America, land of the universal automobile slum, from sea to shining sea. Dick Cheney has our nation desperately fighting to preserve this coarse and rude America, while talking Alice in Wonderland absurdities about supposed ‘democracy installations’, ‘counter-‘terrorism’, and ‘national secuirty’ of the ‘homeland’. The US good life embodied by auto slum America is a lifeless, treeless, community-less slurb, stretching for miles upon miles. But the oil is running out.

Yes, the oil is running out, but just as evolution is denied, global warming is denied, ecological collapse is denied, so too, is the fact that we have over-mined our planet. James Howard Kunstler, in his commentary, The Twilight of Mechanized LumpenLeisure, takes us down our most recently passed motorway on our ride to the future. He has collected for us a series of postcards of the past and present.

Alas, we seem to have an evolutionary future ahead that also is most often denied as being ours. But at least it might well be more tranquil and without the sounds of traffic all around. Are we approaching the end of the universal auto slum? An end to abundant oil?