JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

The scene in the White House these days must be a sort of Opera Bouffe, in which an earnest and rather grave young man moves from one roomful of lesser officials to another in which all agree to pretend that they have prevented the nation from falling into something they call "the abyss." At the end of Act I, a young deputy FDIC commissioner in the Little Mary Sunshine mold gets down on one knee, belts out a show-stopper about the glories of a bright and shining "tomorrow," and the audience goes out for intermission to discover that the city has been burning down around the theater all night.

In my father's house are many mansions. Surely one of them has a room with no elephants in it....

Not to crunch too many metaphors right here at the top, but a consensus seems to be firming up in the animate jello of the Internet that we have entered the Season of the Witch. An odor of ripeness fills the virtual air -- something between dead carp and apples baking. Whatever else appears to be going on in the upper stories and verdigris-tinged turrets of capital finance...the most perplexing part is that there hardly seems any safe place to preserve one's savings.

In our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups of people, and we've paid bitterly for some of that. But now it's our sins against the land itself that threaten to sink the USA as a viable enterprise.

Now that everybody in the USA, from the janitors in their man-caves to the president addressing congress, has declared the "recession" over, is exactly the moment when what's left of the so-called economy is most likely to implode. If there were still shoeshine boys on Wall Street, they'd be starting their own hedge funds now, and CNBC's Larry Kudlow would be toasting them in the Grill Room of The Four Seasons.

One national moment-of-nausea this Labor Day weekend struck Sunday morning, when CNN's John King led off his 10 a.m. State of the Union show with a valentine to ABC's Diane Sawyer, on her becoming anchor of that network's evening news. (This was the most important news of the week???) The old legacy networks have taken on the role of dishing out reassurance to an anxious and insecure public as job number one, and the subtext of the Sawyer lede was that a Mommy figure would soon be in place to soothe the multitudes even as the nation free-falls into bankruptcy and disorder.

My daddy bought Chevrolets in the 1950s, marvelously crazy-looking machines with winged tail-lights that handled like pontoon boats, broke down after 30,000 miles, and were tossed out every couple of years not on account of their mechanical failures so much as their obvious lack of up-to-the-minute styling. The post-war prosperity dazzled his generation with its democratic cornucopian bonanzas. The innocence of all that is truly lost now. There is a dark sense of things shifting out there now in a major way.

I like to think that Mr. Obama really does know what's up -- that "change" means we have to live a lot differently, not mount a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. I suspect that President Obama has learned over the last several weeks that the nation's banking system and economy -- indeed, the whole world's -- are in way worse shape than anyone imagined before January 20.

I've been skeptical of the "stimulus" as sketched out so far, aimed at refurbishing the infrastructure of Happy Motoring. To me, this is the epitome of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable -- since car-dependency is absolutely the last thing we need to shore up and promote.

Mr. Obama's first task taking stage in the lonely Oval Office should be to get right with his own credo of "change," meaning he'll have to persuade the broad American public that the "change" required to salvage this society runs much deeper, colder, and thicker than they'd imagine in their initial transports over hallelujah-Bush-is-Gone. Many of the familiar touchstones of the recent American experience have got to go.

The big theme for 2009 economically will be contraction. The end of the cheap energy era will announce itself as the end of conventional "growth" and the shrinking back of activity, wealth, and populations. ... My hope for the year, at least for my own society, is that we will transition away from being a nation of complacent, distracted, over-fed clowns, to become a purposeful and responsible people willing to put their shoulders to the wheel to get some things done. My motto for the new year: "no more crybabies!"