Although the season officially has a couple more weeks of life, the substantive summer has shuffled off into its back room for a long slumber, leaving us mortals here to battle the demons and delusions of decaying economy and culture. Just as the leaves begin to wither and drop off the trees, so our possibilities for a livable future are dwindling in the long, cool stretches of recession and confusion. 

Of course, the power players in government and finance are convinced that recovery lies just around the corner, if only meddling liberals or obstructionist conservatives will get out of the way and let things roll (depending on your perspective). This is a very convenient but disturbing trope. It works well for political parties and pundits: blaming the other side for the continued economic contraction. They get to shout and bluster, proclaiming the rightness of deficit reduction or the need for more stimulus, regardless of the actual facts on the ground. And having a demonic Other certainly helps rally voters for elections, as the Democrats are about to find out this November (I fully expect the GOP to sweep into the majority in Congress, although perhaps not in as much of a swell as many are predicting).

The confrontational nature of our public discourse is explicitly in service to entertainment value, campaign fundraising, and the overall business of electioneering. Issues are added to the simmering popcorn popper of the news cycle, and the talking heads and mouths of TV and radio stir the electronic batch and ride out the entertaining conflicts for as long as they can. The most obvious recent example is the ridiculous, manufactured hullaballoo over the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero. Now, I'm not sure how many people actually visit Ground Zero every year, but I find it impossible to believe that anyone would actually be more disturbed by a Muslim building than they would be by the ugly, gaping hole in the ground that is still at the site. I have visited Ground Zero myself, and the assortment of wackos, tasteless-souvenir hawkers, conspiracy weirdos, and hyper-jingoistic "patriots" is much more nauseating than any religious structure could ever be. People who claim that they are uncomfortable or upset with the proximity of the proposed center to Ground Zero really need to examine and correct their thinking. To cave in to a vague sense that it "just doesn't feel right" would be to continue to reward the ubiquitous American trends of knowing more about reality TV shows and fantasy baseball than about a religion with a billion global adherents. And notice that any floated "compromise" always involves moving the site, and never mentions something like Christian and Jewish leaders taking a strong stand to educate their followers about their sister faith. There is just no rational reason whatsoever to block the construction. There is, however, a bonanza of future infotainment should the building go through. Just consider months and months of photo-ops, with protests and marches and colorful characters galore. The mainstream media could milk that symbolic conflict for all its worth.

(Side note: today happens to be September 11th, and the latest news is that Pastor/Harley-Enthusiast Terry Jones, he of the mammoth 50-person flock, has thankfully called off his Koran-roasting party, and has flown up to New York to talk with the Imam who wants to build the community center [although the Imam denies any such pow-wow]. The simple fact that this dude gets more than 20 seconds of media coverage, in anything more than the local penny-saver, just goes to show how unwilling the mainstream media is to cover the slow unwinding of the American experiment.)

Meanwhile, the heat is being turned up on the upcoming election season, and we're looking at a full-scale referendum on the first two years of Obama's presidency. As mentioned above, the dominant theme that is emerging is deficit reduction vs. continued stimulus. Every local ad on TV and radio now goes something like this: "America is broke, and free-spending Joe Baloney wants to raise your taxes for more wasteful programs. Say 'no' to Joe this time around, and vote for Harry Truevirtue, a real conservative who knows how to create jobs and move America forward." Unless there is a massive and sudden shift in the next three months, all voters will see is double-digit unemployment, exhausted savings, swelling mortgage foreclosures, and meager hopes for the future. And they'll blame the guys in charge, no matter how much window-dressing the Dems plaster up.

These are the brute facts on the ground. One out of every six Americans who would like to work full-time cannot find anything out there. Jobs that are being created are in lower-paying sectors, or are non-benefitted temp/contingency spots. Home foreclosures are still on the rise: 2 million in 2008, 2.8 million in 2009, and 2010 is on track to be higher still. Keep in mind that the real estate bubble drove Americans to push their chips all-in on their houses as their only source of wealth. With the decimation of home values, around half of all Americans have zero of negative net worth, even despite all of the hoo-ha about increased savings and belt-tightening. 

As mentioned many times in this blog, the American economy has been steadily and impressively growing for the last four decades, but the fruits of that growth have not accrued to regular people. The corporate and financial titans at the top have, for many reasons, captured the vast majority of America's economic proceeds. The top 1% of the population now controls 43% of the nation's wealth, more than the bottom 95% combined (see more disturbing stats in my earlier post, "The Spoils of Inequality"). 

It is very hard to see how any type of recovery can happen when regular families are losing their jobs and losing their homes, their only source of wealth. Essentially, every drop has been squeezed out of the system, spirited away to the coffers of hedge fund managers, bankers, and other corporate brass. More federal stimulus is not going to do the trick, unless it is massive deficit spending on the scale of several trillion dollars, and is solely dedicated to actual physical rehabilitation of manufacturing plants, railroads, bridges, roads, and green power plants. In the current political climate, this is not going to happen. On the flip side, the deficit-busters are not going to rescue us either. Slashing taxes at all levels would certainly take the bite out of our debt, but it would certainly increase unemployment and ruin broad swaths of useful public service, leaving America a cold, stark, brutal place.

As Jim Kunstler repeatedly notes, the real business of the American future is how to manage contraction. How can we navigate the unraveling of large systems of all types, without becoming a society of cutthroats and tyrants? The longer we delay dealing with the devastations of inequality, peak oil, and ecological exhaustion, the more gruesome our actual future will be. 

But the autumn popcorn of pseudo-issues will continue to crackle, as we slouch towards another round of meaningless electioneering and sensationalistic cultural confrontations.