The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #8: The Glossary of Nowhere. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[Intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl, featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and World Made By Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: The Glossary of Nowhere.

Duncan Crary (interview): Hey, Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: Hi, Duncan. How are you?

Duncan Crary: I’m back.

James Howard Kunstler: How’d you turn up here? You just rolled in under the cover over darkness or something?

Duncan Crary: Well, I’ve come here—I’m going to put you to work today. I think one of the most powerful things you ever wrote was in the intro to The Geography of Nowhere, where you’re explaining why it is you wrote this book. I’m wondering if you could read that for our listeners.

James Howard Kunstler: All right.

Excerpt from The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler, 1993. Read by the author.

Thirty years ago, Lewis Mumford said of post-World War II development, “the end product is an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set.” The whole wicked, sprawling megalapolitan mess, he gloomily predicted, would completely demoralize mankind and lead to nuclear holocaust.

It hasn’t come to that, but what Mumford deplored was just the beginning of a process that, instead of blowing up the world, has nearly wreaked the human habitat in America. Ever-busy, ever-building, ever-in-motion, ever-throwing-out the old for the new; we have hardly paused to think about what we are so busy building, and what we have thrown away. Meanwhile, the everyday landscape becomes more nightmarish and unmanageable every year. For many, the word development itself has become a dirty word.

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading—the jive plastic computer track home wastelands, the Potemkin shopping village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk-food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chaingang guards, the particle board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth.”

The newspaper headlines may shout about global warming, extinctions of living species, the devastations of rain forests, and other world-wide catastrophes, but Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity that it represents.

I had a hunch that many other people find their surroundings as distressing as I do my own, yet I sense too that they lack the vocabulary to understand what’s wrong with the places they ought to know best. And that is why I wrote this book.

Copyright © James Howard Kunstler 1993.

Duncan Crary: Wow. Do you remember that? That was 15 years ago you wrote that. Not much has changed.

James Howard Kunstler: I’ve changed though. My brain has shrunk from too many offgassing carpets.

Duncan Crary: One thing you mentioned is that you wrote the book to give people a vocabulary to articulate their disgust with the suburban—

James Howard Kunstler: I was struggling with it myself, you know. I actually went through a period 10, 15 years before I wrote that book of trying to formulate a vocabulary for myself to understand it. I made several attempts to produce written essays on the subject. And I found myself repeatedly defeated, largely because, like a lot of other normal people who are affected by this, I kept defaulting to these style issues.

I didn’t quite understand the physical form issues and design issues. Really (it) wasn’t until I encountered Christopher Alexander and Andres Duany and many other contemporaries in the field that I began to really understand what I was talking about.

Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, would you mind if we do a little “Kunstler Glossary of Terms” of sorts?

James Howard Kunstler: If you can come up with one, sure. I’ll see what I can do.

Duncan Crary: All right, well, I’ll tell you—I’ll come up with the expression and you explain for our listeners what it means. OK? Let’s start with parking lagoon. What are parking lagoons?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, that one was perhaps a little ironic, because the word “lagoon” evokes a lovely kind of tropical place that you’d like to hang around and you’re on your yacht and it’s a lovely kind of place.

[laughter]

James Howard Kunstler: Whereas the parking lot is the opposite of that. It’s a demoralizing repellent place and I was just trying to mess with people a little bit.

Duncan Crary: You can park your yacht-sized car in the parking lot.

James Howard Kunstler: Right. Well, you… that was an implication of it.

Duncan Crary: OK, how about one-story UFOs?

James Howard Kunstler: I don’t know if one story is even that important because there are plenty of UFOs that are two story. I may have actually gotten that from somebody else although I have no recollection of who it might have been. The whole idea was the development as UFO landing strip, and the idea that you’re actually not building anything, certainly not anything memorable. You’re just building a place for something out of this world to put down on. The trouble is, of course, is that they don’t fly away.

Duncan Crary: Nature Band Aids.

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, Nature Band Aids. Those are the little juniper shrub, bark mulch ensembles beloved of the landscaping professionals because they get paid a lot of money to install them and that’s the sort of default remedy for bad buildings. You have a mutilated town, with terrible buildings having been built in the last 30 years—the Burger Kings and all that crap—and you put a Nature Band Aid in front of it to “conceal the building” if possible. You know, when the shrubs grow large enough. And also to make yourself feel better about being “green.” You know “I’m green. I’m a good person, with good intentions.”

The whole thing has been a complete waste of time and money and effort. If we put up buildings that were worth looking at in the first place, we wouldn’t need the Nature Band Aids.

An interesting exercise, for those of you who still do foreign travel: go to the Plaza in front of the Pantheon in Rome. It’s a nicely proportioned outdoor public room with walls that are composed of the size of the buildings around it. There’s probably not one green thing within the whole ensemble. There may be one flower box. They understand in these other countries that you don’t have to “green” everything up. The architecture itself does the work of being wonderful.

Duncan Crary: Well, in a way, berms are Nature Band Aids, although they don’t include juniper shrubs and bark mulch beds. But it’s so crazy, when you go to these planning board meetings, that they insist on a berm. As if whatever you’re building is so hideous that you must have this barrier to obstruct your sight of it.

James Howard Kunstler: Well absolutely. In fact they usually do have plantings on them, that’s the whole point, and they’re called “buffers.” I think that’s generically the name. Typologically the berm is one kind of buffer and that’s a raised kind of little esker that runs between the K-Mart and the Wal-Mart and, you know, you put a bunch of birch trees on it and that’s supposed to make things all right.

One of the things I really love out here, it’s one of my favorite—and this is putting my ironic hat on—one of my favorite constructions out here is that they have this sort of Veteran’s Memorial Park between the Wal-Mart and the Lowe’s in the pod where all of that stuff is. No one ever goes to it, I mean, it was just simply an exercise in grandiosity by the people up in Wilton, New York. They’ve built kind of a semi circle of flags to show how much they care about their country. Then they stick this thing on a scrap of land between the Wal-Mart and the K-Mart. You know it was just ridiculous. It probably cost $300, 000 and the taxpayers in the town paid for it.

Duncan Crary: Well, that brings us to our next term, which is patriotic totems.

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, actually I usually apply that to flagpoles because the idea is you put up a horrible building, like some corporate box, some degrading piece of crap, and then you put an ensemble of three flags in front of it which are not really there to show your patriotism. They’re there to ward off criticism because if you put a flag in front of something that brands it as being something you identify your culture with. So, you’re not supposed to diss your own culture because that’s not nice. So that’s why there are so many flags in front of the corporate buildings.

Duncan Crary: Yeah it’ll be like the state flag, the U.S. flag, and then the company flag or something like that.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah or the Canadian flag or something because they want to be nice to the Canadians who visit here. But it’s always lower than the U.S. flag.

Duncan Crary: So Jim, what is the happy motoring scene?

James Howard Kunstler: Well that is the program. The happy motoring program is what we’ve got in America for gettin’ around. You know the thing is it was really a wonderful—it must have started out as a wonderful experience. I mean imagine being in the United States in 1927 when there are only a few million cars in the country and the open road was really the open road. The countryside had not been screwed up with all of this stuff. It must have been a wonderful experience for the next decade, two, or three, really before World War II. Of course, we had our own oil supply in this country and it was really cheap. It must have just been fabulous.

But of course that’s not the experience of our generation or your generation, which is just below mine. With ours, we got all of the post World War II crap and so that changed everything. It was just a system that got totally out of control and now it’s nearing its end. We can’t imagine living without it and the whole thing is just tragic and awful. I think it’s really important to make the point that the whole happy motoring program was not a diabolical scheme worked up by the Devil to make the American people unhappy. It really seemed like it would be a great thing in the early decades and people, I think, were rightfully enthusiastic about it. They just couldn’t tell how out of control it would get and it’s sad.

Duncan Crary: The topics you write about are really depressing and soul crushing, but they’re funny. Like when I first went to see you speak, I was cracking up. Every time you talk about bark mulch beds [laughs] and juniper shrubs, I still laugh—it’s funny.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, you know, it’s very simple. I actually said in the first chapter of Home From Nowhere, quoting Samuel Beckett, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” When you go see a Laurel and Hardy movie, you know, Laurel and Hardy are hitting each other with two by fours and dropping pianos on each other and running each other over in their Model T Fords. That’s not happy stuff, but we laugh at it. It’s hilarious. If they were giving each other flowers or sitting in a good restaurant having a wonderful meal, that wouldn’t be funny at all.

Duncan Crary: Yeah.

James Howard Kunstler: But comedy is all about people being uncomfortable.

Duncan Crary: So Jim, what’s with your expression “It’s all good“? Where did that come from? What is that?

James Howard Kunstler: That’s interesting. You know I attracted a certain number of correspondents, people were writing to me—writing fan letters—readers, and there was this one particular guy who I still correspond with regularly after seven years and he’s a very interesting cat. He’s a Vietnam Veteran Zen master kind of personality and he introduced me to the (phrase) “It’s all good.” He meant it kind of ironically. I took it that way, and I thought it was funny.

When he signed off in his letters, he always drew a happy face with the slitty little eyes and the smile. So it just seemed to be about the best way to sum up the American experience of our time.

Duncan Crary: When I saw it, it reminded me of… I was showing you before we started recording, for the listeners out there—I’ve got the R. Crumb Handbook, and right after “A Short History of America,” the cartoon series, there’s a quote. You’re quoted in the book.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, I didn’t even know that until you showed it to me today. But I’m very honored to be in R. Crumb’s book because he’s a great genius of our time.

Duncan Crary: [laughs] Yeah, the alternative cartoonist for those of you listening. Right after that and right next to your quote there’s a picture of this guy sitting on a milk carton in this dumpy abandoned yard and he goes, “I just sort of went with the flow, man.”

[laughter]

James Howard Kunstler: I know. Crumb has really got our number.

Duncan Crary: [laughs]

James Howard Kunstler: Notice, by the way, he moved to France about 10 years ago. I just think that he finally realized that actually, you don’t have to put up with this if you’ve got enough dough.

Duncan Crary: OK, well thanks Jim for going through that lesson. I hope all you listeners are ready for the pop quiz that we’re going to have on the glossary of terms.

So, thanks a lot Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, it’s always a pleasure to be here.

[music begins]

Listener Caller: Yeah, this is Brad from Cincinnati, Ohio and I have to agree with what you said about architects. It’s kind of a sad reflection on the profession when the greatest architecture that was ever made was all made before there was any formalized training in architecture. It’s not like medicine, where the greatest surgeries of all time ever happened before there was formalized training in surgery, it’s the exact opposite. So when your entire profession revolves around gradually getting worse at what you do through formalized training, that’s normally a bad sign.

Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866-924-9499.

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