WHAT WILL BECOME OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION?

[Bok Tuklo]

WHAT WILL BECOME OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION?​

Conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city

No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.

It grew around water. In 1911, Theodore Roosevelt stood on the steps of the Tempe Normal School, which, half a century later, would become Arizona State University, and declared that the soaring dam just completed in the Superstition Mountains upstream, established during his presidency and named after him, would provide enough water to allow 100,000 people to live in the Valley. There are now 5 million.

The Valley is one of the fastest-growing regions in America, where a developer decided to put a city of the future on a piece of virgin desert miles from anything. At night, from the air, the Phoenix metroplex looks like a glittering alien craft that has landed where the Earth is flat and wide enough to host it. The street grids and subdivisions spreading across retired farmland end only when they’re stopped by the borders of a tribal reservation or the dark folds of mountains, some of them surrounded on all sides by sprawl.

Phoenix makes you keenly aware of human artifice—its ingenuity and its fragility. The American lust for new things and new ideas, good and bad ones, is most palpable here in the West, but the dynamo that generates all the microchip factories and battery plants and downtown high-rises and master-planned suburbs runs so high that it suggests its own oblivion. New Yorkers and Chicagoans don’t wonder how long their cities will go on existing, but in Phoenix in August, when the heat has broken 110 degrees for a month straight, the desert golf courses and urban freeways give this civilization an air of impermanence, like a mirage composed of sheer hubris, and a surprising number of inhabitants begin to brood on its disappearance.

Growth keeps coming at a furious pace, despite decades of drought, and despite political extremism that makes every election a crisis threatening violence. Democracy is also a fragile artifice. It depends less on tradition and law than on the shifting contents of individual skulls—belief, virtue, restraint. Its durability under natural and human stress is being put to an intense test in the Valley. And because a vision of vanishing now haunts the whole country, Phoenix is a guide to our future.

The Atlantic


***************************************


Few things encapsulate contemporary American politics better than this bit:

"When Kari Lake ran for governor in 2022, everyone knew her position on transgenderism and no one knew her position on water ... "

 

[SNOWFLAKE]

Yeah, BUT.......................... The US is NOT a democracy, someone is bound to say.

 

[mrjurrs]

WHAT WILL BECOME OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION?​

Conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city

No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.

It grew around water. In 1911, Theodore Roosevelt stood on the steps of the Tempe Normal School, which, half a century later, would become Arizona State University, and declared that the soaring dam just completed in the Superstition Mountains upstream, established during his presidency and named after him, would provide enough water to allow 100,000 people to live in the Valley. There are now 5 million.

The Valley is one of the fastest-growing regions in America, where a developer decided to put a city of the future on a piece of virgin desert miles from anything. At night, from the air, the Phoenix metroplex looks like a glittering alien craft that has landed where the Earth is flat and wide enough to host it. The street grids and subdivisions spreading across retired farmland end only when they’re stopped by the borders of a tribal reservation or the dark folds of mountains, some of them surrounded on all sides by sprawl.

Phoenix makes you keenly aware of human artifice—its ingenuity and its fragility. The American lust for new things and new ideas, good and bad ones, is most palpable here in the West, but the dynamo that generates all the microchip factories and battery plants and downtown high-rises and master-planned suburbs runs so high that it suggests its own oblivion. New Yorkers and Chicagoans don’t wonder how long their cities will go on existing, but in Phoenix in August, when the heat has broken 110 degrees for a month straight, the desert golf courses and urban freeways give this civilization an air of impermanence, like a mirage composed of sheer hubris, and a surprising number of inhabitants begin to brood on its disappearance.

Growth keeps coming at a furious pace, despite decades of drought, and despite political extremism that makes every election a crisis threatening violence. Democracy is also a fragile artifice. It depends less on tradition and law than on the shifting contents of individual skulls—belief, virtue, restraint. Its durability under natural and human stress is being put to an intense test in the Valley. And because a vision of vanishing now haunts the whole country, Phoenix is a guide to our future.

The Atlantic


***************************************


Few things encapsulate contemporary American politics better than this bit:

"When Kari Lake ran for governor in 2022, everyone knew her position on transgenderism and no one knew her position on water ... "

In the near future, gun manufacturers profits will go up and more Americans will be killed and wounded by weapons designed to kill as many people in as short of time possible.

 

[slavablueberryjam]

I am remembered of the film Class Of 1984. American society was never a democracy.

 

[Juks]

WHAT WILL BECOME OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION?​

Conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city

No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.

It grew around water. In 1911, Theodore Roosevelt stood on the steps of the Tempe Normal School, which, half a century later, would become Arizona State University, and declared that the soaring dam just completed in the Superstition Mountains upstream, established during his presidency and named after him, would provide enough water to allow 100,000 people to live in the Valley. There are now 5 million.

The Valley is one of the fastest-growing regions in America, where a developer decided to put a city of the future on a piece of virgin desert miles from anything. At night, from the air, the Phoenix metroplex looks like a glittering alien craft that has landed where the Earth is flat and wide enough to host it. The street grids and subdivisions spreading across retired farmland end only when they’re stopped by the borders of a tribal reservation or the dark folds of mountains, some of them surrounded on all sides by sprawl.

Phoenix makes you keenly aware of human artifice—its ingenuity and its fragility. The American lust for new things and new ideas, good and bad ones, is most palpable here in the West, but the dynamo that generates all the microchip factories and battery plants and downtown high-rises and master-planned suburbs runs so high that it suggests its own oblivion. New Yorkers and Chicagoans don’t wonder how long their cities will go on existing, but in Phoenix in August, when the heat has broken 110 degrees for a month straight, the desert golf courses and urban freeways give this civilization an air of impermanence, like a mirage composed of sheer hubris, and a surprising number of inhabitants begin to brood on its disappearance.

Growth keeps coming at a furious pace, despite decades of drought, and despite political extremism that makes every election a crisis threatening violence. Democracy is also a fragile artifice. It depends less on tradition and law than on the shifting contents of individual skulls—belief, virtue, restraint. Its durability under natural and human stress is being put to an intense test in the Valley. And because a vision of vanishing now haunts the whole country, Phoenix is a guide to our future.

The Atlantic


***************************************


Few things encapsulate contemporary American politics better than this bit:

"When Kari Lake ran for governor in 2022, everyone knew her position on transgenderism and no one knew her position on water ... "

Damned well written, George Packer has a poetic touch that I wasn't aware of. I think I’ll have to read his books. He should write a novel; it's very possible that he could measure up to Proust.

 

[SkyChief]

WHAT WILL BECOME OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION?

I think there will come a point in time when government is SO powerful, that people will realize that liberty and freedom have become obsolete.

There will be a groundswell of liberty and freedom lovers who will initiate a new revolution.

American Revolution 2.0.

I'll be dead when it happens, but I'd sure like to be part of it.

 

[Bok Tuklo]

WHAT WILL BECOME OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION?

I think there will come a point in time when government is SO powerful, that people will realize that liberty and freedom have become obsolete.

There will be a groundswell of liberty and freedom lovers who will initiate a new revolution.

A Revolution 2.0.

I'll be dead when it happens, but I sure would like to be part of it.

This article is mostly about water.

 

[SNOWFLAKE]

WHAT WILL BECOME OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION?

I think there will come a point in time when government is SO powerful, that people will realize that liberty and freedom have become obsolete.

There will be a groundswell of liberty and freedom lovers who will initiate a new revolution.

A Revolution 2.0.

I'll be dead when it happens, but I sure would like to be part of it.

Yeah, we saw the kinds of people who will initiate a new revolution. Yup, the kind that take selfies of themselves. When arrested turn evidence against each other for lighter sentences.
Revolution isn't going to happen in a country with America's standard of living. I mean seriously. Maybe a few hillbillies. But you expect most people to give up their backyard BBQs, their SUVs, the big screen TVS, their life of comfort to go get themselves into a shooting match?
THAT is delusional.

 

[SNOWFLAKE]

This article is mostly about water.

React just to the title, it's quicker.

 

[Sweden]

WHAT WILL BECOME OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION?​

Conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city

No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.

It grew around water. In 1911, Theodore Roosevelt stood on the steps of the Tempe Normal School, which, half a century later, would become Arizona State University, and declared that the soaring dam just completed in the Superstition Mountains upstream, established during his presidency and named after him, would provide enough water to allow 100,000 people to live in the Valley. There are now 5 million.

The Valley is one of the fastest-growing regions in America, where a developer decided to put a city of the future on a piece of virgin desert miles from anything. At night, from the air, the Phoenix metroplex looks like a glittering alien craft that has landed where the Earth is flat and wide enough to host it. The street grids and subdivisions spreading across retired farmland end only when they’re stopped by the borders of a tribal reservation or the dark folds of mountains, some of them surrounded on all sides by sprawl.

Phoenix makes you keenly aware of human artifice—its ingenuity and its fragility. The American lust for new things and new ideas, good and bad ones, is most palpable here in the West, but the dynamo that generates all the microchip factories and battery plants and downtown high-rises and master-planned suburbs runs so high that it suggests its own oblivion. New Yorkers and Chicagoans don’t wonder how long their cities will go on existing, but in Phoenix in August, when the heat has broken 110 degrees for a month straight, the desert golf courses and urban freeways give this civilization an air of impermanence, like a mirage composed of sheer hubris, and a surprising number of inhabitants begin to brood on its disappearance.

Growth keeps coming at a furious pace, despite decades of drought, and despite political extremism that makes every election a crisis threatening violence. Democracy is also a fragile artifice. It depends less on tradition and law than on the shifting contents of individual skulls—belief, virtue, restraint. Its durability under natural and human stress is being put to an intense test in the Valley. And because a vision of vanishing now haunts the whole country, Phoenix is a guide to our future.

The Atlantic


***************************************


Few things encapsulate contemporary American politics better than this bit:

"When Kari Lake ran for governor in 2022, everyone knew her position on transgenderism and no one knew her position on water ... "

I suppose you wish to discuss US civililisation, not 'American. Imo there is no such thing. What was instituted in the USA - and still exists - was a branch of European post Enlightenment civilisation transplanted to a new geographic locality. Its future will depend on the US citizens' willingness to stand firm against two imperialist and totalitarian enemies, Chinese and Islamic.

 

[SkyChief]

This article is mostly about water.

True, but I think water will not be the impetus for change. . . there's plenty of water. The oceans are a virtually unlimited source of water.

I think the piecemeal erosion of liberty and freedom will bring about the big changes in American civilization.

 

[Fearandloathing]

Yeah, we saw the kinds of people who will initiate a new revolution. Yup, the kind that take selfies of themselves. When arrested turn evidence against each other for lighter sentences.
Revolution isn't going to happen in a country with America's standard of living. I mean seriously. Maybe a few hillbillies. But you expect most people to give up their backyard BBQs, their SUVs, the big screen TVS, their life of comfort to go get themselves into a shooting match?
THAT is delusional.

Oh....


You know the participants of the Vancouver 2011 riots...

All well-to-do suburbanites from good, Canadian families!!!!

 

[Bok Tuklo]

I suppose you wish to discuss US civililisation, not 'American. Imo there is no such thing. What was instituted in the USA - and still exists - was a branch of European post Enlightenment civilisation transplanted to a new geographic locality. Its future will depend on the US citizens' willingness to stand firm against two imperialist and totalitarian enemies, Chinese and Islamic.

And adequate fresh water.

 

[highroller]

What republicans have wanted for 40 years: balkanization

 

[DrewPaul]

WHAT WILL BECOME OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION?

I think there will come a point in time when government is SO powerful, that people will realize that liberty and freedom have become obsolete.

There will be a groundswell of liberty and freedom lovers who will initiate a new revolution.

American Revolution 2.0.

I'll be dead when it happens, but I'd sure like to be part of it.

I haven't given up on our institutions or manner of government quite yet. One guy who gives me hope is John Fetterman. I'd like to see politicians on either side of the divide stand by what they think whether the party agrees or not. Although the supreme court leans to the right not all its verdicts have been wins for conservatives. I hope the two parties can ratchet down the animosity.

 

[samiam5211]

What is American civilization?

 

[Hamish Howl]

What is American civilization?

332,000,000 primates with a will to be grotesque in all things.

Get out of the way.

 

[samiam5211]

332,000,000 primates with a will to be grotesque in all things.

Get out of the way.

I think there are probably many billions of primates (pretty much every primate on Earth) that fit that description, and it isn't anything new, and it isn't something that will go away.

 

[Hamish Howl]

I think there are probably many billions of primates (pretty much every primate on Earth) that fit that description, and it isn't anything new, and it isn't something that will go away.

Nonsense. There are plenty of countries that are basically Belgium. Slow down. Calm your tits. Why are you this way? What are you doing to that fat guy? That sort of thing.

 

[samiam5211]

Nonsense. There are plenty of countries that are basically Belgium. Slow down. Calm your tits. Why are you this way? What are you doing to that fat guy? That sort of thing.

I lived in Belgium for 3 years.

There are plenty of grotesque primates living there.

 

[Hamish Howl]

I lived in Belgium for 3 years.

There are plenty of grotesque primates living there.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that America is what the United States turned into at 5:29 a.m. MWT (11:29:21 GMT) on July 16, 1945.

 

[Peacenik]

We've got to reclaim the original idea of America, a self-governed nation of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The biggest problem for America's future is the legalized corruption of American government by big powerful money.

We have got to get the big money out of government.

This challenge is believed by most to be impossible, but a few of us have embraced it; and the number grows. When enough people believe in something, then it can be realized. The crucial part is that the power of the many is greater than the power of big money. The key lies in spreading the knowledge that once we unite around one single concept, getting the big money out of government, then many other problems can also be solved. Recapturing truly representative government is the key to everything in our future.

Failure to achieve this prevents progress on most issues because big money spoils everything for everyone else. It robs our values as it robs our pockets. It tells people what to think and gives them scapegoats to blame and hate to distract them from the one thing big money fears the most: An organized and united public determined to make big money useless in purchasing special favors from government.

 

[Sweden]

And adequate fresh water.

Interesting point.

 

[tshade]

View attachment 67515103

Yeah, BUT.......................... The US is NOT a democracy, someone is bound to say.

We are the oldest government on the Earth

 

[Hamish Howl]

We have got to get the big money out of government.

This challenge is believed by most to be impossible,

You're correct.