The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

I just drove home from a lecture gig in Easton, Pa. -- a town which used to be a major regional railroad hub, from which twelve trains a day once ran to New York, but, alas, no more. So I drove. Much of the route took me through northern New Jersey, where the ranks of the new subdivisions and jive-plastic condo clusters are marching clear across the Poconos to the Pennsylvania line and beyond. There is apparently some idea that we will continue indefinitely to be nation of happy motorists, and monocultures of McHouses and McCondos are just what we need to accessorize our lives.

In fact, all you see absolutely everywhere around America anymore is a jamboree of motor vehicles (and their furnishings). Everything else has become an afterthought or a historical residue.

Easton was an interesting case. It had been a manufacturing down in its heyday, as well as railroad town. The old industrial infrastructure was still visable in the form of ruins -- a majestic but boarded-up 19th century brick silk-works, the rusting remnants of the railroad bridges, the vacant lots where the local breweries once stood. The town's site in an elbow of the Lehigh Valley was very dramatic, and several neighborhoods loomed on bluffs above the old town center, which itself contained a beautiful central square with an obelisk in the middle, and quite few lovely streets coming off it where handsome rows of 19th century buildings still stood intact.

But half the town two blocks over on the other side of the square at been bulldozed in a foolish "urban renewal" demolition spree that wiped out 500 buildings. That fabric had been replaced by acres of surface parking, a "senior housing" project that looked like a set of packing crates, a strip mall, and a Mickey-D. There was one splendid neighborhood on the hill around Lafayette College. The others were in various stages of decrepitation. Druggies and their suppliers, I was told, had been moving there on a wholesale basis for a decade or more -- New York City was seventy miles away -- and the old row houses once occupied by factory workers, merchants, and professionals had been chopped up into gnarly little apartments. The heavyweight boxer, Larry Holmes, who lives in the 'burbs outside Easton, had financed two horrendous office-park type buildings on a street near the riverfront (Bushkill Creek) that had been turned into a mini-freeway, with help from the villainous Penn-DOT.

It also looked as if some prodigy of an aluminum siding salesman had blown through town about 1957 and sold seven-eighths of the population on his product. Now the claddings were miserably fatigued and dented, their enamel oxidized in scrofulous patches, and the soffits gray-green with the automobile exhaust of the ages.

I got the sense from talking to a newspaper reporter there that the town's economy was in terrible trouble. Lucent Technology had just closed up a big new operation nearby, shedding up to ten thousand jobs that the town boosters had pinned their hopes on. Lesser businesses had shed more thousands.

I did my thing in an evening slide-talk at a lovely old chapel on the Lafayette campus. The group that brought me in was determined to do better things with the town than their fathers and grandfathers had, but they acted pretty demoralized. Their local politicians were clueless and uninterested in anything but fast food boxes, yet more parking, and other mindless sops to the life of endless motoring.

The audience didn't believe me when I told them to expect a future that featured a lot less driving (and parking). They never do, even the ones who understand how devastating our sick romance with cars has been. They seemed even more shocked when one questioner asked about the hydrogen economy promised by President Bush and I offered my opinion that it was a utter fantasy. The next big energy source for the US is much more likely to be coal, and perhaps Easton's fortunes will turn on their proximity to the big seams of anthracite a few miles to the north. You can bet it will be a much more austere economy, anyway you cut it.

For all its troubles the place is at least fortunate to be a traditional town located on an important geographic site. One can't help but be much more pessimistic about those ranks of McHouses and McCondos I saw on the way in and out. Rolling north toward home on I-287, the radio was full of pre-war jitter news. Crude oil was nearing $40 a barrel. How much longer can this game run, I wondered.