My dystopian posts on truthalyzer.com appear optimistic compared to James Howard Kunstler’s weekly Clusterfuck Nation, as this excerpt illustrates: “It’s sad to be a citizen of a nation that can’t do anything right. . . . We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor, and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a sentient American reeling in angst and anomie. Our popular culture would embarrass a race of hebephrenics. We think that neck tattoos are cool. A lot of our pop music is overtly homicidal. Our richest citizens have managed to define a new banality of evil. Our middle classes are subject to humiliations so baroque that sadomasochism even fails to encompass the finer points. And we don’t even need help from other nations to run our own economic affairs into the ground — we’re digging our national grave with a kind of antic glee, complete with all the lurid stagecraft that Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue can muster. . . . At the Indianapolis Speedway (or the dozens of Nascar ovals around Dixie) — the frantic idiocy of America-on-wheels, the fat slobs in beer can hats grilling cheez dogs in the parking lots, letting loose their asinine rebel yells as though this made men of them, and above it all the deafening noise of a people literally driving themselves to death and madness. Meanwhile, the evil plume of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico grows ever-larger by the hour and every living thing in that quarter of the sea faces slow death. That’s our memorial-in-the-making to ourselves. . . . Dmitry Orlov is right: this is our Chernobyl. This is the cherry-on-top of all our feckless foolishness. Memorial Day this year is the welcome mat to our hard time. . . . Welcome . . . to Slum Nation.”