...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 -
As a resident and homeowner in Japan one of the small aspects of daily life I miss most are yards. In which I might play with my sons, or keep my dog if we had one, or mow and rake as therapeutic look-this-thing-I-did-has-immediate-results. As it is we have pavement, and in one small section, gravel, and a few potted plants. There is a small dedicated neighborhood park adjacent to our home, and for a time I used to busy myself with its upkeep, until it was gently suggested to me that this was accruing undesirable on on the part of the rest of the neighborhood, to whom my behavior could only be seen as odd but then what-can-one-expect-from-foreigners.
I am not sure if lawns in particular are your bugbear, or a general disdain of people. Lawns are arguably not the sole domain of the suburban middle class. You use the term Karen-y which puts you square in my mind in a certain youthful angry nihilistic demographic that is alien to me. Though I could be wrong. The snark may be clouding your greater points.
Huh, could you elaborate? That seems 'very weird', and glances into unfamiliar social situations are often interesting.
You can play with your kids in the neighborhood park, ofc. If anything it's a better place for play as it could naturally gather many different children.
There's a bit of a 'food is shit and portions too small' with the above critique though - lawns suck! They use too much space, and you're not allowed to fill it with a permaculture food forest!
Elaborate how? Of course i can and will, but which part?
Whatever you want to, but I'm specifically interested in whatever social norms led to maintaining the park seeming undesirable and being foreigner behavior, as opposed to anything political. Why isn't it just a harmless hobby? Do the local kids not use parks? Like - a vignette of an unfamiliar culture.
Ah. Let me explain myself. As well to ＠5434a
Because I often make typos it is possible one word seemed to be typed mistakenly, but wasn't. The word on. On (恩) means basically when i do you a favor, you owe me some sort of favor in return (恩返し) . To "accrue undesirable on" then would be to do [something] for someone where they then had a debt to me. My example in this case is the tending of the park--trimming the bushes, weeding unsightly plants, etc. For me to do this alone, in a way for the benefit of the neighborhood, might seem just civic responsibility for an American (or even just a harmless way for a neighbor to pass the time). In Japan however this puts everyone else in the neighborhood in the awkward position of being ever-so-subtly in debt to me, particularly if I am out there often enough, or seem to be applying myself strenuously.
A neighbor who brings you a bag of tomatoes from her back garden has been generous, but you'd do well to in some way take her kids a basket of muffins or whatever. Not the very next day, no need to be too obvious about it, but without too much delay. This is how the wheels of social intercourse stay greased.
None of this is peculiar to Japan, of course, except in the way these norms are adhered to by pretty much all but the most socially inept, fools, or, yes, foreigners. I have lived here long enough that some of this has finally been internalized.
I suspect in the public sphere (certainly in business, at least) the degree to which this kind of behavior scales could dance very close to what would be considered corruption. Reams of text have been published advising non-Japanese how to interact with Japanese representatives--and Japanese as well adjust their norms (at times perhaps hamhandedly) to suit "foreign" behavior. (Scare quotes because for many Jaoanese that term seems to be a monolithic catchall, as if all "foreigners" have the same kind of behavior.
The neighborhood, within about a year, formed a committee of residents represented by a dozen people (who rotate out and in every year or two) and one of the projects the committee created was to have people weed the park. What then happened was that because so many had been recruited to do this cleaning there were more hands than necessary, resulting in a lot of grass that should have stayed in the soil to keep it from eroding getting yanked up and bagged by well-meaning people who couldn't just loaf when there was ostensible work to do. Circle of life.
It's tempting for me to dismiss as odd and dysfunctional a lot of the ways Japanese culture(s) seem to work, but then I have only to think of my own upbringing to realize I shouldn't be casting stones.
If none of this makes sense I will try and clarify.
That does make sense, thanks! I do wonder how little cultural things like that emerge and persist, but that's a broader / harder question
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Fascinating. Would it not be possible to just tell them explicitly that you were doing it for fun and not because you wanted to help anyone or were expecting something in return? Can the on debt be forgiven?
I don't know but I somehow doubt it. Saying almost anything explicitly here is considered bad form--or, actually I only guess that it is bad form, as even that has never been said to me explicitly. Even in my earlier post when I said that it was "put to me" that I was accruing on inadvertently, this was not really put to me. It was hinted at and I got the message.
If I had to imagine it, I would say that I could, yes, state to one or two neighbors that I just wanted to piddle in the
gardenpark for my own gratification, and I would then be seen as a tolerable eccentric (which is how I am usually seen anyway.) But it would contribute to an imbalance of what I will probably inappropriately call the wa of the neighborhood. I would set things off kilter, and as a foreigner here I always take pains to not do that any more than I do by my presence alone. And probably someone would still not feel right about it.On is one of those things that never ends. The cycle commences and then it never stops. We have one neighbor whose sole interactions with us are greetings--no other kindnesses or gestures--for once those begin, they can never end. It's nothing personal. I guess. All of this is just me intuiting the unwritten rules.
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That bit confused me too. What does "accruing undesirable" constitute? Did people see a better kept park and start monopolising it? Are better kept parks considered fussy and unnatural? Were you encroaching on somebody else's remit?
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Japanese density is somewhat of its own, special case that stems from the sheer number of people packed into a rather small island. Their peculiar problems would not really translate to places where land isn't as incredibly limited.
That is interesting. Which demographic would you consider that to be? I was under the impression that the stereotype of a self-absorbed and pushy middle aged crank is not really limited to any particular demographic. It just didn't have a catchy name attached to it until recently.
Cf boomer, incel, millennial. Karen means woman who should be dismissed out of hand. Users of such terms are more an internet demographic if that is a thing. As I say I could be wrong.
Sure Japan is population dense, but still I would love a good backyard. And a front would be icing on the cake. In Botswana they had 'yards' but of sand, and any grass that sprouted you were supposed to dig up by the roots immediately for fear (rational or otherwise I can't say) of snakes. So lots of packed sand yards. I remember one guy up in Maun used to grow a lawn and could be found watering it regularly--an unheard of extravagance in any but the far north areas of that bushveldt/desert country.
That's a very wide net you're casting as far as possible demographics. The only ones you've missed are gen-xers and zoomers. If you care to narrow it down a little bit, I'll comment.
That sentence is silly. Population density fundamentally excludes that. Even (common) courtyards are rare in places as dense as major Japanese metropolises - yards are simply impractical. Almost everything positive that you can ascribe to a Japanese city as a product of that density and would not work in a sprawling giant of a "metro area".
You can say the sentence is silly, of course. Perhaps realistically it's silly, but I can have my preferences, I'm sure you would agree. I have no immediate plans to move but plenty of people do have yards in less urban areas of Japan, and we looked at a house some years ago whose main selling point in my mind was its smallish yard. Whatever population density you are imagining or reading about does not necessarily preclude all people in Japan from having yards.
You misconstrue. I am not saying boomer, etc. are the demographics I am referring to. I am suggesting these are similar terms people use to classify their outgroup, as you have classified Karens, or by using the term "Karen-y" as if that is something we are all meant to sympathize with and understand. The term to me says more about the person using it than it does crystallize in my head whom you may mean.
Here's the key phrase here. I'm specifically seething about the ones in more urban areas. What people do in the middle of nowhere concerns me very little. I in fact sympathise (at least to an extent) with people that prefer more rural living.
Not to go into meta-linguistics, but it's just a shorthand for an annoying, pedantic, and pushy person. All words carry some sort of an origin, but worrying about that sort of thing is just limiting your own ability to express yourself.
Again, you're not getting me. I am saying that there are yards in areas just outside the city. It's not that far-fetched. In city center, sure, right, yes, no yards, except perhaps for the very rich behind their walled gates, but those are usually cultivated Japanese gardens.
As for your quip about my limiting my ability to express myself, let's agree to disagree. Or just disagree, either is fine.
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