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July
14
2018

Hope and Change Are At Hand
James Howard Kunstler

It seems unfair that the earnest polymath Elon Musk should go broke in the electric car business while Kylie Jenner becomes a billionaire at age 20 hawking lip gloss on Snapchat, but that’s how the American Dream rolls these late days of empire. Perhaps the lesson here, for all you MBA wannabes, is that Mr. Musk could switch his production facilities from cars to lip gloss. Of course, to successfully market his new line of cosmetics on social media, Elon might have to consider sexual “reassignment” surgery — unless he could persuade American men via Facebook and Twitter, that lip enhancement boosts male self-esteem almost as much as the purchase of a Ford F-450 pickup truck at a laughable fraction of the cost.

Which raises an interesting question: if President Donald Trump’s most winning personal feature is that magnificent golden hair-do, why doesn’t he (or his family) get out of the pain-in-the-ass hotel business, with all its construction and maintenance issues and dirty sheets, and just put out shampoo? He is obviously adept at Twitter marketing and surely scores high in global brand recognition.

Which raises any number of other major questions about the proper functioning of the US economy. For instance, millions of Americans, especially of Kylie J’s gen, are wasting their lives working dead-end minimum wage jobs manning (personing?) the nation’s fry-o-lator stations when they could start billion dollar cosmetic companies. After all, if you really want to be successful in this land of success stories, don’t you have to first look and feel successful? Perhaps that’s all you really need… forget all those pain-in-the-ass products with their vexing assembly-line, packing, and shipping problems. Just get America feeling great about itself, starting with the most important person in the room: YOU!

Only two things stand in the way: tattoos and blubber. At the rate our fellow citizens are adorning themselves with inky autobiographies, ever fewer will want to cover up their personal messaging with icky makeup. And the remorseless increase in body size implies a concomitant increase in available epidermal sites for said personal messaging — so maybe the tattoo industry ought to be the basis of the next American economy, not electric cars and journeys to Mars, or even lip gloss. Just think of all those empty brick-and-mortar retail spaces out there begging to become Ink Spots! I may be wrong about this, but I haven’t heard of any tattoo billionaires…yet. Who will dare to be first? (Yet another Kardashian?)

With oldest sibling Kim Kardashian-West considering a run for the White House in 2024 the nation can finally cast aside the bygone business model of a pain-in-the-ass manufacturing altogether and concentrate on the more important matters of personal grooming, branding, networking, and leveraging the unfulfilled wishes of the countless under-tattooed into an economy once again on-the-move! Imagine the effect that a President Kim K-W will have on the by-then ancient monster-of-the-east, Vladimir Putin, in their first summit meeting. We’ll have no more election trouble from those meddlesome Kremlin thugs. Maybe the pair will ride horses shirtless together in an amazing display of glasnost and international cooperation.

Don’t despair, readers, fellow Americans, and whoever else might be looking at this in the NSA back office. Hope and change are finally in the wind for real. Two hundred years of swinging pickaxes in the coal mines, sweating on the assembly line, and toiling on the loading dock are coming to an end. The singularity is almost at hand — and surprisingly not the one that Ray Kurzweil ordered. Who needs orgasmic polymorphic super-intelligence in all the parallel universes beyond the end of time when you can reach for brand supremacy here in this best of all possible worlds. Kylie J., you go girl!

New Paintings by JHK 2016 — 2017

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James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.

 

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