James Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere (previously quoted elsewhere on this blog) has a blog of sorts.
“Of sorts,” because it has none of the easy navigation or granularity typically associated with blogs (much less the links, blogroll, etc.); if you want to adhere to the author’s intent, it’s probably best to do away with analogy and just say that it’s called The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle.
If The Geography of Nowhere‘s any indication of typical, the aforementioned TCNC is typically gloomy, cynical, and darkly funny.
The following is a snippet:
I was in Dallas two weeks ago, a wilderness of eight-lane freeways and sodium vapor lamps. I had to remind myself that this is how most Americans live. The so-called “city” was a product of the late 20th century cheap oil fiesta. If you live there, driving is mandatory, and lots of it, over heroic distances. It took me half an hour (and forty bucks) to get across just the north side of the sprawling town to the airport at five-thirty in the morning when the traffic was still light. This is exactly the kind of place that is going to be in deep trouble over the next four years. There are scores of places like it all over America. The people who live in them will be full of consternation and gall when their chosen living arrangement begins to fail them. They will blame whoever is sitting in the oval office.
“Why didn’t you tell us something awful was going to happen?”
“Why didn’t you ask?”
The main pretension of the Presidential campaigns is the idea that the next President will have any ability to control the events that will most determine how we live in this country. The federal government is likely to become more impotent and therefore increasingly irrelevent.
“Why didn’t you do something?”
“We didn’t want to upset you.”
What was the “truth” about the American condition in 2004? The truth was that we had made some bad choices about how we live and that events would soon compel us to change drastically whether we liked it or not. Nobody wanted to hear that, and no political leader dared say it.
(Clusterfuck Nation by James Howard Kunstler; …and about the “navigation” thing… if you want to read previous entries, you ought to go straight to the archives )