California-the-tragic

June 12, 2005
      I just paid $3.25 for a twelve-ounce diet coke in the Los Angeles airport, known by the affectionate name LAX by the locals (sounds so cutting age, like rap stars who give themselves technoid names such as G-Unit). The truth is, LAX is just the airport code on the baggage label that they slap on your suitcase before it vanishes forever into the black hole of lost things. Evidently there was an earthquake here today, but the vibe of the city (if you can call this toxic hyper-mega-burb that) is so catastrophic generally that I didn't even notice.

     I've been on a long book publicity road trip around California, with a side trip to Seattle on Thursday, and it's hard not to feel hopeless about this country after being here. It probably doesn't help that my 10:30 red-eye flight has been delayed ("aircraft availability," the sign says) and I don't know whether I will make my morning connection in Washington for the final flight to upstate New York. My experience with United Airlines is that they (that is, the remaining skeleton crew) are a gang of lying fucks who will make up any excuse to disguise the fact that their company is a barely-functioning shell. As a matter of fact, there was not a single United employee in the entire P-7 terminal when I got here at 8:00 pm and I had to walk a half mile over to terminal P-8 to find a live gate agent. What you see in this miserable airport is simply the death of the airline industry. The airlines are the giant "canaries in the coal mine" of our imploding economy. They can't make any money, even running fully-loaded flights, with the price of jet fuel (which is little more than kerosene) not even very high yet. But I stray from my point.

     Which is that what you see in California is a society with a tragic destiny. I was all over the Bay Area earlier in the week, from San Francisco to Silicon Valley to Berkeley and even down to Santa Cruz, and that was bad enough, But then I got down to Los Angeles on Friday and have been in a state of pathological reflex nausea ever since. Despite their lame attempts to rebuild a few pieces of the 2000-mile-long streetcar system that they gleefully destroyed in the 1950s, life here is all about cars and it will never not be about cars -- until the reality of our oil predicament falls on the hapless public like a hammer of God and the people of California die for their fucking cars in their fucking cars and over their fucking cars. I understand that the scene here is not qualitatively different from Dallas, Orlando, Atlanta, Northern Virginia, Miami, New Jersey and other cloacal hot-spots of the world's highest standard of living. But I digress again, sitting, as I am, on the floor of terminal P-7 because I cannot find a single electric outlet anywhere near a chair, and being fifty-six years old, with an artificial hip, this is not the most felicitous scheme for composing one's thoughts.

     I was invited to give a talk at Google headquarters down in Mountain View last Tuesday. They sent somebody to fetch me (in a hybrid car, zowee!) from my hotel in San Francisco -- as if I had any choice about catching a train down, right? Google HQ was a glass office park pod tucked into an inscrutable tangle of off-ramps, berms, manzanita clumps, and curb-cuts. But inside, it was all tricked out like a kindergarten. They had pool tables, and inflatable yoga balls, and $6000 electronic vibrating massage lounge chairs, and snack stations deployed at twenty-five step intervals, with lucite bins filled with chocolate raisins and granola. The employees dressed like children. There were two motifs: "skateboard rat" and "10th grade nerd." I suppose quite a few of them were millionaires. Many of the work cubicles were literally modular children's playhouses. I gave my spiel about the global oil problem and the unlikelihood that "alternative energy" would even fractionally replace it, and quite a few of the Googlers became incensed.

     "Yo, Dude, you're so, like, wrong! We've got, like, technology!"

      Yeah, well, they weren't interested in making a distinction between energy and technology (or, more precisely where Google is concerned, a massive web-based advertising scheme -- because it is finally clear that all this talk about "connectivity" just leads to more commercial shilling, shucking, jiving, and generally fucking with your headspace in the interstices of whatever purposeful activity one may be struggling to enact on the internet).

     The taxi-cab ride to Berkeley (on Google's tab) ran over $160 on the meter. In Berkeley a radical leftist grandmotherly lady interviewed me for a radio show and once that was over she began to tell me about the chemical contrails that Dick Cheney was cross-hatching across the Berkeley skies for the purpose of controlling the masses of earnest, whole-foods-loving, undyed-wool-wearing devotees of diversity and turning them into whorish Stepford sex robots. Everybody knew it was a cover-up, she said.

     Seattle was a blurr of traffic, tofu, and dark green things that must have been coniferous trees or seaweed, I wasn't sure. The sleeplessness was catching up with me.

     Flying into LA the next day, and traversing its decrepitating central core clean out to Pasadena in the airport van, was like being immersed in an updated Hieronymous Bosch landscape of hell -- only substitute SUVs for spavined reptiles and tortured peasants half-stuck inside eggshells. At every turn of the odometer, one wondered: what will become of this entropic socio-economic sink, especially as the supply of its chief nutrient declines. I conclude that it may no longer maintain its stature as the breast-implant capital of the world.

     I gave a talk at the closing session of the annual Congress for the New Urbanism in Pasadena on Sunday. My message was one that readers of this blog are familiar with -- namely, that we are sleepwalking into desperate circumstances largely determined by our addiction to oil, our supply of which mostly comes from distant lands full of people who hate us, et cetera. I will not bore you by rehearsing this theme further today. Now, the CNU members have generally been among the most forward-looking citizen-activists on the scene for a decade. They certainly recognize the many deficiencies of our drive-in dystopia, apart from the oil issues, and have been working to remedy it. But they don't really believe what I said to them.

      The sad truth is that they are addicted to the same economic mechanisms as the sprawl-meisters: the production home-builders (so-called), the great mortgage mills of the conglomerate banks, and the real estate "industry" (also so-called.) So they don't want to hear that these "sectors" of our economy are not going to make it. They don't want to hear about the necessity to downscale America anymore than the grifters who develop the WalMart power centers want to hear about it.

     But we are going where circumstances are taking us whether we like it or not. We have to make other arrangements -- and I mean really different from the way we live now, not just tweaking the municipal codes and building slightly better housing subdivisions and squeezing chain stores under the condominiums and hiding the parking lots behind the buildings. I hope the New Urbanists come around. They have a whole lot of very useful knowledge that will allow us to make our derelict towns habitable while we re-assign the remaining countryside for growing the food that we need locally.

      Ah, I admit that I am in foul and turbulent spirits. I have been into the land of the American Moloch among its Moloch-worshippers and I am brainsick from it. I promise to cool my jets and come back next week with something a little less hysterical. By the way, my plane finally got out of LAX at 1:30 am Pacific time, three hours and ten minutes late. I missed my connection, so I am finishing this fugue in Dulles Airport, Washington.

Comments

[Paul Cooley]

I've become very disillusioned with some of the people promoting the New Urbanist Developement around here. The development, called Oshara Village, is simply a suburb stuck out on the fringes of Santa Fe. They plan all the good things: a walkable community, shops, jobs, etc., but that doesn't change the unthinking nature of the way most citizens conduct themselves in this country.

One of the supporters of the development has an alternative talk show on the local public radio. (How he is involved with Oshara Village, I am not sure). I have been on his show to talk about being a carfree family. My point is that Santa Fe itself is already a New Urbanist community; all we have to do is treat it like one. There are eight grocery stores within a half hour bike ride of my house. There are movie theaters, a cobbler, countless restaraunts, and so forth. The problem here, at least, is not the physical structure of the city, but the bahvior of the people who live it.

I can see residents of Oshara Village walking to their corner store and feeling smug and progressive after spending a day driving around the rest of the city. Will anyone actually live and work in Oshara Village, occasionally, perhaps, taking the bus into town? I doubt it.

Instead of pouring money into brand new developments, however artful and more intelligent, people simply need to get out of their fucking cars, drop their keys down the nearest sewer grate, and begin making what is around them more beautiful and palatable.

[xenotype]

My brother, a scientist at Boeing's satellite division (which used to be part of Hughes Aircraft) in Torrance is one of those techies robustly confident about the future. He lives in the sylvan charms of Rancho Palos Verdes, drives a spiffy SUV down the "hill", and is generally eupeptic about the future. Even global warming will not deter his optimism: technology will save us.

And, in certain crevices and niches, LA is improving. Transit, not freeways, is finally getting the attention of planners. Downtown is experiencing a housing boom, and the real-estate bubble has conspired to create, however temporary, a sense of wealth among most Californians. On those rare days when the air is clear, LA can feel like heaven.

If you have to be stranded by the road with a 3 ton SUV and an empty gas tank, LA may be just the spot. The huge economic decline that seems to loom on the horizon will be kinder here than elsewhere. How we cope with the difficulties ahead will test our ingenuity and patience. But cope we will.

[JB2]

I sympathize with JHK's crankiness - nothing sucks like waiting for your (delayed) redeye flight to start boarding. At around 10:00 p.m., every bone in your body is telling you that you should be home watching baseball in bed, instead of sitting in a nasty airport.

Meanwhile, I read this morning that plans for 19 new malls and shopping center are underway here in the Detroit area. 19!!! in the most depressed doomed economy in the country! We are truly steaming toward the iceberg.

[David Brice]

So, Kunstler, did you have a nice trip?

This is an unabashed fan letter. I know the word "genius" is overused these days, as some critics apply it to nonentities like P-Diddy. But you really are one. I keep reading your stuff, like today's installment, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. So usually I just mouth-breathe, with my eyeballs protruding slightly, and I'm mumbling all the while, "Yeah, that's obviously true; so why aren't more people saying this shit?"

I just finished reading "The Long Emergency," and it's a masterpiece. I have only a few minor disagreements with anything in it. One is with your analysis of the roots of the Iraq War on pps. 85-87 (even white-hot patriots like Rep. Walter Jones of N.C., originator of the term "freedom fries" now admits the war was predicated on lies), another is with your estimation of the dropout movement of the late sixties/early seventies. Overall, however, it's essential information for every American. Unfortunately, few Americans will take it to heart (at least not this year -- not yet).

The last two chapters are the best.

At this point, though, you're a voice crying in the wilderness. That's ok -- keep crying.

I'll deal with "The Long Emergency" more thoroughly when I review it for Amazon.

In the meantime, I loved your reference to "Moloch" in today's installment. Ginsburg expressed in his cryptic semi-versifying what you delineate much more clearly in your impossible-to-misunderstand prose.

[anonymous]

Grouchy old bastard. They say yoga and meditation help, but like Jim I'm too lazy to bother with either. (ditto for tofu and granola)

[kd]

Great post, Jim! Sad, funny, on target.

Entrapment is this society's
Sole activity
Only laughter is able to blow it to rags.

-Edward Dorn

[mike]

We've got technology eh dude?
Reminds me of course of the kindergarten
class when asked where the fruits & vegetables come from?The supermarket.
Electric power?The socket man.

You know it's bound to happen sooner or later, the Peak Oil deniers.
When oil went to $40 a barrel.Peak OIl blah
blah blah
Now it's at $53?
Where I live (Quebec)all our power comes from hydroelectric dams ($90 a month)
I walk to work.

As for the airlines.
The airlines never made any money.
That's why so many international airlines
are owed by the governments.

[Hermit]

I can sympathize with you Jim on your trip back home. I've had to use LAX several times on my way over to N.Z. and it has gotten worse each time I go through it. You got a bad hip, I got a bad knee, and carrying luggage around that place is bad.

the old hermit

[Rodrigo]

Dude, you need a nap!

1

[Perry Logan]

I'm sorry you had a bummer, but it was a pleasure reading your account of it. Never has Moloch been better invoked!

[Barry]

For a few who don't know Ginsburg, or haven't heard of Moloch, here ya' go -
And, yeah - right on with the invocation, JK

The Moloch Broadside
Poetry by Allen Ginsberg

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! Omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal creams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

1956

Copyright © 2004-2009, Mick Arran. Some rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.

[Eligere]

Oh poor JHK! I have to confess that California (and especially LA) has exactly the same effect on me. I've been there twice and will probably never go again. And a recent flight on United, which miraculously morphed into a flight on USAIR that could not be upgraded using miles from either airline, was perfectly third world.

Please come to Philadelphia. You can walk everywhere, our farmer's markets are burgeoning, our coffee is excellent and there is still enough of the old town left to see how it was done before electricity and industrialization, and how it might be done again.

[sampo]

wow, for a second there i started having deja vu all over again while reading your account of that hellhole which is LAX. i think i may have trumped you this weekend though. trying to fly cheap and making connections internationally, i went through the same shit you did plus a 3 hour "weather" delay PLUS i had to carry my bags from the tom bradly terminal all the way to terminal 7 because they wouldn't check them across for me. Not to worry though, i left a quite indellible desecration in the terminal 7 mens room and it made me feel much better...That and the Xanax...

And at least i didn't have to actually witness the city itself beyond the hazy view from the window seat...the last time i did that, it took 3 hours to get to pasadena...and it was 2 am...i'm getting chills...

[Dave]

I was in L.A. last year to finally see the place and found myself spooked by the sheer mass of cars and cookie cutter houses but the trip was redeemed by the Norton Simon Museum, the Getty and Los Angeles County Musuem of Art. I enjoyed the Yoganda Temple in Santa Monica and Venice Beach. The place has enourmous natural beauty underneath the sea of cement. Its terrible what's become of it and its fate is unspeakable if things fall apart as bad as others who know much more than my poor wits can fathom says it will. A great essay to read is Mumford's "California and the Human Horizon" in the collection The Urban Propect. Written in the early fifties it brings home just what possiblilities were at that time and what has been lost. It can make you weep in light of what lies ahead.
Enjoyed JHK's post and I agree the guy is an eccentric genius who loves his country and is determined to at least try to wake it up before it hits the tipping point. His resolve is good for those like myself who, after twenty five years of local activism, feel at times that the megamachine is unstoppable and best to accept our fate.

[aj]

I love to tout how walkable Montreal is -- like Boston, San Francisco and Philadelphia, these are compact cities by necessity, old and dense from the times when energy was scarcer and sharing warmth between inside walls was more important than having 6 inches of lawn on either side of one's ranch-style.

Sad to say we managed to export our sprawl to the neighboring land north and south of us; Laval and Brossard could easily be anywhere in the Greater Toronto Area, if not for the French signs. Every time I go out to the country I'm appalled at how much former farmland has become a new insta-suburb and the more livable on-island neighborhoods seem increasingly zoned for the very rich or the very poor.

And then there are days like today - the F1 circus was in town with all its attendant Eurotrash, heavy motoring, noise, smoke and ritual burning of precious gas. On top of which, the city has been under a rare pall of smog the past week caused by forest fires far to the north, exacerbating the temperatures, the humidity, and the general unbearableness of it all. 40º C (with humidex) in June is not natural.

Will we have the sense to stop before it's too late?

[Wyse Wisdom]

I am roughly two months away from a degree in computer science, and in the five years I've spent getting this degree I have grown to detest IT and many of the people in it. The almost religious faith in technology as a solution for everything is ever present. How is it that a person can have absolute faith in technology?

I personally believe that a computer science degree should also include a mandatory degree in psychology so that we would actually have some understanding of PEOPLE, as opposed to just MACHINES. It is not healthy as it stands.

But I have noticed that a lot of organic farmers here in Silicon Valley North are IT burnouts, so perhaps everyone eventually comes around.

[kd]

When asked to compare America with a previous nation
Arnold Toynbee replied that it corresponds to Rome
under Cicero during the final days of the Republic
because of the inconceivable power it employs
to the distress and suffering of so many people,
because of a Constitution which once was admirable
but is now invalid, because of disoder at home
and, above all else, because of violence.
Plague creeps down our doors;
a foul odor spreads.

-Evan S. Connell

[kd]

Sorry for typo:

"because of disorder at home"

[fool on the swill]

"How is it that a person can have absolute faith in technology?"

Two words: pain avoidance. No one gets pleasure from coming to grips with the nature of energy as consumed by modern society. It is much less a negative personal experience to fall back onto a belief that technology will provide as opposed to critically examining the nature of the beast.

Case in point: our gracious host has repeatedly debunked the touted hydrogen economy. The facts supporting that refutation have been available pretty much as long as the research into fuel cells / hydrogen as an energy carrier have been pursued. Yet, it has taken until now for almost any commercial entity to even hint about its pipe dream reality...

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/generaltech/article/0,20967,927469,00.html

[carlostheobscure]

Mr. Kunstler uses the word normative alot, which Webster's defines as "of or establishing a norm, or standard. I believe its instructive to consider all the normative economic behaviors going on in America that don't seem that critical to our nation's long term survival. For instance, golf, scotts lawn treatment, one person per car commuters, soccer moms, 72 degree central heat, 68 degree air conditioning, heroic treatment of terminally ill patients, overpackaged food, HDTV, the senior year of high school, major league sports, celebrity culture and slick magazines. jail for drug abusers, cosmetic plastic surgery, pop tarts, and so on ad nauseum.

Frankly, normative life in America isn't so normal. One of the things that keeps me going is a morbid curiosity about what the new "normal" is going to look like a generation from now, and whether or not a constructive ideology will emerge in time to make the strange changes coming something less than terrible for the majority of Americans.

I

[Fazal Majid]

LA will not die from lack of oil. It will die from lack of water first.

[Cambob]

I'd just like to point out that one of Canada's most famous and respected scientists, David Suzuki, has joined the Peak Oil bandwagon. He was recently on T.V. and said that we(human kind) are in a car driving 100 MPH towards a brick wall, arguing about where to sit. He mentioned the words "peak oil".

Anyway, that David Suzuki has spoken out on this has removed all doubt for me.

Here's some of his thoughts:
http://www.energybulletin.net/5567.html

[The Interloafer]

WOW! JHK: What a post! More passionate about the subject matter as ever. Keep giving 'em hell. My comment jumps off the first comment, by Paul Cooley, who wrote: "There are eight grocery stores within a half hour bike ride of my house."

That got me thinking. I have lived and bicycled here in Manhattan for the past 6 years -- my entire adult life after college. There must be well over 50 grocery stores within a half hour bike ride from my apartment, and 15 movie theaters, and 15 bike shops and you get the point. Many New Yorkers walk to work and a higher proportion of us bike to work. We have Home Depots here that don't have a single parking space and we've so far managed to keep Wal-Mart from entering the city.

The city, like those described by aj, above, is like "Montreal is -- like Boston, San Francisco and Philadelphia, these are compact cities by necessity, old and dense from the times when energy was scarcer and sharing warmth between inside walls was more important than having 6 inches of lawn on either side of one's ranch-style."

The four-story walk-up tenements that line the avenues on the West Side, and the brownstones that cover huge swaths of Brooklyn stand cheek by jowl because it was too hard during the horse-and-carriage days to travel all that far. This is one of the few places left where it's easier *not* to have a car.

Yet, JHK sounds just as pessimistic about New York as he is about Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta and Northern Virginia. In the Long Emergency, p. 252, he writes: "[B]ig cities will not be suited to the reduced scale of life in the post-cheap-oil future. ... The biggest cities, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, will join Detroit and hemorrhage their populations."

I agree that car-dependent L.A. has a bleak looking future, but New York and Chicago can survive without car transport. They'd actually be improved by a reduction in the cars that clog their streets, as London has shown with its congestion pricing plan. It's worth pointing out that Detroit lost its population because of the cheap oil fiesta. Cheap oil has hurt America's cities. Expensive oil will help them.

In pre-cheap-oil 1910, when Model T's were crowding the horsecars and trolleys off the cobblestone streets of New York, the city's population was 4.77 million, and the Lower East Side contained the densest concentration of people in the world, if not in human history. In fact, if the rest of America had grown at the exponential rate of the 20th century but New York hadn't added one single person after 1910, it would still be the largest city in the country today. In 2000 it was just over 8 million after rebounding from population loss during the cheap oil fiesta.

People got along in New York City in 1910 as they do now: relatively immune to transportation fuel costs, which account for 70% every barrel of oil.

The problems that Kunstler sees with skyscrapers? Bah. They won't be that bad. Density is good. Crazy hyper density is better. Just look at the list of burgeoning megacities of the world -- Mexico City, Seoul, Sao Paulo, Jakarta, Mumbai, Manila, Shanghai. These are all growing in places without access to the cheap oil we have in the United States. Life may be pretty miserable in these places, like it was in Manhattan's Lower East Side tenements in 1910, but these places are doing anything but hemorrhaging population.

[The Interloafer]

Whoops, I meant to say that a greater proportion of New Yorkers bike to work than people in other cities do, NOT, that more people in New York bike to work than walk, which is not anything close to being true.

[Si]

JHK,
Tell it like it is! It is very interesting that the New Urbanist, Google workers, Collge Kids..ect...ALL seem to be clinging to an idea adn that idea that they cling to has not even been thought about by these same people. Its really kindergarden indeed, almost to the same degree as saying Santa is real...I know it to be true and he will always make Christmas happy. Now if the persons who say this would indeed study the basics of the fact it would not take them long to discover the myth that they believe. It is the same with the tech industry. But in general the studinet is not ready to be told that his LIFE VIEW is a dream. Remember the saying "When the student is ready the teacher will appear" When oil hits the magic number if be 70-80-100-150 bbl many students will start to pay attention and that teacher will be the school of hard knocks.
Airports. Feel for you Jim having to be stuck in hellish place like LAX...but could be worse imagine beeing stuck in an SUV on a hot LA day without a fill up in 10 mile backup traffic.....
On cities as Boston, and Philly. Boston has a good downtown but Boston's weekness is its many burbs. The downtown of Boston will have problems once it's burb people fail to show up to work...Thus that makes Boston a catch 22...and the same with Philly and even San Fran to a degree.For an example in 2003 I was in Boston for 2 weeks. Took the T "transit-electric rail" to the center of the city daily. Up and back I traveled during rush hour and ALWAY had a place to sit down....Now I live in Ukraine....during off times you cant find a place to even sit down in Dnipropetrovsk pop 1,200,000" rails,electric rail,-bus's and subway "during off hours...and Dnipropetrovsk has 20X the public trans as Boston...Thus that tells me the Bostonians are still pretty dendent on their cars and have a way to go.And let me tell you all something...Even with 20X the public trans as any US city it is not fun taking crouded bus's or metros...gets old fast!
I dont honestly know what will happen in the "good" US cities once its car cultures take a nose dive. Even the better cities face some serious adjustments.