As the viscous plumes of petroleum spew forth into the beleaguered waters of the American Gulf, the nation seems poised for a bizarre summer season. In the Northeast, where the seasons still matter, folks are desperately stuffing their fingers into their ears, hoping to just cruise on into the carefree summer Neverland. Meanwhile, Red State America quivers with anti-immigrant rage and teeter-tottering indignation at either BP or the Obama administration, depending on which partisan media outlet is consulted. And bankrupt California, the 8th largest economy in the world? Best not to to discuss that, as the ill-timed Governator struggles to get to budgetary pink, selling off public amenities and historical benchmarks both.

What the hell is going on? Is there even a national political barometer any more? I realize that there is a stark divergence between the conservative Fox-Scape, liberal NPR country, and Uber-Bubba LaLaLand (think Appleby's and the KFC Double-Down), but normally we can at least agree on the political battle terrain.

But right now, the usual "developments" in the socio-political landscape are eerily trepidatious, and the scripted rage from the duopolistic Establishment is unusually halted. Let's consider some recent goings-on:

• Rand Paul, the meteoric son of libertarian stalwart Ron Paul, won a triumphant victory in the Kentucky GOP Senatorial primary. He is the current darling of the Tea Party set, poised to carry the small gub'mint banner into the national spotlight. Unfortunately, some recent uncomfortableness has emerged surrounding his avoidance to publicly outline what the Libertarian agenda would actually mean when enacted in policy, vis-a-vis the Civil Rights statutes currently on the federal books. Should he actually win the Kentucky Senate seat, he will be immediately exposed to the structural difficulties of enacting the Tea Party agenda (see earlier posting on the Tea Party movement ). If elected, he would be subject to the same pro-corporate, big-regulation mandates to which all national politicians are beholden: specifically, he would need to kowtow to the lobbyist culture that actually writes legislation, and he would need to immediately get on the campaign finance gravy-train that supplies the resources for winning reelection. In essence, you can be as radical and outsidersish as you want on the campaign trail, but if there are no fundamental reforms in election finance and its dark twin, corporate funding/lobbying, then there is virtually no chance of actually enacting any divergent policies.
• On a similar note, Sarah Palin is now in the uncomfortable position of having to still support Drill-Baby-Drill talking points, while distancing herself from the actual physical ramifications of said policies. As noted in the last post , one of the main points of the Peak Oil theory is that while the planet does have a lot of oil left, what is actually still there is extremely hard to get at, either because of political instability (the Middle East, or Africa, or diabolically Socialist South America) or physical dauntingness. In technical terms, what we're talking about is EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested). In the old days, you could just stick a drill in the ground, and up would come the bubbling crude. But now, all that "easy oil" is for the most part gone. What we're left with, as perfectly illustrated by the Gulf situation, is having to drill more than mile through the ocean, and then another three miles into the earth's crust, just to get at the glorious black goo. This is not a good hook on which to hang a political energy policy.
• President Obama is now hosed. For the first time in 10 months, he held a press conference yesterday. Ever the policy-wonk nerdlinger, he came off as professorial, detached, and cautious. Conservatives, of course, are scrambling to hang the oil gusher around his neck as his Katrina, with the fortuitous happenstance that it is in the same exact fucking part of the country (if I was a religious man, I would ask: "What did Louisiana do to piss off God so much?" -- I am, of course, not a religious man). More balanced types will note that he inherited a cozy oil-regulatory structure form Dubya, and that the federal government actually does not possess the physical equipment necessary to plug the leak. But the bottom line is that the the American people want to hear from Obama that he is taking charge, kicking-ass, doing everything possible, and holding BP responsible. Easier said than done. As noted above, we're talking about about more than a mile below the surface of the accruing, and the "Top Kill" shot of heavy mud has never been tried in the depths of the Gulf spill. In a very real sense, we are intellectually mind-f'ed by the fact that we have a live web-cam on the leak, but we actually can't get the physical equipment down there to do the job. After all, in the popular mindset, if we can see what's going on, why the fuck can't we fix it? Not a good time for Obama, for BP, or for the future of oil in general.

Those are my thoughts for today. As these glamorous, media-attractive events unfold in the foreground, the entropic, destructive background noise continues to burble away like a crouching time-bomb, waiting to lay waste to the remnants of American consumer capitalism. Full-measure unemployment, when taking into account the under-employed and the ridiculously-imprisoned continues its upward tick. Home foreclosures will continue to pile up, with a lot of teaser mortgages coming home to roost this summer. State and local budgets will continue to crater, with tax bases melting away into the New Economy ether.

We're definitely poised for an explosive couple of election cycles. Illegal (and legal) immigrants are about to get the shit kicked out of them, at least verbally -- although I doubt that the business-owning, Chamber of Commerce Republicans will allow the Tea Party set to upset their pool of cheap day-laborers. And be prepared for a new onslaught against those horribly-socialist programs, Social Security and Medicare (although we'll still have plenty of borrowed Chinese money to fund our numerous wars and the expensive, multi-state weapons programs that even the Pentagon says it doesn't need).

So strap yourselves in, Americans. We may have nothing to show from this summer except some suspicously-blotchy moles and an awesome war between the two Koreas. Oh yeah, and possibly an ink-black South, free of pesky beachgoers and wildlife.