False Spring
by ilene - April 6th, 2010 4:47 pm
False Spring
Courtesy of James Howard Kunstler
In a place like upstate New York, north of Albany, where April is more generally known as "mud season," and the wait for "ice-out" on the big lakes takes forever, and on frigid nights the windigos steal through the tops of the tall pines — it would seem foolish to complain about perfectly beautiful weather.
We just had a week in the 70s, with more to come. The grass went from ochre to bright green in about thirty-six hours. The buds are popping like mad. This is usually what the first week of May is like around here, and that fact alone may explain New York state’s relentless population drain over the past forty years.
I was out on my bicycle, naturally, taking it all in — like, why sit inside and sulk because the weather is strange in a pleasant way? — and I ventured into the outlands east of town, where an impressive number of gigantic new houses had landed like alien mother-ships in the former cow pastures and wood lots. Of course, the aesthetics were an issue apart from the socio-economics of it, but nonetheless interesting.
Each new, gigantic house seemed the result of a losing struggle to reinvent basic design principles that did not require re-invention. I doubt the spirit of joyous "creativity" among the star-architects has seeped down to the level of the provincial house-builders, who, after all, are just assemblers of modular materials like dimensional lumber and eight-foot sheet-rock. It’s their inability to assemble these parts coherently that’s really striking, so what you get is an endless variety of mistakes along with a complete absence of anything done really well — which may be the essence of what the "diversity" craze has really meant to us, the ethos of current times.
The abiding quality of all these houses was grandiosity (by which I do not mean grand-ness). That, too, is a signature of these times in America — the nation too big to fail and tragically destined to do just that on account of its too big to fail-ness. And, of course, one could not fail to wonder, cruising by these hideously ponderous houses, whether as a matter of fact they were failing in terms of the owners’ ability…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site