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Even
if the so-called economy were "recovering," the people of the USA
would be stuck in a physical setting for daily life that has no future - the
nightmare infrastructure of subdivision houses, strip malls, and WalMarts, all rigged up for incessant motoring. Of
course, the so-called economy is not recovering because there is no more
cheap oil. If oil ever gets cheap again, it will be because nobody has enough
money to pay for it and surely you can connect the dots to what that hamster
wheel of futility means.
In
fact, the heart of our economic predicament is that the American economy came
to be based on the construction ever more suburban stuff, the financing of
which, especially the houses, became the fodder for an episode of epic
swindles that has left our banking system a hollowed out shell of accounting
fraud. In short, we built even more stuff with no future, and ruined our
society in the process. How tragic is that?
The
behavioral habits, practices, and consequences of being stuck in that living
arrangement may end up being at least as problematic as the physical residue
of it. It has left the people in a network of alienation, anxiety, and misery
that defeats exactly the mentality needed to break free of it. For the truth
is we're faced with a massive necessary re-ordering of daily life in this
country, and there is no vision or will to get on with job.
Among
the tribulations of this living arrangement is the utter loss of connection
between place and purpose often expressed in the phrase "loss of community,"
which is a little too abstract to me and fails to convey the tragedy of
individuals living with no sense of purpose -- and by that I mean duties,
obligations, and responsibilities to other human beings.
Obviously,
the whole idea of a single-family house by definition dictates a certain
disposition of things. It will lack the dimension and social relations of a
household composed of multiple generations plus non-family members, helpers,
employees, servants. And it should also be obvious that the single-generation,
single-family house is a product of mid-20th century industrial dynamism that
made even factory worker wage slaves rich by historical standards - Tom Wolfe
pointed out years ago that the average GM assembly line drone enjoyed more
sheer physical luxury at home than Louis XIV.
Put
the single-family house in the context of a suburban monoculture organized to
conform relentlessly to the dictates of single use zoning, and you get a
recipe for instant (and permanent) social dysfunction. Then, fill that house
with electronic diversion devices and a microwave oven and you end up with a
very few disconnected humans who rarely share a meal and exist, while
"at home," in a narcissistic vapor-realm of canned entertainment,
pornography, texting (i.e. melodrama created to fill a void of
purposelessness), and the sado-masochistic combats
of video games (a substitute for purposeful, virile endeavor), all floating
on a virtual river of relentless advertising.
It
always interests me to see the emergent purposeless of the American Dream
expressed so vividly in the television sitcoms of that mid-20th century day -
the very moment of its emergence. Ozzie Nelson of Ozzie and Harriet
seemed to have absolutely nothing to do except sit around the kitchen waiting
for somebody else to come in for a cup of coffee. He clearly had nowhere else
to go. The ennui of Ozzie Nelson was a source of mirth to busy hipsters who
savored the ironies of behavioral kitsch - loving what's horrible for the
horror it induces. But it really isn't so funny since it is a portrait of an
un-manned man trapped in utter purposeless and reduced to the pathetic
existential status of somebody endlessly waiting for nothing. (Cue Samuel
Beckett....)
Anyway,
that was then and it's all crashing down now in a great galumphing
debris-field of bankruptcy, psychosis, regret, obesity, and foreclosure. So
what comes next? They say that the millennial generation is the most
group-oriented, cooperative bunch to come along in the march of Boomers, Xs, and Ys. How much of this is
an hallucination of transient computer connectivity,
I don't know. The fact that it is so difficult for them financially to even
hope to form a household will surely be a defining factor in the choices they
make ahead about how exactly to inhabit the landscape. I think they will make
out better in this project than their Boomer forerunners, who started out in
communes sharing toothbrushes and graduated to dismal McMansions
in a geography of nowhere, while dedicating their
careers to the looting of posterity.
I'm
quite sure that many will rediscover a sense of purpose in the re-ordering of
social life that lies ahead, which includes a return to different household
arrangements and probably much more hierarchical social relations. Implicit
in the latter is the now-utterly-incorrect-and-taboo notion of someone
knowing their place. The catch is: you need to have a place in order to know
your place, and therefore know who you are - and in a society full of people
for whom place means nothing, there is little chance
of acquiring a real identity, other than the sham raiment of the
app-supported avatar life that has taken the place of being human.
I
had a fugitive thought the other evening walking through my beaten-down small
town in the late fall chill. I imagined that instead of the blue tomb-like
glow of television emanating from house to house that I could hear the
sequential music of parlor pianos, and voices singing to them, and of healthy
people coming and going from warm kitchens to fetch firewood, and of groups
of people gathered around tables for a meal, and generally of buildings that
were truly inhabited, not just storage containers for lives unspent. I grant
you it was a fleeting nostalgic fantasy. But isn't nostalgia just a state of
being homesick?
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