Will and Kunstler

Two views of the dismal state of affairs this country is in are HERE and HERE. One is more realistic and hence less palatable than the other and shall be read online if at all. One is more acceptable to mainstream media advertisers and thus will be read by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people by Tuesday.

The first is by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist George Will. I read it this morning in our local daily, the Berkshire Eagle, which used “This is what national decline looks like” (the column’s concluding sentence) as its headline. Will is familiar to many as a participant in various TV shows of news and commentary.

The second, which I just read online, is by twice-weekly blogger, novelist and nonfiction writer James Howard Kunstler. It is headed “A Bigger Picture.” I don’t expect ever to see Kunstler on TV apart from a “community access” station.

Will, for this column’s purposes, finds it convenient to blame just about everything on Donald Trump. Kunstler sees the current mess the United States is in as a long time in the building; he wrote last week that his “current position” was that he “would vote for [Trump] this time to keep the Democratic Party out of power.”

— Mark Channing Miller