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 Ice
Cube 
 "It's
a tried and true way of dealing with people or nations that the
ruling elite finds troublesome or inconvenient -- whoever gets
in our way. They're simply lumped into the enemy pile. "
 "
I think art and politics are directly related to each
other, and people that deny the cross-influence are kidding
themselves."  "Carbs
are the new terrorists. Bread is the new Bin Laden.
I can't wait to order a low-carb veggie Whopper. People
are pathetic." |
by Jim Kunstler When exactly the American public entered the Rapture is a little hard to say -- maybe as long ago as the Reagan years -- but it is not the same Rapture as the Born Agains are gleefully awaiting -- the absurd cosmic vacuuming up to heaven that leaves behind all the rest of us sinners. No, the Rapture I speak of is the stupendous complacency of a people convinced that the future is going to be just like the past. Everywhere I look I see things that are not going to work in the years ahead, and see people making plans for conditions that will no longer exist. State DOT officials in Texas are planning to build a new statewide super-mega highway network just as the global oil peak forecloses a future of easy motoring. Where I live, at the rural edge of New York's Capital District, suburban housing pods are springing up in every cow pasture in complete faith that supernaturally cheap mortgages and long commutes will continue to be the norm. Municipalities everywhere are investing in multi-million dollar parking structures in the belief that we will be using cars in 2019 exactly the way we do now. Even the enviros are enraptured. I get letters every day from bio-diesel fans who plan to run the interstate highway system and Disney World on oil derived from algae farms. The collective consciousness is amazingly resistant to the fact that things change. Over in Syracuse, New York, a town sinking into the economic sclerosis of a former soviet-style backwater, the locals have approved perhaps the most idiotic project ever conceived by a free and sovereign people -- a hyper-super-giant-mega-mall to be called DestiNY USA (sic) that would include 400 stores, 4,000 hotel rooms, a saltwater aquarium, a 65-acre park under a Biosphere-like dome, and a food court based around a miniature Erie Canal. The idea is that people will flock to Syracuse by car from places with equally sclerotic economies (Worcester, Mass., Scranton, Pa.) in order to go on shopping sprees for new sneakers and cargo pants, which for some reason may be in short supply where they live. The near-imbecile governor of New York, George Pataki, showed up to grandstand at the "groundbreaking" for this dumb-ass boondoggle (which has garnered tons of tax credits and other windfalls), though not a darn thing has been built since that symbolic shovelful of dirt was turned over. The developer behind DestiNY USA, one Robert Congel, was the CEO of a predatory shopping mall company, Pyramid Inc., which raped the local retail economy of many an upstate city since the 1970s. For all of its grandiosity, DestiNY USA is still minor league stuff compared to the plans afoot for Las Vegas, where the Rapture is in its most florid and terminal stage, and aggravated by yet another collective mental disorder: the belief that it is possible to get something for nothing. I'd go as far to say that a public as complacent and clueless as America's is these days deserves to be played for fools. It's not pretty, but life is tragic. History doesn't care if we sleepwalk into a clusterfuck. Plenty of other societies have before us. The real sin in the real world is the failure to pay attention to the signals that your environment sends you. The signals aimed at us now tell us the following: the oil age is entering an unstable permanent decline; suburbia and all its usufructs is finished; the blue-light special shopping economy is about to end; easy motoring will shortly be a thing of the past; the middle class will be replaced by a new former middle class; and all bets are off as to how violently American politics will shudder when the fog finally lifts. 12 May 05  James
Kunstler is the sharpshooting
author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere and the recently
released novel, Maggie Darling, as well as the only guy in a bowtie Morphizm
doesn't want to crush into a bloodied pulp. His doomsday predictions can
be had for free at his blog, Clusterfuck Nation, as well as here. Which
makes him cool.
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