This is rather amusing, in its way:
Dystopian fiction is hot right now, with countless books and movies featuring decadent oligarchs, brutal police states, ecological collapse, and ordinary citizens biting and clawing just to survive. For bestselling author Naomi Klein, all this gloom is a worrying sign.
...because Naomi Klein apparently has no idea whatsoever that the 1970s was probably the Golden Age of Dystopian fiction, Eco-collapse edition. Including, I might add, a lot of overconfident predictions about global warming that never actually happened. In fact, pretty much none of the things that were worried about then - overpopulation, choking pollution, the loss of every species less hardy than the cockroach, nuclear war, mass famine, running out of oil, running out of water, running out of air, and of course the obligatory dictatorships made up of the authors' least favorite American social groups - didn't actually happen, either.
Shoot, even the Soviet Union fell down and went boom just as soon as Ronald Reagan kicked it in the groin.
And so disaster will probably be averted here, too. Oh, maybe it won't. Maybe we really are doomed this time. But we've been doomed before; and it's surprising that Naomi Klein won't at least nod to the past confident assertions of disaster. Although it should not surprise me that anyone with as high an opinion of Margaret Atwood - a woman who was spectactularly wrong in predicting future history in The Handmaid's Tale - might be somewhat deficient in other aspects of this particular literary genre.
On the other hand, Ms. Klein got me to post something here after two years! So, go her.
Via Instapundit.
Moe Lane