducing the fourtunes materially and spiritually of nearly everyone else—raising the specter of a kind of devolving civility among the folks who wake up and make toast and go to work and come home for the holidays, who cannot quite put their finger on the pulse of their own rising blood-pressure and the causes of an enervating elevation of pressures, the purposeless pressure that destroys the very pump itself.
The smell was so strong in 2000. It is pre-9-11, and it is important to maintain a view of that because it is the key to understanding and appreciating the inverted vision that took hold of the throat of the country after 9-11. Events have been designed to destroy, not protect, “the American way of Life.” I really mean it, when I say that it is not Terrorism that is the threat and it never has been. It is a grand and intentional Error, orchestrated by the People who use People. Not the Dick Cheney’s of the world, but the people that pet Dick Cheney’s little pants-puppet so that he gets stiff for a kind of policy ice that he doesn’t even really (despite being a smart guy) totally fathom. The Neocons think they are the players but they are being played. It is really far more Puritanical and less Adventursome, the imagination that is destroying the future of Americans born after 195; it is actually a “we are destroying it for your own good” kind of Calvanism which tethers together a lot of Old Money theology around war, industriousness, and success. That is the underlying twist. It is not fascism (as we see it played in the neocons) but down right Old Money planetary entittlement. It is wealth, not-for-wealth’s sake, but for the sake of spiritual security. This is the underlying driver. It is not evangelical but puritanical Calvanism.
Whoever owns the commodities in a Global commodity economy owns the Globe, and has evidence of God’s favor. It is not fortunes but God’s favor that Calvanists compete for against all other interests. If your view of salvation is tainted with ideas that make it impossible to imagine a Heaven of Others-those not in the Country Club-you are a Calvanits. If your idea of Eternity, is one of a Country Club where the servants are Angels and not disgusting, commong folk, dressed in clean uniforms, you are a Calvanist. In the Calvanist spiritual economy, Heaven and Hell seem far apart, but are kept very close, because in the Calvanist spiritual economy, the Angels get room and board in Hell but work in Heaven, riding loud, elevater trains everyday, up from the nether shanty-towns. The only way you can be sure that you are saved is to know that your membership in the Country Club Eternity is secure, and the only way you can concoct that kind of certainty is by transforming the Globe into a mirror of that Gospel. I have been saying for 14 years that global material economics is merely an echo of a spiritual economics that is as disturbed, distorted and infantile as the material one is dissipating spiritually, disruptive spiritually, and senile.
This is how Jenna Bush can go to Jamaica, be marvelous, say marvelous things, be tender and loving and so on but turn curiously off when a Jamaican woman to whom Jenna is selling hope asks her to ask her father for a visa for her so she can get to America and begin a new life. Jenna cannot, will not, wont open that door. And there is a door, and there is a wall, and I am sure that Jenna really doesn’t understand what was happening there, not in a deeply conscious way. But it is the cold puritanical spiritual legacy, the spiritual ice-berg at the heart of the Calvanist worldview.
While we are worrying about Global Warming, a very real wory, we are missing the Inversion that compensates it. There is a tremendous Human Cooling going on on the planet right now, as if the human spirit is being frozen and packaged for export to some other planet—where human souls are covated like caviar. Wihtout a grasp of that action and betrayal, we really do not have the thing in its proper scope. Calvanism is the Genious and Demon behind the whole Corporatist, Neocon, Evangelica puppet-show. Each of the three heads thinks it holds the Trump Card of Republican Triumphs but non of the three really does. All threee are bought and paid for by a spiritual cartel that never has to show its face or say its name, it simply offers a shepherd (like Bush) to lead the flocks over the rocks. The Evangelicas (read, “Fundamentalists”), the Neaocons, and the “Corrupt Corporate Types” (Tony) are really just the sheapdogs on very long leashes, in fact not on leashes at all, and only because leashes are not necessary when your soul itself is a spiritual leash and that is the secret of Calvanism, it distorts the conception, perception and reception of souls in such a way as to throw the soul into a trance where it behaves as a leash, leashing a tremendous spirit to a fretful homily of fears that chew-up families, chew-up deeper frienship, chew-up freedom. People in fear will sacrifice real family for the idea of family, real friendship for the idea of friendship, real freedom foor the idea of freedom. There is one requirement for this illusion to really take-hold in such a way that guarantees a scortching of the spirit rather than a kind of spiritual cooking of the human clay through the heat and light of the spirit and that is a kind of loathing of our own humanity. The grand and generous and effective, efficient defense is simple: hold your own humanity dear, and hold the humanity of others dear, and hold your heart like a cargo that cannot be taken by the Caviar Crowd if you are using it as a muscle rather than as a receptor-site.
In the end that is the strategy to overcome the Puritantical Calvanism that distorts the whole relationship between the High and the Low. Their is a phobia, a panic, a paranoia in Calvanism that poisons the human spirit. Calvanism is allergic to being human. That is the real situation on the planet right now. The Planet is owned by the authors of a world where the whole thing is a “Long
Emergency.” It is not sacred, but frightful. The only way to be saved from that fright is to have evidence that you are one of the chosen. Colonialism was all about producing that evidence. Globalism, too, is on course, following the paths it is on right now, as a grand expidition to produce more evidence of being chosen. This is not a silly or smug review of a mindset; what I am writing is the crux of the spiritual deflation of the American People, people who have heartlessly trudged in line right behind the shepherd that is marching them to market. Calvanism has no real knowledge of the INVISIBLE WORLD but has no ability to admit that and is too proud to return to the origens of spiritual renewal; it stiffens against it and insists on all mannner of spiritual tortures. And this is ultimately the psychology of the Calvanist and why torture can resurface among the American people. We are numb to, or unconcsiou, really unconscious (not something cute and “subconscious”) but deepy unconscious of the Calvanist-complex imbedded in the psychology of the 13 original colonies. There is a really frustrating constellation in American pre-history that we fail to deal with at our own spiritual perril and to the material perrile of the plannet. The antidote is not in denying this but in pushing it back on the wall and insisting that this tremendous energy cary some real human weight for the species in general. It requires redemption, and that is why Jenna is in Jamaica…hoping to steel redemption from the songs of suffering…rather than kneeling near a stone in her own yard and really redeaming the calavanist-complex from its condition. TYhe content of the Complex is not Calvanism and the content is crucial. Until the human core is liberated from Calvanism we will not be able to heat our own human core up in a time of Global Warming to a degree we can respond effectively. Human Cooling (in the moral and spiritual and intellectual and ethical) is driving this inability to respond to the conditions of Global Warming, just as it left as frozen to respond to the Conditions that led to Global War a Century ago.
I think it is very possible that there is no “World War III” in the Zeitgeist, at all, but that that is a fantasy, actually comforting to some: it is “the war you know”. What is really going on is not going to be a World War scenario, the scurilous nature of the complex is that it drills to deeper depths every day, and we have to try and drill deeper than the complex. The World Scenario is not War (these wars are childish distractions) the real worldwide scenario is Warming. And I think it probably has a spiritual componenet that will surprise us. Why is the earth building a kiln? Why are we bringing kindling to that kiln? If the World Wars were the Kiln of the previous century, our Kiln is World Warming. Before the World Wars they spoke of “Global War.” After it they spoke of the World War. I think that after Global Warming is confronted, it will be refered to as the World Warming, that is if we make it over the hurdle. But the idea, here, is that the next real spiritual champion (america was after WWII) on this planet will be produced from the confrontation with Global Warming. The real confrontation of our time is ironically one of confronting that we are carbon-based creatures. That is the delicious irony in this. We are having our faces shoved right into the carbon-clock that we find so…so…so…disconcerting on some level. Everything is deeper than it seems; confrontation without fear is a really importan tool, intellectually, morally, ethically, and athletically. There is work of some kind to be done and the human spirit can come through this next tunnel, but it will need some real help, as it always has…but it will not receive help from the John Calvins. It needs a different kind of help, a different kind of Godfather, and underneath it all we know we need to reveal the richer, more extensive roads—not the phony, more expensive ones. It is important to keep a level eye on the CAlvin-complex of this country, because it is insideous and hopeless, but the content bound up in the complex is remarkable, resillient, American stuff.
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