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Driving
down the broad avenues of Cleveland, Ohio, was like flipping through the
pages of a picture book about the rise and fall of our industrial empire.
Where demolitions had not removed things -- a lot was gone -- stood the
residue of a society so different from ours that you felt momentarily
transported to another planet where a different race of beings had gone about
their business.
Among the qualities most visible in the recent ruins of that lost
society is the secure confidence expressed in its buildings. Even the most
modest factory or business establishment built before the 20th century
included decorations and motifs devised for no other reason but to be
beautiful -- towers, swags, medallions, cartouches -- as if
to state we are joined proudly in a great enterprise to make good things
happen in this world. This was true not just of Cleveland, of course, but
the whole nation, for a while anyway.
Equally arresting are the changes visible in the collective demeanor
from the mid-20th century, especially after the Second World War, when the
adolescent panache of a rising economy had morphed into the grinding force of
a place devoted to the production of anything. The memory of the Great
Depression lingered like a metabolic disorder, and the spirit of the place
was no longer caught up in the muscular exuberance of self-discovery but the
sheer determination to stay powerful and alive. This phase didn't last long.
By the 1970s, signs of a new illness were clear. Production was moving
someplace else, incomes and household security with it. An existential pall
settled over the city as ominous symptoms of waning vitality showed up in the
organs of production. Steel-making and car-making staggered. Even the Cuyahoga
river caught on fire, as if fate was a practical joke. Major retail was
moving elsewhere -- to the suburban outlands -- where so many of the people
who worked in the downtown towers had already fled. The population that
remained in the city center was made of recently uprooted agricultural
quasi-serfs who had only just come up to the city a generation before to make
better livings in the factories that were all of a sudden shutting down. It
seemed like a kind of swindle and they were understandably angry about it.
These days, reading what remains of the city by the lake -- like
so many other cities on the lakes and big rivers of the USA heartland -- you
see a place outfitted for different obsolete pasts with almost no sense of a
plausible future. Most of the efforts directed at "economic
development" in our industrial cities have been aimed at recapturing
those pasts, and it is not surprising that they uniformly fail, because we
are not going back there. We could conceivably take ourselves toward futures
to be proud of, but they are not likely to be the kind of futures we are so
busy projecting in our techno-grandiose fantasies about machine
"singularities."
Being an actualist, I'm in favor of getting real about things, and the
reality we've entered is one of comprehensive contraction, especially for our
cities. One of the reasons places like Cleveland (and Detroit, and Milwaukee,
and St Louis, and Kansas City....) continue to fail in their redevelopment
efforts is because they are already too big. They became overgrown organisms
a while ago, unsuited to the realities of the future -- especially the energy
resource realities of the future -- and they have tried everything except
consciously contracting into smaller, finer, denser, differently-scaled
organisms. In fact, the trend up until the so-called housing bubble of recent
years was to just keep on expanding ever outward beyond the suburban
frontier, which left our cities in a condition like imploded death-stars --
cold and inert at the center, with debris speeding uselessly outward to an
unreachable infinity.
This future we're entering, which I call the long emergency,
compels us to imagine our society differently. Our cities and towns exist
where they do because they occupy important sites. Cleveland is where a
significant river empties into the world's greatest inland sea (which has the
additional amazing benefit of being fresh water). Some human settlement will
continue to be there, very probably a place of consequence, but it will not
be run under the same circumstances that produced, for instance, the civic
center of Daniel Burnham with its giant Beaux Arts courthouses, banks, and
municipal towers.
This disintegrating nation is woefully distracted by Web 2.0,
iPads, Avatar movies, Facebook, and the idiot celebrity spectacles of
TV, not to mention the disasters of job loss, foreclosure, medical extortion,
bankruptcy, corporate loot-ocracy, and the squandered moments of politics. We
know we have to go somewhere. We know that something like history is
leaving us behind. We have no idea how to get to a new place. And we're
spending most of our mental energy gaping into the rear-view mirror, which is
the last place to look for your destination.
The confusion is apt to get a lot worse before it gets better. I'm not
saying this to be ornery but because I believe it is true, and it will
benefit us to know the odds we're up against. The confusion is going to
generate a lot of ideas that are inconsistent with reality -- especially involving
the seductive nostrums of technocracy. Our redemption will be found closer to
the ground in the things we do by hand. But we don't know that yet, and we're
going to try everything except looking there before we find out.
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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