Middle class angst: The politics of lemmings, part 2

…The deepest fear in suburbia, never spoken aloud, is that when this epoch unravels, Suburbia’s citizens quite simply will not know how to survive. Even the veterans of war who withdraw back into these spaces are largely incapable of the most basic skills that will be required in a non-technocratic world: building healthy soil, making food, collecting potable water, basic medicine . . . seed-saving, canning, pickling and fermenting . . . all lost; and so Suburbia will fight tooth and nail for its “entitlement to the entropo-technocratic life-support system, even as that system withers away.

Instead, our masculinized version of any post-collapse — which we have compartmentalized into a “fantasy” that cannot be touched by our day-to-day — is what we have borrowed from direct and vicarious experience of the military . . . a Mad Maxish world of roaming armed conflict. This will never happen.

The real choice that Suburbia will face is one between fascism or self-sufficiency, which is a choice — as well — between spiritual death or spiritual renewal.

The political identity of Suburbia that grew out of the spatial re-coding of white supremacy as sui generis . . . class, itself re-coded as meritocracy . . . expressed as the strip mall, the homeowners association, and the PTA.

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