James Howard Kunstler: another elitist dickweed with a publishing career

James Howard Kunstler has built a career out of criticizing our built environment and our over-dependence on fossil fuels. As a concerned environmentalist, and as someone who thinks that suburbia is generally pretty fucked-up and disturbing on many levels, I am generally down with his main arguments. I actually mostly enjoyed The Geography of Nowhere. Then I read his new novel, World Made by Hand.

Kunstler really is a good writer, but I believe he spent more time imagining the buildings of a post-apocalyptic society than he did the plot and characters. He describes every building in the book with flowery architect-speak that most readers are likely unfamiliar with. I am pretty sure nobody struggling to survive would have time to give a damn about cupolas, pergolas, and balustrades. The author is constantly injecting architectural criticisms into his characters' thoughts and words. Scrounging for food after the fall of Western society would probably preclude having the fucking free time to give a damn about whether all that twentieth-century vinyl siding looked tacky or not. And here is the crux of Kunstler's worldview: tackiness is a God-awful moral sin. There appears to be nothing he hates worse; he places it around murder and rape in the moral order of the book.

Needless to say, here at The Magical World of White Trash Insurgency we oppose that view. On political, aesthetic, cultural,and general grounds.

Kunstler's treatment of existent social hegemonies was also pretty fucked: women are portrayed as passive and dependant, racial diversity is a threat, and working-class people - and their culture - are despicable and villainous. JHK comes across pretty chauvinist, envisioning a post-collapse future where comfortably educated and upper middle class white men are still somehow in charge of everything. Presumably, their wise leadership is the only thing keeping dangerous social misfits from running amok. The book is shot through with flagrant stereotypes - including a hellish trailer park, murderous ex-bikers, and a cultish evangelical sect from the South. (He actually uses the term misfits at one point to describe the trailer park folk!) In the characters' dialogue Kunstler has the bad guys speaking with broken grammar and awkwardly-handled colloquialisms. Arguably, his intent is to use such as signifiers of Otherness and danger. I got the feeling Kunstler hasn't spent much time around people who actually speak that way, nor would he feel comfortable doing so. He lumps a bunch of social signifiers of blue-collar culture together with moral degeneracy and violence. In JHK's future-scenario the NASCAR fans, Harley men, truck drivers, roofers, heavy metal fans, and outdoor enthusiasts have degenerated into a bunch of antisocial psychopaths threatening the narrator's community. Kunstler also apparently really hates the lower strata of American popular music. The evil trailer park gang subjects two main characters to bad renditions of Nirvana and Metallica songs as the intro to a gruesome public torturing. The only music he seems to condone is Kingston-Trio-style folk revival songs, removed of course from their original proletarian contexts and sanitized in the hands of professional-men-turned-farmers.

And finally, I am really not convinced that after an apocalypse the former the P.R. executives, lawyers, doctors, and real estate agents Kunstler intends readers to identify with would be better equipped to grow their own food and salvage for life's necessaries than the less affluent that his book casts as apishly-portrayed bad guys.

Fuck this book.