James Howard Kunstler: Rock Me on the Water

03-14-2011 • Kunstler.com

I tried to follow the story on American cable TV Sunday night but with the exception of stolid, dogged CNN, all the other news channels were playing one sordid and titanically stupid program after another: meth freaks, show-biz narcissists, and sex chatter without sex. What a nation of morons we are. Over six hundred cable TV stations and only one that even tries to tell you what is going on in the world. How many citizens of this republic were watching a dessert chef undergo staged humiliation for the failure of a cupcake batch while two nuclear reactors melted down across the Pacific? We deserve what just happened to Japan three times over. And we might just get the equivalent at least in social and political trouble as our money follies unwind and normal living here becomes untenable on the old terms. So many things are shaking loose now in this world-wrapped-too-tight that it is hard to track where they all overlap, but I will try today. ME/NA has gone critical overnight. Saudi Arabia wants to occupy tiny-but-strategic Bahrain, and Bahrain says that would be an act of war - though it hard to conceive how they would wage one against KSA, which is up to its eyeballs in US supplied state-of-the art aircraft and all sorts of other dangerous swag. The Shia population wants to blow the little Kingdom wide open; they'll be lucky if the Saudis don't inadvertently turn it into an ashtray...