Again Kunstler pisses me off.
When I go out in America, I see fat people and skinny people both. When I was in Germany during the last six months of my time in the Army, I got to meet a bunch of fat folks there too. When I went up to Sweden, there were fat people there as well.
Kunstler is a prick sometimes. He is a prophet of peak oil doom whose carbon footprint involves so much jet travel that he could personally power a small town for a year. He decries the shallowness of American suburbia, then goes out and wades in the shallows of personal appearance.
But he is the same as everyone else in America. Content in their own righteousness and ability to see the motes in other's eyes. Like all of us, he is a hypocrite.
But I have a question to ask him. Who maintains the greater sins against his fellow man. A man who uses the equivalent of fifteen or twenty years of my children's inheritance jetting about the world preaching sustainable energy use, or a underemployed, poorly educated serf with a fondness for Whoppers.
2 comments:
There is more than a little bit of H.P Lovecraft in Mr. K. For there own reasons they dislike the common masses of the day. In the case of Mr. Kunstler, he seems to be unable to distinguish upper class Scandinavians from a tiny (for the moment) wealthy country, from the rural (left behind) lower classes of his economically declining section of New York State.
H.P. wrote of cosmic horror. The absolute purposelessness of it all. He would not be a prepper. Why would you want to survive in something you hate.
Kunstler is also not a prepper. He wants to go back to some sort of crafty 19th century that never existed. It shows in his fiction.
H.P. was by far the better writer.
In the comments to Kunstler's blog post, along with various craziness I saw this, which I find a lot more interesting (and less superficial) than Kunstler getting misty-eyed about good-looking young Swedish people:
"andrei_timoshenko | October 25, 2011 3:13 AM | Reply |
You know how sometimes (most times?) in a zoo you see the primates sickly from an amorphous but permeating sense of over-stress? That's the feeling I get in a lot of the US (and the UK too for that matter). Advanced anglo-saxon society has gotten too human-unfriendly in structure and pace, and far, far too geared towards a dichotomy of either having to make money or having to spend it. Europe (especially the Nordics and parts of Switzerland and France) still retain a good sense of the world before it all went crazy. If the US can still style itself as the Land of Opportunity (to fuck people over), the best parts of Europe are still the Land of Possibility (to find oneself)."
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