Ask most people, experts and otherwise about what is happening in the world particularly in the Eurozone and the moribund US and the answer would be an economic or credit malaise.

Real experts would suggest not an economic or fiscal problem but rather a political crisis. As the economic trouble have deepened, the actions of governments to restart commerce have instead made economies wards of the state.

I would rather suggest that the real problems are social, creative and based on a narrative that has literally run out of gas.

What we communicate to each other has disintegrated to a collection of empty buzzwords that are more or less content to contradict each other:

So say all of us! The ‘Great Turnaround’ is right around the corner … right?

Does anyone believe this nonsense, anymore? On what curve are strong export surpluses and significant moves to the upside graded?

The narrative image is a worker in overalls and a baseball cap laboring in a dim and grimy factory pulling a lever on a machine that spews ‘funds’ into a pail. His pail is bigger than other factories’ pails.

Our culture, our narrative is of the heroic worker- innovator who selflessly and single- handedly improves factory output. Think Thomas Edison, Henry Ford or Steven Jobs. Think Andy Warhol’s tinfoil ‘factory’ in Midtown complete with its Dead End Kids’ collection of nutjobs, drug- addict heiresses and superstar wannabes. The hopeful millions (billions) turn their pleading hearts upward to the hero- innovator. Times – and factories – change, but the bigger pail is the constant. In the narrative’s own terms, it is the ‘lifting of the masses out of poverty’. In reality it is the lifting of the innovator out of the fetid bourgeoisie into rarified super- stardom.

The other narrative constant is the narrative itself is a fraud. We’ve imported most of it from Lenin’s Soviet Union. Our narrative creates more poverty than it cures, if only because more billions are created than buckets filled.

Here’s our hero worker, complete with overalls and cap, courtesy of Alexander Rodchenko. The large bucket is just out of view, right around the corner …

More from Rodchenko who gives us factory work with a dose of sex. As is always the case, the pail is just off the edge of the poster, to be had as soon as the cute chick stops yelling and starts innovating.

What is taking place under the surface of the Gulf of Mexico is more of the hero worker narrative. The McGyver- like technicians and engineers (and PR flacks) are innovating and the gusher of oil and gas will soon stop – and we all will (hopefully) share the larger bucket in our gigantic new cars!

The universe popular culture inhabits right now exists mainly on television; the factories change form but they are factories, nevertheless. The outcome, whether it is the jailed and convicted on ‘Law and Order’ or the sublimely mediocre on ‘American Idol’ is an assembly line context where the hero worker adds the needed jumper wire that gains the larger bucket. Because the context is a factory, little more than a slave state, the others are compelled by the heroes’ innovations to work harder.

Few of the participants or observers of this narrative ever win anything or gain a chance. The gusher in the Gulf was caused by innovations that allowed the gusher to be created in the first place. the innovations in turn were required because decades of fuel resource waste with no economic or energy returns allows new fuel only to be found in inaccessible places. The process embodied within the narrative devours the resources necessary for the narrative to develop.

Since the 1900’s – 100 short years – a trillion barrels of oil have been burned. What do we have to show for this besides some terrible TV? The answer is stuffed landfills and a dicey atmosphere. How is this progress?

The markets are oversold because they have been overbought on false promises for decades. Germany’s surplus is the economic consequence of its neighbors’ necessary deficits which Germany conveniently labels as the Eurozone’s problem. The observers of this farce are instead constantly wheedled by suggestions that they are less than fully developed and must by their own labors support the entire enterprise. The great Ponzi- scheme that our narrative has deteriorated into requires constant resource input to simply survive.

In the backwash of crisis, even the factory itself has now fallen out of reach, never mind the pails. How many are going to participate in American Idol? In the National Basketball Association? As television actors? How many will become Thomas Edison: as many as win the lotto. The crumbs – in the form of transfer payments and food stamps – are swept off the banquet table to the desperate masses below, to forestall them from abandoning the narrative and forming putative revolutionary groups: criminal street gangs or militias.

The increasing masses – whe are always suggested to be eager to buy more automobiles/real estate/prescription drugs and thereby increase the size of the funds in the Establishment’s buckets — have become poor. Ponzis work that way: participants provide input until they are tapped out. Ours is a bottom- up narrative crisis. The immediate and future problem is a withering of individual purchasing power.

It’s not hard to find more and more nations and humans camped out at the edge of the pennilessness- abyss. With Ireland, Iceland, Dubai, Somalia, Mexico, Greece, California, Detroit, Spain, Portugal … and others … on the precipice, who goes first? Who pushes whom off the edge?

Finance’s ‘heroes’ are busy looting the remaining productive citizens as fast as possible. That their government enablers are either incompetent or bought and paid for is not particularly relevant to anything contained within the narrative which implies that the (finance) worker is acting toward some form of common good, compelled by an invisible hand. The observable reality is that the well connected remove all the machinery for themselves; holding off the discontented with the invisible fist.

It’s every innovator for himself.

The narrative is bankrupt or it is a fraud. Heros are unmasked, they possess a well- developed sense of self- preservation in times of harm and little else.

After 400 years of industrialization and 100 years of modernity it is not surprising the narrative has become corroded. The narrative can be held up and compared to the actual consequences of industrialization itself. The innovator has the pail’s contents all to himself, his ‘regulators’ are his lackeys, the wider audience for the spectacle is pauperized and the overall result is a widespreading unproductive wasteland of toxic chemicals, pollution and useless and ugly ‘development’. At some point all the pails’ contents are worthless because there is no reasonable context for them. It’s hard to see Warren Buffett or Steve Jobs – or Barton Biggs – ever going broke by themselves, yet when the context falls to pieces what is ‘theirs’ will have no value. The falling to pieces will be the direct outcome of the actions/negligence of the world’s Buffetts’, Biggs’ and Steve Jobs’.

Maybe the narrative isn’t defunct after all. Irony still exists.

After 400 years of industrialization and 100 years of modernity the intertwined promises/demands have not changed. Modernity promises utopia provided it receives the necessary inputs. Within the scope of the narrative, the demand is always ‘one more’!

Prosperity and pails for all are just one more development around the bend. One more coal mine out of primeval forest, one more oil well on the beach, one more watershed ruined, one more bailout, one more subdivision in place of a farm, one more freeway through a park, one more unserviceable debt issuance, one more war to lose, one more country bankrupted, one more asset price bubble to deflate, one more resource squandered … the promise is always for one more after which the promises of industrialization will finally bear fruit.

The narrative of an endless nirvana of carefree consumption and leisure complete with flying cars, waiting just around the corner, all that is required is just one more bit of what remains of the spaceship we are all stranded upon be fed into the furnace.

Currently, so much has already been fed for such little effect that the survivors are reduced to drawing straws to see which can make some kind of claim against what is left. The narrative proves hollow; anyone can look around and see for themselves if they choose to look upon the ruin that modernity leaves behind.

“Better Luck Next Time!” “You too, can be a Winner!” That modern so- called progress has moved out of a grim and nasty shed to the 7- Eleven’s lottery machine is a market indicator determining how far we as a society have stumbled. We are left with scraps of paper and a bucket with a hole in it.