Kunstler demonstrates his prowess as a wordsmith with as masterful a display of writerly chops as I believe I’ve ever seen.
Imagine that on an April evening in 1912, the captain of the RMS Titanic had announced a grand ball at which the male passengers were asked to wear their wives’ clothing and vice-versa…. That was approximately the condition of Western Civ verging on springtime in 2023: preoccupied with silliness while the iceberg awaits.
But who would have thought the sinking of civilization would occur with such fantastic comic ornamentation? Men, in more ways than mere costuming, pretending to be women…incompetence honored, feted, even worshipped…intellect reduced to anti-thinking…anything of value thrown overboard in some weird post-modern potlatch ceremony of twisted moral righteousness…? But the hour is late, the party is near its end, and the iceberg is struck. The rest of the story will be you holding onto a few valuables, including your life, while the lifeboats get lowered.
What can one say, but…
Ain’t it, though. Ain’t it just. But hold onto your personal flotation devices, folks, there’s more where that came from.
Look no further than the fiasco in Ukraine, engineered by geniuses of the US foreign service in some daft exercise to show the world who’s who and what for. And, remind me: what was the basic idea there? To hamstring and hogtie Russia so badly that her people would overthrow the only rational head-of-state in Christendom, a figure who makes the presidents, chancellors, and prime ministers of Western Civ look like a troop of gibbering mandrills, with painted faces and blue butts, the ass-clowns of geopolitics.
Something tells me that this gang will not make it to the lifeboats.
We must hope they don’t, must in fact see to it that they don’t, if only as a matter of seeing justice visited upon them and nothing else. The wreckers, egotists, and purblind fools who sank the ship apurpose deserve no such consideration or forebearance. Let them tread the dark, icy waters until, at last exhausted, they sink all the way down to the very bottom—a most apt retribution for their innumerable crimes against us. They can plead their case for lenience to Davy Jones; there’s no market for it here, I’m afraid.
James carries on from there in like fashion, mining this rich allegorical vein for all it’s worth. It’s a gem—a genuine 24k pleasure to read, for anyone who gives even the limpest, soggiest damn about skillful writing. Best of all, its lustrous sparkle is untarnished by the usual backfilling calls for Voting Harderer At Them™ and bootless Congressional “investigation” meat-beatery at the close. Awestruck kudos to Kunstler for this one.
I have read Kunstler for a long time. He has been wrong on a few occasions.
Suggesting Putin is “…the only rational head-of-state in Christendom…” is simply nuts. Putin is what he has always been, a deeply corrupt murdering thug trained by the KGB.
If that’s the new definition of christian we’ll need some new religions.
He’s so damn rational he’s in a year long war with a tiny* corrupt country and still bogged down. Death and destruction all around is the new rationality I suppose.
*ukraine is less than 1/3 the population of russia