Homeless
Even if the
so-called economy were "recovering," the people of the USA would be
stuck in a physical setting for daily life that has no future - the
nightmare infrastructure of subdivision houses, strip malls, and
WalMarts, all rigged up for incessant motoring. Of course, the so-called
economy is not recovering because there is no more cheap oil. If oil
ever gets cheap again, it will be because nobody has enough money to pay
for it and surely you can connect the dots to what that hamster wheel
of futility means.
In fact, the heart of our economic
predicament is that the American economy came to be based on the
construction ever more suburban stuff, the financing of which,
especially the houses, became the fodder for an episode of epic swindles
that has left our banking system a hollowed out shell of accounting
fraud. In short, we built even more stuff with no future, and ruined our
society in the process. How tragic is that?
The
behavioral habits, practices, and consequences of being stuck in that
living arrangement may end up being at least as problematic as the
physical residue of it. It has left the people in a network of
alienation, anxiety, and misery that defeats exactly the mentality
needed to break free of it. For the truth is we're faced with a massive
necessary re-ordering of daily life in this country, and there is no
vision or will to get on with job.
Among the tribulations
of this living arrangement is the utter loss of connection between place
and purpose often expressed in the phrase "loss of community," which is
a little too abstract to me and fails to convey the tragedy of
individuals living with no sense of purpose -- and by that I mean
duties, obligations, and responsibilities to other human beings.
Obviously, the whole idea of a single-family house by definition
dictates a certain disposition of things. It will lack the dimension and
social relations of a household composed of multiple generations plus
non-family members, helpers, employees, servants. And it should also be
obvious that the single-generation, single-family house is a product of
mid-20th century industrial dynamism that made even factory worker wage
slaves rich by historical standards - Tom Wolfe pointed out years ago
that the average GM assembly line drone enjoyed more sheer physical
luxury at home than Louis XIV.
Put the single-family
house in the context of a suburban monoculture organized to conform
relentlessly to the dictates of single use zoning, and you get a recipe
for instant (and permanent) social dysfunction. Then, fill that house
with electronic diversion devices and a microwave oven and you end up
with a very few disconnected humans who rarely share a meal and exist,
while "at home," in a narcissistic vapor-realm of canned entertainment,
pornography, texting (i.e. melodrama created to fill a void of
purposelessness), and the sado-masochistic combats of video games (a
substitute for purposeful, virile endeavor), all floating on a virtual
river of relentless advertising.
It always interests me
to see the emergent purposeless of the American Dream expressed so
vividly in the television sitcoms of that mid-20th century day - the
very moment of its emergence. Ozzie Nelson of Ozzie and Harriet
seemed to have absolutely nothing to do except sit around the kitchen
waiting for somebody else to come in for a cup of coffee. He clearly had
nowhere else to go. The ennui of Ozzie Nelson was a source of mirth to
busy hipsters who savored the ironies of behavioral kitsch - loving
what's horrible for the horror it induces. But it really isn't so funny
since it is a portrait of an un-manned man trapped in utter purposeless
and reduced to the pathetic existential status of somebody endlessly
waiting for nothing. (Cue Samuel Beckett....)
Anyway,
that was then and it's all crashing down now in a great galumphing
debris-field of bankruptcy, psychosis, regret, obesity, and foreclosure.
So what comes next? They say that the millennial generation is the most
group-oriented, cooperative bunch to come along in the march of
Boomers, Xs, and Ys. How much of this is an hallucination of transient
computer connectivity, I don't know. The fact that it is so difficult
for them financially to even hope to form a household will surely be a
defining factor in the choices they make ahead about how exactly to
inhabit the landscape. I think they will make out better in this project
than their Boomer forerunners, who started out in communes sharing
toothbrushes and graduated to dismal McMansions in a geography of
nowhere, while dedicating their careers to the looting of posterity.
I'm quite sure that many will rediscover a sense of purpose in the
re-ordering of social life that lies ahead, which includes a return to
different household arrangements and probably much more hierarchical
social relations. Implicit in the latter is the
now-utterly-incorrect-and-taboo notion of someone knowing their place.
The catch is: you need to have a place in order to know your place, and
therefore know who you are - and in a society full of people for whom
place means nothing, there is little chance of acquiring a real
identity, other than the sham raiment of the app-supported avatar life
that has taken the place of being human.
I had a fugitive
thought the other evening walking through my beaten-down small town in
the late fall chill. I imagined that instead of the blue tomb-like glow
of television emanating from house to house that I could hear the
sequential music of parlor pianos, and voices singing to them, and of
healthy people coming and going from warm kitchens to fetch firewood,
and of groups of people gathered around tables for a meal, and generally
of buildings that were truly inhabited, not just storage containers for
lives unspent. I grant you it was a fleeting nostalgic fantasy. But
isn't nostalgia just a state of being homesick?
