James Howard Kunstler: Home From Europe
December 15, 2004
Paris was normal, which is to say the streets were thronged with live human
beings (hardly any of them overweight), the cafes and restaurants were bustling,
even the parks were well-populated on a brisk December day and we were reminded
emphatically of the stark contrast with the impoverished public life of America.
In fact, one morning as we puttered in the hotel room with CNN-Europe playing
in the background, a story came on about retail sales back in the States, and
there was a shot of our supersized fellow countrymen waddling around in a WalMart
dressed in the usual slob apparel by which they fail to make a distinction between
being at home and being out in public.
Amsterdam, Holland, was pretty much the same story as Paris, though it is physically
quite different from Paris -- the scale is smaller, the intimate streets are
deployed along a network of beautiful canals, and the car is barely tolerated
(or even much in evidence). There, we would duck into a "brown bar"
(so-called because of the dark wooden wainscotting) at five p.m. and it would
be full of well-dressed, gainfully employed adults in animated conversation.
Public life in Europe is only minimally about shopping and maximally about spending
time with your fellow human beings.
American public life by comparison is pathetic-to-nonexistent. Americans venture
out only to roam the warehouse depots, and only by car. In most American places
bars are strictly for lowlifes, and the public realm for the employed classes
is pretty much restricted to television, with its predictable cast of manufactured
characters and situations. The alienation and isolation of American life is
so pervasive and pathological, compared to life lived elsewhere in this world,
that all the Prozac ever made will never avail to make things better for us.
The process of making America an alienated land of solitary, obese driver-shoppers
has been very profitable for predatory corporations. They have systematically
disassembled the public social infrastructure and repackaged pieces of it for
sale -- starting with the single-family house isolated on its lot from all the
normal amenities of culture and society. Everybody now has their 'home theater'
so the cinema is only a place to park children for two hours so you can drive
elsewhere to buy the cheez doodles, frozen pizza, Pepsi, and other staples of
the American diet. You equip your kitchen with an espresso machine and there
is no reason to "waste your time" in a cafe. Everybody has to have
their own pool, so the kids can go swimming by themselves. Family values. The
rest of the human race is unimportant.
American adults are said to work far more hours than their European counterparts.
Clearly, that is because they have no place to "be" with other people
besides the WalMart, and no way to get anyplace except the car. On top of this
fantastic alienation, there is the inescapable din of manufactured Christmas
festivity, which must only reinforce the deep,chronic loneliness of most average
Americans, the utter lack of connection with other people. In Paris there was
hardly a Santa to be seen, or a carol to be heard, though the busy and beautiful
streets were saturated with cheer and conviviality.
What is also striking in contrast is the stupendous and immersive ugliness of all "normal" American daily environments. Public beauty in buildings and streets is not merely absent, it seems to have been rigorously banished. Americans now move continually through a machine terrain unmediated by any reminders of what it means to be human. Our most celebrated architects are high priests of the machine ethos. America has become a country of sad, lonely, and frightened people. We say that we like our way of life, but I suspect that many Red staters have never known anything else besides the six-lane highway, the box store, and the life of cable TV. The widespread demoralization is too great to be calculated.