James Howard Kunstler is undoubtedly brilliant: A social poet with the sharpest of sharp wits, a truly visionary and pragmatic thinker. In the TED talk below, he’s funny and occasionally charming (Pol Pot got big laughs). But Mr. Kunstler is fighting hard, (and weekly), to change the way that we think about, engage, and use the spaces we all share. And while some might hail him as a god-sent prophet, I think everyone, on both sides of WalMart’s fence, can agree that he’s a really special kind of dick. Just saying.

Read: The Dystopians (The New Yorker, 1/26/09)
Related: a few lines from Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives:

Where there is wealth and poverty, there is awkwardness in any one of these four situations:
A rich man speaking in praise of wealth
A rich man speaking in praise of poverty
A poor man speaking in praise of wealth
A poor man speaking in praise of poverty

Comic primness, or “prim irony,” is an an attitude characterizing a member of a privileged class who somewhat questions the state of affairs whereby he enjoys his privileges; but after all, he does not enjoy them, and so in the last analysis he resigns himself to the dubious conditions, in a state of ironic complexity that is apologetic, but not abnegatory.