I love reading James Kunstler. He has some of the most insightful and cogent commentary on the American experience in the entire blogosphere/media/celebrity universe. He has outlined the problems we face with clarity and humor.
But it is obvious that he is a social snob. His mean-spirited tirades on the non-pretty and the less than slim have become tiresome. In a sense, he lives in a fantasy construct as all encompassing as the Landscape of Nowhere. It is a world where the lower classes toil in picturesque beauty, providing a pleasant field of view for the intellectual elites to survey as they jet from conference to conference. For some reason, people who don't look like liberal preppies really seem to get his goat.
But the world he desires is as unattainable as the happy motoring fantasies of the 50's. Us Proles have always been a rough crowd. We don't clean up well and get pissed off if you try to make us. We are rude, crude, violent, and uninterested in proper socialization by the improvers. I should know, that is the world I grew out of.
So James: Please get off your high horse. Yes, we like our cheetos and our beer. Our waists are bigger than our inseam. Some of us have a tattoo or two and we curse more than strictly necessary. A lot of us are unemployed because some corporate puke moved our jobs elsewhere and we really don't have any desire to become a website designer. We build shit and work. We don't add value, we create value. Sure our lives will suck when the shit hits the fan, but we will persevere and get through it. Sure some will fall by the wayside, but that has always been the case. We will be skinnier (against our will) and our tattoos and attitudes will fade.
But at the end of the day, we will also be the ones who will be rolling up our sleeves and grabbing the shovels to dig our way out of the shitpile when you and the intelligensia will still be having conferences concerning how best to maximize our urban environment.
Us lowlifes are as much the country as your elitist dreams.
4 comments:
Good post. Funny how every time we listen to some idiot savant from the academic world our plight becomes more dire.
A guy who's always looking for the world to come to an end as we know it, has a distinct problem when it doesn't, what does he do then?
This has always been the problem of sages, charlatans, who-do men, preachers, and those flogging books, the end is ways nigh and they have the only true path.
Which they will always share with you for a price, so far we're still here, some what worse the ware thank you very much, but where are they? If you are attractive to these sorts, make sure you get an acolyte's share at least you will have some money when you have to leave town fast, mobs tend not to wait till you've packed and that tar is hot!
The Black
I seriously resemble those remarks, right down to the tattoo.
Same here with the 'same here'
but for the fact that I'm not a guy.
lol
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