pafret Loc: Northeast

"Lamentation"
by James Howard Kunstler



"An awful lot of sheetrock is going to be permanently ruined over the next few days down along the coast of Dixieland. Following the spectacle of hurricane reportage on TV reveals very little while the event is in progress. The cheapo building materials of the stereotypical strip malls flap around in the gale and the valiant cable news storm-chasers lean into the horizontal deluge in the empty parking lots, but their reportage doesn’t tell much of the real story, which only emerges when the roaring blob of weather moves on and the sun finally comes out.

More than a decade of punishing storms along the US coastline must be wrecking the insurance industry as much as the stuff on the landscape. They’ve been pummeled from another direction for ten years by the supernaturally low interest rates that make it so hard to refurbish their coffers after whole regions like the Houston metro area and the entire island of Puerto Rico get blasted and they have to pay out billions in claims.

This time around, all those vinyl and chip-board McHouses along the Atlantic beaches will not be replaced. But farther inland, far from the roaring surf, along all the overflowing estuaries that drain the coastal plain, the damage will be widespread and epic. It may create a whole new social class of de-housed, displaced Sunbelters who will never again have a decent place of their own to live in. Since many are retirees, the event may even lead to a stealth die-off of people who are just too far along to start over.

The lamentation for the northern part of “flyover” America is an old story now. Nobody is surprised anymore by the desolation of de-industrialized places like Youngstown, Ohio, or Gary, Indiana, where American wealth was once minted the hard way by men toiling around blast furnaces. But the southeast states enjoyed a strange interlude of artificial dynamism since the 1950s, which is about three generations, and there is little cultural memory for what the region was like before: an agricultural backwater with few cities of consequence and widespread Third Worldish poverty, barefoot children with hookworm, and scrawny field laborers in ragged straw hats leaning on their hoes in the stifling heat.

The demographic shifts of recent decades turned a lot of it into an endless theme park of All-You-Can-Eat buffets, drive-in beer emporia, hamburger palaces, gated retirement subdivisions, evangelical churches built like giant muffler shops, vast wastelands of free parking, and all the other trappings of the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. Like many of history’s prankish proceedings, it seemed like a good idea at the time. As survivors slosh around in the plastic debris in the weeks ahead, and the news media spins out its heartwarming vignettes of rescue and heroism, will there be any awareness of what has actually happened: the very sudden end of a whole regional economy that was a tragic blunder from the get-go?

It is probably hard to imagine Dixieland struggling into wh**ever its next economy might be. In some places, it’s not even possible to return to a prior economy based on agriculture. A lot of the landscape was farmed so ruinously for two hundred years that the soil has turned into a kind of natural cement, called hardpan or caliche. The climate prospects for the region are not favorable either, not to mention the certain cessation of universal air-conditioning and “happy motoring” that made the unwise mega-developments of recent decades possible.

The one salutary effect of Hurricane Florence may be that news of the after-effects will supersede the incoherent manufactured political blather welling up around the coming midterm e******ns — especially if the financial damage is powerful enough to disturb the debt-fueled occult economic “boom” attributed to the magic powers of our deal-wielding POTUS."
- http://kunstler.com/

Carol Kelly

I agree with all of this except an early paragraph about insurance. After Katrina there were signs all over the place like Nationwide Where AreYou. We’d had our insurance with the same company, life, car, home for more than forty years. We were retired! And they paid us for the contents on the east wall and not much more although we were fully covered, we thought. The entire four bedroom, three bath, etc. brick home was completely gone. The truck we’d left behind was nose down in the mud up to the back end. We were told we’d have to get it out before they could assess the damage. Fema offered no assistance because we had too much. I guess too much of everything, but then we didn’t because we had to start all over again. Katrina brought a forty foot surge in and what the wind didn’t destroy, the water washed away. Just saying! This is what people have to face. By the way contrary to reporting the brunt of Katrina hit Mississippi, not New Orleans. There were buses fueled up, those people need not have taken over the New Orleans Saints dome stadium. They could have gotten themselves out instead of waiting to be taken care of. I’m glad I got that off my chest. If you read it, thank you.
I feel much better now.

woodguru

That's going to play hell with the republican base in N Carolina.

pafret Loc: Northeast

This doesn't surprise me. It was far cheaper to pay off the few who could afford to mount a lawsuit to compel their performance. Until then they just lied, stiffed everyone on their coverage and left them out to hang. Insurance Companies are like that, all of them.

Idaho

I can recall years ago in Junior High, living in St Louis, we drove out town in the start of a weekend camping trip on an interstate that was elevated above the bottom land adjacent to one of the rivers (I am fuzzy now about which). On previous trips over the years this section of the drive had sometimes been flooded. This time all the vegetation had been pulled out, big old cotton woods, willows and other large trees removed and the surface had been blacktopped or concreted for acres around a new industrial building.

It made a lasting impression. I asked my dad what the business owners were going to do when it flooded again, thinking there must be some super pump and sandbag arrangement somewhere and interested to see it. (Flooding around St Louis is common and my dad took us with him a few times to help with sandbagging in the community - not sure if young people ever do that anymore).

I was shocked at the time by his answer, enough to remember it today. The companies concerned would get government to declare a natural disaster and rebuild it for them. In my naivety I asked why they were able to get the government to pay for it, when it was their own stupid fault for building there? I liked the next answer even less - because they were friends with the big bosses in government and that’s just the way things work.

So we are living today with stupidity and corruption that has been going on for decades. Want to do something about that? Go get elected into local government on an anti-corruption ticket. Regardless of where you live, there is probably a major need for honest patriots to participate in civic activities.

Carol Kelly

And there is an honest need. It’s just difficult to tell anymore who’s honest who’s not.
Former lifelong democrats running on Republican tickets? How can you tell where the sincerity is. But your Dad was completely right.