TO ALL: I just finished reading Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant. Holy Shit. If you have not yet seen this book, you MUST read it.
It was just recently published (June 2007) so it's quite current. I typed out an excerpt just to give you a bit of flavor from it:
"With inventories of unsold homes now increasing and appreciation rates flattening or decreasing, plus all the other peak oil / global warming shit hitting, I think we'll start to see major bankruptcies of lenders foundering with scads of unsellable housing stock on their books. And little tribes of squatters, gardeners and salvage artists moving from vacant house to vacant house. The McMansion folks with their unheatable foyers and 5,000-square-foot master suites and 'too big to mow, too small to plow' yards are at least as dependent on two whomp-ass incomes as Joe Sixpack is on the wifey's part-time gig driving a school bus. It won't be too long before we're dismantling those McM's for their copper and firewood and gardening those three-acre 'estate' lots like coolies".
And another:
"The overfed and overspent throng, distracted by the national hologram, hasn't a clue. Working mooks like Tom Henderson and mortgage hustlers like Mike cling to the notion that everything is going to be okay. Yessiree, these things have a way of working out. Science will come up with an answer. Global warming will turn out like the Y2K scare, and we will go motoring into the endless retail summer. These comforting assurances will be sustained by the corporate and political masters of the national hologram right up until the day our financial elites pack up their duds and head for their homes abroad. Contrary to popular belief, these homes are not usually located in storm-prone Caribbean islands alongside their secret tax-free bank accounts, which....hold more than $11.5 trillion -- an amount greater than the US national debt and equal to a third of the world's assets. The richest 400 Americans alone have $1.2 trillion in assets, with the rest distributed among 793 wealthy and powerful people. Of course, when the deal goes down, all hell is going to break loose in this country...."
Bageant and Kunstler were cut from the same cloth, and I got turned onto Bageant after reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which in essence is about class warfare in the USA. However, unlike Zinn's work, Bageant is decidedly IN....YOUR....FACE almost blog-style about it, and IMO it's a great read.
Try your local library (I did) or amazon.com |
