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.
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.
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. -- Wickipedia
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 Likes 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 U.S. history, like losing a limb or a
loved one. The U.S. 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.
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My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback at all booksellers.
LINK: Kunstler.com