I begin to understand why the death of Ferguson, Mo, teen Michael Brown sent such shock waves through America last year. He truly symbolized our country: an overgrown, oafish, wannabe thug making one bad choice after another until his final, suicidal lurch against authority — followed by all the exculpatory lying on his behalf: the “gentle giant,” hands up, don’t shoot! This is exactly how America acts on the world stage these days. We are the Michael Brown among nations, high on exceptionalism, stoned on entitlement, swaggering moronically from one place to another grabbing what we feel like, smashing things up as we go.

Also, as in the case of the actual Michael Brown, supposedly sentient observers do not have the guts to call bullshit on all the excuses we make for ourselves. Has any self-styled presidential candidate made a peep about America’s idiotic campaign to make Ukraine the 51st state? Has Hillary (“It’s Her Turn”) Clinton asked publically why the US is egging on NATO to stage military exercises on the Russian border? Do we still have a senate Foreign Relations Committee, and does it convene once in a while? Is The New York Times so preoccupied with its “Gay Cities” index it forgot that the world is full of serious conflicts and hazards that extend beyond the choosing of apartment décor?

Likewise, there are obvious reasons why we’re so busy demonizing Vladimir Putin. He’s the only serious adult on a stage full of special ed students. When Vlad goes on vacation what does the American media do? It launches into raptures of speculation about his “love child” — because in this country any political leader foolish enough to step out of the spotlight for a few minutes will be gleefully unmasked as a “cheater,” a lothario (because, despite our ultra-pornified 24/7 twerk-o-rama culture, we apparently think sex is bad), so then the peanut gallery can enjoy the grotesque spectacle of apology and the inevitable punishment that follows despite any apologies. Vlad walked out of a winter Olympic venue fourteen months ago and said, simply, “I’m divorcing Lyudmila….” End of story. Oh, and Vlad also doesn’t subscribe to the current American notion that being homosexual is a major life achievement. That truly offends!

This also explains America’s obsession with cartoon superheros, and especially characters who enjoy high-tech prosthetics for projecting power — all those robo-soldiers and cops, and the fabulous American Sniper with his thousand yard kill-shot. Without all this magic we’d be revealed as weaklings, our vitality sapped by decades of Froot Loops, Cheez Doodles, and Pepsi, our brains shriveled by untold hours of conditioning by way of Grand Theft Auto, Dark Souls II, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. What do foreign leaders think when they have concluded their mystifying sessions with our Secretary of State, the haircut-in-search-of-a-brain, John Kerry. Do they look around the floor of their ministerial offices to see if any sawdust leaked out of his head?

Has anyone actually looked around and noticed what a scabrous sight American towns and cities present these days? There are places here in the old Yankee northeast that Borat would be ashamed to call home. We live amidst so much delaminating plastic it’s a wonder that virtually everybody doesn’t have cancer. The squalor is awesome, and to make matters worse, we’re even too lazy to clean up the stuff that is just lying around on the ground — and certainly too lazy to try to grow anything in that ground if it didn’t promise to grow up looking like a pepperoni stick or a corn dog.

America’s moment of getting kicked to the curb by other nations is at hand. I don’t think it will be a kinetic war, not right away, but it will be a hearty financial beat-down, and many of the members of our insane clown posse in Europe are going to feel the beat-down, too. America tried, at the very last moment, to join the new BRICs development bank. Who finally decided that? Barack Obama? John Kerry? Jack Lew: the Three Stooges? Get gold. If you can.

Note: JHK’s 2014 Garden Report is finally up

The new World Made By Hand novel

!! Is now available !!

“Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” — Booklist

My local indie booksellers… Battenkill Books (Autographed by the Author) … or Northshire Books…

or Amazon…

Also: Published as an E-book for the first time!

The 20th Anniversary edition

With an entertaining new introduction by the author

Bargain Price $3.99

Amazon Kindle …or … Barnes & Noble Nook …or… Kobo