The Song of Spring (James Howard Kunstler)

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

May 9, 2011 -- This is a nervous country. I'm not sure that hanging Osama Bin Laden on the White House wall like a coonskin really helps that much.

Already, a familiar darkness sets back in, a loss of purpose of the kind that Lindsay Lohan must feel when she gets out of rehab. This is exactly the situation that empty rhetoric was designed for, so we got a week of talk about "bringing our nation together" when the truth is that Fox News would like to send Team Six into the oval office with guns blazing and helmet cams on "record."

We have no idea what we're going to do as a people and absolutely no credible thought on this emanates from the upper echelons. Leadership is more than telling people what they want to hear. In the middle ranks of society, a sullen docility rules, no matter how many affronts to reality we witness. You ride this wreck until the wheels come off and think of what to do next when you're sitting in the drainage ditch by the side of the road. There's no period in U.S. history that matches this for lassitude.

I had a strange experience, driving north about 50 miles along Route 22 in eastern upstate New York, from Canaan to Cambridge, a very rural stretch that roughly parallels the Massachusetts and Vermont lines. Aside from a few convenience stores serving up gasoline, slim-jims, and pepsi, there was no visible economic activity in any of the towns along the way. The little town of Berlin, N.Y., was especially striking. A "for sale" sign stood forlornly in the parking lot of the lumber yard, the inventory sheds plainly empty of stock. The Seagroatt wholesale flower company -- where, years ago, I picked up roses as the delivery guy for a Saratoga retailer -- was shut down, with rows of empty greenhouses standing vacantly in the late day spring sunshine. The little downtown on a street 100 feet off the highway was not only empty of businesses, but the old wooden buildings themselves had gone lopsided from a lack of regular caretaking, while the paint was all but gone. A number of old houses were still occupied -- cars in the driveways -- but they looked battered and worn, one bad winter from roof failure, and often with front yards strewn with plastic detritus.

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After all, recent events have shown the inadequacies of (1) pushing nuclear power (2) phony health care reform (3) economic stimulus for the wealthy corporations and to-big-to-fail banks.

But those non-solutions are in place to stay, for all that they "solve" nothing and may make the underlying conditions worse, until there is a regime change.

Unfortunately, changing the party in power will not bring about regime change. Changing the party in power from the Corporations and and the Crazies to small-p people might. Oh, yes, the fancy, corruptible election machinery has "fixed" that problem, too.

You need citizens' committees organizing from the bottom up around uncorruptible candidates prepared to sweep out the stables and start afresh.