James Howard Kunstler: In The Headlights

09-09-2010 • Kunstler.com

And the simple moral of the story is that the only sane thing America can do is simplify itself, de-complexify its dangerously hyper-complex organs of daily life. I've stated them before but, briefly, this means simplifying the way we do farming, commerce, transportation, inhabiting the landscape, schooling, medicine, and banking. Everything we do to add additional layers of complexity to these already tottering systems will guarantee an eventual orgy of blood and material destruction to this land. Everything we do to prop up the unsustainable instead of reconstructing the armatures of everyday life will make American life a nightmare in a very few years ahead. It must be the case that President Obama and the other denizens of high places do not have a clue what I might mean by all this -- though I am hardly the only one advancing this set of ideas and it is not really radical considering the alternatives. But our leaders' foolish intransigence insures a political convulsion that will follow the onset of an involuntary restructuring that can't be avoided anymore, because reality has mandates of its own, and is closer to God than all the hosts of our ridiculous politics.