De nye kjøpesenterkristne

Kjør derfor ut og gjør alle bilister til mine disipler i det dere døper dem i den suburbane bunkerens, bilens og kjøpesenterets navn. Amen!

Les først den briljante artikkelen i Vårt Land:

- Kjør derfor ut

Som dere ser øverst har jeg fullført den nye misjonsbefalingen VL påbegynte.

Deretter kom en pastor fra Straume med et aldeles horribelt tilsvar. Dette er det like greit å ikke forspille tid på, les heller min kommentar:

- Lavmål fra kristen-Norge!

Det er svært trist å se en teolog forsvare det suburbane helvetet som har kvalt vårt land, fremelsket av General Motors og andre. Heldigvis finnes det mer oppegående mennesker, som ikke forkynner denne splittelsen av livet, hvor alle meningsfulle forbindelser er brutt. Her vil jeg særlig trekke fram den kristne filosofen og forfatteren Wendell Berry.

“Here we can see the radical nature of Berry’s vision. Our entire economy, our very culture of work, leisure, and home is constructed around the idea of easy mobility and the disintegration of various aspects of our lives. We live in one place, work in another, shop in another, worship in another, and take our leisure somewhere else. According to Berry, an integrated life, a life of integrity, is one characterized by membership in a community in which one lives, works, worships, and conducts the vast majority of other human activities. The choice is stark: “If we do not live where we work, and when we work, we are wasting our lives, and our work too.””

– Wendell Berry And The New Urbanism: Agrarian Remedies, Urban Prospects: http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2011/03/wendell-berrys-new-urbanism-agrarian-remedies-urban-prospects/

Denne splittelsen av livet er det Nyborg forsvarer, denne dyrkelsen av individualisme og konsum. Det suburbane ble promotert av PR-industriens far Edvard Bernays, for å gjøre folk bilavhengige. Den suburbane giftsuppa du forkynner er hverken urban eller rural, en kvasikultur som har gjort Norge til et ødeland. Alternativet er VillageTowns, som jeg nylig skrev et innlegg om.

- Village Towns for Norwegian Countryside

"Let's face it, Plan A (automobile-based suburban sprawl) is not working anymore. We need a Plan B.

We call it VillageTown."

I dag publiserte jeg en artikkel om lommenabolaget, som er alternativet til den suburbane konsumentbunkeren din konsumeristmenighet forkynner.

- Tre lommelandsbyer på Østlandet?

Selv har jeg gått på Bildøy bibelskole, som ble flyttet fra sentrum av Bergen ut til det suburbane helvetet ute på Straume. Det hadde jeg ikke gjort i dag! Aldri vender jeg tilbake dit, og de får ikke ei krone mer av meg. Denne bibelskolen med sin plassering er en hyllest til det suburbane, som drepte den norske kulturen, inklusive grenda mi, hvor totenåsens apostel holdt til.

Hva Kunstler skriver om det suburbane er også en beskrivelse av Norge:

"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.” – James Howard Kunstler, “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape”, page 166

"In America, with its superabundance of cheap land, simple property laws, social mobility, mania for profit, zest for practical invention, and Bible-drunk sense of history, the yearning to escape industrialism expressed itself as a renewed search for Eden. America reinvented that paradise, described so briefly and vaguely in the book of genesis, called it Suburbia, and put it for sale.” – James Howard Kunstler, “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape”, page 37

“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.” – James Howard Kunstler, “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape”, page 167

“But this new wealth was spent on suburban houses, and on cars to get to them and appliances to put in them. It transformed American (and Norwegian) culture. The private world of home and family was everything; the public realm was out. When middle-class families took a vacation, it meant a trip by car to a national park, or perhaps to a second home by a mountain lake or beach. Most of all, it meant getting away from other people. Americans (and Norwegians) no longer wished to congregate in “playgrounds” like Atlantic City where most of the action took place in public places with crowds of strangers pressing in. Those still in the habit went to new playgrounds like Miami Beach, where the decor was not threadbare and the weather nicer. If you wanted the public realm in postwar America (and Norway), there was TV.” – James Howard Kunstler, “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape”, page 229

“I don’t believe automobile suburbs are an adequate replacement for cities, since the motive force behind suburbia has been the exaltation of privacy and the elimination of the public realm. Where city life optimizes the possibility of contact between people, and especially different kinds of people, the suburb strives to eliminate precisely that kind of human contact.” – James Howard Kunstler, “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape”, page 189

The Dream, more specifically, was a detached home on a sacred plot of earth in a rural setting, unbesmirched by the industry that made the home possible; a place where one could play at cultivating the soil without having to rely on husbandry for a livelihood; a place that was, most of all, not the city. – James Howard Kunstler, “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape”, page 101

Den modernistiske arkitekturen du og dine sammen med den norske kirke forsvarer er et uttrykk for fornektelsen av historien, kulturen og Gud. Jeg har skrevet en artikkel om temaet hos Kulturverk:

- Ser vi Guds finger i Kvartal 42, Kristiansand?

Det er visst ikke kun grenda mi som har falt, hele kristennorge har falt!

- I finstua til Totenåsens apostel

Dessverre kommer ikke boka til Spaans ut før jul, så jeg får ønske meg et gavekort. Den blir garantert en god oppfølger til James Howard Kunstlers bok, som jeg leste tidligere i år. For de som ikke har lest den, den er også en god beskrivelse av forslummingen av det norske urbane og rurale landskapet, omformet i bilens bilde, ikke i Guds bilde. Her er et totalt fravær av Gud.

Heldigvis ser vi et opprør på gang i Sverige, men på Straume ser de alle ut til å være fortapt til det suburbane helvetet, slik den fabelaktige urbanisten Nathan Lewis formulerer det.

www.arkitekturupproret.se

Denne artikkelen var et lavmål. Norske konsumentkristne gidder jeg ikke å ha noe mer med å gjøre. Dere har absolutt ingen av kvalitetene til min oldefar og totenåsens apostel.

Takk til Ronny Spaans, en av Norges mest klartenkte urbanister! Helt på linje med Nathan Lewis! Gå til Lewis sitt fantastiske arkiv, hvis du som jeg ble oppgitt og frustrert over rotet og tullet fra Geir Magnus Nyborg!

Traditional City/Heroic Materialism Series Archive