Thread by @Rjrasva

From George Kennan's memoirs on his childhood memories the rural Wisconsin of the pre automobile era in contrast to the new era. Note the carnage of turtles he mentions, the # of small wildlife killed on roads by automobiles is very high
google.com/books/edition/…

I thought, by way of contrast, of the sociable English highway of Chaucer's day, sometimes full of human danger but full, also, of life and companionship. It seemed to me that we had impoverished ourselves by the change; and I could not, after the years in Europe, accustom myself

Kennan's third person rumination on himself in 1933 diary entry:

What have I in common with the average Southerner, or the New York Jew, or any one of a hundred types? America is hardly a national conception anymore. It is a sort of international entity.
harpers.org/archive/2014/0…

The Invisible Empire: Alt-Right Afterlives of George Kennan
BY MATHIAS FUELLING | 2.24.19
automobile was a boon to “crime and to juvenile delinquency.” Cars were forces of pollution, atomism, and social destruction. These were long running ideas for Kennan
refractionmag.com/blog-1/2019/2/…

The Kennan Diaries

From 1974:

The tendency of the motor age is to overwhelm, subdue, and eventually destroy, in its life-giving qualities, the sea... with the blessing of peoples and governments, for the internal combustion engine is now king over man

Kennan's thoughts on Southern California & its future on November 4, 1951:

But equally disturbing to me is the utter dependence on the costly, uneconomical gadget called the automobile, for practically every process of life from birth and education, through shopping, work and

It is not meant as an offense to the great achievements of the Latin cultural world if I say that there will take place here something like a “latinization” of political life. Southern California will become politically, as it already is climatically, a Latin American country

Kennan's thoughts in 1997 in his diary on NATO expansion:

That the Russians will not react wisely and moderately to the decision of NATO to extend its boundaries to the Russian frontiers is clear. They are already reacting differently

The deep commitment of our government to press the expansion of NATO right up to the Russian borders is the greatest mistake of the entire post–Cold War period. I feel that I should state that view publicly. But then it would be wrong to do this without notifying the few friends

Just as they, without consulting me, have nailed their flag to their mast, so must I nail my flag to mine. Let them see how they can extract themselves from the mess they themselves have created.

I have been rendered most unhappy by the press reports of the NATO meeting in Madrid where the formal decision was taken to admit Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary to membership in NATO... How, one asks, are the Russians to take this? What NATO missions are there for which

“Marion, I am simply heartbroken over what is now occurring. I see nothing in it other than a new Cold War, probably ending in a hot one, and the end of the effort to achieve a workable democracy in Russia. I see also a total, tragic, and wholly unnecessary end to an acceptable

Jan 3, 1955:

It is not I who have left my country. It is my country that has left me, the country I thought I knew and understood. As for the rest, I could leave it without a pang: the endless streams of cars, the bored, set faces behind the windshield, the chrome, the asphalt,

1938:

It seemed for a moment as though this quiet nocturnal stream of temporary moving prisons, of closed doors and closed groups, was the reductio ad absurdum of the exaggerated American desire for privacy. What
was in England an evil of the upper class seemed here to have

September 4, 1928:

Americanism, like Bolshevism, is a disease which gains footing only in a weakened body. I have lost my sympathy for the Europeans who protest against the influx of American automobiles and American phonograph records.

1937:

It was very nice and encouraging but in the distance, the roar of the Sunday traffic on the big turnpikes was never lost, and it was never clearer that man is a skin-disease of the earth.

where human warmth and simplicity and graciousness defied the encroachments of a diseased world and of
people drugged and debilitated by automobiles and advertisements and radios and moving pictures.

1956:

I wish the ice would stay good and smooth and slippery for days. Let them slither and struggle, I say to myself, until they comprehend what a frivolity they have committed in selling their habits and their souls to the automobile