He's spot on on the typical Transition Town type though...First-time author WR Flynn, a retired law enforcement officer living near Portland, Oregon who traveled in Eastern Europe and the USSR, and in 1985, spent a month in Cuba working on a communal farm, has written a didactic novel clearly to make a point. Namely, that our powerful and seemingly solid society is actually frighteningly brittle and vulnerable to the slightest financial shock.
So, despite a nearly complete absence of characterization, a compelling theme or a love story that’s messy enough to identify with (what romance the book offers is thin and unsatisfying), Shut Down works because its relentless focus on plot alone creates enough tension and suspense to keep the pages turning.
First they came for the banks
Yes, you already know from the title that the whole American experiment will be murdered. But that doesn’t stop you from wanting to see the murder weapon, learn the effect on the survivors and most of all, find out who dunnit. Shut Down lets you get up close and see the bloodstains on the pavement. And it also shows how a maddeningly financial system makes global industrial civilization more immediately vulnerable than such threats as climate change, terrorism, or even peak oil and peak everything.
Here’s the simple, yet fiendish, plot that gave me nightmares for a week: On Monday morning the FDIC closes more than 600 insolvent banks nationwide. But under pressure from a deficit-hawkish, Tea Party Congress, the agency forgoes its customary caution and closes more banks at the same time than prudence would suggest. This shocks the financial system enough to shut down both debit cards and Food Stamp cards, sending the US public into panic when they can’t get cash and sending hungry people first into the streets, and then into grocery stores for looting. Electronic panic spreads throughout the world’s interconnected financial system. From there, with payments stopped, oil supplies are disrupted, depriving law enforcement of fuel for patrol cars. That leaves the streets to urban street gangs who start a massive LA Riot in every major city in the US, soon followed by civil unrest around the world.
Focused around the author’s hometown in and around Portland, Flynn seems unimpressed by the world-leading sustainability efforts and peak oil prep that the city has done over the last few years. Instead, just like any other doomed urban area, by Wednesday in Portland, survivors who can have cleared out of the city and are now evacuating the suburbs. Not far behind are the inner-city gangs who have quickly formed themselves into vandal armies to pillage the suburbs and the countryside.
As one reply puts it...
live in the Portland area, and have been a member of Portland Peak Oil, as informal as the group is. I've learned a wealth in onfo regarding organic agriculture form my portland friends, over the years.
However, like the author of this book, I'm also a beans, bullets and band aids prepper. However, Please don't confuse the Transition movement with actual preparedness. They "hate guns," and don't know anything about them, and just assume everyone is going to be helpfull and happy.
Any of us preppers who are familiar with the Transition Town crowd know that they are going to die, period. That bat-eared little clown Rob Hopkins, and his little army of paid activists from the UK (yes, I know the one in the Portland area) aren't doing anyone in this counttry any good, and they should know better, coming from a country of 60 million, shoe-horned into a country the size of Alabama. No wonder that neo-hippie movement is dying here in the Pacific Northwest.
