Waving the Flag While Circling the Bowl

Has anyone else noticed just how obnoxious flag-waving has become in America these past few years? Plastering flags everywhere first became a huge fad right after 9/11, which should not have been unexpected under the circumstances. Those were the days when it suddenly became impossible to spot a politician anywhere out in public who wasn't sporting a flag pin on their lapel, and in which lots of people actually bothered to learn the words to the Star Spangled Banner so they wouldn't have to fake-lip sync it anymore. Even the Pledge of Allegiance and God Bless America came back into vogue, and to hell with them Atheist types if they didn't like the religious overtones of those two archaic gestures from times gone by.

The quest to make anything and everything seem patriotic got so ridiculous that the lyric "Some folks are born, made to wave the flag" from the Creedence Clearwater Revival song "Fortunate Son" and the refrain from "American Woman" by the Guess Who were used in patriotic-themed commercials DESPITE both songs being anthems of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Such overt public expressions cooled somewhat a few years later as the Iraq quagmire deepened and then the Bush economy finally imploded. One might have then thought that with the American military having to again ignominiously pull out of yet another guerrilla war and unpopular foreign occupation, that flag waving gestures and other expressions of mindless patriotism would have gone completely out of style, but that is not what's happened. In fact, it seems to be getting worse than ever.

One habit of your average American consumer that I personally have not been able to break is watching professional and college athletics, particularly football and baseball. Now, it's a well known fact that sports fans and athletes tend to be more conservative than your average American. The days when the likes of Muhammad Ali and pitcher Bill "Spaceman" Lee openly questioned the status quo are long over. Your modern athlete is far more interested in getting endorsement deals than promoting social justice.

But for some reason, as our national malaise has slowly worsened during the tenure of President Hopey-Changey, superficial patriotism is actually on the rise, especially in the sporting world. These days, it is not enough to merely have the National Anthem sung prior to an NFL game, but it must be accompanied by a field-sized flag held up by dozens of service members while a formation of fighter jets buzz the stadium (all at taxpayer expense, no doubt). Meanwhile, the singing of God Bless America has invaded baseball's 7th inning stretch along with countless in-game tributes to "the troops." Some teams like the San Diego Padres and Cincinnati Reds even go so far as to wear "camouflage" uniforms on occasion. I'm so old that I recall a time back when I served during the dark ages (the 1980s) that military people would get greatly offended at seeing any civilian wearing any outfit that remotely resembled "THE uniform." Not anymore, apparently.

Nevermind too, that unlike in previous generations none of the young millionaires on the field are ever going to be at risk of having to actually go fight in America's countless imperial wars. Nope, no modern day Ted Williams will ever lose four of his prime playing years while in uniform. Heck, the one NFL player who put his money where the league's supposedly patriotic mouth is and volunteered after 9/11 managed to get himself killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. Other players may call Pat Tillman a hero, but none of them have seen fit to emulate his example (the volunteering part, not getting killed that is).

Then, just when it seemed there was no limit to how far a sports team (and the apparel companies who dress them) could go with their mindless military fetishism, the Northwestern University football team came up with the abomination pictured above. Nope, I didn't photoshop that picture, that's a (supposed) Northwestern player wearing a flag-themed uniform splattered with fake blood. Incredibly, that uniform was supposedly worn to help raise funds for the Wounded Warriors project, which is kind of like a cancer charity selling tee-shirts depicting a full blown metastatic tumor.

Just as disgusting is that the uniform in question replaced the players' names with the words representing seven supposed "core values," to include: courage, duty, integrity, honor, country, service and commitment. None of which, I might add, have anything whatsoever to do with the disgusting and hypocritical world of big time college football.

In fact, it's gotten to the point where when I see any one of those seven terms used in the media, or other words such as "freedom" or "liberty" I automatically assume they are being used perversely in a way diametrically opposed to their true meaning. This is what happens when an empire teeters on the brink of collapse. Instead of recognizing what's really happening and trying to stave off catastrophe, the vast majority of its denizens shut their eyes and wave their flags harder and harder as if the resulting breeze will somehow cast away the boogeyman at the door.


Bonus: "I don't need your war machines...I don't need your ghetto scenes"

The Most Ironic Nobel Peace Prize Yet?

Remember back in 2009 when Obama was awarded his "Affirmative Action Nobel Peace Prize" in the hopes that he would reduce America's warlike belligerance around the world, only to have President Hopey-Changey wipe his ass on the medal before ordering the Afghanistan surge and stepping up drone missile bombings of innocent civilians? Well, that hideously misguided decision looks like the paragon of wisdom next to this year's choice:

The European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a choice that celebrates Europe’s post-World War II economic and political integration but comes as the 27-nation body confronts widespread criticism over its handling of a massive debt crisis that is by far the biggest challenge of its existence.

The award honored the struggle in Europe to not only hold the union together in the wake of the debt crisis, but also to deepen integration across a vast swath of the region stretching from the isles of Greece to the Scottish Highlands, from the ports of Portugal to northern Finland.

To say this was a less than popular move is a bit of an understatement:

The choice elicited audible gasps from a roomful of journalists who attended the announcement in Oslo. The union has been accused of being slow and overly bureaucratic, and of foisting onto its heavily indebted members a crushing austerity that has crippled domestic economies and sparked social unrest in nations such as Greece and Spain.

“Twenty years ago, this prize would have been sycophantic, but maybe more justified. Today it is downright out of touch,” said Martin Callanan, a Conservative British politician and chairman of the European Conservative and Reformists Party in the European Parliament. “The E.U.’s policies have exacerbated the fallout of the financial crisis and led to social unrest that we haven’t seen for a generation.”

The peace prize decision fed into complaints that the Norwegian Nobel Committee increasingly has strayed from the award’s original ideals — including when it honored President Obama in 2009, just months after he took office. Some critics said the prize is venturing deeper into the realm of political theater.

“It’s just laughable,” Svetlana Gannushkina, a longtime Russian human rights activist whom Norwegian parliamentarians said they had nominated for the award, told Interfax. “The award has been depersonalized to such an extent . . . The Nobel Committee could have defended the principles of peace and democracy if it had awarded the prize to those who have worked in this sphere for many years and now need support.”

The blockheads really don't get it, do they. Europe in 2012 is poised about where it was in around 1932 or so. The economies of many of its member nations are in free fall, the political "leadership" is weak and divided and ugly nationalism and xenophobia are starting starting to rear their ugly heads again.

If what the global economy is experiencing were just a run-of-the-mill post World War Two recession, one could maybe shrug what's happening in Europe off as being of no long term consequence. But it's not. Not only is the global economy on the precipice of a major economic catastrophe, but Europe is particularly fucked because what oil reserves it does possess are rapidly depleting and will likely run out completely within the next couple of decades just as the Export Land Model (rising demand combined with falling production in oil exporting nations) makes oil virtually unavailable on the world markets. Combine that with a population that is largely accustomed to living a middle class lifestyle with a generous social safety net and you have the recipe for a continent-wide conflagration that could well dwarf even World War Two in its destructiveness.

My prediction is that 100 years from now historians, assuming there still are any, will be able to only shake their heads in wonder and disbelief that the Nobel committee awarded its 2012 Peace Prize to the very entity which was just about to fly apart and experience perhaps the mother of all resource wars.


Bonus: "I put my trust in you..."

They Should Have Died Before They Got Old

image: "Old man wasteland...it's only old man wastelaaaaaaaand!"

The Rolling Stones are seriously contemplating going out on tour again next year to celebrate their 50th anniversary as a band. I’ll pause for a moment and let the sheer horror of that last sentence sink in. Yes, you heard it right. A bunch of wrinkled up septuagenarians whose lead singer is going to squeeze his tired old bones into skin tight pants and try to prance around like he still has the sex appeal he lost back during the Reagan administration, are going to take the stage once more to bleat out “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” “Start Me Up,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Sympathy for the Devil” and a bunch of other once-risqué tunes that if the audience wasn’t freebasing on simplistic nostalgia ought to induce little more than uncontrollable giggling spasms. I mean, if your grandpa started mumbling the sexually charged lyrics to an old Stones song, you’d be sure to keep a close eye on him whenever the grandkids are around.

In fairness to Mick, Keith and Charlie, they are far from being the only rockers who have failed to recognize that they are now decades past their sell by dates and need to just go the fuck away already. Pete Townshend, for example, really should have taken his own advice and followed band mate Keith Moon’s example of dying before he could get old and become a creepy surfer of child pornography websites. Did you happen catch The Who’s pathetic Super Bowl halftime appearance a few years ago? The camera had to cut away from lead singer Roger Daltrey right before the famous scream at the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” so it wouldn’t be so painfully obvious that one of the greatest frontmen in rock and roll history was lip synching so he wouldn’t hurt himself from the effort.

Speaking of which, if you are a rock legend and you find yourself agreeing to play the Superbowl half time show, please do us all a favor and find someone to do to you what The Chief did to Jack Nicolson’s character at the end of One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest. There should be an automatic condition attached to induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame which stipulates a lifetime ban for any musician who plays the Superbowl. Leave that superficial spectacle celebrating America’s endless addiction to mindless consumption to talentless cretins like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.

In fact, I would be willing to go even further and impose a Logan’s Run rule for all rock stars. You can have all of the fame, fortune, booze, drugs and groupies that you can possibly consume, but on your 40th birthday you have to turn yourself into the authorities for proper disposal before you get the chance to go out and debase your talents on a money grubbing nostalgia tour or have to start playing state fairs in order to make the rent. The same rule would also apply if you ever allow your waistline to expand beyond 40 inches. Honestly, no one but the most pathetic, no life member of the fan club wants to see your fat ass waddling around on stage in black Spandex.

There are just so many ways for aging rock stars to debase their legacy. In the past year alone, Sir Paul McCartney, once half of the greatest songwriting team in rock history, apparently lost his muse to the point where he was reduced to releasing a virtually unlistenable album of old big band standards. Strawberry fields are NOT forever, apparently. On this side of the Atlantic, former Velvet Underground leader Lou Reed made a desperate pitch to remain relevant by teaming up with heavy metal troubadours Metallica—and merely managed to prove that both acts really ought to just go fishing or something. And then there was the frightening spectacle of Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler doing time in the literal sense as an American Idol judge. C’mon, Steven, did all of the many millions you earned during your long career really end up going right up your nose? Apparently so.

In a way, the sad fate of so many old rock stars kind of mirrors that of America as a country. It must be admitted that we were pretty hot shit right after World War Two, with our undamaged “arsenal of freedom,” our rapidly expanding suburbs and our exploding middle class. As a nation we were young, we were HOT and everybody wanted to BE us. Well, except for those crazy old commies, and they didn’t really count anyway. Flash forward six decades, and now we are the wheezing, overweight Ozzy Osborne, still attempting to scream into the microphone while failing to recognize that we’ve become a big, fat joke with our hollowed out economy, rapidly deteriorating infrastructure and a middle class that is being slowly impoverished by the greed of our predatory elites.

These days, America is on its very own pathetic nostalgia tour, still trying to throw our now flabby weight around the world stage as if any discerning observer can’t tell that as a nation we are desperately out of breath and merely lip synching our lines. Yet the average American still sits like the fans at a Rolling Stones show applauding every note like it is still 1969 and Mick can still bang half-a-dozen groupies in his dressing room without popping copious amounts of Viagra tablets as if they were Mother’s Little Helpers. Someday, this show is going to end and the lights of reality are going to come on, and the Americans in the audience are going to stare in bewilderment at the revelation that the once great nation of their hopes and dreams has actually become a dried out, decrepit old carcass just going through the motions.


Bonus: A classic song from the one guy who has been the exception the old rock stars suck rule

There is No Hope, Only Denial

image: "There is no hope...and you know it now, like I do, don't you? There is no hope for any of us."

There is a memorable scene in the climactic episode of the first season of the otherwise erratic television series, The Walking Dead, in which the last surviving doctor at the Center for Disease Control blurts out to Deputy Sheriff Rick Grimes and his ragtag band of zombie apocalypse survivors, "The world runs on fossil fuels...I mean how stupid is that?" right before the generators at the CDC facility run out of gas, extinguishing forever the last hope that a cure might be found for the plague that has turned humanity into mindless, flesh eating corpses. It's just one scene in the series that has resonance in the real world as we are living in it today. Another is in the second season when God-fearing farmer Herschel Greene has a drunken epiphany and confesses to Grimes that he has lost all hope for the future.

For 16 months now I have been writing this blog and attempting to document what I see as the hopeless predicament faced by our industrialized society and America in particular as we confront the multiple scourges of peak oil, resource depletion, overpopulation, climate change and environmental degradation. One thing you may have noticed if you have been a regular reader of this blog is a distinct lack of proffered solutions to our collective predicament. Quite simply, that is because I do not have any solutions, or at least not any that I believe have any chance of being accepted by enough people to matter. Beyond making adjustments in your own life to ensure that you don't fall between the cracks during this "zombie economy" period in which the lights still come on at night, I am firmly of the belief that there is not a whole lot you, me or any other single individual can do. We are merely passengers on this runaway train, and the engine room is as off limits to us as the dark side of the moon.

The impending end of our modern way of life is unlikely to come tomorrow, next week, next month, next year or even within the next few years, but the long term trends could not be more obvious or unavoidable. And while at this late date it might still be theoretically possible with the remaining reserves of fossil fuels available for mankind to manage a powering down in such a way that avoids a world wide calamity and mass die off, that would assume a collective wisdom and willingness to participate in shared sacrifice that sadly our species just does not seem to possess. As long as there are sociopaths who strive for dominance--and they seem to have taken over a vast majority of the leadership positions in the world today--there is no chance of awakening the mass consciousness before it is too late.

Back in June I made the decision to take a break from blogging and then reduce the number of posts here at the Downward Spiral. My motivation was in part so I could do a little more living and spend a bit less time tied to computer keyboard. That part of the plan has actually worked out fairly well. My other reason for doing so was that I had hoped that reducing my relentless obsession with the future might brighten my outlook a bit. That part hasn't been nearly so successful. Even though my thinking has evolved from those dark days of the fall of 2008, and I no longer see a fast collapse of civilization as being a likely outcome, my hopes that by pulling back a bit I might find reasons to be at least a little bit more optimistic about the eventual endgame have not borne fruit.

The same old question that has been nagging me for the past four years still remains: just how quickly are things going to devolve? Well, if I knew the correct answer, I could probably make enough money to ensure that I would be one of the lucky few around the middle of the 21st century who still manage to die of old age. It would seem, for example, that a U.S. presidential campaign could not possibly become more trivial and devoid of substance than the sham we are going through right now. That would seem to indicate that by 2016, a full eight years after America's economy became irreparably broken, awareness that the old paradigm of economic growth is dead should be widespread enough that the powers that be will be forced to snuff out the remaining facade of representative democracy in order to maintain their control. But then again, four years ago I would have said the same thing about the elections of 2012.

The fact is that no one knows how long we have left before things really start to unravel, and anyone who claims they do is completely full of shit. I've said this before, but author Jim Kunstler was very wise to describe what we are going through as a LONG emergency. Nevertheless, getting back to the main theme of this post, that does NOT mean that I see any possibility of redemption when 99% of the population (the REAL 99%) remain utterly oblivious and in deep denial about what's coming (and even the 1% who do know continually argue and fight amongst themselves as to what can or should be done). Thanks to the desire of our "leaders" to keep the game going as long as possible, we'll likely keep on bumbling along until one day we can't any longer. And that is the most definitive prediction about the future that I am willing to make.


Bonus: "This is what takes us down...This is our extinction event"

A Preview of America's Future as Desired by the Oligarchs

image: street scene, Phnom Penh, Cambodia -- the future is now

On Saturday, Dave Cohen of Decline of the Empire blog posted about a new book called The Betrayal of the American Dream, in which authors Donald Bartlett and James Steele discuss the ongoing destruction of the American middle class. As Cohen rightly points out, what most Americans, raised in a maddeningly insular society in the midst of the post-World War Two economic boom, do not understand is that their very existence as non-elites enjoying any genuine prosperity is an historical anomaly. The fact that the predatory sociopaths who really run the country are in the process of taking back what they feel was "stolen" from them by the New Deal and Great Society programs is not nearly as astonishing as is the ease and speed by which the dumbed down and media benumbed citizenry is allowing them to do it.

So where is it all heading? Well, assuming that enough energy supplies remain to be exploited to allow the elites to maintain control, which given the all out exploitation of the world's remaining energy reserves that is currently going on seems likely to continue for many years yet, I think I know the answer to that question. In my own post from Saturday, I briefly mentioned that I have been reading the book Cambodia's Curse by journalist Joel Brinkley, a recently published history of that unfortunate country. Brinkley spent a couple of years travelling around Cambodia interviewing everyone from top officials to dirt poor farmers and the portrait he draws is both arresting and frightening in its implications. Whereas Brinkley is attempting to tell Cambodia's sad story to the outside world, I chose to see what he has written as a warning of what our own future potentially holds for us.

Because you see, modern Cambodia is actually Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's wet dream. Imagine a nation where the government's only real role in the lives of the citizenry is to provide for the national defense and to build roads and bridges in order to enable commerce. Imagine a country where other than a few select elite government officials like Paul Ryan, every civil servant is paid at most a few dollars a day with no health or retirement benefits whatsoever. Imagine a nation where every natural resource, including vast tracts of lush hardwood forests, is stripped down and illegally sold abroad to line the pockets of its kleptocrat rulers. Imagine, too, a country where workers have zero rights vis-a-vis their employers, who pay them as little as they can possibly get away with. If Ayn Rand were still alive, she would probably be having spontaneous orgasms just thinking about it while conveniently ignoring the fact that Cambodian dictator Prime Minister Hun Sen used to be a dirty rotten communist, though one could argue that Pol Pot was the ultimate real world John Galt.

So how much fun is it to be an ordinary citizen in such a country? Oh loads, as long as you don't mind giving your children a wad of Riel every morning so that they can bribe their teacher so he will agree to actually teach them that day even though he might only have a third grade education himself. Oh, and if your precious snowflake is particularly dense, you can give the teacher another bribe to ensure that she passes her final exams. This method of "education" then continues right on up the line and even into the universities and medical schools, with those who do have the means paying bribes to ensure they eventually earn their diplomas.

Speaking of medical schools, when you get sick or injured and have to go to the hospital, you'll need to pay a bribe to that doctor who bribed his way through school in order to get him to treat you at all. If you don't pay him, you'll be given long expired medications if any at all, and left in a bug infested ward on a straw mat to recover or not more or less on your own.

You could try to complain to the police about the doctor's request for a bribe, but unless you bribe them they won't investigate, and unless you bribe the prosector he won't bring a case and unless you bribe the judge you won't get a ruling in your favor anyway. And then on your way home from court, you might be stopped at a random police roadblock and have to pay another bribe so they will overlook the fact that your left tail light is out or your driving license is expired. Oh, so you say you want to renew that driving license? If so, you'll have to bribe the local government official who is in charge of issuing licenses--doesn't matter if you actually know how to drive or not.

Let's then say you become sick and tired of all this corruption and want to launch a public campaign against it. Great. Just be mindful that when you try to have a public rally to support your cause, some disguised government thug may throw a grenade in the midst of it and then the police will blame you for trying to score political points against the regime by killing and maiming your own supporters.

Yep, Cambodia is true worker's paradise. It's the type of place where your boss, a military officer, can order you to go by motorbike and pick up a rare endangered animal so that it can be illegally transported to China to be eaten. Just don't let that animal accidentally escape, or you'll have to face the wrath of your boss, who might just be so enraged that he will douse you with gasoline and set you on fire, and when you die your wife and child will be left destitute. Surely, you think, that if an employer tried such a thing the press would find out and make a big stink about it, right? Well, they would, except that the newspaper reporter went to the army officer and requested a bribe so that the story would never be published.

This is just a little taste of what it is like to live in a country that has been stripped of most of its resources and where the unaccountable elites feel no obligation to provide any kind of safety net for its citizens. This is exactly the kind of society our own predatory oligarchs are slowly establishing here in America. If you don't believe it, ask yourself how if providing for the less fortunate is an unalterable established political consensus several American public officeholders have within this last year publicly compared the food stamp program to "feeding wild animals?" Even five years ago, such utterances would have been unthinkable in the public arena. That's just one small example of how the public rhetoric, to eventually be followed by public policy, is evolving--or rather devolving--in America these days. Not incidentally, impoverishing the working and middle classes has the added benefit of stretching out the availability of the planet's increasingly scarce resources. That, as any Harvard educated MBA would tell you, is a classic example of a win-win.

The Betrayal of The American Dream is very good way of portraying what is happening in this country, though it really only tells half of the story. The sad fact is that the betrayal would not be happening without the active complicity of so many average Americans. Starting in earnest around 1980, a vast majority of this country's citizenry chose to shut off their brains and turn the "thinking" about America's future over to frauds and charlatans, starting with Ronald Reagan, who promised easy answers while initiating the betrayal. Thirty years later we are now collectively reaping our very just rewards for our failure to recognize who the real enemies are.


Bonus: "I have only committed this mistake...of believing in you, the Americans"

Book Review: Zone One by Colson Whitehead (and a Site Announcement)

"To Kaitlyn, the scourge came from a different population. She aimed at the rabble who nibbled at the edge of her dream: the weak-willed smokers, dead beat dads and welfare cheats, single moms incessantly breeding, the flouters of speed laws and those who had only themselves to blame for their ridiculous credit card debt."

There is just something primal about a great zombie story. Maybe it's because zombies touch the deep fear many of us have of ever being singled out for destruction by a crowd of our fellow citizens, or maybe it's because zombies make the perfect metaphor for our brain dead, out-of-control consumer culture, but it is probably no accident in these paranoid times that the zombie has risen (so to speak) from B-movie status to become a very prominent icon in our popular culture.

That said, and take this as coming from someone who considers himself a bit of a zombie aficionado, most zombie novels (ahem) stink. They are often either self-published and atrociously edited and/or, the hero/protagonist is portrayed as some cartoonish action figure mowing down legions of the undead and ushering his little band of survivors to safety. Left unexplored in such books is a thoughtful examination of what it would be like to actually live in a world overrun with the undead. The one previous novel that explored such territory was Max Brooks's sublime World War Z, which stands as a towering monument among the vast wasteland that is zombie literature.

Well, now we can add a second entry to the list of great zombie novels. Colson Whitehead is probably the most talented writer to ever tackle the genre, and his writing style more resembles someone who produces short fiction for the New Yorker than someone who writes with too much testosterone and not enough (double ahem) brains. Zone One starts off kind of slowly, and much of the action takes place in a series of flashbacks, but it picks up steam and towards the end begins to deliver a series of strong stomach punches to the reader.

The story's protagonist, whose true name is never revealed but who goes by the ironic nickname of Mark Spitz, has been assigned as a sweeper, disposing of straggling numbers of the walking dead from lower Manhattan as part of a project by the newly reborn U.S. government to retake the island and once again make it suitable for habitation by the living. Mark Spitz and his fellow sweepers move methodically from building to building, ousting and dispatching the occasional animated corpse while dealing with their own tormented memories of the Last Night and everything they have lost and have witnessed since then. A constant theme of the novel is whether the survivors should let themselves hope that civilization can really be reborn, or whether they should remain within their hardened psychic shells (suffering from variations of a malady wryly named Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, or PASD) until the war against the undead has truly been won.

As all good zombie stories should, Zone One contains plenty of wry social commentary on the times in which we live, satirizing everything from the militarization of our society to the banality of reality television. The plot, despite the many detours through each main character's personal history, builds to a appropriate and logical climax. My one forewarning is that this is a literary zombie novel, and the style of writing may be a bit off-putting at first (this could also be why it has such a low average customer review rating on Amazon). Overall, Zone One is a very appropriate story that seems distinctively tailored to times in which we live.


Site announcement: I will be out of town starting tomorrow until after Labor Day (September 3rd). There will no posting and there may be long delays in moderating comments (depending on my Internet connectivity) during this time.

Bonus: "All we want to do is eat your brains"

The Hate Lies Waiting

I know that I am a cynical son-of-a-bitch (no, Bill, say it isn’t so!), and very little that I read or hear surprises me anymore. But I’ll admit that this story from the Washington Post about a DC police officer assigned to Michelle Obama’s protection detail actually shocked me:

A D.C. police officer who worked as a motorcycle escort for White House officials and other dignitaries was moved to administrative duty Wednesday after he allegedly was overheard making threatening comments toward Michelle Obama, according to several police officials.

The police department’s Internal Affairs Division is investigating the alleged comments and notified the U.S. Secret Service Wednesday, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to give details of the investigation.

The motorman allegedly made the comments Wednesday morning as several officers from the Special Operations Division discussed threats against the Obamas. It was not immediately clear where the alleged conversation took place or exactly how many officers took part in the conversation.

During that conversation, the officials said, the officer allegedly said he would shoot the First Lady and then used his phone to retrieve a picture of the firearm he said he would use. It was not immediately clear what type of firearm was allegedly shown.

An officer overheard the alleged threat and reported it to a police lieutenant at the Division, who immediately notified superiors, the officials said.

No matter what you may think of Obama, and regular readers know that I personally despise the man for the way he has consolidated and legitimized all of the horrible things that Bush wrought upon America during his eight year reign of error, what this incident portends could not possibly be more disturbing. This was not some unemployed loser ranting and raving to his fellow Klansmen and skinheads in some deep, dark Internet chat room. I don’t know which aspect of this story is more unsettling, that a police officer assigned to protect the first lady was harboring apparently serious thoughts about killing her or that he actually felt he had a receptive audience among his fellow officers and was comfortable enough to openly share those thoughts.

What this story really indicates is that in our public discourse we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of the amount of seething hatred and resentment being harbored by many of our fellow citizens. The Pretty Hate Machine has not only been injecting pure bile into our collective consciousness for the past 30 years, but it has been gradually becoming more blatant in its utter disdain for anyone who is perceived as the “other.” And it’s not just racism, although it along with sexism and homophobia are always the key ingredients in the volatile bile cocktail served up by the malevolent charlatans who pump out the propaganda.

The body politic in America is becoming like a forest undergoing a severe drought, slowly drying out and just waiting for the spark which will set off the inevitable conflagration. All signs in the economy are now pointing towards another market crash, though just how far away that event might be remains unclear. When it happens, and when unemployment begins to skyrocket again as a result, it seems pretty clear that the undercurrents of hatred thrumming just below the surface are likely to explode out into the open and threaten to consume us all.


Bonus: "Listening to some bullet head and that madness that he's saying"

Taking a Break

image: welcome to my nightmare

About a month and a half ago I announced that I was going to reduce the frequency of my posts here at TDS because I was getting burned out. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Since that time, the feelings of burnout have just gotten worse. In the 13 months since I started this blog, I have pretty much said everything that was on my mind when I started it, and nothing substantially new has happened since then. Every day when I peruse my usual news sites, it's like watching the Bill Murray flick, Groundhog Day: a slowly unfolding downward grind with the powers that be playing all the games they can to keep the facade of business as usual propped up as long as possible. Yadda, yadda Greece...yadda, yadda bailouts...yadda, yadda Obama/Romney/Paul/Gingrich/Cain/Bachmann's gonna save us...yadda, yaddda lies damn lies and government statistics,...yadda, yadda The Bernanke...yadda, yadda Vampire Squid...yadda yadda muppets...yadda, yadda austerity...yadda, yadda stimulus...yadda, yadda fuck the hell off already.

How much longer can they keep it up? I don't know the answer to that question, but quite obviously much longer than I can stand to keep writing about it day after grueling goddamn day.

So as you've probably gathered I've decided to take a break from blogging for awhile to see if I can recharge my batteries. I'm not sure right now how long it will be. If something big happens next week, I might even be back then. As always, I appreciate all of the great support my readers have given me these past 13 months. Though my primary motivation in doing the blog was to get a handle on my own thoughts and feelings about our inescapable collective predicament, you are what has really made all of my efforts worthwhile.


Bonus: I've posted this tune before, but this time I'd like to dedicate it to the vast legions of the unaware out there. After all, they piss and moan, but they let the devil in their homes

Nazi Germany’s Example and the Future of America (Part 2)

In the first part of this essay last Friday, I briefly recounted the history of Nazi Germany’s final years and how Hitler’s government managed to stave off collapse well past the point where the world war became a hopeless quest by marshalling all of the resources still available to the nation. The takeaway is that even though the inevitability of eventual collapse may have been as apparent to any rational observer then as it should be in America today, when it comes to extending the status quo for as long as humanly possible, rationality usually finds itself locked out in the cold.

In part two, I would like to examine what life is like for an average citizen living under a regime that is beginning to see its delusions of grandeur crumbling into dust. Once again, we can look to Hitler’s Germany for clues as to what our own future may well hold. Many people with only a superficial grasp of Nazi Germany’s history seem to have the idea that Hitler simply took power, snapped his fingers, and unleashed the Holocaust. The reality, however, is far more complex. Though life for Germany’s Jews was certainly precarious once Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, their situation in fact only slowly deteriorated and it was not until 1942—more than two years after World War Two began—that the Final Solution became the official policy of the German government. In fact, by the time Reinhard Heydrich called the Wannsee Conference in January of that year, sealing their fate once and for all, the tide of war was already beginning to turn inexorably against the Nazis.

The lesson here is again fairly simple: governments become more repressive during times of national crisis, and that repression increases as the situation becomes more desperate. Looking back at some of the greatest assaults on individual liberties throughout American history—the Alien and Sedition Acts in the late 1790s, the suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War, the imprisonment of antiwar protestors during World War I, the Palmer raids during the first wave of Red scares, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the McCarthy hearings early in the Cold War, the Kent State shootings when the Vietnam War had become a hopeless quagmire and waterboarding, rendition, and warrantless wiretapping during the “War” on Terror—shows that they all occurred at a time when America was either actively at war or feared it was about to be attacked.

What is even more illustrative than the Holocaust in the case of Nazi Germany is the repression the regime unleashed against many Aryan Germans once defeat became inevitable. The Nazi regime was built on terror, of course, and many communists, labor unionists, Social Democrats and others deemed “undesirable” were rounded up after Hitler’s ascension to power to be beaten and tortured in the first concentration camps. What is less well remembered is that after the regime had successfully placed its boot heel on the necks of the German populace, many of the concentration camp inmates were released, and by the late 1930s, only a relatively small number of Germans were still suffering “indefinite detention.”

The fact is, if you were a non-Nazi “Good German” during this time—law abiding, able bodied, willing to work and not too vociferous in your complaints about the nation’s leadership—the first seven years or so of Hitler’s rule must have seemed like a glorious time to be alive. Even after Hitler launched the war and chronic shortages of nearly every consumer good became endemic, for awhile you could at least take national pride in the seemingly never ending stream of German military successes. In fact, unless you were one of the unlucky souls slogging it out in the brutal combat of the eastern front, it was only after the defeat at Stalingrad and the appearance of American and Royal Air Force bombers overhead with relentless regularity that your quality of life really began to suffer.

The Nazi leadership was not blind to this importance of morale on the home front. Because one of the key memes used by Hitler during his rise to power was the so-called “stab in the back,” when the “traitors” supposedly turned on Kaiser Wilhelm at the end of World War One, the SS’s intelligence service was forever monitoring the mood of the population, determined to stamp out any such “insurrection” before it had a chance to threaten the regime. By 1944, an ill-advised casual joke told about Der Fuhrer overheard by the wrong person could result in its teller being swiftly bundled off to a concentration camp.

Worse still, by early 1945 when the Russian tanks were already closing in on Berlin, fervent Nazis took to the streets and began summarily hanging anyone they considered to be a “defeatist” or a “deserter.” One might view their actions in light of the looming total defeat as insanity, but they did ensure that the German people continued to at least passively accept the regime right up until the very moment when their own city or town was “liberated” by the Allies.

Just as many Nazis refused to accept the approaching reality that their nation had been totally defeated in war, most Americans today refuse to accept that our “way of life” is not only negotiable but in fact completely unsustainable and already unraveling. From this perspective, it is hard not to hear someone spout the idiotic phrase, “Drill, baby, drill” without thinking of how it in spirit resembles the “Horst Wessel Song.”

While it is hyperbolic to say that America is already an authoritarian regime, it is not too difficult to see where the trends of this past decade are heading. As our economic decline continues we can expect that there will be a corresponding increase in the curtailment of individual liberties. The supreme irony is that as growing energy restraints force the Pentagon to begin dismantling its overseas empire of military bases, political repression will likely be increasing here at home.

That doesn’t mean, however, that you should expect to wake up one day and see a squadron of jackboots goose-stepping down your street. When overt repression finally comes to American streets and towns beyond putting down Occupy protests it will more likely be, as we are starting to see already, in the form of electronic monitoring, internal check points and surveillance drones, augmented by a healthy number of informants planted among the citizenry. Don’t be surprised if “hoarding” gets placed on the list of “subversive” activities, which is all the more reason preppers would be well advised to keep their activities as low key as possible.

The most amusing thing about many Americans’ messianic belief in our “exceptionalism” is the idea that this country is somehow different in behavior than any other nation-state or empire in world history despite all of the evidence to the contrary. As the reality of our predicament becomes more and more undeniable in the coming years, we’re about to find out that many of us have merely been “Good Germans” all along and that being so won’t save us from inclusion in the eventual Gotterdammerung.


Bonus: From my You Tube channel - A cool song about domestic spying (yes, really)

Human Moral Weakness and its Consequences

Blogger Ian Welsh put up an interesting post recently about how basic human weakness is what causes so many people to blindly follow their "leaders." The whole thing is worth reading, but here is a snippet that gets the point across:

When we say humans are weak, what we mean is that they tend to do what they’re told to do, and tend to follow the roles and norms of their society and peer group. We’ll explore this by touching on two famous experiments: the Milgram electroshock experiment and the Stanford prison experiment.

In the Milgram experiment subjects were told to administer painful electrical shocks to another person when that person answered a question wrong. Each time an answer was wrong, the amount of the shock was increased. Sixty-three percent went all the way up to a 450 volt shock, continuing after the person being shocked started screaming, begged them to stop and told them they had a heart condition. With variations, the number who would go all the way could be increased to 91% or go as low as 28%. This result has been replicated time and again since the original experiment in 1963, and has been found to be true in multiple cultures

The sixty-three percent compliance rate was a surprise to psychologists when the result was first published, despite the world having recently seen the Nazi death camps. Perhaps this is because death camp guards were under military discipline and could expect harsh punishment for refusing orders. Or perhaps it is because Americans assumed it was a cultural thing: Germans would do it, Soviets would do it, but Americans wouldn’t.

The students in the Milgram experiment were American and faced no consequences for refusing to shock a scream man. Most of them shocked the man anyway.

Americans would. People of every culture would.

Milgram’s subjects almost all felt that shocking the subject was wrong. They did it anyway.

Most people will do something they believe is wrong if told to by a figure in authority.

When I read this, I immediately recalled a rather harrowing video I saw just this past week. Here we see a bunch of North Koreans viciously abusing an effigy of South Korea's president on behalf of a monstrous regime that has been terrifying and subjugating them for more than 60 years:



Many in the west who watch this no doubt smugly look down their nose at the "barbarous" North Koreans, confident that such a thing could never happen where they live. I would argue, however, that the only difference between the North Koreans and us westerners is the level of propaganda they have been subjected to during their lives. A scary thought for a society in which the level of propaganda slowly increases with every passing year.


Bonus: "This is for all of the weak people in the audience...is there anyone here who is weak?"

Nazi Germany’s Example and the Future of America (Part 1)

I’ve always been an avid history buff, with a particular fascination for the peculiar and tragic trajectory of Germany during the years 1919-1945. Part of it has to do with my German heritage, but there’s also a voyeuristic aspect to it—I mean, how can one’s attention NOT be drawn to the spectacle of history’s greatest national train wreck?

Despite my obsession with all things National Socialist, however, I usually try to avoid making Nazi Germany analogies when writing about current events. It’s been my experience that most people who make such comparisons have no more than a superficial understanding of Adolf Hitler and his movement, and throwing out the charge that someone you disagree with is a Nazi is the quickest way to shut down any reasoned debate. For example, no American leader that has appeared on the scene as yet (no, not even George W. Bush) has earned being mentioned in the same breath with Hitler, and those who engage in such frivolous name calling never seem to notice that a modern day Gestapo doesn’t then immediately break down their door and haul them off to a concentration camp, as WOULD likely happen if we really were experiencing the second coming of the Third Reich.

Nevertheless, there actually are some parallels that can be usefully examined between Hitler’s twelve year reign and what is happening in America today. First and foremost is the prevailing attitude of “exceptionalism” that exists among the respective ruling classes of each country. The Germans of the 1930s really believed that Germany’s destiny was to rule most of Europe if not the world, and in their hubris they failed to recognize that however much the Nazi regime was able through extensive propaganda and intimidation to stifle dissent and get the vast majority of the population working towards that goal, Germany’s geopolitical situation—particularly the fact that a lion’s share of the world’s known oil reserves at the time were controlled by its two biggest potential enemies—was in fact going to make such a conquest impossible.

America today, of course, faces a much subtler but no less limiting reality—that the worldwide production of oil and other resources needed to continue growing our mammoth-sized economy and hence maintain our global military hegemony is peaking and soon to go into irreversible decline. Just as the Germans stubbornly refused to acknowledge that the combined economic and military might of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. was going to be impossible for their nation to defeat in a global conflict, America’s “leaders” today are just as determined that maintaining a military presence on every continent and in every ocean is not a policy subject to natural limits.

Though obviously much shorter lived, the German empire built by the Nazis followed a trajectory very similar to our own. Germany in the 1930s went through a period of rapid expansion not all that dissimilar to how America aggressively conquered a continent and then began expanding its reach overseas. The amount of physical territory acquired by Germany didn’t actually peak until 1942, at the time of its greatest advance on the eastern front but well beyond the point where its battlefield successes were going to be sustainable in the long run. Likewise, America’s “Operation Barbarossa” moment came in the wake of 9/11 when the Bush administration decided to double down on America’s planetary hegemony by launching two wars of choice in the Middle East while simultaneously expanding both our military presence around the globe and the national security state here at home. Ten years later, the national debt has nearly tripled in size and we have already passed the point where our “successes” at expanding the reach of the empire during the War on Terror will be sustainable in the long run.

For purposes of this discussion, however, it is far more telling to examine what happened in Germany once it should have become obvious to even the most thickheaded Nazi that the country was dangerously overextended and a day of reckoning was rapidly approaching. By early 1943, Stalingrad had been recaptured by the Soviets, all but sealing the eventual fate of the German armies on the eastern front. U.S. and British planes were making frequent appearances in the skies above German cities, wreaking havoc with their bombing raids. Later during that same year, allied armies also invaded Italy, causing the government of Germany’s most important European ally to collapse. Any realistic analysis of the military situation at that point would have concluded that Germany’s prospects of winning the war were hopeless and the Nazi regime was doomed despite the fact that the country still controlled a vast amount of territory.

And yet, under new Armaments Minister Albert Speer the years 1943 and 1944 were the most productive for Germany in terms of producing munitions for the war effort, despite the frequent air raids that battered the factories and killed and maimed many of those who worked in them. How did the Germans accomplish this? Resorting to slave labor was part of the answer, but more importantly, despite its increasingly hopeless situation the Nazi government was able to marshal all the nation’s remaining resources into preventing collapse for as long as it could possibly be prevented.

The lesson for those of us in the reality based community who are reading the many indicators pointing towards a future collapse of the United States is quite apparent: governments that find themselves backed into a corner are capable of putting forth extraordinary efforts in attempting to stave off the inevitable. There has been a lot of speculation that one day the whole system is just going to lock up—gas stations will run dry, the supermarket shelves will be quickly emptied and the electrical grid will stop functioning—causing mass panic, especially in the cities. The experience of the Germans who lived through the Nazi period shows that such an overnight unraveling is extremely unlikely and that a government that still has resources available to it will use those resources to prevent a fast collapse at all costs, even if the effort merely prolongs the agony.

Make no mistake—it might be the Nazi Germany equivalent of early 1943 in America today, but on the whole our country still has a tremendous amount of resources available to it. Even if foreign supplies of oil were cut off completely, there would be enough domestic production (to say nothing of Canadian production) to support a functioning government. The nation is also still blessed with a huge amount of agricultural land, meaning that mass starvation is unlikely so long as the government can ensure that enough of the remaining oil supplies are dedicated to food production.

Obviously, such a scenario would require a greatly reduced standard of living on the part of the average American, something we would not expect to happen without considerable domestic unrest. How the American government is likely to react to that eventuality and deal with a discontented population will be the subject of part two of this essay to be published on Monday.


Bonus: From my You Tube Channel - "Don't want to live vicariously...in a virtual reality...shopping malls and prison walls all look the same to me"

Collapse Is All Around Us

My Blogger colleague over at The Hipcrime Vocab wrote an outstanding piece back on April 29th called, "What If A Collapse Happened And Nobody Noticed?" basically asserting that those in the reality based community who have been patiently waiting around for the collapse to begin should instead just take a good look around them. The whole post is fairly lengthy and well worth reading in its entirety, but concludes thusly:

People often wonder if the Romans knew at the time that their society was collapsing. Even if some intelligent and literate Romans did recognize it, could they have done anything about it? We who know better at least know that we are on our own to deal with this. You know the truth. You don't have to flee to a bunker, and you don't have to die off either (of course we all will someday, but that's a different story...). Don't wait for politicians to tell you the truth about austerity, because they never will. You can see that this engineered collapse is exactly what we've been fearing all this time. No reason to fear the collapse-look around, you're already living though it even as you read these words, and you're presumably still here. Take a deep breath. Relax. Have a beer. Listen to some music. No Zombies Required.

It's a point I've been trying to make around here, but don't think I have ever expressed nearly as well in a single post. It also got me motivated to get off my behind and do something I've been meaning to do for awhile now. Namely, go and document the evidence of collapse that lies right outside my own doorstep.

But first, a little background. I live in Fairfax County, Virginia, a well-to-do suburban burg that lies just west of the Capital Beltway outside Washington, DC. Fairfax County has long sat near the top of the list of wealthiest counties in the country on a per capita income basis. Thanks to the close proximity of the federal government, to say nothing of being the headquarters for a galaxy of Beltway Bandit government contract companies, unemployment around here has remained well below the national average all through the Great Recession, and home values didn't take nearly the hit locally that they have elsewhere. If one is living around here and is particularly numbed by the desensitizing effects of the Hologram, one might actually be forgiven for not recognizing that there is anything unusually bad going on with the economy right now.

Yet the little signs of economic collapse ARE there. All you have to do is open your eyes to them. For instance, one would think a jurisdiction as wealthy as Fairfax County would have little trouble keeping its roadways and public spaces in good order, but one would be wrong about that. Since 2008, the overall condition of the streets and roads around here has deteriorated considerably. More dramatically, the county apparently no longer has the money to keep the medians well mowed. I've lived here for 20 years, and prior to four years ago the grassy center strips were always immaculately kept, maintaining an appearance befitting a large upper middle class enclave.

To show you what I mean, this past weekend I left my house and walked exactly one block out of my subdivision and onto the main roadway that passes by our community. The following series of pictures documents what I see everyday whenever I leave to go anywhere:

What you are looking at in the photograph above is waist high weeds that have been allowed to grow completely unkempt on the roadway median. And this is not some rural highway, but basically a four lane divided street running through the middle of a residential neighborhood. Note the two houses visible on the left. Those are two brand new, hideously ugly McMansions that have been built just in the last year--the second of which is still under construction. My guess is that each of them probably cost around three quarters of a million dollars despite being placed on quarter acre lots right on the main roadway. What you see in the picture is not an aberration, but is instead typical of how similar roadways now appear all over Fairfax County.

For this second shot, I merely turned around and faced the other way. Here you can see the deplorable condition of the street surface, in which the county has now taken to literally putting patches on top of patches. This street has not been resurfaced in a at least 10 years, and this is what is happening as a result. It also is not an aberration. Although there is still street resurfacing going on in Fairfax County, these days it isn't happening nearly fast enough to keep up with the widespread deterioration of the roadways.

This last shot gives some perspective as to just how high the weeds on the median really are...basically up to above the hood level of the car passing on the opposite side of the roadway. This problem is so bad that there are actually intersections where you have to be careful when making a left hand turn because you can't easily see the oncoming traffic. That's not to say the county won't have this mess mowed at some point this year. Last summer, I think they actually did it twice when the weeds got really bad, and each time left huge mounds of clippings strewn everywhere afterwards.

Again, prior to 2008, you never saw any of this. The medians were mowed probably about as regularly as most people mow their own front lawns. I should also again emphasize that this is happening in a community that has a huge tax base and a very high property tax rate. I can only imagining what is happening in the less affluent areas of the country.

So there you have it...evidence of collapse documented with about ten minutes worth of effort on my part. It took more than twice that amount of time for me to write this post. I will bet that everyone who reads this will upon reflection now notice similar examples where they are. For it should be pretty obvious by now that collapse is not some distant future event, but something that is already happening all around us, every single day.


Bonus: "Crazy guy with a matted beard standing on the corner...shouting out 'End Times Are Here!' but nobody notices...but I can hear him loud and clear"

Happy Birthday TDS!

Well, it is hard to believe, but as of today it has already been a full year since I activated The Downward Spiral Blog. It is even harder to believe that in the past year I have written nearly 900 blog posts that have been viewed more than 450,000 times. In April alone, TDS's page view count soared to over 87,000, a new monthly record that beat March's previous monthly high by around 17,000. I guess I've managed to really strike a chord with my faithful readers.

The only downside is that the heavy blogging load has been kind of wearing me out lately (especially since I do still have my day job, damnit). Since last November or so, I've settled into a pattern where I've done one longer post each morning on a topic that really put a bee in my bonnet, followed up by two to three additional shorter posts on other relevant articles. In trying to keep up with the torrid pace I was setting, I have upon reflection been less than satisfied with a few of my recent ramblings.

To remedy this problem, I've decided to cut back a bit on writing longer posts in which I do much of the talking. From here on out I plan to compose the more in depth pieces as the mood strikes me rather than because I feel I HAVE to put something fresh up every day. Heck, it might even give me time to do some real research once in awhile. But don't worry, I still intend to do daily posts on relevant news stories, especially those from local media sources that don't necessarily get a lot of coverage on other economic blogs. The media in general does a very poor job of making any links between such related stories, and I like to think that is where TDS really provides a valuable service.

As always, my most heartfelt thanks goes out to you, my regular readers. You are what makes this effort so worthwhile.

Cheers!

Bill


Bonus: "Happy Birthday to me and to you"

March Blogging Statistics: TDS Surges To A New Monthly Record

Just like the stock market, you can't keep the page view value of The Downward Spiral Blog down for long. After a minor dip in February, TDS surged to over 70,000 page views during March, topping January's all time record by more than 10,000. It was a fitting example of growth during a month in which the iconic DC area cherry blossoms bloomed two weeks earlier than they ever have before. Once again I am gratified and humbled that so many people choose to patronize TDS and help make it a success.

One development of note during March was that the blog became a place for former employees of two companies that experienced mass layoffs to comment about their situation. In the case of the post about Connexion Technologies in North Carolina, in fact, the comment section became like a message board. My heart goes out to those who lost their jobs in that instance from gross mismanagement if not actual malfeasance, and am glad I was albe to provide an outlet for your frustrations.

Also, as a reminder, the book version of TDS is available in print-on-demand form at the link right below the page view counter. I don't take donations for the blog because I really don't need the money, but if you want to show your support by more than just reading the site regularly buying a copy would be a great way to do it.

Cheers!


Bonus: One of my favorite songs from the past few years - "The Twist" by Frightened Rabbit

My Top 10 End of The World Novels List Is Now On TopTenz.net

It has been a long time since I actually got paid to write something. A decade ago I was an aspiring mystery writer who actually had a contract with a small publisher for a private eye novel I wrote. During that period, I also managed to sell a short story to a dead tree mystery magazine (now long defunct) and had a short lived regular column about assassinations for the same magazine. When the publisher went out of business before my novel came out, I became frustrated and didn't take up writing as a hobby regularly again until I started this gig.

So I was quite pleased when the website TopTez.net picked up my submission of an article I did for them consolidating the End of the World novels list I posted here at TDS last June. And the best part is, they actually PAID me.

So in case you're interested some tips concerning quality apocalyptic fiction to pass the time while we wait for things to wind down in meat space, here's the link to the article:

Top 10 End of the World Novels

Enjoy!


Bonus: But of course

Niall Ferguson Warns Of Possible Collapse--And Gets It All Wrong

With this post I very much realize that I am boxing FAR above my weight class. I mean, who am I really to tell an esteemed Harvard History Professor that he is unfortunately full of shit? After all, I'm just a lonely blogger sitting on the couch in my basement shaking my fist in impotent anger at all of the injustice in the world. Hell, I only minored in history, and I've never earned a sheepskin more prestigious than a BA. So what do I know?

Okay, enough disclaimers, lets get started. The aforementioned esteemed Professor Ferguson wrote a recent essay entitled, "Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall?" Sounds like it would be right up my alley, doesn't it? Well, here is how it starts off:

As a freshman historian at Oxford back in 1982, I was required to read Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ever since that first encounter with the greatest of all historians, I have pondered the question whether or not the modern West could succumb to degenerative tendencies similar to the ones described so vividly by Gibbon. My most recent book, Civilization: The West and the Rest attempts an answer to that question.

The good news is that I do not believe that Western civilization is in some kind of gradual, inexorable decline. In my view, civilizations do not rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History is not one smooth, parabolic curve after another. The bad news is that its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.

To see what I mean, pay a visit to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. In 1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from the heights of the Peruvian Andes. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses, gunpowder, and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. Today tourists gawp at the ruins that remain.

The notion that civilizations do not decline but collapse inspired the anthropologist Jared Diamond's 2005 book, Collapse. But Diamond focused, fashionably, on man-made environmental disasters as the causes of collapse. As a historian, I take a broader view. My point is that when you look back on the history of past civilizations, a striking feature is the speed with which most of them collapsed, regardless of the cause.

The Roman Empire did not decline and fall over a millennium, as Gibbon's monumental work seemed to suggest. It collapsed within a few decades in the early fifth century, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders and internal divisions. In the space of a generation, the vast imperial metropolis of Rome fell into disrepair, the aqueducts broken, the splendid marketplaces deserted. The Ming dynasty's rule in China also fell apart with extraordinary speed in the mid–17th century, succumbing to internal strife and external invasion. Again, the transition from equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade.

A more recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, if you still doubt that collapse comes suddenly, just think of how the postcolonial dictatorships of North Africa and the Middle East imploded this year. Twelve months ago, Messrs. Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi seemed secure in their gaudy palaces. Here yesterday, gone today.

What all these collapsed powers have in common is that the complex social systems that underpinned them suddenly ceased to function. One minute rulers had legitimacy in the eyes of their people; the next they did not. This process is a familiar one to students of financial markets. Even as I write, it is far from clear that the European Monetary Union can be salvaged from the dramatic collapse of confidence in the fiscal policies of its peripheral member states. In the realm of power, as in the domain of the bond vigilantes, you are fine until you are not fine—and when you're not fine, you are suddenly in a terrifying death spiral.

Right off the bat, Ferguson shows that despite having studied history his whole career, he really has very little understanding of it. I'm sorry, but I just don't see how someone with a lick of common sense can possibly believe that absent a cataclysmic natural (or in the case of the Incas, man made) disaster, societies do not rot from within for many years before some momentous event finally pushes them over the brink and into a rapid collapse.

Take Rome, for example, since Ferguson does. It expanded over many centuries from a mere city-state to an colossal empire spanning from the British Isles to Mesopotamia. Around the time of Emperor Hadrian in the first half of the second century A.D., the Romans came to realize that they had reached a point of diminishing returns where conquering new territory would not result in an expanded resource base sufficient to pay the price of conquest. At that point, Hadrian's Walls were built, effectively marking the end of Roman expansion. Not coincidentally, less than half a century later after the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the quality of Roman leadership began an inexorable decline. As the far more lucid historian, Adrian Goldsworthy, points out in his excellent book, How Rome Fell, from early in the third century onward Rome was plagued by a never ending series of civil wars, and more Roman soldiers were actually killed by other Roman soldiers during this tumultuous period than by all of the Empire's foreign enemies combined.

Or take the example of the Soviet Union. The senior Soviet leadership was well aware, even if it would never have publicly admitted it, that their empire's economy was utterly failing and had been for a long time. Mikhail Gorbachev was allowed by his senior comrades to enact Peristroika in a desperate attempt to save the system. The ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union only appeared sudden to clueless westerners like Ferguson who completely misread the obvious warning signs.

And as for Mubarak, Ghadaffi and Ben Ali, it could not be more apparent in hindsight that their regimes had ossified during their many years in power. I seriously doubt that any one of those three could have been toppled so easily 15 or 20 years ago. It takes many years of a dictator abusing a population to create a condition ripe for revolt. In the cases of Tunisia and Egypt, at least, those who rose against the leadership were aided and abetted by rapidly rising food and energy prices, which had fueled great popular resentment against two utterly corrupt regimes.

Moving on, here is what Ferguson has to say about how the West achieved its global dominance:

The West first surged ahead of the Rest after about 1500 thanks to a series of institutional innovations that (to entice younger readers) I call the "killer applications":

1.Competition. Europe was politically fragmented into multiple monarchies and republics, which were in turn internally divided into competing corporate entities, among them the ancestors of modern business corporations.

2.The Scientific Revolution. All the major 17th-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology happened in Western Europe.

3.The Rule of Law and Representative Government. An optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on private-property rights and the representation of property owners in elected legislatures.

4.Modern Medicine. Nearly all the major 19th- and 20th-century breakthroughs in health care were made by Western Europeans and North Americans.

5.The Consumer Society. The Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better, and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments.

6.The Work Ethic. Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.

For hundreds of years, these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia. They are the best explanation for what economic historians call "the great divergence": the astonishing gap that arose between Western standards of living and those in the rest of the world. In 1500 the average Chinese was richer than the average North American. By the late 1970s the American was more than 20 times richer than the Chinese.

Westerners not only grew richer than "Resterners." They grew taller, healthier, and longer-lived. They also grew more powerful. By the early 20th century, just a dozen Western empires—including the United States—controlled 58 percent of the world's land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy.

Here I won't quibble, as these assertions are very similar to what Historian Paul Kennedy wrote in his classic work, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, a generation ago.

It is in this passage where Ferguson really misses the boat:

Beginning with Japan, however, one non-Western society after another has worked out that these apps can be downloaded and installed in non-Western operating systems. That explains about half the catching up that we have witnessed in our lifetimes, especially since the onset of economic reforms in China in 1978.

I am not one of those people filled with angst at the thought of a world in which the average American is no longer vastly richer than the average Chinese. I welcome the escape of hundreds of millions of Asians from poverty, not to mention the improvements we are seeing in South America and parts of Africa. But there is a second, more insidious cause of the "great reconvergence," which I do deplore—and that is the tendency of Western societies to delete their own killer apps.

Who's got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days in the U.S. And you do not have to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian-Americans. The consumer society? 26 of the 30 biggest shopping malls in the world are now in emerging markets, mostly in Asia. Modern medicine? As a share of gross domestic product, the United States spends twice what Japan spends on health care and more than three times what China spends. Yet life expectancy in the U.S. has risen from 70 to 78 in the past 50 years, compared with leaps from 68 to 83 in Japan and from 43 to 73 in China.

The rule of law? For a real eye-opener, take a look at the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) Executive Opinion Survey. On no fewer than 15 of 16 different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection. On every other count, its reputation is shockingly bad. The U.S. ranks 86th in the world for the costs imposed on business by organized crime, 50th for public trust in the ethics of politicians, 42nd for various forms of bribery, and 40th for standards of auditing and financial reporting.

What about science? U.S.-based scientists continue to walk off with plenty of Nobel Prizes each year. But Nobel winners are old men. The future belongs not to them but to today's teenagers. Here is another striking statistic. Every three years the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment tests the educational attainment of 15-year-olds around the world. The latest data on "mathematical literacy" reveal that the gap between the world leaders—the students of Shanghai and Singapore—and their American counterparts is now as big as the gap between U.S. kids and teenagers in Albania and Tunisia.

The late, lamented Steve Jobs convinced Americans that the future would be "Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China." Yet statistics from the World Intellectual Property Organization show that already more patents originate in Japan than in the U.S., that South Korea overtook Germany to take third place in 2005, and that China has just overtaken Germany too.

Finally, there's competition, the original killer app that sent the fragmented West down a completely different path from monolithic imperial China. The WEF has conducted a comprehensive Global Competitiveness survey every year since 1979. Since the current methodology was adopted in 2004, the United States' average competitiveness score has fallen from 5.82 to 5.43, one of the steepest declines among developed economies. China's score, meanwhile, has leapt up from 4.29 to 4.90.

Not only is the U.S. less competitive abroad. Perhaps more disturbing is the decline of meaningful competition at home, as the social mobility of the postwar era has given way to an extraordinary social polarization. You do not have to be an Occupy Wall Street activist to believe that the American super-rich elite—the 1 percent that collects 20 percent of the income—has become dangerously divorced from the rest of society, especially from the underclass at the bottom of the income distribution.

But if we are headed toward collapse, what will it look like? An upsurge in civil unrest and crime, as happened in the 1970s? A loss of faith on the part of investors and a sudden Greek-style leap in government borrowing costs? How about a spike of violence in the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan, as insurgents capitalize on our troop withdrawals? Or a paralyzing cyberattack from the rising Asian superpower we complacently underrate?

Is there anything we can do to prevent such disasters? Social scientist Charles Murray calls for a "civic great awakening"—a return to the original values of the American republic. He has a point. Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just cannot understand why it is running so damn slowly.

What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic.

Then we need to download the updates that are running more successfully in other countries, from Finland to New Zealand, from Denmark to Hong Kong, from Singapore to Sweden. And finally we need to reboot our whole system.

Voters and politicians alike dare not postpone the big reboot. If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may even be tighter than one election cycle.

Notice what is missing in that analysis? Any acknowledgment whatsoever that declining resources are the root cause of the predicament in which America finds itself. Everything above that Ferguson names as "viruses that have crept into our system," are not the CAUSES of America's decline, but are in fact SYMPTOMS of that decline. Confusing cause and effect is a basic intellectual fallacy, and I'm sure Professor Ferguson would brusquely call out any student who ever dared to employ such faulty logic in one of his classes.

The reason that our "software is running so damn slowly," to quote Ferguson's rather ridiculous metaphor, is that the resources, especially cheap petroleum, that are needed to continue growing our economy are gradually becoming more expensive and less available. As a result there is a scramble going on among the many special interest groups, and especially the elites, to grab whatever they can while they still can. They may not know precisely WHY they are feeling compelled to act they way they do, just that their perquisites are under pressure from a system that can no longer afford to provide for everyone in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

The unfortunate thing is that Niall Ferguson's viewpoint is going to carry weight with a lot of people despite the fact that he is completely wrong precisely because he can point to his credentials as a Harvard history professor. The underlying message of a potential collapse is one that needs to be heard, but such analysis that does not take into account the effects of peak oil and resource depletion is in fact worse than useless since it allows people to believe things can be fixed without a dramatic alteration in our suburban, consumerist lifestyles.

Of course, if Ferguson were to tell the truth about America's predicament, that if we don't greatly power down catastrophic collapse is inevitable, he would quickly find himself ostracized in the world of academia and government. So is he as clueless as he appears to be, or does he actually know the truth but is deliberately obfuscating? At this point, given how far down the road towards collapse America is already and the fact that the forces supporting the status quo are far too powerful to be dislodged, it no longer seems like it really matters either way.


Bonus: I'd like to dedicate this song to Harvard Professor of History Niall Ferguson