James Howard Kunstler, much like Joe Bageant, is an American muckraker. Topics he mucks typically include:
Kunstler is a lively, oft larger-than-life characture of the Oracle of Delphi: a bardic, cathartic, fire-and-brimstone prophet of the present-day. (“He’s the best we’ve got!”)
Posters at the The Oil Drum had this, pointedly, to say about him:
Kunstler is a muckraker, not an oil analyst, stock market analyst, or even a teacher. There is a long tradition of muckraking in the U.S., and he is brilliant at it. He has probably done more than anyone else to get info out to the masses about peak oil, and he’s definitely more right than wrong on this issue.
Not only that, but he’s an incredibly entertaining writer.
— Moe Gamble.
He’s an incredibly perceptive intellectual in the best tradition of American writing. I like to read his rants out loud to the family.
— PigglyWiggly.
> Why is a "muckraker" really needed?Are you serious? Given the endless stream of happy talk from the Iron Triangle (not to mention people like you), we have a desperate need for people to rake through the muck to try to get a glimpse of what is really going on.
But what Kunstler really is is a prophet, in the old Biblical sense of the word. And the thing about prophets is that they only have to be right once to be vindicated. And it is waaaay to early to say Kunstler has been wrong. Whereas the anti-phrophets need to be right continually for years.
That’s just the nature of the predicting of discontinuities. It is nearly impossible to predict the extact time of a discontinuity, even though it is possible to predict that a discontinuity will occur. People who predict them are basically right if the discontinuity occurs, even if they miss the exact date.
TPTB, the happy talkers, the optimists are always caught with their pants down when the discontinuities hit. It is because they can’t imagine anything but BAU, or they are so invested in the status quo that they’ll defend it to their (perhaps literal) dying days.
— shargash.