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Reality of Sprawl

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Category: Preservation
Published on Thursday, 19 November 2009 00:00
Written by Randy Garbin

Eighty percent of everything that has ever been built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, and spiritually degrading — the jive-​plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the lego-​block hotel complexes, the “gourmet-​mansardic” junk-​food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-​gang guards, the particle-​board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-​inducing spectacle and politicians proudly call “growth.”

James Howard Kunstler

Comments

0 # melliot 2009-​11-​26 00:36
Kunstler has it right on the money. His treatise puts in mind of William S. Burrough’s Thanksgiving Prayer, which is appropriate for this eve of our Thanksgiving Day. This holiday implores us to find the good in the muck and mire, but I think Burroughs’s sentiment gets it just right too. Here’s the first stanza:

Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be sh** out through wholesome American guts.
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
Thanks for the American Dream, To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.

Happy holidays!

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