Joyride

Before automobiles, transportation was not an easy task. Yes, there were horses and streetcars, but they were not effective and the cons were greater than their pros. For instance, horses were often worked to death and their manure caused health problems, and streetcars were very slow and pretty costly to run. However, cars were considered "rich men's playthings," and roads were not well maintained. With Ford's invention of the Model T, and the use of the assembly line, cars were now affordable by the common man. General Motors Corporation tried to put streetcars out of business all over America.

Cars most certainly helped the economy, but trouble laid ahead, and it was happening on the farms. Farming was once a sort of culture, but it soon became industrialized, along with everything else. Ford had come out with a tractor, which aided the farmers immensely. However, because they had gotten rid of their horses, they now had to get artificial fertilizer and spread it, which took a lot of time and money.

Times began to get rough. Car manufacturers were making more cars than they could sell, and the economy was beginning to collapse. However bad the economy got, everyone still wanted a car. Then Robert Moses came around. He was, according to the text, an "evil genius." He bulldozed farms and estates into parking lots, not even considering any consequences. Moses also knew how to get his projects going by misleading state legislatures. FDR didn't care for him much, but his projects did provide jobs, and that's something people were desperate for during the Great Depression.

During the war, manufacturers were cranking out jeeps, tanks, airplanes, uniforms, helmets, parachutes, etc, and the good news was America produced their own petroleum. When the rest of the world's economy was crumbling, America was finally able to get back on its feet.

Because cars were something many people had, more and more traffic were on the roads, so the new idea was to build for lane expressways. "The chief political justification was that the new expressways would ease the evacuation of cities during a nuclear attack." This helped the economy in the 1960s boom. According to the text, however, this sent the cities to hell because it took away their taxpaying residents and the beltways became physical barriers.

As a result of all of this and new technology, America has become dependent on oil.

Questions

a. American culture was certainly changed by the car and tractor. People could now go wherever they wanted to go, it expanded everything.

b. After WWII, more people needed homes and so more energy was needed to provide them.

My Questions

1. "Why did America build a reality of terrible places from which people longed to escape?"

I thought this quote was very interesting because Kunstler has a good point. America was and is always trying to stay ahead of the game, and by doing this, we have created somewhere people want to go and live, until they get here and find out it's not all it's cracked up to be.

2. This isn't really a question, but I noticed that James Howard Kunstler was very biased in his writing. He was quick to berate what America has done, but he didn't really offer a lot of insight as to what can be done to fix it.

3. Number two brings up the question, well what can we do?