O tempus, o mores

About 10 years ago, the bike trip we took from Avignon to Albi was almost entirely on country roads so tiny that the occasional center line seemed like a visual joke pulled by the road crew.  I swear most of the cars were a lot smaller 10 years ago.  We carried all our camping and cooking stuff,  food, clothing, all reduced to a bare minimum such that when one of the Thermarest sleeping pads failed, we had to go shopping.  Like Rip Van Winkles we briefly ventured onto a couple major highways looking for camping stores in shopping malls.  New sleeping pad bungeed to the back rack, we slammed the door on that madness and pushed on through a world that was pretty much built up by 1860, the stone farmhouses and barns, the orchards, the vineyards.

An article in Basta (http://www.bastamag.net) made me realize how much difference 10 years has made.  First of all, that there IS a Basta, founded in 2005 as a journal about anti-development fights.  And you can find it anywhere in France,  in almost any newspaper store in almost any town of more than a couple thousand inhabitants.  I'm not sure how this distribution system works, but there's nothing like it in the USA where any equally radical viewpoint is relegated to the internet.   You could never find something like  CounterPunch for example at an American airport newspaper stand.  

And second, that Basta is covering the protest movement against the cancer of shopping centers.  "In Toulouse, soon there will be more supermarkets than there are customers."  The tide seems irresistable as we have been noticing around the outskirts of Cahors.  How on earth in this day and age and in the middle of a world-wide financial crisis could they be cutting ribbons on huge new shopping centers?  But they are.   And the cars are relentlessly getting bigger too.

proposed "Gateway to Gascony" shopping center sprawling out to gobble farmland near Toulouse

The developer, a company with American roots, has a bizarre website http://lesportesdegascogne.com/ with splendid pictures of airy, environmentally correct shopping experience (no cars in view, no parking lots, no pollution).  An elegant tickertape runs beneath this revelling in the triumphant facts:  the French high court affirmed a lower court permit, so now it's build, baby, build.

We've changed a lot in 10 years too.  From timid buyers of a sleeping pad at InterSport, we have degenerated to consumers of major appliances, queen-sized beds, building materials all bought at major chain stores in large shopping centers.