Den suburbane kulturen anno 2016; dvs. den nye norske kulturen

Lesningen av James Howard Kunstlers bok "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape", skrider sakte framover. Og jeg bøyer meg stadig dypere i støvet for denne klarsynte giganten og hvordan Kunstler med sitt uovertrufne språk, humor og sarkasme, beskriver den vitsen vi og vår kultur har blitt. Her er nok en liten lekkerisken for tenkende lesere:

Across the rural northeast, where I live, the countryside is littered with new houses. It was good farmland until recently. On every country road, every unpaved lane, every former cowpath, stand new houses, and each one is somebody's version of the American Dream. Most are simple raised ranches based on tried-and-true formulas – plans conceived originally in the 1950s, not rethought since then, and sold ten thousand times over.

These housing "products" represent a triumph of mass merchandising over regional building traditions, of salesmanship over civilization. You can be sure the same houses have been built along a highway strip outside Fresno, California, as at the edge of a swamp in Pahokee, Florida, and on the blizzard-blown fringes of St. Cloud, Minnesota. They might be anywhere. The places they stand are just different versions of nowhere, because these houses exist in no specific relation to anything except the road and the power cable. Electric lighting has reduced the windows to lame gestures. Tradition comes prepackaged as screw-on aluminium shutters, vinyl clapboards, perhaps a phony cupola on the roof ridge, or a plastic pediment over the door – tribute, in sad vestiges, to a lost past from which nearly all connections have been severed. There they sit on their one- or two- or half-acre parcels of land – the scruffy lawns littered with the jetsam of a consumerist religion (broken tricycles, junk cars, torn plastic wading pools) – these dwellings of a proud and sovereign people. If the ordinary house of our time seems like a joke, remember that it expresses the spirit of our age. The question, then, is: what kind of joke represents the spirit of our age? And the answer is: a joke on ourselves. - Kunstler, side 166

Denne amerikanske søppelkulturen er det at herr Fossemøllens øyensten, grenda mi, det totscansce landskapet, ja vår nasjon har gått tapt til!

Kunstler fortsetter:

The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather, it seals them off from it. The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.

The car, of course, is the other connection to the outside world, but to be precise it connects the inhabitants to the inside of their car, not to the outside world per se. The outside world is only an element for moving through, as submarines move through water. - Kunstler, side 167

Slik er altså den suburbane kulturen anno 2016, dvs. den nye norske kulturen. For med Sigmund Kvaløy Setrengs død har vi ikke lenger to kulturer på norsk jord!

Med Sigmund K. Setrengs bortgang døde den norske kulturen ut. Tilbake står vi med en reindyrket suburban kultur, med raserene suburbanitter. Ingenting annet!

Foto: Jens Petter Søraa