Chariots of the Morons
Posted by TFG on 23rd June 2008
Dear John,
Meet another John.
Scott
Note to readers: the second John doesn’t make his living scaring the shit out of people by proposing Walker Percy’s Love In The Ruins as the working model for the world going forward and then finding random stories to back them up to prove his price was worth it to the people who paid it. For example, Robb’s latest bon mot of Things are going well revolves around the so-called “Walk-Awayers” and implies that we’re in some kind of national crisis of them, which buttresses his other super-scary case that the suburbs are rapidly being hollowed out by defaulters and their homes are being taken over by either “poor” people or gang-bangers & meth-cookers, but never mind that.
But, in fact, the article is about shady web sites feasting on morons, much like our old friends, the Nigerian spammers and Viagra salesman. There’s nothing new in the article — precisely nothing. Desperate stupid people called those late-night infomercial midgets in Hawaii to get in on the real-estate boom, and I’m betting that a lot of those same stupid desperate people are calling these boiler-room web operators looking for a way out from the bottom of the pyramid, too. Time magazine, and John Robb too, could have run a story that said nothing more than “PT Barnum is still right.” and that would have been that. That doesn’t justify book deals and consulting fees for John Robb or enormous ad buys for Time, though, so no, we get TEOTWAWKI.
Still, I have to say — Excellent work, John Robb, for alerting us again that there are still grifters striding the earth. Say, does that next book of yours tell us how to deal with grifters when we get our Peak Oil Resilient Communities up and running? Do you give them a new name, too? I personally hope we stick with Snake Oil Salesman, and that’s just because I have that embedded in my lexicon.
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