Shocking news from Atlanta:

..."The reason you spend so much time driving is because you live in an auto-dependent neighborhood," Frank said. "The study shows that these travel choices are important predictors of our weight."...

Could it be that fat people simply prefer the suburbs?



11:18 PM | Link | (0) comments   

During Memorial Day weekend, the contours of American life tend to materialize in sharp relief.

The television news juxtaposes the stories of dead American soldiers against reports of rising gas prices and weekend traffic. Scenes showing neat rows of military tombstones segue into lines of motor vehicles clogging the nation's highways. The stunning carnage on American roadways -- about 500 people will be killed over the course of the long weekend -- make Najaf and Fallujah look downright safe.

Memorial Day is the official kick-off of the summer motoring season. More than 30 million Americans honor their war dead, fittingly, by piling into vehicles and heading out for weekend road trips. Though an increasing number of Americans will celebrate this year's Memorial Day grieving for fallen soldiers, for most of us, it's a day off work, a barbeque, or a family trip to the beach.

On Memorial Day the connection between our sprawling, motoring, energy-intensive way of life and the large U.S. military presence alongside our Middle East gas station, is more painfully clear than usual. Americans, for the most part, don't seem to want to see that connection. We don't want to think about the remarkably vast flow of cheap oil that is required to keep the American Way of Life up and running, Yet, Islamic militants are making it harder to ignore. In the last month, a coordinated strategy has emerged to violently sabotage oil infrastructure in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Whether mourning at Arlington Cemetary or motoring to Walt Disney World, the underlying theme of this year's Memorial Day is sacrifice, suffering and pain--on the battle field and at the gas pump. We'll hear our national leaders and media pundits talking a lot about both of these issues this weekend. What we won't hear any of our leaders saying, is that unil we decide to make fundamental changes in the American Way of Life, the sacrifice, suffering and pain is only going to grow.

2:32 PM | Link | (0) comments   

I just saw a documentary film called The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream.

It's a really good little movie with some important information that Americans really need to hear and see. I urge you to click over to this web site, buy yourself the DVD, and invite a few friends over to watch and discuss it.

Here's what it's about:

Since World War II North Americans have invested much of their newfound wealth in suburbia. It has promised a sense of space, affordability, family life and upward mobility. As the population of suburban sprawl has exploded in the past 50 years, so too the suburban way of life has become embedded in the American consciousness.

Suburbia, and all it promises, has become the American Dream.

But as we enter the 21st century, serious questions are beginning to emerge about the sustainability of this way of life. With brutal honesty and a touch of irony, The End of Suburbia explores the American Way of Life and its prospects as the planet approaches a critical era, as global demand for fossil fuels begins to outstrip supply. World Oil Peak and the inevitable decline of fossil fuels are upon us now, some scientists and policy makers argue in this documentary. The consequences of inaction in the face of this global crisis are enormous. What does Oil Peak mean for North America? As energy prices skyrocket in the coming years, how will the populations of suburbia react to the collapse of their dream? Are today's suburbs destined to become the slums of tomorrow? And what can be done NOW, individually and collectively, to avoid The End of Suburbia ?


12:39 AM | Link | (0) comments   

I'm convinced that whomever wins the 2004 presidential election is pretty much screwed. The U.S. economy and American way of life is now being sucked into a perfect storm of uncontrollable oil prices, massive, unprecedented debt, and an islamic-fascist hornets' nest. Any one of these three problems by itself would be a handful. But all three at the same time? We're moving into unchartered waters. I don't envy the president or the political party that gets tagged with creating the mess we're in by 2008.

In general, I think we focus way too much on the president and the presidential elections. The election has become a year-long reality show that we might actually be better for turning off. All of the calls to get out and vote -- yes, voting is important. But pulling the lever once every four years in a presidential election is the absolute barest minimum of political participation a citizen can have. By the time the election rolls around, most of the big and little decisions have been made. You're simply choosing A or B -- it's like you're taking the world's easiest multiple choice quiz rather than delving into a meaty essay question. We need to turn off the Road to the White House reality TV show with all it's story-lines, plots and sub-plots. If we really want to change things and have impact, we can't wait until the presidiential election comes around. We've got to get into the game much earlier and much closer to home.

That being said, it's clear that these Bush guys aren't going to give up the White House easily. If they are good at one thing, it's power. They know how to seize it and wield it. It would not at all surprise me if the tricks are even dirtier in 2004, then they were in 2000.

The bottom line is that there are forces at work now, that no president can really control. It's easy not to notice, but our American Way of Life is remarkably dependent on a vast, steady flow of inexpensive oil. If no one in the world has extra capacity to pump the increasing amounts of oil that the world demands (and it increasingly looks like no one does) then oil can and will cost $80, $90, $120/barrel. As the world's greatest energy consumer, the US will be hit harder by this than anyone else. The result of high oil prices will be massive inflation (or deflation and a crash of the housing market, where most Americans store their wealth). With the sharpened guillotine of consumer and government debt hanging over us, we won't have a lot of options for dealing with this meltdown. Add to that, the nagging, persistent feeling that if a smart, focused, creative group of maniacal idiots want to commit acts of humongous attrocity in our midst, there probably isn't all that much we can do to stop them. At some point in the near future, they will likely be successful.

It's comforting to think that the President of the United States has enough power to prevent and control all these things. But he really doesn't. Neither Kerry nor Bush can stop this storm from coming. We've pretty much got to just try to navigate our way through it without being ripped to shreds. Perhaps Kerry would be better at managing the coming crises then Bush. But in today's shallow, mean, talk radio culture of litigous blame and rampant entitlement, it seems unlikely that Americans will be able to rally round, come together, and do the difficult things that need to be done. This isn't 1941 and we're not in Kansas anymore. Whomever sits in the Oval Office when the sh*t hits the fan will not be loved. He'll make Herbert Hoover look like a hero.

Truly, I believe we're gonna need an Abraham Lincoln of a president to do the difficult things that will need to be done to hold our world together. But I don't think we'll get her until 2008, when Americans ask Hillary Clinton takes over the wreckage of the Religious Right's eight years. You don't even want to hear my predictions about what happens after that...

All hands on deck! Batton down the hatches!!!


11:25 PM | Link | (0) comments   

Two anthologies have recently been published that include Honku along with a number of other excellent writers and artists.

As Smart as We Are is an album by the talented, Brooklyn-based accordian and theremin-playing duo, One Ring Zero. To make this album, the band marshaled some serious literary firepower to contribute lyrics -- people like Jonathan Ames, Paul Auster, Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody and Aaron Naparstek... OK, they must have made a mistake on that last one. Still, it's a great record, sort of a cross between a hip Manhattan book party and a spooky Weimar circus. Get yourself a copy and see how they turned my first honku into freaky 5/7 rhythmic anthem.

Traffic Life: Passionate Tales and Exit Strategies is a wide-ranging and entertaining anthology of short stories, poems, cartoons and lots of other art, all about the problems of automobiles, traffic and a world that has been built to accomodate automobiles and traffic. Stephan Wehner, the editor, collected and solicited works by Ray Bradbury, Andy Singer, Attila the Stockbroker and, yep, some honku as well. Self-published by a committed idealist, this book is a good one.

3:19 PM | Link | (0) comments   

"One of the local characters in the small city where I grew up was Judge
Green. A giant man, probably 6 feet 7, he was widely admired around town, in
part because he had been star of the only Urbana High School team ever to
make it to the championship game of the Illinois state basketball
tournament. I remember him as a cheerful man who greeted everyone with a
smile. But he had one trait that made him seem a bit peculiar: He walked to
work every day. If you drove down Broadway Avenue at certain hours, you
couldn't miss his towering figure striding along the sidewalk.

"One day, home from college and already an ardent environmentalist, I was
walking uptown myself when it dawned on me that Judge Green's home was only
a few blocks from the courthouse - hardly more than half a mile. I was
shocked. The man many folks thought eccentric (and I thought heroic) for not
driving to work each day was covering a distance that would be nothing to
pedestrians in Europe, or most other places outside the United States. How
sad, I sighed. There really is no hope that Americans will ever get out of
their cars if a half-mile walk looks to them like an Olympic endurance
event..."

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18554

7:21 PM | Link |