James Howard Kunstler
This Fourth of July, watching fireworks over an Adirondack lake, with the rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air (and the motorboats finally at rest after a day of cuisinarting through the loons and mergansers), I was moved to reflect on the extraordinary level of violence in American society today. It’s so pervasive that I think we fail to register it.
Have you ever gotten out of your car for any reason in the shoulder lane of an interstate highway? All the comfort and security of being inside immediately dissolves and your muscles contract at the violent noise of cars and trucks passing at seventy miles per hour, not to mention the inescapable sense of danger at being so close to them passing by. Inside and back on the road again, we quickly forget how much violence we are were exposed to—and now we contribute to it as our journey continues.
The everyday world of America is a ceaseless assault on human neurology (and certainly the neurology of other beings) from a din of numberless motors: air conditioners, lawn mowers, weed-whackers, ventilation blowers, fry-o-later hoods, airplanes, as well as the constant background roar of car traffic.
Our entertainments are saturated with violence. Hollywood has completely forgotten how to make stories based on the predicaments of human character and emotion. The only emotions they understand are bluster, threat, and murderous aggression with overtones of sexual excitement (because this is the way show business professionals act among themselves, and it is the only behavior they understand). Is it any wonder that rogue maniacs drive around the nation snatching children in order to torture and kill them? Or that the Cable News stations are now utterly preoccupied with covering the exploits of murderous maniacs, to the exclusion of everything else going on in the world?
Millions of red-blooded red staters spend their leisure hours moiling at the Nascar tracks. Do you have any idea how unpleasant it is to be a spectator at a car race? How saturated with violence the atmosphere around the track is? I have been to several races as a journalist. The noise alone is supernatural. Then there is the fans’ unspoken sadistic voyeurism in anticipating a crash to liven up the boredom of watching cars roar for hours around the oval. Nascar fans will surely deny it, because it reveals the necrophilia at the heart of their so-called
“sport,” but crashes are part of the excitement. Dale Ehrnhardt surely died for their sins, and when the next driver kills himself on the track there will be new heaps of teddy bears to take the focus away from the crocodile tears shed in the stands and TV rooms of the Raleigh-Durham metroplex.
Finally, thousands of miles away, there’s the war in Iraq and Afghanistan—it’s all one war, by the way. It’s being fought to fuel up all those Nascars, and power the interstate highways, and to keep the weed-whackers and fry-o-later hoods humming, and keep the suburban housing industry chugging along so more Americans can drive to the video store to get violently stupid movies about quasi-humans with great destructive powers. We are watching ourselves become monsters.
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