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Remarks on the opening
of "The Other Modern"
in Bologna March 9,
2000 by James Howard Kunstler
I spent a lot of time last autumn in what we call the
Sunbelt of America
-- Atlanta, Houston, Orlando, Florida. This was necessarily a very
depressing project, because what we have achieved in American urbanism is
what I like to call the National Automobile Slum. It’s all
the same and
it’s all terrible. The parking lots of Beverly Hills are not any
more
spiritually rewarding than the parking lots of the South Bronx. All
Sunbelt
cities in America look exactly the same -- like UFO landing strips -- and
all
of them are leached of the last drop of urban amenity. All the
Prozac in the
world will not avail to correct the situation -- and that is our
particular
national tragedy.
To accessorize the National automobile slum we have
invented an
architecture of occult mysticism, based on the competitive contrivance of
new
metaphysics, the more incomprehensible the better. And these two
cultural
developments compliment each other. In both instances the losers are
the
people who have to live in America. The sad truth of the matter is
that the
United States is increasingly composed of thousands of places that are not
worth caring about. The ultimate result will be a nation and a way
of life
that is not worth caring about or defending.
We have accomplished something really remarkable in
America. We have
perfected an individual trasportation system that can now take us with
perfect comfort and ease to places that are not worth going to and
certainly
not worth living in.
This is the salient characteristic of the American town
and city today.
They are places with no sense of a future. What is the destiny
of the
K-marts and Burger Kings of Dallas? I ask myself this question often.
It
may lead to yet another branch of metaphysics.
We cannot blame places like Dallas, Texas, and Phoenix,
Arizona, for
having no past. This is self-evident. What is not so
self-evident is that
they should have been busy creating a past for themselves in the short
time
they have existed. But they will have none. American culture
as currently
constituted will not support the idea of future connected to the past
through
the medium of a hopeful present.
This is what I think lies at the heart of the classical
tradition -- it
is not a collection of motifs, not a menu of styles. It is an
attitude
toward the project of civilization, which is based on the idea that we are
poised between memory and hope; that we have come from someplace memorable
and are bound for someplace hopeful, and that the present time we occupy
ought to be endowed with grace.
I, for one, am deeply grateful that the 20th Century is
over. The world
now has an excuse -- if one is needed -- to get on with the task of being
human. Modern-ism -- the notion that a particular time is exempted
from
history -- is now itself an historical idea and, ironically, subject now
to
the terrible judgement of history. As I wrote in one of my own books,
ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.
We need an everyday world that is worthy of our
affection, that is worthy
of our aspirations, that is worthy of what is best in the human spirit,
not
what is worst, most antisocial, most paranoid, most destructive.
I congratulate you for choosing your heroic pathway in
a difficult
profession, and I hope you have a very successful meeting in this
beautiful
city.
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