The day after New Year's, The News-Journal ran a huge map on the front of the business section highlighting retail's "coming attractions" in Flagler and Volusia counties. I counted eight major developments adding up to more than 2 million square feet of retail and commercial space. Counting the smaller strip malls that invariably escort the larger ones, and a few other big ones likely to be announced in the next few years, the shopping makeover in Flagler and Volusia -- just the new stuff -- will probably add up to more retail space than the Mall of America's 2.5 million square feet. That place, in Bloomington, Minn., attracts 35 million to 40 million visitors a year to stay viable, or as many visitors as Disney's Big Four theme parks in Orlando combined (Magic Kingdom, Epcot, MGM and Animal Kingdom attracted 38 million visitors in 2003).

Shopping is the nation's leading time-killer next to television, so maybe Flagler and Volusia are onto something. "Because you see the main thing today is -- shopping," Solomon tells Victor in "The Price," the late Arthur Miller's play. "Years ago a person, he was unhappy, didn't know what to do with himself -- he'd go to church, start a revolution -- something. Today you're unhappy? Can't figure it out? What is the salvation? Go shopping."

So we have. The nation has been adding more than 250 million square feet of retail space every year since 1998. Wal-Mart alone is building or expanding 250 supercenters this year. Lowe's, the home-improvement giant, will open 150 stores. Lowe's must have its eyes on the projected $120 billion in construction spending for the year, which would break the $112 billion record set in 2000. With debts and deficits all around, you wonder where the money to sustain this frenzied pace is coming from.

Your imagination is a good place to start, because much of the money is imaginary. Consumer debt, already at a record $2.2 trillion, rose at an annual 6.6 percent rate in January. The number rises to $10.3 trillion when you include mortgages (up from $4.6 trillion 10 years ago). That works out to a $35,000 debt for every man, woman and child, or $140,000 for the average family of four, at a time when median household income has fallen for the past three years, to $43,300.

When Arthur Miller published "The Price" in 1968, Victor could heed Solomon's words comfortably enough to splurge. For all of Vietnam's and the Great Society's burdens on the economy, the federal budget deficit was $25 billion, and ran up a $3 billion surplus the following year (compared with a $412 billion deficit in 2004). The United States was still the world's fattest creditor. The entire national debt accumulated through the Republic's history was a measly $358 billion, or less than $2 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars. It grew by $2 trillion just in the first four years of George Bush's "conservative" presidency.

There isn't just a lot of borrowing going on. There's a growing deficit between assumptions and reality. The assumption is that because the sun shone on the nation's prosperity yesterday, it will shine again tomorrow. The assumption is based on something President Bush likes to say whenever his assumptions about just about anything under the sun are challenged: "We are America." The phrase once evoked the noble notion of inalienable right. Somehow it has devolved into the more prosaic notion of inalienable might. The notion has its purpose. It helps prolong an illusion of strength. But it is just another form of borrowing -- on public trust, on global confidence, on the future: take your pick.

The day before the "coming attractions" map ran in this newspaper, The New York Times ran a long op-ed by Jared Diamond on "The ends of the world as we know them." Diamond won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for "Guns, Germs and Steel," a book that links the rise and fall of human societies to factors less conventional than white power or black plagues. He makes a specialty of tracing nations' fates to their relationships with the environment. "A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions," Diamond wrote. "Historically, we viewed the United States as a land of unlimited plenty, and so we practiced unrestrained consumerism, but that's no longer viable in a world of finite resources. We can't continue to deplete our own resources as well as those of much of the world." The piece in the Times sums up his argument in a new book called "Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed." We have been choosing to fail, Diamond argues.

The historical evidence on his side is more convincing than the speculative evidence of the "we-are-America" crowd. To take one example: America's consumer debt is not just a debt of dollars, but a reflection of how much we've borrowed against the world's financial and environmental banks. It reflects an imbalance of resources which, if not righted, will mean a lot worse than the collapse of a few malls. Those emporiums about to hum with shoppers and ozonated air all over Flagler and Volusia are a sign of great economic optimism. They're also local versions of the same collective wager on a future of endlessly greater consumption. Not only are the bet's assumptions unsustainable. The bet itself is on credit. Our coming attractions, in other words, may not have a happy ending.

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. He can be reached at ptristam@att.net

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