I’m currently enjoying Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere. Here’s an excerpt:
This is quite an extraordinary thing. It can only be possible where people feel no connection or allegiance to their locality – and, in fact, Americans move relentlessly, every four years on average.
Quickest to uproot themselves are the educated classes, generally to advance their corporate careers. In an earlier era, these would have been the people who stayed put long enough to become stewards, official or otherwise, of that complex of values known as pride of place. They would have owned the business blocks downtown, and taken care of them. They would have built the churches, the libraries, the town bandshell, the ballfields. And they would have built houses for their own families that embodied the ideas of endurance and community. Today, this class of citizen is in the service of the large corporations whose very survival is predicated on destroying local economies and thus local communities. So it is somehow just that their hirelings should live in places of no character, no history, and no community. (pp148-149)
Christopher Lasch makes the same point in The Revolt of the Elites. Americans are too mobile to become attached to any place in particular. The places in which they do live, subdivisions devoid of a public realm, are not worth caring about. This is the key to understanding the disintegration of communal values like race, ethnicity, and tradition in the late twentieth century.
The places in which they do live, subdivisions devoid of a public realm, are not worth caring about. This is the key to understanding the disintegration of communal values like race, ethnicity, and tradition in the late twentieth century.
This reverses cause and effect. Our racial, ethnic, and traditional values have been under assault for generations. Only after they finally buckled during WWII did we build suburbs and adopt wandering as a norm.
And as far as consequences of our loss of values goes, the turd worlders flooding into this country present a far more deadly problem than the ugliest, most cheaply constructed housing ever could.
A connection exists between the two. Americans are not really attached to the suburbs. They are not genuine communities. This is why they are abandoned so easily. In Europe, the natives have deeper roots in their localities and immigration has become a more pressing public policy issue in the mainstream.
We don’t react more strongly against the invasion because our values have been hollowed out and our minds are poisoned by disinformation, not because we live in disposable housing.
The apartment complexes in cities are more ugly, more anonymous, and more disposable than suburban homes. Even so they’re not the cause of our problems either.
It’s also because they are so new, with very little (communal) history behind them, that no great loss is felt in abandoning them. This moving to elswhere chimes well with and is encouraged by the innovativeness often claimed to characterize the national spirit, in which newer is generally regarded as better, and all things venerable, antiquated.
I recently read that capitalism is merely a precusor to Communism, in that it destroys all sense of place, locality, family, roots, etc.
http://www.cambriawillnotyield.com
He’s right.
Sorry. Full blog address is as follows:
http://www.cambriawillnotyield.blogspot.com/
There are European races.
There is no American race. Neither is there an “American suburban race.”