>. For what it's worth, here's my take on that period in the US:
>
><http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2007/04/weather-vain.html>
Nice.
Here's something from a while back. As Iain Sinclair says, "When in doubt, quote Ballard."
http://www.rickmcgrath.com/jgballard/rolling_stone_1987.html
(J.G. Ballard) In the 1970s, I was invited to make a trip across Germany from Bremerhaven to Stuttgart -- this as part of a journalistic junket sponsored by Mercedes-Benz -- and we drove along secondary roads. Everything we observed dated from 1945, of course. We trundled through endless immaculate suburbs of executive housing where even a drifting leaf looked as if it had too much freedom. There was a Mercedes or a BMW in every driveway, motorboats on their trailers, identical children identically dressed. We might have been looking at a population of brilliantly designed robots placed there merely to establish a contextual landscape! And this went on and on. I suddenly realized that the future of this planet was not going to be like New York City or Tokyo or London or Moscow but rather like a suburb of Dusseldorf. And you know, most of the Baader-Meinhof gang in fact grew up in these suburbs, and I realized why that kind of terrorism erupted from this kind of landscape. Because in that world, madness is the only freedom.
JC: But think of the nineteen-year-old West German guy who recently flew his Cessna to Red Square.
JGB: Yes, it's wonderfully encouraging to see the human imagination still capable of these huge conceptual leaps that leave air-defense systems completely paralyzed!