CrazyLand
June 3, 2024
“As regards Trump, it’s quite obvious that the effective removal of political opponents by all lawful and unlawful means is going on, and the whole world can see it with a naked eye,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov
All Magadom denounces the unanimous jury verdict as a shameful partisan witch-hunt. While the partisanship is all theirs, saying anything to vaunt their vile leader. Totally ignoring the actual evidence, proving Trump guilty as charged.* It’s they who shamefully war against rule of law and the justice system, undermining public confidence in its integrity and fairness — a civic nihilism on par with their corrosive lies about election integrity. It’s profoundly sick and evil.
My 2022 Trump Shitstorm book comprised past blog essays; so last Christmas my daughter gifted me a mirror compendium, by James Howard Kunstler, titled CrazyLand.
Years ago, I went up to Kunstler in public and said, “You, sir, are being an ass.” He’d come to speak at my local humanist group — and with insulting complaints had reduced the emcee to tears.
He might (generously) be termed a “social critic,” a Cassandra deeming our whole civilization doomed. This was his rant that I attended. He’s advocated chucking our entire industrial economy in favor of a bucolic small-town-small-farm agricultural utopia. A drum he still beats relentlessly in CrazyLand. Clueless how grim life actually was in past societies like that.
While in 2016, Kunstler initially saw Trump’s awfulness, his obsessive animus against all of society soon plunged him off the cliff. So in a three-page Foreword we get the Full Monty. “Russiagate” was the underhanded work of a “malevolent cabal” trying to overthrow Trump. The real criminals were the investigators. The first impeachment was “another confection of Deep State scoundrels,” burying the truth about “the bribery operations in Ukraine of the Biden family” — leading to Biden’s “idiotic war in Ukraine.” A war provoked, of course, by NATO and the West. Then “the fantastic mind fuckery of Covid-19 and the phony, useless, harmful vaccinations that have to date killed many people . . . and set up all of Western civilization for an era of medical, financial, and political tyranny.” Oh, and of course the 2020 election was “obviously crooked,” leading to “the FBI-instigated ‘insurrection,’” and “a government at war against the truth.”
Reading this, I actually thought it would be revealed as a wicked send-up of Trumpian absurdism. But no. And we’re only on page 3.
Kunstler is a better writer than me. Or, at least, louder. Like Nigel in Spinal Tap, boasting that his amplifier knob “goes to eleven” (not the usual limit of ten). But here there’s more sound and fury than analysis. Not to mention fact. (A favorite word is “janky.” I had to look it up.)
He has a dim view of pretty much everybody. Including America’s middle yeomanry, whom he romanticizes as victims, yet showers with Menckenian contempt. He’s actually quite trenchant in calling out the woke left, but makes it seem that’s the whole Democratic party. In fact it’s just a sliver. Proven in 2020 voting when Democrats nationally went for the most moderate centrist choice. (Wokeism is mainly a campus thing.) Whereas the Republican party IS one total MAGA nuthouse. Literally excommunicating any divergent voices (like Liz Cheney) — talk about “cancel culture!”
Kunstler is actually weirdly well-informed and knowledgeable. Weird because it’s tragic how it’s all consumed into a firestorm of nonsense. If only he could get a grip, he might have produced some good analysis.
Central is his assurance of imminent apocalyptic doom. In that talk I attended, it was “peak oil.” That threat has faded; as Saudi Oil Minister Yamani once said, the stone age didn’t end for lack of stone; likewise for the oil age. So Kunstler has now moved on from peak oil fearmongering to financial collapse fearmongering. A different cataclysm where money becomes worthless and we’re cast back to medieval, or even stone age living. Very soon.
Like, by the end of 2017, he wrote in mid-year. Then on July 24 he brought it forward to “the end of the summer.” In December — “long about March or April.” And so on. You’d think he’d give himself more of a cushion against being repeatedly wrong. He’s like those cult gurus forecasting world’s end on a specific date, then just changing it when nothing happens.
Kunstler holds that our economy is actually contracting, not growing; that seeming economic growth is a mirage; it’s all financial legerdemain; we can’t grow because we can’t afford the energy (mainly fossil fuels) needed. This is fallacious in every particular. Kunstler, for all his monetary obsession, doesn’t understand money, ignorant that a dollar changing hands ten times has a $10 economic effect. He also seems to suppose productivity means only “things you can drop on your foot.” In reality it’s anything a customer wants and will pay for, most of which nowadays isn’t droppable. That basically makes the whole book silly.
We did of course have a pretty severe financial crisis in 2008, but the economy righted itself. When Covid hit, Kunstler was cock-a-hoop, certain the apocalypse he craved was now surely at hand. Yet the economy again righted itself.
Eventually the book becomes a tsunami of demented anti-Democrat and anti-Biden invective, volcanic name-calling. Devoid of any factual substance. Bursting with ludicrous untruths. President Biden deemed both a satanic monster and (contradictorily) brain dead. How many times does Kunstler screech 2020 “ballot fraud” when that’s been thoroughly debunked? (Even the notorious bogus “2000 Mules” film alleging it has now been pulled; it was Trump and his minions blatantly trying to steal the election.)
MAGA cultists jeer “Trump derangement syndrome” at their critics. And Kunstler’s ironically apt subtitle references the Great American Derangement of Our Time. While they fall down a rabbit hole with not just divergent policy views, not even just perverted morality, but at war with reality itself.
Janky indeed.
* And all his other adjudicated sociopathy: business fraud, tax fraud, Trump University fraud, charity fraud, and serial sexual assaults. But of course the GOP is the party of law and order and family values.