Kunstler’s article captures the spirit of my article in much fewer words. I hope his hope for a better tomorrow comes true.
Homeless
By James Howard Kunstler
on December 3, 2012 9:14 AM
Even if the so-called economy were “recovering,” the people of the USA would be stuck in a physical setting for daily life that has no future – the nightmare infrastructure of subdivision houses, strip malls, and WalMarts, all rigged up for incessant motoring. Of course, the so-called economy is not recovering because there is no more cheap oil. If oil ever gets cheap again, it will be because nobody has enough money to pay for it and surely you can connect the dots to what that hamster wheel of futility means.
In fact, the heart of our economic predicament is that the American economy came to be based on the construction ever more suburban stuff, the financing of which, especially the houses, became the fodder for an episode of epic swindles that has left our banking system a hollowed out shell of accounting fraud. In short, we built even more stuff with no future, and ruined our society in the process. How tragic is that?
The behavioral habits, practices, and consequences of being stuck in that living arrangement may end up being at least as problematic as the physical residue of it. It has left the people in a network of alienation, anxiety, and misery that defeats exactly the mentality needed to break free of it. For the truth is we’re faced with a massive necessary re-ordering of daily life in this country, and there is no vision or will to get on with job.
Among the tribulations of this living arrangement is the utter loss of connection between place and purpose often expressed in the phrase “loss of community,” which is a little too abstract to me and fails to convey the tragedy of individuals living with no sense of purpose — and by that I mean duties, obligations, and responsibilities to other human beings.
Obviously, the whole idea of a single-family house by definition dictates a certain disposition of things. It will lack the dimension and social relations of a household composed of multiple generations plus non-family members, helpers, employees, servants. And it should also be obvious that the single-generation, single-family house is a product of mid-20th century industrial dynamism that made even factory worker wage slaves rich by historical standards – Tom Wolfe pointed out years ago that the average GM assembly line drone enjoyed more sheer physical luxury at home than Louis XIV.
Put the single-family house in the context of a suburban monoculture organized to conform relentlessly to the dictates of single use zoning, and you get a recipe for instant (and permanent) social dysfunction. Then, fill that house with electronic diversion devices and a microwave oven and you end up with a very few disconnected humans who rarely share a meal and exist, while “at home,” in a narcissistic vapor-realm of canned entertainment, pornography, texting (i.e. melodrama created to fill a void of purposelessness), and the sado-masochistic combats of video games (a substitute for purposeful, virile endeavor), all floating on a virtual river of relentless advertising.
It always interests me to see the emergent purposeless of the American Dream expressed so vividly in the television sitcoms of that mid-20th century day – the very moment of its emergence. Ozzie Nelson of Ozzie and Harriet seemed to have absolutely nothing to do except sit around the kitchen waiting for somebody else to come in for a cup of coffee. He clearly had nowhere else to go. The ennui of Ozzie Nelson was a source of mirth to busy hipsters who savored the ironies of behavioral kitsch – loving what’s horrible for the horror it induces. But it really isn’t so funny since it is a portrait of an un-manned man trapped in utter purposeless and reduced to the pathetic existential status of somebody endlessly waiting for nothing. (Cue Samuel Beckett….)
Anyway, that was then and it’s all crashing down now in a great galumphing debris-field of bankruptcy, psychosis, regret, obesity, and foreclosure. So what comes next? They say that the millennial generation is the most group-oriented, cooperative bunch to come along in the march of Boomers, Xs, and Ys. How much of this is an hallucination of transient computer connectivity, I don’t know. The fact that it is so difficult for them financially to even hope to form a household will surely be a defining factor in the choices they make ahead about how exactly to inhabit the landscape. I think they will make out better in this project than their Boomer forerunners, who started out in communes sharing toothbrushes and graduated to dismal McMansions in a geography of nowhere, while dedicating their careers to the looting of posterity.
I’m quite sure that many will rediscover a sense of purpose in the re-ordering of social life that lies ahead, which includes a return to different household arrangements and probably much more hierarchical social relations. Implicit in the latter is the now-utterly-incorrect-and-taboo notion of someone knowing their place. The catch is: you need to have a place in order to know your place, and therefore know who you are – and in a society full of people for whom place means nothing, there is little chance of acquiring a real identity, other than the sham raiment of the app-supported avatar life that has taken the place of being human.
I had a fugitive thought the other evening walking through my beaten-down small town in the late fall chill. I imagined that instead of the blue tomb-like glow of television emanating from house to house that I could hear the sequential music of parlor pianos, and voices singing to them, and of healthy people coming and going from warm kitchens to fetch firewood, and of groups of people gathered around tables for a meal, and generally of buildings that were truly inhabited, not just storage containers for lives unspent. I grant you it was a fleeting nostalgic fantasy. But isn’t nostalgia just a state of being homesick?
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For a complete list of books by James Howard Kunstler and purchase links, CLICK HERE.
Pirate Jo says:
Ugh … if I had to live with my family members, I would end up with fewer family members.
And the idea that our life’s only purpose consists of our “duties, obligations, and responsibilities to other human beings?” Sorry, but in my opinion my obligations to other human beings make up a pretty short list: to 1) not harm them in any way, and 2) do whatever I have promised them I will do in exchange for what they promised to pay me.
Admittedly, like AWD I am feeling a little too burned out by the FSA and its many demands to want to hear another damn thing about any more obligations I supposedly have.
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3rd December 2012 at 12:13 pm
ThePessimisticChemist says:
“Obviously, the whole idea of a single-family house by definition dictates a certain disposition of things. It will lack the dimension and social relations of a household composed of multiple generations plus non-family members, helpers, employees, servants. And it should also be obvious that the single-generation, single-family house is a product of mid-20th century industrial dynamism that made even factory worker wage slaves rich by historical standards”
Someone asked me what I would do with all that money if I got rich. (In an area of massive underachievement)
Start a couple businesses, invest in others, buy up some land, and of course get some servants.
That last one really pisses people off, but the reality is that a staggering amount of American jobs are nothing but a more nicely named servant, and a more well-paid one as well.
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3rd December 2012 at 12:30 pm
TeresaE says:
The only thing I feel I owe anyone – barring the children I brought into this world – is to leave them alone, not steal their shit and as long as they are not hurting me, or stealing my stuff, let them find happiness wherever it leads them.
Now that thought makes me nostalgic.
And PJ, I’m with ya’. I love my family, but moved 100 miles away from them for a reason.
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3rd December 2012 at 12:52 pm
Eddie says:
There is a significant new novel that I’m reading, one that makes me think of JHK on nearly every page.
I’m pretty sure he reads you, admin…maybe he looks at these comments…so on the off chance that he does:
Dear Jim K.
Please read Flight Behavior, the new book by Barbara Kingsolver. You can learn a lot about Southerners while reading a book about climate change that I’m sure you will agree is excellent. It also delves into the delusiional behavior of the American public, circa 2012.
Probably the best novel of the year, maybe the decade.
(We now return you to your regularly scheduled comments.)
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3rd December 2012 at 12:53 pm
Nonanonymous says:
PJ, no one will be shacking up for the convenience of it. How many millenials are living at home now? It wasn’t by choice. It’s because opportunity has slowly dried up, as if there ever was any. The technology didn’t exist to subjugate an entire generation when the boomers came along. It does now, and there have been plenty of dry runs.
You should consider yourself fortunate, if the worst case were to happen, to have any family left. My wife just started her new career after kids working third shift at a nursing home. It occurred to me that if the cops don’t show up for work in a grid down situation, neither are health care workers. Those dependent on others for care and feeding will be the first casualties.
Kunstler wasn’t talking about reasoned approach to civilized life, he was referring to what will arise out of the consequences of not taking a civilized approach, that civil life will resume regardless of whatever happens, and that means shared responsibility, instead of shared sacrifice, comrade.
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3rd December 2012 at 1:04 pm
AWD says:
What a bunch of crap, the usual weekly crap. I’m getting bored with his worldview. He’s cut from the cloth of most liberals; miserable, somebody else’s fault, average people (non-liberals) are boring, useless eaters, a waste of oxygen. Oh, dear me, fucking boomers, the world would only be better if we did things their way, despite the fact the JK and his ilk have destroyed the moral, ethical and spiritual fabric of this nation.
It’s obvious to me HIS life is empty, vapid, narcissistic, and futile, like most liberals, and most boomers. He never solves any problems (just go back to eating dinner around the table?), just complains, bitches and moans. At least he has a small modicum of reflection:
“…their Boomer forerunners, who started out in communes sharing toothbrushes and graduated to dismal McMansions in a geography of nowhere, while dedicating their careers to the looting of posterity.”
He voted for Obama, he’s a boomer, and he, at least morally, continues the looting of posterity. He hasn’t really had anything interesting to say for more than 6 months, since long before the election. From all his writing (projections from a miserable SOB psyche), you can see a sad soulless individual, trying to find his soul via the suburban masses, the Southerners, and all the other idiots he scorns. He needs to spend some time on the psychiatrist’s couch, like most boomers, to begin to understand all the pathology that a boomer liberal worldview has caused to his soul (what’s left of it). Yawn.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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3rd December 2012 at 1:10 pm
Pirate Jo says:
By the time I am old, I won’t have any family left. I call that a good thing, because there won’t be anyone to try and force me into a nursing home, so I’ll be allowed to die in peace. That’s what my grandma wanted to do, but the DHS threatened that my parents would be charged with neglect if they didn’t stick her in a nursing home. So she spent the last ten years of her life on Title 19 and in a nursing home – unable to hear, barely able to see, didn’t recognize anyone, sleeping all day and having her diapers changed. That’s not going to happen to me. Even if it has to happen by my own hand, I will die before that happens.
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3rd December 2012 at 1:57 pm
Stucky says:
I’m only commenting because Eddie said Kunsler might read this blog. Therefore, …
Hey, Kunstler! You’re a hypocritical lying tiresome sack of shit. You might consider trying to write something original, instead of the rehashed same old shit week after week, you limp dicked moron.
Sincerely,
Hot debate. What do you think?
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3rd December 2012 at 2:38 pm
Robmu1 says:
What a miserable bastard. Why doesn’t he just drink to excess like the rest of us when he gets down instead of crying like all of the moaners on MSNBC?
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3rd December 2012 at 3:19 pm
flash says:
One of the reasons murder rates across the greater part of the good ole’ US are low is because families are no longer forced to live together ’till death do us part.
You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your brain dead relatives.
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3rd December 2012 at 4:00 pm
sangell says:
A piano is not much different than a car in terms of industrial complexity and cost to manufacture and, as I recall, Ozzie Nelson’s day job was as a musician, so Kuntsler’s dream of hearing piano music and singalongs coming from within the houses along his street has a certain bourgeois quality to it.
Almost a stately 19th century Victorian uppermiddleclass feel to it. Indeed it was only since the post
war era dawned that a working man could aspire to have even a replica of such a lifestyle in his suburban tract home right down to a piano in his house that his children would have the time to learn to play.
Kuntsler overestimates the gloom. Yes the 150 to 300 horsepower family car may become a thing of the past ( but I wouldn’t bet on it unless fuel costs rise to well above $10 per gallon as fuel costs are not that great of an expense compared to the cost of the car and are less today on the basis of that ratio than they were 50 years ago) Even if gasoline disappears as a everyday fuel, people are not going to be reduced to horses or pedaling bicycles for transportation. You can buy an electric bike with a 250 watt electric motor for a lot less than a horse. No reason people would not have small electric cars that might not go 400 miles on a tankful at 75 mph but would still be better than any previous personal transportation mankind had prior to about 1930.
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3rd December 2012 at 9:33 pm
Makati1 says:
Wow! Such hate….of your families! My life started in a loving America where extended family living was the norm not the exception. I lived in my grand parent’s house for the first two years. Then we moved out and became ‘single family’ home Americans.
What a mistake! We have produced a country full of whiners and intolerant adult children. I’m talking about those who never got to the mature stage in human life. THAT is why I hold no hope for a future for America. When the SHTF as it is going to do soon, the typical American is going to go psycho and not know how to deal with a reality that have ignored most of their lives. That of a real world and responsibility.
I was fortunate to have been raised as much by my grand parents as my parents and learned how to save, think, the value of being able to garden, build furniture, build homes, cook, clean, etc. And how to get along with people. While I lived with my grandparents, my great grandmother also lived there for her last years. She was 94 and senile. I learned a lot from that experience. I could not have done that if She was stuffed away in a home somewhere, out of sight and mind.
No, reality is about to teach all of you Prozac poppers that the real world cannot be hidden much longer. Good Luck!
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3rd December 2012 at 10:59 pm