EPIC WORLDWIDE FAIL

Zeitgeist Failure
By James Howard Kunstler

In an age of gross zeitgeist dysfunction — when untruth, delusion, and deception rule – politics is mere advertising, which is to say surface shimmer playing on the public’s wish-fulfillment fantasies. The trouble at this moment in history is that the American public’s wishful fantasies are inconsistent with the circumstances that reality offers to us and the choices for action that they present.

President Obama’s historical role will be seen as a wish-fulfillment totem for late 20th century progressive liberalism – the first black president. The Democratic Party apotheosized the genial young lawyer with his appealing family in order to demonstrate the triumph of social justice, which was their great struggle of the era. Evidence of that is the striking divergence from the get-go between Mr. Obama’s Hope and Change advertising and his sedulous defense of pervasive racketeering at the highest levels of polity once in office. Otherwise, you must decide whether he was a tool of the giant banks, or a dupe-made-hostage to them, or simply too clueless to understand what was required in 2009 – namely the break-up and reorganization of the banks plus hearty prosecution of their executives for massive swindling (along with reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act). I voted for him in 2008, by the way, since the wish-fulfillment motif moved me, and also because of the horrifying McCain-Palin opposition.

In office, then, Mr. Obama quickly proved to be a different breed of porpoise than the voters bargained for. He let the Wall Street privateers run amuck another four years, aided with colossal infusions of conjured-out-of-nothing “money” from the Federal Reserve. He let loose the demons of a high-tech totalitarian “security” state with every sort of electronic surveillance, citizen data-mining, and drone spying that innovation allowed. He stood silent like a Banana Republic store mannequin after the supreme court decided that corporations could buy elections (he could have pushed loudly for legislation or even a constitutional amendment to redefine corporate “personhood”). And of course, he continued to prosecute the absurd war in Afghanistan where, after nine years, US forces are unable to accomplish the only aims of being there: to control the terrain and to moderate the behavior of the people who live there.

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