The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
April 22, 2002
I ventured into the heartland this weekend, specifically to Denver, Colorado, for yet another cold splash of Clusterfuck Nation reality. You know, living as I do in a main street town that has been relatively successful (by US standards) at resisting the suburban death machine, it's shocking to see what "normal" life has become in other quarters of this republic.
I stayed with a friend who is a faculty member at a university there. He lived with girlfriend and kids in the gloaming of 1960s and 70s vintage sprawl that extends for tens of miles beyond the relatively tiny kernel of true urbanism at the center of this hypertrophic mess. It was officially Littleton, but not quite the same place that spawned the Columbine High School Massacre of 2000 -- those kids came from the 1980s and 90s burbs a little further out. Where we were, the old one-mile section roads from the initial 19th century survey had all turned into eight-lane commercial strips lined by the usual architectural garbage and screaming signage clear across the flat prairie horizon, with monocultures of cul-de-sac housing tracts filling the quarter-sections in between. While I was in the midst of plenty, surrounded by discount merchandise, and with every wondrous food product known in the universe, from mesquite-flavored jerky to arugula pesto, and no shortage of bathrooms or clean water, it was hard to imagine a more dismal human ecology. It was also difficult to imagine that places such as Littleton have a future.
While I was there, we made several excursions around the metro area, always in the car, always attended by the cell phone, necessary for coordinating the difficult logistics of the family Saturday, with children needing to be shuttled from one play venue to the next. It was normal and it was all completely insane. These suburbs of Denver are exactly the kind of American places that are going to be crushed by the coming disorders of destabilized oil markets and the attendant political mischief. We tolerate their ugliness and civic impoverishment because we are sleepwalking in the rapture of our cheap oil addiction. The wake-up call is going to be extremely harsh, like the thrashing agony of heroin withdrawal. It may shake our country to pieces.
The depressing trip out to the Denver airport captured the whole dilemma for me. There it stood out on the treeless plain, so far from the city that it could have been in outer space. Planners of the 1980s had assumed, I'm sure, that this metro organism was going to continue to grow in exactly the same way far into the future, and so they left plenty of room for another generation of suburban metastasis between the new airport and the city. Yet what a place like Denver really faces is not more-of-the-same, but rather the drastic and desperate necessity to downscale itself, to compress and condense itself, to reduce its hypertrophic scale, to exchange low-grade quantity for quality.
By the time Denver realizes this -- in the form of a popular consensus -- it will almost certainly be too late to take action. Then the question will be: how much damage and civil disorder can it endure, and how long will it go on, before the organism can repair itself. . . if ever?