I almost always enjoy reading Jim Kunstler's blog, Clusterfuck Nation. He's truly a modern Jeremiah, shouting his warnings of economic ruin and peak oil and the demise of the suburbs and the end of life as we know on a weekly basis. What I like about him is that at the core, he is an urban geographer and planner, and I have studied a lot of what he talks about in college and thought a lot about it since then. Kunstler's stuff is almost always topical and relevant, and it's always thought-provoking. The trick to Kunstler is to see what he has to say and then think about whether or not I agree, where he might be wrong and what I think about his topic.
Tonight he had a particularly dreary post, however on The Coming Age of Austerity. Among other things, he foretells pitchfork riots sometime between Memorial Day and July 4. To help underscore this point, he illustrated it with the painting above, The Triumph of Death, by Pieter Bruegel.
Let's hope he's as accurate on this one as he was on Y2K, which came off pretty much without a hitch despite his dire warnings about that.
I laugh when I read things like his post especially when I thing of how strong our country was a few hundred years ago. Now we have become zombies wanting our next fix of corn or electronics instead of rioting on Washington and evil doers responsible for this mess. Now I am not advocating these things, just commenting on how complacent we have become.
ReplyDeleteI don't disagree with him on the zombie point. We watched "Idiocracy" last week on Netflix and found it chillingly close to home on a lot of fronts (did you notice that everyone wore Crocs in that movie and all the clothes had advertising on them?). I am reading Kunstler's World Made By Hand right now and he hits on that loss of self-sufficiency, and the complacency themes a lot in that book.
ReplyDeleteHe has a good Podcast as well that my wife and I both enjoy, but again, it's totally his soapbox. It's a lot of fun to listen to.
Never have seen the movie, but based on your statements about crocs, etc. we will skip it.
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