American culture...or is that an oxymoron (long)
Posted: September 23, 2003, 1:09 pm
This is a pretty good read, and has spawned a long-ass chain of emails between me & my friends discussing it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Big and Blue in the USA
by James Howard Kunstler
Having just returned from a week in England where, among other things,
walking more than ten yards a day is quite normal, I was once again
startled by the crypto-human land whales waddling down the aisles of my
local supermarket in search of Nabisco Snack-Wells, Wow chips, and
other fraudulent inducements to "diet" by overindulgence in "low-fat"
carbohydrate-laden treats. And they did not look happy.
To say that Americans are shockingly obese is hardly a novel
observation, yet it is discouraging to see so many of your fellow
citizens in such a desperate and unhealthy condition, and I'm sure it
is even more discouraging to be in such a state. Related to this is the
recent disclosure that one-third of all Americans are taking prescribed
antidepressant medications, specifically the SSRIs of the Prozac family
(Selective Seratonin Re-uptake Inhibitors, including Zoloft, Paxil, and
Celexa). That's one out of every three men, women, and children! The
American media routinely regard the scandalous levels of both obesity
and emotional distress here with befuddlement and even indignation, as
though it were inexplicable and even unfair that such a friendly,
generous, valiant, humorous, and enterprising folk as we should be so
mysteriously afflicted with The Blues.
Have any reporters noticed how we actually live here in America? With
very few exceptions, our cities are hollowed out ruins. Our towns have
committed ritualized suicide in thrall to the WalMart God. Most
Americans live in suburban habitats that are isolating, disaggregated,
and neurologically punishing, and from which every last human quality
unrelated to shopping convenience and personal hygiene has been
expunged. We live in places where virtually no activity or service can
be accessed without driving a car, and the (usually solo) journey past
horrifying vistas of on-ramps and off-ramps offers no chance of a
social encounter along the way. Our suburban environments have by
definition destroyed the transition between the urban habitat and the
rural hinterlands. In other words, we can't walk out of town into the
countryside anywhere. Our "homes," as we have taken to calling mere
mass-produced vinyl boxes at the prompting of the realtors, exist in
settings leached of meaningful public space or connection to civic
amenity, with all activity focused inward to the canned entertainments
piped into giant receivers -- where the children especially sprawl in
masturbatory trances, fondling joysticks and keyboards, engorged on
cheez doodles and taco chips.
Placed in such an environment even a theoretically healthy individual
would sooner or later succumb to the kind of despair and anomie that we
have labeled "depression" in our less than honest attempt to shift the
blame for these predictable responses from our own behavioral choices
and national philosophy to some more random "disease" process. But the
misery is multiplied when these very behavioral choices -- inactivity,
isolation, and overeating sugary foods -- lead to disfiguring obesity
on top of despair. And it must be obvious that I am describing a
self-reinforcing feedback loop that generates evermore personal misery
and self-destruction.
Another way of looking at our predicament is as the result of a high
entropy economy -- entropy being provoked by huge "free" energy
"inputs" in the form of a hundred years of cheap oil, and entropy being
expressed in forms as varied as toxic waste, ruined soils, and
buildings so remorselessly ugly that the pain of living with them
corrodes our souls. Depression (despair and anomie) and obesity are as
much expressions of high entropy as the commercial highway strips, the
Big Box stores, the housing subdivisions, the hamburger chains, and all
the other accessories of the wished-for drive-in Utopia.
It doesn't help, of course, that this entropic fiasco of
self-reinforcing feedback loops, and diminishing returns have been
labeled the American Dream -- because neither patriotism nor all the
Prozac in the world will immunize us from the consequences of our own
behavior, our foolish choices, and our self-destructive beliefs. This
particular American Dream more and more looks suspiciously like a
previous investment trap -- we've sunk so much of our national wealth
into a particular way of doing things that we're psychologically
compelled to defend it even if it drives us crazy and kills us.
It was interesting to note over in England how many people were out
enjoying themselves in the public realm, with other people. By public
realm I mean in the streets, the cafes, the pubs, the parks, the
riverside promenades and other places explicitly designed for humans to
enact their hard-wired social proclivities. Everywhere I went in
Oxford, Cambridge, and London I was amazed at the hordes of young
people so obviously enjoying the company of groups of their friends,
and what a contrast this was to the current culture back home where you
hardly ever see anything but a couple, or perhaps two couples, out in a
bar or restaurant, and where the Starbucks cafes are filled with
solitary individuals, and the streets are for cars only, usually with
lone occupants. It was also startling in England to see groups of old
people walking together in the streets or sitting on a blanket in the
park, because in America old people have been conditioned to go about
outside of home only in cars. Today's older Americans have spent their
entire lives in a car-obsessed culture in which walking is seen as
uncomfortable at least and at worst socially stigmatizing, something
only winos do.
In Europe, people make 33% of their trips by foot or bicycle, compared
with 9.4% for Americans. American suburbanites weigh on average 6
pounds more than their counterparts in walkable cities. They have
higher blood pressure, are more susceptible to diabetes, and live two
years fewer on average than Europeans. Pedestrians in the US are three
times more likely to be killed in traffic than in Germany, six times
more likely than in Holland. Bicyclists here are twice as likely to be
killed in traffic than Germans, three times as likely as Dutch.
Statistics hardly tell the whole story, though. The emotional toll of
the American Dream is steep. What we see all over our nation is a
situational loneliness of the most extreme kind; and it is sometimes
only recognizable in contrast to the ways that people behave in other
countries. Any culture, after all, is an immersive environment, and I
suspect that most Americans are unaware of how socially isolated they
are among the strip malls and the gated apartment complexes. Or, to put
it another way, of what an effort it takes to put themselves in the
company of other people.
This pervasive situational loneliness, of being stuck alone in your
car, alone in your work cubicle, alone in your apartment, alone at the
supermarket, alone at the video rental shop -- because that's how
American daily life has come to be organized -- is the injury to which
the insult of living in degrading, ugly, frightening, and monotonous
surroundings is added. Is it any wonder that Americans resort to the
few things available that afford even a semblance of contentment:
eating easily obtainable and cheap junk food and popping a daily dose
of Paxil or Prozac to stave off feelings of despair that might actually
be a predictable response to settings and circumstances of our lives?
(I'd add pornography to the list also, a substitute for sex with other
real people who cannot be accessed in the condition of pervasive
situational loneliness).
How depressing.
If it's any consolation, I repeat what I have said in this space in
previous rants: that we are headed into a social and economic maelstrom
so severe, as the people on this earth contest over the remaining oil
and gas supplies, that everything about contemporary life in America
will have to be rearranged, reorganized, reformed, and re-scaled. The
infrastructure of suburbia just won't work without utterly dependable
supplies of reliably cheap oil and natural gas. No combination of
alternative fuels or energy systems will permit us to run what we are
currently running, or even close to it. The vaunted hydrogen economy
is, at this stage, a complete fantasy, and at the very least there is
going to be an interlude of severe disorder and economic discontinuity
between the unwinding of the cheap oil age and anything that might
plausibly follow it.
We will be driving a lot less than we do now and cars will generally be
a diminished presence in our lives. The automakers and the oil
companies can lobby all they like, but history has a velocity of its
own, and it is taking us into uncharted territory where the GM Yukons
and Ford Excursions will be useless. When the suburbs tank, they will
go down hard and fast. The loss of hallucinated wealth is going to
shock us to our socks, and the fight over the table scraps of the 20th
century is liable to entail a lot of political mischief here in the USA.
The physical arrangements for daily living will have to be revised and
re-ordered accordingly. We're going to have to return to traditional
human habitats: towns, villages, cities, and agricultural landscapes.
We will have to walk out of necessity, or at least ride some places
with other people. We may be too busy to indulge in the blandishments
of television and the other entertainment narcotics we've become
addicted to, and even the Internet may be made irrelevant in a world of
regular brownouts. We may have to grow more of our food closer to home
and do some of the physical work ourselves. As far as I know, there is
no such thing as a Cheez Doodle bush. We are going to be living a lot
more locally and thrown on our own resources.
We're going to have to do this whether we like it or not, because
circumstances will compel us to. There may be a lot of hardship and
difficulty, but in the process we are going to get some things back
that we threw away in our foolish attempt to become a drive-in
civilization. And most of these things we get back will have to do with
living on more intimate terms with other people, getting more regular
exercise, eating better food, leading more purposeful lives, and
rediscovering the public realm that is the dwelling place of our
collective spirit. Paradoxically, when that happens fewer of us will
need Prozac or the Atkins diet.
From:
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/cur ... dBlue.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Big and Blue in the USA
by James Howard Kunstler
Having just returned from a week in England where, among other things,
walking more than ten yards a day is quite normal, I was once again
startled by the crypto-human land whales waddling down the aisles of my
local supermarket in search of Nabisco Snack-Wells, Wow chips, and
other fraudulent inducements to "diet" by overindulgence in "low-fat"
carbohydrate-laden treats. And they did not look happy.
To say that Americans are shockingly obese is hardly a novel
observation, yet it is discouraging to see so many of your fellow
citizens in such a desperate and unhealthy condition, and I'm sure it
is even more discouraging to be in such a state. Related to this is the
recent disclosure that one-third of all Americans are taking prescribed
antidepressant medications, specifically the SSRIs of the Prozac family
(Selective Seratonin Re-uptake Inhibitors, including Zoloft, Paxil, and
Celexa). That's one out of every three men, women, and children! The
American media routinely regard the scandalous levels of both obesity
and emotional distress here with befuddlement and even indignation, as
though it were inexplicable and even unfair that such a friendly,
generous, valiant, humorous, and enterprising folk as we should be so
mysteriously afflicted with The Blues.
Have any reporters noticed how we actually live here in America? With
very few exceptions, our cities are hollowed out ruins. Our towns have
committed ritualized suicide in thrall to the WalMart God. Most
Americans live in suburban habitats that are isolating, disaggregated,
and neurologically punishing, and from which every last human quality
unrelated to shopping convenience and personal hygiene has been
expunged. We live in places where virtually no activity or service can
be accessed without driving a car, and the (usually solo) journey past
horrifying vistas of on-ramps and off-ramps offers no chance of a
social encounter along the way. Our suburban environments have by
definition destroyed the transition between the urban habitat and the
rural hinterlands. In other words, we can't walk out of town into the
countryside anywhere. Our "homes," as we have taken to calling mere
mass-produced vinyl boxes at the prompting of the realtors, exist in
settings leached of meaningful public space or connection to civic
amenity, with all activity focused inward to the canned entertainments
piped into giant receivers -- where the children especially sprawl in
masturbatory trances, fondling joysticks and keyboards, engorged on
cheez doodles and taco chips.
Placed in such an environment even a theoretically healthy individual
would sooner or later succumb to the kind of despair and anomie that we
have labeled "depression" in our less than honest attempt to shift the
blame for these predictable responses from our own behavioral choices
and national philosophy to some more random "disease" process. But the
misery is multiplied when these very behavioral choices -- inactivity,
isolation, and overeating sugary foods -- lead to disfiguring obesity
on top of despair. And it must be obvious that I am describing a
self-reinforcing feedback loop that generates evermore personal misery
and self-destruction.
Another way of looking at our predicament is as the result of a high
entropy economy -- entropy being provoked by huge "free" energy
"inputs" in the form of a hundred years of cheap oil, and entropy being
expressed in forms as varied as toxic waste, ruined soils, and
buildings so remorselessly ugly that the pain of living with them
corrodes our souls. Depression (despair and anomie) and obesity are as
much expressions of high entropy as the commercial highway strips, the
Big Box stores, the housing subdivisions, the hamburger chains, and all
the other accessories of the wished-for drive-in Utopia.
It doesn't help, of course, that this entropic fiasco of
self-reinforcing feedback loops, and diminishing returns have been
labeled the American Dream -- because neither patriotism nor all the
Prozac in the world will immunize us from the consequences of our own
behavior, our foolish choices, and our self-destructive beliefs. This
particular American Dream more and more looks suspiciously like a
previous investment trap -- we've sunk so much of our national wealth
into a particular way of doing things that we're psychologically
compelled to defend it even if it drives us crazy and kills us.
It was interesting to note over in England how many people were out
enjoying themselves in the public realm, with other people. By public
realm I mean in the streets, the cafes, the pubs, the parks, the
riverside promenades and other places explicitly designed for humans to
enact their hard-wired social proclivities. Everywhere I went in
Oxford, Cambridge, and London I was amazed at the hordes of young
people so obviously enjoying the company of groups of their friends,
and what a contrast this was to the current culture back home where you
hardly ever see anything but a couple, or perhaps two couples, out in a
bar or restaurant, and where the Starbucks cafes are filled with
solitary individuals, and the streets are for cars only, usually with
lone occupants. It was also startling in England to see groups of old
people walking together in the streets or sitting on a blanket in the
park, because in America old people have been conditioned to go about
outside of home only in cars. Today's older Americans have spent their
entire lives in a car-obsessed culture in which walking is seen as
uncomfortable at least and at worst socially stigmatizing, something
only winos do.
In Europe, people make 33% of their trips by foot or bicycle, compared
with 9.4% for Americans. American suburbanites weigh on average 6
pounds more than their counterparts in walkable cities. They have
higher blood pressure, are more susceptible to diabetes, and live two
years fewer on average than Europeans. Pedestrians in the US are three
times more likely to be killed in traffic than in Germany, six times
more likely than in Holland. Bicyclists here are twice as likely to be
killed in traffic than Germans, three times as likely as Dutch.
Statistics hardly tell the whole story, though. The emotional toll of
the American Dream is steep. What we see all over our nation is a
situational loneliness of the most extreme kind; and it is sometimes
only recognizable in contrast to the ways that people behave in other
countries. Any culture, after all, is an immersive environment, and I
suspect that most Americans are unaware of how socially isolated they
are among the strip malls and the gated apartment complexes. Or, to put
it another way, of what an effort it takes to put themselves in the
company of other people.
This pervasive situational loneliness, of being stuck alone in your
car, alone in your work cubicle, alone in your apartment, alone at the
supermarket, alone at the video rental shop -- because that's how
American daily life has come to be organized -- is the injury to which
the insult of living in degrading, ugly, frightening, and monotonous
surroundings is added. Is it any wonder that Americans resort to the
few things available that afford even a semblance of contentment:
eating easily obtainable and cheap junk food and popping a daily dose
of Paxil or Prozac to stave off feelings of despair that might actually
be a predictable response to settings and circumstances of our lives?
(I'd add pornography to the list also, a substitute for sex with other
real people who cannot be accessed in the condition of pervasive
situational loneliness).
How depressing.
If it's any consolation, I repeat what I have said in this space in
previous rants: that we are headed into a social and economic maelstrom
so severe, as the people on this earth contest over the remaining oil
and gas supplies, that everything about contemporary life in America
will have to be rearranged, reorganized, reformed, and re-scaled. The
infrastructure of suburbia just won't work without utterly dependable
supplies of reliably cheap oil and natural gas. No combination of
alternative fuels or energy systems will permit us to run what we are
currently running, or even close to it. The vaunted hydrogen economy
is, at this stage, a complete fantasy, and at the very least there is
going to be an interlude of severe disorder and economic discontinuity
between the unwinding of the cheap oil age and anything that might
plausibly follow it.
We will be driving a lot less than we do now and cars will generally be
a diminished presence in our lives. The automakers and the oil
companies can lobby all they like, but history has a velocity of its
own, and it is taking us into uncharted territory where the GM Yukons
and Ford Excursions will be useless. When the suburbs tank, they will
go down hard and fast. The loss of hallucinated wealth is going to
shock us to our socks, and the fight over the table scraps of the 20th
century is liable to entail a lot of political mischief here in the USA.
The physical arrangements for daily living will have to be revised and
re-ordered accordingly. We're going to have to return to traditional
human habitats: towns, villages, cities, and agricultural landscapes.
We will have to walk out of necessity, or at least ride some places
with other people. We may be too busy to indulge in the blandishments
of television and the other entertainment narcotics we've become
addicted to, and even the Internet may be made irrelevant in a world of
regular brownouts. We may have to grow more of our food closer to home
and do some of the physical work ourselves. As far as I know, there is
no such thing as a Cheez Doodle bush. We are going to be living a lot
more locally and thrown on our own resources.
We're going to have to do this whether we like it or not, because
circumstances will compel us to. There may be a lot of hardship and
difficulty, but in the process we are going to get some things back
that we threw away in our foolish attempt to become a drive-in
civilization. And most of these things we get back will have to do with
living on more intimate terms with other people, getting more regular
exercise, eating better food, leading more purposeful lives, and
rediscovering the public realm that is the dwelling place of our
collective spirit. Paradoxically, when that happens fewer of us will
need Prozac or the Atkins diet.
From:
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/cur ... dBlue.html
Again, the guy is just overgeneralizing. Sure, he saw that in London, and he'd see it in a lot of American cities as well. I'm sure there are cities in Europe that would make LA look nice as well.