Before I turn over to Mr Kunstler, I had a thought today while walking back from school. Have you noticed that people who are not in machines, not in cars, scuttle across roads, basically dodging oncoming traffic. The thing is, the people in those machines are just like us, so why are people in machines given right of way over people who are not. You may think it's a pathetic idea, but take it to the extreme. You have a baby. Your baby is crawling across a busy highway. Are you really going to throw up your hands and say, "That's it." We'd' all like to know, when it comes down to the crunch, whether people will put other people first. If it was our son or daughter, we would. Why not others?
The second thing is how helpless and lazy we have become with what Kunstler describes below as push-buttons that allow our lives to be pretty simple. Push a button and a light comes on. Turn a lever and you have water. Press 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 numbers and you're in contact with whoever you want to be in contact with. Too hot, too cold, press a button. Want news, entertainment, music. Press a button. Want games. Button. Want food warm or cold - press. Ever wonder where on Earth we would begin if the energy behind all those buttons went out.
There's a scene in War of the Worlds that captures that quite well. Lightning has just struck a spot 26 times. When Ray emerges from under the table, nothing works. Not cars, not refrigerators, or watches or cellphones. People pilfer wrecked jets for water. Lots of people walking.
Have a look at that light burning in your house, above your books, above the fish lounging in their bowl. It's a merry, happy, safe light. Behind it are all the good and easy things. Just think about that.
July 5, 2005
(Posting off schedule again due to holiday)
This Fourth of July, watching fireworks over an Adirondack lake, with the rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air (and the motorboats finally at rest after a day of cuisinarting through the loons and mergansers), I was moved to reflect on the extraordinary level of violence in American society today. It's so pervasive that I think we fail to register it.
Have you ever gotten out of your car for any reason in the shoulder lane of an interstate highway? All the comfort and security of being inside immediately dissolves and your muscles contract at the violent noise of cars and trucks passing at seventy miles per hour, not to mention the inescapable sense of danger at being so close to them passing by. Inside and back on the road again, we quickly forget how much violence we are were exposed to -- and now we contribute to it as our journey continues.
The everyday world of America is a ceaseless assult on human neurology (and certainly the neurology of other beings) from a din of numberless motors: air conditioners, lawn mowers, weed-whackers, ventilation blowers, fry-o-later hoods, airplanes, as well as the constant background roar of car traffic.
Our entertainments are saturated with violence. Hollywood has completely forgotten how to make stories based on the predicaments of human character and emotion. The only emotions they understand are bluster, threat, and murderous aggression with overtones of sexual excitement (because this is the way show business professionals act among themselves, and it is the only behavior they understand). Is it any wonder that rogue maniacs drive around the nation snatching children in order to torture and kill them? Or that the Cable News stations are now utterly preoccupied with covering the exploits of murderous maniacs, to the exclusion of everything else going on in the world?
Millions of red-blooded red staters spend their leisure hours moiling at the Nascar tracks. Do you have any idea how unpleasant it is to be a spectator at a car race? How saturated with violence the atmosphere around the track is? I have been to several races as a journalist. The noise alone is supernatural. Then there is the fans' unspoken sadistic voyeurism in anticipating a crash to liven up the boredom of watching cars roar for hours around the oval. Nascar fans will surely deny it, because it reveals the necrophilia at the heart of their so-called "sport," but crashes are part of the excitement. Dale Ehrnhardt surely died for their sins, and when the next driver kills himself on the track there will be new heaps of teddy bears to take the focus away from the crocodile tears shed in the stands and TV rooms of the Raleigh-Durham metroplex.
Finally, thousands of miles away, there's the war in Iraq and Afghanistan -- it's all one war, by the way. It's being fought to fuel up all those Nascars, and power the interstate highways, and to keep the weed-whackers and fry-o-later hoods humming, and keep the suburban housing industry chugging along so more Americans can drive to the video store to get violently stupid movies about quasi-humans with great destructive powers. We are watching ourselves become monsters.
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