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kimberlysteele
The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047 was published in 2016 and is a scathing satire of current events. The Mandibles is about one extended family's journey through the collapse of the American petrodollar and how they adjust (or do not manage to adjust) to reduced living circumstances. Various family members in the Mandible clan are counting on inherited wealth via the death of their old grandpa when the rug is pulled out from underneath the American economy in the fateful year 2029, 100 years later than the Great Crash of 1929 that set off the Great Depression. The dollar, now worthless, is replaced by a currency called the bancor from which Americans are vengefully excluded. Inflation and money printing leads regular Americans down the garden path trod by Weimar Germans and millennial Argentinians.
In this Book Club, I hope to open some discussions about the far more real and hopefully less hyperbolic collapse that we are facing right now. I welcome comments anywhere you'd like to leave them on the Mandibles posts, but obviously more eyes are on the most recent ones. Here is the tag with prior Mandibles posts:
https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/mandibles
Okay, now a discussion of the current chapter. This one is pretty straightforward via its title -- Douglas Mandible, who is father to Carter and Nollie and grandfather to Florence, Avery, and the yet-unseen Jarred, is 97 years old. He is living out the rest of his days at Wellcome Arms, the poshest of assisted living facilities. Carter is driving out to see his father with strained intentions. He feels guilty about asking grandad about his inheritance. The stock market has recently been detonated as we saw in Chapter 2: KARMIC CLUMPING, and Carter is worried that Grandad has blown the inheritance by living high on the hog. To add insult to injury, the dollar has been replaced by the bancor as the world's currency.
Carter finds his father literally playing tennis. He tries not to wonder if his father is going to live to be 150, hoarding the inheritance the entire way. Carter's father was a publishing guru who had acquired the work of important authors back when book publishing meant something. The two have a chat where Carter dances around the subject of the inheritance and Douglas bloviates about the current crashed condition of the stock market and how money is largely imaginary. Carter frets about his wife, Jayne, and mentally compares their relative poverty to Douglas's opulence. They took a "proper vacation" to Tuscany in 2003, but they had always longed to go to Japan. Jayne has become increasingly fearful as her favorite deli was looted and ransacked. Though Carter and Jayne have a paid-off mortgage, are in good health, and live more comfortably and prestigiously than 95% of the planet, Carter can only see poverty because his house is "brick, not brownstone" and he and Jayne are not taking deluxe, international jet plane vacations every year.
Douglas is in high spirits, taking a devil-may-care attitude to Carter's worries over a fine bourbon. He has lived his life, and that life included divorcing Carter's mother at age 60 to run off with a 38 year old woman named Luella. Carter wryly considers the joke was on Douglas, because by middle age, Luella was a drooling, senile invalid due to early-onset dementia. Nevertheless, Douglas quietly lords his wealth over his son's head, which is cruel mostly because of the way his son views money.
At the end of the chapter, there is no real resolution. Carter wants the money now because he has put off what he sees as truly living. He is not rude or crude enough to openly ask his father for it.
In a few short weeks or months, our world (not the fictional one of the Mandibles) may possibly have a catastrophic collapse. It's not looking good. President Trump and his lackey, Vance have admitted there are fewer than 3 weeks left of oil in the tanks. Though they talk a big game about saying NO to Israel, there are no sanctions and Israel continues to wage its wannabe-apocalyptic wars unchecked on Iran and Lebanon. American money still flows into the little blue country that is smaller than New Jersey at an unprecedented rate, money that could be staying at home and propping up American people instead of Israelis and their spy networks. Add to this the problem of AI, and a much-needed loss of faith in large language modeling slop. AI is collapsing in real time, yet that hasn't stopped Canadian reality show psychos from building data centers and sucking up the resources of entire states for their own personal (most likely literally) Luciferian glory.
We are currently in a long collapse that started shortly after the Covid lockdowns, a shenanigan that Shriver did not see coming in her book. She did, however, predict Putin would still be president of Russia, so good call on her part.
We have been in hyperinflation. Gas is still twice as expensive as it was shortly after Trump's election. The only difference that we might perceive in the coming months is that it happens at an accelerated pace: gas doubling in price in one day instead of over one year. People cannot find jobs. The more skilled or degreed you are, the less you should admit it on a resume because your qualifications mean absolutely nothing. Entire sections of job hunting sites are companies baldly doing false advertising for the express purpose of harvesting applicant data. People cannot afford Planet Fitness, a chain that charges $10 a month and that counts on people signing up in January and forgetting about the fee by March. McDonalds has lowered its prices out of desperation and people still aren't eating there because they are eating at home.
Because of the current idiots in charge, a Weimar style collapse may actually happen by October nearly exactly as described in the Mandibles. The Carter Mandibles of the world -- old-at-heart people who live provisionally and who take every luxury they have for granted -- will be in the worst part of the predicament. For even when Carter Mandible had it good with his paid off house in a pretty neighborhood and a trip to Tuscany in his 40s, he only saw what he lacked. He needed to keep up with the Joneses, and in his case, the Joneses were his own father and his wife. He never truly saw any of his privileges, and now they are about to be yanked away because of the collapse of the dollar to worthless paper.
I think each one of us needs to ask ourselves what luxuries we take for granted, whether it is the ability to take a modest, non-overseas vacation or the blessing of running water from the tap. Carter Mandible is an ingrate born of an ingrate. Douglas Mandible's head is so far up his ass, he has to peer out of his own throat to see the sky. He is an insufferable, arrogant jerk. His son, Carter, is a Wendigo-ridden wretch who wastes all his time wishing for more when he already has more than enough. The ingrate will always find a way to be ungrateful, complaining that the strawberries he is able to get in wintertime (Roman emperors could not get fresh strawberries in wintertime) are not sweet enough without added sugar. The ungrateful have a warped perspective. Not only are they blind to their own unearned wealth, they fail to understand that no matter how much they have, it will never be enough.
The survival of any given collapse, including the one we find ourselves soaking in, is a matter of gratitude and how much you are willing to work with what you've got. In India, as we speak, there are children who have been maimed by mafias in order to put them out on the street as beggars. These children are addicted to hard drugs by their handlers on purpose so their manufactured handicaps can be more easily weaponized to gain sympathy and donations. If you did not drag your rotting legs across a garbage pile to subsist off a few scraps of rotten food on the inside of a sharp can, you actually have it pretty good.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-23 04:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-24 01:58 am (UTC)Re: Waiting
Date: 2026-06-23 07:37 pm (UTC)Douglas is at least affable, even if there's a lot to not admire. In Carter though, there are some similarities to my parents, in that kind of entitled, blind thinking that has them unemployed at retirement age (but not "retired," not that word!) in a house too large for them, unable to consider making the arrangements they ought to. They did not have the same advantages as Carter regarding family wealth or paid-off domiciles, but their mindsets are not that far off.
I'll agree that we're definitely heading into an economic trainwreck - at least a steeper bit of decline - over the next 3-12 months. I've done everything I feasibly could do to get ahead of it. My job pays better than Florence's but is equally as crisis-secure.
My parents have not, nor have they learned from a lifetime of being screwed by corporations and extended periods of unemployment. Accepting a less than upper-salary-class lifestyle is too humiliating, somehow.
Re: Waiting
Date: 2026-06-24 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-24 01:12 am (UTC)One thing I think that should be emphasized is that these coming days of hardship will be a blessing in the sense of spiritual opportunity - acceptance, sacrifice, patience, cooperation. As individual spiritual seekers we should be grateful for these challenges just as we are for the challenges and hardships in our personal lives.
best,
Will M
no subject
Date: 2026-06-24 02:09 am (UTC)