By James Howard Kunstler - January 7, 2022
What you’re actually seeing in the rhetorical hoo-ha over the January Sixth capitol riot is the main cattle-prod driving mob madness — fear of Covid-19 — losing its power to terrorize the public. The Party-of-Chaos put on a grand opera of lamentation Thursday to celebrate its unity in victim-hood — we wuz so traumatized by the riot! — but in the background, they can see their dearer dream of total vaccination — and total control of the population — fade in the winter mists.
This is the crisis of a managerial class that has lost its ability to manage anything, including all of us. Thus, the hysteria in the blue precincts of America, where they are concentrated. And, as I’ve averred before, the madness probably has its roots in the slow-motion train wreck of our techno-industrial economy. The managerial class can surely sense it and see it coming, but they don’t have a clue what to do about it. So, in desperate need of some signifying ritual, they’re left performing a grand-scale Chinese fire drill like drunken sophomores of yore — a flurry of pointless, attention-seeking activity.
You see, this total vaccination fantasy is meant to compensate for that inability to govern in a time of epic turbulence. It provides an illusion of control. But the obvious insanity of it stands out in the demonstrable facts that the vaccinations don’t work, and that they are racking up an impressive record of harming people. These two facts must be ignored by the vax-happy Blue Team, even as the immunizing and pretty harmless Omicron variant spreads speedily across the land conferring superior natural immunity on those who survive it — which is, functionally, everyone.
The virus looks like it’s on that ol’ exit ramp, but the disintegrating economy will still be with us, and no amount of political degeneracy disguised as virtue will stop it. We still have to manage our lives individually and collectively going through it. It’s going to be a tough slog. The federal government in its current iteration is looking like more of an impediment than a help to any of us. Its current hysterical flounderings send a clear message: You can’t depend on us to do anything right. Instead, select a favorable place to plant your flag, and figure out what you can do locally to rebuild some means of productive activity, fortify basic institutions of law, public safety, and money, and restore credible authority.
You will have to be nimble and resourceful. The Covid lockdowns of the past two years have destroyed many small businesses, but think of that as the tide going out before the blowback of a tsunami that will sweep away the large businesses next. The WalMarts, the automobile industry, the airlines, trucking, Amazon.com, major league sports, the fast-food empires, the oil industry, the mega-banks — all these systems have gone into speed-wobble and most of them will crash hard.
It’s an issue of scale. The broken giants will have to be replaced by lower-scaled systems for producing stuff, moving it, and selling it. That includes food, especially, by the way. How are you going to be part of that where you live? What role can you imagine yourself in? What are you good at? What do you dream of being good at? Can you assemble a social network for yourself? Do you have any ability to look after the public interest? Can you speak coherently? Do you mean what you say? Are you grounded morally in right-and-wrong? Can others depend on you to keep your word? These are the questions that will matter going forward, not whether you were vaccinated, or voted for Mr. Trump, or know the lyrics to God Bless America.
It looks like the disorders of economy and community are heading to center stage as the Covid-19 melodrama closes down. Since human nature is perverse, the current mass formation psychosis may transfer its energy onto new hobgoblins. But the mass of Americans — putting aside blue and red insignia for a moment — might simply be tired of lunacy. They may even begin to show some impatience with those who generate it, for instance the cable TV news channels. Some of the most practiced conveyers of lunacy are heading out the door in the months ahead. Joy Reid of MSNBC is reportedly on her way off-camera (not by choice), and a while back the redoubtably dishonest Rachel Maddow announced her exit for April of this year, probably in anticipation of all her beloved narratives falling apart.
Lunacy is exhausting. Soon enough, even the crazed governments of Euroland and Australia will suddenly drop their lockdowns and vaccination tyrannies as reality presses on the bubbles they occupy. In the face of the Omicron fade-out, they’ll turn 180-degrees and try to pretend that the episode of madness never happened. I doubt they will get away with it. Many politicians in these lands will be bum-rushed from office at the first opportunity.
Even our earnestly malicious Dr. Fauci is back-pedaling furiously, perhaps hearing the bloodhounds of justice yapping out in the gloaming. This week, he finally admitted that half the hospital cases of Covid were actually some other illnesses with the label “Covid” slapped on — in effect, to bribe corrupt hospital managers with big wads of federal subsidy money for using the killer drug remdesivir and intubating hapless Covid victims. Sounds like a racket, a little bit, but then the word racket defines the totality of Dr. Fauci’s career. The decisions he made about banning early treatment of Covid and suppressing information about cheap and effective drugs — in the service of preserving the emergency use authorization and the concomitant liability shield for his deadly “vaccines” — arguably led to the deaths of several hundred thousand people . . .
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