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December
15
2018

Sleepwalkers Awoke!
James Howard Kunstler

Andrew Sullivan called it “the Great Awokening” in a shrewd New York Magazine column this week. He refers, off course, to earlier episodes of American religious hysteria, namely the Great Awakening of the 1730s that featured the Rev. Jonathan Edwards raining sulfur and brimstone down on guilt-wracked New Englanders, and then the Second Awakening of the the early 1800s that spun off innumerable Protestant sects, cults, and utopian experiments. I like the term “Wokesterism” because the “ism” part acknowledges that the current hysteria makes a religion out of politics.

Sullivan’s theory is that Wokesterism is an improvised replacement for sclerotic American Christianity, to fill the vacuum of entropic meaninglessness that pervades life in the republic these days. He says:

And so we’re mistaken if we believe that the collapse of Christianity in America has led to a decline in religion. It has merely led to religious impulses being expressed by political cults. Like almost all new cultish impulses, they see no boundary between politics and their religion.

Wokesterism eerily mirrors many of the harsher practices of the most severe American Protestantism. It offers its own original sin, “white privilege,” from which there is neither redemption nor hope of redemption — like the old Presbyterian hell for babies who have come into this world drenched in sin. No amount of abject apology will avail for heretics to Wokesterism. The principal aims of Wokesterism are coercion of others, persecution, and punishment of the guilty (the un-Woke). Most importantly, it requires the suspension of individual conscience in order to promote unthinking, robotic obedience and mob justice. That helps explain the disgraceful blindness of the Wokester Left, especially the educated elites who work in the news media, the computer tech sector, and other “creative class” vocations.

One thing that Sullivan leaves out is the necessity for the Devil. That role is filled by Mr. Trump. His sinister cargo of belief, countering the Wokefullness of unicorns and rainbows, is the dark theology of MAGA, and Mr. Trump’s followers are the imps, demons, incubi and succubi of deplorable fly-over land. Wokesters will spare no effort to vanquish all this wickedness, and even lying and cheating in the service of that end is considered fair play. Hence the arrant and epic dishonesty of The New York Times.

Interesting case in point: Yesterday’s developments in the General Flynn court case are not even present in this morning’s Times. I speak of the action on the bench of Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan. It’s been brought to his attention that the scurrilous entrapment of Gen. Flynn by Woke FBI managers entailed departures from normal, lawful procedure. Gen. Flynn was interrogated in January of 2017, and the FBI account of the interview was not written (supposedly) until August of that year. Reports and memoranda must be written ASAP after an interview for the obvious reason that much important fact may be forgotten or misremembered if not documented right away. There is actually reason to believe that earlier versions of the report exist (or did exist), and they were trashed or buried when the main interrogator-of-Flynn, Peter Strzok, was cashiered from Robert Mueller’s team in July 2017. Judge Sullivan has demanded that the FBI produce those earlier docs by today (Friday) at 3:00 pm. It will be interesting to see if the FBI complies… or not. There is also a fair chance that Judge Sullivan will throw out Gen. Flynn’s conviction based on prosecutorial misconduct.

In the event, we could see the awesome downfall of the Archangel Mueller, and the unravelling of Wokester dreams of defeating the Devil via the Mueller inquisition. It will certainly be an embarrassment to the ardent Wokesters of the news media, who have shilled for this campaign for over two years. The General Flynn business is not the only thread unwinding in the giant tapestry of Wokester narrative. As in other epic persecutions, like the Jacobin Reign of Terror in 1790s France, and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, the tables are turning. The inquisitors, prosecutors, and executioners are going too face charges themselves, and harsh punishment is not out of the question.

The defeat of Wokesterism would be a very salutary outcome for a nation that has so badly lost its bearings to the worst of human instincts: religious persecution. It could be a fatal blow to the Democratic Party, which will have to find an alternative reason for its existence than Devil-and-Demon hunting. The Devil hunters themselves could be in the dock in 2019, answering for their actual crimes against American citizens and the public interest. Even the sainted Holy Mother of Wokesterism, the Archangel Hillary, may find herself wingless in a witness chair, answering how all that schwag from Russian banksters happened to end up in her foundation’s cookie jar.

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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