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In a
place like upstate New York, north of Albany, where April is more generally known
as "mud season," and the wait for "ice-out" on the big
lakes takes forever, and on frigid nights the windigos steal through the
tops of the tall pines -- it would seem foolish to complain about perfectly
beautiful weather.
We just had a week in the 70s, with more to come. The grass went from
ochre to bright green in about thirty-six hours. The buds are popping like
mad. This is usually what the first week of May is like around here, and that
fact alone may explain New York state's relentless population drain over the
past forty years.
I was out on my bicycle, naturally, taking it all in -- like, why sit
inside and sulk because the weather is strange in a pleasant way? -- and I
ventured into the outlands east of town, where an impressive number of
gigantic new houses had landed like alien mother-ships in the former cow
pastures and wood lots. Of course, the aesthetics were an issue apart from
the socio-economics of it, but nonetheless interesting.
Each new, gigantic house seemed the result of a losing struggle to
reinvent basic design principles that did not require re-invention. I doubt
the spirit of joyous "creativity" among the star-architects has
seeped down to the level of the provincial house-builders, who, after all,
are just assemblers of modular materials like dimensional lumber and
eight-foot sheet-rock. It's their inability to assemble these parts
coherently that's really striking, so what you get is an endless variety of
mistakes along with a complete absence of anything done really well -- which
may be the essence of what the "diversity" craze has really meant
to us, the ethos of current times.
The abiding quality of all these houses was grandiosity (by which I do
not mean grand-ness). That, too, is a signature of these times in America --
the nation too big to fail and tragically destined to do just that on account
of its too big to fail-ness. And, of course, one could not fail to wonder,
cruising by these hideously ponderous houses, whether as a matter of fact
they were failing in terms of the owners' ability to keep up with the
payments, for instance. One after another, I pictured a husband and wife
within sitting in the sunny breakfast room on Easter morning humped in tears
as they sorted through stacks of bills and bank statements... and I imagined
the yellow foreclosure tape a few weeks hence atop the weird split-block
portico treatments and misbegotten arrays of concrete balusters, and
the colossal Palladianesque windows with their pathetic snap-in muntins (and
the fantastic solar heat-gain, not figured-in by the designer-builder, that
would turn the lawyer-foyer into something like a crematorium by two p.m.)...
and the pension fund in Wisconsin or Norway that was sitting on the
booby-trapped CDO that contained this sketchy mortgage and thousands of
others just like it... and, well, this choo-choo of thoughts led to
envisioning the train-wreck of economies and nations that lies in wait just
around the bend....
One also could not fail to reflect on the recklessness of a nation
that placed untold million-dollar bets on the idea that it would be possible
to travel anywhere in an automobile from houses like these a few scant years
from now. This far along in the tribulations of our time, most Americans
still have not heard of peak oil, and the few who have regard it as some
figment that Ralph Nader or Al Gore conjured up on an acid trip in a sweat
lodge. The more sophisticated among the mentally unwashed are certain
that the earth has a creamy nougat center of low-sulfer light crude oil, or
they heard that the Bakken formation in Dakota holds more oil than Saudi
Arabia, or that the whole US car and truck fleet will be electrified in a
year or two, or that we can drill-baby-drill our way to permanent oil
abundance, or just that the American can-do spirit will come up with
something to keep Happy Motoring alive because we're the greatest! Such
grandiosity!
Personally, I look at these houses scattered around what was only
recently a dedicated farm landscape and I am quite sure that the denizens
within will be marooned in their great rooms, and that very probably many of
them will have no job to go to -- in the conventional sense of what we think
a job is, in some corporation or institution -- and that in a surprisingly short
span of years these buildings will be ruins or squats. I think these thoughts
after struggling up a rather steep hill more than half-a-mile (and many
others previously). A trip anywhere from here, to do anything, and the return
trip, would occupy an entire day even for someone in decent physical
condition. Somebody accustomed to rations of Cheez Doodles and Mountain Dew
would be dead by then. There will be lots of dead.
On the macro level, the feeling spreads across the USA that our
troubles are behind us. Employment is ticking up. The S & P index only
goes up now. The banks have stabilized and those "toxic assets"
(which I call "frauds" and "swindles") have been disarmed
and safely buried under Yucca Mountain. Housing starts may still be weak, but
the "gaming" industry is making great strides in places like the
old Puritan commonwealth of Massachusetts, so soon we'll have a virtually
automatic economy of leisure-and-entertainment paid for by creaming off a
small percentage of the quarters pumped into video slot stations. No doubt
the Chinese will be jealous and try to imitate us.
All these lovely mild days, I was not unconscious of the eeriness of
the weather and the possible insidious effects of it on the local ecosystem
in everything from the added generations of deer ticks carrying Lyme disease
and the death of the honeybees to the fate of this year's apple crop. I
confess: it made me very nervous. Something is happening... out there.
James
Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
James
Howard Kunstler’s new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
James
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
latest 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.
You
can purchase your own copy here : The Long Emergency
. You can get more from James Howard Kunstler - including his artwork,
information about his other novels, and his blog - at his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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