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I was plying
the interstate highways of New England this weekend -- there is no sane way
to get from Albany, New York, to the vicinity of Middletown, Connecticut, by
public transit -- marveling at the vistas of normality all around me: the
freeway lanes with their orderly streams of happy motorists, the chain stores
floating like islands on the gray undulating landscape, the corporate towers
of Springfield, Mass, and then Hartford, gleaming in the persistent
pre-spring sunshine, as though they physically represented the wished-for
dynamism of economies in recovery. "I see dead people..." said
the kid in that horror movie. I see dying ways of life.
There was no denying the spectacular weather for us long-suffering
northeasterners. A week ago, it was like living in a banana daiquiri around
here. Now, it was sixty-two degrees in East Haddam, CT, along a very
beautiful stretch of the Connecticut River somehow miraculously unmarred by
the usual mutilations of industry or recreation. On a few hillsides facing
south, daffodils were already up with blossom heads ready to pop. The mind
could go two ways: into the past, when wooden sailing craft were built
in yards along the river; or into the future, when it would be easy to
imagine wooden sailing craft being built there again, only twenty miles or so
from the great sheltered mini-sea of Long Island Sound.
Whatever else one thinks of how we live these days, it's hard to not
see it as temporary, historically anomalous, a peculiar blip in human
experience. I've spent my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning
whether the makings of tomorrow's supper would be there waiting on the
supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the lights
would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my personal
safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I don't feel tremors of massive
change in these things, as though all life's comforts and structural
certainties rested on a groaning fault line.
It
had been one of those eventless weeks when the world pretended to be a
settled place. The collapse of Greece seemed like little more than a passing
case of geo-financial heartburn. The 36,000-odd newly-unemployed were spun
magically into a feel-good story for public consumption, and the stock
markets ratified it by levitating over a hundred points. The news media was
preoccupied with the Great Question of whether the first woman film
director would win a prize, thus settling all accounts in the age-old
gender war, and the health care reform bill lumbered around the congressional
offices like a zombie in search of a silver bullet that might send it back to
the comforts of the tomb.
All in all, it was the sort of quiescent string of days that makes
someone like me nervous. I can't help imagining what it was like in the
spring of 1860, for instance, when so many terrible questions of polity hung
over the country, and hundreds of thousands of young men still walked behind
their plows or stood at their counting desks or turned their wrenches in the
exciting new industries -- not knowing that destiny was busy preparing a
ditch somewhere to receive their shattered corpses in places as-yet-unknown
called Spotsylvania, Shiloh, and Cold Harbor. Or else my mind projects to the
spring of 1939, when men dressed in neckties and hats sat in a ballpark
watching Joe DiMaggio and Charlie Keller play "pepper" in the
pregame sunshine, and nobody much thought about the coming beaches of
Normandy and the canebrakes of the Solomon Islands.
Everything we know about it seems to indicate that human beings happily go
along with the program -- whatever the program is -- until all of a sudden
they can't, and then they don't. It's like the quote oft-repeated these
days (because it's so apt for these times) by surly old Ernest
Hemingway about how the man in a story went broke: slowly, and then
all at once. In the background of last week's reassuring torpor, one ominous
little signal flashed perhaps dimly in all that sunshine: the price of
oil broke above $81-a-barrel. Of course in that range it becomes impossible
for the staggering monster of our so-called "consumer" economy to
enter the much-wished-for nirvana of "recovery" -- where the orgies
of spending on houses and cars and electronic entertainment machines will
resume like the force of nature it is presumed to be. Over $80-a-barrel and
we're in the zone where what's left of this economy cracks and crumbles a
little bit more each day, lurching forward to that moment when something
life-changing occurs all at once.
I
gave a talk down in Connecticut to a roomful of people who are still pretty
much preoccupied with such questions as how to fight the landing of the next WalMart UFO, or how best to entice tourists to purchase objets-d'art, or serve up weekend entertainments along
with fine dining and accommodations. Meanwhile, I'm thinking: how many
of you might be grubbing around the woods six months from now for enough
acorns and mushrooms to make something resembling soup...? It's an extreme fantasy,
I know, but it dogs me. Elsewhere in this big nation, I imagine a laid-off
engineer -- a genial, capable fellow, once valued by his former employer -- tinkering in his Ohio basement with a device
designed to blow up the headquarters of the health insurance company that has
just denied his wife treatment for cancer of some organ or other. Or my mind
ventures into the rank "function room" of a Holiday Inn outside
Indianapolis, where Tea Party recruits meet over chicken nuggets to discuss
the New World Order, and the Bilderberg conspiracy,
and the suspicious numbers of Jews in the bonus-padded upper echelons of the
Wall Street banks, and what might be done about that.
On
the trip back to upstate New York, my eyes couldn't fix on anything in the landscape
that seemed even remotely permanent. Even the massiveness of all that steel
and concrete deployed in everything from the glass towers to the highway toll
booths seemed insubstantial. I could easily envisage the Mass Pike
empty of cars with mulleins and sumacs popping through fissures in the
pavement, and sheets of aluminum on the vacant Big Box stores flapping
rhythmically in the wind, and something entirely new going on in the hills
and valleys along the way, where people labored to bring forth new life.
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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