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Page added on October 12, 2015
Kunstler: Bang, You’re Dead
Apropos of the recent Roseburg, Oregon, school massacre that left nine dead, President Obama said, “we’re going to have to come together and stop these things from happening.” That’s an understandable sentiment, and the president has to say something, after all. But within the context of how life is lived in this country these days, we’re not going to stop these things from happening.
And what is that context? A nation physically arranged on-the-ground to produce maximum loneliness, arranged economically to produce maximum anxiety, and disposed socially to produce maximum alienation. Really, everything in the once vaunted American way of life slouches in the direction of depression, rage, violence, and death.
This begs the question about guns. I believe it should be harder to buy guns. I believe certain weapons-of-war, such as assault rifles, should not be sold in the civilian market. But I also believe that the evolution of our Deep State — the collusion of a corrupt corporate oligarchy with an overbearing police and surveillance apparatus — is such a threat to liberty and decency that the public needs to be armed in defense of it. The Deep State needs to worry about the citizens it is fucking with.
The laws on gun sales range from ridiculously lax in many states to onerous in a few. Yet the most stringent, Connecticut, (rated “A” by the Brady Campaign org), was the site of the most horrific massacre of recent times so far, the 2012 Sandy Hook School shooting. The handgun law in New York City is the most extreme in the nation — limiting possession only to police and a few other very special categories of citizens. But it took the “stop-and-frisk” policy to really shake the weapons out of the gang-banging demographic. And now that Mayor Bill deBlasio has deemed that “racist,” gang-banging murders are going up again.
Which leads to a consideration that there is already such a fantastic arsenal of weapons loose in this country that attempts to regulate them would be an exercise in futility — it would only stimulate brisker underground trafficking in the existing supply.
What concerns me more than the gun issue per se is the extraordinary violence-saturated, pornified culture of young men driven crazy by failure, loneliness, grievance, and anger. More and more, there are no parameters for the normal expression of masculine behavior in America — for instance, taking pride in doing something well, or becoming a good candidate for marriage. The lower classes have almost no vocational domain for the normal enactments of manhood, and one of the few left is the army, where they are overtly trained to be killers.
Much of what used to be the working class is now an idle class that can only dream of what it means to be a man and they are bombarded with the most sordid pre-packaged media dreams in the form of video games based on homicide, the narcissistic power fantasies of movies, TV, and professional sports, and the frustrating tauntings of free porn. The last thing they’re able to do is form families. All of this operates in conditions where there are no normal models of male authority, especially fathers and bosses, to regulate the impulse control of young men — and teach them to regulate it themselves.
The physical setting of American life composed of a failing suburban sprawl pattern for daily life — the perfect set-up for making community impossible — obliterates the secondary layer of socialization beyond the family. This is life in the strip-mall wilderness of our country, which has gotten to be most of where people live. Imagine a society without families and real communities and wave your flag over that.
President Obama and whatever else passes for authority in America these days won’t even talk about that. They don’t have a vocabulary for it. They don’t understand how it works and what it’s doing to the nation. Many of the parts and modules of it make up what’s left of our foundering economy: junk food, pointless and endless motoring, television. We’re not going to do anything about it. The killing and the mayhem will continue through the process of economic collapse that we have entered. And when we reach the destination of all that, probably something medieval or feudal in make-up, it will be possible once again for boys to develop into men instead of monsters.
34 Comments on "Kunstler: Bang, You’re Dead"
ghung on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 1:14 pm
Kunstler ;“But I also believe that the evolution of our Deep State — the collusion of a corrupt corporate oligarchy with an overbearing police and surveillance apparatus — is such a threat to liberty and decency that the public needs to be armed in defense of it. The Deep State needs to worry about the citizens it is fucking with.”
Here, here! God help the US, especially my part of the country, if martial law is ever invoked.
Pennsyguy on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 1:55 pm
“The deep state needs to worry—.” I doubt if the U.S. military, with its tanks, drones, B-52s, Howitzers, et al. is afraid of overweight gun owners. The U.S. Marines vs. American gun owners? I’ll bet on the Marines, or the 101st Airborne, First Infantry Division, etc. That’s the only part of JHK”s work I disagree with.
Rita on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 2:04 pm
In 50 years during communism we don’t remember to have had a single gun victim in our cities in Albania. There must have been more gun victims in the USA than from Stalin during the Soviet Union (after the war). The gun industry lobby is the american Stalin.
NotALiberal on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 4:47 pm
“The laws on gun sales range from ridiculously lax in many states to onerous in a few. Yet the most stringent, Connecticut, (rated “A” by the Brady Campaign org), was the site of the most horrific massacre of recent times so far, the 2012 Sandy Hook School shooting.”
Ey, never let a good tragedy go to waste, isn’t that right liberals?
“taking pride in doing something well, or becoming a good candidate for marriage”
1) No, generally we still take pride in people’s accomplishments, and enjoy people with talent.
2) Thank feminism for destroying marriage
“The last thing they’re able to do is form families. All of this operates in conditions where there are no normal models of male authority, especially fathers and bosses, to regulate the impulse control of young men — and teach them to regulate it themselves.”
Liberal mindset:
1) Destroy marriage
2) Destroy all healthy forms of masculinity
3) ????
4) Blame society for causing men to not be men.
America has a lot of problems, they are an for the most part a weak and undisciplined nation of effeminate whiners. I started my own business online with $10, these people are fucking clowns. They can talk and talk and talk but unless they give a meaningful solution, or hell say anything new, they should shut their fucking mouths.
Rodster on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 5:07 pm
“Liberal mindset:
1) Destroy marriage
2) Destroy all healthy forms of masculinity
3) ????
4) Blame society for causing men to not be men.
America has a lot of problems, they are an for the most part a weak and undisciplined nation of effeminate whiners. I started my own business online with $10, these people are fucking clowns. They can talk and talk and talk but unless they give a meaningful solution, or hell say anything new, they should shut their fucking mouths.”
I totally agree with the above. In fact I left a similar comment on his site and it started a feeding frenzy of comments such as it all started with Reagan (started with Pres Johnson) including that I must be poor (that one is funny because I live on an island 3 blocks from the beach) and a lefty (another funny as I don’t support either party) or that I deserve for voting for losers. And yet it pretty much all started in the 1960’s with the Great Society and the feminist movement. The Govt also began removing God from the schools.
green_achers on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 5:22 pm
The “deep state” does not, and will not ever have a reason to fear Bubba’s guns. No one with a significant position in the “deep state” will ever face Bubba’s guns. They will send some poor working-class schmuck, probably Bubba’s cousin.
apneaman on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 5:24 pm
NotALiberal, No one gives a shit about your meaningless business or common life antidotes. What kind of world class indoctrinated loser goes around bragging up their reverse identity? Look everyone, Look at me, I’m special because I am not this or not that? Only the most insecure identify themselves by what they are not. Like all political creatures you probably have spent your whole life regurgitating Daddy’s hate filled rants and pseudo philosophy – never an original thought. Just parroting party/think tank lines and memes like a good little unthinking soldier. No one is weaker than those who fall for prefabricated belief systems because it makes them feel superior. What is your solution superstar? I’m guessing it has to do with adopting your beliefs. Ever consider that there are no solutions? Past the point of no return, like all the dead civilizations that have come and gone. When you have a bunch of groups within a society- liberals, conservatives, libertarians who are 100% certain that their views and only their views are the only ones that count and there can be no compromise, that indicates that the society is almost spent. The entire species is almost spent and I doubt apes will see another century.
GregT on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 5:41 pm
“The physical setting of American life composed of a failing suburban sprawl pattern for daily life — the perfect set-up for making community impossible — obliterates the secondary layer of socialization beyond the family. This is life in the strip-mall wilderness of our country, which has gotten to be most of where people live. Imagine a society without families and real communities and wave your flag over that.”
Enough of the American exceptionalism James. We Canadians may not be there yet, but we are doing our best to catch up. Give us some slack man.
idontknowmyself on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 6:10 pm
Google MGTOW or search for MGTOW on youtube. Some young man are actually bailing out of this society because this social arrangement of worshipping everything that is feminine does not appel to them. These young man want to see this system to collapse. There is no real number about them so it is difficult to quantify them. Westerns culture has completely abandoned young man and only care about women. We have complete matriarchal form of governance in western countries where women needs and desires come before everything.
Cloud9 on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 6:51 pm
Chairman Mao said it best. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Framers of the Constitution knew this very well. An armed man has a choice. A disarmed man has his choices made for him. We on this board have been watching the decline of oil reserves and the ever increasing costs of extraction. In our gut many of us feel that at some point we are going to reach Liebig’s Law of the Minimum and we will be in the middle of systemic collapse.
The general populace senses the sea change that is taking place. The zeitgeist of the country is a feeling of angst. This is what is driving arms sales. Americans have bought enough guns and ammunition to outfit an army of 50,000 men every two days for most of the last seven years.
The suspension of the Constitution and the assumption by the executive of the powers of life and death in the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act have alarmed some folks.
Within the gun owning public more and more people are reading Soltzhenitsyen’s Quote of how we burned in the camps. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/34738-and-how-we-burned-in-the-camps-later-thinking-what
Many of them subscribe to the metric that defined the Revolution and believe that one third of the population will actively resist any effort to disarm them. Of that third it is a fair estimate that three percent of that population will kill anyone who kicks their door in. A serious effort at confiscation would spark a civil war.
If sales ended tomorrow viable fire arms will still be in the hands of the populace a hundred years from now. I shoot a trap door Springfield that is 120 years old. It fires a black powder round that I make that will kill anything that walks on this planet. It is reasonably accurate out to 270 yards. The Army did tests on it in the 19th century and hit targets two miles out.
Ammunition if properly stored has a shelf life of half a century. I recently shot my dad’s Police Special using ammunition he bought back in the early sixties.
After watching the collapse of the New Orleans Police Department during Katrina, most thinking people have come to the conclusion that we are pretty much on our own.
Nobody wants to be on The Road with just two rounds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQS0fRIuFeA
onlooker on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 6:56 pm
I can only say damm can we just for once stop thinking that someone(s) are out to do us harm and we must defend ourselves. Can we simply just drop the guns and all our damm military and just live in peace. I suppose not. People are just too afraid, afraid of death, afraid of others etc.
Boat on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 6:58 pm
Ya’ll are over blowing the issue. Right or wrong guns are considered a birthright like Christmas,the 4th of July and owning a pet. We will accept the negatives of owning guns to keep them.
Cloud9 on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 7:19 pm
Onlooker, for a decade I worked as a classification officer for the Florida Department of Corrections. Once a year I had to bring up my inmates for parole consideration. Once a year I reread their presentence investigations. One guy still comes to mind. He liked to murder and rape little girls just as they were going through the change. Finally when he realized I was never going to recommend him for parole, we took off our social masks. I asked him one day, Herbert Lee why did you kill those little girls before you raped them. He said, I did not like to hear them bitch.”
The devil walks among us bud. He looks just like you and me. He has an easy smile and a firm hand shake and he will kill you for a pack of cigarettes.
Thank your God that you have not met the people I have met. Have a good night.
Davy on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 7:25 pm
Gun control in the U.S. Is a done deal meaning it is done. That horse left the barn and is in the next pasture.
I rarely shoot a gun anymore. I don’t hunt anything and won’t until it is needed for survival. It is a karma thing. Animals know I come in peace.
I am very well armed and a great shot. My guns and ammo are stashed along with other prep assets. As long as this country is crawling with idiots and many of them armed I am armed.
Davy on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 7:40 pm
Onlooker, bad blood must purge bad blood. Peace and understanding will play second fiddle to war pigs and their war games. It is possible a bad event with plenty of repercussions at home and abroad will focus enough sheeples. Hunger has a way of focusing attentions or making men mad. Hunger is the handmaiden of war.
apneaman on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 8:51 pm
Cloud9, we had a guy like that terrorizing BC when I was a kid. Clifford Robert Olson. It’s why I have always been a death penalty proponent for the most extreme cases. Not for deterrence, that’s a joke. You cannot deter abominations. No, I figure that maybe some little girls and boys might sleep better, might have a few less nightmares knowing that we still kill the monsters once in awhile. I think that’s worth it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Olson
makati1 on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 9:20 pm
“A nation physically arranged on-the-ground to produce maximum loneliness, arranged economically to produce maximum anxiety, and disposed socially to produce maximum alienation. Really, everything in the once vaunted American way of life slouches in the direction of depression, rage, violence, and death.” JHK
Well said.
Truth Has A Liberal Bias on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 9:42 pm
As long as you have the NRA defending the rights of people with Aspergers Syndrome to buy guns you’ll have mass shootings. A guy one day out from the mental asylum can buy a gun at a gun show with no background check due to the gun show loop hole. The president of the NRA makes a lot of money, it’s in his interest to keep the guns flowing. Background checks are a valid and rational policy but the NRA will fight it tooth and nail and retarded Americans will throw money at the NRA in the form of membership purchases to help them do it. There is one bright side though to the high prevelance of mass shootings in America. Less Americans.
makati1 on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 10:11 pm
Truth, if you throw in all murders, highway deaths, obesity and drug overdoses, you get a significant number that keeps the population down. A plus as I see it.
In the middle on Mon, 12th Oct 2015 11:22 pm
One of many problems with the idea of gun control is how relatively easy it is to manufacture, even mass produce a fully automatic handgun with a cheap Chinese 3 axis lathe or combination of a mill and a simple $1000 lathe. Using common tool steel as the barrel ground to an od on the lathe and composite materials for most else. A state of the art hand gun or even rifle can easily be reverse engineered by someone with only little experience in machining and cad software where the cost is negligible. 3d software and technology make it even easier. Do you see the problem here gentlemen? If you take the guns away from good citizens, like it happened in Roseburg and Columbine and, and…. only the criminals had the guns. Germany 1940, Syria today, America tomorrow.
GregT on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 3:37 am
In the middle,
The biggest problem with gun control is that it doesn’t address the real problem. The real problem is human beings. If there were no guns, we would be having the same debate over sticks and stones control, or fist control. I agree with you completely. Taking away peoples’ rights to defend themselves from those that wish to do others harm, makes absolutely no sense. Unfortunately we are surrounded by people that believe that the state will take care of them, and protect them. Those people have a very rude awakening coming their way.
charmcitysking on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 5:56 am
“This begs the question about guns. I believe it should be harder to buy guns. I believe certain weapons-of-war, such as assault rifles, should not be sold in the civilian market. But I also believe that the evolution of our Deep State — the collusion of a corrupt corporate oligarchy with an overbearing police and surveillance apparatus — is such a threat to liberty and decency that the public needs to be armed in defense of it. The Deep State needs to worry about the citizens it is fucking with.”
—————
A complete homerun. Brilliant.
Davy on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 6:28 am
Charm, and all the others, forget all the happiness on civil liberties and rights. That is all going out the window when food and fuel become rationed and society breaks down as we know it. You guys want answer to gun control and there are none. You want to bitch about murders and death but that will be the new reality of descent while we have an order of magnitude too many people. Forget your bitching about the police state and surveillance. Start worrying about hunger and how you can take care of yourself and your family. You all are crying over spilled milk. You are whining about democracy that is dead. It died long ago. All we are doing now is going through the motions of a dead man walking. Many of us here are going to die much younger than we expect. All those pretty notions of prosperity and the security of retirement are fantasy. Wake up and get a backbone. Face reality like a man before it is too late. This will require action and tough action the weak are going to be chewed up in this machinery of collapse.
Davy on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 6:34 am
Not true with liberal doses of dumbass I look forward to when your Montreal is overrun by Americans with guns and they rape and kill you and your neighbors. Yes, not true with liberal doses of dumbass you can be raped too and very violently. How is that fuck wack? Two can play the game of death lust you moron. If you notice I do not comment on your comments when you are responsible if you want to wish my death have at it but I want you to suffer and die too.
Davy on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 6:42 am
Dog Paw did you read what BC said in his comment from “Peak oil Crisis When”? This is what he said:
“What will surprise most now and hereafter will be how precariously close to widespread food and utilization insecurity are parts of Eastern Europe, China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.”
You do realize a country with 100Mil in the space of the state of Arizona is going to be an awful place when food security breaks down. Your death lust for Americans is fine. You regurgitate it daily. Here is what I hope for you. I hope you get stuck in your Manila, an urban area with 20Mil too many people and you are starved to death. If you make it to your dumbass jungle farm I hope it is overrun by the locust of people leaving Manila to forage on such places. In fact I hope some young Philippine boys come along and hack you up for stew meat.
If you and not true with liberal doses of dumbass want Americans dead fine. You have that right but I also wish you dead and horribly.
Cloud9 on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 6:58 am
It is estimated that we would lose 90 percent of our population within the first year if the grid went down. NASA gives us a chance of 12 percent for that eventuality resulting from a massive solar flair. http://www.wired.com/2012/02/massive-solar-flare/
Factor in the potential for nuclear war and social unrest and the risk of grid collapse is even higher.
How exactly do you imagine that population reduction will take place? Do you suspect that we will all sit around campfires singing kumbaya while we gently starve to death? What would a man do to feed his starving children? What would you do to hang on to your last can of Spam? How many will turn to cannibalism? If you do not think guns factor into this chaos you are not paying attention.
Do some research on the Great Famine of 1315.
Davy on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 7:21 am
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-ungoverned-world/
shortonoil on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 1:29 pm
“Do some research on the Great Famine of 1315.”
“The terror of Europe in those early years was famine. Hallam records that in the seventy three years of Hugh Capet and his two successors, forty eight years of famine and that from 1015 to 1020 the whole western world was almost destitute of bread – a frightful interregnum of barbarism when, as Hallam records, mothers ate their children, and children their parents and human flesh was sold in the market place.”
“Men of Wealth”
John T. Flynn 1941
Hallam, fourteenth century historian
Cloud9 on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 2:24 pm
Truth, background checks are done at gun shows. Private sales are not checked which makes up a very small portion of guns sold. I have been going to gun shows for 45 years. I have two guns that were private sales made at a gun show. That is about 4% of what I have bought. What I sold was sold through a gun shop on consignment.
BobInget on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 4:18 pm
Pro-Life = Pro-Gun
go figure
Cloud9 on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 6:30 pm
safe by making me defenseless. Go door to door with that effort and you will unleash a conflagration that neither of us can fully imagine.
In as much as I believe that the exponential population growth we have seen over the last two centuries is directly connected to the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels, it stands to reason that when we reach the end of growth a die off is inevitable.
If the state has the soul monopoly on violence, then the state will determine who lives and who dies. Germany may very well serve as a template of how this plays out. The state collapsed, resulting in the death of money and the Nazis took power. They disarmed their target populations and then proceeded to wipe them out.
Take a trip to Buchenwald. Look up what is believed to be Reverend Niemoller’s cell. Then read his quote. Here, they will first come for the Mexicans.
shortonoil on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 7:15 pm
“Take a trip to Buchenwald. Look up what is believed to be Reverend Niemoller’s cell. Then read his quote. Here, they will first come for the Mexicans.”
If the dam, incompetent fools can’t even conquer Syria, they are never going to make it into Texas!
Apneaman on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 8:01 pm
“Here, they will first come for the Mexicans.”
Good luck with that.
According to U.S. Census Bureau population estimates as of July 1, 2013, there are roughly 54 million Hispanics living in the United States, representing approximately 17% of the U.S. total population, making people of Hispanic origin the nation’s largest ethnic or race minority.May 5, 2015″
The German Jewish population was only 500,000 out of 67 million in the 1930’s. Hispanics have guns too and if they came for them the blacks (13%) would probably start getting nervous to say the least and so would the asians and all other non whites. The US military has many blacks and hispanics serving. It also would be very costly in resources. Better for TPTB to starve the masses, as has been the way for most of history during overshoot.
In the middle on Tue, 13th Oct 2015 8:36 pm
Bob. Does this mean pro-choice = pro murder? Go figure. What’s the difference. At least if I have a gun I can stop them from aborting me.