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Historians of the future, roasting rat kabobs over their campfires will look back at the year 2016 and marvel at the death throes of the zombie republic that died eating its own brains. This grotesque Deep State lumbers from one misadventure of governance to the next consuming its prospects for a plausible future in a fugue of autophagy, inducing the great nausea that now settles over the land.
President Trump — really? We would be lucky of it only resulted in a revolt of the generals, and there goes 200-plus years of institutional heritage. Yet it cannot be denied that the Deep State needs to be kicked to the curb, stomped, water-boarded, and hung out to dry. The sad part is that the job might have been done by men of character, but incredibly the long-vaunted baby boomer generation did not manage to produce any, nor the so-called Gen-X now coming into its own power. And if such hypothetical figures do exist, why are they hiding in the thickets of public life?
Well, there is Bernie, after all. Credit must be given to this lone crusader for at least opposing the avatar of the Deep State, she whose “turn” must not be denied in the rotating management of rackets-and-grift that our politics have sunk to. He thrashed her roundly in the three primary contests over the weekend — so badly in the vote count that she may be suffering an existential hangover as I write. The fabled Democratic Party super-delegates may also be going through a dark night of the soul as they study the intractable anti-charisma of Hillary. Much as I admire Bernie’s chutzpah, his particular Old Left theories of wealth redistribution do not convince me — though the management of our dwindling capital surely lies at the heart of our problems. His nomination would go down in the Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not annals of the world’s greatest improbabilities.
Otherwise, the latest meme spreading across the web wires is how deeply the voters divide by sex: men flocking around Trump (or Machine Gun Ted Cruz), and the ladies standing at each mighty column of Hillary’s azure pant-suit. Yes, a national war of the sexes. Just what we need with all our shit falling apart. This sorry diversion results not from the triumph of feminism, as widely believed, but actually from the failure of American manhood. Proof of that, of course, is the ascendance of Trump, this punch-line of a political leader with all the gravitas of a hood ornament. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce — thank you, Karl Marx, O peevish mischief-maker squirming upon your fabled boils!
Finally, what will take the Deep State down is not some lance-wielding armored savior on a white horse but the awful undertow of financial implosion that awaits as the seasons of 2016 turn. When faith in our money and the instruments represented in it goes, look out below. There are so many rifts in the international banking system that the vista begins to look like the spring ice break-up on the Lake of Nations. When the grifters can’t cash their checks — or move their pixels into the accounts receivable column — they will be immobilized. Of course, if that happens, so will everything else, including your ability to buy anymore frozen pizzas.
Trump, Cruz, Hillary, and Bernie are signs that this poor paralyzed country needs to go through a convulsion to flush out all the toxic idiocy of this historical moment. Trigger warning: it may be the messiest revolution in history when it finally comes, there is so much dross to clear out of the system. Trump and Hillary are like two giant fistulas obstructing the national bowel. Of course, a lot of sentient Americans do not want their nation dying on the toilet like Elvis. The indignity of it! In the name of the founding fathers, please, someone, fetch the enema bag.
Events still lie hidden like bear traps on the path to “Decision 2016” as they like to say on the cable networks. Somewhere in London, Singapore, Shanghai, or New York, a 25-year-old coked-out Forex trader is going to tap the untoward keystroke that brings down a derivatives avalanche… or two brothers of Allah in some Berlin row-house will go forth one bright morning in vests of Semtex… and finally enough will be enough.
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Coming in June
World Made By Hand 4 (and final)
Praise for A History of the Future:
“Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand
