...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 think if people want lawns, they should be able to have lawns. Personally I find the sad little strip of concrete or what have you even worse than a tiny patch of grass. And you're never going to " 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" because the patches of lawn are all in separate strips of housing and separated out by the various towns. You can't magically clump them all together to get "same surface area as Disneyland plus Champs Elysees", so it's not really a coherent argument. If you want to argue "the money and time spent on maintaining lawns would come to X amount and could be spent elsewhere" sure, but given my cultural background, very much I go "fuck you, this patch of land is MINE not the possession of the landlord or the Crown and if I want to grow a lawn I damn well can and will do so because it is MINE and belongs to ME" breaks into The Fields of Athenry
If you don't want lawns, you should also be able to not have lawns. Ditto with if you want to grow flowers, vegetables, etc. The whole HOA thing is something very foreign (ha!) to me. So long as you don't have rusting broken-down cars up on concrete blocks in the front yard, it's nobody's business what you do with "your home is your castle".
The irony here is your objections to the HOA is precisely because they act like "this is not yours, it is PUBLIC" even as you scold people for wanting lawns because "But nooooo, this isn't good enough, because that would be public".
"Public" does mean the HOA or other pinched-face clipboard-holder coming round to tell you what you can and can't do with that piece of land. If you don't want a lawn, owning it as MINE MINE MINE means you can tell them to take a hike.
That part is literally the simplest fix imaginable. A stroke of a pen changes that. Imaginary lines on a map are hardly the biggest obstacle here.
I'm not "magically" clumping anything together, I'm merely making a point that the same area housing the same number of people in units of the same size could easily be accomplished in a tiny fraction of that area, with additional space left over being enough to have a [insert large landmark].
It's a thought experiment.
Exactly, lol. This is precisely the attitude I have described in this post.
Sure, the city won't let you have a toxic waste dump or a bottomless pit, but their decisions are based on public good and real, objective realities of an urban environment. Not conceptual unity with some grotesque local aesthetic chosen by a class of office plankton as a ludicrous way to signal their status.
Okay, sweetie. How are you going to roll up all the lawns and put them down in one large open space to become Disneyland with merely "a simple stroke of the pen"?
Demonstrate to me how you get the green bits from this all connected up together into an area the size of Disneyland, please!
Now if what you mean is "demolish all the houses in all the suburbs around all the towns and cities and turn them back to a brownfield site" well yes, I imagine if you knock down every house in all the estates you'll end up with a large open space. But that's not what the original quote said.
It's like the "if you take a gazillion people all suffering from the momentary discomfort of a dust speck in the eye, it outweighs torturing one person every day for fifty years" argument. No, it doesn't scale up like that.
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