Excess
This essay is about excess, or more precisely; the misspent and squandered human, natural, and to a degree, creative resources. America has always been a land of plenty, and continues today even with the current population of over three hundred million. But of late we’ve drifted into gluttony, and our avarice has exceeded the national productive capacity by about ten percent (a simple estimate subtracting the international trade and federal deficits from the GDP). I ignore alternative views coming from the left and right fringes, the resource or behavior economists; their conclusions confound enumeration, and Mother Nature eschews quantification, and her wrath is capricious. The idiom, Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman Scorned applies to Gaia’s looming vengeance. Beware!
Excess is a word rarely used by social scientists and others who attempt economic and societal analyses and projections; they are more concerned with avoiding inaccuracies. Academic prognosticators, especially economists, shy away from words that express imprecise or spurious conclusions. I use excess here in a pejorative sense, a way to paint an impressionistic picture of the American consumer economy. The truth is somewhat more misleading; we have an excess of material wealth, but too many rich and poor people and a wide crater in the center — an imbalanced and unhealthy state of national affairs. For the middle-class, it’s a Mad Max race for economic survival, one that is slowly degrading domestic life and leaving otherwise healthy people despondent and morose. Excess, when it’s distributed disproportionately or haphazardly leads to profligacy, demoralization, and ultimately destroys a nation’s spirit and hope.
I often witness the effects of excess when walking or bicycling through the streets of my hometown of Pittsburgh; it’s an exercise in forbearance. I recoil and oftentimes shy away from the stark, side by side poverty and wealth; poverty because of the detritus scattered about from panhandling, drugs, alcohol abuse, unhygienic lifestyles, littering, decrepit housing, and most recently, the uptick in roving youth gangs. Wealth because of the obtrusive and luxurious condominiums, ubiquitous electronic surveillance cameras, monster sports utility vehicles, boutique hotels, expensive and extravagant sit-down restaurants, and haughty, off-putting attitudes. They are indeed an odd couple, the bedraggled and the bejeweled, thrown together, helter-skelter, counter-intuitively buttressing each other like an engineering student’s Rube Goldberg contraption.
Admitting being a little selfish, I’m biased in favor of aesthetics. If buildings, people, streets, and parks look good, in these places, they usually escape my reproach — ignorance is indeed bliss. But excess has become pervasive, impelling me to go deeper, investigate the reasons, and consider advocating for reform and alternatives. Excess has besmirched our fragile world, made the whole country ugly, the beaches, deserts, forests, and farmland, metropolitan centers, suburbs, the few remaining free-flowing rivers and the Rocky Mountains.
Historically, American cities in the Northeast and Midwest favored economic prosperity over cosmetics. They made fortunes in manufacturing, transportation, food processing, beer breweries, and real estate development. Corporate and government leaders who lived like kings, inspired the grandest edifices, both public and private — extravagant showcases to show off their cities to the world. It ended quite suddenly when deindustrialization struck in the mid-eighties. Soon after the smoke cleared in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Gary, and Bethlehem, and the factories closed in Baltimore, Flint, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Rochester, the workers dispersed, which left only the poor and disenfranchised. The wealth shifted to New York City, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Seattle. Excess is cyclical, but it has taken a detour into crass consumerism.
Corporate and government leaders in my hometown, Pittsburgh, did their best to cover the devastation with a sparkling downtown and North Shore revitalization; sports stadiums, universities, and medical centers, but the incipient rot spread to the edges, destroying hundreds of surrounding once prosperous mill towns caught in a vortex of social/economic decline. They have yet to recover. Social progressives came to the rescue. They reminded me of an old Ma & Pa Kettle movie where the family spiffed up the farmstead ahead of the Farm Bureau’s inspection, in comic relief, only falling apart mid-visit. Though a fictional comedy, the Ma & Pa Kettle movie mirrors efforts by our local progressives.
Not only have we descended into shameless consumerism, we’ve done it with scant regard to what we left behind. Forgive this wild life analogy, but our middens are indeed disgraces; the wolf packs are tidier. In this essay I focus on three primary targets: the car, trash, and consumerism.
The most flagrant and destructive display of excess revolves around our autocentric lifestyles; and this, I concede, is a personal matter. I recoil with caution and exasperation as thousands of oversized motor vehicles overcome me on my bicycle, choking the air, turning the streets into demolition derbies, killing wildlife, endangering pedestrians and cyclists, and draining individual and family financial reserves; in short, a massive onslaught of carbon-emitting machines driven by people oblivious to the damage they are causing to themselves and the earth. To date, three have hit me, two from behind and one from the side, by the mercy of the merciful Fates, notwithstanding my bike, I suffered only minor injuries. I repeatedly admonish people, especially the young, about the inanity of purchasing and maintaining a car, accusing them of prioritizing it ahead of home ownership, a baby, an advanced degree, or a more secure retirement. Today, with the war in the Middle East raging, I add national security.
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The car is also responsible for the hollowing out of our once great American cities. When the road builders constructed the Interstate Highways System and linked it to major arteries leading into metropolitan areas, they provided an escape route to millions of urban dwellers confined to over-crowded urban neighborhoods. Understandably, people wanted breathing room, perhaps a yard and a garden. Companies and jobs followed, which led to more suburbanites and more freeways, and quite imperceptibly, a congested and inadequate transportation infrastructure.
The Autocentric economy has morphed into an autonomous machine, one that few if any have any direct control. Reversing course is the only option. Backtracking on highway construction or commencing deconstruction are good initial starts. It would reduce the number of cars on the road — a simple remedy for many older cities in the Northeast. People would adjust their lifestyles, and in time, revitalize the urban centers.
Moving on to trash. Years ago, on a walk with my father, we passed a row of garbage cans placed on the sidewalk; his comment: they oozed poverty. His words ring in my ears on every pickup day. I took it to heart — trash is just another excess exposing its ugly head. A couple who lives in a house two doors from me places at least four Hefty plastic bags filled with garbage on the sidewalk every week. They are a middle-class, professional couple, homeowners, two cars, two incomes, and no children, though they claim not to be wealthy. All Americans, rich, poor, college educated, young and old have become oblivious to the trash they produce. Yet, in our minds we know there is no such thing as waste; we live on a cyclical biosphere; the earth eventually recycles everything back to nature, including, if we persist in our trashy habits, the human species. Mother Nature, as a matter of self-defense, may eventually produce a virus to eradicate us.
There are ways that we can mitigate excess trash, but it must be participatory, not wholly dependent on municipal governments, though a degree of enforcement is necessary. It starts with early childhood indoctrination based on the premise that there is no such thing as waste; everything must return to its natural form, even our bodily excretions. It’s imperative if we are ever to conquer space. Again, my concern is not so much with its effect on the environment as it is with my own sensibilities; trash simply looks, smells, feels, sounds, and even tastes bad. As for aesthetics, it’s inelegant — bad form.
Finally, consumerism, the bête noire of the American way of life. A columnist from the San Francisco Chronicle once wrote that the consumer economy will eventually die of ugliness, a jeremiad responding to President Reagan’s speech indirectly encouraging shopping as the answer for the American economy. I’m still waiting. Consumerism is the corollary of the free enterprise system, not predicated on the production of necessary products or services, but the pursuit of profit. A car is a good example, initially a better mode of transportation, now simply a way to make money. The car is at the heart of consumerism, and oil is its lifeblood. Take them away and the American economy would collapse. Isn’t any wonder that we are willing to go to war to protect the oil and auto industries? We should thank the Islamic Republic for driving home this bitter truth.
Consumerism is indeed ugly. This is apparent to anyone who walks through big box stores like Costco or Sam’s Club. I recently bicycled there for their lunchtime samples — sparing no opportunity to save money, even at the price of humility. The store, located in an enormous shopping center called the Waterfront, a development built on an industrial brownfield at the old US Steel site, once the biggest steel producer in the world. The Homestead Works, until 1982 employed tens of thousands of union workers. The surrounding communities, despite the retail development, have since devolved into ghettos. But I’m going off track — apologies. Everything at Costco is oversized, the parking lot, the store, the shelving, the products on display, and most distressing, the shoppers — a retail outlet conceived, designed, and built for a cohort of giants. I don’t mean to unfairly single out Costco; they are only one in the many like businesses at the Waterfront, all with the same oversized configuration.
There is a corporate style diner called Eat’n Park along the river. It sits on a pod (shopping center parlance for a restaurant fronted by a football stadium size parking lot). Feeling the urge for coffee and a slice of cherry pie, an indulgence once enjoyed at neighborhood diners, I walked in, looked about, and immediately lost my appetite. My first thought was they needed a better interior designer, then recalling the giants at Costco, I relented. The restaurant lacked any semblance of the now vanishing, inner-city diners. Everything was out of proportion, the stools too distant from the counter, the booths too wide, aisles that could accommodate six people walking abreast, the ceiling too high, and the air too saccharine sweet. The wait staff, at the sight of a lone cyclist wanting only coffee and a slice of cherry pie, ala mode, ignored me. I walked out and cycled back to my home, eight miles away via a bucolic path along the Monongahela River, the highlight of my day.
In conclusion, American business people built a modern marketplace not fit for humans, but ideal for giant, voracious mega-consumers — excess at scale. The architects of the consumer economy worked hard to disguise the inherent inequalities, the environmental damage, the aesthetic blasphemy, and the insults to the natural human anatomy.
Emil B. Lester, Jr.
