This link is from a friend of mine who is very bright. In fact, he is an engineer and he designs solar hot water systems for commercial and residential applications. He believes biofuels will get us out of the mess we’re in, though, and he’s stoked to see what Brazil is doing with sugar cane.

He said:

Politicians standing in the way of progress, as usual.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/10/world/americas/10brazil.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/E/Environment

http://www.worldproutassembly.org/orangutan-pictures.jpg

UY, the US has a pretty low population density when considering the country as a whole. Using the numbers from the CIA World Factbook, Sweden’s density is 21.39 people/sq_km, and the US is 33.16. A bit higher, sure, but I’m thinking that both countries concentrate their population along the coasts. We also have a lot of renewable resources: bio, wind, solar (better than Sweden, I’ll bet), hydro… those resources are scattered around the country but that’s what an electrical grid is for, right? What we’re lacking w/r/t Sweden is the political will to buck entrenched interests; it doesn’t help that we’re pouring billions down an Iraqhole as well.

Nudge, I think TV shows like the OC and others just grew the way they have — if they’re targeted, they’re targeted at a certain demographic (and I don’t mean foreign poor). I suppose a lot of UPLers think everyone in Britain is like the people in Dr. Who or Fawlty Towers, too. :-P

As far as a real lifestyles thing goes, try Studs Terkel’s “The Great Divide.” Yeah, it’s a book, not a TV show. Maybe a documentary featuring lower-middle (or lower) class Americans would be the way to go.

Last year on NPR I heard a rather interesting segment about an Iraqi guy who hard worked there for US forces as a translator. He had actually bought into the thing about us “helping” Iraq. After a few years of service, he earned the right to come to America to live here. In his own words, he said he had expected it to be something like Disneyland on account of everything he’d ever seen about the place in movies and on television. Over here, he had to contend with his own family breaking up, crime, the lack of imagined opportunity, and so on.

Has anyone here ever watched ‘the OC’? To perhaps a greater extent than most shows and movies, that is exactly the sort of “lifestyle propaganda” we export to the rest of the world. In that show, everyone is rich and happy and good-looking, with barely a worry to be seen anywhere. The cars and houses are huge, everything is so clean, the weather is perfect, everyone has lots of fabulous clothes to wear. It’s like nirvana on earth. The reality of life in the UPL, however, is somewhat different.

The sort of lifestyle propaganda has two gross effects. The one most visible in this country is the way every tomato-picker and sheetrock-hanger from south of the border wants come here to work a few shit jobs and become a millionaire ~ just like on television, oddly enough. The other effect, the one we don’t see here directly, is they way people in other countries come to look at that way of life as “normal” and as something they should have for themselves too.

I couldn’t tell you if the lifestyle propaganda was designed to suck foreigners in to work shit jobs here illegally at low wages (hoping they’ll be the next Mr. Trump or Mr. Gates along the way, of course) before fleeing home during the next recession or being picked up by ICE and deported, or if that’s something that just happens on its own. Regardless of the intent, though, these are the effects. We have successfully exported our image of what “normal life” is like, even if the image is quite false.

So I keep hoping that Robin Leach will do a television series called “Lifestyles of the Poor and Obscure”, showing the reality of life in the slums of Detroit, the slums of Philadelphia, the slums of Chicago, the trailer parks of upstate NY and Arkansas, the economically devastated areas of Florida, and so on.