Getting Cross With An Author

There’s a section in this book when I am explaining how to spot someone is quite clearly not an Underminer. It’s all very well creating complex definitions and making up examples, but there is nothing like a real life version of the very essence of non-Underminedness (new word alert!) to be able to draw on. The example comes from a book that I thought was excellent until I reached the last two chapters – I don’t think that’s enough to give it away – at which point it collapses into a sort of prone submission to the system, not just acting symbolically but actively attacking the very people who are Underminers.

To say it made me cross when I first read it is an understatement. Near the end of the penultimate chapter I wrote, “No it doesn’t, fool!” in the margin, and on the next page scrawled, “Crap! No way can you get 100% reduction + a viable economy. Greenwash again.”

And so on.

It was shockingly easy to pick a three paragraph extract apart, and that’s the saddest part – the writer (actually there are two, but one of them only writes the slightly “tougher” bits) is so confident of his agenda that there is no attempt at subtlety. I wasn’t big, and I wasn’t clever: I didn’t have to be.

I don’t think the author will take to the analysis kindly, but as will become very clear when it becomes public, there’s no point being nice to people who are actively trying to keep things as bad as they are – it only encourages them.