What Are We Recovering To?

From earlier this week, James Kunstler writes on his website what he thinks about the 'recovery' talk going on in the media, on Wall Street, and in government right now:

Out in America-the-Real, Halloween time in this year of 2009 has an
interesting "Day of the Locust" flavor. There's more than a whiff of smoke in
the air, along with an odor of dead carp wafting out of all the the offices and
institutions we depend on to define reality. Like the Hollywood of Nathaniel
West's dark 1939 novel, America today seems poised in the gate of some harsh
judgment. When the historians look back at this era - especially at the time
between January 20th and the holiday season of 2009 - won't they marvel at how
well-understood our predicament actually was, by so many parties to it, and the
gulf between that comprehension and the story we told ourselves: that we
were "recovering."

Like a lot of other observer-interlocutors, I'd
like to know what folks imagine we are recovering to. To a renewed orgy of
credit-card spending? To yet another round of suburban expansion, with the
boys in the yellow hard-hats driving stakes out in the sagebrush for another new
thousand-unit pop-up "community?" For a next generation of super-cars built to
look like medieval war wagons? That's the "hope" that our officials seem
to pretend to offer. It's completely inconsistent with any reality-based
trend-lines, by the way.