CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World

"Where Were You at $1.62?"

The key stages of acculturation into our "car culture" have always been those adolescent "rites of passage" of obtaining one's driver's license, buying a car, and then "cruising" with one's friends. Cinematically iconicized in George Lucas' 1973 film American Graffiti, (which asked film-goers, "where were you in '62"?) cruising can be found in just about every community, on popular restaurant strips, in parks and just about anywhere where young people hang out. Who of us doesn't have fond memories of crankin' the stereo and indulging in questionable amounts of controlled substances in parking lots and drive-in theatres? Oh, and necking.

Now, that rite of passage may be on its way out. As the Globe and Mail reports, out-of-control gas prices  are making car ownership and cruising out of reach for the typical teenager:

"Recreational driving, or cruising, has been a rite of passage for generations of teenagers, representing freedom and independence to anyone old enough to obtain a licence, but record-high gas prices are putting the brakes on the classic summertime activity. The carefree days of driving for the sake of driving are over.

Teens say they're now spending as little time behind the wheel as possible, hanging out instead at friends' houses, at parks and beaches, and at movie theatres.

The romance of cruising fades, teens say, when they have to scrutinize their gas consumption like minutes on their cellphones."

As I write this, gasoline is $1.32 a litre in Winnipeg, and already this is changing my own driving habits. What the breaking point will be, I'm not sure.

But as cars become too expensive for their former mass consumption, they will take on an ever smaller part of our lives. More of us are becoming aware that expensive driving is going to force individuals, families and cities to face a huge range of hugely pressing problems affecting everything from livelihoods to basic survival.

With such pressing needs ahead of us, it might seem frivolous to wonder about our psyches. Yet I can't help but wonder what the loss of mass car ownership is going to do to our sense of self, both collectively and as individuals.

As any anthropologist will tell you, with the loss of ritual comes the erosion of culture, and our own car culture should not be considered immune to such degradation. If this culture of ours -- which has for so long been defined by mobility and the "freedom of the road" -- is to die, what will replace it?

And who will we be?

So many of us (particularly men) have for so long built and reinforced our personal and social identities base on our relationship with our cars that we feel we are what we drive. When our wheels are taken away, what will we have? How will we define ourselves culturally?

These are not just academic questions: It is the substance and strength of a society's culture that can determine the extent of its resilience -- in other words, its ability to endure.

With teenagers bypassing the ritual of car ownership, and probably many of them forgoing it altogether as adults, we are doubtless going to be seeing a generation emerge that will have vastly different values,aspirations and expectations. Surely it is today's young people who will help us make this transition -- and help to create the culture that will follow.

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Kalokairi Calling: Mama Mia! and 'Redesigning the American Dream'

Nowhere does the aphorism that "all politics are personal" apply more potently than to America's so-called "culture wars", where anything seen to be remotely touching on conceptions of the family becomes not just the stuff of political campaigns, but the difference between personal fulfillment and a lifetime of frustration and unhappiness. Whether one is talking about childcare, employment equity, reproductive rights, sexual diversity or gender relations we're not concerned strictly speaking with the family as such, but with all those structures on which men, women and their families  must depend, be they based in public policy or how we design our cities.

So when the popular culture appears to be staking out new territory in this debate -- and having a great deal of fun at the same time -- it's worth paying attention.

The recently-released ABBA musical Mama Mia! is gloriously set on the fictional Greek Island of Kalokairi where taverna owner Donna (Meryl Streep) is preparing for the wedding of her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried). While Donna has invited her two long-time friends and bandmates Tanya (Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters), Sophie has  secretly invited three men, each of whom she suspects might be her biological father.

Mama Mia! stands out not only for its sunny lightheartedness (many reviewers are saying silliness) but also for what others see as its unabashed feminism.  The  leading characters -- all women -- drive the action, deal with the world on their own terms and leave the men in the film mostly scratching their heads. Significantly (and unusually for Hollywood) the most sexual of the characters are the three women in their 50s, who cavort unself-consciously about the island singing and raising temperatures. At one point they even inspire an entire village of women and girls to dance their way to the beach to the tune of "Dancing Queen."

The strength and independence of the film's female characters, as well as the nonchalance with which the film deals with Donna's sexual history, have gained the attention of feminist writers, who see in the film a wonderfully subversive social critique as Sarah Seltzer explains:

"It's hard to imagine a movie that's come out recently that is, at its core, as offensive to the right wing's so-called family values. The film's women -- including a mother and daughter -- accept each other as sexual beings. Donna isn't punished for her earlier promiscuity, and Amanda isn't forced to get married despite her clear sexual maturity. The concept of three men revolving around a matriarchal family core is celebrated."

While the power of the women in the film is indeed refreshing, I think what is more remarkable still is something larger: that these women have a community with whom to be empowered, and a physical setting that helps to make such empowerment possible.

Let me first admit that I realize looking for cues to social behavior in a musical is a dodgy proposition. Furthermore, this is an adaptation of a stage musical, so its conventions are particularly theatrical. Indeed, the film comes very close to meeting Aristotle's famous "Three Unities" of time (it takes place over approximately 24 hours) place (one island) and action (one plot). The Greek villagers also act very much like a chorus, commenting on the inner lives of the main characters.

Even granting all these things, what we see in the taverna and village on Kalokairi is to most North Americans quite foreign: an extremely dense social environment where families live in close proximity, where everyone knows each other, and the visual and auditory permeability of the village means that everyone also knows each other's business (which of course is being sung at full volume, but still). Donna has many local people who either work for her or are there to help her, and would have surely been there to assist her in raising Sophie. The public realm is plentiful and attractive, offering several venues for ritual and celebration. And of course, there are no cars, save for three in the opening scenes that deliver the characters on site.  Indeed, the entire feel of the film is so pre-industrial that, given a few changes in costume and music the essential story could be told in almost any historical period.

But the essential element that lends such joie de vivre to the film is that it is ultimately about a community of people, one that nonjudgmentally accepts one another and is there to celebrate life's passages and transitions together.

The contrast to the urban loneliness in that other big "chick flick" of the summer, Sex and the City, is striking, as Jane Becker notes:

"The women in 'SATC' are a good 20 years younger than their counterparts in 'Mama', but they seem infinitely less happy.  They sit around coffee shops and trendy restaurants discussing their unhappiness. The women in 'Mama' sing and dance. Christine Baranski kicks ass on the dance floor, Julie Walters chews through the scenery and Meryl…well, Meryl does a split in the air after bouncing off a bed.  When I grow up, I want to be them."

The sadder contrast still of course is not to other another movie, but to what many of us actually experience: increasingly isolated lives, raising families as islands unto themselves in larger islands of subdivisions, cut off from any semblance of actual community. Parents (often unaided mothers) are expected to meet all the needs that were once met by community, and institutionalized social supports that might make a huge difference for millions of families -- such as affordable and accessible childcare -- are unhelpfully fraught with controversy.

Kalokairi may as well be on another planet.

But there are alternatives. In 1980, architect and historian Dolores Hayden asked, "What Would a Non-Sexist City be Like?" and her proposals for Redesigning the American Dream share much in common with Kalokairi: closely-set multifamily housing sharing common facilities such as kitchens and child care, locally employed and equitably paid on-site staff to help out, attractive social gathering and play spaces, and a community of families to assist in looking after children.

The other term for this of course is the village -- how we once all lived before industrialism and bloated urban expansion scattered us apart. The irony is that the conservative agenda behind the "family values" debate is promoting a "traditional" family model that is in fact an historical aberration. For the past half-century, through a combination of social policy and urban planning decisions guided more by myth than reality families have been forced into unprecedented, community-eroding isolation. As Hayden and other feminist architects, planners and geographers have been pointing out for years, these patterns have served the needs of women and families very poorly.

Now, however, this social experiment appears to be reaching a terminal phase. Between the devastation brought about by the current foreclosure epidemic and surging gasoline prices, many are predicting that the suburbs will be the slums of the future. The need for us to reconsider how we live with and among one another is becoming ever more acute, and economic and resource considerations are going to require us to move past the pointlessness of debating what constitutes a "real" family, or the proper values by which to raise one.

The good news is that our need for community is built into our social DNA. What may be attracting audiences to the world of Mama Mia! is not so much the message that women can have identities independent of a particular man, but that all of us can be a part of something larger than ourselves.    

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Will Canada's "New Deal" for Cities Run Out of Gas?

In response to a political movement for a "new deal" for Canada's cities, successive Federal governments have instituted a Gas Tax Fund to provide Canadian municipalities with a supposedly stable means to finance their infrastructure needs. The 2008 Federal Budget extended the fund to beyond 2013-14 to become a permanent measure. Agreements were drawn up between each province and Ottawa to set specific amounts, based on per capita need and other principles. The Fund is to be directed by the provinces towards "environmentally sustainable municipal infrastructure projects that contribute to cleaner air, cleaner water and reduced greenhouse gas emissions."

Now, however, this promise of stable funding is being undermined by the -- entirely predictable -- consumer response to high gas prices. In the United States pump prices soaring past $4.00 a gallon have resulted in such a significant decrease in American motoring that the federal highways trust fund -- which is supported by gas taxes -- is running out of money. According to the Los Angeles Times,

"The fund, set to finance about $40 billion in transportation projects next year, is increasingly strained. And the problem has taken on greater urgency as lawmakers face a backlog of projects to maintain the nation's aging interstate highway system and ease traffic congestion.

The federal gasoline tax is tied to every gallon sold, not every dollar spent, so federal gas tax revenue goes up only if consumption increases. This year, consumption is projected to drop for the first time since 1991. Vehicle miles traveled on the nation's roads are trending downward for the first time since the oil shocks of the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to the Cambridge Energy Research Associates consulting firm. The shortfall was projected at $3.2 billion this year, but it is expected to be higher when the White House budget office issues a revised estimate this month."

Of course, here in Canada consumers are also scaling back their use of gas. A June 2008 poll shows that

"Canadians are also continuing to change their travel habits as a result of rising gasoline and fuel costs, with 51 per cent cutting back on use of their automobile, up marginally from the 48 per cent who planned to cut back last year. Forty-four per cent say they will likely change vacation plans as a result of both higher gas prices and airline fuel surcharges."

While most environmentalists are cheering reduced driving, we need to step back and consider what this is going to mean for all the sustainable infrastructure projects that were supposed to be funded by the Gas Tax Fund. As the energy crisis deepens Canadians may find their infrastructure funding drying up just as it is in the United States, and the provinces are going to eventually need to renegotiate with Ottawa some new way to fund their needs.

While charging social bads to pay for social goods may seem like a socially desireable strategy, the root problem here of course is that the social bad in question will eventually run dry. The end of cheap oil is going to force us to rethink how we plan -- and pay for -- just about everything.

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Batman and the "End of 9/11": Overcoming America's Dark Night in Gotham City

One of the "biggest" ideas of the year, according to James Fallows writing in the Atlantic Magazine, is the End of 9/11 as a metanarrative for American politics. For a growing domestic and international constituency, it is no longer tolerable for the very invocation of those events to warrant overriding every principle of American democracy. That moment of thoughtless panic has passed, and appears now to have been a dream of madness. Casting aside principles in the name of the "war on terror" -- to "work...the dark side, if you will", as Dick Cheney put it -- is now being recognized as the path to becoming the very evil we feared.

One of the most potent confirmations of this maturing zeitgeist is the overwhelmingly positive critical and public reception of Christopher Nolan's stunning new Batman film The Dark Knight , which, in its careful use of 9/11 visual tropes takes the viewer on a sometimes traumatic but ultimately redemptive and humanistic journey towards a truly post-9/11 ethic.

Many reviewers have already noted that the film is commenting on the "war on terror," and audiences were surely meant to revisit their own painful memories of 9/11 by the chilling advance posters for the film, which feature Batman standing before a skyscraper in which a gigantic flaming gash in the shape of a bat has been blasted. Cues evoking 9/11 build from the opening frames, which propel the viewer into a dark swirling cloud of smoke and then to an aerial shot flying us towards a glass building, through to a series of escalating depictions of urban chaos and destruction. Buildings implode, thousands of people flee Gotham city on foot, and at one point Batman broods in the foreground while firefighters struggle to contain fires amid twisted steel columns. Unlike any other superhero film ever made, The Dark Knight is set in a world of realism we -- sadly -- know only too well.

This realism is significantly owed to the actual urban locations of the film. Previous incarnations of Gotham City were either fascistic sets improbably dominated by statues or fanciful computer-generated creations that never succeeded in convincing us; here, the on-location shooting in downtown Chicago and Hong Kong goes a long way to grounding viewers and thereby preparing them for the moral arguments to come.

The morality play of The Dark Knight is driven by Heath Ledger's astonishing performance as the Joker, who is not so much a character as he is a force of unknowable, abstract evil. By positioning the villain this way, screenwriters Jonathan and Christopher Nolan have made the Joker the very incarnation of a Manichean view of morality: he is not an evil set apart from oneself that can be destroyed, but rather as  a potentiality within oneself that must be resisted by one's predisposition for good.

What makes The Dark Knight so remarkable is that it frames this resistance to evil with nuanced debates about the natures of human moral agency and decision-making.

In an early scene, when Batman's alter-ego Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), discuss the merits of having one strong man take responsibility for defending society against evil, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) reminds them that when Rome made that choice, it resulted in a dictatorship. For all his wistful temptation for Roman absolutism, however, Dent is a morally principled man who doggedly works within the legal system to put criminals behind bars. So certain is he of his own moral compass that he makes a show of flipping a coin to make crucial decisions -- a coin which is later revealed to have two faces. Wayne admires Dent for his principled, public and fully legal stand and is himself tempted to forsake the lawless vigilantism of Batman and make Dent alone the public face of justice in Gotham. 

Between the unaccountability of the Batman and the deontological morality of Dent lies the consequentialism of Commissioner James Gordon (Gary Oldman), a veteran cop whose situational judgments and actions in a corrupt, complex and dangerous environment are criticized by Dent, who once ran an Internal Affairs investigation against Gordon's precinct.

With this moral triad at its core, the film then proceeds to metaphorically -- and not so metaphorically -- demolish the methods, moral vacuity and false ontology of the "war on terror."

First, Batman practices some "enhanced interrogation techniques" on the Joker, only to learn that he was being manipulated by the Joker all along, with fatal results. Then when Bruce uses an advanced and secret project at Wayne Industries to turn every cell phone in Gotham into sonar-based surveillance devices, his partner in Bat-tech, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), is appalled, swearing to resign if the machine isn't destroyed. While they agree to use the mass "unwarranted wiretap" just once, successfully pinpointing the Joker and what appear to be his henchmen in a skyscraper on the waterfront, when Batman arrives in advance of the S.W.A.T. team he is horrified to discover that despite its sophistication his technology was incapable of distinguishing hostages from terrorists, something of which only human presence and judgment is capable.

Next, we see the abandonment of Dent's "constitution." The Joker destroys Harvey Dent by disfiguring him and killing Rachel. Traumatized, grieving and seeking revenge, the formerly principled Dent kills five people, including two corrupt cops, but not before flipping his lucky coin -- which by now is as burnt on one side as he is, thus surrendering all his moral choices to an external force: sheer chance.

But it is in the film's gut-wrenching climax that reveals the supposed existential crisis of the "war on terror" for the cruel and dehumanizing proposition it is.

Fleeing the chaos of Gotham city, two crowded ferries break down in the harbor: one filled with ordinary citizens, the other with convicts clad in Guantanomo-esque orange suits. Each ship's crew discovers the boats are filled with explosives, as well as provided with a gift-wrapped detonator. Over the intercom, the Joker reveals the nature of his "social experiment": the detonators are for the other ship's bombs. If the passengers don't blow up the other ship, he'll blow up both of them at midnight.

For 15 agonizing minutes, the passengers argue amongst themselves and the ship's authorities, who are themselves paralyzed but increasingly tempted to destroy their sister ships. The prison ship is held in particular contempt by some of the passengers, who argue that the men on that boat "made their choice" of lawlessness and may therefore be sacrificed -- in other words, it is best to kill them over there before they kill us over here. Unable to make the final fatal decision, the authorities on both boats abdicate responsibility and turn the detonators over to their passengers -- who ultimately refuse to kill out of fear. In the end, the simple recognition of shared humanity and the insistence on retaining one's own moral agency are shown to be the most heroic acts of all.

At the same time, however, Gotham City's moral leaders are undone. Dent is killed by Batman, who then convinces Gordon that, to preserve Gotham's "constitution" -- the public image of Dent and all he stood for -- Batman and all he stands for must instead accept culpability for Dent's crimes. Unilateral, lawless and unaccountable vigilantism are now publicly discredited. The final scenes of the film show Fox turning his back on and walking away from the machinery of surveillance while Batman flees into the night, chased by police and dogs. Gordon, surrounded by press and members of the public then grimly takes an axe to the bat-beacon, cutting off the state's recourse to vigilantism.

Without either Dent or Batman to intervene on their behalf, Gordon and all of Gotham -- and by extension, the audience -- are left to face a complex, dangerous and interconnected world as a community of individual moral agents, guided by Dent's principles of law, fairness and justice -- as well as their own reclaimed humanism. Even in the face of incomprehensible, implacable evil, The Dark Knight reminds us that these are our only anchors, for without them we betray both them and ourselves.

America may still have that chance. At the moment, however, its Constitution has been mauled, and politicians of both parties long ago surrendered their capacities to stop an illegal war and the looting of the nation's wealth. Now, however, The Dark Knight warns against both abandoning our principles out of fear, grief and hatred, as well as abdicating our moral agency to external authorities -- both of which comprised the hallmark moral syndrome of the years following 9/11.

That audiences and critics have embraced this film gives one hope that the days of uncritically turning to leaders promising to save us from our fears are at an end. As James Fallows says, the 9/11 era is over.

We are all Gothamites now.

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WALL-E in the "World Without Us"

Alan Weisman's recent book "The World Without Us" carries out a fascinating thought experiment, absenting us from the planet and then taking us through decades and centuries into the far future to see what befalls the works of humans. We watch as our cities and infrastructure crumble before the forces of insects, microbes, plants and rust and discover that our most lasting legacies are not our great works of art and literature, but our trash, our chemical and radioactive pollution and our television and radio broadcasts. The reader is left both humbled and awed at the uncontainable power of nature.

In Disney/Pixar's latest outing, WALL-E, the viewer is also treated to a vision of the far future, but is left instead with an unjustified faith in humanity but no real appreciation for or understanding of the natural world.

When the film starts the world has been without us for over 700 years, and all that remains are desolate cities and a planet covered in unimaginably massive piles of trash. The only activity we see is that of a lone robot named WALL-E (an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth-Class), the last of an army left behind by the Buy 'n Large corporation to clean up the planet while humanity vacations on its corporate cruise starships far off in space.

The opening sequences of the film are breathtakingly ghastly, like no post-apocalyptic vision ever put on film. The cityscape is not just deserted, it is disappearing under a cancerous envelope of debris, and even orbital space is a cloud of satellites and junk. And everywhere we see the entity responsible for most of the despoliation: the Buy 'n Large Corporation, which appears, in the final stages of humanity's days on Earth, to have owned and run absolutely everything, making Wal-Mart look like a dime store operation in comparison.

Amid this ravaged world, WALL-E fills his days compacting and piling trash, but also collecting and relishing objects that delight and mystify him: egg beaters, Rubik's cubes and a television with which he watches Hello Dolly! over and over again.

His centuries of routine are disrupted when he finds a tiny green plant. Then a gigantic spaceship deposits the egg-shaped EVE (or the Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) robot, which proceeds to scan the city -- and when things surprise or annoy her, blow them up. WALL-E is smitten by her lethal charms, and when he shows her the plant, she immediately scoops it into herself and shuts down, awaiting recovery and return.

EVE's mission, it turns out, was at the command of the Buy 'n Large corporation, and the ship that picks her up (and to which WALL-E clings in a bid to rescue her) delivers them to the Axiom, one of the gigantic cruise ships launched centuries before.

Unsurprisingly, given that Buy 'n Large (BnL) is still our dominant institution, humans have learned absolutely nothing from their experience as environmental refugees. The Axiom is populated by identically-dressed and morbidly obese humans carried about on multi-media hoverchairs, their every desire met by a fleet of robots and the omnipresent BnL, which exhorts them to continue to consume every waking hour. And of course, the unceasing consumption continues to produce vast amounts of trash, which is regularly compacted and expunged from the ship.

But through his efforts to rescue EVE, WALL-E gradually disrupts the consumerist and media-soaked ecology of the Axiom. Deprived of their non-stop multimedia two of the humans begin responding to their environment as if for the first time -- appreciating beauty, taking physical enjoyment from a previously neglected pool and actually conversing with each other.

In the end, the humans land on Earth and stumble into the light, determined to farm and support themselves, with no apparent role for the Buy 'n Large Corporation. They have liberated themselves from the corporation and from compulsions of the marketplace.

As satisfying as this anti-corporate and anti-consumerist theme is, it's hard to take too seriously.

After all, Disney is the world's premier vertically-integrated entertainment and merchandising machine. Already the market is crowded with WALL-E toys and other crap, much of which will eventually wind up in landfills. And speaking of irony, what exactly are we to make of the "credit cookie"? Following the closing credits and the Pixar and Disney logos, we once more see the Buy 'n Large logo while its jingle echoes in our ears. It's clever but a bit too cynical by half.

But writer-director Andrew Stanton's most serious difficulty in articulating a theme the audience can actually identify is that the animators are so loving in their attention to details on robots and spaceships that -- unlike his earlier Pixar film Finding Nemo -- they appear to have spent little effort trying to incorporate natural processes.

It's annoying but forgivable that WALL-E finds the plant in a closed refrigerator, apparently sprouting without benefit of sunlight, or that he holds the plant out to show to EVA while they are floating in deep space, presumably at temperatures near absolute zero, with no ill effects.

But this lack of understanding of how nature actually functions makes the conflict driving the climax of the movie ultimately without purpose. The humans return to Earth, but the viewer can't help but wish that they'd just stayed away.

The Axiom's captain sees footage of Earth and becomes taken with the idea of farming, believing they need to return to Earth to "help it out." Except -- that's exactly what they don't do: the closing credits feature a nifty bit of animation employing artistic styles ranging from cave paintings to impressionism, showing the familiar arc of civilization - from fishing to farming to the construction of new cities, except this time we have robots doing a lot of the work for us. But at no point is there a hint of humans actually "helping" nature - we're just helping ourselves again.

In other words, as far as we can see and Pixar can show us, humans will do exactly what we always have done. But if we do, the results will not be what we see here: the streams will not magically fill with fish, or fields with verdant flowers, trees and plants.

If the humans had instead never returned, however, the planet Earth of WALL-E might have had a chance. As Alan Weisman shows us, at that point when the world is actually "without us," nature will in fact eventually break through the insults we've laid over her and finally disguise all our works beneath green foliage. She will recover -- but of course not replace -- much of what was destroyed, and through cycles of glaciation crush every last trace of us.

But I guess that wouldn't make a very good movie. Or sell any merchandise.

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CBC's False Populism Leaves Rural Canada Behind

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is set to embark this fall on a radically sweeping set of programming changes to Radio 2. The most significant of these is that classical music will be dramatically de-emphasized. As well, long-time hosts -- with all their years of experience and expertise -- will be discarded in favour of younger, "edgier" ones. The Globe and Mail's Russell Smith was one of the first to condemn the changes in March, and the response from readers was such that a week later, he wrote again, describing how furious Canadians were with the CBC over the proposals. Smith stressed that what he was hearing from readers ran quite counter to official arguments:

"There are two common criticisms of a government-funded classical-music station: one, that it is elitist because it appeals only to the educated or privileged, and two, that it is irrelevant in the modern world because it can appeal only to the old. My readers, and the complainants to the CBC's own website, prove both these conjectures wrong. My correspondents included a fair number of university professors and trained classical musicians, yes (as does the listenership of the CBC). But they were far outnumbered by the people who work in car dealerships or in boring offices, and who love serious music just as much as any bespectacled Torontonian."

There is one other very serious problem with the changes that Smith identifies: that gutting the CBC of classical music introduces a profound spatial inequity for millions of Canadians: those living in small towns and rural areas will be denied access to a significant cultural asset only available to those who live in larger cities:

"Those who were the most passionate in their lamentations for this lifeline to challenging culture were those who lived in small towns or in the country. Over and over, they reminded me that, without public radio and in the absence of any regular music-appreciation classes in the public-school system, there was nowhere, absolutely nowhere, for them to ever hear symphonic, opera, choral or chamber music (or any discussions thereof)."

This morning, Smith has reported that the federal government, after conducting some obligatory and perfunctory hearings, has declined to intervene. As a result,

"we are now on schedule for a dramatic dismantling of the last public national resource for access to a musical education - particularly for those in small towns, and for those without privileged access to an educated milieu. Once this point of entry to an educated world is gone, that world will wither."

Ironically, that loss will all be for naught, thanks to ubiquitous personal electronics. The "edgier" youth audience they hope to attract already has a world of music loaded onto their iPods and won't even notice the new Radio 2. But those formerly loyal listeners, once lost, won't likely be back.

This unheeding rush to undo decades' worth of CBC tradition as a national platform for cultural expression by adopting a seemingly slavish nod to hypertextual youth culture is akin to burning down a library because you have an internet connection. It is as if the broadcaster has been taken over by the most popular clique in the high school and it is out to stick it to the nerds. It may be assuming an anti-elitist veneer, but it is a false populism.

It is also anti-rural. The CBC has adopted a course of action that assumes that only "elitists" enjoy classical music, and that such people are presumably urban anyways and will therefore be able to find classical music concerts on their own where they live. Rural people are small town, down-home, regular hard-workin' folks who don't care for that kind of music anyways and won't miss it. And can't they just go online and download classical music if they want it?

It is the CBC brass, not the devoted fans of classical music, that is guilty of elitism. Housed in their downtown Toronto offices they are dismissing the needs of anyone not part of their urban world and their "edgy" world view. They are apparently unable to conceive of a Canada where the radio is the glue that attaches dispersed people to the rest of a vast country and to the world beyond.

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The Hungry City

The problem of feeding the world in an energy-poor future -- when we can hardly say the world has been fed in a time of wealth and plenty -- is gaining more attention all the time, particularly as it concerns the controversy over biofuels. But few are as blunt as is energy activist Jan Lundberg, who puts it as plainly as possible in his recent op-ed You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get Food.:

"We are headed for massive shortages of food and other essentials, mainly brought about by the depletion of geological fossil reserves of cheap energy and water. Three days is our average food supply around the modernized world, i.e., for cities and their supermarkets. Long-term food stocks have plummeted: 'Cereal stocks that are at their lowest level in 30 years,' according to Worldwatch institute in its most recent Vital Signs. This is exacerbated by increasingly weirder weather, compounded by the oil price/supply pressure on food."

Unfortunately, we're not going to be able to garden our way out of this crisis: despite rosy scenarios of a nation of urban gardeners, according to author Stan Cox Turning Your Lawn into a Victory Garden Won't Save You:

"Suppose that half of the land on every one-acre-or-smaller urban/suburban home lot in the entire nation were devoted to food-growing. That would amount to a little over 5 million acres sown to food plants...compare[d] with about 7 million acres of America's commercial cropland currently in vegetables, fruits, and nuts, and 350 to 400 million acres of total farmland."

The problem, according to Cox, is that farming has become so highly industrial, mechanized and concentrated in corporate hands that sweeping land reforms are needed to get more people working on the land.

Yet as Adrian Atkinson warns in his monumental three-part series on Cities After Oil, (see here; here and here) that's exactly what will happen anyways when industrial farming -- and just about everything else -- breaks down. The near-future collapse as energy supplies dwindle will render all conceptions of globalization obsolete and force a dramatic reduction in scale of all human activities. He writes,

"[O]nce the collapse sets in, the dense interdependence of our globalised world will be subject to strains, then shattering right across the system against which no modern state will be able to insulate itself, even if the impacts are differential. The whole orientation of political relations and structures of production and distribution will be violently torn apart ending in all probability...as the usual end result of the collapse of complex societies...in much smaller political entities with substantially simplified information and production systems and consumption patterns."

Without the ability to fuel our complex infrastructure of industrial agriculture production and distribution systems, there will be mass starvation. Cities will become uninhabitable; but the countryside will be unable to support the masses of refugees who will flood there.

"The return to locally organised life will not be temporary but rather a return to life somewhat as it was many generations ago, or even in the Middle Ages. Not even many of today's farmers will know how to farm under these circumstances and the making of appropriate farm implements and the raising of draft animals will take time."

Atkinson's papers are probably the most devastating I have ever read on our prospects in an energy-poor future. Even more thoughtful, thorough (and certainly more international in scope) than Kunstler's Long Emergency, Atkinson's analysis lays out how the discourse on "sustainability" has fallen so woefully short of addressing the impending crisis; how our Occidental world view of progress mediates against the adherence to natural limits; and how all current trends point to an exhaustion of fossil-based energy sources and an inexorable collapse of modern society.

The end of cheap energy, according to Atkinson, could bring about our extinction. At the very least we are facing a complete fragmentation of human habitations: small groups of people scattered in isolated communities, possibly at war with one another over the detritus of our civilization. A few generations of such existence might render unrecognizable any vestige of our society as we know it.

Atkinson's analysis is a must-read, if only to help us imagine a fate which we must by all means seek to avert. Planning for the post-carbon era is not just a matter of environmental sustainability, but the basis for continuing the project of civilization.

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Suburbia's "Point of no Return"

As we see oil surging towards $140.00 a barrel and gasoline prices reaching unprecedented levels; transit services reporting huge increases in ridership because people can’t afford to drive as much as they used to; housing markets drying up to the extent that some developers are offering “2-for-1” sales; tent cities sprouting around American cities, crowded with former homeowners who have lost their homes in the subprime mortgage crisis; thousands of renters evicted from homes that had fallen into foreclosure; Ford and General Motors closing factories, vowing to dramatically curtail or eliminate the production of SUVs, thereby throwing thousands out of work; credit drying up, making it difficult for people to get home and car loans; and the U.S. economy lurching into recession

--- it is difficult to escape the conclusion that something quite profound is happening all around us. It is as if everything is spinning out of control, and we are all getting a sense that, "this is what the 21st century will be about - a great unraveling of some things long taken for granted."

In such a time, what was once heresy becomes common wisdom, and the unthinkable becomes the new normal. Case in point: the emerging mainstream consensus in the mass media that Suburbia has no future.

Consider CNN's recent report that "the American Dream is collapsing into a nightmare". As thousands of suburban properties become abandoned, it appears that gangs are moving in. And it's not just the subprime debacle to blame: rather, it's a combination of

"changing demographics [as well as] a major shift in the way an increasing number of Americans -- especially younger generations -- want to live and work. Instead [of suburbia, homeowners] are looking for "walkable urbanism" -- both small communities and big cities characterized by efficient mass transit systems and high density developments enabling residents to walk virtually everywhere for everything -- from home to work to restaurants to movie theaters."

The Atlantic Magazine also weighed in on this phenomenon and speculated that suburbia does have a future – but only as the Next Slum:

"Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has looked carefully at trends in American demographics, construction, house prices, and consumer preferences. In 2006, using recent consumer research, housing supply data, and population growth rates, he modeled future demand for various types of housing. The results were bracing: Nelson forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) by 2025—that’s roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay."

In response to such gloomy scenarios, The Toronto Star recently opined that it's time to start retrofitting suburbia to prepare for an urban future, that it is the "only alternative:" "Every day it becomes clearer and clearer that the suburban model so beloved by Americans and Canadians doesn't work. In fact, the need for change has reached a critical moment, a point of no return."

While it's encouraging -- if sobering -- to see in mainstream news sources what was only a few years ago the stuff of planning students' papers, "peak oil" DVDs and blogs it's important to remind ourselves that media (some of them anyways) are years ahead of industry and government in this realization. Things move slowly in city-building: topsoil is only now being churned for subdivisions approved years ago.

Never mind radical change: many city politicians remain paralyzed on even the most basic of steps away from the old paradigm. For example, in my own city of Winnipeg -- even with gasoline prices escalating daily – city hall still can't decide if rapid transit is a good idea – despite debating the issue since 1976!

What will change that picture? Perhaps when enough voters suddenly find they can't afford their remote homes or the cars needed to supply them there will come a political point of no return, when people will demand radical changes in the way their cities and suburbs are built and provisioned.

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"Peak Information": Libraries and the End of Oil

Russell Smith's Globe & Mail column on why the digitization of books will not mean the end of libraries refers to what the director of the University Library at Harvard, Robert Darnton, recently wrote in the New York Review of Books: that

"no matter how successful the Google book project becomes - no matter how many libraries co-operate and no matter how many billions of pages are ultimately archived online - physical libraries full of paper books will become 'more important than ever.'"

Darnton’s argument includes the fact that Google could never hope to completely digitize all the holdings in the world’s libraries, and that unlike acid-free paper, electronic media degrade or become obsolete over time. So libraries will always have functions that computers can never replace.

Looking ahead, though, there are even more compelling reasons why libraries will not become extinct: in a world running out of cheap energy, we will need them too badly.

Debra Slone, writing this past March in Library Journal, has ventured to speculate how the public library will be affected by peak oil. Most of the article relates to an expected surge in reference questions on self-reliance, as people are no longer able to afford what they used to purchase, or else are unable to travel to get those things any more.

"Librarians will have to locate and provide information about local resources for food, medicine, travel, and shelter. They will be required to identify local talent and experts and list plants native to the area. They will carry information about the environmental needs of the region, its transportation and the source of the community's water, and whether it is healthy. Libraries will have to maintain current travel information (walking, bus, car, golf cart, etc.) and knowledge about local land use. Librarians will also identify and address barriers to information access. They will facilitate local access to people developing alternative means of transportation, energy, and more. They will keep track of available housing and whether there is enough of it. Armed with data about the resources that make communities function, librarians can begin to develop an information, communication, and referral system that addresses the unique needs and assets of their region."

But there is more: if we are in fact, facing an energy crisis of unprecedented scope and permanent duration, then the infrastructure we have created for the "information age" may itself become an inaccessible relic. As Adrian Atkinson writes in his remarkable trilogy Cities After Oil, when our society has passed the "peak oil" era and run out of cheap energy,

"[m]ost of what today is considered to be 'information' will disappear—for three reasons. Firstly, much information today is only available electronically and with the failure of electrical systems this will disappear through the illegibility of electronic memories. Secondly, most of what is deemed to be useful today by way of knowledge and information will lose its relevance and so be abandoned. And finally, making a living through developing and processing knowledge will become a luxury in so far as most human time will return to manual work in fields and workshops. One can imagine, if there is some planning for an energy- (and knowledge-) parsimonious future, that some centres (universities or whatever) will survive and these will rescue and store information and go on to recover or re-learn knowledge relevant to the emergent circumstances."

It may be hard to believe that we in the "information age" could be living in an era of "peak information". Yet there would appear a very real possibility that all those gazillions of bytes of data we now take for granted may well be lost as our society powers down. It makes Nicholson Baker's Double Fold -- a condemnation of microfilming, digitization and the disposal of paper in libraries -- seem doubly prescient.

If Atkinson, Slone and other peak oil theorists are to be heeded, libraries need to be thinking about a radically different mission for themselves in the coming decades: to act as a vital resource to enable communities to adapt to the new reality. As well, they may find themselves returning to the mission they held for centuries as Europe struggled from the ruins of Rome towards Enlightenment: preserving written records of civilizations past so that, when the era of crisis has subsided, something of what we are and now know may once again see the light of day.

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Indiana Jones and the Fridge of Doom

The newest Indiana Jones movie "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is generating a lot of derision for an early scene in which Jones finds himself in a mock-up of a 1950s subdivision populated with mannequins. He quickly realizes that this is a nuclear test site, and as a countdown echoes over a loudspeaker he seeks the only refuge he can: a refrigerator that turns out to be lined with lead. The blast hurls the fridge what appears to be several kilometers across the desert, where it crashes into the sizzling sand and tumbles repeatedly before coming to a steaming stop in front of a (CGI) gopher. Jones pushes the door open, and walks away with no apparent injury, watching as an enormous mushroom cloud rolls into the sky.

The scene is admittedly spectacular, and in its sunny evocation of all the requisite 50s suburban stereotypes in the shadow of a nuclear bomb tower (a mannequin family is seen watching Howdy Doody), rather creepy.

But Indy's survival of the nuclear blast has so strained the audience's otherwise willing suspension of disbelief that it has already generated a new buzz-phrase -- "Nuke the Fridge" as a successor to "Jump the Shark" -- meaning, that moment when a film series has gotten so ridiculous that it marks a new low in quality.

To show just how rapidly our culture can gorge on itself, the phrase has, in two short weeks taken on a life of its own. Nuke the Fridge has its own website and FaceBook Page. There are also a number of creative YouTube videos mocking the sequence.

I too was annoyed by the scene, but not just for its extreme unbelievability. It marks a new low in American cinema for its disturbingly casual use of nuclear weapons as a narrative device.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have turned the most horrifying technology ever devised and made it into a minor plot juncture, as if it were just another fight scene. Worse: it's actually monumentally unnecessary to the film's plot. It's completely irrelevant, a total non-sequitur. It could be entirely removed from the film with no loss of coherence. We interrupt this film to bring you a scene from the end of the world.

The result is in my opinion is a total mind f**k for the audience.

While it's true that this is a fantasy film, and not supposed to be taken too seriously, watching a nuclear apocalypse go off around Indy does irreparable damage to the fantasy universe these films have set up. It's true, too, that the Bomb has driven the plots of any number of adventure films (Thunderball etc), but actually setting one off a few thousand yards from the film's hero is a whole order of horror beyond anything the viewer of a fantasy film should expect or tolerate. It's too terrible a thing to make light entertainment out of -- kind of like having Spielberg and Lucas come up with a clever and amusing way for Indy to escape from a gas chamber at Auschwitz.

As a result, a beloved film character is put through an experience the audience knows he couldn't have possibly survived, and for no good reason. It's not just that it's unbelievable; the audience simply *cannot believe* he's still alive. I don't know about you, but I kept waiting for his hair to fall out. Not the kind of thinking you want to be doing at an Indiana Jones film!

The real mind f**k is that the set-up of the scene is so horrifying, so realistic and apocalyptic in its execution that its corny, jokey denouement (the aforementioned gopher stares at Indy and then jumps back into its hole) creates a jarring psychological rupture in the mind of the viewer.

I personally found the cognitive dissonance of the scene very disturbing, and it affected my experience of the rest of the film. It was kind of like watching Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, in which Jimmy Stewart's character is in the opening scenes suspended off a building with no hope of survival, so that all subsequent action in the movie, too, is 'suspended' over an abyss.

In this case, I doubt very much that this was the intention. But intended or not, the "nuke the fridge" scene suggests a more serious psychological consequence for the viewer, owing not only to the dissonance it evokes, but to the particular juncture in history when this film was released.

The rhetoric coming from the governments of the United States and Israel threatening Iran with attack are getting more frequent and more bellicose. Whether through the direct use of nuclear weapons on Iran's nuclear facilities, or simply through the destruction of such facilities by "conventional" means, we are probably closer to seeing a nuclear war than at any time since the end of the Soviet Union. It has become politically mainstream to threaten Iran with destruction (John McCain went so far as to sing about it) and none of the major political candidates running for U.S. president have stated that nuclear weapons are 'off the table.'

So to my mind Spielberg's and Lucas' narrative use of the Bomb is rather tone-deaf. While Crystal Skull isn't without its political commentary (it makes Indy the subject of a McCarthy-esque witch-hunt and has a character mutter, "I don't recognize this country anymore"), its attempt to bring the series into the 1950s fails, chiefly because of this sequence.

In the 1950s, the specter of nuclear destruction was so recent, so possible and so widely feared that it could not be treated this casually at the movies. In fact, a filmed depiction of nuclear destruction this realistic (minus the fridge, of course) would probably have panicked an audience in 1957 and retained a chilling reputation for decades. Yet 50 years on, it's little more than an inconvenience for Indiana Jones.

While nobody is going to be going out to buy lead-lined refrigerators after seeing the movie, I do worry that, like the actual nuclear tests of the 1950s, Crystal Skull will serve to desensitize audiences to nuclear war, normalizing atomic destruction at an historical moment when we should be most aroused against it.

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