CNN is frantically advertising a set of "live" debates between the
presidential candidates this week -- Democrats Sunday and Republicans
Tuesday, with loads of "color commentary" before and after. This big
media show is being staged in New Hampshire, whose once-significant
early primary election has been reduced -- like so much else in our
national life -- to merely symbolic status now that fifteen other
states have crammed theirs into the super-duper primary day of February
5, 2008. Since I believe that a collective unconscious operates among
groups at all levels of the social hierarchy, including the national
level, this extraordinarily early staged contest says a lot about how
insecure we must be about our leadership, about our place in the world,
and about where we are headed.
US election campaign periods
have never been regulated in terms of a set number of weeks or months,
the way some other nations do. But the 2008 US election is the first in
my lifetime that ramped up to such an intense and formal level of
activity so far in advance. If nothing else, the amount of money that
the candidates need to raise -- and burn through in airplane charters,
staff salaries, and staged events -- puts them all in jeopardy of
corrupting themselves to the various donors desperate to preserve their
prerogatives under the status quo.
What everybody seems to
sense semi-consciously is that the status quo is dragging the US into
an abyss. But so far, no one among the declared candidates has been
able or willing to express a coherent view of what it is in the status
quo, exactly, that is doing the dragging. One undeclared figure, Al
Gore, has presented the climate change part of the story and pretty
much stopped there -- perhaps sensing that if he ventured to offer
views on anything else, he'd start sounding like an actual candidate.
But my guess is that the really important issues will never be
articulated in the course of this campaign because they are too painful
for the public to hear. And so all the premature debating and posturing
will amount to a smokescreen of words meant to conceal the fact that we
are a nation without confidence that any leadership can guide us into a
plausible future.
In the background of all this sits the
pathetic figure of President George W. Bush. He's pathetic because he
has been in a position -- not facing reelection -- to tell the American
people the truth, but he's shown no capacity for apprehending it. If he
represents anything, it's the idea that the truth is optional, that if
reality is disappointing, just create your own reality.
Here are the some of
truths that we seem unable to face:
Very soon we won't have the fossil fuel energy supplies to run the
USA as it is currently set up, and no combination of wished-for
alternative energy schemes based on so-called "renewables" will allow
us to keep running it, either. Meaning, that we'd better start making
other arrangements immediately for how we occupy the landscape, how we
grow our food, how we move people and things from place to place, and
how we reconstruct an economy consistent with these new arrangements.
The longer we put off making these new arrangements, the harder
we're going to slam into a wall of reality, and when it occurs a lot of
things will shake loose in this country. It will become self-evident
that the things we've invested all our wealth in will not retain value
-- especially suburban real estate and all the activities related to
car dependency, from the interstate highway system to national chain
retail. It will also become obvious that we can't base our economy on
building more of this stuff.
Our current military
adventures in the Middle East, are predicated largely on keeping the
old arrangements going. We're in Iraq because we built Dallas, Atlanta,
Orlando, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Long Island the way we did,
and the only way we can hope to keep these organisms going even a
little while longer is to keep open our oil supply line to the Persian
Gulf. The truth is, these organisms will not survive the oil-scarcer
future in the form they're in. The American people need to come to
grips with this. No amount of chest-thumping around the globe will
change it. In any case, sooner or later we'll exhaust our military and
bankrupt ourselves trying to project our influence into these places
overseas -- meaning, sooner or later we will withdraw back into our own
hemisphere. I wonder if Wolf Blitzer of CNN will ask any of the
candidates, what happens then?
A basic rule of
reality is that you can't get something for nothing. Sooner or later
the financial sector will have to come to grips with this rule, meaning
that that debt is not wealth and the revolving reallocation of debt in
the form of credit does not amount to wealth creation. The US will
arrive at a magic moment when the full force of this reality
reasserts itself, and it is likely to make itself manifest in the
collapse of the entity most closely associated the idea of wealth: the
dollar. Assets vested in the dollar's legitimacy will follow its fate.
The implication is that an awful lot of the presumed wealth held by
Americans could vanish into thin air. Do any of the candidates for
president recognize how this works, or have any idea how much disorder
this phase change will send thundering through our sociopolitical infrastructure?
With the election campaign revving up so prematurely, it is very
possible that all the candidates now in the arena will exhaust,
bankrupt, and even disgrace their campaigns as they desperately
pirouette around these painful truths, and that none of them will
survive the process with their political legitimacy intact. In the
meantime, unsettling events on the outside will intrude on the
protective bubble in which the public has taken shelter -- more bloody
disturbances around the Middle East, dangerous shenanigans in the
financial markets, untoward weather events in vulnerable places.
The premature election campaign, with all its reassuring televised
ceremonies of pre-cooked debate and formal posturing, may end up having
the opposite of its intended effect. It may expose the more frightening
reality that our political system is not up to the challenges before
us. And then what will we do?
