In keeping with a long tradition of conservatism, Kennan mourned the loss of small communities with their sense of common purpose. In 1938, while working at the State Department, he took a brief leave and bicycled through rural Wisconsin, the state he grew up in, and recalled how the small villages he moved through had often rallied together, in the wake of floods, hurricanes and war, and how modern life, with its emphasis on individualism, was eroding that sense of solidarity. Seventeen years later, he surveyed his country — the booming, urbanizing America of the 1950s — with disgust: “I could leave it without a pang: the endless streams of cars, the bored, set faces behind the windshield, the chrome, the asphalt, the advertising, the television sets, the filling stations, the hot-dog stands, the barren business centers, the suburban brick boxes, the country clubs, the bars and grills, the empty activity.” He saw a dark side in almost all the advances of modern life, especially cars and airplanes. On the former: “The best thing is travel by turnpike — at night, a wholly useless exercise, to be sure — hours of death subtracted from the hours of life, but better than seeing anything.” “Flying (but particularly the airports) puts me into the nearest thing to a wholly psychotic depression,” he explained. His reaction to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 was to note that he would gladly trade “the entire American space program, in all its forms military and civilian, for a good national telegraph system and railway transportation network such as we used to have.”
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 07:04:12 +0000
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