Kunstler, Long Emergency, "gender confusion"

It's been a couple of weeks since I checked in with James Howard Kunstler's site. He's got some new stuff up. Here's an excerpt of an interview he did with the Russell Kirk Center's University Bookman:

3. What is your opinion of the legacy of the baby boomers? Will they be remembered as a generation that brought idealism to public life again, or a generation that could not see beyond its own interests in light of the looming oil problem?

The boomers managed to degrade all the standards and norms of behavior necessary to keep our civilization going, and to respond to changing circumstances effectively. A simple example is Boomer finance. Boomer lending practices, especially in the realm of mortgages, has led to a credit fiasco so exorbitant that it may destroy the legitimacy of capital as a general proposition far into the future (the way the "Mississippi Bubble" discredited banking in France for more than a century). Boomer greed and narcissism has led us into an economy based on the expectation of unearned riches. I agree with the authors Strauss and Howe who say, in their excellent book, The Fourth Turning, that Boomers will be harshly punished in their old age by their children and grandchildren by the withdrawal of support. I hasten to add that the pre-Boomer generation (my parents' generation) was just as bad, though in a different way--they thought they deserved to live in a technological heaven-on-earth as a reward for having fought and survived the Second World War.

4. Is there any political figure you see who recognizes or is addressing the natural resource problem?

Well, Al Gore is an obvious choice, but more for his very public campaign about climate change, which is the flip side of the resource problem. The rest of the scene is sort of like the 1850s--you have two major parties (back then, the Whigs and Democrats) losing legitimacy and credibility, and the whole nation paralyzed over the issue of slavery. Today it's a paralysis over looming fossil fuel scarcities and the flip side of climate change. Both the Republicans and Democrats are preoccupied with idiotic distractions like the issues arising out of gender confusion. I'm a dissatisfied registered Democrat. I would like to see my party become less preoccupied with homosexual issues and more active on restoring the U.S. passenger rail system. The time has come for those suffering from gender confusion to take their problems out of the political arena and work them out in private. The Republicans, on the other hand, face even more acute problems regarding loss-of-legitimacy as a result of the Iraq war fiasco and the impressive body of scandal generated by its members the past decade. We're in for some big political changes, in my opinion, but my crystal ball is pretty cloudy for the moment.

And, as ever, his "Cluster**ck Nation Chronicle" available on his site's main page is a real rip. Excerpt from the latest:

What's happening is that American society is sliding into a greater depression than the one Grandma lived through. On the technical side, there has been unending controversy as to whether we're gripped by inflation or deflation. It's certainly deceptive. Food and gasoline prices are rising faster than the rivers of Iowa. But the prices of assets, like houses, stocks, jet-skis, GMC Yukons and pre-owned Hummel figurines are cratering as America turns into Yard Sale Nation.

We're a very different country than we were in 1932. In that earlier crisis of capital, few people had any money but our society still possessed fantastic resources. We had plenty of everything that our land could provide: a treasure trove of mineral ores and the equipment to refine it all, a wealth of oil and gas still in the ground, and all the rigs needed to get at it, manpower galore (and of a highly disciplined, regimented kind), with fine-tuned factories waiting for orders. We had a railroad system that was the envy of the world and millions of family farms (even despite the dust bowl) owned by people who retained age-old skills not yet degraded by agribusiness. We had fully-functional cities with operating waterfronts and ten thousand small towns with local economies, local newspapers, and local culture.

... Our debt problems today are of a magnitude so extreme that astronomers would be hard pressed to calculate them.

For people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.