Sustainability through the looking glass with Jeff Wattrick of Wonkette

I'm showing "The End of Suburbia" to my students this week. They would probably love it if I posted the answers to the worksheet they have to fill out. I won't, not for all of them. Instead, I will point out I have answers to a few of the questions scattered throughout my blog.

For example, part of the answer to #8, "include how peak usage contributed to the crisis" is mentioned in the introduction to the worksheet post. I comment on the answer to #9 "What are the issues involved with the various modes of generating electricity, concentrating on the problems with natural gas?" in Portland is watching "The End of Suburbia", where I note things aren't as bad now as they were nine years ago when the film was shot. I mention part of the answer to #18 "How do the people interviewed think the American people will react to energy shortages? Include the political effects" in several entries. All one has to do is search for 'maniacs.' I used it first in a post about Michele Bachmann demagoguing the price of gas. Finally, one of the possible answers to #29 and #30 (it will work for either) is in Kunstler in a Big Yellow Taxi and some more are in the introduction to the worksheet entry among the student reactions.

So, what am I going to do instead? I'm going to excerpt Metro Detroit's own Jeff Wattrick's Dispatches from the FEMA camps, his satire of corn pone fascist thinking about sustainability.

Between now and Obama’s second inauguration, Wonkette will be your source for exclusive details about our shining path to a new America that will be like Greece crossed with Cuba but only more Muslim-y. Also gay.

Follow over the jump for Jeff's fantasized solutions to suburbia, a way of life that became the new American Dream and promised space, convenience, affordability, family life, and upward mobility, but instead ended up decanting cities into the countryside and becoming the greatest waste of resources in the history of the world and a living arrangement that has no future.*

In Part 1, Jeff explains how people will be herded from the country and suburbia into the cities.

FEMA will be herding meth-addled real ‘Mericans from all across the heartland into railcar and shipping them to camps. Why trains? Because it’s more socialist that way.

Hey, maybe in this wingnut dystopia, we won't have a railway system Bulgaria--or Dagny Taggart--would be ashamed of. That would be a step up.

But what will convince people to get on the FEMA trains?

Of course, Wonketteers are probably reading this and saying to themselves: “Hey this sounds great and all but how will Barry create the kind of emergency necessary to justify FEMA camps?”

The answer is the same way he got re-elected: Sandy-like superstorms.

“Hurricane Sandy interrupted Mr. Romney’s momentum and allowed Mr. Obama to look presidential and bipartisan,” Karl Rove rightly explained. Why do you think Obama used the White House weather machine to create Sandy in the first place?

You didn’t think the whole climate change conspiracy was just a ruse to build solar panels and wind farms did you? You’re missing the overall. Wind farms are the little Donald Segretti of this plot.

Obama and his handlers — Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Che Guevara (he faked his own death to manage Obama’s rise to power) — convinced the planet’s foremost climate scientists to invent this global warming business as a cover for the man-made storms that will allow Obama to herd the masses into FEMA camps.

Looks like Jeff's got Climate Change crossed with HAARP. Now, that's something I hadn't seen before, but it's been a while since I've read alt.fan.art-bell on USENET.

So, what kind of future awaits the transported in the FEMA camps? Here's what won't be there--Applebees and vinyl siding.

The image of FEMA Camps as these desolate concentration camps is actually wrong. In reality, these encampments will be Agenda 21-compliant model cities.

You and your family will have your own dwelling, but it will be small. Think of the average-size McMansion that all job creators strive for. Now, imagine the space where, back when this was a free country, that McMansion would have had a “great room.” That is where another family’s house will be. The second floor will be, instead of bedrooms and a master bath, homes for like six more families. Instead of spreading out these homes over a completely illogical series of cul-de-sacs, as the market demands, they will be arranged on a centrally-planned grid.

Everything will be pedestrian friendly and “sustainable.” Back when Obama was at that Kenyan madrassa, Saul Alinsky taught him that sustainability is the key to making everything socialist. There will be plentiful sidewalks and bike lanes because no one except for camp commandants will have cars. Commandants will have Chinese-made Jeeps for patrol purposes only.

Residents will have the option of taking FEMA light rail trollies to jobs — provided they join the FEMA union — making windmill components and solar panels for Solyndra, or at the camp’s Planned Parenthood Abortionplex. That place will always need workers because Obama’s second term totally means a One Couple/One Child policy for white people.

What you won’t see at the FEMA Camps are the strip malls, chain restaurants, and cul-de-sac faux-neighborhoods that our Founding Fathers intended. No churches or synagogues either, but plenty of mosques. And all restaurants and grocery stores will be vegan co-ops.

Now, you Wonketteers are probably thinking: “This sounds like the most magical socialist paradise ever and I can’t wait, but there’s no way people who love their Red Robin bottomless fries and vinyl houses with stucco facades will tolerate this glorious UN-planned desecration of American values.

Kunstler might enjoy this future. At least most of the things he hates--sprawl, cars, and consumer culture--won't be there. As for the other inhabitants, which Jeff describes in the passages I haven't quoted and that you should read, that's another matter. I have my doubts and so might my readers.

Speaking of Agenda 21, the latest news on that topic from Mother Jones makes a cameo in Part 2. I won't spoil it for you; read it for yourself. However, it mentions the Delphi technique, which really is a way of producing consensus, but which the Agenda 21 paranoids are calling "mind control." Of that, Jeff writes.

The Delphi technique is so air tight and perfect that there’s no way a revolt against the Agenda 21/FEMA camps will ever be successful. So you can forget about Glenn Beck’s anti-Agenda 21 Turner Diaries fantasy ever coming true.

Jeff promises more installments of "Dispatches from the FEMA camps." I'll keep you posted.

Finally, since this is an Agenda 21 entry, it needs a manatee.



*Yes, I just gave the answers to #1, #2, #4, and #5. Let's see if my students use the right search terms to find them. Muahahahaha!

By the way, my students have trouble with "decant."  The only ones who understood it worked in restaurants.  Once I tell them that the word means "poured out," they comprehended the concept.