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James Howard Kunstler on American Politics / The Long Emergency

American politics have fallen into a gothic family melodrama, and the theme is the same one being played out on the micro level all over the country: failed parenting. James Howard Kunstler explains...

Dead-Beat Dads and Mommies-With-a-Vengeance
by James Howard Kunstler

Politics is the way we work out our collective national psychology - if you believe in such a thing (and I do). The Republicans have made themselves into the Daddy Party and the Democrats have become Mommy - and both are failing.

George W. Bush is our "Ward Cleaver," the very visible head of the household with no apparent duties other than being visible. The mission of the Daddy Party is pure Daddy stuff: to prevent the daughters from getting in trouble (having fun) with boys, to grub as much money as possible via mysterious corporate activities to support the family, and to defend the household if necessary. So, we get the "right-to-life" campaign (which is becoming the anti-contraception and anti-sex campaign), and the tacit support for any kind of corporate mischief in pursuit of profits in the "marketplace," and the prosecution of war against "the terrorists."

The Mommy Party wants everybody to feel good and for all outcomes to be fair, even if Mommy has to use force to make it happen. Since the Mommy Party is not afraid of appearing cultivated and is in charge of the family's education, the Mommy Party has taken defacto control of the universities, where justice and fairness are the main courses of study. Mommy's discipline there is very severe for those who cross Mommy - ask Larry Summers over at Harvard. The men of the Mommy Party are uniformly
"whipped" and must submit to an ideology that regards gender confusion as an achievement - because all daddies are such losers.

The Daddy Party has entered a zone of failure both frightening and abject. Daddy has mismanaged the family finances so badly that the repo man may take the house away. He's on a rampage against his daughters (some of whom remain romantically infatuated with Daddy and still wish to please him at all costs). He's addicted to a petroleum-based smack and refuses to consider any behavioral changes that might get him off the stuff. And he's gone and poked a stick into the largest hornets' nest in his drug dealer's 'hood."

The Mommy Party doesn't want to talk about the mismanagement of the household and its relations with other households. The Mommy Party is excessively concerned with appearances (sometimes at the expense of the truth). The Mommy Party gets around these inconveniences by focusing on everybody's feelings. The Mommy Party is like an Oprah show that never ends and resolves nothing.

Because Daddy is failing so badly, and the family anxiety level is so high, the children allied with Mommy have fantasized a dark Daddy alter ego that they transfer their fears to. That's Vice-president Dick Cheney. Daddy's activities may be mysterious, but his alter ego's duties are clear: to keep those corporate systems running things in the background happy and productive by any means necessary. Nobody doubts the alter ego's power and influence in these matters. He is considered as adept as Daddy is inept. If you cross him, he might even blow your head off, so watch
out.

With the Daddy Party entering what appears to be terminal failure, all eyes are now turned to the Mommy Party and its presumed figurehead, Mommy-with-a-vengence, Hillary. There is still the hope that she can carry on as the head of a single-parent family, keep the corporate flywheels spinning, and even look after the family's security from the thugs coming into the 'hood.

My own guess is that actual conditions in the household may be too far gone for even Mommy to set things right. Our situation with oil and natural gas are much more dire than the kid's realize. Dad's investments were idiotic and his portfolio is shredded. Not only is the house about to be repossessed, but the car and the home theater will be going with it. The bad 'hoods around the world are set to explode. The kids are going to have to grow up fast. Some will just go feral. Some will become Mommies
and Daddies themselves, and they will try to form new households with the remnants of the old one. Maybe they can cobble together something like an American common culture out of whatever's left, and recreate some organizing principles for a family life that make sense.

Let's just hope that social services doesn't have to come in to clean up the mess.

James Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.

You can get more from James Kunstler - including his artwork, information about his other novels, and his blog - at his Web site:

www.kunstler.com


The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
by James Kunstler

Kunstler established a writing career criticizing American suburbia, and his animosity against his bete noire does not abate here. It's a wide-casting, statistics-studded ramble through energy production and technologies, world economic and political history, and climatology that culminates in predictions that the suburbs are doomed. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military
invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.

To get your copy, click here: The Long Emergency


Note: The above information is from the Daily Reckoning's weekend edition (March 25), to which I subscribe, finding it an interesting, entertaining, highly-informative newsletter.

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posted by Annamarie at 6:04 PM