Kunstler: "As If Nothing Matters"

http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/04/as-if-nothing-matters.html

No one in the American media is paying attention to the unfolding tragedy of Japan - and by this I refer not only to the unfinished Fukushima saga, but the parallel story of Japan closing down virtually its entire nuclear power industry necessitating gigantic additional imports of oil and gas to generate electric power - all of which points to the likelihood that Japan will become the first advanced industrial nation to bid sayonara to modernity and return to a neo-medieval socio-economic model of daily life. The Middle West and North Africa still smolder away like giant root fires. Nothing has been settled politically and the prospects are excellent that Islamic maniacs will shortly be in charge of Egypt and Libya, not to mention Syria, or even America's trillion-dollar battleground of Afghanistan where, after ten years of persistent struggle, we can't control either the terrain or the behavior of the people who dwell on it. Meanwhile, half of Sudan's oil production was blown up over the weekend. [As this points out, Sudan and South Sudan are disputing ownership of oil reserves, most of which lie in South Sudan. And South Sudan now refuses to export its oil through Sudan. This is an overview of the conflict.--P.Z.] And King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is not getting any younger at 88. Saudi spare oil capacity won't matter so much when the kingdom is up in flames. What I wonder is how long the American public will remain in its Kardashian trance. At this torpid moment no one believes that any theoretical political cohort in this land - tea-partiers, swindled youth, professional lefties (or what's left of them), or the fugitive thinking centrists (wherever they are) - might bestir themselves to bust up a nominating convention or march on one of many debauched institutions in the nation's capital, from the SEC to the wax museum formally known as the Department of Justice. I think differently, though. I think this grim interval of crisis consolidation is drawing to a close and, like the buds swelling on every tree in New England, events will soon burst into astounding efflorescence.

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