The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
Tom Friedman of the New York Times put it so nicely yesterday when he said it's an interesting world when George W. Bush loses a global popularity contest to Saddam Hussein.
Well, we're back from a week's vacation in Key West, Florida, just in time for War-TV to begin. Key West was a strange experience. The little old town, a gem of preserved wooden buildings and sweet little streets, has been lately horribly over-programmed for hyper-festivity of a kind that seems oddly analogous to the frantic consumer fiesta on the mainland. The Key West economy is now based almost solely on drinking to excess and servicing the drunks who come to do it -- just as the mainland USA economy is now based solely on the development of suburban sprawl and the servicing of its primary inhabitants: cars.
It was astonishing to see how much suburban crapola had actually been crammed into the newer, eastern half of Key West's island over recent decades, a staggering cavalcade of strip malls, McHotels, car dealerships, and other emblems of the world's highest standard of living.
I think what you see in Key West is a snapshot of all America's wretched excess of recent decades in miniature. The value of real estate in Old Town, for instance, inflated at an even more fantastic rate than the housing bubble on the mainland. Little "conch cottages" built by shrimpers have been fetching well over $1 million. We saw an ominous number of realtors' signs planted in the tiny front yards, and it would appear that Key West is now poised for a housing market crash that will probably be disproportionately worse than the crash coming on the mainland. If there are any oil market disruptions in the period ahead, Key West tourism will crater. And since the town has become accustomed to hyper-tourism in the same way that the rest of America has become addicted to hyper-spending, hyper-consumption, and hyper-debt, its prospects are dubious.
We learned a bit about Key West history during our week there. In a century and a half, the town has gone through some economic cycles so severe that it might have existed on different economic planets from era to era. The town first prospered off salvaging wrecks -- a kind of legal piracy -- the reefs fetching up a seemingly endless supply of booty. That business died when the US government began to take an interest in protecting ships by putting up lighthouses and marking the reefs. Fishing, shrimping, canning of Cuban pineapples, and cigar-making kept the town going modestly in the early 20th century. A hurricane took out Henry Flagler's heroic railroad causeway in the 1930s. By the 1960s, the town itself was a wreck, its treasure chest of wooden architecture falling to pieces, the cigar industry finished, commercial fishing near death. Dope smuggling was its chief economic engine for a while.
The late 20th century cheap oil fiesta allowed Key West to ramp up as the Heavy Drinking Tourist Capital of the US. Airfares were cheap. The chains all built resort hotels where the shrimpers used to dock. The T-shirt shops took over the "normal" businesses on Duval -- Sample: "I said no to drugs, but they didn't listen." Hordes of gawking retirees debouched from the cruise lines there every day. It's been quite a party.
We were there during the merry time of Spring Break, and Duval Street had become a kind of rum-drenched mosh pit. The college kids have been busy turning themselves into proto-barbarians, all tattooed up and pierced, making themselves look scary, as though via some collective radar they all sense the kind of world they are growing up into. As they return to campus, now, they can watch it reveal itself on War-TV.