Within the context of conventional party
politics - the kind that has been baseline
"normal" in the USA for a long time - we see
this playing out in two factions that are
increasingly out-of-touch with reality.  The
Obama government has made itself hostage to a
toxic form of pretense and lying. In order to
sustain the wish for "hope" - if not hope
itself - the President and his White House
advisors along with his cabinet appointments,
are pretending that the historical forces of
compressive contraction are not underway.
They're flat-out lying about the employment
figures issued in the government's name.
They're willfully ignoring the comprehensive
bankruptcy gripping government at all levels.
They refuse to bring the law to bear against
"the malefactors of great wealth." They appear
to not understand the epochal energy scarcity
problem the whole world faces, or its
implications for industrial economies. Most of
all, they persist in promoting the lie that
this economy can return to the prior state of
reckless debt accumulation (a.k.a
"consumerism") that has made us so ridiculous
and unhealthy.

  The trouble with self-delusion, either in a
person or a society, is that reality doesn't
care what anybody believes, or what story they
put out.  Reality doesn't "spin." Reality does
not have a self-image problem.  Reality does
not yield its workings to self-esteem
management. These days, Americans don't like
reality very much because it won't let them
push it around. Reality is an implacable force
and the only question for human beings in the
face of it is: what will you do?  In other
words, it's not really possible to manage
reality, but you can certainly choose to
manage your affairs within reality.  We won't
do that because it's too difficult. This harsh
situation leaves the public increasingly with
little more than bad feelings of
discouragement and persecution. It's
astonishing that all the smart people around
the president don't get this.

  Reality unfolds emergently, and this ought
to interest us.  For instance, I have
maintained for many years that we are
approaching the twilight of the automobile age
- and the implications of this for daily life
in the USA are pretty large. For a long time,
I had assumed that this change of
circumstances would proceed from our problems
with the oil supply.  But reality is sly.  It
has thrown two new plot twists into the story
lately. America's romance with cars may not
founder just on the fuel supply question.  It
now appears that our problems with capital are
so severe that far fewer people will be able
to borrow money from banks to buy cars at the
rate, and in the way, that the system has been
organized to depend on.  Our problems with
capital are also depriving us of the ability
to pay to fix the hypercomplex system of
county roads, interstate highways, and even
city streets that make motoring possible. What
will we do?


  For now, a cashless government gives out
cash-for-clunkers, which is basically a
self-esteem building program designed to make
the government feel better about itself
because it is ostensibly taking
11-miles-per-gallon cars off the road and
replacing them with 27-miles-per-gallon cars,
thus forestalling scary problems with climate
change. It's dumb of course, but the failure
of leadership is comprehensive. Even the elite
environmentalists at the Aspen Institute are
preoccupied with finding new "green" ways to
keep all the cars running.  They put zero
effort into the idea of walkable communities,
or restoring the railroad system, which will
be the reality-based remedies for the
car-dependency problem.

  The Republican right wing is, if anything,
even more childishly delusional. For Glen Beck
and Sarah Palin it comes down to "drill, baby,
drill."  They know nothing about the geology
of oil - they don't even believe that the
earth is more than six-thousand years old,
meaning they don't believe in geology, period
- but they are inflamed with the faith of
eight-year-old children that we must have a
lot more oil in the ground because this is
America and God loves us more than people in
other parts of the planet so it must be there.
As their disappointment mounts, their childish
ideas will turn cruel and sadistic. They'll
seek to punish anybody who believes that the
earth is more than six thousand years old. The
catch is, If they get into power in the
election cycles ahead, they'll be impotent and
ineffectual even at persecuting their
enemies. 

  In the meantime, American life will just
wind down, no matter what we believe.  It
won't wind down to a complete stop.  Its
near-term destination is to lower levels of
complexity and scale than what we've been used
to for a long time.  People will be able to
drive fewer cars fewer miles.  The roads will
get worse.  They'll be worse in some places
than others. There will be fewer jobs to go to
and fewer things sold. People who live in
communities scaled to the energy and capital
realities of the years ahead are liable to be
more comfortable. We're surely going to have
trouble with money. Households will drown in
debt and lose all their savings.  Money could
be scarce or worthless. Credit will be
scarcer.

  Both factions of American political life
indulge in the fiction of control. History is
reality's big brother.  It is taking us
someplace that we don't want to go, so it will
probably have to drag us there kicking and
screaming. For starters, both reality and
history will probably take us out to some
woodshed of the national soul and beat the
crap out of us.  That could be a salutary
thing, since the crap consists of all the lies
we tell ourselves. Once we're rid of all that,
we may rediscover a few things left inside our
collective identity that are worth regarding
with real self-respect.