Kunstler's Evil Empire

The Red Barn Burger JointDuring the culminating chapter of this week’s reading, Kunstler sets out to identify facets of “The Evil Empire.” His choice of title, which now cannot be disassociated from the popular Bush-era rhetoric of a decade later, should be a warning sign from the beginning. Besides using a particularly modernist mental exercise of separating the good from the bad—strange for such a critic of modernism—this declaration comes from an intellectual simplicity that lacks any sense of subtlety. In a brash attempt to grab attention from the complacent citizen, The Geography of Nowhere reduces complex processes with little hesitation. Kunstler’s criticism of the scholarship of J.B. Jackson in particular, and the university system in general, exposes his larger agenda. (It should be noted here that I hardly know Jackson’s work, and certainly have no attachment it—my goal here is not to pick his work off the ground after Kunstler’s decisive knockdown. I hope merely to complicate the simplistic dichotomy that Kunstler creates. Further, I share much of Kunstler’s personal feelings towards the current phase of the built environment; it is his approach that I want to criticize here.) As Kunstler describes it, Jackson “especially loved the task of trying to understand how it all worked,” to delve deeper into the inner workings of spatial organization and the social functions existent therein (122). This curiosity is troublesome for Kunstler because it lacks the pragmatism necessary for critical observation—he imagines Jackson sitting back, content with a passive interaction with both the built and natural environment. “He was not interested in consequences, only manifestations,” Kunstler proclaims, a statement that I can neither confirm nor dispute through personal knowledge (122). Jackson’s supposed shortcoming plays out most vividly at the Red Barn hamburger joint. As Kunstler claims, “a Jacksonian student of landscape can observe a Red Barn hamburger joint … and never arrive at the conclusion that the Red Barn is an ignoble piece of shit that degrades the community” (123-4). In this passage of frustration with not only Jackson but also the state of the entire world, Kunstler seems to provoke for provoking’s sake. Kunstler’s mistake lies not in his desire for a critical gaze, but that the critical gaze he provides is rather unsatisfactory in and of itself, not to mention accompanied by cheap shots. His criticism balloons quickly from the scale of a single scholar to global proportions in an effort to point out moments of stupidity that symbolize things far greater. In doing so, he paints a colorless image of developmental change that, in turn, only takes away from the power of his claims.