One Happy Big-Box Wasteland

[Guest guest]

One critical aspect the author failed to mention is the unsustainability

of the big-box construction.

 

Within 10 years the whole of the suburbs will start unravelling as

global oil production declines, prices skyrocket and the U.S. economy

crashes.

 

For more, read The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler.

 

A preview was published in Rolling Stone Magazine:

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7203633

 

David

 

califpacific wrote:

 

>===================================

>One Happy Big-Box Wasteland

>By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

>Wednesday, August 17, 2005

>

>http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file==/gate/archive/2005/08/17/notes08170\

5.DTL

>

>Do you want to feel like you might as well be in Tucson or Boise or

>Modesto or Wichita or Muncie and it no longer freakin' matters, because we as a

nation have lost all sense of community and place? Why, just pull over, baby.

Take the next exit. Right here, this very one.

>

>Ah, there it is, yet another massive big-box mega-strip mall, a giant

>beacon of glorious community decay, a wilted exclamation point of consumerism

gone wild. This is America. You have arrived. You are home. Eat it and smile.

>

>

[Guest guest]

One Happy Big-Box Wasteland

Oh my yes, there is indeed one force that is eating away the American

soul like a cancer

 

--By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

 

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file==/gate/archive/2005/08/17/notes081705\

..DTL

 

Do you want to feel like you might as well be in Tucson or Boise or

Modesto or Wichita or Muncie and it no longer freakin' matters,

because we as a nation have lost all sense of community and place?

Why, just pull over, baby. Take the next exit. Right here, this very

one.

 

Ah, there it is, yet another massive big-box mega-strip mall, a giant

beacon of glorious community decay, a wilted exclamation point of

consumerism gone wild. This is America. You have arrived. You are

home. Eat it and smile.

 

There is the Target. There is the Wal-Mart and there is the Home Depot

and the Kmart, the Borders and the Staples and the Sam's Club and the

Office Depot and the Costco and the Toys " R " Us and of course the

mandatory Container Store so you may buy more enormous plastic tubs in

which to dump all your new sweatshop-made crap.

 

What else do you need? Ah yes, food. Or something vaguely

approximating it.

There is the Wendy's and the Burger King and the Taco Bell/KFC hybrid

(ewww) and there is the Mickey D's and the Subway and the Starbucks

and the dozen other garbage-food fiends lined up down the road like

toxic dominoes, all lying in wait to maul your arteries and poison

your heart and make you think about hospitals.

 

And here's the beautiful part: This snapshot, it's the same as it was

10 miles back, same as it will be 10 miles ahead, the exact same

massive cluster of insidious development as you will find in roughly

10,000 noncommunities around the nation and each and every one making

you feel about as connected to the town you're in and the body you

inhabit as a fish feels on Saturn. In the dark. In a hole. Dead.

 

You have seen the plague. I have seen the plague. Anyone over 30 has

seen the plague evolve from a mere germ of disease in the late '80s to

a full-blown pestilence of big-box shopping hell. I was recently up in

northern Idaho, where my family has owned a beautiful house on a lake

in a tiny burg near the Canadian border for 40 years, and to get to

this region you must pass through the explosively grown resort town of

Coeur d'Alene, and the plague is there perhaps worse than anywhere

within a 75-mile radius.

 

I am officially old enough to remember when passing through Coeur

d'Alene meant stopping at exactly one -- one -- traffic light on

Highway 95 on the way north, surrounded by roughly one million pine

trees and breathtaking mountain vistas and vast, calming open spaces,

farms and fields and sawmills and funky roadside shops and gorgeous

lakes for miles.

 

There are now about 20 traffic lights added in as many years,

scattered down a 10-mile stretch of highway and each and every one

demarcates a turnoff into a massive low-lying horribly designed strip

mall, tacky and cheaply built and utterly heartless, and clearly zero

planning went into any of these megashops, except to space them so

obnoxiously that you have to get back in your goddamn car to drive the

eighth of a mile to get to the Target to the Best Buy to the Wal-Mart

to the Super Foods and back to your freakin' sanity.

 

Do you want to know what depresses the American spirit? Do you want to

know why it feels like the center cannot hold and the tyranny of

mediocrity has been loosed upon our world? Do you want to know what

instills more thoughts of suicide and creates a desperate, low-level

rage the source of which we cannot quite identify but which we know is

right under our noses and which we now inhale Prozac and Xanax and

Paxil by the truckload to attempt to mollify?

 

I have your answer. Here it is. Look. It is the appalling spread of

big-box strip malls, tract homes like a cancer, metadevelopments

paving over the American landscape, all creating a bizarre sense of

copious loss, empty excess, heartless glut, forcing us to ask, once

again, the Great All-American Question: How can we have so damned much

but still feel like we have almost nothing at all?

 

Oh and by the way, Coeur d'Alene has a distinct central portion of

town, well off the toxic highway. It is calm and tree lined and

emptily pretty and it is packed with, well, restaurants and art

galleries. And real estate offices. For yuppies. Because, of course,

there are no local shops left. No mom-and-pops, few unique small

businesses of any kind. No charm. No real community per se. Just

well-manicured food and mediocre art no true local can actually afford

and business parks where the heart used to be.

 

I have little real clue as to what children growing up in this sort of

bizarre megaconsumerist dystopia will face as they age, what sort of

warped perspective and decimated sense of place and community and

home. But if you think meth addiction and teen pregnancy and wicked

religious homogeny and a frightening addiction to blowing s-- up in

violent video games isn't a direct reaction to it, you're not paying

close enough attention.

 

This is the new America. Our crazed sense of entitlement, our nearly

rabid desire for easy access to mountains of bargain-basement junk has

led to the upsurge of soulless big-box shops which has, in turn, led

to a deadly sense of prefabricated, vacuous sameness wherever we go.

And here's the kicker: We think it's good. We think it helps, brings

jobs, tax money, affordable goods. We call it progress. We call it

choice. It is the exact opposite.

 

Result No. 1: Towns no longer have personality, individuality, heart.

Community drags. Environment suffers. Our once diverse and quirky and

idiosyncratic landscape becomes ugly and bland and vacuous and cheap.

 

Result No. 2: a false sense of safety, of comfort, wrought of empty

sameness. We want all our goods to be antiseptic and sanitized and

brightly lit and clean. In a nation that has lost all sense of

direction and all sense of pride and whose dollar is a global joke and

whose economy is running on fumes and whose goods are all made

overseas and whose incompetent warmongering leader makes the world

gag, that toxic sameness is, paradoxically, reassuring.

 

Result No. 3: We are trained, once again, to fear the different, the

Other, That Which Does Not Conform. We learn to dislike the unique,

the foreign, foreigners. We lose any sense of personal connection to

what we create and what we buy and I do not care how cheap that jute

rug from Ikea was: When they are mass-produced in 100,000 chunks in a

factory in Malaysia, it ain't quirky.

 

Sameness is in. Sameness is the new black. It is no different than

preplanned Disney World vacations or organized religion or preplanned

cruises or themed restaurants where all edges have been filed off and

every experience has been predigested and sanitized for your

protection because God forbid you have an authentic experience or

nurture genuine individual perspective or dare to question the bland

norm lest your poor addled soul shudder and recoil and the Powers That

Be look at you as a serious threat.

 

I have seen the plague and so have you. Hell, you're probably shopping

in it. After all, what choice do you have?

 

 

--

Diana Gonzalez

 

 

 

 

Nothing wastes more energy than worrying - the longer a problem is

carried, the heavier it gets. Don't take things too seriously - live a

life of serenity, not a life of regrets.

-Unknown