Over the last ten days, somebody shot the "Green Shoots" narrative
in the head. There is no way the American economy can re-expand.
Watching the summer panorama on an
Adirondack lake is like reading a history of the post World War Two
decades, because almost nothing on view there now existed before 1945
and we'll be stunned to see how swiftly it all terminates. The
fantastic prosperity of these postwar decades killed the wildness of
these once-remote lakes. Fortunes were made -- like everywhere else in
the USA -- carving up the landscape and deploying graceless houses made
of cheap, fabricated materials. All the diabolical genius brought to
engineering the New Jersey and Long Island suburbs was eventually
turned loose on the Adirondack wilderness, with predictable results.
The lakes themselves, stuffed with all those sleek plastic power boats,
are like the Long Island Expressway minus the painted lanes.
The American victory over manifest evil in World War Two was so total
that there was no one else left on earth to compete with in making and
selling useful articles, at least for a while. And it produced a middle
class so well-paid that it could express itself in a vast spewage of
plastic and leisure across the land. The human race will look back on
this society with wonder and nausea for whatever remains of its time on
Earth. For at least twenty years, though, this way of life has been
running on fumes, inertia, and promissory notes. The amazing thing is
that these life-extension strategies worked, especially the past ten
years when there was really nothing left besides a Ponzi structure of
interlocked swindles and rackets.
When the time comes when we
do look back to understand what went wrong, I think we'll see that the
Woodstock generation went off the rails in 1980, with the election of
the actor Ronald Reagan, who really established the idea that a
society could benefit hugely just by lying to itself, or simply
pretending. It wasn't "morning in America," of course. It was more
like eleven-thirty at night, and the rest of the world had eaten our
breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and we decided that inflating our
national self-esteem was more important than paying attention to
reality. That was when we became a something-for-nothing society --
and, incidentally, it was also the take-off point for legalized
gambling all over America (an "industry" based on the worship of
unearned riches). And that was, coincidentally, the moment when we
became a nation of dupes, grifters, marks, and suckers.
Now,
when I look around that Adirondack lake, I can easily imagine the time
-- not far off -- when the motors cease to ring, and the big, white
plastic ridiculous power boats vanish from the scene, and the houses
along the shore de-laminate, or are plundered for their materials, and
the sites they occupy return to nature, and the aroma of roasting hot
dogs no longer wafts on the summer air, and the pastures and orchards
run back from the shoreline up the slopes, with people laboring
earnestly in them -- rather than dragging children on plastic tubes
around the water behind a boat that gets four miles to the gallon of
gasoline.
For those still capable of paying attention to our national predicament, the questions are: what happens from here... and how does it happen?
Over the last ten days, somebody shot the "Green Shoots" narrative
in the head. There is no way the American economy can re-expand. This
is a debt deflation like unto nothing the world has ever seen before.
We've entered the really painful zone of the "work-out" where
insolvency can no longer be denied. Things will be heard crashing
every day -- enterprises, households, assets, institutions, prospects,
deals. No amount of simulus, first, second, or beyond, will avail to
stop this process.
President Obama had better turn his
efforts from pretending to re-start the revolving credit rackets to
overseeing the comprehensive re-simplifying of American life. I think
he has a few weeks to turn his rhetoric around before the political
mischief begins for real, and the aggrieved classes start shooting
things up and burning things down. These classes really do need
something to hope for, and something to work at, and something to
occupy their attention besides their grief over the massive losses in
their lives. But none of that energy will be focused beneficially
unless they hear the truth... that there really is no going back to
what was before.
It's also vitally important to commence public
hearings and official investigations of those who committed real crimes
and malfeasances. Bernie Madoff has been salted away for two and a
half lifetimes, but Henry Paulson is still at large after overseeing
the creation of the biggest heap of fraudulent securities the world has
ever known -- and then betting against them in the swaps market, in
effect shorting his own swindle -- not to mention his misdeeds at the
U.S. Deparftment of the Treasury. Why are those other Wall Street
smoothies still enjoying their Hamptons villas while the foreclosed set
up tents in the Sacramento Delta? Why are the government officials who
failed so miserably at regulation still enjoying their salaries, perqs,
and pensions while those not employed by a bloated government struggle
to stay alive another week. And how many more weeks will go by before
Michael Jackson is buried in the ground?
James Howard Kunstler says he wrote The
Geography of Nowhere, "Because I believe a lot of people share my
feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots,
housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that
makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work."
Home From Nowhere was a continuation
of that discussion with an emphasis on the remedies. A portion of it
appeared as the cover story in the September 1996 Atlantic Monthly.
His next book in the series, The City in Mind: Notes
on the Urban Condition, published by Simon & Schuster / Free Press,
is a look a wide-ranging look at cities here and abroad, an inquiry
into what makes them great (or miserable), and in particular what America
is going to do with it's mutilated cities.
His latest book, The Long Emergency,
published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in 2005, is about the
challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate
change, and other "converging catastrophes of the 21st Century."
The Atlantic Monthly Press also published his novel, Maggie Darling, in 2004.
Mr. Kunstler is also the author of eight other
novels including The Halloween Ball, An Embarrassment of Riches.
He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and
Op-Ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic issues.
Mr. Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948.
He moved to the Long Island suburbs in 1954 and returned to the city
in 1957 where he spent most of his childhood. He graduated from the
State Univerity of New York, Brockport campus, 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. He has no formal training in architecture
or the related design fields.
He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia,
Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, RPI, the University of Virginia and many other
colleges, and he has appeared before many professional organizations
such as the AIA , the APA., and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
He lives in Saratoga Springs in upstate New
York.