Shattered and Shuttered

[Crewleader]

By James Howard Kunstler
on June 1, 2009 7:21 AM

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, 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.

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

[eridani]

1. Crossing into Canada

Is this because of single payer health care?

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.)

[yy4me]

2. And while Canada takes care of Central Asia, Maybe they can

give us some ideas as to how to fix our own mess. Starting with health care.

[DCKit]

3. We're the bad kid who refuses to learn by example.

Unfortunately, experience might kill us.

[Wednesdays]

4. K&R

:kick:

[Mark Twain Girl]

5. "The tectonics of history are taking us to a strange place." Intense read, thanks. nt