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Entry: Norman's Conquests Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/normans_conquests#9923 Post contents: Funny enough, I am, by profession, an "urban planner". America is a sick, sick society, and you can see it in it's landscape. I look out my office window and see a "big box" department store lying alone, next to a 6 lane “boulevard", everyone alone in their cars, anonymous. Interestingly enough, just last night I was reading Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer", and the narrator, "Binx", was commenting that he has a car, but prefers to ride the buses and streetcars, because he feels so anonymous in an automobile, that all people see are his tail lights as he drives by... I believe it was Russell Kirk (or Richard M Weaver) that called the automobile "mechanical Jacobins". No doubt Norman Mailer would have agreed. Being Jewish and/or "liberal" doesn't automatically make one an opponent of traditional culture, although being a "liberal" does make it much more difficult for one to implement, as it were, traditional culture/design in a city. This is the failure of the "New Urbanism" architecture - it divorces the design from the traditional culture it wishes to imitate. Without a fundamental "conversion", American urban design will remain Jacobin. Sent at: 2008 07 06