The American lifestyle frankly sucks. The media is generally shit. The food stinks. We spend too much time in traffic and too much time taking care of a badly built McHouse that has the ergonomics of a coach seat on a discount airline. Add to that the lack of health care (just listened to a Stanford lecture about the American Couple that cited a study that determined that the single biggest predictor of long-term marital happiness is whether both partners have health care), the enormous wealth-gap between the rich and poor, blisteringly expensive tertiary education, an infant mortality rate that's straight out of Victorian England, and a national security apparat that shoves its fist up my asshole every time I get on an airplane, and I don't think that this country is much of a paragon of quality living.
(Via Beyond the Beyond.)
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Cory Doctorow nails it:
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3 comments:
Don't read the quote I posted in isolation. This isn't a case of "hating America"; it's a matter of seeing what we're doing wrong and being willing to learn by example.
I like how CD turns the question of "how many earths would it take to allow everyone to live like an American?" around to: how many would it take to support the lifestyle of the average Florentine?"
Unfortunately, when people talk about those lovely old European cities that are liveable and walkable and funky, they're really just talking about the really expensive parts that only well-off people can afford to live in. You won't find any starving poets living in the center of Paris, for example. Any city in the world has it's groovy spots - if you can afford them. For the rest of us, suburbs all look pretty much the same the world over.
Any city in the world has it's groovy spots - if you can afford them. For the rest of us, suburbs all look pretty much the same the world over.
I'm afraid you're right. But I'd argue -- as CD does -- that this is a *design* problem. We can do better.
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