...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.
No email address required.
Notes -
That is just patently false. Human is a social ape that for most of its history had not even the slightest inkling of personal space or privacy. The idea of a personal house separated by some space barrier from the next one is a very modern one.
Our ancestors grew up in very close proximity to their close relatives and tribe members, but they also grew up separated by vast distances from other groups of strangers. I think that's the key difference between your conceptualisation and Ace's.
Pretty much all semi-successful cultures have developed some conception of a dense city as soon as they could. First cities, in fact, have (rather counter-intuitively) sprung up even before agriculture. If we're going to Paleolithic - you'd be right. But that wasn't due to social preference or something as much as it was about the fact that hunter-gatherers in general have a limit to the amount of people their lifestyle can support. As soon as that natural limit was lifted, tribes (or by that time - villages) started growing exponentially and combining into even larger polities. In many places and entirely independently.
The idea that homo sapiens is a solitary creature like a tiger is a very weird pseudoromanticism. We are in fact hard-wired to loathe loneliness above nearly all else.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
An ape that did not live amongst tar and cement but in nature. Greenery (even yallery-greenery if we're talking of the savannah) is in our collective unconsciousness. We're social animals but we're not a hive or an ant nest.
More options
Context Copy link
Yea, with a small number of people they know well, not literal strangers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link