November 12, 2003
      The condition of Midwestern cities never fails to astound me. This time, an endowed lecture by the Johnson's Wax company took me to Racine, Wisconsin, about 20 miles south of Milwaukee on Lake Michigan. The town looked like a provincial Soviet backwater as imagined by cartoonist R. Crumb. Outside of a miniscule historic district where a few grand old 19th century mansions stood on a bluff above the lakeshore, there was hardly a single object or building in the town that was not aggressively hidious. The newest buildings were among the worst.
       My hotel was a case in point. The six year old Radisson had been built down by the lakeshore on filled land next to a marina. It was tucked behind a gigantic parking structure and the street approach to the main entrance took you right past the hotel dumpster and an electric company switching box the size of an SUV. The hotel itself was a jive-plastic packing crate in the spirit of a hypertrophied McMansion, complete with vinyl siding. To get to the hotel restaurant from the lobby, you literally had to pass through the laundry room annex. And once inside the restaurant, to get from the dining room to the bar you had to go through the waiter's pantry. I'm not kidding. This is how things are done in the Midwest.
      The landscape itself, apart from the grandeur of the lake, is rather flat, bleak and featureless. But there was a tiny remnant of the old farming economy and its obsolete accessories visible around the outskirts, and you tell from seeing the old farms that the problem out there was not the landscape. The problem is the things that the locals have built there throughout the 20th century and particularly after World War Two. I think the following explanation works:
     After the war, the US economy was the only advanced industrial one in the world that was wholly intact and financially solvent. Europe was a mess. Germany was flattened. Even the victors, Britain and France, were virtually bankrupt. And Russia, of course, was on a socioeconomic planet of its own (not a very nice one). America's industrial base was all there, humming away, ready to be reprogrammed from munitions, bombers, and tanks to consumer goods. This was promptly accomplished and places like Racine, Wisconsin, benefited hugely. We could sell anything we made to the other people of the world and even lend them money to buy it.
      In particular, the American working class benefited. The 1950s and 60s saw factory workers rise from their former lumpenprole status to an amazing level of middle class prosperity, and in vast numbers. Their reward for winning the war was the American Dream of a single family house in the suburbs and as many cars as they could ever want. Cheap gasoline sealed the deal. So, what you see in a place like Racine is a landscape filled with little industrial box dwellings for a class of people who had no previous experience with things valued by any criteria besides industrial efficiency, and the things they built for themselves show it. They had a positive genius for ugly houses and they were diabolically inventive in finding endless variations for expressing industrial efficiency.
      As the 1970s and 80s came along, they further accessorized their world with all the hyper-car-oriented commercial infrastucture intended to replace their existing downtown -- the strip malls, the fry-pits, the stand-alone mega-stores, and all the other entropic architectural garbage of the time. The old center of town was left to rot. It was never very nice to begin with by world standards but they managed to make it downright pitiful. Then in the 1990s, with globalization and the final surge to the global oil production peak, Racine began to shrivel and sink from the orgy of industrial outsourcing.
      The Johnson company still remains. They've dominated the town the way the Bolsheviks dominated Bellarus for generations. They have a company headquarters designed by the great Midwestern hater of cities, Frank Lloyd Wright, and naturally it was done in the form of a suburban "campus," which is to say a development pattern that will not have much of a future. It's no worse than any other suburban office "complex" but it isn't any better either. Otherwise, the Johnson's mark on the city is remarkably paltry. They built a new downtown Main Street building recently -- designed by the "green building" guru Bill McDonough, a green glass and steel monstrosity that is no doubt highly energy efficient (efficiency once again exalted beyond all other values). But it appears to not contain any ground floor retail. The locals insisted there was a store and a restaurant inside, but there was no signage to indicate it -- perhaps signage is too vulgar for the "green" spirit.
      I gave my lecture on civic design in an auditorium that had been the Johnson's Wax pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair -- and which was afterward taken apart and shipped back to company headquarters. It looked like one of the flying saucers from the old science fiction flick The Day the Earth Stood Still. The audience was mostly middle-aged and older. I suppose they were the very people who acquiesced in the destruction of their town. I was hard on them. They were suffering, like other people all over the country, from living in punishing and hideous environments. But it was my sad duty to tell them that they were entirely responsible for creating them, that it was their own low standards and incapicity to value anything beyond efficiency that had left Racine in its current miserable condition.
      After my talk, a middle-aged guy came up to argue with me that we will never in the conceivable future live without the benefit of automobiles, and generally on the same mass basis as today. He was aflame with hopes for the fuel cell and the promised hydrogen economy. I politely disagreed with him but he was one of these pests who turn up at a lecture who just want to harrass you like a mad dog.
     I feel bad about places like Racine and the people who live there. They are completely unprepared for the future. They seem to believe, with the faith of little children, that the world as we know it today will go on forever. A tragic view of the human condition is beyond their powers to imagine -- and that is precisely what will cause things to end tragically for them.
      

November 2, 2003
      Circumstances twice lately have taken me down the 20-mile Route 50 highway strip between Saratoga Springs and Schenectady, New York. I call it Entropy Alley because it illustrates so perfectly the cavalcade of destruction induced by our 100-year cheap oil fiesta.
      What started out before World War One as a country road connecting the "Electric City" (as Schenectady was called because of its dominating company, GE) with a string of small towns has become a continuous cavalcade of auto-centric commercial spewage characteristic of an economy dedicated to transforming cheap energy into all varieties of toxic waste. Such is entropy that its negative value products can be expressed so diversely in things, qualities, and conditions ranging from aggressively hideous architecture, to pollution, to roadside trash, to garden apartments designed like muffler shops, to odious business activities such as "adult" bookstores, to the mental states of those doomed to live and work in that environment, e.g. alienation, anxiety, depression, and anomie.
      Most fascinating to me about Entropy Alley, though, is how the layers of each decade are visible to the discerning eye.
      You can easily make out the original farm houses of the pre-20th century, even the ones that have been converted into tanning parlors and bathroom tile shops. Here and there you find the bungalows of the 1920s, a few still functioning as dwellings amidst the psychic reading parlors and chiropractic studios. You can easily imagine how sweet it must have been much earlier in the entropy cycle to motor up the then-rural road after work on a May evening in your Model-A Ford. The appeal of the experience is obvious, but was short-lived. The cumulative degradation that would follow was probably not so easy to apprehend at the time. The strip malls of the 1950s are obviously worse than those of the 40s, which still tried to appear and function as neighborhood centers. By the 1960s all civic pretense is dropped and the commercial buildings become mere tilt-up boxes. In the 70s, they get an "environmental" do-over, with cedar shakes. In the 80s, architectural cartoonification takes over. In the 90s the Big Boxes invade, as the ethos of the swarm organism sweeps all before its path in a climactic orgy of economic predation.
      A feedback loop is a devious mechanism. Each new construction short-cut, each new violation of the human scale in favor of the 40mph motorist, each victory of the chain store over locally-owned business, each new attention-grabbing sign, the steady accretion of insults to the landscaped prompted a further escalation of destructiveness until the property owners surrendered the last residual wish to dignify the human spirit and yielded completely to the toxic spirit of the high entropy enterprise.
      This project is now clearly in its terminal state. Even the strip malls of the 1990s are now visibly de-laminating, while giant supermarkets stand vacant and shuttered by plywood, and many of the cobbed-over former houses have become so disgusting that the pornographers will not even rent them.
      Astoundingly, though, new things are still being built along Route 50 in the service of further entropy. Not much but some. The town of Ballston, I noticed, is erecting a new school bus garage in the obvious expecation that there will plenty of diesel fuel fifteen years from now to continue to run vast fleets of yellow school buses. Personally, I don't think it's going to work out that way, but the community consensus, as expressed by local politicians, holds that the future is going to be just like the past, only more so. The CVS drugstore chain is putting in yet another stand-alone store on an out-parcel. Their business model is based on metastatic expansion, and the outcome for the company will be the same as the outcome of metastasis in a leukemia patient. Only expressed in Q-10 reports instead of blood counts.
      While I admit to a morbid fascination as an observer traveling through this spectacle of toxic decay, I must also confess that it leaves me in a state of depleted agitation and deep melancholy. I see a portrait of a hopeful, youthful nation turned into a dark panorama of hopeless civilizational sclerosis. My country is dying.
      

October 25, 2003
      I was warned before my lecture visit to a Union College sociology class that several black students in the class were "upset by what you wrote" in the assigned book, Home From Nowhere, specifically, the chapter titled "The Public Realm and the Common Good." in which I really did try to grapple with some of the problems of race and social status.
     Well, anyway, I gave a formal slide lecture about civic design and then there was a Q and A period, and a very pretty Barbadian girl made a little speech saying, "I'm offended by what you wrote about the underclass and about affirmative action, etc etc." It was as though she were reciting a girl scout pledge, something beyond practiced: rote.
      I'm not an academic, which is to say that I don't have to function in what must be a semi-psychotic melieu these days. But I have a keen interest in the phenomenon of political correctness for two reasons. 1.) it's so bizzare and nonsensical, and 2.) it was created, or perhaps a better word is developed, by my generation of 60s hippies who now run the universities. But I've been mystified as to actually what it is. Now I think I finally know: it's just good old-fashioned Maoism.
      Remember back around 1966 (maybe you don't) when Chairman Mao TseTung (as it was then spelled) virtual emperor of "Red China" (as it was then called) promoted a vicious campaign called the Cultural Revolution. To many of us in the West following the story in the papers, it seemed pretty insane. Mao and his lieutenants in the party hierarchy had decided to unleash the youth of China in a great purge of incorrectness by their elders. Students were let off of higher education for several years and organized into gangs who then went around harrassing, punishing, and even killing elders and authority figures who, for some reason, had exhibited less-than-pure revolutionary thought. They dragged teachers out of schools and stuck them in "re-education" jails. They paraded local and regional officials around in public wearing dunce caps and humiliating sandwich boards. Among the latter was one Deng Shao Ping, then a rising provincial politician. Years later when this madness subsided, Deng would emerge as the ultimate Chinese leader who put a stop to all Maoist nonsense and began to take China into real modernity.
      So what we're seeing in the universities these days is a very special form of low-grade Maoism -- young people given a license by the university authorities to harrass and re-educate their elders. For practical purposes, only 'minority' students have that license.
      What got me in the incident I describe is how perfectly programmed the young lady was, as though she had allowed herself to become a walking palm pilot. And the incident had the peculiar aura of an oft-repeated ceremony: visiting lecturer comes in, visiting lecturer gets scolded for incorrect thinking, visiting lecturer apologizes for all the multitudinous turpitudes of the white race.
       I think I shocked the class by replying to the young lady that the time for complaining and being a crybaby is over; that this nation is about to face troubles that will dwarf her adolescent anxieties at a small private college; and the real issue for her and anybody else in the room will soon be how to live a purposeful life in the face of extremely difficult times.

October 20, 2003
      I spent the past weekend in pitcuresque Camden, Maine, at the 7th annual PopTech Conference which brought together a diverse gang of authors, digirati, and scientists ranging from Geoffrey Ballard, 'father' of the modern fuel cell, to Peter Ward on global warming, Harvard's Juan Enriquez on bio-tech, Aubrey deGray of Cambridge, England, on life extension, Andrew Zolli on cultural paradigm shifts, NASA architect Constance Adams on deisgning the next space station, and the ever-demure Virginia Postrel on The Substance of Style (her new book).
      I did my act, too, of course.
      Anyone looking for a reassuring glimpse into the future would have left the Friday session wishing to gargle with Gillette Blue Blades. (I opted for vodka instead.) It was sheer Frankenstein-o-rama. Enriquez and Gregory Stock of UCLA told us that bio-engineering was coming whether we liked it or not, for good or for ill. Peter Ward declared that global warming was way worse than we dared to think and that, well, basically we're fucked. Aubrey deGray told us that (good news) the battle against aging was very win-able in a decade or so and (the bad news) the implication would be a world without children. Al Goldstein of Alfred U said that the development of new bio-materials was way more out-of-control than any of us realized and that we ought to be really scared about the laboratory development of non-carbon-based life forms. David Martin told us that the financial world (especially tech) was based on patent fraud and wholesale chicanery, and Geoffrey Ballard said that the most likely use for his fuel cells within the next quarter century would be limited to running fork lifts. Yours Truly gave a talk on Parking Lot Nation and the coming oil clusterfuck.
      One thing stood out: none of the other speakers even mentioned the problems we're headed into concerning fossil fuels. Ballard barely hinted at it. His fuel cell program is obviously based on the assumption that there is a limitless supply of natural gas. Ballard did state his conviction that we (the USA) would soon have to reverse current policy on nuclear power and build lots more new reactors-- which I took as a tacit recognition that something is up with fossil fuels -- but he gave every impression of expecting a smooth segue from the way we live today to the "next thing," as he characterized the as-yet-unknown saviour energy technology coming soon to a freeway near you.
      This strange omission was particularly baffling vis-a-vis the bio-tech and digital factions, because their work presumes stable institutional support within the context of a stable society running cheap fuel and a reliable electric grid, and they appear oblivious to the implications of the coming oil crunch. Good luck with your computers and centrifuges, folks.
     There was one recondite clue that suggested many of them are paying attention at least semi-consicously to the bigger energy picture: a surprising dearth of carping about the Bush administration or the Iraq occupation. Many of these folks were my contemporaries, i.e. former hippie peaceniks, who usually can't resist the impulse to politicize anything and everything. But not this time. This said to me that they basically accepted the unappetizing necessity of the US policing the Middle East. But that's only supposition on my part.  
     The conference organizers ran the logisitics brilliantly, and the chow was first-rate. Maine was pretty at peak leaf color. Little Camden has become a refuge for retired corporate CEO bigshots, including former Apple chief John Scully, one of the founders of PopTech.  Oil crunch Jeramiah Matthew Simmons also has a place there, but I was told he was in Houston for the time being.
     I came home feeling as though my brains had been pulled out through my nose.

October 8, 2003
      Hasta la vista, baby -- y ola el Gobernator!
      Ah-nawld uber alles!
      Arnold now steps into power as the classic man on a white horse, the horse being the hopes and expectations of Californians that he can cut through the great Oz-curtain of political bullshit and govern the mess of a tarnished Golden State. Like Napoleon Bonaparte, Arnold is an outsider coming out of left field. Unlike Napoleon, Arnold is ripped.
      Bonaparte was an obscure young artillary officer, not thirty years old, when he stepped into the vacuum of a revolution that had eaten all its children and finally exhausted itself. His great and self-evident virtue was his competence. He exuded it like cologne. Nobody failed to notice. Not only could he get things done, that is, command people and make sure they did what he commanded, but he also understood how things worked. He possessed an acute intellectual curiousity that drove him to gain a working knowledge of practical things like engineering and law, and so in the early, zesty years of his dictatorship he was able to rapidly reconstruct a civil society out of the social ruins of the revolution. And then, of course, poor Nappy got hopelessly sidetracked in the pursuit of military glory. If you asked him, he would have said the neighbors were always ganging up on him.
     He was an awfully good general and stunningly successful until near the end. I've seen the display of Napoleonic military uniforms in Museum of the Army at the Invalides, and it is not hard to understand why any young man would want to get duded up in the costume of a hussar with gold-frogged tunic, knee-high boots, bearskin hat, saber, and -- for godsake! -- a leopard skin cape! Mounted on a horse! It must have been a great way to meet girls.
     I get away from my subject. . . .
     So, in rides Arnold in his grand Hummer, Special Edition, to preside over an entropic meltdown of good intentions turbo-charged by runaway entitlements and interest-goosing, with an overlay of extreme political correctness. The legislature is dominated by extreme economic re-distributionists. Illegal immigrants are breaking the social services and schools -- even though they do all the yard work. Will Arnold dare to even assert that there is a difference between a legal and an illegal immigrant? He would be the right person to make that distinction. Will he challenge the absurd long-term electricity contracts that Gray Davis fecklessly entered into during the Enron debacle?
     I doubt that there is anything Arnold can or will do about California's most ominous condition: its extreme car-dependency and an installed infrastructure of suburban sprawl that has no future as a living arrangement. Lucky for him that he is not entering the office during an oil crisis -- but one could arise any moment (if Prince Abdallah of Saudi Arabia sneezes too hard or stands too close to a satchel full of Semtex).
      They say as California goes, so goes the nation. California is the prototype and exemplar of the high entropy economy. The only real solution to the state's morass of problems is for a lot of people to live differently and make different choices about how they behave. While I admire the new Gobernator's pluck, I sense that he mainly represents the wish to keep California Dreamin'. Keep cruisin' down the strip. I just doubt that is possible given what is happening in the world: the twilight of the fossel fuel fiesta and the economic unraveling that will accompany it.
     It's just a good thing that Arnold is not a military man.

October 2, 2003


Guest Column   

Issues More Pressing Than Do-Not-Call

By Daniel G. Jennings

     Nothing can be more indicative of the crisis America faces than the uproar over the Do Not Call List for telemarketers. Our country faces grave challenges; Iraq, terrorism, a looming energy crisis, strained relations with other nations, health care, poverty, unemployment, the evaporation of our industry and numerous other problems. Yet, the only problem our political leaders can agree to try and solve is one of sleazy salesmen calling people in the middle of the night and trying to sell them newspaper subscriptions and trips to Disneyland.
     If our politicians can get together over telemarketing, why can't they can come together on questions like transportation, energy and national health care? The Do Not Call List debate proves that the political battles between our leaders are shallow, silly and superficial, pursued more to give professional politicos a reason to gather campaign contributions than to settle real divisions of ideas and policy.
     For instance, how should we meet the massive energy and transportation crisis America is facing? Well here's my solution. Unlike most of the dippy schemes out there it's do-able and based upon real technologies that exist here in the real world right now.

1) Launch a massive program to build new nuclear reactors to provide vast amounts of new electricity so America will have an alternative to fossil fuels. In particular replace the coal and natural gas burning power plants which waste energy and create pollution. This would free natural gas up for home heating consumption. Yes, there are risks with nuclear power, but they're no where near as great as those created by fossil fuels.

2) Electrify all of our major railroad lines. This would give us a national transportation system not dependent on fossil fuel. It would make transportation cheaper and more efficient and boost productivity. It would also provide a major public works program to create jobs and boost industrial production.

3) At the same time greatly increase the capacity of our railroad system. Build new passenger rail lines to cities that lack them (such as Columbus, Ohio, and Nashville, Tennessee) build new freight lines and new rail yards. Build bypasses to take rail lines around major cities. Modernize track for faster and more efficient rail service.

4) Make a major effort to build a special add-on national system of high-speed rail lines for both freight and passenger transport. Build passenger-only high-speed rail lines in high population areas and freight and passenger high speed rail lines connecting our major population centers.

5) Launch a massive effort to build new electric powered light-rail transit systems in all of the major cities that don't have them and expand existing systems. Give particular emphasis to expanding the New York, Washington and Los Angeles subway systems, and the light rail systems in cities like Denver, Phoenix, Houston, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, San Jose and Salt Lake City.

6) Launch a major effort to create new regional and commuter passenger railroad systems and expand existing ones using existing railroad track.

7) Make a major effort to expand bus service in all of America's cities and towns. Especially in areas where population doesn't justify rail service.

8) Make a major effort to expand and extend existing regional, national and commuter passenger bus service.

     The transportation aspects of this effort can be funded by diverting funds from air travel and highway spending. Nuclear power could be funded by eliminating some of Bush's tax cuts or by a new national sales tax.
     Such an effort won't be easy but its do-able and in the long run it's the only alternative America has for a workable energy and transportation system and the maintenance of a modern society. I believe we'll see such programs implemented in the United States in the next few decades but only after energy and transportation crises show us we have no alternative. The question we must ask ourselves is will this transition be more painful and wasteful than it has to be.

Daniel G Jennings is a Denver-based freelance writer. You can reach him at: Jdangjenn@aol.com

September 29 2003
      What really allowed America to become a car-addicted society was the democracy of it. By the late 20th century, virtually anybody who wanted a car could get one, from the richest computer nerd tycoon to the lowliest Burger King floor-mopper. And, most importantly, everybody in between. The ethos for this really began when Henry Ford made the decision (outrageous in its time) around 1915 to pay his assembly line workers five dollars a day. That was a fat wage back then, and Ford did it explicitly to enable his workers to buy cars (and to prompt other manufacturers to do likewise). The price of the ubiquitous Model-T dropped steadily into the 1920s until one could be bought (on the installment plan) for around $280. This set the tone for the whole American Dream drive-in utopia program that followed.
      The boom of the 1920s was all about the money generated by cars, and their accessories, and retrofitting the landscape and our cities to accomodate them. During the 1920s, car ownership became progressively broader. The effect of cars of the rural south was tremendous. Cars (and hydroelectric power) began to stir a geographically huge region of near serfdom from a century-long coma. The Great Depression and World War Two interrupted this process for fifteen years (1930 - 1945), but when it was over, and the other industrial nations of the world lay in ruins, and an intact America could sell anything it made (and lend others money to but it), an interesting thing happened: we developed the richest and broadest middle class that the world every saw. Factory workers were not only unionized, but the military elan acquired in the war added to the unions' potency. By the 1960s, Ford assembly line line workers were making more money than college professors.
      Suburbia was their reward for winning the war: the antidote to the industrial city, life in a simulacrum of the rural countryside. The whole package: decent wages on a guaranteed job, house in the 'burbs, affordable cars, bacame the American Dream, the lifestyle that George HW Bush later declared to be non-negotiable. Well, history has a way of undermining bold declarations like that.
       In the outsourced, oil-poor, indebted America that we have become, the national lifestyle had better become negotiable. The mother-of-all-trends is a steep decline in the standard of living in America, meaning a lot of personal economic hardship and suffering. As this happens, the whole car-ownership picture will become progressively less democratic. The grand entitlement of the American Dream will dissolve. Some of the losers will battle fiercely to hold onto their fading entitlements, perhaps electing maniacs to keep the program going at any cost, perhaps fighting in the streets (or the malls!) Others perhaps will slide passively into economic despondency and desperation. As this happens, the colossal armature of the drive-in life -- the ubiquitous sprawl and its accoutrements -- will start to disintegrate. It won't be repairable. We will be too insolvent to replace it. And it won't be worth replacing anyway in a post-cheap oil world. The consensus about how we live in this country will disintegrate with it.
       I took my 1992 Toyota pickup truck into the shop for its yearly inspection last week and I'm looking at around $800 in bills to repair the brakes and something in the front end called the swaybar bushings. I'm am very fortunate because I can cover that, at least this year. I'm lucky because I hardly have to drive the damn thing. It only has 79,000 miles on it after eleven years. (I'm also lucky to be living near the center of a small main street town where I can walk or ride a bike to get the things I need.) What about someone else lucky enough to have a steady job who is just getting by from paycheck to paycheck, and unlucky enough to be stuck in the 20th century American dream of the suburbs, where driving is mandatory-- where you lose your car and it's, like, game over, Charlie -- and he gets an $800 bill and there's just no money for it??
       I suppose the short answer is that a lot of people put car repairs on their credit cars, along with other mounting bills, and incrementally you get a nation full of financially ruined individuals and families (and ultimately a financially ruined nation).
         So, my larger question -- or is it just a notion? -- of the day is this: is there some way that the idea of the American Dream can be detached from this pernicious mania for cars? The New Urbanists have had a pretty good solution for the past decade: redirect our collective desires toward the idea of community, especially as manifested in the physical form of neighborhoods and towns that are worth living in. But the psychology of previous investment is an awful obstacle to overcome. And many Americans have shown an amazing active hostility to even the most reasonable and emotionally appealing suggestions for change.
       Meanwhile, driving will become less democratic every day as fewer people can afford those ordinary $800 repair bills. And, of course, the coming oil clusterfuck will complicate matters greatly. What percentage of dis-entitled car-owners and former motorists will it take to reach a "tipping point?" 17 percent? 23 percent? 31 percent?  At what point do large number of Americans decide that they don't want to pay to repair all the automobile infrastructure so that the lucky remaining motorists can enjoy motoring on it? Where is the national leadership thinking about these questions and articulating it for a sinking public?
      

September 18, 2003
      The following is from a shy friend without a website who wishes to remain anonymous. While his point-of-view is not identical to mine, his analysis is interesting.  For example, I do not know enough about depleted uranium to have a firm opinion about it, but his theory is intriguing, especially in light of the mysterious Gulf War Syndrome that left so many US soldiers sick and disabled in the 1990s. Depleted uranium is used in bullets and artillary rounds because its super-hardness enables it to penetrate armored vehicles. Tremendous amounts of the stuff were expended in the recent war, now scattered all over Iraq (and Afghanistan) in the form of radioactive dust.  These dust particles have been blamed for an unusual rise of lung illnesses in US troops lately.

   The DU clock is ticking in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Already the "mystery illness" attrition rate exceeds the killed in action toll by a factor of 15. To be sure, DU is an equal opportunity health hazard and it will thus diminish the ardor of partisans as well. They, too, will get too sick to do much. America's next problem in Iraq and Afghanistan will be mutiny by panicking troops. When the malaise reaches ten percent, Washington will realize that withdrawal is the only option. And since rebuilding Iraq is not do-able either economically or physically, an entropy-riddled corpse of a nation will be left to its own devices.
      Moslems will respond by refusing to sell oil either to Europe or America, since both crusader and Yank left a legacy of violence, greed, and predatory deceit.
   The net effect of the two Bush administrations: to make China a gift of 95 percent of the world's exportable oil by 2010. Also, all those industries outsourced to China created a skilled labor pool while at the same time degrading the ability of America's labor pool to produce tangibles. The greed of America's overclass thus was demonstrably at variance with the common good of American citizens. This dissonance will necessarily result in the circulation of elites as America plunges into insolvency and disorder.
   

September 9, 2003
       Last night, PBS aired Ric Burns's three-hour post-script to his previously completed documentary on the history of New York City. The postscript was solely concerned with the rise and fall (and thirty-year career) of the World Trade Center. The program had the same majesterial air as the original material and provided rich insights into a perplexing story beyond even the scope of the fantastic tragedy that occurred there.
      One theme stood out: theTwin Towers were uniformly reviled as works of architecture per se. Two commentators in particular were unsparing in their scorn: Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture and Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine. (The redoubtable Ada Louise Huxtable, critic emeritus of the New York Times was not hot on them either). The towers were variously labeled banal, grandiose, boring, dreary, grim, vacuous gross abstractions, and objects of extreme hubris. Goldberger said that the windswept plaza at the base -- "a cement football field" -- was never peopled during the buildings' entire thirty year lifespan, noting that the place even looked dead when the movie musical The Wiz was filmed there. Many people who worked there, they said, never felt comfortable. There weren't even any good views out of it because the structural steel beams that bore all the buildings' weight were so close together that the windows were like narrow slits. The site plan destroyed a fine-grained network of downtown streets, leaving a poorly-connected superblock and erasing scores of historic buildings. The two towers cast immense shadows that blocked sunlight to thousands of other buildings downtown and darkened streets. They turned out to be the last sheer behemoths of their kind in New York City, and a few scant years later even their record height was surpassed by a building in Chicago.
       The WTC was also regarded by many commentators as a wildly misconceived land development catastrophe -- much of the blame falling on David Rockefeller, head of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and his brother Nelson, four-term governor of New York -- both of them archetypal figures of Modernist gargantuanism, with Promethean ambitions. (Nelson went on to build another monumental architectural abortion, the Empire State Plaza in Albany, which virtually destroyed the heart of New York's capital city.)
       The WTC was obsolete before it was finished, the talking heads said. It horribly skewed real estate valuations in all of lower Manhattan by adding 10 million square feet of rentable space to the district at a time when Wall Street was already drowning in vacant offices. Since it was owned by the the Port Authority, the WTC was tax-exempt and contributed nothing to the city treasury. By the time it was finished, most of the finger piers along Manhattan's West Side were crumbling, and New York's function as a shipping port was surrendered completely to New Jersey. The towers were not fully leased up until the 1990s, when a dubious financial boom based on Dot.com public offerings, Enron scams, and other hallucinated business schemes, sent the money industry into a toxic transport.
       The few people who adored the Twin Towers included a high-wire artist named Phillipe Petite who pulled off the great acrobatic feat of rigging a cable between the towers and then capering a quarter-mile above the streets on it one morning in 1974. The documentary spends an inordinate amount of its running time on this incident, and on M. Petite's poetical remembrences of what was, after all, a rather narcissistic stunt -- though one perfectly suited to an extremely egotistical pair of buildings.
      The rest of the story, of course, is horror and death. A beautiful September morning so clear that the very air seemed to possess powers of magnification. The terrifying video clips of airplanes appearing out of nowhere slicing into both towers. Great smoky orange gouts of flame. The doomed jumpers. The astonishing collapse into little more than dust and pink vapor. The long tearful aftermath. . . .
       I mention all this coming up on the two-year anniversary of the tragedy, because after watching the story it seems to me that the proposed re-design for the site by architect Daniel Liebeskind is perhaps even more horrible, more misconceived, more arrogant, and more foolish, and perhaps more evil than the original Twin Towers themselves. Liebeskind proposes a set of skewed, warped, tortured, and torqued glass boxes, offset by a decorative tower even taller than the two that fell down. The "monument" to the dead is nothing more than the excavated "tub" of the original retaining walls of the foundation.
       Have we learned nothing?
       In the 1960s, the Rockefeller brothers sought a hugeness of scale for its own sake, a symbolic upthrust of steel and concrete crudly asserting American power rampant -- one tower for each brother. The original WTC had nothing to do with the life of the city per se, especially the life of the street -- a point Goldberger returned to many times. Liebeskind's replacement is really no different, except that this time, in the spirit of our age, the venture is just an exercise in fashion and celebrity dressed up with phony graduate school metaphysical theoretics.
       Both in the Burns film, and elsewhere in the press recently, commentators have made the point that the land development process in New York is much more open and democratic now than it was in the days when the Rockefeller boys and the Port Authority ran roughshod over everybody else. I wonder if we are giving ourselves too much credit. The supposedly democratic process surrounding the redevelopment design competition produced, with one exception, a bunch of profoundly anti-urban, tricked-up, grandiose art stunts, no less narcissistic than Phillipe Petite's 1974 caper, but far less honest.* What's more, we are now entering a period of prolonged strife over the world's remaining fossil fuel supplies that will make this kind of mega-project an instant and extreme anachronism if not a complete failure.
       The hard truth about democracy is that people don't necessarily get what they expect, but they get what they deserve.
       Let's really honor the dead and construct something truly worthy of both them and ourselves.

*The exception was the entry by Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg, a traditional civic plaza comprehensibly enfronted by normal buildings, with a restored street grid.

September 1, 2003
       All through a rainy holiday weekend I've been haunted by a this idea: how special and anomolous the 20th century was, and what will we think about it in the years ahead?
       What you get in the 20th century is a fantastic explosion of energy to do work from oil and natural gas and nuclear fission, and an equally fantastic explosion of food production and population growth, and for a fortunate minority you get standards of living so luxurious as to surpass that of any king or emperor reigning before 1910. You get electric lights, automobiles, recorded music, air cooling and central heating, dental implants, jet airplanes, motion pictures, journeys to the moon, skyscrapers, television, ski lifts, websites. . . ohmigod the list is so long. And of course you get stupendous violence along with all this: the slaughter of the trenches (1914 - 18); Naziism, World War Two, and Auschwitz (not to mention the Bataan Death March and Hiroshima), and 75 years of Soviet terror, and the insanity of Vietnam, and a hundred other wars, insurrections, and genocides from Cambodia to Bosnia to Rwanda.
      America has been extremely fortunate inasmuch as most of the bad things that happened in this world as a consequence of hyper-turbo industrialism did not happen on our territory. Until 9/11. Two years later, I do believe thatr 9/11 was the end of something.
      This morning we were driving south on Interstate 87 from the Adirondacks. When you're on a freeway moving along at 65mph in clear conditions, the technology that enables that journey to happen seems very beneficent and normal, and (I believe) most of the people traveling on that road assume that the circumstances making their journey possible will continue indefinitely into the future.
      I just don't see it that way. My sense of things is that we are nearing the end of the hyper-turbo industrial cycle. We're going to look back on all the wonders and horrors of the last century and shake our heads in amazement. I was born right in the middle of it: 1948. My generation has lived under conditions of fantastic luxury and ease our whole lives. We have no capacity to imagine things being any other way. An era of tremendous discontinuity lies ahead in which all ideas of normality have to be redefined. The 20th century in retrospect will seem like an epic magic show. Or more properly (as one correspondent reminds me) a movie.

August 27, 2003
       I was in the Philadelphia airport at the boarding gate for the 4:50pm flight to Gatwick Airport, London, on August 14 when I peeked into the bar across the hall to see this fantastic spectacle on the wall-mounted TV of mobs pouring across the Brooklyn Bridge. Holy fuck! What now. Another Manhattan disaster! I had just gleaned a few stray bits of information about a "big blackout" and Cleveland and Detroit being down, too, when the gate agent called our row for boarding -- and we were outta there (the last US Airway flight that would get into Gatwick that night, it turned out).
      Apologies for my mysterious absence. There's a lot to cover.
      First, the blackout. Well, I missed the whole amazing thing. This interview with Matthew Simmons by Mike Ruppert of Fromthewilderness.com says it all: Simmons on the Blackout.
      To me, the UN bombing in Baghdad was a defining event -- the moment that Baghdad became Beirut II. It seems to me that Jihadistas from many lands have most certainly converged into Iraq and they are going to do everything possible to turn that nation into an Islamic despotism -- and we may not be able to stop it. The advantages of asymmetrical warfare are very much in their favor. All they have to do is keep on blowing things up -- small things like water lines and oil pipelines, medium things like buildings -- to prevent a basic level of civic order from being established. And without that basic background of civic order all our efforts to build institutions would be an exercise in futility. The people of Iraq will be inflamed over their lack of water, electricity, public safety, and income, and they will blame the US. Meanwhile, as the US Troop bushwhackings mount up the American public may show an equivalent impatience for the whole enterprise -- and from there it could be a short leap to a kind of Saigon-style pull-out. The next few weeks will determine whether the US can overcome these ominous trends.
      The US policy response may be to try to greatly accelerate the installation of Iraqi authorities of all kinds -- governing boards and officers, technicians running essential services -- and then to prepare to get out as expeditiously as possible. But Iraqi infrastructure, physical, social and civil, may be too decepit for that to work, and our "installed base" of leaders at the wheel of a Jalopy Nation would soon succumb to a Jihadista overthrow. The Jihadis could happily run a medieval despotic theocracy under medieval social conditions. It is, after all, exactly what they want.
       Meanwhile, the bus bombing in Israel and the ensuing retaliations pretty obviously spell the end of the Road Map for Peace. I believe that US motives in attempting to mediate this mess were sincerely benevolent. But it also seems to me an absolutely intractable situation, and my guess is that Jihadistas will join with Palestinian paramilitaries to attempt to widen this salient in what is evolving into a larger war of Fundamentalist Islam against the "Crusaders and Jews."
        Against this background we have an evolving desperate situation concerning the petroleum supplies of the Middle East, as well as a developing crisis in North America over natural gas reserves and the situation in the entire could not be more fraught. I can't help being reminded of August 1918 or September 1938.
         These dates come to mind because I had occasion in London this week of dropping into the Imperial War Museum (located curiously enough in what used to be the main pavilion of Bedlam (Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane). The museum is mostly devoted to those two great catastrophes of the the 20th century and it is amazing to be reminded of how rapidly the international scene can unravel and how immense can be the destruction that follows. In the case of the First World War (1914 - 1916) the slaughter of trench warfare still staggers the imagination. More soldiers were killed in the battle of the Somme than in the first three years of the American Civil War. And the reasons for the war starting in the first place remain as abstruse and ridiculous as ever -- no matter how many times you read John Keegan or Barbara Tuchman. Then, one can't fail to be impressed by the fiasco of Naziism and how quickly it followed the calamity of World War One, and how rapidly the contestents went back to war again! Finally, there is the awsome scale of the violence in World War Two. Whole cities flattened. Whole peoples exterminated.
        I reflected on these things against the backdrop of present-day England -- a strange spectacle. You are faced constantly with the residue of the great industrial fiesta that made England the first technocratically modern nation: the endless ranks of brick rowhouses, not just spreading out of London but in every town and minor city you pass through; the hulking brick factories, many of them now empty, where the great engines of empire were manufactured; the ubiquitous railroads (many of them down for repair while I was there); and the patina of old soot on every object made of brick that speaks of the fossil fuel orgy behind the industrial melodrama.
        Present-day England is a cored-out economy enjoying the final fruits of its North Sea oil bonanza -- a 20-year climactic blowout to the greater long-playing industrial extravaganza. The world wars of the last century are now fading from the collective imagination. They've gone car-crazy over there almost as much as we have, and have built themselves a system of freeways that rivals our interstate system -- though obviously on a smaller geographic scale. You get the feeling that they are clueless about the fact that the North Sea oil fields have peaked and entered the arc of depletion, and there is no sense in the media that this presents a problem for the near future. The Brits are also aping our proccupation with pop culture triviality. The newspapers and even the BBC are full of idiocy about soccer and show biz and small-time crime and little else. I could barely find anything about the American blackout until I got my mitts on a copy of the International Herald Tribune. Rupert Murdoch now owns the Times of London and controls much of the independent television, with predictable results.
         I have yet to catch up fully on all the details of the Phoenix gasoline clusterfuck, but it appears to be another signal that our integrated networks are shuddering.
        

August 13, 2003
     California is now so bankrupt -- over $34 billion in deficit -- that it's hard to conceive how it may ever climb out of its hole. Seems to me that California, by defaulting on some of its own massive obligations, could singlehandedly turn the bond market from a rout into a train-wreck, perhaps even setting in motion the mythic cascading chain of failures that would melt away the global credit daydream like sunlight beaming on a claque of vampires caught out of their graves by mischance at dawn.
      My own sense of reality -- subject to anyone's reasonable emendation -- is that the California clusterfuck can be attributed pretty much to one cause: massive illegal immigration that has hopelessly stressed the state's ability to provide services:, schools, health-care, police, social services (especially housing).
      The Democrats, as personified by embattled governor Gray Davis, can't even discuss the issue of illegal immigration because of Political Correctness and the wish to pander to Hispanic voters, who voted overwhelmingly Democratic in recent elections.
      The Republicans have only pandered to the same voters, without much success, to cover up their addiction to discount labor. Viva la Huelga!
       Roughly 60 percent of Californians voted for Proposition 187 in 1994, cutting off social services and school entitlements to illegal immigrants. A federal judge eventually ruled that Prop 187 was unconstitutional, saying only the federal government had jurisdiction over immigration. Gov. Davis refused to appeal the ruling, and the status quo was preserved.
     Our culture is obviously deeply conflicted over this issue. Beyond even the venality of politicians, our national mythology demands an inordinate obesience to the immigrant idea -- since all non-Indian descendents got here that way. But this is a poor excuse for not making a fundamental distinction between those who follow the laws in settling here and those who do not. The current hypocrisy over illegal immigration is especially vibrant in politically "progressive" circles, as embodied by National Public Radio, where the company policy seems to have virtually banned the term "illegal immigrant" in favor of the euphemism "undocumented individual."
      It will be interesting to see over the next two months if any of the serious candidates in October's recall election raise the issue, especially Arnold Schwartzenegger, himself a documented individual originally from Austria. I don't see why he is not in a position to do so, and he would gain my respect if he did -- though I can't vote in California.
      The issue of illegal immigration is, to me, especially significant because if our political system cannot resolve such a clear-cut question as who follows rules in coming here and who does not, then that system will probably fail to resolve the more difficult questions of the years ahead, such as what is justice is an era of severely declining resources?

August 6, 2003
     It's that time of the year to climb an Adirondack hill and take a long view of where American society is and where it is going.
     We're heading into a winter natural gas crisis. We can't drill enough to meet the demand, and North America has entered a permanent gas depletion arc. There's no shortage of information about this. The oracle of the Federal Reserve discussed this in his latest appearance before congress. It's liable to bring on astronomical home heating bills, electrical service disruptions, and shortages of chemical fertilizers for next year's taco chip crop. But, if CNN is any measure, the US public is more interested in Kobe Bryant's sex life.
      The nation continues hemmorhaging jobs. And the destruction is moving up the social scale. It's not just jar-heads on the assembly line anymore. IBM got in trouble two weeks ago when a corporate memo leaked out stating the company's intention to send thousands of programming jobs to India. Microsoft just announced their largest layoff in the company's history. The good news is that this leaves tens of thousands of American adults free to work at WalMart, a company voraciously intent on monopolizing all retail trade in the world.
      The well-being of Parking Lot Nation is utterly dependent on stability in Saudi Arabia, which supplies nearly a fifth of our imported oil (and parks $1 trillion in US investments). King Fahd is a stroke-downer on life support; Prince Abdullah, the regent, is on the shady side of 70 years old; and the region is infested with mullahs calling for jihad against "corruption" meaning not just the infidel West but the Saud family itself. If the regime goes, then the American way of life, as currently conceived, goes down with it -- and global political stability probably also goes, as all nations commence a desperate contest for vital oil supplies.
      The up-creep of real interest rates is telling us that the world is finally nervous about the dollar. Global finance has been enjoying the long speculative romp in hallucinated dollar-denominated paper. There will be a lot of indignant howling when the "tilt" light goes on and "game over" flashes across MSNBC's tape-crawl, as much of the world's imagined "wealth" goes up in a vapor.
       Rising real interest rates will certainly kill off the re-financing fiesta that has kept the game going at the cash register level in the US, and also the suburban house-building jamboree. A crash in house values and suburban construction would commence a chain of economic destruction that could rival or exceed the Great Depression. Since the creation of suburban sprawl is America's chief "industry," the suspension of sprawl-building, and the trade in its components by realtors, would mean the end of our economy.    
       I imagine that in a decade or so -- once this new century gets some real traction -- that the American turbo-consumption society, and all of its ideas and values, will be regarded in retrospect as a kind of historical obscenity. We'll look back and be amazed at how complacent, purposeless, and utterly demoralized we were in the face of a gathering catastrophe.
      

July 28, 2003
     The bushwhacking of Saddam Hussein's two sons was certainly an important moment in the Iraq melodrama. Someone is going to collect a cool two times $12 million for it. And it's hard to imagine that someone else (or, who knows, perhaps the same someone) won't be sorely tempted to turn in the Big Enchilada himself for another $25 million. Aren't you amazed that Saddam has remained on the loose this long? -- imagine Adolf Hitler hiding out in Berlin from April until August of 1945 !
     Well, there are some differences. Berlin in 1945 was defended only by old men and boys, and they were deeply demoralized at that. Iraq is full of healthy, well-fed young men, many of them soldiers by vocation. Which means that Baghdad today is much harder to secure than Berlin was a half century ago. The number of potent small arms among the Iraqis must be impressive and the supply must be virtually limitless, given the arms bazaar that has been the region's second industry after oil for fifty years. Rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) can be fired surreptitiously and create enormous deadly mischief. Not to mention automatic rifles, shoulder launched missiles, Semtex plastic explosive, and other tools of the asymmetrical warfare trade. They'll never run out of shit to throw at our boys.
      It is within the realm of possibility that Saddam Hussein will be captured alive. If that happens, the world will get a juridical circus that will make the OJ Simpson trial look like a day in traffic court. It could be useful for the US to put on such a show, as a distraction from the continuing travails of nation building. (We will soon find out whether there was anything to the Ba'athist party beyond Saddam's cult of personality.)
     I can see things going either way at this point: collapse of resistance or continuation of. Whether US intentions are good or not, there must be a lot of people in Iraq who hate us, hate our lust for their oil, hate our sordid pop culture, our vicious tattoos and creepy haircuts, hate us being there, and think our political ideals are childish. I'm not saying we deserve the antipathy (or that we don't). On the whole, though, I think American polity would be satisfied by an Iraq run by Iraqi non-maniacs. Is that asking too much. Maybe.
      It is an ominous note that attacks on US troops are continuing after the deaths of Uday and Qusai, because Saddam himself cannot have much of a support system left, and this suggests that Ba'athists enjoy a Nazi-like solidarity.
      The US has been rather lucky the past several months in enjoying an interlude of relative stability at home and around the world. But as we head into the fall, other ominous undertones gather in the background. What if North Korea gets frisky? What if the House of Saud gets pushed out the window? What if West Africa melts down? What if the housing re-fi fiesta grinds to a halt and takes the otherwise largely fictive US economy down? What if the natural gas crisis makes life extra-difficult at home? What if there is another major terror act in the US?
      What if more than one of these things happens at the same time? What are the odds?
     

July 21, 2003
     The stress of leaving the modern age behind and sailing into uncharted territory of history is beginning to show very clearly in the level of public distraction and delusion as illustrated in three current issues here in the United States.
     The first is the current hoo-hah over the lack of evidence for Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destructions. The upshot of the hoo-hah is that since no WMDs have been found, they must have never existed and therefore the entire Iraq adventure was a shuck, and that Saddam was a harmless and distant despot of no account to American interests. I find this position inane on several counts.
      Saddam had a good ten years to obtain, study, experiment with, fabricate, distribute, sell, lend, or hide all kinds of deadly devices and substances. The fact that we haven't found fissionable material or stockpiles of smallpox or sarin gas should not necessarily lead to the conclusion that they never existed. Rather, I'd wonder to whom might they have been given or sold, or where they were stashed. The failure to turn up WMDs also does not mean that we had no reason to invade Iraq and topple Saddam. He was a pathological presence in the world's most geopolitically sensitive region. He was a megalomaniac totalitarian who started several wars, who tried and almost succeeded in gaining control over most of the remaining oil in the world, and openly wished to lead a kind of secular jihad against the United States -- in tandem with the parallel religious jihad being waged by various Islamists, Wahabis, al qaedas, mullahocracies, Talibans, Hezbollahs, and freelance Muslim maniacs.
       A nation of people devoted to a car-dependent, oil-addicted lifestyle -- namely, US -- has to be responsible for the fact that the security of the Middle East is directly in our interest -- either that or start reforming how we live in this country, which no credible American leader currently on stage is willing to talk about. Since we won't begin to think about giving up our oil addiction, the necessity to turn Iraq into a regional police station then becomes manifest.
      As I said more than a few times lately: my friends spent much of the spring driving their SUVs to the peace marches. I can't take them seriously on the subject of peace. And the fact that many of these people belong to our educated and supposedly "progressive" elite troubles me, because if they are so confused imagine what the lumpen proles will come up with when the stress builds.
      A second related issue now is the hoo-hah over President Bush's squishy assertion in the State of the Union speech that Saddam Hussein had acquired uranium from Niger. It turned out to be based on faulty intelligence. However, there seems to be some illusion among the same class of American progressives that the spy game is an utterly transparent and rational enterprise, and that we should be able to clearly understand everything it presents to us at every step along the way. Nothing could be further from the way the world really works. The spy game is murky and riddled with deception and the best minds in the world of any ideological stripe are challenged at any given time to understand what the fuck is really going on. So what this complaint boils down to is something that Paul Berman describes so lucidly in his excellent book Terror and Liberalism -- the failure of western progressives to consider that the world is not perfectly rational, a habit of thinking that leaves us profoundly vulnerable to the homicidal and totalitarian impulses lately stirring through the Islamic societies who happen also to control most of the world's remaining petroleum.
      The third issue is the increasingly spreading belief -- in my opinion completely delusional -- that high American officials knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks and allowed them to happen in order to advance their wicked agenda of world domination, or something like that. I have heard several otherwise intelligent people express their interest in this idea lately, and it prompts me to wonder what it means about the collective mental health of our culture -- that is, how scared and crazy are we below the seemingly "normal" surface of the world's highest standard of living?