If America has a rendezvous with doom rather than destiny, if our end lies not in physical destruction but in moral decline and material decadence, we need only look at the false history we continue to manufacture. From the McMansions that litter the land to our neglect of the land itself, in which colleges crumble from within and presidential libraries collapse from without; in which the rot is a triumph of pseudoscience, on the one hand, and a series of pseudo-events, on the other, look to Thomas Frank's new book, Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society, for a survey of the damage.
Start with the McMansion, a big box of exposed brick and cotton candy insulation. Or so it seems, since these houses are as much a corruption of style as they are a crime against common sense. How else to explain the existence of these mausoleums for the living dead, where the buildings decay faster than their residents? How else to describe these buildings, except to say they house more fifth columnists than all the columns of their tawdry exteriors combined?
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