Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Looking forward to the Consumer Electronics Show?
CES, held in early January every year in Las Vegas, is the largest trade show in the world. So along comes my buddy, apocalyptacist James Kunstler, with this description of Las Vegas:
The city is a pathological hypertrophic suburbanoid anomaly in the middle of a desert wasteland, analogous to a deadly tumor growing in a remote part of a person's body, say the colon. The tumor of Las Vegas was established for the same reason that a tumor occurs in a body: exposure to toxins and broken DNA. In the case of Las Vegas, the main toxin has been a half-century of cheap energy. The broken DNA is present in the animating principle behind the gambling mecca, the idea that it is possible to get something for nothing. If anything, the destiny of Las Vegas is to dry up and blow away, sooner rather than later. Here's why:And the why he lays out is not "over the top" at all; a half a century of bubbliciously cheap energy, leading to cheap water in deserts, leading to . . .
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