Cynicism and Ugliness: An American Marriage

Though Hunter S. Thompson still casts a long shadow, the best ranter alive has to be James Howard Kunstler, who in a new essay breezes past Thompson and Marx and Mencken and into a realm of his own:

The new stuff built all over America in the late 20th century was analogous to the content of the television programming to which the lower classes insidiously became addicted – a cartoon simulacrum of a real world that was systematically being obliterated.  Instead of a real countryside outside the hated cities, we now had suburbia, a cartoon of country living. Instead of towns, shopping malls. Eventually the theme park, as represented by developments of the Walt Disney corporation and their clones, became both the embodiment of the destruction wreaked across the land and paradoxically the last refuge from it. Americans would flock to Walt Disney World in Orlando to put themselves in a saccharine replica of the authentic Main Street environments that they had thoroughly trashed in their own home places.

He connects as so few can the physical ugliness of American life with the brutal cynicism of development; the thrill of destruction, the roar of greed.

In other words, our living arrangement essentially became the remaining basis of our economy, in the absence of any other purposeful creation of value or wealth, such as manufacturing things.  And because it was a racket devoted to a way of life with no future, it spawned enormous cynicism.  Just as the immersive ugliness of the suburban highway strip was economic entropy made visible, so the cynicism of the public was entropy applied to human values, a force propelling things into disorder.  When nothing was sacred, everything became profane.