At left, General Growth Properties’ “Defining You” campaign for the Providence Place Mall. At right, a parody portion of Adriana Yoto and Michael Townsend’s mall habitation project.

Can Americans actually solve climate change? Our culture’s aspirations can be reduced to a single advertising campaign by General Growth Properties the Providence Place Mall: “Defining you”  (by the by, check up on Adriana Yoto andMichael Townsend’s Trummerkind project).

That’s right, we are defined by the products we are implicitly or explicitly told to buy. We manufacture nothing apart from corn syrup and debt. The project of the individual is perhaps a manufactured conceit, and is one that makes a ”sustainable” way of living impossible (depending upon how you define sustainably).

The pundits and economists on television assume that economic growth is the only goal, or at least the only metric in successful recovery (which itself is a troubled term: recovery from what? To what?) In me there is a democratic idealism that thinks, “economic growth, I can get behind that. A rising tide lifts all boats.” After World War II made soldiers of every man who had been born into the Depression, the middle class greatly expanded and came into great wealth. A million enlisted men stormed their yards and fearlessly cut down the scourge of crabgrass. Then they, like every other generation before them, consolidated wealth and bred.

Their children’s (my parents) prosperous birthright was shocked by OPEC’s world war of limited supply. Ronald Reagan squandered their great opportunity by casting off Carter’s cardigan, embracing cheap oil. Wealth becomes consolidated by the few, and the democratic horde is again and again convinced to vote against their best interests. The snowball that becomes “defining you.”

This post is becoming too pessimistic. I sound maybe like a first year public humanities student at Brown or a copyeditor at Adbusters. I was going on a Vitruvius fueled rant about architects “suckling at the teat of capital” (my own deleted words), but I’ve been giving this URL to potential employers. I’m worried about damaging my job prospects.  Whoops.