I live in a liberal university town that is basically an island of blue voters surrounded by a sea of red voters. If you travel 30 minutes outside of town, you start to see these same trucks you spoke of with the "We the People" and "Don't Tread on Me" stencils quite a bit. A strange juxtaposition.
I agree with your reply to another comment that America is going to just slip into a long terminal decline rather than a great conflagration that many of these guys may fantasize about.
Very strange times we live in no doubt.
Glad to see you're still posting after moving from Medium. I hope you have more books in the works also.
I’ve seen them, too. Amusing fantasy, misdirected response to generalized anxiety, sad, maybe sometimes dangerous. Is it an art form, like unrefined kabuki? Street level gasoline power staged impromptu theatre?
It took the Roman Empire centuries to "die," or--more to the point--to diminish and transmogrify into several other things. The reason there will be no revolution, no civil war, none of that, begins with the 30-year mortgage and ends with the universal dependency on money. Things will get worse--capital has made sure of that--but everyone is on the grid. We're in this together, like it or not. What's on display with this kind of macho cosplay is a crisis in masculinity, not a general crisis. And our deeper crisis is spiritual.
57 . . . the age of my conversion 15 years ago. There won't be a Mad Max scenario (I wish we weren't so thoroughly formed by media representations). There will be something fare more gradual, to which we'll adapt piecemeal as bricoleurs. Look, I worked for some time as a permaculturist, so there are forms of what some might call "prepping" that I'm all about. But it has to do with reskilling and making exemplary islands where possible. There won't be some singular, catharto-apocalyptic crash (barring nuclear war, which would render everything moot), but a long, painful period of adaptation. In any case, no one survives (that's why none of this survival-IST stuff makes a lick of sense to me . . . is that the goal? Bare life? Then we're back to a decadent liberalism.)
I live in a liberal university town that is basically an island of blue voters surrounded by a sea of red voters. If you travel 30 minutes outside of town, you start to see these same trucks you spoke of with the "We the People" and "Don't Tread on Me" stencils quite a bit. A strange juxtaposition.
I agree with your reply to another comment that America is going to just slip into a long terminal decline rather than a great conflagration that many of these guys may fantasize about.
Very strange times we live in no doubt.
Glad to see you're still posting after moving from Medium. I hope you have more books in the works also.
I’ve seen them, too. Amusing fantasy, misdirected response to generalized anxiety, sad, maybe sometimes dangerous. Is it an art form, like unrefined kabuki? Street level gasoline power staged impromptu theatre?
It took the Roman Empire centuries to "die," or--more to the point--to diminish and transmogrify into several other things. The reason there will be no revolution, no civil war, none of that, begins with the 30-year mortgage and ends with the universal dependency on money. Things will get worse--capital has made sure of that--but everyone is on the grid. We're in this together, like it or not. What's on display with this kind of macho cosplay is a crisis in masculinity, not a general crisis. And our deeper crisis is spiritual.
57 . . . the age of my conversion 15 years ago. There won't be a Mad Max scenario (I wish we weren't so thoroughly formed by media representations). There will be something fare more gradual, to which we'll adapt piecemeal as bricoleurs. Look, I worked for some time as a permaculturist, so there are forms of what some might call "prepping" that I'm all about. But it has to do with reskilling and making exemplary islands where possible. There won't be some singular, catharto-apocalyptic crash (barring nuclear war, which would render everything moot), but a long, painful period of adaptation. In any case, no one survives (that's why none of this survival-IST stuff makes a lick of sense to me . . . is that the goal? Bare life? Then we're back to a decadent liberalism.)