Posted inPolitics: National

Secession — A good idea this time

The Republic is beset by many distractions: Dick Cheney running madly in the midair of potential war crimes prosecution, a la Wile E Coyote; cowardly Democratic Senators bowing to tales of Osama's boys living on welfare in Oklahoma City, watching for those "green shoots" that mean we can go back to business as usual.

I don't put the Texas secession dustup in that category. We should take it seriously. We should even look on it favorably.

Note that President Obama doesn't seem to dwell on Lincoln any longer — the Lincoln who said that if he failed, he would be the last president of the United States. Obama's judicious mind has persuaded him that the crisis that seemed to engulf the nation last fall was overstated. He has been enveloped in the protective visions of his moneymen, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and, behind them, Bob Rubin. The Obama administration will be Clinton 2.0, without Bill's missteps and with the magnificent oratory — as was done yesterday in the glow of the Constitution — that makes one proud to be an American.

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Posted inUncategorized

The apocalyptics

Readers have asked me what I think of the school of writers The New Yorker has dubbed "the dystopians." There is no shortage of slap-in-the-face reality on this blog, so you can decide whether I am one of them. Chief among them is James Howard Kunstler. Another is the Russian emigre Dmitry Orlov. In the magazine, Ben McGrath writes:

Thomas Malthus first lent rational philosophy to the apocalyptic
inklings of religious prophets with his “Essay on the Principle of
Population,” in 1798, and secular doom booms have tended to coincide
with periods of political upheaval or economic breakdown ever since.
The Malthusian movement has expanded with time into a kind of peaknik
diaspora. Peak oil and peak carbon (i.e., global warming) are the
heaviest. The bank and auto industry bailouts have thrust a new concern
to the front: peak dollars…

Malthus was wrong in his time, of course. Kunstler, on the other hand, has proven remarkably prescient in the here-and-now.

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