The question of Who Gets It Right is always vexing, and the search usually involves dabblings at the fringes of opinion, be it in realms of food, of music, of politics, of education or whatever. As a lifelong adventurer in interstices, such territory is pretty familiar to me. I’m probably a contrarian by preference, though I’m fairly closeted in terms of expressing my views to audiences who don’t already know (and, mostly, share…) my predilections.

One of the writers I seem to be in pretty close agreement with is Jim Kunstler, author of (among others) The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape and the recent novel World Made By Hand (which I haven’t read yet) and a lively blog. From the penultimate paragraph of today’s posting:

The only “change” that America really wants to hear about is evicting George Bush from the White House. They’re sick of him and all the disturbance he has caused in their financial affairs. But beyond that, the American public is deathly afraid of the kind of changes we actually face — such as, the end of consumer culture, the gross loss of value in suburban real estate (which forms the bulk of the middle class’s private wealth), the prospect of food and fuel scarcities, the need to re-localize our lives, the need to physically shape up to stop the costly and unnecessary drain on our medical resources, to grow more of our own food, to work harder at things that actually matter, and to save whatever we can for a difficult future.

The whole posting (couched as a list “Does Mr. O know?” that’s heavy on the subject of the prospects of oil) is surely worth reading, and should be filed in the Look Again in 6 Months file. That one is beginning to bulge… and might well be turned into a blog of its own, which would deliver stuff for re-reading at a later date. Wonder if there’s any software out there to facilitate such a service?