JAMES KUNSTLER: Summer Fun

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James Kunstler -- World News Trust

The summer driving season officially kicks off Friday with the Memorial Day weekend and, as gasoline prices prompt more families to stay home, a lot of Americans will be stuck in their oppressively boring suburbs wondering about the meaning of it all. The failures and disconnections of the living arrangement most Americans have been induced to choose will at last become manifest.

They will discover that a luxurious private realm, with more bathrooms per inhabitant than any other society, will not compensate for a public realm that has been reduced and impoverished into a universal automobile slum. The children will be relegated to their TVs and video game terminals. The only other option will be trips to the mall -- except that credit cards maxed out on gasoline fill-ups will put the kibosh on recreational shopping, too, and the public will make the additional discovery that malls have little else to offer non-spenders, except a keener awareness of their hopeless debt levels. The adults will blame George W. Bush.

It seems to me that as the weeks advance into the hardcore vacation zone, the price of gasoline is only likely to go higher. (Duh. . . .) It will be a strange interplay between increased competition (or growing scarcity) of global oil resources and weakness in the U.S. dollar itself -- and it may not be so easy to tell which is the chicken or the egg. The dollar's loss of value against other currencies will force the federal reserve to keep bumping up interest rates so that all the foreign holders of U.S. debt paper will not dump it.

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