Peacenik thinks this little essay by Jim Kunstler is appropriate as summer holidays arrive. Images of the lake and boats and kids having fun on tubes. Peacenik has read all the economic doomsday predictions. Kunstler says American's are in a dreamworld...partying on...while their society collapses. But Peacenik admits Peacenik is thinking about summer frivolity as well.
It may not be very realistic, but summer is short in Canada. And Peacenik acknowledges that everyone, including Peacenik, needs a little R & R. As George Bush used to say it is tough work worrying about everything. So Peacenik looks forward to some holidays, and doesn't begrudge people their last chance at a bit of a golden summer. Harsh reality will come soon enough. Have fun, why fight it?
By James Howard Kunstler
on July 6, 2009 6:34 AM
I was out on a big Adirondack lake in a canoe this weekend while the American economy was dying -- but you wouldn't have known it for the fleets of giant power boats dragging children back and forth across the water on rubber tubes, and the giant camping vehicles crammed into every bare spot. How do people pay for these things, I wondered. For not a few, installment loans, no doubt -- though that still begs the question. The sheer programming of American life runs wide and deep. We are, apparently, a people born to drag children behind hundred-and-fifty horsepower two-stroke engines, so that's what we do, no matter what is really going on in the world. Alas, mindless programming is the sort of thing that kills societies.
Watching the summer panorama on an Adirondack lake is like reading a history of the post World War Two decades, because almost nothing on view there now existed before 1945 and we'll be stunned to see how swiftly it all terminates. The fantastic prosperity of these postwar decades killed the wildness of these once-remote lakes. Fortunes were made -- like everywhere else in the USA -- carving up the landscape and deploying graceless houses made of cheap, fabricated materials. All the diabolical genius brought to engineering the New Jersey and Long Island suburbs was eventually turned loose on the Adirondack wilderness, with predictable results. The lakes themselves, stuffed with all those sleek plastic power boats, are like the Long Island Expressway minus the painted lanes.
Read on...
It may not be very realistic, but summer is short in Canada. And Peacenik acknowledges that everyone, including Peacenik, needs a little R & R. As George Bush used to say it is tough work worrying about everything. So Peacenik looks forward to some holidays, and doesn't begrudge people their last chance at a bit of a golden summer. Harsh reality will come soon enough. Have fun, why fight it?
By James Howard Kunstler
on July 6, 2009 6:34 AM
I was out on a big Adirondack lake in a canoe this weekend while the American economy was dying -- but you wouldn't have known it for the fleets of giant power boats dragging children back and forth across the water on rubber tubes, and the giant camping vehicles crammed into every bare spot. How do people pay for these things, I wondered. For not a few, installment loans, no doubt -- though that still begs the question. The sheer programming of American life runs wide and deep. We are, apparently, a people born to drag children behind hundred-and-fifty horsepower two-stroke engines, so that's what we do, no matter what is really going on in the world. Alas, mindless programming is the sort of thing that kills societies.
Watching the summer panorama on an Adirondack lake is like reading a history of the post World War Two decades, because almost nothing on view there now existed before 1945 and we'll be stunned to see how swiftly it all terminates. The fantastic prosperity of these postwar decades killed the wildness of these once-remote lakes. Fortunes were made -- like everywhere else in the USA -- carving up the landscape and deploying graceless houses made of cheap, fabricated materials. All the diabolical genius brought to engineering the New Jersey and Long Island suburbs was eventually turned loose on the Adirondack wilderness, with predictable results. The lakes themselves, stuffed with all those sleek plastic power boats, are like the Long Island Expressway minus the painted lanes.
Read on...
