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Elegy

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Published : April 30th, 2012
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Category : Editorials

 

 

 

 

A few weeks ago I flew to Chicago, hopped into a rent-a-car, and navigated my way on the tangle of interstate highways to the now mostly former industrial region in the northwest corner of Indiana just off lowest Lake Michigan between the towns of Whiting and Gary. The desolation of human endeavor lay across the land like nausea made visible, but more impressive was how rapid the rise and fall of it all had been.


Not much more than 150 years ago this was a region of marshes, dunes, swales, laurel slicks, and little backwater ponds of the huge lake. The forbidding flat emptiness of the terrain made it perfect for running railroad track, and before long much of the heavy industry that epitomized the modern interval opened for business there, downwind from the pulsating new organism called Chicago. The storied steel mills of Gary are gone, and the numberless small shops and sheds that turned out useful widgets exist now, if at all, as ghostly brick and concrete shells along the stupendous grid of highways.


The one gigantic enterprise still going was the BP oil refinery, originally the Standard Oil operation, a demonic jumble of pipes, retorts, and exhaust stacks that sprawled over hundreds of acres, with flared off plumes of leaping orange flame from gas too cheap to sell lurid against the Great Lakes sunset in a lower key of rose and salmon pink. The refinery was there to support the only other visible activity in region, which was motoring.


In a place so desolate it was hard to tell where everybody was going in such numbers on the endless four-laners. Between the ghostly remnants of factories stood a score of small cities and neighborhoods where the immigrants settled five generations ago. A lot of it was foreclosed and shuttered. They were places of such stunning, relentless dreariness that you felt depressed just imagining how depressed the remaning denizens of these endless blocks of run-down shoebox houses must feel. Judging from the frequency of taquerias in the 1950s-vintage strip-malls, one inferred that the old Eastern European population had been lately supplanted by a new wave of Mexicans. They had inherited an infrastructure for daily life that was utterly devoid of conscious artistry when it was new, and now had the special patina of supernatural rot over it that only comes from materials not found in nature disintegrating in surprising and unexpected ways, sometimes even sublimely, like the sheen of an oil slick on water at a certain angle to the sun. There was a Chernobyl-like grandeur to it, as of the longed-for end of something enormous that hadn't worked out well.


Yet people were coming and going in their cars from the welfare ruins of East Chicago to the even more spectacular tatters of Gary, where the old front porches are disappearing into prairie grass and the 20th century retreats into the mists of mythology. For a while, I suppose, people were interested that the Michael Jackson nativity occurred there, but that, too, is a shred of history now merging with the fabled wendigo of the Wyandots and the fate of the North American mastodon. You might draw the conclusion that driving cars is the only activity left in certain parts of the USA. Many of the ones I saw in this forsaken corner of the Midwest were classic beaters occupied by young men in pairs searching, searching, searching. It takes a certain special kind of mental bearing to persist in searching such a place for something that is not there.


I was never so glad to get out of a place than those hundred-odd square miles of soured American dreamland. I was driving too, along with everybody else, on the Dan Ryan Expressway (US I-94), and for about 20 miles or so, from Pullman to the West Loop, the traffic barely pulsed along, like the contents in the terminal portion of the human gastrointestinal tract. This is what remains out in the Heartland of our country: a place so dire that you want to race shrieking from it and forget what you saw there. I have a feeling that its agonizing return to nature - or what's left of nature - will not be mitigated by anything Barack Obama or Mitt Romney might propose to do. I wouldn't want to be around when the driving stops.


 

 

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James Howard Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. His nonfiction book, "The Long Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
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If anybody here did not agree with my suggestion that USA military should be cut,I make a further suggestion that they should read Ron Paul's article posted today.
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Kunstler gets close. However there's another factor which not many people bother to mention or want to talk about. If this current state of affairs is where capitalism is heading for and going to wind up - I don't want any part of it simply because it's not capitalism. It's theft in action and no one seems very intent on explaining exactly HOW we can stop the looters, liars and thieves from running amok and ruining the fundamental blueprint of capitalism, which, at one time worked very well, thank you. I understand that many folks out there do not want government interference in any business activity and at this moment in our nation's history, government should not, cannot and will not be trusted. So, tell me, tell yourselves - exactly HOW do we rid the capitalist process of the bloodthirsty creatures running things right now?
I see a lot of faces "longing for the end of something enormous that hasn't turned out well" around here. The reign of the Mitch Daniels Regime is finally coming to an end. Having to "build the world by hand" isn't the desired outcome; it's the default outcome at the end of this enormous thing that hasn't turned out well.
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I was born only a few miles from Indiana but we never went there. I'm 56 and I may have been there three times. Chicago is literally across the street from Indiana and if you ask someone there if they have been to Indiana you get a blank stare. We never go there but have no idea why.
Notre Dame people are the only Illinoisans who venture forth to "Wander Indiana." Them and the adventurers who want to buy fireworks. I get my firecrackers in Missouri or Wisconsin.
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"Notre Dame people are the only Illinoisans who venture forth to "Wander Indiana." Them and the adventurers who want to buy fireworks. I get my firecrackers in Missouri or Wisconsin."

Ha ha....too true. Although Indiana Dunes State Park is worth a visit.
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I have been there and it is beautiful. I actually am now considering a driveabout of the non-Gary part of Indiana which I'm sure is very nice. Gary should be flattened and returned to greenfield status. Only 100 years ago it was just that. Engineers from United States Steel were sent from their Joliet, Illinois facility to plot out and plan a new steel plant there. Illinoisans are unfortunately responsible for the horrifying gateway to Indiana called Gary.
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Last fall while returning to the Midwest for my 50th class reunion, I also revisited that same area where I grew up during the 1950s and early 60s. I remembered that this was once a thriving industrial powerhouse whose mills and refineries provided tens of thousands of living wage jobs. It was never a scenic paradise but I remember it as a colorful fabric of Poles, Hungarians, Serbs and Croats who enjoyed full employment and a rising standard of living. Gary and Hammond were vibrant retail centers. Now it is an area on life support. Gary is truly a place where you want to floor the accelerator and flee in shrieking horror. The collapsed Cline Street overpass is a perfect metaphor for a broken economy. Believe me, the 50s when we had low inflation and unemployment was a better time and a better place.
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We won't even be able to flee into the woods-- legally, anyway-- Jim. Why? Because Kuntsler's allies are implementing Agenda 21, which forces you out of the wilderness into even more dreary "rack and stack" residences, with stores on the ground floor, walkable communities with no parking, no cars. Meat eating isn't allowed. Unaffordable bullet trains may never be built to whisk you between the few permissible human habitation areas. The master plan mandates a world population reduction to 500 million, but is very vague on how that will be accomplished. A cashless society will track every penny you spend, where and when you spend it. GPS devices will monitor your movements. Your car, if you are one of the few fortunate elite to still own one, will be fitted with a black box monitoring every parameter in real time and ackill switch to be used at the direction of your masters, the government, who are just here to help.

I'm not making up any of this. If that doesn't make you want to have a much shorter life or instigate a rebellion, maybe nothing will.
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I'm not nearly so gloomy as Mr. Kunstler or Jim C. But the disappearance of 'industry' is what happens when you have operations like Bain Capital which strip off the assets, terminate the workers and pocket the millions. While those jobs and factories may have been shipped over to China in a race to the bottom, that does not mean those jobs and factories have to stay there. Perhaps instead of wasting trillions on the banks in the vain hope they'll invest it here, the Bernank could get it to people who might actually build something. Chicago and industrial Indiana grew for a reason. It is a transportation hub. It may not be pretty, but I'll take the grime if jobs come with it.
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Kunstler is at it again. What do you call an individual that seeks out urine filled alleyways, vomit stained pavements, devastation, turmoil, head-on collisions, and every kind of human and societal malfunction?

A Doomster, a Chicken Little - and those names out of politeness. There is not a little glee in Kunstler's discoveries. I imagine his smile widening, his breath coming fast, at every new revelation of human agony.

And never offered a solution -- other then fleeing into the woods.



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Agree completely.I am wondering why go there in the first place, especially when you have to spend your little bit of jet fuel,hire one of those beasts of cars and fill it full of that dwindling resource called gas.
Certainly JHK's description of the place is apt, though I have not been there.

People move on. Some will stay in those types of towns till the bitter end,likely because they have so little other option for various reasons, be it money, age, health etc.

As for industry,it has to make a profit or else not exist.
So the solution is...make better product that people want and can afford.
Unfortunately,at this point in time at least, the workers in those factories, businesses etc have to work for less money than their counterparts in China.
The government naturally has to cut taxes ( business and personal) to the bone.
With far less revenue the Gov't then has to cut their spending which could only be a good thing. Suggestion....start with the military and public handouts.
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S.W:

Yes, we need solutions, not a weekly report on the number of sidewalk defecations one encounters walking to the local bar.

The problem is not Capitalism, but the extent that government has been and is hintering a free economic system. Returning to a world made by hand where lifespans were short, child mortality high, and anything beyond scrambling for survival was out of the question, is not a thing any rational mind would wish for.
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If anybody here did not agree with my suggestion that USA military should be cut,I make a further suggestion that they should read Ron Paul's article posted today. Read more
S W. - 5/1/2012 at 8:17 PM GMT
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