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This is a nervous
country. I'm not sure that hanging Osama Bin Laden on the White House wall
like a coonskin really helps that much. Already, a familiar darkness sets
back in, a loss of purpose of the kind that Lindsay Lohan
must feel when she gets out of rehab. This is exactly the situation that
empty rhetoric was designed for, so we got a week of talk about
"bringing our nation together" when the truth is that Fox News
would like to send Team Six into the oval office with guns blazing and helmet
cams on "record."
We
have no idea what we're going to do as a people and absolutely no credible
thought on this emanates from the upper echelons. Leadership is more than
telling people what they want to hear. In the middle ranks of society, a
sullen docility rules, no matter how many affronts to reality we witness. You
ride this wreck until the wheels come off and think of what to do next when
you're sitting in the drainage ditch by the side of the road. There's no
period in US history that matches this for lassitude.
I
had a strange experience, driving north about fifty miles along Route 22 in
eastern upstate New York, from Canaan to Cambridge, a very rural stretch that
roughly parallels the Massachusetts and Vermont lines. Aside from a few
convenience stores serving up gasoline, slim-jims, and pepsi,
there was no visible economic activity in any of the towns along the way. The
little town of Berlin, NY, was especially striking. A "for sale"
sign stood forlornly in the parking lot of the lumber yard, the inventory sheds
plainly empty of stock. The Seagroatt wholesale
flower company - where, years ago, I picked up roses as the delivery guy for
a Saratoga retailer - was shut down, with rows of empty greenhouses standing
vacantly in the late day spring sunshine. The little downtown on a street one
hundred feet off the highway was not only empty of businesses, but the old
wooden buildings themselves had gone lopsided from a lack of regular
caretaking, while the paint was all but gone. A number of old houses were
still occupied - cars in the driveways - but they looked battered and worn,
one bad winter from roof failure, and often with front yards strewn with
plastic detritus.
One
thing you didn't see a lot of along Route 22 was farming. Columbia,
Rensselaer, and Washington Counties used to be all about farming. For much of
the 20th century, it was dairy farming after electric milking machines and
bulk refrigeration came in, and you could run larger herds. That's done now,
since the giant factory farms in the Midwest and California started up, where
the business model is you jam hundreds of cows into a giant steel shed where
they stand hock deep in their own wastes all day long, with their necks
locked into a stanchion, and it's
"economic" to truck their milk back east. Who needs pastures with
grass growing in them? Who needs a happy cow? That will change, by the way,
yet it is one of the many things we're not having a conversation about in
this demoralized land.
I
saw teenagers here and there along the way, wherever
a convenience store exerted its magnetic pull of sweet and salty snacks, the
boys all wearing black outfits, those dumb-looking calf-length baby pants,
and death-metal T-shirts. This must be the longest period of history for a
particular teen fashion - going on two decades now? When even teenagers lack
the enterprise to think up a new look (that is, to make a fresh statement
about who they are), you know you're in a moribund society. I saw some young
adults, too. You could tell more or less because they had young women and
babies with them, and they were stopping for gas or groceries (if you call a
sack full of Froot Loops, jerky, Mountain Dew, and
Pringles "groceries"). Their costume innovation du jour is the cholo hat, a super-deluxe edition of a baseball cap with special
embroidered emblems and a completely flat brim -presenting a look of equal
parts idiocy and homicidal danger. The day was warm enough for
"wife-beater" shirts, all the better for displaying tattoos, which
are now universal among a working class that has no work and no expectation
of work, ever. I tried to think of them as the descendants of men who had
marched off to Cold Harbor, Virginia, and those who built the great engine
that the American economy once was - but it was no go.
Up
the highway, I passed through the classic Main Street town of Hoosick Falls,
just outside of which were the haunts of "Grandma" Moses (Anna Mary
Robertson Moses), the painter of rural scenes. Try as you will to find them,
there are no characters in her paintings wearing cholo
hats and no indication of tattoos under the stiff frock coats and bodices.
The little burg's downtown has a quirky main street that doglegs twice in an
interesting way that you rarely see in this country. It contained some
wonderful old buildings that radiated confidence and noble aspiration from a
time that is bygone. We couldn't reproduce one
correctly now to save our lives. I don't think there was any business besides
a pizza joint and a consignment shop along the whole length of the main
street. All was vacancy and desolation in Hometown USA. The victory of the
national chain stores is now complete. I hope our citizens are happy with the
result.
The
time will come when that disposition of things will change of course. If that
time is at hand, few are aware of it. Perhaps they get an inkling in the
moment when they realize that they have no money to spend in the chain store,
even if the could buy enough gas to get there. The
chain store executives must sense something themselves in those dark moments
after closing when they have to send the day's report to Bentonville,
Arkansas, over the Internet.
These
are the spring sights one encounters in the background of a time in history
when a society slides toward change nobody wants to believe in. Not believing
is easy, especially when you don't pay attention. Meanwhile, somewhere off in
a European bank, an executive reads a computer screen and gags on his lunch.
In Shanghai, a Chinese government banking official wonders what it means when
he lends money to an army general to buy an enterprise owned by the
government. Down in the heart of Dixieland, Memphis drowns and New Orleans
once more looks anxiously to the levees. Who was
Osama Bin Laden, anyway?
James
Howard Kunstler
James
Howard Kunstler’s new novel of the post-oil future, World
Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.
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