ku # 529 ~ the vultures come home to roost in Shangri La

Turkey vulture (buzzard) • click to embiggenI assume that most of you understood my 4th of July upside down flag intentions. As Aaron correctly pointed out (in answer to a question about it), a US flag flown upside down is a signal of distress. This is the second year running that I have posted an upside down flag image on July 4th. IMO, if there had been blogging 30 years ago, I could have been doing it every year since then.

CAVEAT: this entry is actually about photography's ability to illustrate and illuminate the real and the truth - although that may not be clear until you reach the end of the entry.

I don't know how many of you took the time to read the linked article on the July 4th post. As Kent opined, it's "A scary, theoretical piece ...", which is true enough. The piece does lean heavily on political and economic theory - something that most Americans have little time to consider as they go about living their merry disillusions.

Nevertheless, all that theoretical rumination has a living, breathing, practical, everyday-life side. I've seen it coming for over 30 years or more. You can read about it in Part 2 of the (UK) Telegraph piece, America and China: The Eagle and the Dragon Part two: Requiem for a dream.

IMO, the most pertinent point of the article is as follows:

Once symbolic of optimism and certainty, America's credit-crunched suburbs may be facing a decline as dramatic as that of Detroit, itself once a beacon of industry ... America took all of its postwar wealth and invested it in a living arrangement that has no future ... The design of our living arrangement is simply inconsistent with the energy realities of the future. But Americans are just not able to process this. If you look hard enough at America, what you discover is a shockingly infantile belief system, with two fundamental ideas that are deleterious to our future. There's a widespread belief in America that it's possible to get something for nothing, and that mentality has been very destructive to our society. The other idea that has become normative is that when you wish upon a star your dream comes true. These two things have become the basis of the new American ideology ....

Since 1993, I have been calling this "ideology" the I'm not going to pay a lot for this muffler school of life. This nomenclature comes from the mouth of George Foreman in a tv commercial for Meineke Muffler.

This statement just about sums up life in America since the Reagan years - those are the years in which most Americans come to fully believe and endorse the idea - propagated by the big-business class, aka, vultures - that living the good life meant having things, lots of things, and the cheaper those thing could be, the better.

No thought given to the idea of what not paying a lot for that muffler (tv, car, toaster, tee shirt ... or whatever) meant to the American workforce, American cities and towns, American society and culture, and, oh yeah, the global environment. No, no time for that. Everyone was too busy living The Dream. So busy, in fact, that no one noticed that The Dream was little more than a scam by the big-business class to facilitate the largest (and quickest) transfer of wealth (from the middle class to the wealthy beyond imagining class) the world has ever seen.

It may be too late but it's time to wake the fuck up America. Read Part 3 of the Telegraph series, America and China: The Eagle and the Dragon Part Three: onward and upward to see where the money you are spending to not pay a lot for that muffler is actually going (after the big-business class has taken their extremely generous pound of flesh) - the money that used to go to American workers and American cities and towns.

FYI, the thing that got me all worked up over this issue is the wonderful photography of Alec Soth that accompanies the series. Photography that illustrates and illuminates a big heaping dose of the real and the truth - if one only takes the time and makes the effort to see it.

Thanks to Jörg Colberg over on Conscientious for bringing the Telegraph series to my attention.

Comments

[Matt]

Here is a great (and related) video from JH Kunstler:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ&feature=related

Also, everyone should read his book titled "The Geography of Nowhere"

[Dennis Allshouse]

Horrifying story via the link.

[Mike]

To dream The Dream means you've got to be asleep.