[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Shattered and Shuttered

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

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

www.kunstler.com (June 01 2009)


The dollar was up to its armpits in quicksand, and oil prices had crept
stealthily into the death-to-airlines range, and if, in the old slogan,
what's good for General Motors really is good for the USA, then destiny
was dealing a harsh lesson to The Land of the Free - while I made a
drive on Thursday (in a Japanese rent-a-car) through the remotest ends
of upstate New York State into the province of Ontario, Canada, to see
what I could see. What I saw was pretty scary.

You get into these far reaches of upstate New York and your senses
report that you have entered something like an HP Lovecraft story {1},
where the sun comes up twenty minutes late, and the magnetic poles are
not where they're supposed to be, and the few remaining denizens of the
towns all have eleven fingers ... Even though I've seen plenty of
desolation like it in other parts of the country - the back roads of
Ohio, the Mississippi River towns of the upper Midwest, the morbid
stretch of blue highway between Memphis and Little Rock - I've never
encountered a landscape so shattered by the mere ravages of economic fate.

The most striking feature is how all the things once so "modern", all
the roadside business enterprises designed along "space age" motifs -
the car dealerships with boomerang-shaped signs, the rocket-ship-style
food huts, the schools that look like atomic power installations - all
teeter now in sublime decrepitude. The reversal of spirit from childlike
exuberance of the 1960s to the senile sclerosis of today said everything
about where America is at. Much of what existed before the space age is
not even there anymore, bulldozed decades ago in our haste to erase
pre-drive-in living, as if it branded us a lower life-form than, say,
our arch-enemy, the Soviets.  I've wondered for many years what
Modernism would be like when time finally passed it by, when it was no
longer the sole thing it declared itself to be, up-to-date - and there
it was smeared all over the landscape like so much road kill.

The most horrifying part of the trip was the old city of Watertown, a
short hop shy of the Canadian border.

Named after the many falls located on the Black River, the city
developed early in the 19th century as a manufacturing center. From
years of generating industrial wealth, in the early 20th century the
city was said to have more millionaires per capita than any other city
in the nation. Residents of Watertown built a rich public and private
architectural legacy. It is the smallest city to have a park designed by
Frederick Law Olmsted, the celebrated landscape architect who created
Central Park in New York City. - Wikipedia {2}

All that industry is gone now, apparently, and all that's left of the
town's economy is whatever it gets from nearby Fort Drum, the giant US
Army installation. Nineteen year old soldiers-in-training are not so
impressed by Olmsted parks and the civic embellishments dreamed up by
timber magnates, bankers, and the owners of piano factories.  The
humanity visible on the downtown streets of Watertown looked like extras
who wandered away from the latest Road Warrior location shoot -
semi-hominid creatures with strange loping gaits, arresting hair-dos,
and enough tattoos to qualify them for harpoon duty on Herman Melville's
Pequod.  You passed by groups of them on the streets and wanted to make
sure the car's doors were locked.

At the heart of the old town, everything possible had been done to erase
the vestiges of pre-automobile living.  I suppose this is because the
first thing many young army recruits did until fairly recently was buy a
car. If having to join the army (because there are so few other jobs)
buys you a ticket to The American Dream, then getting a car is the
consolation prize - even if you have to make four years of "easy monthly
payments" on it.  Very little of the town's physical history was left
standing, and most of it stood in isolation, devoid of context, awaiting
the next parade of the front-end-loaders.  What was left of "the action"
had shifted to a ghastly franchise strip along the Route 3 connector to
I-81.  This stretch of highway was clearly where all the money had gone
since, say 1976, though mostly to the pavement itself and its heroic
furnishings of signage, light poles, multiple turning lanes, and curb
cuts. The buildings were little more than packing crates with a few
plastic doo-dads stuck on. You had to wonder if all this stuff would
ever see another iteration of repair and restoration.  I doubt it.

Burger King was doing some kind of promotion in its Watertown huts and
the marquee in their several parking lots proclaimed - I swear to God -
"Ask us about our Angry Burger".  WTF? Is the rage of lumpen America so
repressed now that it can only be expressed in menu items that turn
people into hulking four-hundred-pound monsters?

It was, I'm sad to say, a relief to cross the border out of my own
country. Once you got off the main highway of Canada, 401, along the
north side of Lake Ontario, the landscape presented a disturbing
contrast to what you saw on the American side. Unlike the slovenly,
failing farms of New York State, the farms of Ontario looked successful
and prosperous.  The barns did not tilt at weird angles and the roofs
were intact.  The farm houses were freshly painted and the grounds
generally not strewn with the sort of dingy plastic effluvia Americans
like to deploy around their dwellings to give the impression of
plentitude. You wondered: how did all the IQ points below the Great
Lakes somehow migrate over to the Canadian side?  Had they invented some
kind of quantum spirit vacuum, run perhaps on dark matter, that sucked
all the vitality out of their neighbor-to-the-south? (If so, maybe
Canada should take over our dreary duties in Central Asia.)

All this was occurring against the background of General Motors looming
bankruptcy, an epochal moment in US history, like losing a limb or a
loved one. The US Government has decided to drive a Chevrolet off the
cliff Thelma and Louise style.  We were heading there anyway, so why not
make the trip in air-conditioned comfort, with plenty of room for all
the family members, and on-board video entertainment for the little
ones.  In fact, it may not be the bankruptcy of GM itself that will
amaze and appall the other nations of the world, so much as the US
government's pretense that the company can return to health in just a
little while and pay back all the money that the citizenry has allowed
to be sucked into its black hole of losses.

My daddy bought Chevrolets in the 1950s, marvelously crazy-looking
machines with winged tail-lights that handled like pontoon boats, broke
down after 30,000 miles, and were tossed out every couple of years not
on account of their mechanical failures so much as their obvious lack of
up-to-the-minute styling. The post-war prosperity dazzled his generation
with its democratic cornucopian bonanzas.  The innocence of all that is
truly lost now. There is a dark sense of things shifting out there now
in a major way.  The tectonics of history are taking us to a strange
place.  Maybe Mr Lovecraft had it right.

Links:

{1} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft

{2} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watertown,_New_York

_____

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

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/06/shattered-and-shuttered.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/