The Obtuse American

I am indebted to James Kunstler, whose Clusterfuck website is linked on this page, for the observation that 80% of everything which has ever been built in the United States was thrown up in the last 50 years (The Geography of Nowhere, Knopf, 1993). My generation's sojourn through life is marked definitively by this transfiguration of the American landscape. It hardly needs mentioning that the vast majority of the stuff built is crud: ugly, inhuman, alienating, anti-nature, insane.

The Interstate Highway Act of 1957 began the final linkage of suburban metroplexes, followed by the explosive growth of chain restaurants, motels, gas stations, and shopping malls, which finally reached its apotheosis in the development of big box stores driving all local commerce to extinction. We have, during this period, become a kind of Trailer Park Sparta, a nation with a huge military establishment but without national health care or much of a social safety net for its dwindling middle class. The God-obsessed citizenry is haunted by obscurantist ideas about the value of modern science and education. The destruction of the American Bill of Rights by the current neo-Fascist government goes largely unremarked. Things have gotten so bad that in the last two national elections for President, half the voting populace, (sick, obese, poorly educated), hung their chads for George W. Bush, the dimmest bulb in the history of the American Republic.

The working class struggles to support the old and the disabled through confiscatory taxes for retirement and Medicare. What's left over is mostly given to the defense industry, so the executive branch can invade one country after another in a series of endless wars. The wars now always include a phase of "nation building," which means that we still think of ourselves as some kind of model for another country's aspiration. Either that, or we might best analogize our foreign policy to Dadaist art: Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal on a pedestal and called it "Fountain." We build a Taco Bell in the middle of Iraq and call it "America."