Betting on Gray Sludge: What Fun
http://www.unz.com/freed/betting-on-gray-sludge-what-fun/
The economy will continue its slide while the rich, no longer attached to any particular country, will become stupefyingly rich. (Someone recently paid $172 million for a Modigliani). If things go bad in Manhattan, they can easily move to the south of France.
I do not see how civil unrest (it won’t be civil) can fail to arise. Comfortable people, which white Americans still barely are, do not readily clash with others. But comfort dwindles. The young now often have to live with their parents. People with advanced degrees work as baristas at Starbucks. Universities use “adjunct professors,” academic migrant workers, to lower pay and avoid providing benefits. Many companies hire people as “individual contractors,” likewise to avoid paying benefits. Large numbers who want to work are on food stamps and unemployment.
Not parenthetically, I remember being in Italy at breakfast with a tour group. The restaurant had not ordered enough food for the buffet. These sophisticated and civil people began grabbing, reaching over each other, to get the yogurt and doughnuts. Civilization is a veneer, and not a thick one. Nationally, we are running out of doughnuts.
One thing is clear: America is no longer “one nation under God” (who is, I suppose, an undocumented alien) .It is an unhappy land of warring tribes, of peoples who have nothing in common and do not like each other. Blacks, whites, browns, Syrians, Somalis, Southerners, Yankees, Christians, mostly detesting each other. The battle lines are drawn. The question is what kind of battle it will be.
