The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

For a real case of the free-floating heebie-jeebies, where our collective national fate is concerned, there's nothing like a trip to California. I was there over the weekend, destination the Sierra foothills, to give my talk on town planning (you laugh?). But bad signage on I-5 put me on a detour through Lodi, a poster-child for Clusterfuck Nation.

The highway mega-strip that the town had evolved into was not materially different from 27,000 other like it across America, but there was no trace, no residue whatsover that I could see of a previous settlement pattern. It must have been there, because Lodi was a major agricultural town long before our collective decision to become a Drive-In Utopia, but it would have taken a team of archeologists to locate it.

What you did see was a agglomeration of provisional crap in support of unsustainable economic relationships with no future. The human scale had been eradicated along with all the infrastructure of history. Most of the visible retail trade among the miles of strip malls was devoted to the production of obesity and social hypnosis (i.e., taco joints and video stores). As an environment, it gave off intimations of anxiety and depression the way new wall-to-wall carpets off-gas carcinogens. Civilization there seemed not a thin veneer but something less than a spray-on film.

I couldn't help but wonder what will happen in Lodi when the oil markets wobble, because there is no question of whether that will happen, only when.

I gave my talk in the village of Sutter City (predictably an "antiques mall") to a fairly receptive audience gathered up by the Sierra Business Council -- many of its members coming from ski resort towns. One could not fail to consider that in a coming age of energy austerity (and economic distress) ski resorts may not be doing a flush business. Anyway, they're still debating whether to permit accessory apartments as a way of providing affordable housing for their armies of waiters and cleaning persons. Most of their citizens are against the idea, of course.