Authored by Jim Kunstler,
“A sane society cannot debate its way out of psychosis. It must diagnose the patient with lethal precision and restore the ancient boundary between the mad and the free.”
- LHGrey on “X”
Back in the days of sailing ships, a certain subtropical zone of the ocean became known as the “horse latitudes.” There, an eerie windless calm prevailed, sometimes for weeks, stalling the progress of ships in mid-crossing. In desperation to save water on-board, captains ordered the horses being transported to America to be cast overboard, and the animals’ bloated carcasses drifted in an ominous cortège of warning to other mariners entering the zone of stillness and death.
This stretch of weeks in late summer has become the horse latitudes of human affairs for American politics. The primaries are mostly over, at least the ones that mattered. Congress has departed the Potomac swamp for the lakes, seashores, and the county fairs out where the corn grows high. The heat in the Arabian Sea must turn the deck of an American aircraft carrier into a giant hot-plate sailors fear to tread. Even the country’s multitude of lawyers turn off their cell-phones and contemplate the blank, watery horizon with heads full of iced brown liquor.
We civilians are stuck between that old rock and a hard place... two political parties whirling around the drain of extinction in a nation seeming to drift toward the edge of the known world.
In the background, a massi
