"Slum Nation" By James Howard Kunstler

When last I was in Berlin in 1997, the town was still reeling from the shock of reunification. Only a few tentative businesses had started up on the former communist side, and most of the route of the infamous wall remained a yawning, weedy scrape-off zone. Now the repair of the city is well-advanced, though I give very mixed reviews to some of the premier projects.

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When I was there in '97, I was struck by how utterly all remnants of Hitler had been erased. I suppose it was a form of post traumatic stress syndrome. Quite a bit of memory has been recovered since then, and new monuments abound, from the Peter Eisenman-designed Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe -- very solemnly eloquent -- to a smaller memorial to Hitler's gay victims in the big park called the Tiergarten. Plaques explaining one Nazi horror after another are now liberally deployed around the old city center, and Herman Goering's Air Force Ministry was left standing as the last example of Third Reich art deco -- a form of extreme stripped down neo-classicism with all femininity removed, no curves, no ornaments. The site of Hitler's bunker is no longer a weed patch, but perhaps appropriately one of the city's rather rare surface parking lots, with a plaque telling the tale and tourist docents pointing out (I swear I heard this) that "...Hitler's bedroom lay about where that white Audi is parked...."

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America today is arguably a far less civilized land, and even more neurotic, than the Germany of the 1930s. We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor, and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a sentient American reeling in angst and anomie. Our popular culture would embarrass a race of hebephrenics. We think that neck tattoos are cool. A lot of our pop music is overtly homicidal. Our richest citizens have managed to define a new banality of evil. Our middle classes are subject to humiliations so baroque that sadomasochism even fails to encompass the finer points. And we don't even need help from other nations to run our own economic affairs into the ground -- we're digging our national grave with a kind of antic glee, complete with all the lurid stagecraft that Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue can muster.

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Meanwhile, the evil plume of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico grows ever-larger by the hour and every living thing in that quarter of the sea faces slow death. That's our memorial-in-the-making to ourselves. I feel sorry for Barack Obama in this situation. Dmitry Orlov is right: this is our Chernobyl. This is the cherry-on-top of all our feckless foolishness. Memorial Day this year is the welcome mat to our hard time. We'll be lucky if some honorable as-yet-unknown colonel in the wadis of Afghanistan comes home to overthrow president Glenn Beck, or whichever lethal moron ends up in power after 2012. We'll be a very different America then, with no going back.

Coming home to the USA was like re-entering a special kind of mega-slum where nothing that can be screwed up is left un-screwed up. My Delta flight was two hours late, of course. Amusingly, the explanation given was that new runways were under construction at JFK airport -- like, Delta just discovered it that morning, or somehow they've been unable to work that into their scheduling process after months and months. The things we tell ourselves are so absurd that even the late George Carlin couldn't make them up. We stopped on the tarmac at JFK because they didn't have a gate for us. We passengers were put onto some kind of people-mover contraption. The engine failed so we we sat in this steel box in 90-degree heat until they fetched another one. Then there was the journey through a set of dim tunnels to customs, and another journey up a steep ramp shared by motor vehicles and their exhalations to the terminal exit. Welcome home to Slum Nation.

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Thanks. I'm not being sarcastic. The insight is worth it.

It's been an exponential decline into depravity. I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice. I wish I could do something about it, but I feel like a foreigner in my native land...even though I have returned to my home state, which is still recognizable, but several degrees out of kilter from where it was. And as for my home city of Detroit, the less said, the better.

(highly recommended to all, especially the young, and daring)

that's when i first noticed how they (elite/pols/media) were blaming everything on the poor, for all that ails us... as if the bag ladies were pushing gold bricks around :shakes-head:

i have children who are not finished school, who i am most fearful for =(

BTW: Thank you for your weekly financial summaries, i never miss them :toast:

I just supplement his daily logging of the economy.

Thank you for your kind words!

he'll find peace in Berlin.

thats fer sure

my mother is from france and we talk to our cousins and aunts, ect.
Our country has become the hillbilly trailer park style that is just so shameful. And we seem to be rapidly regressing in our country rather then progressing.
I think what it may be like in another 30 years....our downfall so stunning and we are putting our heads in the sand rather then face up to the facts.

We EXPECT things to be bad . . . we EXPECT things not to work properly . . . we EXPECT poor service and poor workmanship . . .

When we get from Point A to Point B unscathed, it's almost as if a miracle has occurred. :cry: