[wordup] The Clusterfuck Nation Manifesto

[Adam Shand]

I think this is a really interesting article, not so much for what it 
says but because what it shows about the mind of the author.  He says he 
gets email from people who object to his pessimisim, but given the 
assumptions he's making this is an *incredibly* optimistic view on what 
would come from that.

I remember reading "Islands in the Net" by Bruce Sterling when I was a 
teenager and talking to my dad about the role corporations could play in 
the future.  I thought that maybe as governments became obsolete that 
corporations would step into the responsibility vacuum which the current 
power imbalance in the parent (goverment) child (corporation) 
relationship causes (corporations don't have to look after people 
because that's the governments job, yet the corporations have so much 
more power then the goverment in may ways that in effect you have a 
rogue child).

I no longer believe that's likely.  I believe that after a certain 
amount of time any beaurocracy essentially becomes a living organism and 
will fight for their own survival.  By granting corporations the legal 
status of "people" we have created a new class of entity which has no 
loyalty to anything but itself.  In otherwords possibility of "Brazil" 
scares me a lot more then the possibility of "The Terminator".

</rant>
Adam.

From: http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diaryplus.html

The Clusterfuck Nation Manifesto

Strategies for Survival
Notes on the Coming Transformation of American Life

by Jim Kunstler

I get e-mail from people who object to what they construe to be an 
excessively pessimistic view of our national scene.  Well, what if you 
suggested to the people of Germany in 1936 that Dresden would be turned 
into an ashtry within a decade and that Berliners would cut down all the 
trees in the Tiergarten to heat their homes?

What I've been suggesting about the direction of our country is hardly 
that drastic.

I personally believe that there is much we can do as a nation, and as a 
collection of communities, to mitigate the problems I have been 
describing, even to create conditions in which American civilization can 
advance beyond the hardships of the early 21st century.

The overriding imperative task for us in the face of the problems ahead 
will be the downscaling of virtually all activities in America. This 
should not be misunderstood. I do not mean that we ought to become any 
less of a nation, or less of a democracy, only that the scale at which 
we conduct the work of American life will have to be adjusted to fit the 
requirements of a post-globalist, post-cheap-oil age. The future is 
already telling us very clearly what must be done. If we fail to pay 
attention, we risk very costly distraction in political turmoil, 
military mischief, civil disturbance, and permanent economic loss.

I will focus here on examples of three national "systems," so to speak, 
that will have to be downscaled sooner rather than later: retail trade, 
agriculture, and schooling.

America made the unfortunate choice (by inattention, really) of allowing 
nearly all of its retail trade to be consolidated by a very few huge 
national operations, the Wal-Marts and other gigantic discounters. Many 
Americans viewed this as a bonanza of bargain shopping without noticing 
the significant losses and costs entailed to their communities, and to 
the long-term health of their nation's economy. I have described the 
extreme vulnerability of the giant national retail operations to the 
vicissitudes ahead: disrupted oil markets, far-flung supply chains, and 
so forth. When these behemoths go down - and they will go down hard and 
fast - everyday retail trade will have to be reorganized in America. 
This is a tremendous task.

It will have to be reorganized at the local and regional scale. It will 
have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances at multiple 
increments and probably by multiple modes of transport. It is almost 
certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy - which is 
another way of stating we face a period of austerity - but it is apt to 
bring back many lost civic benefits in return. The national chains 
eliminated practically all the "middlemen," who were disparaged as 
parasites adding needless costs to everyday products. The fact is that 
these middlemen, the wholesalers, jobbers, warehousers, distributors, 
played necessary roles in a complex system that operated very 
differently than the current model. They were members of local 
communities; they were economic participants in their communities; they 
made decisions that had to take the needs of their communities into 
account; they were caretakers of civic institutions, and they were 
employers. We will need this category of business person again, as we 
will need the local retailer, the persons and families who run local 
businesses trading with the public at large. We will need a 
multi-layered system for the distribution of regular goods, even if it 
costs more to operate.

Some of the infrastructure needed to re-localize American commerce is 
there, though it is not in very good shape - the urban downtowns, small 
town main streets and business districts. Some of the big boxes might be 
integrated with it - dead Kmarts may be the local warehouses of the 
future, and some shopping centers and malls may be retrofitted into 
neighborhood centers - but much of this newer car-oriented fabric will 
more likely end up as salvage. The railroad system the US needs to 
replace the long-haul trucking system that we have relied on for decades 
is also in poor shape, but railroad track is much easier to repair and 
restore per mile than comparable amounts of interstate highway. Perhaps 
our biggest problem is that so many products we're accustomed to are no 
longer manufactured in the United States. The factories themselves have 
physically disappeared. Hence, another feature of the years ahead: for a 
period of time, Americans may have to make do with a lot less and with 
smaller selections of fewer products. This is another reason to regard 
the coming era as one of austerity.

It would be a mistake to take this view of the coming decades as 
nostalgic. The future will simply demand it. I happen to believe that 
there is much to gain in amenity from the downscaling of American life. 
We will benefit from knowing the people we do business with. There is a 
good chance that many people currently underemployed will find a gainful 
niche to occupy in the reorganization of American trade, and communities 
will benefit from their being gainfully occupied. But at the same time, 
we will be saying goodbye to a way of life which, however unsustainable 
and even crazy it might have been, was a set of arrangements we had 
grown accustomed to, and it is never easy for a culture to change the 
way it does things as fundamental as everyday commerce.

Agriculture faces a similar predicament. Today, we grow a few 
monocultures of grain or milk or beef or pork in vast quantities on 
gigantic factory farms, process most of the outputs at a similar 
enormous scale, and truck it great distances to gigantic super-stores. 
The end of cheap oil means this will no longer be possible. We are going 
to have to grow at least some of our food closer to home. We will have 
to do it with fewer petroleum inputs, the fossil-fuel-based fertilizers 
and pesticides. Our methods will have to be along lines that are today 
labeled as "organic." Farming will have to be done at a smaller scale, 
and it will probably entail more intensive human labor. A class of 
people will re-emerge on the scene: American agricultural laborers. 
Their lives will probably be far from idyllic. Don't count on this kind 
of work being done by foreign migrants when we are engaged in border 
disputes and demographic / territorial contests with Mexico. When the US 
economy shudders and stumbles, life will become worse by orders of 
magnitude in Mexico, which is already struggling.

The re-localization of farming in America is going to be very difficult. 
Our relationship with land the past half century has been one almost 
exclusively of brutal commodity exploitation. A lot of farmland in 
California is close to being ruined from over-irrigation; you can see 
the salt precipitates in the fields off Interstate Five in the Central 
Valley today. Some of the best eastern farmland has been paved over. The 
years ahead will require us to rediscover a relationship of caring for 
land and doing so by hand, tenderly. In an age when the farmland around 
our towns and cities seemed to have value only as potential development 
- for monocultures of suburban houses and discount shopping - 
stewardship was regarded as merely prissy. In the future, our lives will 
depend on how we take care of the land.

The re-localization of agriculture presumes that many so-called 
value-added activities will take place on a more local and regional 
basis, too: the conversion of milk into dairy products, the production 
of meats, hams, sausages, wine, preserved foods, and so on. Europeans 
never stopped doing this. Their models and methods exist to be emulated, 
and we will have to do it as the end of globalism becomes a more 
emphatic condition of life. Today, there are probably fewer than fifty 
immense factories producing most of the cheese in America, all 
absolutely dependent on long-haul trucking based on cheap diesel fuel. 
Twenty years in the future, there may be thousands of smaller dairies 
operating across the US. They will probably put out better products. 
They will employ people in complex vocations. They will have regional 
differences.

The downscaling of agriculture presents some obvious problems. Farms 
take years to establish. The knowledge for running diverse, small-scale 
farms becomes a little more lost every day as elderly farmers die and 
the culture of farming dies with them. Theend of the cheap oil economy 
may bring dysfunction so swiftly to our current arrangements that we 
will not have time to make an orderly transition. This could result in a 
specific food emergency in the US that might go on for years. As the 
Chinese proverb goes: a well-fed person may have many problems but a 
starving person only has one problem - another reason to be prepared for 
political strife here in the US. In the meantime, we may see swiss chard 
and potatoes sprout where formerly the monocultures of Kentucky 
bluegrass, stoked by oil-based turf-builders, grew so luxuriantly on the 
lawns of suburbia.

School, is another major system facing drastic reorganization. The 
failure of schooling in America is already manifest. Our inner-city 
schools are in nearly complete state of entropy due to the effects of 
our overall disinvestment in cities - the school buildings themselves 
are crumbling while books and supplies are beyond the point of critical 
shortage - and to an array of social conditions ranging from the 
disintegration of families to the absence of standards of normative 
behavior. Whether these might all be lumped together as the consequences 
of poverty is debatable, in my opinion, but the effects are not 
debatable. These schools are not producing literate citizens with 
adequate social skills.

Gigantic alienating schools are producing so much anxiety and depression 
that multiple slayings have occurred at regular intervals in recent years.

Our schools are too big. The centralized suburban schools with their 
fleets of buses will become rapidly obsolete when the first oil market 
disruptions occur. The inner city schools will be too broken to fix. The 
suburban schools will be too large to heat economically (especially 
since the overwhelming majority of them all over the nation, regardless 
of climate, are sprawling one-story modernist boxes). School will have 
to be reorganized on a local basis, at a much smaller scale, in smaller 
buildings that do not look like medium security prisons. School will be 
required for fewer years, and with more deliberate sorting of children 
into academic and vocational tracks. Children will have to live closer 
to the schools they attend - the yellow bus fleets will be history. 
Children and teachers will benefit from being in physically smaller 
institutions where all will at least have the chance to know one 
another. In a post-cheap-oil world, teens might be needed to work part 
of the day or part of the year.

Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and one of the leading 
reformers of education in America, has argued that people need to finish 
regular school by age 16 and assume a new set of responsibilities to 
increase their sense of adulthood.13 He advocates abolishing high school 
as it is now known altogether.  Years from now fewer will go on to 
college. Colleges, too, are likely to go through severe downsizing, 
especially the enormous state universities, as college ceases to be a 
mass consumer activity. Real life may not be so easily postponable. 
Vocational trades requiring real skills may gain in status and some 
professions such as law may lose status (and earning power). Some 
occupations - public relations, travel agentry, authoring books - may 
shrink or disappear altogether. Work for many may become a matter of 
making oneself useful to others with the added benefit of earning a living.

One hazard to the enterprise of reforming education will be the 
psychology of previous investment. We have poured our accumulated 
national wealth into building gigantic central schools and 
galactic-scale university campuses, with their semi-professional sports 
facilities and vast parking lots, and there will be a tendency to try to 
make them work no matter what conditions prevail in the real world. But 
circumstances will demand nonetheless that we change.

What is liable to happen to these three major activities, retail, 
agriculture, and school is also true of virtually all other things we do 
in the US. Everything you can imagine from banking to real estate 
development to church-going to professional sports will have to reduce 
its scale and scope of operation or fail. The problems ahead will compel 
us to move from being a culture of quantity to a culture of quality. We 
will have to make do with fewer and less, and we can compensate by 
demanding that it be finer. We will have to live locally and we can 
benefit from the restoration of robust civic relations.

Many of the beliefs and accepted dogmas of the late 20th century will 
fall away as a new and very different reality asserts itself. Cultural 
relativism will be discredited in an era when it becomes necessary, even 
for intellectuals, to make distinctions between good and bad, between 
excellence and worthlessness - because our lives may depend on the 
ability to make these distinctions. Hierarchies of value will become 
normative. Elitism will no longer be a pejorative but rather a 
recognition that some things really are better than other things.