I don’t know how you all are spending this cold and icy night, but as for thy, I nuked a bowl of popcorn, turned off the lights, and watched Labyrinth, for probably the first time in ten years. I loved this movie when I was a kid, and re-discovered it shortly before graduating college. When I saw a copy at Target last week on sale for $7, I just couldn’t resist.

If you’d asked me what I remembered of the movie, I would’ve told you, “Jennifer’s hot, David Bowie’s creepy, and there’s an M.C. Esher stage at the finale.” And yet, watching it, it was like I’d always remembered the film, and all the characters, and all the eccentricities of the Labyrinth.

It’s kind of like reuniting with an old friend you haven’t thought of in decades.

The first of the double-title is the subtitle of James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency.

The Long Emergency was given to me as a gift by my friend Tim. It’s about the consequences for a society built on the framework of cheap energy. Well, what happens when that energy goes bye-bye? It’s a frightening view of the world, and of the drastic changes that will occur on every level of society. I don’t pretend to know how much of a doomsayer Kunstler is, or how accurate his predictions are, but I do know it’s a very frightening book. This is not to say Kunstler doesn’t have a way for words, in fact, after attending a conference in Maine in 2003, he writes, “I was so depressed I felt like gargling with razor blades.” Which is kind of how I felt after reading this book.

Anyway. In The Long Emergency, Kunstler describes how suburban-dwelling Americans will adopt: middle class Americans will flee to cities and small towns. Suburbs, dependant on gas powered transport no longer available, will become the new slums:

The gigantic smear of suburbia that runs almost without interruption from north of Boston through Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, Washington, and northern Virginia is not going to be a happy place. It will be subject to the most extreme loss of utility and equity value. This suburban portion of what was once called megalopolis may become as much a forbidden zone as the South Bronx became in the late twentieth century. The inhabitants of the Bronx in 1925 would never have believed how deparate their burrough would become in 1970; by the same token, the denizens of Bergen County, New Jersey or Fairfield County, Connecticut, today may never believe how desparate their localities may become in 2025. (291).

The second of the double title is the title of an article by Christopher B. Leinberger for The Atlantic.com. Here’s an excerpt:

In the first half of last year, residential burglaries rose by 35 percent and robberies by 58 percent in suburban Lee County, Florida, where one in four houses stands empty. Charlotte’s crime rates have stayed flat overall in recent years—but from 2003 to 2006, in the 10 suburbs of the city that have experienced the highest foreclosure rates, crime rose 33 percent. Civic organizations in some suburbs have begun to mow the lawns around empty houses to keep up the appearance of stability. Police departments are mapping foreclosures in an effort to identify emerging criminal hot spots.

It hasn’t been brought about by the collapse of our countrys’ dependance on cheap energy, true, but Kunstler discussed the mortgage crisis in his book (published in 2005, FYI):

The economic wreckage is liable to be impressive. If large numbers of house owners cannot make their mortgage payments, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and by extension the federal government, would be the big losers. The failure of the GSEs (government sponsored entities) would make the S&L fiasco of the 1980s look like a bad night of poker. The failure of the GSEs would pose a far graver situation than the LTCM (Long Term Capital Management) flameout. It could easily bring on cascading failures that might jeopardize global finance. This time, the American public would feel the pain. (233).

I was, frankly, more than a little disturbed when I read The Long Emergency. Reading that article in The Atlantic terrifies me, not because I live in tracts of empty residential suburbia (although I do think there’s an empty apartment or two in this building), but because Kunstler seems to be, how do I say it? “Right on.” And if he was right about the mortgage consequences, what else is he right about?