'my fellow americans' are like the blind people describing the elephant they have their hands on depending on where on said elephant their hands are resting upon. few see a larger picture of the way the nation has descended into madness since the cia killed jfk. kunstler sees it to some degree and in this piece tells you some of what he sees. i see no solution to the monster empire beyond collapse which would render it incapable of further crimes;
The opening chapters of Michael Lewis’s new book, The Fifth Risk,
detail the carelessness of the Trump transition team in the months
leading up to his swearing-in as president. Former New Jersey governor
Chris Christie led the team, with its binders full of possible agency
chiefs, before he was summarily canned by Steve Bannon, who would be
dumped soon himself by the ascending Golden Golem of Greatness. There
was, in fact, a set of rigorous protocols for managing the transition of
power based on decades of cumulative practice — and anxiety over the
frightening nuclear demons at the core of US power — and they were
disdained, to the horror of the permanent bureaucracy waiting in place
for leadership.
In those months after the election, Mr. Trump was apparently dazed
and confused by his unexpected victory, and completely unprepared to
actually run the country. His super-sized “stable genius” brain surveyed
the scene and his field-of-view saw nothing but swamp from sea
to shining sea, populated by lizards, snakes, raptors, and poisonous
insects, with higher-order mammalian predators in the C-suites. When he
finally caught on to the game being played, Mr. Trump rounded up his own
menagerie of crispy critters and sent them forth to run operations like
the Department of Energy — in that case, former Texas governor Rick
Perry, who knew next-to-nothing about the department’s responsibilities,
and had sworn to abolish it in the primary elections (when he
remembered it existed).
The politics around these deadly serious matters are interesting
enough, and Michael Lewis, as always, excels at unpacking the fraught
mysteries of highly complicated systems run by comically limited humans.
But something else emerges from this story, perhaps unintentionally:
that the complexities of government are now hopelessly unmanageable, no
matter who is in charge of them, and that the actual path of this
still-growing complexity leads to criticality and collapse. If Lewis
catches onto this later in the book, which I doubt, if only for his
cavalier references to the dodgy business of shale oil, there’s no sign
of it in the early chapters.
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/fishtailing-into-the-future/
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