A tragic wishfulness strains to sustain the unsustainable - Kunstler Column

And newspapers are committing suicide-by-irrelevance

You can already see it being baked in the cake. Happy Motoring is so entangled in our national identity that the loss of it is bound to cause a national identity crisis.

SHOOT: He says we're all caught up in the myth that the 'stimulus' will work. It's the opposed of delayed gratification. It's delayed reality, delayed punishment and toil and austerity. What's interesting in this piece also is that Jim writes not only is the motoring era over but highways are in a death spiral. There's not enough money to maintain highways as the car industry collapses.

Kunstler: ... the American Society of Civil Engineers reported several years ago that the condition of many highway bridges and tunnels was at the "D-minus" level, so we had already fallen far behind on a highway system that had simply grown too large to fix...

clipped from kunstler.com Here in the USA, we will mount the most strenuous campaign to keep the motoring system going -- in fact, we're already doing it -- but it will fail just as surely as two (so far) of the "big three" automakers have failed. It will fail because car-making is only one facet of a larger network of systems that is coming undone, namely a revolving debt cheap energy economy.       Americans will never again buy as many new cars as they were able to do before 2008 on the terms that were normal until then: installment loans.  Our credit system is completely broken.  That complex of frauds and swindles coincided with the background force of peak oil, which meant, among other things, that economic growth based on ever-increasing energy resources was over, and along with it ever-increasing credit.  What it boils down to now is that we can't service our debt at any level, personal, corporate, or government -- and that translates into comprehensive societal bankruptcy.