The Real Doomers

Every once in a while, doomerism rears its ugly head. Right about here, you'd think that I will refer to the latest Kunstler or an arbitrarily chosen peakoil.com denizen speaking about the hard landing we will face shortly. Slim chance or fat chance of that happening (which covers just about everything on the sliding weight scale).

Actually, doomerism has migrated to the right-wing political sphere, with a completely different set of potential outcomes. Doomers have suddenly become the right-wing nutjobs like radio host Hugh Hewitt, who has lately started to crow incessantly about his effectiveness in discussing Avian Flu and the carnage it may invoke. Which I find quite odd, because in the years I have spent listening to the Spew Spewitt nozzle (in an academic sense only, you see, you have to listen to them to understand them), I have never heard him discussing oil depletion as a worry, or even acknowledging it for that matter. Without cognitive dissonance interfering with my thinking, I would imagine that peak oil, with its own doomer scenarios, would have piqued Hewitt's interest over the years. And, what, nothing on the Hummer over-supply?

I only have one explanation for this curious behavior. Those that Marc Maron call the christo fascist zombie brigade want only one thing -- a combination of armageddon and the rapture to befall us with a sudden vengeance. Let me pose a rhetorical question to clear things up: Do they believe that peak oil does not pack enough of a bang for biblical purposes, and may land with far too much of a whimper? Know your evangelicals: Hugh Hewitt.

These kind of guys scare me more than the garden variety peak oil doomer. They play to their audience, and their audience thinks a rapture awaits.

The entire Furitan right-wing plays like a doom machine; although they project all capitalism as this side of hunky-dory, when they see their ideas of end-times coming, either conveyed as Avian Flu or Paris Burning, they start preaching to the choir. Heathens die, and Europeans go to hell.

Fortunately, we have Maron and his pal, the Cardinal Milfington, on the Rapture Watch to lighten things up. Halle-burton-lujah.

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No doomer, Bill McKibben best describes what a soft landing may end up looking like. Thanks to Big Gav for the link. I rate McKibben highly on my list of non-fiction writers; read Long Distance if you want to understand the mind of an amateur endurance athlete.