Piet Mondrian ‘Untitled’
It is wonderful to watch the primary mechanism of our culture at work. Even as its driving mechanism is on its way into the sucking vortex of history, the cultural zeitgeist of ironic detachment floats over the entire mess like leaves in the pond circling the drain.
A perfect example is the Stoneleigh World Tour, where the High- Priestess of Deflationary Calamity is on her way to becoming a media celebrity like Suze Ormond.
… or Madonna. Hey! She’s Canadian, she’s cute!
Laugh! Stoneleigh started out writing a blog (that nobody read), then edited at The Oil Drum Canada, then took up residence at The Automatic Earth where she both developed a style and gathered an audience. At least a hundred people outside her immediate family know who she is.
Like so many nascent rock and roll acts before her, she started her touring ‘gig’ in living rooms and basements (with milk and cookies) … she’s at the ‘Fugazi playing in Some Dude’s Basement’ stage of her career.
Next comes organized gigs in real auditoriums with seats and everything.
Next comes the radio interviews, a polished public spiel … how far away can Madison Square Garden be?
Stoneleigh and Dave Matthews Band.
Of course, the deflationary message is flattened into insignificance by the process of her elevation into ‘superstar’ status. Who cares? The ‘story arc’ of Stoneleigh’s meteoric rise requires that she crash and burn anyway. If others crash alongside her the better the story.
Sadly for Stoneleigh, the arc of the story intends the rest of the world to blame everything on her! Stoneleigh is of course blissfully unaware of her fate as designated cultural fall- person but she will have plenty of time to prepare a ‘bug- out villa’ in Singapore or Tuscany in order to escape the enraged mobs of tea-partiers who will blame her for the depression that is inescapable at this point.
What of Stoneleigh’s message?
First of all, she is the most literate and poetic of prognisticators outside of Kunstler who often tries too hard and is best as a polemicist. Deftness rules Stoneleigh which results in Rilke- esque ‘Unbearable Mightiness of Deflation’ and the ‘Infinite Elasticity of Credit’. Really bad news has never been delivered with such grace.
There is much to Stoneleigh’s approach that I agree with. Along with Hyman Minsky we are in the death throes of a Ponzi economy (created to hedge against energy deflation). Credit will collapse as cash flow to service it dries up. Cash will be far more valuable than other kinds of assets which are containers for/proxies of more and more credit. She has the big picture in focus as well as anyone including Your’s Truly!
Where I question Stoneleigh is the identification of our current crisis as a debt rather than an energy crisis. We have been running out of gas since 1999. When it’s gone past a certain level, its gone. We are fast approaching that point. The fact that militaries are making public noises indicates the Peak Oil consequences are just around the corner.
What to do? Stoneleigh is in the best tradition of stock touts such as Robert Prechter and James Grant when she calls for preserving cash and preparing a ‘lifeboat’ for the worst. Better advice cannot be found … up to a point. What comes next is political action and a reorganization of (what’s left) of society. A more useful structure is necessary and its absence is noteworthy. If Stoneleigh can use her nascent celebrity status to lobby for a reality- based politics she might be able to transcend herself as a story- arc character.
After all, in the land of the blind the one- eyed (wo)man is king.
EDIT: Dear readers, I cannot really comment because ‘Windows Parental Control’ won’t allow it! Dratted hotel computer: here I am up here!
Our culture dematerializes those who we hope to reach out to. Think Roger Clemens, Barach Obama, Marilyn Monroe. The nail sticking up gets pounded down, in this way the establishment cuts everyone down to one size … insignificant. It’s the ‘Co- opting Culture’, it gives with one hand while undermining with the other.,
You start with James Madison who describes (human) nature toward different forms of observation toward reasoning toward application toward rationalization to advertising and profits where you wind up with Nathan Rothschild … to Sir Evelyn de Rothschild to Rothschild wannabes and ending up with Groucho Marx and Sarah Palin. The last two are both artists of sorts. Andy Warhol is usually parked at the beginning and the end of the ‘circle of descriptive rationalizations’. Warhol’s descriptions (colored photographs) of his environment are as valid as Palin’s evocation of hers.
Both are equally ‘gay’ too, BTW. See how it’s done? The reduction of complexity into derogatory simplification: wanna watch me do it again?
What can be taken away from all this is the distracting folly of discrediting others’ models by discrediting those who are interchangeable with them. Everyone constantly does it, I do and that’s human nature. We are all as competitive as race- car drivers and don’t care if the other crashes! ‘Ms. Gayness’ Palin can cry all the way to the bank with the $20 million she’s made from her gay- bashing, neo- Nazi ‘disciples’ over the past six months! Good grief! I look better in a pink chiffon dress than she does! I’m also a far better shot. Where’s MY $20 mil?
All the models are valid which are rendered internally consistent; Gell- Mann’s process is the forge of internal linearization or the crafting of a narrative by absorbing components from the outside. The models gain integrity. Blaming the ills of the world on Jews may not be factual or historically accurate – certainly not geologically accurate – but internal consistency of the approach that rationalizes this way cannot be easily argued against. There is always to a mathematical certainty that wherever there is some trouble there is a Jew within a couple of thousand miles. The quid pro quo is as clear as the nose on my face; at the same time, how do you model absurdities? It’s not required when the model is self- reinforcing. The components of absurdities are inwardly rational as laws of science. Scientific method is irrelevant to show business. Both Freeman Dyson’s and James Hanson’s imaginations of climate are superficially coherent, differentiated in ways that are quibbling and hard to quantify but the AGW argument is fatally undermined when Dyson becomes ‘Mr. Climate Change’.
This happens here! Whaddya going to do? Arguing with Dyson now is arguing with science itself. All the deniers’ rigor follows from that point.
How will Peak Oil ever transcend Matt Simmons? Simmons is the ‘Mr. Peak Oil Dude’ that’s all that matters; the issue becomes whether he beats his dog. The next step is for Joe Isuzu to take that dog- beating Matt Simmons’ place. When that happens, peak oil as a concept disintegrates.
Until reality arrives, that is …
Louis Farrakhan called Hitler a ‘Great Man; what did he mean by ‘great’? Did that word mean a great … disaster? Germany’s surrender in May of 1945 spared Berlin or Dresden or Leipzig the atomic bomb. Hitler was a catastrophe to Germany first! Yet, the Germans were ‘under a spell’ and denial and unreality held sway until the end; we Americans are trodding a well- worn path that ends in the same place in spirit if not if form. Yet today, in the New York Times’ Bob Herbert measures the American cultural and gestalt center of the Auto Age as a ‘Dresden Equivalent’:
What you’ll see are endless acres of urban ruin, block after block and mile after mile of empty and rotting office buildings, storefronts, hotels, apartment buildings and private homes. It’s a scene of devastation and disintegration that stuns the mind, a major American city that still is home to 900,0000 people but which looks at times like a cross between postwar Berlin and the ruin of an ancient civilization.
Out heroes are doomed, we murder the thing(s) that we love. It’s a danger to be aware of, right?