Clusterfuck Nation
by James Howard Kunstler / June 30th, 2012
Is there a Baby Boomer so dim in this land of rackets and
swindles who thinks that he or she will escape the wrath of the
Millennials rising? The developing story is so obvious that only an
academic economist could fail to notice. Here’s how it will go: some
months from now, as the financial unwind worsens, and the mirage of
gainful employment shimmers away to nothing, and the technocrats of
Europe meet nervously by some Swiss lakeside (and are seen glumly
shaking their heads), and Romney and Obama try to out-do each other
peddling miracle cures for the tanking national self-esteem – a
dangerous meme will go forth across the internet, and this meme will
say: Millennials, renounce your college loans and set yourselves free!
And then something truly marvelous will happen. They will at
once disempower the swindling generation of their fathers, teachers,
loan officers, and overlords and quite possibly bring on, at long last,
the epochal collision of pervasive American control fraud with the hard
hand of reality.
I think this will happen, and I would venture even to set the
meme loose here and now and watch it go viral. The college loan racket
has been an even more cynical enterprise than the mortgage racket was
because so many people who ought to have known better, people of
supposed intelligence such as college deans, cabinet secretaries, and
think-tank Yodas, all colluded to support the false promise that the
gigantic cargo cult of higher ed would keep churning out fresh careers
forever — when the truth was that the entire groaning vessel of hopes
and dreams was already under water and sinking into the eternal
darkness.
And is there a Millennial so dim who believes that the promised
package of lifetime goodies once called “a job with benefits” waits
like a liveried servant to conduct them without friction through the
ceremonies of career and family according to premises and promises of an
obsolete American Dream? Dreams do die hard. As dreams go it was a
pretty good one while it lasted, but like all dreams, it has vanished in
the mists of a new morning leaving the dreamers half-sick, anxious, and
drained. They have nothing to lose but their fears of the re-po man and
the simulated dudgeon of telephone robot debt-collectors.
This idea should catch on as the election season heats up. Like
the anti-war youth of August, 1968, burning their draft cards in the
streets of Chicago, the Millennials should flock to Charlotte and Tampa
this summer and fill the parking lots (there are no streets in these
places) with the smoke of their burning loan contracts — and then
proceed with the loud repudiation of party politics in its two current
useless, lying, craven, feckless factions. The effrontery of these
rogues, promising a hundred years of shale gas, and jobs, jobs, jobs,
and a personal relationship with Jesus! Send them packing into the
bowels of history, then go home and make it work locally, where it will
have to happen in any case because the arc of events has a velocity of
its own now and that is our certain destination.
The colleges themselves will, of course, implode shortly, along
with everything else currently organized on the super-gigantic scale.
They are no more prepared for what is about to happen to them than the
chiselers in government, banking, medicine, and global corporate
enterprise. We will wonder in retrospect how they ever managed to winkle
50-grand a year for their absurd promises, and how we permitted young
people with undeveloped powers of judgment to sign their financial lives
away on terms even more stringent than their parents’ mortgages. When
the universities do go down, tossing their employees overboard in the
process, it will be interesting to see the former faculty chairpersons
and distinguished professors of econometric modeling learn how to plant
kale and care for chickens side-by-side with their formerly-indentured
students. I can imagine a period of turmoil in America even harsher
than, say, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China where
officials, professors, and authorities of all kinds were paraded through
the angry mobs wearing dunce caps. Weird things happen in history.
The college loan money will not be paid back anyway, so
Millennial youth ought to seize the golden opportunity to make the
deliberate point that the years of swindling are officially over now.
This strange jubilee could, and should, change everything.
James Howard Kunstler wrote
The Geography of Nowhere,
"Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic
landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls,
junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday
environment where most Americans live and work." His
The City in Mind is a wide-ranging look at cities here and abroad, what makes them great (or miserable).
The Long Emergency
is about the challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil
crisis, climate change, and other "converging catastrophes of the 21st
Century."
Read other articles by James, or
visit James's website.
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