...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 -
Have you never grilled out and drank beer with friends on a nice green lawn?
The answer is bums, hobos, panhandlers, psychos, perverts, buskers, criminals, litterers, and generally obnoxious people, and the leaders that do nothing effective to stop them from shitting the commons.
Vast majority of these issues are created via horrifically failed social policies. While bums and whatnot are always going to be present under any social system where the need to keep the ruled in fear is paramount for its continued existence - having a less despicable middle class whose insecurities don't cause them to adopt as ghoulish of policies typically helps with having them at least somewhat contained, even in places that aren't nearly as wealthy.
But, of course, as long as the system continues to require a terrifyingly downtrodden underclass to scare the general mass into compliance - bums will continue to exist in the cities. In the cities, because their survival depends on being in areas of dense foot traffic. That's hardly a legitimate reason to retreat to the unbelievably lame dystopia of the endless lawn...
I have no idea what you mean by this, elaborate? Are you suggesting the middle or upper middle class would stop working if homeless people were less visible? That doesn't seem correct.
No. I'm suggesting that homelessness and extreme poverty could in most cases be easily be fixed by any modern society. The cost of such a collection of measures would be tiny in comparison to the externalities associated with actually having homelessness and associated social ills. But it's not being fixed, since it provides the working precariat something unbelievably scary to prevent them from quitting. Existence of homelessness is kind of a virtual whip for the modern proletarian.
I don't think any individual decision-makers believe this, though. The closest thing that exists is 'welfare removes the incentive to work', but conservatives and capitalists seem to, at least publicly, care a lot more about how homelessness is awful and how the evil liberals want to let the homeless roam the streets.
Even if the homeless were given free pods and showers, the precariat still wouldn't want to lose their apartments, their jobs, the ability to spend money on whatever things they enjoy, and the respect from their peers all of those things grant.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link