A Still Moment (James Howard Kunstler)

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

April 25, 2010 -- George W. Bush was onto something in the fall of 2008 when he remarked apropos of the Lehman collapse: "...this sucker could go down."

It's my serene conviction, by the way, that this sucker actually is going down, right now, even as I clatter away at the keys -- perhaps in slow motion, so that not many other bystanders have noticed yet, and the few who have noticed are mostly too crosseyed with nausea to speak.

It's perhaps useful to define even what we mean when we say "this sucker." Everybody knows what a sucker is, of course -- say, a Midwestern public employees' union pension fund snookered into buying a fat slice of equity tranche in a Goldman Sachs-engineered CDO. But "this sucker" is something else:a rather large cargo of commercial relations, entailed obligations, hopes, expectations, habits of daily life -- indeed millions of whole lives -- loaded onto the rather creaky vessel we call modern civilization. "This sucker" was such an apt term coming from someone whose understanding of civilization was like unto that of a boy who found a PlayStation under the Christmas tree.

It's also perhaps useful to define what we mean by "going down." To my mind it means an awful lot of money disappears and nobody can pay for anything and an awful of things that have kept going on promises to pay and to get paid will stop keeping going. I don't think that the idea of money disappears -- that is, paper certificates representing claims on future work -- but there will be a lot less of it to go around. Eventually the idea of money could go, too, at least in its current form as Federal Reserve notes. But mostly for some years it will just be a lot of people, companies, and governments who are broke.

"Going down" will mean a society with no money and an infrastructure for daily life that requires gobs of money to run, and a populace too dazed, confused, and inflamed to do anything useful in the way of organizing new infrastructures for daily life for their new circumstances. In retrospect, the Great Depression of the 1930s will look like "The Philadelphia Story" compared to what we wake up to ten years from now.

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"Lately, I wonder if there will even be an election six months from now."

: )