[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Road Trip

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (2005)

www.kunstler.com (February 02 2009)


"We will not apologize for our way of life ..."


This unfortunate phrase from President Obama's otherwise sturdy
inaugural address, echoed through my mind last week as I cruised the
suburban outlands of Montgomery, Alabama. All the usual commercial
furnishings of consumerist America hugged the flattish ochre and
dusty-green landscape of played-out cotton fields where thirty feet of
topsoil has washed away in the two hundred years since the mainly
English settlers shoved out the native Alabamu, Coosa, and Tallapoosa.
Along the low horizon, mall followed strip mall followed "lifestyle
center", book-ending the "one house" failed subdivisions of otherwise
empty unsold lots in a cavalcade of floundering enterprise. It seemed at
times as if the terrain was a kind of sea-like expanse, and all the
retail boxes ghost ships drifting to oblivion.

They say that the banks have stopped calling in their loans on the
commercial real estate, even though the owners of the malls and strip
malls have arrived firmly in default. Calling in the loans would only
pin another horrifying liability on the banks' balance sheets. So all
parties join in a game of "pretend", that nothing has really happened to
the fundamental equations of business life. Something similar goes on at
the next level down, where the tenants of the malls and strip malls sink
deeper into rent arrears every month, and the eviction process is simply
postponed, while the stores themselves put off paying their vendors and
suppliers - as the whole system, the whole way of life, enters upon a
circle-jerk of mutual denial in a last desperate effort to forestall the
mandates of reality .

How long will these games go on? This is the primary question that
haunts the republic as we wait for new TARPS, and "bad banks", economic
stimulus packages, infrastructure renewal roll-outs, and other policy
life-lines thrown out in guarded hopefulness to haul America out of a ditch.

The center of Montgomery was instructive, too. Not unlike any other city
in the USA (population about 200,000), the former main artery of
downtown commerce - Dexter Avenue, rolling out like a red carpet below
the state capitol hill, where Martin Luther King's early career kicked
off in a modest red brick church, and where Rosa Parks famously refused
to move to the back of her bus - this "main street" presented a sad
sequence of empty shopfronts interrupted here and there by rather creepy
amateur murals depicting the cruelties of slavery, as if a remonstrance
to the politicos up the hill. Most of the buildings lining the avenue
still stood burdened by the clownish facade re-doos and ghastly
claddings of the 1950s, which had replaced the ordered
classical-vernacular decorum of the original 19th century frontages.
Once the malls had landed in the old cotton fields, and MLK moved on to
Atlanta, Dexter Avenue was just left to rot in the memory trunk.

Here and there around the rest of the downtown, other weird experiments
in American post-war anti-urbanism presented themselves, most notably a
"building" designed to look like a small-scaled Death Star, all black
reflective glass, canted concrete and steel walls - which turned out to
belong to Morris Dees' renowned Southern Poverty Law Center - deployed
directly across the street from the modest white
clapboard-with-green-shutters house once occupied by Jefferson Davis
after Richmond fell and the Confederate leadership skeedaddled further
south. There were a few recently-built government towers that looked
like Nascar trophies. But the rest of the downtown - the parts not
dedicated to surface parking - was the ubiquitous array of muffler
shops, or restaurants and churches that looked like muffler shops.

With the city center thus nearly dead, and the asteroid belt of malls
and strips on their knees financially, this emblematic sunbelt metro
area finds itself in a pickle. Cotton being well-past decline, and
having wrecked the soil, the "new" economy of recent decades dedicated
itself to building car-dependent air-conditioned suburban sprawl - the
perceived perfect antidote to a previous economic order based on
serfdom, hook-worm, and inescapable heat. That now-not-so-new economy of
sprawl, in turn, has come to a screeching halt, as a cruel destiny threw
sand in the mechanisms of reliably cheap oil and revolving credit, and
the gears seized up. A mood of ominous watching and waiting pervaded the
city, but many of the movers-and-shakers had pinned their hopes on the
chance that Mr Obama's stimulus bill would allow them to commence
building a new freeway to the ocean on the Florida panhandle.

My journey continued on the Jesus-haunted blue highways, to that
selfsame place, Walton County, Florida, where some of the most famous
experiments in the New Urbanism were conducted beginning in the 1980s
with the new town of Seaside. I had been there many times over the
years, and I was called down to get a prize in the service of the
movement, but it was a little disconcerting to see how the build-out had
progressed.

The Seaside experiment began very modestly as the idea for a bohemian
village of architects and artists in what was then an almost empty
quarter of piney woods owned by the St Joe timber company. Seaside was
designed so beautifully that it attracted the attention of every
thoracic surgeon and corporate lawyer between Nashville and New Orleans,
and pretty soon Seaside became the Riviera of the sunbelt's economic
elite - and came in for gales of criticism for becoming that. The newer
houses and commercial structures grew ever grander, as a Boomer
generation status competition ramped up into the new millennium. Several
more, ever-grander New Urbanist towns sprouted along the adjacent
beaches, some of the most recent composed of immense mansions
embarrassing in their opulence. The outcome was a little scary,
especially now that the fortunes behind many of these mansions may be
threatened by the multiplying fiascos of finance and economy
overspreading the nation like a vicious plague.

The New Urbanists had not set out to build monuments to Yuppie-Boomer
consumerism, but a peculiar destiny shoved them into that role for a
while - even while they toiled elsewhere around the nation to reform
town planning laws and generally provide an antidote to the fatal
cultural cancer of sprawl, that is, of a settlement pattern guaranteed
to comprehensively bankrupt our society. Anyway, the collapse of the
housing bubble has affected the New Urbanists' business, too, and this
may turn out to be a very good thing because they can put aside the
distractions of building very grand places to sop up ill-gotten wealth
and focus on the issues that Mr Obama's people should have been paying
attention to all along, namely, how are we going to reform the way we
live in this country and what will be the physical manifestation of how
we live in the decades to come.

The New Urbanists have preached for years that conventional suburbia
would fail America in the long run, and that we'd have to prepare for
this failure by restoring traditional modes of occupying the landscape.
So far, the Obama team has not been willing to identify the suburban
system as the heart of our economic problem. They can't recognize it for
what it truly is: a living arrangement with no future - and an economic,
ecological, and spiritual disaster. It is, of course, the primary reason
why we find ourselves in the deadly predicament of importing over
two-thirds of the oil we use every day.

But then, more than half the population lives the suburban way of life,
with its deadly mortgage traps, its mandatory motoring, and its civic
disengagements. Nobody in power dares tell the truth: that we can't live
this way anymore.

But there are scores of places like Montgomery, Alabama, and thousands
of traditional main street small towns that are sitting out there
waiting to be re-activated. We need to do this much more than we need to
build new freeways to the beach. Suburbia is not going to be abandoned
overnight (even if it fails logistically and economically !) but we have
got to arrive at a consensus about rehabilitating our forsaken small
cities and small towns. The New Urbanists have gathered, organized, and
codified all the principle and methodology needed to carry out this
campaign. This should be their moment. Mr Obama and his team should get
with the program.

_____

My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at
all booksellers.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2009/02/road-trip.html



TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/