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It's sad to be a
citizen of a nation that can't do anything right. While BP was fumbling its
"kill shot" into the Deepwater Horizon hole, and the dying pelicans
were flopping in the poisoned marshlands, and rumors seeped across the
Internet that nothing short of an atom bomb would avail to stop the
underwater oil gusher -- not to mention, meanwhile, all the other problems out
there, such as the ongoing melt-away of of
capital in every corner of the world -- I found myself in Berlin, Germany, touring
the city on a rented bicycle (after a 4,500-mil airplane ride, it is true).
When last I was in Berlin in 1997, the town was still reeling from the shock
of reunification. Only a few tentative businesses had started up on the
former communist side, and most of the route of the infamous wall remained a
yawning, weedy scrape-off zone. Now the repair of the city is well-advanced,
though I give very mixed reviews to some of the premier projects.
Back in '97, my biggest surprise was, holy shit, the place is in color.
After almost fifty years of watching Hitler documentaries I'd assumed the
city only existed in black-and-white. By extension, of course, I realized
that Hitler himself had been in living color, and that's where a really vivid
sense of the horror set in. In '97, the scars of World War Two still showed
all over the east side, where an acne of bullet holes and artillery craters
defaced virtually every older building. They said the communists had been too
poor for cosmetic renovation -- or else the Russian overlords took a certain
sadistic pride in their wartime handiwork and wanted to keep the hostage
denizens of the east cowed with never-ending reminders of their subjugation.
A necrotic odor of defeat lingered in the streets there. The west side,
meanwhile, was all jaunty with shopping and techno-pop teens and the normal
hoopla of a money economy.
The the Battle of Berlin, fought mainly by the
Russians, had left most of the important civic stuff inside the communist
zone of the city -- major museums, the opera and symphony, Humboldt
University, the Brandenburg gate and the grand avenue called the Unter Den Linden leading off it, the site of the old
royal palace, most of the old government buildings (their shells at least),
and, of course, the chief souvenirs of Hitlerdom,
especially the dreadful bunker of the final days. It was all in pretty
shabby shape when I was there in '97. Hitler's bunker, which had proved too
sturdy to blow up even with controlled demolitions, was finally just filled
with sand by the Russians, and looked like a mere weedy mound in a vacant
lot. The spot was apparently deemed too spiritually toxic to do anything with
it. The nearby Potsdamer Platz,
once Berlin's Times Square, was a vast set of holes in the ground with a
bizarre network of primary-colored pipes emanating from them to drain
groundwater preceding foundation work. And finally there was Sir Norman
Foster's rebuilding of the Reichstag, just then getting underway in a
rubble-strewn plain.
All those projects are about finished. The area around the Brandenburg Gate,
once a forlorn encampment of morose ragtag Russians hawking fake amber
plastic necklaces, now swarms with tourists. Likewise the Reichstag and its
landscaped front and rear courts. The Unter Den
Linden is almost too crowded to walk down. And the whole region around the
old communist Alexander Platz -- originally
designed by the commies to look like a Jetson's
shopping mall, minus the shopping of course -- seems to have become the
consumer electronics mecca of Europe. Sad to say,
those holes in the ground around the Potsdamer Platz grew up to be a set of inglorious glass box towers,
each trying to out-do the next in sleek corporate narcissism, while the
streets themselves look like something the state of Georgia DOT would come up
with -- intersecting six-laners, a demolition derby
in a suburban office park.
When I was there in '97, I was struck by how utterly all remnants of Hitler
had been erased. I suppose it was a form of post traumatic stress syndrome.
Quite a bit of memory has been recovered since then, and new monuments
abound, from the Peter Eisenman-designed Memorial
to the Murdered Jews of Europe -- very solemnly eloquent -- to a smaller
memorial to Hitler's gay victims in the big park called the Tiergarten. Plaques explaining one Nazi horror after
another are now liberally deployed around the old city center, and Herman
Goering's Air Force Ministry was left standing as the last example of Third
Reich art deco -- a form of extreme stripped down neo-classicism with all
femininity removed, no curves, no ornaments. The
site of Hitler's bunker is no longer a weed patch, but perhaps appropriately
one of the city's rather rare surface parking lots, with a plaque telling the
tale and tourist docents pointing out (I swear I heard this) that "...Hitler's
bedroom lay about where that white Audi is parked...."
It
seemed to me that, altogether, the German expression of regret appears deeply
sincere now and absolutely straightforward, with no side-trips into the realm
of excuses or attempted explanations. With the German social mentality
now restored to normality -- laughter in the busy streets and all dark
thoughts of race vengeance banished -- one was prompted to reflect on just
how such a civilized folk could fall into a mass psychosis like Naziism. And by extension, it was hard to evade the
question as to how the USA might not lurch into something worse. The Germans
were punished pretty severely for losing (and starting!) the First World War.
Depression and hyper-inflation drove them to their knees. I daresay, too,
that something about industrialization meshed with their ethnic neuroses to
very bad effect (though this is a subject that would take a book to lay out). Anyway, it drove them batshit.
They followed a madman through the gates of hell and made a smoking ruin of
their home place.
America today is arguably a far less civilized land, and even more neurotic,
than the Germany of the 1930s. We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor,
and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a sentient American
reeling in angst and anomie. Our popular culture would embarrass a race of hebephrenics. We think that neck tattoos are
cool. A lot of our pop music is overtly homicidal. Our richest citizens
have managed to define a new banality of evil. Our middle classes are subject
to humiliations so baroque that sadomasochism even fails to encompass the
finer points. And we don't even need help from other nations to run our own
economic affairs into the ground -- we're digging our national grave with a
kind of antic glee, complete with all the lurid stagecraft that Las Vegas,
Hollywood, and Madison Avenue can muster.
Biking around Berlin -- especially the non-tourist neighborhoods, and the
beautiful, shaded paths beside the little river Spree, where young people sat
enjoying the simple tranquility of the waterside on a spring day -- I could
only imagine the scene back home at the Indianapolis Speedway (or the dozens
of Nascar ovals around Dixie) -- the frantic idiocy
of America-on-wheels, the fat slobs in beer can hats grilling cheez dogs in the parking lots, letting loose their
asinine rebel yells as though this made men of them, and above it all the
deafening noise of a people literally driving themselves to death and
madness.
Meanwhile, the evil plume of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico grows
ever-larger by the hour and every living thing in that quarter of the sea
faces slow death. That's our memorial-in-the-making to ourselves.
I feel sorry for Barack Obama in this situation. Dmitry Orlov
is right: this is our Chernobyl. This is the cherry-on-top of all our
feckless foolishness. Memorial Day this year is the welcome mat to our hard
time. We'll be lucky if some honorable as-yet-unknown colonel in the wadis of Afghanistan comes home to overthrow president
Glenn Beck, or whichever lethal moron ends up in power after 2012. We'll be a
very different America then, with no going back.
Coming home to the USA was like re-entering a special kind of mega-slum where
nothing that can be screwed up is left un-screwed up. My Delta flight was two
hours late, of course. Amusingly, the explanation given was that new runways
were under construction at JFK airport -- like, Delta just discovered it that
morning, or somehow they've been unable to work that into their scheduling
process after months and months. The things we tell ourselves are so absurd
that even the late George Carlin couldn't make them up. We stopped on the
tarmac at JFK because they didn't have a gate for us. We passengers
were put onto some kind of people-mover contraption. The engine failed so we we sat in this steel box in 90-degree heat until they
fetched another one. Then there was the journey through a set of dim tunnels
to customs, and another journey up a steep ramp shared by motor vehicles and
their exhalations to the terminal exit. Welcome home to Slum Nation.
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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