Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler - Highlights

Mr. Obama deserves credit for a lot of things, but perhaps most amazingly his ability to see "hope" in a public so demoralized by their own bad choices that the USA scene has devolved to a non-stop Special Olympics of everyday life, where absolutely everybody is debilitated, deluded, challenged, or needs a leg up, or an extra buck, or a pallet on the floor, or a gastric bypass, or a week in detox, or a head-start, or a fourth strike, or a $150-billion bailout.

He inherits a government of superficially gleaming marble edifices -- all gloriously on view tomorrow -- but full of broken machinery within, infested with weevils, termites, and rats. The USA is functionally bankrupt. We have no money. The pixel "money" being emailed over to the insolvent banks has no basis in reality beyond the quiver in Ben Bernanke's voice as he announces each new injection. Yet all reports so far indicate that President Obama is bent on continuing the process one way or another.

It will be a very salutary thing if we stop even referring to ourselves as "consumers." This degrading moniker, used for decades unthinkingly by everyone from The New York Times Nobel Prize pundits to the Econ 101 section men of the land-grant diploma mills has been such a drag on our collective development that it has extinguished the last latent flickers of duty, obligation, and responsibility for the greater good in a republic of broken communities shattered by WalMarts.

It will be stirring to watch Barack Obama's inauguration, and all the hoopla and balls, and the radiant children, and the exemplary First Lady dancing with the First Partner. Euphoria is a legitimate part of the human condition, though we know it soon passes into the heavy lifting of real life. There are many Americans of good will who would like to see the meaning of real "change" clearly articulated in a way that comports with reality, not just "dreams" and wishes. We'll hear a lot about dreams this week, anyway, of course, but then reality will set in and the heavy lifting will commence. Many Americans of good will also stand ready to face reality, to roll up our sleeves, ditch the video games and the Nascar and the microwaved cheese treats, and the internet porn and all the other noxious, narcolepsy-inducing distractions of our time, and put our shoulders to the wheel to haul this nation into a plausible future. For the moment: a rousing cry of "Good Luck!" To President Obama from this little outpost of Clusterfuck Nation.

Farewell GWB:

A prankish fate put George W. Bush in the oval office to keep America stupid. The nation was far from ready to see where it was going in the 21st century, and he was just the figure to keep it that way, with his void of curiosity, his allergy to reading, and his panderings to wealth-worshipping, Ponzi-loving, science-hating Jesus cultists. He goes out of office broadly regarded as an object of horror and loathing while the nation, now facing wholesale bankruptcy, struggles to imagine a plausible future, like someone who has just awakened from a cheap red wine drunk into the grip of a vicious hangover.

To me, GWB will remain the perfect representative of his time, place, and culture. During his years in Washington, America became a nation of clowns posturing in cowboy hats, bethinking ourselves righteous agents of Jesus in a Las Vegas of the spirit, where wishing was enough to get something for nothing, where "mistakes were made," but everybody was excused from the consequences of bad choices. The break from that mentality will be very severe, and we may look back in twelve months and wonder how we ever fell for the whole package. The answering of that question will occupy historians for ages to come.

From Comments: "Our Lord Ponzi is kinda like Fonzi, ,but he leaves you broken and destitude (but laughing.)"

California this past Friday declared its Treasury desiccated. Welfare ends 01 February 2009 (500,000 VICTIMS! in LA County alone). State employees are suspended en masse without pay - no income but ineligible for unemployment (sparing statistics). California unemployment offices are mute by phone or in person; Web only - with months delay in processing.

12 ga. Buck shotshells vanish from shelves as stocked here. The Officially Sad fall off their golden palanquins in two weeks. Social advocacy will be returned to the income-redistributed as they repeatedly chamber their votes.

Walk the streets of southside Chicago like Obama did and I think you'll see Obama has faced hard truths.

We are in trouble...

• The population of this country is 300 million.
• 160 million are retired.
• That leaves 140 million to do the work.
• There are 85 million in school.
• Which leaves 55 million to do the work.
• Of this there are 35 million employed by the federal government.
• Leaving 15 million to do the work.
• 2.8 million are in the armed forces preoccupied with killing Osama
• Bin-Laden.
• Which leaves 12.2 million to do the work.
• Take from that total the 10.8 million people who work for state and city
• Governments. And that leaves 1.4 million to do the work.
• At any given time there are 188,000 people in hospitals.
• Leaving 1,212,000 to do the work.
• Now, there are 1,211,998 people in prisons.
• That leaves just two people to do the work.
• You and me.
• And there you are,
• Sitting on your derriere,
• At your computer, reading jokes.

THE BIRTH OF A CANDY BAR

One Payday Mr. Goodbar wanted a Bit O'Honey so he took:
Miss Hershey back in the Power house on the corner of Clark & Fifth Ave. He began to feel her Mounds and that was sure Almond Joy which made his Tootsie Roll. He let out a Snicker and his Butterfingers went up her Kit Kat and caused a Milky Way. She screamed "O Henry" and squeezed his Zagnuts. Miss Hershey said you were even better than the Three Musketeers. Soon she was a bit Chunky. Nine months later she had a Baby Ruth.

HEY MERCEDES "Bells" Lyrics

Is this the best you have to offer us?

you genius, your hair mussed

by now you must have heard about the whirling world outside

twist a knife in it, i don't care

drain the life from it, i don't care

if you can fake it you can take them like a photograph.



with a coy sigh in time

your girlfriend's waiting on the line

can't you wait to make her cry?

and they'll remember you alive

as that pain in their unkind invitation tonight

so here's your credit for the lie

that you've been hanging

and over awaiting your reply.



is this the worst you have to peddle us?

scandalous! oh spare us!

by now they must have heard about your worried world inside

pull the covers up, i don't care

call all your lovers up, i don't care

if the fates sing to your face queen of the raincloud club.


I lied when i said we were alike

your best friend's waiting on the line

to compliment your new shine

I can hardly stand to stand here now

to be your stare to admit to all

the pain that you've been painting

and over and i can't bear to stay.

so come on!

sing along!



aren't we bridges aren't we bells?

aren't we chuckling through our curls?

up to heaven and down to hell

say it again pal, aren't we bells?



aren't we statues in a story

where we choose our goals of glory

over family and over friends

say it again and again.


aren't we bridges aren't we bells?

aren't we sighing in our cells?

up to heaven and down to hell

say it again pal, aren't we bells?

aren't we bells?

American Psycho Excerpt

I make no comment, lost in my own private maze, thinking about other things: warrants, stock offerings, ESOPs, LBOs, IPOs,finances, refinances, debentures, converts, proxy statements, 8-Ks, 10-Qs, zero coupons, PiKs, GNPs, the IMF, hot executive gadgets, billionaires, KenkichiNakajima, infinity, Infinity, how fast a luxury car should go, bailouts, junk bonds, whether to cancel my subscription to The Economist, the Christmas Eve when I was fourteen and had raped one of our maids, Inclusivity, envyingsomeone's life, whether someone could survive a fractured skull, waiting inairports, stifling a scream, credit cards and someone's passport and a book ofmatches from La Cote Basque splattered with blood, surface surface surface, a Rolls is a Rolls is a Rolls. To Evelyn our relationship is yellow and blue, but to me it's a gray place, most of it blacked out, bombed, footage from the film in my head is mindless shots of stone and any language heard is utterly foreign,automated tellers, women giving birth through their assholes, embryos frozen or scrambled (which is it?), nuclear warheads, billions of dollars, the total destruction of the world, someone gets beaten up, someone else dies, sometimes bloodlessly, more often mostly by a rifle shot, assassinations, comas, life played out as a sitcom, a blank canvas that reconfigure itself into a soap opera. It's an isolation ward that serves only to expose my own severely impaired capacity to feel. I am at its center, out of season, and no one ever asks me for any identification...

American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis

Sudelbuch ‘J,’ No. 392

A great speech is easy to learn by heart and a great poem is easier still. How hard it would be to memorize as many words linked together senselessly, or a speech in a foreign tongue! Sense and understanding are thus critical to the function of memory. Sense is order and order is in the final analysis conformity with our nature. When we speak reasonably, it is our being and our nature that speaks. When we want to incorporate something into our memory, we always search for a sense or another kind of order as a tool to that end. That is why we utilize the notions of genus and species in the case of plants and animals. The practice of forming hypotheses must be considered in this same light: we are obliged to have them because otherwise we would be unable to retain things. And while this is frequently observed, we must return to it again and again. The question is whether everything is legible to us. Certainly experiment as well as reflection enable us to introduce a significance into what is not legible, either to us or at all: thus we see faces or landscapes in the sand, though they are certainly not there. The introduction of symmetry belongs here too, seeing silhouettes in inkblots, for instance. Likewise the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: truly, all of this is not to be found in the things themselves, but in us. In general we cannot recall too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.


– Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbuch ‘J,’ No. 392 (1789) in: Schriften und Briefe, vol. 1, p. 710 (W. Promies ed. 1968)(S.H. transl.)

How to Simulate Burning Man (sent via Mother)

1. Pay an escort of your preference to not bathe for five days, cover themselves in glitter, dust, and sunscreen, wear a skanky neon wig, dance naked, then say they have a lover back home at the end of the night.
2. Tear down your house. Put it in a truck.
3. Drive 10 hours in any direction. Put the house back together.
4. Invite everyone you meet to come over and party.
5. When they leave, follow them back to their homes, drink all their booze, and break things.
6. Stack all your fans in one corner of the living room.
7. Put on your most fabulous outfit.
8. Turn the fans on full blast.
9. Dump a vacuum cleaner bag in front of them.
10. Buy a new set of expensive camping gear.
11. Break it.
12. Lean back in a chair until that point where you're just about to fall over, but you catch yourself at the last moment. Hold that position for 9 hours.
13. Only use the toilet in a house that is at least 3 blocks away.
14. Drain all the water from the toilet.
15. Only flush it every 3 days.
16. Hide all the toilet paper.
17. Set your house thermostat so it's 50 degrees for the first hour of sleep and 100 degrees the rest of the night.
18. Before eating any food, drop it in a sandbox and lick a battery.
19. Mail $200 to the Reno casino of your choice.
20. Spend thousands of dollars and several months of your life building a deeply personal art work. Hide it in a funhouse on the edge of the city. Hire people to come by and alternate saying "I love it" and "this sucks balls".
21. Blow it up.
22. Set up a DJ system downwind of a three alarm fire.
23. Play a short loop of drum'n'bass until the embers are cold.
24. Make a list of all the things you'll do different next year.
25. Never look at it.
26. Have a 3 a.m. soul baring conversation with a drag nun in platforms, a crocodile and Bugs Bunny. Be unable to tell if you're hallucinating. Lust after Bugs Bunny.
27. Cut, burn, electrocute, bruise, and sunburn various parts of your body.
28. Forget how you did it. Don't go to a doctor.
29. "Downsize" last year's camp by adding two geodesic domes, a new sound system, art car, and 20 newbies.
30. Don't sleep for 5 days.
31. Take a wide variety of hallucinogenic/emotion altering drugs.
32. Pick a fight with your boyfriend/girlfriend.
33. Spend a whole year rummaging through thrift stores for the perfect, most outrageous costume.
34. Never Wear it.
35. Shop at Wal-mart, Cost-Co, and Home Depot while espousing anti-corporate views.
36. Tell everyone that you're going to a "Leave-No-Trace" event. Empty your car into a dumpster.
37. Read "Dhalgren" by Samuel R. Delany.
38. Read "The City Not Long After" by Pat Murphy.
39. Cut off the bindings, throw all the pages up in the air, and shuffle them back together.
40. Reread "The City After Dhalgren" by Samuel Murphy.
41. Burn it. Read the ashes.
42. Listen to music you hate for 168 hours straight, or until you think you are going to scream. Scream.
43. Realize you'll love the music for the rest of your life.
44. Spend 5 months planning a "theme camp" like it's the invasion of Normandy.
45. Spend Monday-Wednesday building the camp.
46. Spend Thurs-Sunday nowhere near camp because you're sick of it or can't find it.
47. Walk around your neighborhood and knock on doors until someone offers you cocktails and dinner.
48. Bust your ass for a "community."
49. See all the attention get focused on the drama queen crybaby.
50. Get so drunk you can't recognize your own house.
51. Walk slowly around the block for 5 hours.
52. Tell your boss you aren't coming to work this week but he should "gift" you a paycheck anyway.
53. When he refuses accuse him of not loving the "community".
54. Search alleys until you find a couch so unbelievably tacky and nasty filthy that a state college frat house wouldn't want it.
55. Take a nap on the couch and sleep like you are king of the world.
56. Ask your most annoying neighbor to interrupt your fun several times a day with third hand gossip about every horrible thing that's happened in the last 24 hours. Have them wear khaki.