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- World Made By Hand
- Part of the Every Book Shii Reads project
Review
Book Made By Idiot.
There's a wonderful comic book series in Japan called Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. Much like World Made By Hand, it takes place in a post-apocalyptic future without all the violence that usually marks those books. It ran for fourteen years in a magazine and over the course of that time nothing much happened; the characters got older, people learned things, little bits of history were found out. Government and politics are absent and the world seems to be winding down. But YKK does not attempt to imitate life. There is no garbage in its future, no pollution or toxic waste; the plumbing seems to work; and most mysteriously at all, there are still vending machines and someone seems to be supplying them with fresh cold drinks. In short, it is pure fantasy. The purpose is not to make people feel good about the future, but to imagine a comforting world existing parallel to the here and now.
World Made By Hand is very different. Every sentence fawns over the romantic simplicity of life without computers or cars. And much of it is as comforting as YKK, but the intention is sinister. The author asserts that he recognizes how tough life "will" be in the future, but actually he seems to be looking forward to that future and eagerly enjoying every step that takes our civilization downhill (check out his blog for evidence). In short, this book is meant to encourage a very subtle rapture belief. Kunstler wants us to give up on trying to fix our society and go back to the land.
It would have been nice if he had, you know, done some research or something.
Line-by-line through the sample chapter
http://www.worldmadebyhand.com/Jobeandbullock.html
Let's read this together, shall we?
- As the modern world came apart, and the local economy with it, Bullock took the opportunity to acquire at least eight other properties adjacent to the original family farm.
What opening line could reveal its schadenfreude more blatantly than "as the modern world came apart and the local economy with it"? Farewell, modern world! Good riddance!
- “Have you tried oxen?” Bullock said. “They’re peachy in the woodlot and behind the plow.”
- “I don’t know the first thing about an ox,” Brother Jobe said. “We’re all about mules where we come from.”
All about mules? What about the donkeys and horses that produce the mules? Mules are sterile!!
- He was particularly proud of his experiments with spelt, an antique precursor of our common wheats and apparently immune to the rust disease that lurked in our soils. It did not have the gluten content of modern wheat, he said, but it was better than rye.
Sounds like this guy has been reading Wikipedia! I wonder where he found Wikipedia years after the Internet went dead.
- Coyotes had been killing his calves lately. He’d had to post sharpshooters.
Personally I'd be more concerned with... you know... starving Vice Presidents of Marketing stealing his calves.
- The men working around the new cane mill greeted Bullock enthusiastically. I recognized at least two of them from the old days: Jack Hellinger, who used to be the Rite Aid pharmacist in town, and Michael Delsen, who had a little insurance agency with his Dad on Main Street. It was hard to tell whether the workmen’s enthusiasm on seeing their boss was that of free, happy men or of people who had to put on a face to authority. Bullock’s relations with the people who lived on the plantation was the subject of much speculation among us who lived back in town. Being a world of its own, there was no way we outsiders knew what his people had to say about how things worked there, except that it pretty obviously wasn’t a democracy.
Democracy is over! Yahoo!
- The cottages were deployed along a picturesque little main street with a few narrow lanes off it. There were about thirty buildings in all. This main street lacked shops or places of business because the only business there was Bullock’s business.
What happened to the suburbs? Developments? Condominiums? Was there a general consensus to knock down all the more recent, big, and useful buildings?
- Soon Bullock’s people began streaming in from the fields and forests. All nodded their heads at Bullock in deference.
- "They seem well fed,” Brother Jobe said.
- “They’re not fed,” Bullock said.
- “Excuse me. . . ?”
- “Well, I’m not running a zoo here. They feed themselves.”
Good deal he's got going there... they pay him for anything they need to buy in town, and with the sharpshooters he's paying he can probably get them to pay taxes, too. Does he shoot the people who don't pay up? I assume there's no one to stop him if he does want to shoot them... ooh, life after civilization will be great!!