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I’ve encountered James Howard Kuntsler several times in the past. I picked up his book Home from Nowhere a few years ago on a discount shelf, having never heard of him, and enjoyed it quite a lot. After that, I started reading his website, and his blog posts have become a weekly ritual for me (he updates every Monday). Since I have read his ideas before, this book hasn’t taken me by surprise, but he still doesn’t fail to elicit strong imagery and emotional responses with his no-holds-barred approach.
"On Earth – when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass – the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another – particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish." - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
I love that Kuntlser begins his book referencing "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." Not only because that’s one of my favorite movies from my childhood/adolescence, but also because I had never caught on to the moral. I was too young to "get it" when I last saw it, and it’s hilarious that a movie I loved for completely different reasons carried an ideology that I would agree with so clearly as an adult. I also love the fact that Kuntsler doesn’t pull any punches, and he doesn’t hold anything back. He irreverently describes the Puritans as "cultish" and unflinchingly mentions adolescent drug use. He even blames some of those activities on the geography of nowhere itself, although I’m sure he knows drug use is a pretty common thing with… humanity in general, no matter when, how, or where they live.
It’s not a new idea, but the clarity with which he explains the unsustainability of a society that depends on automobiles and has no real other options is depressing. We are absolutely stuck in a situation which, if our energy sources suddenly run out (see: peak oil), we are, as Kuntsler would put it, screwed. There is absolutely no seeing our way out of a problem like that once it arises, and the possibility of its arising is getting more and more realistic and less and less the proverbial "sky is falling / end is near" raving.
His step-by-step description of how America became a nation of bland suburban oil-draining boredom is well-written and dead-on. He links modernism, Marxism, capitalism, greed, sex, and religion in a way I’ve never witnessed before, and he does it very, very well. My hope, however, is that he offers some positive suggestions and not simply criticism, though his criticism is well-placed and rings absolutely true.
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