There is something strange happening across America that nobody seems to be speaking about.

They don't have language for the phenomenon (I'm sure somebody in urban planning, or in sociology, has names for it-but the people have no name for it)-and without common language for the phenomenon, it is difficult to get a handle on.

A phrase posited: the plague of vacancy. Because vacancy is what it looks like, and what it feels like. This is not a scientific analysis of what's happening, so it includes subjective, psychic impressions; the liberty of writing about the feeling of it as well as the observable signs of it.

We'll start with the observable. Throughout the country-especially in the middle, in the heartland-are decaying towns. Not the interstate towns. The towns you run through when you take the old roads, the U.S. routes that didn't become parallel with the interstates. They're falling apart, and nobody's rebuilding: the only people building are Walmarts and the like, on the fringes of town. But in the center... empty buildings, shutters in the wind, boarded windows, empty movie marquees, no people.

Yeah, everybody knows how the story goes: Walmart comes to a town, the downtown businesses and the mom n' pop shops have to close up, that's the way it goes. But there's more going on that just that story (always told with a helpless sense of resignation, of progress, of inability to change things...) We can talk about this phenomena in terms of suburban sprawl, but that would be missing a lot.

Also observable is the poverty-- poverty that comes from, we can presume, a loss of domestic jobs to overseas locales. The poverty is an effect of free-trade globalization, but people don't seem to link the job loss with things like free trade. Still, this is just one more factor, not the totality of the problem.

The sense of decay and emptiness is strange because it seems to go unrecognized: do these people even realize their towns are falling apart? or does it just proceed slowly enough that it can be overlooked-is it that they have no language to call it by-is it that they don't get out often enough to know that other parts of the country are prosperous in comparison? Part of it must be that the media they access-the television shows, music, and movies that everyone is fed-doesn't show this. If you learned about America solely by watching television, you wouldn't even necessarily know that small-town America exists: everything happens in the city, or the occasional affluent suburb.

Possibility: it is not lack of recognition, but lack of empowerment that is allowing these towns to decline. People don't feel as if they can do anything about it. (I think of the recent rampage in Granby, Colorado where a disgruntled citizen ran a bulldozer through the town: a desperation to be able to do something, I imagine)... Here's an extended quote from Hakim Bey that touches on the psychic condition that comes from this sensation of disempowerment, of helplessness, of not having an opposition to the capitalist culture / the state / the media hell / etc...

"The most tangible thing, and I think really the thing which gave me the clue to think about this, is precisely a psychic condition. One could point to lots of economic or social factors, but above all I feel a psychic malaise that is something quite new, and, well, a few years ago I began noticing in public speaking that there was a great deal less response on the part of audiences. You would get audiences that would sit there quite passively looking at you as if you were on television. And if questions came, they were very likely to be questions such as "Tell us what to do". You know when people ask you this sort of question they have no intention of actually taking your advice. What they're doing to trying to fill up some hole in themselves. So I thought, first of all it's just the influence of TV that's been around since 1947 or whatever, but then I realized that that's not a sufficient explanation for this kind of strange passivity. And I began hearing about it from other people who are involved in public speaking and then finally I read a whole section about it in Noam Chomsky's latest book. He has exactly the same experience of audiences, and all of these experiences begin around 1989, 1991. What I think has happened to us is not just TV. TV is just a symptom. So, what's happening is a kind of cognitive collapse around this single world. When people no longer feel a possibility in the world, a possibility of another position, then they become consciously opposed to the one. And conscious opposition is extremely difficult in an atmosphere that's completely poisoned by media such that no oppositional voice is ever really heard. Unless you yourself make the effort to get down to the alternative media, where that voice is still feebly speaking, then you're left simply in this one world of sameness and separation. Sameness -- everything is the same; separation -- every individual is separated from every other individual; complete alienation, complete unity. And I think that on the unconscious level, on the level of images, on the mythological level, on the religious level if you wanna put if that way, this is what's happening, especially in America."

Lack of empowerment, an attitude of resignation commingled with fear... and this is the plague of vacancy, the plague within. It exists inside the people. When you walk into a store and the person behind the counter is vacant. You leave a restaurant dimly and don't remember the face of the person that served you, because there was no real interaction: vacant. Worse than apathy (voter apathy / we don't vote because we don't think it will really change anything // vacant apathy / we don't live because we don't think we can change anything?) ...it's the ultimate defeat of humanity, and it's eating away at the centers of our communities. The observable boarded-up windows are only the visible symptoms of this invisible way America is changing. You can say, offhandedly, sure it's all parking lots and gas stations nowadays-but do you know what the reality of that feels like?

It's hard to explain what it feels like. I tried to capture it in images, which I've included below; unfortunately, photography is not my gift. I tried to capture it in words, long ago: these poems are a bit more successful, but even they are dated, as the plague has intensified in the seven years since they were written, and my understanding of it has changed.

cairo, illinois: and the message from the corner door:

also in cairo:

eden, texas:

mississippi

I've been speaking of small-town America (which is a resonant chord in our nation's heart, for sure), and what I haven't yet mentioned is our cities. The hearts of the cities, too, are falling apart. It's even easier to write them off because of the racism in our country-we almost take it for granted that the "inner" city is going to be in a state of disrepair and despair.

Then there's the suburbs, which-let's be straight-up here-are not the answer. They can be affluent, but this isn't genuine prosperity (I doubt I have to expound on this point too much considering the nature of my audience) but let's just say that bland homes with endless blank garage doors, packed together, and miles from the nearest anything (besides maybe a strip mall with a wasteland of a parking garage) are a whole new strand of vacancy. Next time you go to a Safeway at 3am, take in the fluorescent lights, the endless unappetizing mass-produced junk that they want you to put in your body, the smell of the floor polish; that's vacancy, clothed in the illusion of abundance. Stand in a parking lot in the middle of the night, under the unreal pink sky, and listen to the buzzing of the sodium streetlamps... the Safeway is not the Safe Way. It's a neurotic way that spells out more danger (because you give up your life and freedom to live in this security / and besides, that lifestyle isn't sustainable, considering the environmental limitations it's doomed, etc. etc., you already know).

buffalo in the south denver suburbs /
and then old america meets new in boulder, colorado

I couldn't capture the immensity of the suburbs, nor the decay of the city... but you probably know. If you don't, go for a drive. Come back & tell me what you think. Maybe you won't see a nation whose centers are being eaten, where the only solution offered is the vacant alien suburbs: maybe your vision is completely different / then I hope you can change my mind. But: what if the plague of vacancy is spreading?