America on vacation

No.. I am not referring to Bush's Asian (and earlier this summer European) jaunts... but to something that James Kuntsler, who often uses alarmist language and indulges in hyperbolic fear-mongering by taking problems to their logical and sometimes illogical extremes, wrote this week:

America is on vacation from its financial, fiscal, and economic problems, having left the centers of power in Wall Street and Washington for a Nantucket-of-the-mind, where, in a haze of artisanal vodka and bong smoke, it's out in the cool dune grass watching imaginary whalefishes blow, leaving only the TV Bubbleheads behind back home.

Alarmist and fear-mongering - Yes. But perhaps sometimes necessary to wake people out of their stupor?

Kuntsler is the author of the 2005 book The Long Emergency, in which he argues that declining oil production is likely to result in the end of industrialized society and force Americans to live in localized, agrarian communities! (Read an excerpt here.) He has also been an outspoken critic of suburbia and urban development trends in the US, writing:

The tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work [is] … a land full of places that are not worth caring about [and] will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.

More ranting about greedy developers and suburban developments some other time!