has it come to this
I finished James Kunstler's The Long Emergency on Monday, and not a day too soon: there are so many things wrong with this book - essentially, 300 pages of Rachel Carson by way of Bret Easton Ellis - yet all the same, there's plenty worth paying attention to.
Kunstler still fumbles the carry, as he dresses up what is there in a kind of monumental arrogance (not surprisingly, the only places that won't become road productions of The Hills Have Eyes, Mad Max, or Escape From New York are the kinds of little New England towns...James Kunstler lives in) and disgust for everything America is and has been since the turn of the century (not only is there an impending race war - which you should've figured out by listening to hip-hop - with the disappearance of cheap oil, but a hundred years of social progress will go down the drain) that ultimately makes this a difficult text to try and rescue or parse out the good (impending oil production peaks, problems with the "petroleum platform" and alternative energy, climate change and food) from the bad (there's no timeline he'll commit to, and the role of government, any government, is missing except as an historical actor; in addition, there's no one - not a soul - who is doing anything worthwhile to address the energy crisis, and the final 30 or 40 pages of the book are more angry than analytical).
What remains with the reader, at least this one, is a sort of hangover - terror over a nightmare future that's either ten days or twenty years from now, and more than a little revulsion at Kunstler's belief that the American Experiment is utterly beyond any sort of redemption, and as he sees it, deservedly so.
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