JAMES KUNSTLER: Science Fiction

James Kunstler -- Clusterfuck Nation

Riding the van out of the airport Friday night to the Park-and-Fly lot, with the planes floating down in the distant violet gloaming, an eerie recognition came over me that life today is as much like science fiction as it will ever get -- at least as far ahead as I can see. Some of my friends' kids may never fly in airplanes. They may never own cars. At some point twenty, thirty years ahead, they may not take for granted throwing a light switch in a dark room.

Our sense of normality will be coming up for review soon, and hardly anybody seems ready to face it. The now-consistently moronic New York Times played a story in the Sunday business section which said that "consumers" were just shrugging off $3 gasoline and spending like gangbusters in the super discount box stores. It seems not to have occurred to the editors that perhaps $3 a gallon is not the final destination of our pump prices. They were so triumphal over the public's supernatural immunity to the $3 flu that they failed to essay what $4- or even $5-a-gallon gasoline might do to America's shopping heroes.

My own guess is that it is liable to drive the NASCAR grandstand ticket prices a wee bit higher, at least.

But such is the mood of the nation on the cusp of the summer driving season. What the Timesmen/women might have also missed is the fact that all that heroic shopping is being accomplished with "money" as yet unearned -- on plastic, that is. The $3-a-gallon fill-up isn't causing any pain because nobody is forking over actual dollar bills, and the same thing with those $1,500 plasma flat screen TVs that the hero consumers are scooping up so valiently from the Best Buy loading docks.

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He seems to be saying that a strange and unexpected environment is science fiction. Very odd.

It is not impossible to reduce our energy use, and to use renewable, lower-grade energy sources for the essentials of life. There just isn't any corporate will to do so, because it's damn hard to profit by it when people produce their own power without the grids.

Similarly, there are many make-work jobs in this nation, jobs that, if they never got done again, would not cause one moment of distress to any soul. Take advertising, for one. If you never received an annoying phone call at dinnertime again, nor watched another blaring, jarring commercial on television, would you cry? I didn't think so.

If fashion became obsolete, and dressing for the weather the style of the day, who would gripe?

If the gaudy and gratutious entertainment outlets evaporated, and people had to make friends and learn to entertain each other and themselves, would our society crumble, or become well-knit?

If all the print media except books vanished, and the Internet took over, eliminating along the way all other forms of distance communication, would we be poorer, or better served?

The time is coming when people individually and collectively will have to make GOOD, measured choices, not random, I'm bored so what the hell, anything for a thrill choices.

Take the #1 source of future savings, quality of life improvement, and good public policy: universal health care, single-payer system. The insurance industry nationalized: not only health, but also risk, and since it would be a matter of public policy, all would be covered, at greatly reduced costs, not just the privileged, corporate and political few who got earmarked.

The list of choices never taken is quite long, and the rewards for finally growing up as a nation and acting in an adult fashion will be spectacular. I hope I live that long, and that we can put the crooks out of public policy-making business.