Do not dignify it by calling it “vinyl siding”. A more appropriate architectural terminology is to call it “That fucking vinyl siding shit.” Faded, toxic strips of free market wisdom peeling off our housing stock like layers peeling off the last onion in the bag.
And so it is that we are in the process of leaving shitty archeological ruins to future generations. Ancient civilizations the world over from Machu Pichu to The Giza Plateau; from Gobekli Tepi to Teotihuacan have left astonishingly beautiful ruins as a testament to their vision and tenacity. At Baalbek in Lebanon, archeologists are puzzled at how ancient people moved megaliths weighing far in excess of 1000 tons. Years from now, we will be remembered for crumbling concrete, rusting steel and vast amounts of faded plastic fluttering in the wind.
The movie Idiocracy was a silly Hollywood comedy, but the central message that stupid people are outbreeding the intelligent ones is something that we ignore at our own peril. For in the future, the roving, criminal gangs of mutant zombie tweekers will have little or no idea how things came to look this way or what fools and clowns preceded them. The tanning salons, doggie grooming parlors and Chucky Cheeses will be toxic leach heaps still fermenting over the alter of the free market. The concrete tilt-up walls of the Targets, Walmarts and Home Depots will serve as tacky fortresses protecting their occupants from the stunted cretins groveling for existence on the outside.
Amid it all will be the never ending river of time. The biodiversity will return to at least obscure the piles of polystyrene, vinyl and formaldehyde. Eons of rainfall and UV radiation will finally break down even the most persistent, carbon-based pollutants. After millions of years of geological processes, enough of the carbon that we nonchalantly spewed into the atmosphere will be re-sequestered back into the Earth’s crust from which it should not have been taken in the first place, that we will finally have the long-delayed ice age that we were warned about in the 70’s. One 100,000 year cycle of glaciation will largely strip the terrane clear of humankind’s folly. And our poor beleagered planet will go on with restoring the biodiversity lost during the reign of the atom splitting monkeys.