Jim Kunstler echoes what many are is feeling. That things aren’t right and we are at a major pivot point of history. In other words, something is going to happen, something big, and then that which was in flux will suddenly have trajectory.
So what’s it going to be? People are twitchy now. Faith and trust in institutions and government is evaporating as the few continue to pillage the many. The government stands by either helpless or complicit and does little to stop it.
He raises the possibility of a coup by patriotic, battle-hardened military sickened at seeing the country continuing to be looted and the ideals they believe in spit upon by thugs in high places. A year ago I’d have thought that a loony idea. But not any more.
I have friends in their 50’s and 60’s who worked hard all their lives and are losing their homes, filing bankruptcy, losing jobs. Others are just barely getting by. Any thought of retiring seems gone. There’s a sense of unease in the country now, and it’s not going away.
I’m not promoting a coup d’etat, you understand, but I am raising it as a realistic possibility as elected officials prove utterly unwilling to cope with a mounting crisis of capital and resources. The ‘corn-pone Hitler’ scenario is still another possibility – Glen Beck and Sarah Palin vying for the hearts and minds of the morons who want ‘to keep gubmint out of Medicare!’ – but I suspect that there is a growing cadre of concerned officers around the Pentagon who will not brook that fucking nonsense for a Crystal City minute and, what’s more, would be very impatient to begin correcting the many fiascos currently blowing the nation apart from within. Remember, today’s US military elite is battle-hardened after eight years of war in Asia. No doubt they love their country, as Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte loved theirs. It may pain them to stand by and watch it dissolve like a castle made of sugar in a winter gale.
I raise this possibility because no one else has, and I think we ought to be aware that all kinds of strange outcomes are possible in a society under severe stress. History is a harsh mistress. For all his ‘star quality’ and likable personality, President Obama is increasingly perceived as impotent where the real ongoing disasters of public life are concerned, and he has made the tragic choice to appear to be hostage to the bankers who are systematically draining the life-blood from the middle class. Whatever we are seeing on the S & P ticker these days does not register the agony of ordinary people losing everything they worked for and even believed in. In a leadership vacuum, centers don’t hold, things come apart, and rough beasts slouch toward Wall Street.
The playbook is seventy-five years old.