...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!
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
I’ll echo what other posters have contended with, mainly that this post argues folks that live in American suburbs are:
Who
And are
Where is your evidence for this? How could you be persuaded of a counterpoint?
In fact, what is your argument in this post? All I’m reading is that you think people in the American middle class who own suburbs are inherently bad, and have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Do you think none of these people love their spouses, their children, or their community? Are you really so ready to attack their entire way of life because you don’t understand them?
How about this. You’re a poor American who has worked hard your entire life. You’ve jumped through the hoops, tried your best, earned the status symbols and are trying to wrest some meaning from your life. You’re tired and you just want to relax and enjoy your small house with your family. You indulge in the aesthetic sensibilities that you were socialized into.
Please explain, why are these people bad, exactly? If you can give me a coherent argument, without relying on constant smears, I would be willing to engage with you.
Otherwise I’m siding with @Amadan and @naraburns, in that I’d like to see far less of this type of post on this site.
...and that meaning comes from a lawn? Christ... What a miserable conception of a meaning...
Because if you have this in your genetic ancestral memory, it fucking well does. My home is my castle. This is my own tiny small patch of land that I own and no fucker looking down his nose at my plebeian tastes can do anything but seethe barrenly about the effrontery of me "aping" my "betters".
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