Full Bore to the Vanishing Point (James Howard Kunstler)

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Oct. 4, 2010 -- Last evening at twilight I was driving my rent-a-car up Interstate 5 north of Seattle with a vivid testicular fear of being trapped in the very metaphor of a failing society racing into a dark future.

All around me loomed the monuments of an out-of-control financial credit Moloch -- the tilt-up chain store boxes with their giant logos glowing against the distant craggy peaks of the Cascades (many of them active volcanoes which, like Mt. Saint Helens, might blow their tops any day). At every compass point sprawled the McHousing pods of American dream mortgage time-bombs silently blowing families to financial smithereens, and banks with them, including, incidentally just this Friday, the state of Washington's own Shoreline Bank just off I-5 north of Seattle, seized by the FDIC.

My way was lighted, as darkness finally stole in, by the endlessly replicated dispensaries of fast food-dom (pizza-burgers-chicken-fries-and-shakes) provoking this nation of overfed clowns to ever-greater feats of gluttony, medical catastrophe, and bankruptcy. And, of course, these were my fellow-travelers in the perpetual stream of cars plying this great thoroughfare of the tragic western littoral, burning up gasoline that had traveled all the way from the sands of Abqaiq or from some sweltering platform off the Niger Delta, where dangerous, angry, armed men in Zodiac boats plot mayhem nearby among the mangrove thickets. Not to mention the row-upon-row of idle cars parked in the lagoons surrounding the countless malls and strip-malls and auto dealerships that flanked I-5 for 50 miles north of Seattle.

Cars, cars, cars, as far as the eye could see where the sodium-vapor lamps cut through the crepuscular murk. Sasquatch was a no-show. But Sasquatch don't drive.

more

http://worldnewstrust.com/index.php?option=com_flexicontent&view=items&cid=149:edited&id=8282:full-bore-to-the-vanishing-point-james-howard-kunstler&Itemid=343