...so I was drunk in rdrama/motte BotC server one day and promised to write up a post-level critique of the American middle class. Of course, the "project" kept getting bumped for the sake of far more important things, such as drinking joylessly while reposting telegram posts on shitty drama discord servers, this being a far less effort-intensive way to anger people. However, today I suddenly felt bored enough to actually remember my prior commitments, so here it is:
Lawns are fucking moronic. Just think about it - if you put like 20% of Cook County lawns together and combine all the land, money, and effort that goes into their maintenance into something actually useful - you'll have a fucking Disneyland with a Champs-Élysées annex. But nooooo, this isn't good enough, because that would be public and not MINE, MIIIINE, MOOOOOOOOOM, HE'S USING A TOY THAT'S MIIIIIINE!!!
Worse yet, if I were to personally decide "fuck this, this is retarded, I don't need this shit, there's a perfectly good park like three fucking blocks away - I'll just grow potatoes or something else actually productive on this plot" - a formless, permanently scowling creature - the dreaded bored HOA housewife - is sure to be crawling out of the woodwork in seconds, with a clipboard and her trademark Karen-y bangs. And she'll instantly begin to shrilly preach about how something so unbelievably ludicrous could not possibly allowed under any circumstances, because, god forbid, other Karens looking for a place to live will drive past and certainly think "waah, waah, this is proposterous! Potatoes?! I can't even! I need everything to be exactly uniform!", leading to her pride and joy, the land value of the lawn containing her shitty cardboard box with fancy beige siding - will go down. Un-acc-ept-ab-le!
This isn't really my main point - it's just an absolutely phenomenal illustration of why the American middle class is the worst fucking socioeconomic group to ever live. They are petit bourgeois to an extent (primarily in their deeply rooted insecurity and precarious status), but their sensibilities are worse than that - they see themselves as some sort of smaller-scale genteel manor lord, whose lifestyle they so artlessly attempt to ape - but they lack the taste, the resources, or the confidence to actually do that. So instead, they ape the simplest bit - a manicured lawn that said gentleman would use for playing cricket or going on mid-afternoon horseback rides or whatever the fuck it is that those inbred bastards do there - but without the space to realistically be usable for that or really anything else outside of serving as a glorified litter box for the family dog.
And yet they do see themselves as above everyone else. They are aggressive about it, too! “Look at me, I have made it, I have my lawn. Mine! MINE! I won't live in a pod like those disgusting city-dwellers, ugh!.. I'm a real American. This is real America! I like my Bud Light Coors Light, my pickup, my Jesus, and my Red Lobster! Oh, and my vastly superfluous rifle collection! My office plankton job makes me inherently superior to those dirty poors, who just lack my good, old-fashioned work ethic, or they’d be able to file regional shrinkage dynamics reports just like me and become productive members of society!”
To sum it up, the only real question is... Why are they like this? Who hurt them? What possible calamity has caused them to become these incredibly shallow, yet exceptionally vain shells of something vaguely resembling human form? Perhaps we’ll never know.
I am, however, interested in your guys’ opinions on the subject!
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Notes -
I'm not a fan of rdrama, nor do I want its aesthetics and hyperbole imported here.
I am not a huge fan of lawns, and my own yard is some combination of native grass and spindly flowing things.
Still, I find myself confused by your confusion. The lawn people have two children and a dog. If they're older, maybe they have some grandkids and a cat. They do not want to have to supervise them or have them in the same room with themselves all the time, or even all the time when they're home on evenings and weekends. They cannot send them to the park on their own for 13 years, or depending on the neighborhood, ever. Hence, the yard. Why is that the case? Because it's a big American city, and Americans are kind of paranoid and drive around drunk in trucks where they can't see kids.
Why is the yard full of grass instead of potatoes? Partly because potatoes are kind of a stupid thing to be growing in modern industrial society, where they're incredibly cheap and they'd have to dig up their yard to get them, and there are a bunch of utilities under the soil, so you have to map out where you'd even be able to dig safely.
Some of them do in fact grow kale and such in their backyards, but in suburban Chicago there is a bunch of lead in the soil and the paints and the pipes, and it isn't trivially easy to grow vegetables that are worth eating. It's a lot harder to learn how to grow actually useful plants, neatly, than to keep a lawn, and they subscribe to the broken window theory, where a poorly kept, weedy garden is analogous to a broken window in signaling urban decay. In their defense, a lot of neighborhoods are undergoing a process of decay.
Ok, but why aren't they at least growing fruit or nuts? I don't know, it would amuse the children and the cat, and is easy. Maybe they should. The ones who drive around in pickup trucks, drinking beer while they fish in canals do have fruit trees (and also messy vegetable gardens, and are really an entirely different demographic than the suburban middle class lawn owners). It is probably fairly easy to convince a suburban lawn owner to plant a fruit tree, with a neatly mulched barrier between it and the lawn.
I planted locally-appropriate fruit trees at my last house. Two produced fruit within a couple years, but it was a constant battle to rescue them from fungal infections; the third grew wonderfully, but (although it was supposed to be a self-pollenating variety) never gave me any fruit.
Maybe the ease varies with climate? When I visit extended family in California I get bags of fruit thrust upon me, because apparently you can't so much as drop a seed in a flowerpot there without being inundated by oranges the size of grapefruits soon after.
Yeah, I probably should have added a caveat to that.
I learned only last week about the American Chestnut blight wiping them all out; previously I had just assumed that "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" weren't available in the Western US because they're annoying to pick or something.
In the West, fruit trees are generally very easy to maintain once established, since there aren't a bunch of endemic fungal diseases trying to take them out. They don't always produce, with late storms and winds and droughts and whatnot, but are a lot less work than a lawn.
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My late mother planted the seeds from an apple years ago and we still have a very small apple tree that provides a ton of eating apples in autumn. So many that, because I'm not the baking and cooking type, a lot of them go to waste.
Currant bushes etc. are also easy to grow. Don't plant strawberries, the runners will take over and turn your garden patch into a weedy wasteland. I've heard the same re: mint so that's another one to avoid.
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