Election Day of the Apocalypse

It's the most ominous headline ever seen on a plain vanilla Associated Press news article: "Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out Of Control."

A terrifying litany of economic, social, political and environmental collapse, the AP story ties together such horrors as the flooding of the entire U.S. Midwest, the awful failure of the "War On Terror" in Afghanistan and Iraq, the skyrocketing gasoline prices that are literally crippling America in a matter of weeks, the melting of the Earth's polar ice caps, the dramatic sudden failure of our nation's infrastructure, the hundreds of thousands of dead or missing after the Sichuan earthquake and Myanmar cyclone, and the U.S. real estate collapse which has violently stripped away the only real wealth of more than half of all homeowners -- and it's all only getting worse.

Beaten, debt-ridden and baffled by everything, many Americans have been obsessed by this long presidential primary and election season, at least on the Democratic side, where people voted in record numbers for either a return to the relative peace and prosperity of the 1990s, or gamble on someone stained by neither side of the Bush/Clinton regime. But what hellish skeleton of the American Dream will remain when we finally drag ourselves to the polling place on November 4?

Here's a cheery factoid mentioned on the public radio business program Marketplace last week: There are now 9,000 -- nine thousand! -- new home foreclosures every day. That's 270,000 houses per month, more than 3 million when this awful year has finally ended.

Nobody, least of all the greed-crazed bankers who fueled this real-estate fire, has any idea how bad it will get and how many homeowners will be left homeless and penniless by the time this long collapse is complete. But optimistic estimates from early spring (when things were supposedly starting to get better) predicted nearly 7 million homes would be lost to foreclosure by 2010, or more than 8% of all American mortgages.

The real number is too grim to even guess, as the combination of massive job losses and $5 or $6 or $10 per gallon gasoline force people to choose between making payments on an exurb house worth half its mortgage or abandoning it for a hovel within walking distance of the grocery store and its $10 poison tomatoes.

Meanwhile, this nation of debtors is falling behind or forfeiting on all their other loans and revolving accounts. The FDIC and consumer lenders say that a record number of borrowers have stopped paying their home equity, car, college, credit card, construction and small-business debt. According to the Washington Post, the regional banks holding most of this bad paper "are teetering, and a few have already collapsed."

In the chill of November, we'll finally see the effect of these oil prices on the Northeast and Midwest and Great Lakes -- where the choice between surviving the winter and freezing to death will be made only by those who can afford thousands of gallons of heating oil or $500 a month to keep the propane tank filled.

Four months is a long time, even when things are good. Memory is short in this country and attention spans are infantile. Will the record-breaking numbers of the primaries repeat on Election Day, or will the people finally be too beaten down to bother?

Ken Layne is the managing editor of Wonkette.