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August
29
2022

An Ill Wind
James Howard Kunstler

Something’s coming… everybody feels it…

Something ominously foul rides the late summer breeze as our country, and Western Civ with it, tilts into the season of growing darkness. Can you sense it? Death is in the air, and not in the usual Halloween vaudeville mode, either, with the cackling lawn zombies and top-hatted, tap-dancing skeletons. This ain’t no foolin’ around.

We have never been so unprepared for a calamity in plain sight and that is because the people who run things have made it happen in combined acts of wickedness and stupidity. After decades of mere racketeering, arranging things so as to bankrupt anyone who gets seriously ill, corporatized health care now presides over a harvest of medically-induced death, pretending dumbly that there is nothing to see.

Get this: the people are seeing it now, and talking about it, and there will be no stopping their discovery of exactly what has gone on, or their wrath in the afterwash. The chief architect of this epic debacle, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Captain Queeg of American Public Health, has announced his exit from the scene “to pursue the next chapter of my career.” He was coy about what that might be. I think the job title is: defendant. It will be a milestone in human history to witness The Science itself go on trial, should it live long enough. What awaits to take its place? Viziers with wands and pointed hats? Crones riding broomsticks against a cold, lifeless moon? A principality of dark magic? Descent into the underworld?

The medically-induced termination of life at large scale accompanies the current effort to provoke the suicide of culture and nationhood — more orchestrated depravity and folly. Institutions are turned against us like flame-throwers. The FBI might break down your door next in its quest to suppress dissent. The composers of official mind-fuckery never sleep, assuring that you will not know which end of anything is up. Your purblind legislators just set 87,000 new IRS agents on your asses, as if that was any sort of a good idea. The courts exist to protect The Party, but which party? (What does it matter, at this point? quoth Hillary Clinton.) Take your pissant complaints about those alleged constitutional rights someplace else, like Twitter and Facebook, where they can be expunged as soon as you hit the “post” button. You’ll be dead soon, anyway.

We’ve heard ad nauseam that the Washington DC insiders, the denizens of that demi-mythic Deep State in the wealthiest metro area of all the land, look down on the rest of America. Why is that? I’ll tell you. Because the DC confederacy of grifters has gotten fat off your suffering as they have systematically wrecked and looted that rest of America, the sinking middle-class. They are living in fabulous comfort off your bamboozlement and ruin. Their contempt for you grows on your tragic breakdown like fungus on a once-mighty fallen tree. They prevailed in this world and you didn’t. You chumps are in Palookaville on your way to the bone orchard, and therefore they are better than you, ha ha ha.

There is another side of this life, in case all that has got you demoralized. That is the side where human beings say things that comport with reality, where people mean what they say and use language as if it evolved to describe things and doings with some exactitude — as in this is this and that is that… and not the inverse or opposite. That is the side of life where pretending is not the highest-and-best use of human intelligence. I know, these days it’s hard to imagine that side of life, but it’s actually still there, waiting to be reanimated.

The regime that has turned our world inside out in its Satanic pursuit of comfort and power will be stripped naked and judged, if not by official judges, then by an unstoppable consensus. The sore-beset public will take an inventory of what has been lost and begin reconstructing a scaffold of shared life that rewards fidelity to the way things actually work. It will be a rough passage out of what amounts to a hostage crisis. There will be friction and heat. You will not be comfortable, but you will be dauntless. You will certainly not have nothing or be happy about that. You will have, at least, a restored memory of what it was like to strive honorably for a life worth living.

We’re in the crucible of all that just now, where everything is white hot. Do not bend or melt. Soldier through. Be men and be women (there is truly nothing in-between, and do not fall for faithless inducements to doubt that). You are brothers and sisters in an enterprise worth saving and you have a history worth defending. Believe it.




 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

kunstler.com

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