Kunstler, on a roll

The foulmouthed Jeremiah of the Hudson River Valley lights into Alan Greenspan, who says in his new memoir that the Iraq war is about oil, and the rest of us'n. Excerpt:

[The housing bubble], of course, represents an insidious psychology. It could only happen in a culture that has come off the rails mentally, so to speak, as ours has in the sense that nobody has any sense of consequence, neither the leaders nor those who affect to follow the leaders. The leading religion in America is not evangelical Christianity, it is the worship of unearned riches, and its golden rule is the belief that is is possible to get something for nothing. Its holy shrines are Las Vegas and Wall Street. (And, by the way, has anybody heard the evangelical Christians complain about Las Vegas? They complain about a lot of things, but are themselves among the greatest believers in unearned riches -- given their preference for prayer over earnest effort in the service of solving life's problems.)

No, the American public, including the cheerleaders in the media, have only themselves to blame for the bitter harvest now underway in the asset and credit markets. And thus it would be a salutary thing for Baby Jeezus, or the forces of nature, or whatever powers guide the universe, to now kick the [expletive] out of them, so to speak, financially, because that is exactly what the American public is full of, from top to bottom, from George W. Bush at his lonely desk on Pennsylvania Avenue to the pitiful, bankrupt householders of Orange County and Boca Raton.

Now, as to the shock of Al's revelation that the Iraq war is about oil -- the media and the public have got this all wrong, too. The logic here seems to be that because the Iraq war is about oil it is therefore unnecessary, optional, a mistake, an indulgence, something we should not dirty our hands in. In fact, the Iraq war is not about oil, per se, so much as it is about America's behavior here at home, about the choices we make for how we live on this continent. None of those who complain most loudly about our military presence in Iraq have advanced any proposals for reforming how we live here -- and hence for our enslavement to oil, much of the world's remaining supply of which happens to be in the neighborhood of Iraq. When these complainers start complaining about the ubiquitous acceptance of suburban sprawl and abject car-dependency -- and this includes the environmental boy scouts out there who want to get merit badges for buying hybrid cars -- then they will deserve to be taken seriously. Until then, the American people have got exactly the grinding war that they deserve.

Patrick Deneen, the tradcon Georgetown prof, generally approves, but dissents a bit:

And, Kunstler is wrong to say that "the American people" have got "exactly the grinding war" we deserve: we don't have a war so much as a very small segment of our population. Our war critics and supporters alike are almost wholly unaffected by this war. Our republic does business as usual while our soldiers do the hard and deadly work of enforcing the non-negotiability of the American way of life.

By the way, my brother-in-law Mike is on his way to Baghdad now, having finished his stateside training. I talked to him last night to say goodbye. He was stoic, saying only, "I'm doing what my country asks of me." So he is. So we have. Men like him are sacrificing, so the rest of us don't have to.