White Is The New Black (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Feb. 21, 2011 -- Let it be remembered that as the world was blowing up, Fashion Week gave the New York news media a case of the vapors.

But let them tell it. In the immortal words of The New York Times's Cathy Horyn: "... amid the parkas and the managed pant-suits there was a story here: the amount of embellishment and new technology...."

The mantra of New Technology is on everybody's lips, of course. New Technology is the New Jesus. It's descending from out of the holy ethers to float us across the rivers of Babylon to the New Jerusalem -- although, now that fashion has got its hooks into the stuff, I dunno, it could be game over for New Technology. Nothing goes out of fashion like fashion. The same newspaper, by the way, tells us that "long-form blogs" are also joining the Dodo and Paris Hilton in the Museum of Extinct Curiosities. But I wouldn't want to try this on Twitter. And the mosh-pit of Facebook seems an uncongenial place for my brand of high-toned comedy. I guess I'll have to soldier on here.

Around the same time that Kanye West was perusing the gift bags at the Alexander Wang show on Pier 94, I heard a curious thing on NPR. Some cheeky young envoy from the realm of New Technology was complaining that the "public space" of Twitter and Facebook had to be respected world-wide as "the new town square," and wasn't it appalling that the authorities tried to shut these things down in places like Egypt, Algeria, and the lesser kingdoms of Arabia?

This is the kind of virtual thinking that passes for mental exercise these days in the land ruled by Lady Gaga. Hello. We (meaning the USA) do not run these foreign countries -- I know it may come as a surprise to the paranoid conspiracy crowd. Even when these faraway places blow up and their former tyrants beat it to Monte Carlo, Zurich, or Riyadh, we do not step in and run them. We try to meddle a little, of course, but in the moiling red mists of revolution nobody even has the authority to pay attention to one of our perspiring attaches, and they don't want to hear our bullshit anyway, even when it comes with a suitcase full of cash.

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