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Quote by Jim Horlock

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Jim Horlock

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“All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together,looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.”

EnvironmentalismUrban Sprawl
Book:Snow Crash
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“No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bun-gee jumping. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris; immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian powers; young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. Young smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can handle it.”

Urban Sprawl
Book:Snow Crash
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“A democracy is understandably boisterous and subject to the prevailing social and economic whims of the nation’s bulging populous. Politics based upon mass appeal reveals an unseemly side, and a degree of pronounced vulgarity permeates American social and political culture. Make no mistake, Americans are loud, brash, and biased. The constitutional right to free speech and the established right to assemble enable pornography shops to do business wherever they please and allow virtually any organization to parade downtown. Part of what makes America beautiful – the right for people to do and say anything they please – also contributes to that distinctly Americana crust of crudeness. American cities reflect American’s propensity for vulgarity. Most of the cities built to satisfy America’s capitalistic needs are either boring or an outright eyesore. America’s cities contain oversized high-rises, sprinkled liberally with drab shopping malls, and dotted with ugly concrete edifices that stifle nature’s beauty. A nation’s functional architecture reflects the populations’ intrinsic values. Corporate conglomerates undertook most of the expensive new construction in America, and its boxy steel and glass structures are utilitarian in nature. Recent attempts at city planning and urban renewal cannot erase the tackiness and blockiness that accompanies so much of America’s tedious urban sprawl.”

DemocracyAmerican CultureAmericansCorporate AmericaUrban SprawlAmerican Architecture
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Like Robert frost, my heart ached to be in the pastoral countryside. On the Interstate, you really never leave the city. The two asphalt slabs are always surrounded by a continuous, homogeneous channel of pavement, cables and wires, and urban sprawl.”

CompareCountrysideUrban Sprawl
Book:The Last Hobo: A Clueless Detroit Kid Hitchhikes Across America the Summer the Seventies Ran Out of Gas
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