From the always impressive James Howard Kunstler, comes an eloquent synopsis of the misgivings many people have about the presidential election campaign.  No Confidence?

CNN is frantically advertising a set of “live” debates between the presidential candidates this week — Democrats Sunday and Republicans Tuesday, with loads of “color commentary” before and after. This big media show is being staged in New Hampshire, whose once-significant early primary election has been reduced — like so much else in our national life — to merely symbolic status now that fifteen other states have crammed theirs into the super-duper primary day of February 5, 2008. Since I believe that a collective unconscious operates among groups at all levels of the social hierarchy, including the national level, this extraordinarily early staged contest says a lot about how insecure we must be about our leadership, about our place in the world, and about where we are headed.

     US election campaign periods have never been regulated in terms of a set number of weeks or months, the way some other nations do. But the 2008 US election is the first in my lifetime that ramped up to such an intense and formal level of activity so far in advance. If nothing else, the amount of money that the candidates need to raise — and burn through in airplane charters, staff salaries, and staged events — puts them all in jeopardy of corrupting themselves to the various donors desperate to preserve their prerogatives under the status quo.

     What everybody seems to sense semi-consciously is that the status quo is dragging the US into an abyss.

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