Sweet America.
“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”
- America, Baudrillard.
Americans like to believe that a great totalitarian state will have men on every corner holding guns. The great church-state they fear has come to pass, and the simple fact is the streets are too wide to need the guns with men. You can run forever in an American street, at least until your body sprawls across the window of a car. For the American the car window is a great TV screen, the landscape outside passes them by and nothing seems to happen, or more specifically nothing happens to them. A nation full of things that do not happen. To the American anything that happens through the window of a car simply happens elsewhere, it is how they can speed past the wreck of another car, for it did not happen to them. Americans could crash into each other in a city and form a great pileup and the next day it would simply not seem to ever occurred, the streets would be cleaned and the events forgotten about. America is at this point a place for cars, the urban planner, the great idiot she is, believes that no longer are there people but instead simply cars. Virilio said the engineers of the 18th century in their fortress plans “don't even mention the troops assigned to defend it, as if the fortress were capable of functioning by itself.”1 And that is what we see with the entire urban sprawl! The city faeself is thought to pass through time without anyone living in it. You could kill thousands of people in a city and in a few weeks no one would remember if you left the architecture unharmed. Now if you killed one of the few monuments in a city then that event would never be forgotten, for in 9/11 it was not the people who mattered, it was just the symbol. Every American city has very few monuments or reference points, you can get lost so easily, everything looks so same it almost makes you want to blow someone’s head off. Have you seen those apartments? The ones that are in every city. They seemed to all have popped up in the 2010s and seem as if they could be burned so easily, once you see them you cannot stop seeing them. If you enter the wrong way you cannot find your way around, only able to find your own apartment via habit. The people in these apartments do not know their neighbors, the grill or pool the apartments offer go unused, there is no community here. This is why the church-state of America does not need any of this nonsense with men with guns on every corner, because no one goes out, they sit in their apartments and wish for something better, or at least something different. Americans happily await the end of the world because it is the only thing they believe could save them from all of this. I do not want the end of the world, I just wish the apartments looked like anything else and not copy and pasted nonsense. “We wish to end the world” is so easy to say but no one has done it yet. The architecture that I speak of here is not supernatural, it is merely boring, so boring it bores you to death. Anything interesting in America is killed quickly. The city went from a place to be lived in to a place that things happen to live in. Dead flesh pretending it is alive! Those murals you see that say nothing at all save “I am here and I will be here forever!” Foolish murals forgetting that what makes good art in a city is the fact no part of it will be there in thirty years. Men like banksy do not understand that their things will be painted over by another person. The ads are everywhere but if you tear one or cover it up down a woman with skin white as klan robes will run up to you and delight in exercising her civic duty to making sure nothing happens. I do not care about the oppression of the suburban white woman. She happily waits to call the cops on those she deems unsavory, she would call the police to kill all of nature. The White Woman is happy to rot in her perfect house and wonder why no one talks to each other. She wants to be an Aryan Fucker but is not pretty or blond enough for it so she just tries to come as close as one can.
These White Women have raised an entire generation of idiots who believe that all art must reflect the ideal world rather than reflect the that-which-is and comment upon it, the point of art is to see the ideal and to comment upon the that-which-is and via these two actions help us move past the that-which-is. The suburbs are the prime example of that-which-is, they stretch so far into the past and future they seem to forever be stuck in 2005 or 1993, they stretch across the landscape like a great desert, or rather an image of what the west believes the desert is, lifeless. At first there was a that-which-is that was quite different from our that-which-is, and this single realm was split into two to become the civilized and the other part became nature. The that-which-is of the civilized supposes it should become a true that-which-is, and it seems it has done its job, one cannot be in nature anymore, all of nature is now simply a captured victim of the civilized. Those apartments with the sameness that kills never are protested much because they are that-which-is! Time wraps in on itself to the point there is no escape it seems. We can only move past the that-which-is by replacing it, carving out its flesh and building where it once stood, not by destroying it. That-which-is shall then fall apart and there shall only be many worlds on Earth and not a single. I do not wish to destroy a park, I wish instead to take it and transform it into a place for the cohabitation of beings, those beings we suppose are natural, geese, ducks, so forth, and those we suppose are civilized, and then have it all simply be there.
Speed and Politics, page 38, 2006 editon.