The Twilight of Mechanized Lumpenleisure

By James Howard Kunstler

Among the many wonders and marvels of American life in the twentieth century, especially after World War Two, when our country ruled much of the world economically, was the astounding rise in standards of living among social classes who had hardly known leisure or had a dollar to spare on the accoutrements of it from time immemorial. The subject of class itself in America has been so sore, that we can barely acknowledge its existence as a fact of life, despite the workings of whole industries devoted to exploiting the envy of the lower orders. The very term I have just used

I write this, by the way, as someone who does not have a Marxist bone in his body