Long Strange Trip

“Lately it appears to me, what a long strange trip its been.” Jerry Garcia

Here we have Greece going bankrupt, Europe grounded by a volcano, and a huge oil slick heading to Louisiana from the deep sea well that was going to regain American oil reserves. Meanwhile the head of Goldman Sachs admitting they profited from the housing meltdown, though still making sure their Republican stooges keep any regulations from happening. Oh yeah, and the stock Market has kept levitating for no apparent reason. I haven’t heard anybody who seems to know how people are going to maintain their purchasing power as unemployment continues to erode future propects. To top it off, South Park is blacked out for fear of enraging Muslims by poking fun at Mohammed.

Long Strange Trip indeed. I don’t know about you, but to me it is now appears that a lot of stuff is coming apart rather more rapidly than any of us like to think. However, for some reason, we all continue on as if nothing is happening. We each plan for our next vacation, and our next purchase, and the possibility of our retirement. We make all those day to day decisions but now there is this niggling sense that they may prove to be a total waste of time. I must admit, this momentum of the mundane is truly immense.

This post has been wandering in various directions of late, while circling the basic perception that a Bad Moons on the Rise. But I got away from why I originally wanted to do and keep getting bogged down in longer single issues. Basically the purpose was to share the wealth of ideas and information I keep stumbling on, out there in hopes that my friends would not be too surprised as the somewhat predictable crisis events unfold. There seemed a need for some kind of filtering of these prospects. Some of the posts I chose are uncomfortable for those of you who expect things to get back to normal. I believe they mostly share an underlying humanist critique of our tenuous reality which, in turn, provides a counterpoint to this age of Tea party bloggers and growing corporatist confabulation.

So getting back roots in this post, I would like to start with a little chest thumping for having flagged some a real stoys months before ity hit. Last summer in the second Eeyore posting, I was enraged by the NY Times failure to understand the complex computer manipulation of the stock market was being employed by Goldman and others. Go back to the first archive link and check it yourself. So, imagine my surprise when this Truthout article appeared in their posted digest yesterday, on Goldmans Frontrunning Stock Manipluations. Better late than never, I guess. But really, you would think supposed investigative folks would have started digging earlier.

OK, so now for the news.

Nice weather we’ve been having, dontcha think?

Anyone who has talked to me recently has realized that I am completely freaked out by this climate shift we just had in New England. Boom! We are in North Carolina. Everything is in bloom at the same moment. It is beyond strange, yet everyone is just so happy at the beautiful weather that they give me nothing but shit if I mention how frightening this really is. I will post a poem to that effect next time, but I want to try to submit it to publications first.

Then there is this continuing feeling of looming menace in the whole structure of the economy and the nation. Jim Kuntsler provides a wonderfully acidic job of recounting my concerns in this weeks post, A Still Moment. He may even go further than I do with his belief that our system is going down and won’t make it to the November election. He is one of those who tends to jump the gun. The momentum of the mundane will probably exceed his expectations, but who knows by how much.

I must admit, that I am personally and psychically experiencing is this weird internal balancing act arising from competing belief systems. On one hand I daily have to act normal, in accordance with my accepted deviance and make plans and decisions for the future. On the other, I am scared that that future Kuntsler describes is all to immediate. If that is so, panic is not to irrational a response.

Anyone else find themselves maintaining this balance? Or, Should I check myself in for rebalancing? What do you think?

Following the “normalcy “route of personal choices would mean that I have accepted the inevitability of oligarchic control of our economic and social futures. Following an “oh shit the sky is falling!” route puts me in tin foil cap territory. Pretty grim choice, isn’t it?

But don’t listen to me, I’m unbalanced. Instead, you might check out Bill Moyer’s interview with Simon Johnson last week. Johnson is not scared of some massive conspiracy. Rather, he sees the more frightening our collective learned helplessness in the face of the financial system’s sheer manufactured complexity. Our fear of losing our present wealth by messing with this complexity has become the main engine supporting the flowering of the oligarchy made up of those who gamed the system best.

It is a political, not an economic, question to figure out how to tame this beast. Yet the polis remains so scared (or is it lazy) of facing the costs of ending the complexity engine, it continues to pray at the manger where this rough beast was born. The church of the Free Market continues to be triumphant, Don't believe me? Then please check out Matt Taibi’s current screed The Lunatics who Made a Religion out of Greed. He cites the monumental stupidity of an economic system run by the precepts of Ayn Rand. Now I have to admit that I was a bit of a Rand fan at age of 14, along with the conservative push for "Liberty". It was good adolescent stuff to chew on, and in retrospect it was probably because it drove my good Democratic parents nuts.

For a government to embrace a policy based on such drivel seems to be the height of immaturity. But it has been the national dogma since the Regan years, which seems to be when we massively chose stupidity as a national ideal. If it is all coming apart, we have no one but ourselves to blame for not sliding off the gravy train earlier and making change when it was still possible. Another post from Reason Magazine takes off from the premise that America isn’t Coming Apart Fast Enough. I might tend to agree.

Keeping with the same theme, NPRs “This American Life” did a great program with Pro Publica last week called Inside Job, which explains how one hedge fund used the complex swaps and derivatives to screw a whole lot of investors. The show led to the producers commissioning the song, Betting Against the American Dream. Be sure to watch the recording of the song video at the link. It’s a scream for those of you with a really dark sense of humor.

With all the sense of breakdown and dissolution in the air, I note that Chris Hedges, with the New Secessionists, has turned a generous eye on national dissolution. As many of you know, this I perceive as the only positive way of cleaning up the American mess. Hedges heaps a lot of praise on the Second Vermont Republic movement. Of course good liberals look on this with aghast. I got no end of snide comments on the Cultural Confederacies posting last fall. The general critique of my proposal was, such a breakup would violate the Constitution and leave the people of color in the South at the hands of the racists. Maybe. It would also leave us up here in the north free of the governmental hegemony of the corporatist crazies and the Born Again whack jobs. A fair trade from my perspective.

The next leg of this Long Strange Trip promises to be interesting.