http://www.truth-out.org/james-howard-kunstler-where-have-we-been-where-are-we-going61264These factories at what was first called Bakers Falls began in 1858 as an iron machine works, intended to produce the frames for water wheels. Soon they quit that in favor of making replacement parts for the growing paper-making industry that made use of the pulpwood from the Adirondack Mountains. Activities related to this went on clear through the 1960s, about a century in all, until things fell apart in the upper Hudson Valley and business mysteriously went elsewhere.
I'm sure it was a mystery to many of the people around here who got a living from these factories, who felt strong, willing, and able to trade their labor for a decent paycheck. How could the world not need them anymore? American political leadership explained it rather poorly to them. This was a new economy, they said. From now on making a living in America would be all about being clever at cooking up "innovations" that the rest of the people in the world could use in order to churn things out for us at twenty cents an hour.
America's young people, they said, should go to college, even if it meant taking on a lifetime of loan obligations. Or enroll at the local community college to learn "computer technology," the coming thing.
What really happened to places like Hudson Falls is now painfully visible on-the-ground, in the streets, and in the shopfront windows, which are either vacant or occupied by the most marginal businesses - martial arts studios (training for what? Gang war? Insurrection? Afghanistan?), second-hand shops, and the ubiquitous pizza joints for a cheese-hungry populace. The once dignified business blocks at the small center of town - itself perched on a bluff with a panoramic view west - are vacant and falling into gross disrepair. The owner class of citizen, still inveighed against in progressive radio circles, are so gone that their ghosts seem to have packed up and left, too. But then so is every other class of people above the nether-class - that is, people engaged in something other than subsidized idleness and crime, people who's only obligation in life is waking up in the morning. (No wonder the nation is obsessed with zombies these days.) I passed a wedding late in the afternoon on my way out of town. The bride had a tattoo the size of bumper-sticker on her décolletage. The groomsmen were dressed in black baby shorts and backwards hats. You want to weep for their offspring.
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