People with Rigid Political Views Should Read More Widely

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Thomas Jefferson 

America is more divided than at any time since the Civil War. The country is split into two hostile camps. The MAGA crowd is mostly addicted to Fox News. The Trump haters get their news from the legacy media: The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and other progressive news sources.

I advise Trump's supporters to read the New York Times, which occasionally takes a breather from Trump bashing and objectively reports on current events. They might even tune in to The View. The View ladies will not convert anyone from MAGA Land to their political philosophy, but it's always edifying to get a glimpse of an alien culture.

Trump haters should also read more widely. In addition to the New York Times, they should peruse the New York Post. If they subscribe to the Washington Post, they should also read the Washington Examiner.

And everyone--left-wing or right-wing, MAGA ideologues and leftist Never-Trumpers--should stop reading The Guardian, which is a rabidly anti-Trump screed sheet. In a recent funding appeal, The Guardian proclaimed: "We're funded by readers, not billionaires--which means we can publish factual journalism with no outside influence."

In fact, as Andy Gorel wrote, citing Wikipedia:

The Guardian is owned by The Guardian Media Group (GMG), which is “wholly owned by the Scott Trust Limited, which exists to secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity. The Group's annual report (for the year ending 2 April 2023) indicated that the Scott Trust Endowment Fund was valued at £1.24 billion.”

While there may be a degree of separation, this means The Guardian is backed by a $1.56 billion endowment.

Readers can read The Guardian online, which is posted without a pay wall, making it readily accessible for free. If you read the publication's content for just a few days, you will understand how biased it is against President Trump. 

My advice: skip The Guardian and look for fairer critical coverage of the Trump administration.

Finally, I advise everyone to read two premier bloggers: James Howard Kunstler and Matt Taibbi. Both have stellar journalism credentials, and both think outside the box. 

Image credit: Your Dictionary

 

90-Seconds Book Review: Look, I'm Gone by James Howard Kunstler Exorcises Catcher in the Rye

 Look, I'm Gone by James Howard Kunstler is a coming-of-age novel set in New York City over the 1963 Thanksgiving holiday season. 

Jeff Greenaway, 12 years old, is a student at Ponsonby Hall, a New Hampshire boarding school for troubled adolescents from wealthy families. President Kennedy’s assassination disrupts the orderly life of the school, and school authorities decide to release the kids a few days early for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Jeff returns to his parents' home in Manhattan and spends the next several days exploring New York City, watching movies, and spending a wad of cash he obtained at a schoolboy poker game. 

On a whim, Jeff enters "Dreamboat Landing," a dance studio advertising "Girls, Girls, Girls... 25 cents a dance." He dances with Yvonne, a young, working-class woman who teaches him the box step and the foxtrot. 

During their brief encounter, Yvonne decides that Jeff is a screwed up but decent kid, and she impulsively gives him her copy of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. "Here," she tells him, "the story of your life."

Jeff is enchanted by the novel, which he reads three times over a few days. He identifies with Holden Caulfield, the book's depressed and morose main character, and soon adopts Holden's persona, including the fictional character's habit of inserting the word "goddamn" into casual conversations.

Like Jeff, Holden Caulfield is a boarding school student on holiday in Manhattan. Jeff is amazed at how much Holden Caulfield's world resembles his own. He begins to feel that Catcher in the Rye was written specifically for him, like "a message in a bottle."

 Thanks to Salinger's book, Jeff recognizes "the phoniness and pointlessness of everything around him," and he embraces Holden's view that the “goddamn world is full of phonies." 

However, Jeff Greenaway is not Holden Caulfield, and his holiday odyssey in New York City differs from Holden’s. In a bold move, he talks his way backstage at a Broadway theater and persuades a beautiful child star to have dinner with him at a swank restaurant. 

And Jeff has another un-Holden-like experience. Jeff believes that the Russians assassinated President Kennedy, which leads him to stake out the Russian UN embassy. The Russian ambassador, touched by Jeff's naive intensity, tells Jeff that "truth will set you free," and that the CIA, not the Russians, killed President Kennedy.

Jeff's initial attraction to Catcher in the Rye leads him to search out Salinger's other books: Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters. He hopes these works will be as inspiring as Salinger's blockbuster, but he finds them boring and incomprehensible.

On his return trip to boarding school, Jeff finds out where Salinger lives, and he manages to have an extended conversation with the reclusive author on a snowy New England night. I won’t tell you about that passage in the book, because that would spoil Kunstler’s story for people reading Look, I’m Gone.

Catcher in the Rye is often described as a coming-of-age novel, and the book is required reading at some American schools. But Salinger’s novel is not a coming-of-age tale, because Holden never achieves the mature self-awareness that young people must obtain to transition from youth to adulthood. At the novel's end, Holden is as depressed as he was at the beginning.

Look, I’m Gone is an exorcism of Catcher in the Rye. Unlike Holden Caulfield, Jeff Greenaway engages with the world around him, takes chances, and embraces new and unsettling experiences—like his meeting with a Russian diplomat and his brief encounter with a vibrant child actor.

Millions of young Americans will read Catcher in the Rye and become depressed, cynical, and world-weary. Thus, as an antidote, I recommend all Salinger fans to read Look, I’m Gone immediately after reading Catcher in the Rye.

However, one need not read Catcher in the Rye to appreciate Kunstler's novel. Look, I'm Gone stands on its own as one of the great American coming-of-age tales beside Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Richard Bradford's Red Sky at Morning, John Knowles's A Separate Peace, and Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy.

Image credit: Slate

Lazy College Professors are Voting for Lazy Kamala Harris

 "Kamala Harris," James Howard Kunstler pithily observed,  "was just pulled out of a hat, like a rabbit. And everybody involved knew she was a dud, a slow learner, inattentive, not well-educated, lazy, possibly high a lot of the time, self-medicating due to anxiety, insecurity, purposelessness."

Yet college professors overwhelmingly support Kamala Harris over Donald Trump for the presidency. According to an Inside Higher Education poll, 78 percent of college professors plan to vote for Harris on November 5th, while only 8 percent said they will vote for Trump. 

Why? Because a high percentage of college faculty members—like Kamala Harris—are lazy. 

Professors feel a kinship with Harris. Like Kamala, most professors speak gobbledegook, a lazy mode of speech, and they find the Vice President's incoherent word salads strangely comforting.

President Biden appointed Kamala as the border czar, but she was too lazy to act on the nation's southern border crisis. Her sloth reassures professors because many aren't doing any practical work themselves.

On college campuses across America, rigor and discipline have collapsed. Grade inflation is rampant because professors are lazy. It's too damn hard for an instructor to distinguish between an A exam paper and a B. It's easier to give every student an A grade. Even at Harvard, the nation’s most elite university, 80 percent of undergraduate students have an A- grade average.

Academic assessment in graduate programs is almost nonexistent. Most graduate students get A or B grades, and plagiarism is no longer a serious academic offense. Professors are too lazy to uphold academic standards.

Again, Harvard is an example. Harvard president Claudine Gay was accused of plagiarizing passages in her dissertation and three academic articles. Harvard investigated these allegations and cleared her of any intentional wrongdoing. After all, plagiarism is no longer an act of academic dishonesty. It's merely a sign of laziness, and laziness is not a sin in the culture of American higher education.

We should not be surprised to learn that lazy college professors support Kamala Harris, a lazy vice president who wants to become our lazy president.

Kamala wants to be president. How hard can the job be?

The Spanish Inquisition comes to Manhattan: The Trump hush money trial

A New York jury convicted President Trump on 34 felony counts for a bookkeeping bookkeeping error connected to hush money Trump paid to a porn star. He will be sentenced later this summer.

As James Howard Kunstler, Alan Dershowitz, and others have observed, Trump was convicted by a kangaroo court in a show trial reminiscent of the justice system in Stalinist Russia. 

Judge Juan Merchan was obviously biased and should have recused himself. 

Prejudice towards President Trump runs rampant in Manhattan, and he was entitled to a change of venue. 

Trump’s conduct was, at worst, a simple misdemeanor, and the statute of limitations expired on the alleged offense. Only through tortured legal reasoning were prosecutors able to bootstrap a trivial matter into a felony, thereby extending the statutory deadline for prosecution. 

Judge Merchan tainted the entire proceedings by allowing Stormy Daniels's salacious testimony, testimony that was irrelevant to the charges against the President.

In essence, Donald Trump was subjected to a modern-day Spanish Inquisition. The trial was a political event obviously designed to keep him from returning to the White House. The mainstream media cheered and jeered like a Jacobin mob during the French Revolution.

About half the nation hates President Trump and enjoys seeing him humiliated. But we should all remember that a fair and unbiased judicial system is the foundation of democracy and a safe and secure society. What happened to President Trump can happen to anyone. It could happen to you.

The Spanish Inquisition: Now showing in a theater near you.

Our Year for Living Dangerously: 2024 Predictions and Premonitions from Flyover Country

 In late December or early January, pundits and commentators make predictions for the new year. This year, I’m going to join in that tradition from my home on Lake Mary in Southern Mississippi.

I’m making three predictions for 2024. I’m also sharing three premonitions about the coming year. I feel certain that my 2024 predictions will come true. I hope my premonitions will not come true, but I fear they will.

 

Prediction number one: Joe Biden won’t be the Democratic nominee for President in 2024.

 

I agree with James Howard Kunstler that Joe Biden will not be on the ballot for the presidential election in November. Biden will participate in most primaries, and he will easily collect enough delegates to capture the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nomination, but someonne else will be the Democratic Party's nominee.

As Kunstler has suggested, I think Biden will disclose that he has a serious medical condition sometime next summer. For the good of the country, he will say, he is stepping down from the presidential race and releasing his delegates to someone else.

Who will that person be? I don’t know and you don’t know, but someone living on Martha’s Vineyard knows. The Democratic nominee won’t be a person who participated in the Democratic primaries. After Biden steps aside, the Democratic Party’s Super Delegates will nominate someone who skipped the primaries. Credible speculation says it will be Michelle Obama.

 

The mainstream media pretends that Biden is a serious candidate for another term as President, but no one believes that. His declining health is evident to everyone. Biden has some sort of cognitive disability, which is steadily getting worse. 

Moreover, the Republicans are finding evidence that the Biden family took bribes from foreign countries and stashed the money in offshore bank accounts. If substantiated, those charges could led to an  impeahment trial during Biden's second term. 

 

I think Biden will pardon himself and his entire family (including his grandchildren) before leaving office. He will then shuffle off the world stage and live the remainder of his days in an opulent and secure memory care facility. 

 

Prediction number two: Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for President in November. 

 

Within weeks, the Supreme Court will overrule decisions by various state officials to keep Trump off the presidential ballot for allegedly participating in an insurrection. You can take that to the bank.

 

Trump is also facing criminal charges in various jurisdictions. I think he will beat those charges. Alternatively, any convictions against him will be overturned by the appellate courts.

 

Thus, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president, and he will face an opponent chosen by the Democratic Party’s Super Delegates.

 

Prediction number three: Americans will regret our involvement in the Ukraine war.

 

Ukraine is losing its war with Russia. It will never regain the Donbas or reoccupy Crimea. Meanwhile, the NATO countries are more and more ambivalent about their support for Ukraine. Russia has the stamina for siege warfare and prolonged fighting. The western nations do not.

 

Eventually, Ukraine and Russia must reach a settlement, and that settlement will require Ukraine to give up some territory. The longer the West waits before coming to that conclusion, the more people will die in this foolish and unnecessary war.

 

Now here are my premonitions for 2024—premonitions I hope will not come to pass.

 

Premonition number one: Urban violence. I fear an outbreak of violence in our cities during the summer of 2024, which will peak during the Republican and Democratic Party conventions. I also fear anti-Israel protests will become larger and more disruptive and will invite more violence.

 

Premonition number two. Rampant inflation. In spite of our government’s effort to deceive the American people, inflation in this country is out of control and is getting worse. In particular, the rising cost of food and housing will cause millions of Americans to suffer before the year is out. 

 

Premonition number three: Terrorists will cross our southern border and kill hundreds of Americans.

 

Illegal immigrants are entering the United States at the rate of 10,000 people a day, and they are not all coming from Latin America. A significant number of border crossers come from the Middle East and some are on the government’s Terrorist Watch List. No nation can absorb those numbers indefinitely without endangering its sovereignty.

2024 may be the year in which PresidentJoe Biden's insane boder policy enables terrorists to cross our southern border and commit a wanton and spectacular act of murder.  I hope not.

Conclusion

 

I hope 2024 will be the year when Americans take prudent steps to protect our security, our culture, and our way of life. I hope this is the year Americans will stop electing crooks and madmen to public office and quit sending their children to universities that promote racism.

 

I fear, however, that America will continue along its downward path toward financial and social collapse. If Americans don’t do something this year to remove the crooks from public office, reform our education system, and get our financial house in order, the days of American greatness will be over.

 

 

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows: Preventing the wrong people from running for President

Be Awake, College Students! Massive Economic Turmoil is Coming

A friend sent me a copy of the Magnificat journal's Advent Companion, a selection of daily reflections for the Advent season. Advent begins on November 27, and I read the first entry, which reflects on Matthew 24 and Christ's warning to be watchful.

During the time of Noah, Jesus instructed, people ate, drank, and married until the day the flood came and carried them all away.

"Therefore, stay awake!" Christ cautioned, and be prepared for the hour you don't expect.

As I read the Advocate Companion, I thought this passage would make an excellent advertisement for My Patriot Supply, an outfit that sells emergency food kits with a shelf life of 25 years. 

This is not a religious message. Instead, I warn that our national economy, built on financial speculation and easy money, will ultimately collapse. Perhaps it will be brought on by the cryptocurrency meltdown. If you aren't convinced, read James Howard Kunstler's recent blog essays posted on Clusterfuck Nation.

If you are a college student, this is no time to take out extravagant student loans. Higher education is under extreme duress: Since 2004, 861 colleges have closed their doors, and more than 9,000 campuses have shut down.

Stay awake, and don't take out loans to attend an obscure small college with a tuition rate of $25,000 a semester. Don't enroll in an online degree program unless you are pretty damned sure that an online college degree will lead to a good job.

Just importantly, don't be deceived by all the talk of student-loan forgiveness or by the Department of Education's pause on student-loan repayment--which will last more than three years.

A few people will get their loans forgiven under DOE's borrower defense program based on findings of fraud, and President Biden's loan forgiveness initiative may ultimately be approved by the courts. Still, the President's plan to forgive $10,000 of student debt, if it comes to fruition, will be a drop in the bucket for students paying $50,000 a year in college tuition. 

If you are pretty sure a college degree will lead to a job, by all means, go for it. People with degrees in the medical services field will probably find jobs.

But you are insane if you plan to take out $50,000 or more in student loans to get a humanities degree, a liberal arts degree, or a degree in gender studies.

You are insane if your college degree requires your parents to take out Parent Plus loans that they can't discharge in bankruptcy.

You are insane to take out a Grad PLUS loan to get a graduate degree in business, journalism, or the liberal arts.

Sometimes the Bible has some good advice. Indeed, now is an excellent time to head the biblical admonition to "Stay Awake!" and be prepared for global economic turmoil--which is coming.

 

Robert Crimo III Killed Six People and Escaped in a 2010 Honda Fit: Are We Teaching Our Children Well?

 We all know the drill. An alienated young white guy commits mass murder with a semiautomatic rifle. Almost instantly, the shooter is captured or gunned down or commits suicide.

Political leaders, flanked by their lackeys, hold a press conference where they heap lavish praise on the police even if the police did a lousy job (like at Columbine and Uvalde). The liberal media cries out for gun control. Pundits describe the shooter as a cowardly scumbag.

Our political, media and cultural elites never blame themselves for these mass shootings. No one blames the public schools, where all these young shooters spent their childhood and youth. No one laments our waning religious beliefs or the disintegration of our nation's civic life.

No one ponders why so many of these shooters were addicted to video games. No one asks why these shooters express their anguish in graphic detail on social media--anguish that is wholly ignored.

Crimo shot up a Fourth of July parade and escaped in a 2010 Honda Fit. Perhaps he knew that this pathetic little car symbolized his pathetic little life.

Crimo probably sensed that taking out student loans for college would not help him build a decent future for himself. He probably didn't have a girlfriend or any vocational goals. He was perhaps searching for meaning without having been issued a moral compass.

Whose fault is that?

James Howard Kunstler recently observed that "[t]he chief duty of men and women in [the] future will be doing everything possible to ensure that their children do not become hot messes." 

Who disagrees? 

But Americans are not striving to prevent their children from becoming hot messes. They're not doing everything they can to nurture and encourage young people to become functioning, self-reliant, and moral adults. 

Instead, our government shovels money into our corrupt universities to pay professorial nihilists to teach that America's heritage is nothing more than the story of white oppression. 

Our mainstream media has nothing good to say about patriotism or traditional civic values. Instead, op-ed writers label religious, patriotic Americans as "Christian nationalists," which is a racist code phrase.

No wonder guys like Robert Crimo III are becoming increasingly common. Indeed, the United States can hardly go a week without a mass shooting.

Ironically, the elites trying to destroy American civilization are never the victims of these young men's rage. They live in gated communities or highrise condos, surrounded by bodyguards and safely protected behind bullet-proof glass.

No, the people killed or maimed by the Robert Crimos of the world are school children, mall shoppers, and folks who only want to enjoy a Fourth of July parade.

Making his getaway in a 2010 Honda Fit

Summer Reading Suggestions: Dip Into Apocalyptic Literature

 Summer is here, and everyone is looking for an enticing novel to read while on vacation. Most of us want a page-turner--something vacuous but exciting, a book we can read on the beach while sipping a tropical cocktail.

The summer of 2022 is different from the summers of the recent past. Inflation is rising, and most of us feel that we are only beginning to see substantial price increases in food and staples. Gas prices are at historic highs. It seems like everyone is unhappy, anxious, and fretful. What lies ahead?

So--why not read some apocalyptic literature to help us focus on what may well be America's future? Here are my suggestions:

First, I urge everyone to read James Howard Kunstler's World Made By Hand novels. Kunstler's books are set in upstate New York during the post-petroleum age. He describes a nation that has dropped back into the nineteenth century with people riding horses instead of driving cars and lighting their homes with candles rather than lightbulbs.

Before diving into Kunstler's novels, I suggest you read The Long Emergency, his best-known nonfiction work. In this book, Kunstler argues that the petroleum-based economy is ending and that so-called renewable energy (wind turbines, solar panels, and such) will not allow us to maintain our lavishly materialistic lifestyle.

The Long Emergency is very persuasive. Kunstler convinced me that our gasoline-driven world is not sustainable. I fear our future will be bleaker than progressive voices predict. We are more likely to be raising chickens than driving electric cars.

I also recommend reading some of John Wesley Rawls' apocalyptic novels.  Rawls' books imagine life in a world after the global economy collapses. Violence breaks out all across the United States, and an international, fascist military force stamps out democracy and individual freedoms.

What I like best about Rawls' books are the technical details. For example, he provides a recipe for making napalm out of styrofoam and describes how to harden a suburban home against a terrorist attack. His books even have glossaries.

Rawls is a prolific writer, and I recommend you begin by reading these four novels: Patriots,  Survivors, Expatriots, and Liberators. If you read all four of these books, I predict you will buy 2,000 rounds of .22 ammunition and a 10/22 Ruger rifle with a camouflage finish.

William Forstchen is another master of the apocalyptic genre. One Second After describes life in Black Mountain, North Carolina, after one of America's enemies set off nuclear bombs in the earth's upper atmosphere. These explosions trigger an electromagnetic pulse that shuts down all electronic devices--including vehicles and electrically powered machinery.

As food runs short, Forstchen's town officials begin rationing, and looters and arsonists are summarily shot. Large terroristic gangs sustain themselves by cannibalism, and the town organizes a militia made up primarily of college students that fights the terrorists in a bitter battle to the death.  

Finally, I recommend people to read Cormac McCarthy's dark and harrowing book, The Road.  McCarthy's apocalyptic environment is not drawn as sharply as those sketched out by Kunstler, Rawls, and Forstchen. Still, he describes a grey, ashen world in which the sun no longer shines and crops cannot grow--a perpetual nuclear winter. It is a harrowing book that ends with a bare flicker of hope.

Americans should read all four of these authors because they sketch out for us--to one degree or another--America's future. We should pay heed and prepare for it.

I, for one, went to the grocery store and bought four cans of Spam.

Did colleges engage in a bait-and-switch scam to maximize revenues during the coronavirus pandemic?

According to a recent article in the Washington Examiner, American universities lured students back to campus this fall by deceptively promising to offer at least some in-person instruction. Then--after the students showed up and paid their tuition and fees--the colleges changed their policies and offered most or all of their classes in an online format.

In the Examiner's view:

[C]ollege administrators pulled a classic con artist's bait and switch. They asked college students to return to campus and bilked parents out of full-freight fees with the promise that at least some instruction would be in-person rather than online. Shortly before school opened, with the money safely in the bank, they shifted exclusively or at least nearly exclusively to online instruction, but asked student to come back to campus anyway.

Is this a fair indictment? I think it is.  Schools all over the United States shifted to online teaching for the fall semester, which almost everyone agrees is inferior to face-to-face instruction. Nevertheless, the schools did not discount their tuition, and they did not close their dormitories.

How can a college tell students that in-person classes are dangerous while continuing to stuff the kids into residence halls and frat houses, where the risk of contracting the coronavirus is unreasonably high?

In my view, American colleges responded to the COVID-19 crisis to maximize revenue at the expense of their students' health. It was nuts for universities to pack young adults into dorms at a time when the coronavirus pandemic is still not under control.

But the colleges were forced to adopt this reckless policy because they need the cash flow.  Many universities financed their dorm-building sprees by floating bonds or entering into partnerships with private corporations that funded the construction projects in return for getting a percentage of the room-and-board fees. These schools have got to keep their dorms full to meet their financial obligations.

Unfortunately for American higher education, the coronavirus disrupted its business model.  Parents are not going to pay fifty grand a year for their children to take online classes, and they are not going to pay room-and-board fees so their kids can live in crowded dormitories where they face an elevated risk of contracting COVID-19.

This cash-before-kids policy is not going to work for a lot of colleges. Many will close in the coming year.  And the upcoming shut-down of American schools is not just due to the coronavirus pandemic. A lot of families have figured out that that the universities are charging way too much for mediocre academic programs that don't lead to good jobs.

As James Howard Kunstler put it in a recent blog essay:

[T]he colleges and universities are [not] going down hard . . . just because Covid-19 has interrupted their business plan. Rather, because of the stupendous and gross dishonesty that higher ed has fallen into. The racketeering around college loans was bad enough but the intellectual racketeering around fake fields of study, thought-crime persecutions, and an epic sexual hysteria has disgraced the very mission of higher ed, turned it into something no better than a sick cult . . . .

I could not have said it better myself. Americans are awaking to the fact that much of our nation's higher education system is a big scam, and they are increasingly unwilling to subject their children to an education system that looks more and more like the Spanish Inquisition.

The penalty for saying "All Lives Matter" on a university campus

Living in the Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler: A book review

James Howard Kunstler, prolific blogger, novelist, and social commentator, has written a new book, Living in the Long Emergency. You should read it. America's economy and social order are careening toward the abyss, and Kunstler explains why.

Living in the Long Emergency is an update of The Long Emergency, which Kunstler published in 2005. In his earlier book, Kunstler predicted the collapse of America's industrial economy due to the world's rapidly depleting supply of recoverable petroleum. 

In Living in the Long Emergency, Kunstler reiterates his earlier thesis and explains why the so-called fracking miracle for extracting shale oil has not altered his predictions. Kunstler writes that fracking is far more expensive than traditional methods of extracting oil and is only viable when it can be financed through low-interest rates and high oil prices.  Moreover, it is a short-term phenomenon that does not alter the fundamental reality of dwindling petroleum reserves.  

As Kunstler summarized the matter:

Therefore, the shale oil "miracle" was a very impressive financial and technological stunt. In practical terms, it provided a means to pull forward the last dregs of recoverable oil from the future, so the US could live large for a few years longer. As [an] independent oil analyst . . . put it: "Shale is a retirement party for the oil industry."

Kunstler's new book also includes a brutal analysis of contemporary American culture, which our oil-dependent economy helped foster. His assessment of American life is unrelievedly bleak. Kunstler writes that a casual survey of American culture "reveals shocking degrees of neuroticism, delusion, dishonesty, and functional failure in culture."

Suburbia, made possible by cheap gasoline, has "produced yawning ugliness on the landscape, an epidemic of loneliness, family dysfunction, and a dismal cavalcade of mass shootings in public schools." In America's heartland, what we now call flyover country, Kunstler sees traditional American values eroded by opiate addiction, suicide, obesity, and unemployment.

Kunstler is tough on American higher education. "The thinking class," he writes, squanders its waking hours on a quixotic campaign to destroy every remnant of American common culture and, by extension, a reviled Western civilization . . . ."

I've spent much of my life shuffling around in American universities, including three years in Harvard's re-education camp (cleverly disguised as Harvard's Graduate School of Education). Kunstler's summation of American higher education is spot on. 

Rather than try to summarize Kunstler's cogent analysis, I'll simply quote him:

In case you haven't been paying attention to the hijinks on campus—the attacks on reason, fairness, and common decency, the kangaroo courts, diversity tribunals, assaults on public speech and speakers themselves, the denunciation of science—here is the key takeaway: It is not about ideas or ideologies anymore. Instead, it's purely about the pleasure of coercion, of pushing other people around, of telling them what to think and how to act.

Kunstler's book includes more provocative ideas and social analysis than I have mentioned here. My brief review doesn't do it justice. But I fully endorse his fundamental conclusion, which I think is this: America has crapped in its own mess kit and doesn't have the money or the moral energy to repair the damage it has inflicted on itself.

A hundred years from now, people will still be reading James Howard Kunstler's work to understand how America went so wrong. He is one of the few people who comprehend what happened to us.

"If I were a carpenter": Manual skills will be more valuable than a liberal arts degree in the post-coronavirus economy

If I were a carpenter, and you were a lady

Would you marry me anyway?

Would you have my baby?

Tim Hardin

Sung best by Johnny Cash and June Carter

James Howard Kunstler wrote somewhere that in the coming age, carpenters will be more valued than people who design video games (or words to that effect). Kunstler's observation worried me because I have no mechanical skills at all, although I am a pretty good gardener.

Kunstler is right, and the coming age is now. Coronavirus is transforming the American economy. Millions of jobs have been lost that won't come back. All of a sudden, it matters if a person has real skills. A carpenter is going to be more valued in the years ahead than a sociology professor.

Americans have indulged themselves in the acquisition of meaningless university degrees--hundreds of thousands of degrees, and they will soon learn that all the millions of hours spent in university classrooms won't help them feed themselves.

I should know. I have been a university professor for 25 years, and I sat on dozens of dissertation committees. I would be embarrassed to list the titles of some of the dissertations I approved.  I remember one doctoral student at the University of Houston who wrote his thesis on what it felt like to be a graduate student.  I feel sure he is a tenured professor at some obscure regional university.

During my years in the Alice and Wonderland world of higher education, I stumbled across several instances of plagiarism. No plagiarist I discovered was ever kicked out of graduate school.  We treated plagiarism like a punctuation error--easily corrected.

All this foolishness was financed by the federal student-loan program, the Pell Grant program, and various forms of state and federal government support. And most of the people who acquired frothy university degrees got jobs--often soft-skill jobs in the public sector.  But few people who collected these degrees learned how to make anything useful.

Of course, not all higher education is vacuous. Programs in engineering, the medical profession, law, and accounting all teach useful skills. And several of my colleagues in my own field, which is education, are excellent scholars and dedicated teachers. I cast no aspersions on their work. But in general, the fields of education, liberal arts, and social studies offer degrees that lack real substance.

As I write this, nearly 17 million Americans are out of work, and this is just the first wave of job losses. Before the end of this year, people in government and education are going to feel the cold breath of a new Depression.  Experts reasonably predict that the unemployment rate in this country will reach 30 percent.

The world of higher education is in for a rude shock. Slovenly professors, who did very little work and made rare appearances on campus dressed in gym clothes, are going to lose their cushy sinecures.  If they are smart, they will acquire a craft skill and retool themselves as carpenters, plumbers, electricians, or technical workers.

As the job market for college professors collapses--and it will collapse, few laid-off professors are going to find new positions in academia. So If they don't retool, they will be forced on the dole, subsisting on food stamps and living with someone who has a real job.  

As for the people who took out student loans to get frivolous degrees, they are going to find it damned difficult to get a decent job and even more challenging to pay off their student debt. They, too, will need to master a useful skill if they aspire to own a home, get married, or have children.

James Howard Kunstler says plant a garden: That's good advice

Blow up your t.v.

throw away your paper

Go to the country, 

build you a home

Plant a little garden

eat a lot of peaches

Try and find Jesus on your own

Spanish Pipedream

John Prine

If you would like to get a provocative and unconventional take on the coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying financial crisis, you should read James Howard Kunstler's refreshing blog, clusterfuck nation. Mr. Kunstler has been predicting an economic meltdown for a long time. And now, by God, his prediction has finally come true.

What we are experiencing is not just a health emergency, and it's not a recession. We are at the beginning of the 21st century's Great Depression, and it is going to last a long time. A lot of industries, a lot of organizations, and a lot of jobs are going to disappear, and many of them are not coming back.

So what should we do? Kunstler recommends planting a spring garden:

If you’re prudent, you can begin at once to organize serious gardening efforts, if you live in a part of the country where that is possible. I’d go heavy on the potatoes, cabbages, winter squashes, and beans, because they’re all keepers over winter. Baby chicks sell at the local ag stores for a few bucks each now and you’ll be very grateful for the eggs. Get a rooster — even though they can be a pain-in-the-ass — and you won’t have to buy any more chicks.

I think Kunstler is right. I'm not saying we are in danger of starving to death in the coming months. I feel sure that our supply chains and grocery stores will continue to provide us with food. We may not be able to get Mexican blueberries in February, but we will always be able to get canned beans and Kraft macaroni and cheese--or so I believe. And, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, we'll always have baloney.

But planting a garden is a good thing to do. I have maintained a vegetable garden for the last eight years, and it gives me great satisfaction to harvest and eat food I grew myself. As everyone knows, homegrown tomatoes are better than the store-bought varieties. And homegrown broccoli, harvested and cooked on the same day, is a totally different experience from eating frozen broccoli from the grocery store.

Furthermore, by planting a garden, we begin to retrieve essential skills that our grandparents knew. My elders knew when to plant various crops and when to harvest. They knew how to preserve fruit and vegetables through the winter. They knew how to butcher a hog and turn it into smoked hams, bacon, sausages, and lard.  

I can't feed my family on what I grow in five raised garden beds.  In fact, if I gathered all the food my garden grows over the course of a year, my wife and I would survive for about a week. But I am learning a few things about raising food crops.

For example, I planted a fall garden this year and learned that broccoli can survive a light freeze.  I also learned that collard greens are ridiculously easy to grow and taste delicious if seasoned with bacon and a little garlic. 

I plant okra in my spring garden.  I've learned that okra likes hot weather and grows so fast once it starts producing that I have to pick okra every other day. But I also learned that I don't like okra very much.

In World War II, Americans ripped out their front lawns and planted victory gardens. I am told that at one time, people's individual victory gardens produced more food than all commercial farming combined.  

That's comforting to contemplate because things are changing in America, and they are changing fast. We are going to have to be more resilient, more frugal, and more self-reliant.  Planting a garden will help us obtain these virtues. 

After all, a tomato bush growing behind the garage is a reminder that we are capable of taking care of ourselves.