Cutting Our Losses and Moving On
You can’t overstate the baleful effects for Americans of living in the
tortured landscapes and townscapes we created for ourselves in the past
century. This fiasco of cartoon suburbia, overgrown metroplexes,
trashed small cities and abandoned small towns, and the gruesome connective
tissue of roadways, commercial smarm, and free parking is the toxic medium of
everyday life in this country. Its corrosive omnipresence induces a
general failure of conscious awareness that it works implacably at every moment
to diminish our lives. It is both the expression of our collapsed values and a
self-reinforcing malady collapsing our values further. The worse it gets, the
worse we become.
The citizens who do recognize their own discomfort in this geography of
nowhere generally articulate it as a response to “ugliness.” This is only
part of the story. The effects actually run much deeper. The aggressive and
immersive ugliness of the built landscape is entropy made visible. It is
composed of elements that move us in the direction of death, and the
apprehension of this dynamic is what really makes people uncomfortable. It
spreads a vacuum of lost meaning and purpose wherever it reaches. It is worse
than nothing, worse than if it had never existed. As such, it qualifies under St.
Augustine’s conception of “evil” in the sense that it represents antagonism to
the forces of life.
We find ourselves now in a strange slough of history. Circumstances
gathering in the home economics of mankind ought to inform us that we can’t
keep living this way and need to make plans for living differently. But our
sunk costs in this infrastructure for daily life with no future prevent us from
making better choices. At least for the moment. In large part this is because
the “development” of all this ghastly crap — the vinyl-and-strandboard housing
subdivisions, the highway strips, malls, and “lifestyle centers,” the “Darth
Vader” office parks, the infinity of asphalt pavements — became, for a while,
our replacement for an economy of ecological sanity. The housing bubble
was all about building more stuff with no future, and that is why the attempt
to re-start it is evil.
Sooner rather than later we’ll have to make better choices. We’ll have to
redesign the human habitat in America because our current environs will become
uninhabitable. The means and modes for doing this are already understood. They
do not require heroic “innovation” or great leaps of “new technology.” Mostly
they require a decent respect for easily referenced history and a readjustment
of our values in the general direction of promoting life over death. This means
for accomplishing this will be the subject of Part
II of this essay, but it is necessary to review a
pathology report of the damage done.
Launching Nirvana
I have a new theory of history: things
happen in human affairs because they seem like a good idea at the time.
This helps explain events that otherwise defy understanding, for example the
causes of the First World War. England, France, Russia, Germany, and Italy
joined that war because it seemed
like a good idea at the time, namely August of 1914. There hadn’t been a
real good dust-up on the continent since Waterloo in 1814. Old grievances were
stewing. Empires were both rising and falling, contracting and reaching out.
The “players” seemed to go into the war thinking it would be a short,
redemptive, and rather glorious adventure, complete with cavalry charges
and evenings in ballrooms. The “deciders” failed to take into account the
effects of newly mechanized warfare. The result was the staggering industrial
slaughter of the trenches. Poison gas attacks did not inspire picturesque
heroism. And what started the whole thing? Ostensibly the assassination of an
unpopular Hapsburg prince in Serbia. Was Franz Ferdinand an important figure?
Not really. Was Austria a threat to France and England? It was in steep decline,
a sclerotic empire held together with whipped cream and waltz music. Did Russia
really care about little Serbia? Was Germany insane to attack on two fronts?
Starting the fight seemed like a
good idea at the time — and then, of course, the unintended consequences
bit back like a mad dog from hell.
Likewise America’s war against its own landscape, which got underway in
earnest just as the First World War ended (1918). The preceding years had seen
Henry Ford perfect, first, the Model T (1908), and then the assembly line
method of production (1915), and when WW I was out of the way, America embarked
on its romance with democratic motoring. First, the cities were retrofitted for
cars. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but the streets were soon
overwhelmed by them. By the mid-1920s the temptation to motorize the
countryside beyond the cities was irresistible, as were the potential profits
to be reaped. What’s more, automobilizing the cities made them more unpleasant
places to live, and reinforced the established American animus against city
life in general, while supporting and enabling the fantasy that everyone ought
to live in some approximation to a country squire, preferably in some kind of
frontier.
The urban hinterlands presented just such a simulacrum of a frontier. It
wasn’t a true frontier anymore in the sense of civilization meeting wilderness,
but it was a real estate frontier and that was good enough for the moment.
Developing it with houses seemed like a good idea. Indeed, it proved to be an
excellent way to make money. The first iteration of 1920s car suburbs bloomed
in the rural ring around every city in the land. An expanding middle class
could “move to the country” but still have easy access to the city, with all
its business and cultural amenities. What a wonderful thing! And so suburban
real estate development became embedded in the national economic psychology as
a pillar of “progress” and “growth.”
This activity contributed hugely to the fabled boom of the 1920s.
Alas, the financial shenanigans arising out of all this new wealth, along with
other disorders of capital, such as the saturation of markets, blew up the
banking system and the Great Depression was on. The construction industry was
hardest it. Very little private real estate development happened in the 1930s.
And as that decade segued right into the Second World War, the dearth
continued.
When the soldiers came home, the economic climate had shifted. America was
the only industrial economy left standing, with all the advantages implied by
that, plus military control over the loser lands. We already possessed the
world’s biggest oil industry. But after two decades of depression, war, and neglect,
American cities were less appealing than ever. The dominant image of city life
in 1952 was Ralph Kramden’s apartment in The Honeymooners TV show. Yccchhh. America was a large
nation, with a lot of agricultural land just beyond the city limits. Hence, the
mushrooming middle class, including now well-paid factory workers, could easily
be sold on “country living.” The suburban project, languishing since 1930,
resumed with a vengeance. The interstate highway program accelerated it.
The Broken Promises of Suburbia
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Country life for everybody in the
world’s savior democracy! Fresh air! Light! Play space for the little ones!
Nothing in world history had been easier to sell. Interestingly, in a nation
newly-addicted to television viewing, the suburban expansion of the 1950s took
on a cartoon flavor. It was soon apparent that the emergent “product” was not
“country living” but rather a cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of the
country. Yet it still sold. Americans were quite satisfied to live in a cartoon
environment. It was uncomplicated. It could be purchased on installment loans.
We had plenty of cheap energy to run it.
It took decades of accreting suburbia for its more insidious deficiencies
to become apparent. Most noticeable was the disappearance of the rural edge as
the subdivisions quickly fanned outward, dissolving the adjacent pastures,
cornfields, and forests that served as reminder of the original promise of
“country living.” Next was the parallel problem of accreting car traffic. Soon,
that negated the promise of spacious country living in other ways. The hated
urban “congestion” of living among too many people became an even more
obnoxious congestion of cars. That problem was aggravated by the idiocies of single-use
zoning, which mandated the strictest possible separation of activities and
forced every denizen of the suburbs into driving for every little task. Under
those codes (no mixed use!), the corner store was outlawed, as well as the
café, the bistro, indeed any sort of gathering place within a short walk that
is normal in one form or another in virtually every other culture.
This lack of public amenity drove
the movement to make every household a self-contained, hermetically-sealed
social unit. Instead of mixing with other people outside the family on a
regular basis, Americans had TV and developed more meaningful relations with
the characters on it than with the real people around them. Television was also
the perfect medium for selling redundant “consumer” products: every house had
to have its own lawnmower, washing machine, and pretty soon a separate TV for
each family member. The result of all that was the corrosion of civic
life (a.k.a “community”) until just about every civic association except for school
oversight (the fabled PTA) dwindled and faded. And the net effect of all that
was the stupendous loneliness, monotony, atomization, superficiality, and
boredom of suburbia’s social vacuum. It was especially hard on the supposed
greatest beneficiaries, children, who, having outgrown the play space of the
yard by age eight, could not easily navigate the matrix of freeways and
highways outside the subdivision without the aid of the “family chauffeur,”
(i.e. Mom).
A couple of points about the current situation in suburbia ought to
be self-evident. One is that our predicament vis-à-vis oil, along
with cratering middle class incomes, suggests that we won’t be able
to run this arrangement of things on the landscape a whole lot longer. The
circulatory system of suburbia depends on cars which run on liquid hydrocarbon
fuels. Despite the current propaganda (“drill, baby drill”), we have poor
prospects of continuing an affordable supply of those things, and poorer
prospects of running the US motor vehicle fleet by other means, despite the
share price of Tesla, Inc. The second point is how poorly all suburbia’s
components are aging — the vinyl-clad houses, the tilt-up strip malls, the
countless chicken shacks, burger stands, and muffler shops, all the generic
accessories and furnishings that litter the terrain from sea to shining sea.
There are a lot of reasons these things now look bad (and lose value) but the
chief one is that most of them are things nobody really cares about.
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