Did you read the New Yorker piece about doomsayers and apocalypse seekers and semi-survivalists? A topic close to my heart, of course.

It fulfilled its assigned task, which was to make them all look like clowns. But it felt stitched together. The connections drawn between those forecasting/anticipating/seeking the apocalypse and the Vermont free staters didn't make much sense to me and this article definitely misses the boat on the looming end times.

Part of me thinks that some or most of the secular end time people just hate what they perceive the general tawdriness and tackiness of modern American life and so wish for its destruction to prove they have superior taste. Jim Kunstler seems to fall into this category a bit, as a reading of his blog Clusterfuck Nation telegraphs.

He does get up a good head of steam, but is given to the "air quotes" a "lot", which I "think" is the updated version OF ALL CAPITALS, WHICH ONLY CRAZY ASSHOLES USED TO USE* BUT WHICH HAVE BEEN RETIRED BECAUSE THE "WEB" AND IT MAKES IT SEEM LIKE YOU ARE SHOUTING or something of that nature.

I will read Kunstler's novel about the post-apocalypse and report back.

Kunstler, a man so-assured-of-the-end, doesn't even own a decent gun (he has a 16 gauge, which which will be very effective in killing pigeons in the New Days, and he is "applying for a handgun permit.") If nothing else, this shows the man to be on the clueless end of things. Since he thinks end times are nigh, he might consider moving to Virginia to stock up. Here, my brother, you are only limited to a handgun a month.

Since the times are indeed in the shitter, and likely to decline for a bit, perhaps we should shelve the longing for Mad Max and maybe return to Murray Bookchin?




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*this is true--one way to judge someones decline is to track when their published works began to rely heavily on all caps. Tom Watson was most assuredly one, Watterson was too, though to a lesser extent