James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust
Aug. 31, 2009 -- In my larval, pre-blogging days, I always faced the back-to-school moment with abject dread. It meant returning to a program of the most severe, mind-numbing regimentation in the ghastly New York City public schools after a summer of idyllic unreality in the New Hampshire woods, where I went to a Lord of the Flies type of summer camp. And so here I am, many decades later, still uneasy as the final page of the August calendar flies away in a hot Santa Ana wind, and a great hellfire closes in on the far eastern reaches of Los Angeles, and the American money system falls into a peculiar limbo, and every fifth person is out of work, or going bankrupt, or glugging down the seawater of default, or being denied coverage by health insurance that he-or-she has already shelled out ten grand for this year, or getting shot in a trailer park.
I was in Los Angeles for a few days last week, as chance had it, marveling at the odd disposition of things there. I've been there many times over the years, but you forget how overwhelmingly weird it is. Altogether the LA metro area has the ambience of a garage the size of Rhode Island where someone happened to leave the engine running. To say that LA is all about cars is kind of like saying the Pacific Ocean is all about water. But one forgets the supernatural scale of the freeways, the tsunamis of vehicles, the cosmic despair of the traffic jams. The vistas of present-day LA make the Blade Runner vision of things look quaint in comparison.
You motor out of the LAX airport -- personally, I love the name "LAX" because it so beautifully describes the collective ethos of the place -- and you discover quickly that the taxi cab's windows are not that dirty, it's the air itself colored brown like miso soup. Going north on the 405 freeway, you see the looming Moloch of the downtown skyline through the brown miso soup. And you begin to understand why the products of the film industry are so fixated on the theme of machine apocalypse. Downtown LA looks like just such a gigantic machine as the FX crews would dream up, as if a day will come when those gleaming mirrored office towers will pull themselves out of the ground from their roots and begin lumbering, crunch crunch crunch, north toward the Hollywood Hills seeking to exterminate the vile humanity responsible for making the place what it is.
I happened to be camping out briefly in West Hollywood, in a scene-ster hotel where tiny bubbles of show biz mega-success wafted around amidst a background odor of failure, and an impossibly thin line was drawn between being pampered and being asked to go die in the gutter, please. The place is not without a certain decorum. I couldn't help but imagine how lovely Hollywood must have been in, say, 1923, when 92 percent of all the hopeless crapola now on the ground there had not yet been built, when there were no freeways, and fewer cars than currently found in Lincoln, Nebraska, you could go out to the Pacific Ocean on a "Big Red" streetcar, and on a clear day you could see from La Cienga out to Mount Wilson, and the movie "industry" was like a college theater department. What a fabulous giggle it must have all been -- apart from poor Fatty Arbuckle -- in that romantic desert at the edge of the world.
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