Goodbye To James Howard Kunstler

I used to look up to James Howard Kunstler.  The former Rolling Stone writer and urban-planning critic wrote many a readable and entertaining treatise on autocentric suburban development - malls, tract houses, multilane highways - and their corrosive effect on the political, social, financial and cultural lifeblood of the United States.  But Kunstler has long since gone to the dark side, forsaking his expertise on urbanism and focusing instead on Donald Trump and how courageous he has been against the "resistance" of liberals, progressives, and Democratic Party establishmentarians who have worked  to stop him.  And now - get this - Kunstler turns out to be one of those who believe that the election was indeed stolen and that Joe Biden is a puppet for the "Deep State" and the Progressive Thought Police.  Consider this excerpt of his blog post "Fog and Noise," published on January 8, two days after the Capitol insurrection:

Let's also just step back for a moment and ask: why did so many flag-waving MAGAs turn out Wednesday on the Mall in Washington, D.C.? Answer: Because they have been served one shit sandwich after another for four years by the Democratic Party and their captive news media, and the latest one featured vote tabulations getting erased in real time at ten-plus thousand vote increments right before their eyes on the flat-screen in the wee hours of November 4. And after that, and other balloting monkeyshines, the response from their government was a mere yawn. Total institutional failure. The ballot fraud that so many witnessed was never aired or adjudicated in a proper legal forum, and they were good and goddamn pissed about it.

And here's an excerpt commentary from his blog post "Insurrection Versus Insurrection," from January 11: 

There is a lot of chatter on the lowdown that the current President - that would be Mr. Trump, for those out there who are confused - is about to act to take down the scurvy party that enabled and condoned six months of rioting, arson, and looting in at least a dozen cities - cadres of whom may have actually instigated that incursion into the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday. The President appears to understand his duty to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. He had plenty of opportunity to be a quitter from 2017 to 2021 and he hung in there, against every cockamamie operation the Deep State threw at him. Odds are he’s not quitting now.

He's essentially blaming the Democrats for inciting riots after George Floyd's death.

And finally, an excerpt from his blog post "Signs and Wonder," from yesterday, January 15:

In case you don’t know what condition our condition is in, the name for it is a crisis of legitimacy. Four years of seditious harassment by a "Resistance" within-and-without the U.S. Government culminates in the janky election of a mentally incapable grifter . . . run by whom? Does anyone seek to know who, exactly, is pulling Joe Biden's strings? My guess would be . . . duh . . . Barack Obama and his posse. When will he be outed? Maybe today . . . or next week at the latest. Heads will explode to see liberalism’s bowling trophy fall off the national mantelpiece. If you think Nancy Pelosi is running around in a hebephrenic fugue state now, just wait . . ..

Did you catch Joe Biden on TV last night? Did his appearance fill you with the sweet, warm unction of reassurance? Or did you get the impression that I got: of a near-mummy in a state of panicky confusion, sent from his hidey-hole out to a podium to give an impersonation of someone in authority? I didn't believe the performance for a minute. The poor schlemiel is headed straight into history's discontinued-merchandise bin. He will probably wonder what awful vanity propelled him down the memory hole as he descends into the darkness . . . but his memory preceded him down the memory hole and he will have forgotten how the whole thing started. His exit will be a merciful one compared to the people who trussed him up and shoved him onstage to flesh out their lame narrative.

Enough.

I don't know what pushed Kunstler over to the QAnon/MAGA/White Lives Matter crowd, but I do know that he's not coming back to the side of reason, where he once praised Howard Dean and took defensible stands on center-right positions such as toning down political correctness in addition to bashing oversized theme parks and godawful skyscraper architecture.  He doesn't do much of that these days, as he's too busy going after "elitists" like Barack Obama, a man he once championed. 

As far as I am concerned, the James Howard Kunstler I once admired doesn't exist anymore.  He's been taken over by a pod person.  And as such, I will no longer read his commentary or buy his books. Maybe I'll give my copies of Kunstler's books to a free-library box, as they were written in his saner period and I don't need to read them again. Did I happen to mention that I was one of his Facebook friends?  No more - I "unfriended" him.  I have no use for him anymore.

As to who will lead the cause for saner urban development and a revival of public transit when the pandemic is over?  Well . . . as Bob Dylan would say, we're gonna miss our best friend now.  We're gonna have to find ourselves another best friend somehow.   

What's The Matter With James Howard Kunstler?

Does anyone remember when James Howard Kunstler was the most trenchant social commentator and urban planning critic in America?

Kunstler, who turns 71 today, first made a name for himself in 1993 with his book "The Geography of Nowhere," a brilliant polemic of American automobile suburbia and how the United States' man-made landscape of tract housing, shopping malls, highway strips, and office parks littered the countryside with cartoon architecture and left our cities - especially old industrial metropolises like Detroit - as dead zones while turning us into an antisocial people.  He offered a bit of hope for the future and proposed that we were ready to move on from the egregious mistakes we made in building our nightmarish human habitat and the horrible effects on society that created, such as life revolving around television and the growth of the "pathological ghetto culture" (his words) in our cities that begat hip-hop.  His two follow-up books, 1996's "Home From Nowhere" and 2002's "The City In Mind," cast doubt on reason for hope despite the New Urbanist movement that advocated (note tense - the movement didn't last) traditionally designed neighborhoods and towns, and his 2005 book "The Long Emergency" and 2011's "Too Much Magic" went further in explaining how our overreliance on technology and insatiable appetite for fossil-fuel energy was leading to Armageddon.

Kunstler isn't writing about that so much on his blog anymore.  He's too busy defending - yes, defending - the Trump administration in its efforts to thwart impeachment and removal from office.  He's not a  Trump fan - he mockingly calls Trump the "Golden Golem of Greatness," and he thinks he's a buffoon - but he's angry at Democrats for trying to nullify his election to the Presidency, which he sees as legitimate, and he regularly attacks them as being part of the "Deep State" that's trying to subvert the will of the people in the 2016 election (54 percent of the electorate, including Kunstler himself, voted against Trump), as if the Democratic Party and the federal bureaucracy were trying to overthrow the elected government like the CIA tried to overthrow elected governments in Latin America.  He sees Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as being part of a cabal trying to restore control of Washington, and he sees the Mueller report and the impeachment process as part of this . . . when he isn't dismissing the New York Times and the Washington Post as organs of the state.

In other words, Kunstler has drunk the right-wing Kool-Aid that Trump's base has been sipping for years.  Some of his rage stems from his understandable and justifiable hatred of political correctness and the demonization of white men, but he seems to think that there's some sort of nefarious plot on behalf of female and non-white Americans to to try to create some sort of PC Utopia that will get not just Trump but all white guys out of the way.

One point Kunstler has still been making on occasion is that he thinks we're going to run out of oil any day now.  We'll more likely run out later than sooner, which is why so many people are investing in alternative, renewable energy sources, but Kunstler doesn't have faith in any of them to create a sustainable civilization based on present-day standards or even mid-century-modern (i.e., 1950s) standards, and he views electric cars, from Bolts and Volts to e-Golfs and Teslas, as a joke.  (Though Kunstler supports conventional passenger rail, he doesn't hold out hope for high-speed rail in America , arguing that the age of cheap energy has peaked and that it is too late to have here what Japan has had for half a century.)  Because of all this, Kunstler has gone into some sort of survivalist mode, preparing for an inevitable civil war where identity politics will lead to a multifaceted struggle pitting Americans of different races and ethnicities against each other and also pitting men and women against each other . . . which, again, he blames on Democrats.

What's shocking is what Kunstler is not saying.  He doesn't talk about the need to revitalize our cities and leave auto suburbia behind like he once did, and he doesn't talk all that much about solutions to our long-term energy needs like he used to.  He may still write on his blog about the inevitable end of fossil-fuel energy from time to time, but, given his disdain for solar power and fuel cells, doesn't offer ideas and solutions of his own so much now.  He's focusing virtually all of his attention on his hatred and paranoia on the governing class and how they won't accept Trump's election as fair and square.   I actually accepted Trump's election as fair and square - hey, Hillary blew it! - but I don't see some sort of wicked Democratic-Deep State plot to make their opponents suffer and pay for voting for Trump.  That's tin-foil-hat talk.  

James  Howard Kunstler has lost his interest in critiquing America's autocentric living pattern and its disregard for decency and culture.  He himself has taken an indecent turn on his own blog, spewing out the same Fox News-type vitriol that coarsens our culture.   He's not only lost his edge . . . he's lost his mind.

What a loss, indeed. :-(

I hope he enjoys his birthday today, but it seems like he isn't capable of enjoying much.

Grammys 2018: Who The Hell Cares?

So who are going to be the big winners at the Grammys tonight?  I don't give a twit.  The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) has moved to honor rap and hip-hop records to the point where it's no longer part of American popular music.  It is American popular music.

I can't stand it.  Everyone is talking about how "diverse" the Grammys have become, and how NARAS is catching up to the culture, and how acknowledging spoken-word rants set to computerized beats as art (indeed, as music!) is long overdue, and if this is indeed the future of American music, we might as well seal our ears right now.

Call me a bigot.  I don't care. I don't want to hear about how inner-city blacks created rap and hip-hop as a way to express themselves musically when arts and music programs in urban school systems were eliminated or pared back by budget cuts, and how that enriched the culture . . . I want to hear about how people are going to restore the music programs in the schools to get kids interested in playing music on real instruments and learning complicated chords and fingerings so they don't have to make sounds with turntables and laptops.   I want to hear how young people are going to be imbued with an appreciation for music that takes real skill and intense practice - classical, jazz, everything else - rather than excuses for creating a form of pop that is merely a high-tech equivalent of beating on pots and pans.

No, I'm not going to hear any of that, because so-called intellectuals are too busy studying hip-hop and trying to find some deeper, intellectual "meaning" to the phenomenon.  Harvard - Harvard - has actually taken the initiate to do just that.  The Hiphop Archive & Research Institute (yes, "Hiphop" as one word, capitalized!)  describes its mission as being "to facilitate and encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture and responsible leadership through Hiphop. We are uncompromising in our commitment to build and support intellectually challenging and innovative scholarship that both reflects the rigor and achievement of performance in Hiphop and transforms our thinking and our lives."

There's so much navel-gazing here, yet they can't see the disgusting lint in their midst.

You want an intellectual dissection of music made with dissected electronics?  How about this observation from cultural critic James Howard Kunstler, written in 2005 but as true now as it was then?  "Hip-hop has to be taken seriously because it is so pervasive," he wrote, "and it presents a range of compelling cultural meanings. The most threatening, of course, is its association with criminal behavior - the rhetoric of gangsterism, the glorification of gunplay and murder, and the grandiose imagery of unearned riches. Street mythology has it that hip-hop clothes, accessories, and lingo are extensions of jailhouse fashion. Less obvious is how much these childish conventions of manner - exaggerated clumsy body language, pants many times too large, hats worn sideways - infantilize their followers."

But, no one cares about that, because rap is still so lucrative after all these years, and of course there's big money to be made off it.  Only the narcissistic and the clueless, Kunstler tells us, could possibly welcome rap as "just another species of entertainment."

Some smug hip-hop fans are quite happy to see white male artists pretty much shut out for the Song Of the Year or Album of the Year, because they don't want more "diversity" (however, award NARAS points for Bruno Mars' nominations), which merely means wanting less of us - more to the point, they want nothing to do with us.  They want us completely out.  Although I'm sick of it, I have to get used to the fact that we male Caucasians are always viewed as the bad guys.  I know the lack of a tune.  We're the guys who ruined rock and roll after we stole it from black musicians and brought it over to England, we're the guys who overproduced, sanitized, and just plain ruined popular music, we're the ones whose best music is derivative and whose most original music is made up of pompous, turgid, interminable instrumentals played in gilded concert halls by ninety-piece orchestras, the guys whose most original pop is that corny cowboy music called country, or that annoying, self-important acoustic-guitar protest music played by guys like David Crosby and Tom Chapin, and whose music is so lame that we can't dance to it so we mime guitar playing to it.  We get it - you hate us!  You don't want us!  You're glad to see us go!  

Well, if rappers want to dominate the Grammys, they can have them.  If NARAS has no interest in white guys, well, I have no interest in them.  Keep your stupid awards.

Because usually when you do give the Album Of the Year Grammy to white guys, you give it to hacks like Toto anyway. :-p

"But Steve," you say, "wouldn't you agree that, thanks to hip-hop, today's popular music is more colorful and innovative than it was in the early eighties, when pop was dominated by awful bands like Toto?"  I never thought I'd say this, but when I hear some of today's popular music, I almost miss Toto.