Posted on 12/27/2008 5:53:20 AM PST by VU4G10
"Revolutionary Road," based on Richard Yates's 1961 novel of the same name, is the latest entry in a long stream of art that portrays the American suburbs as the physical correlative to spiritual and mental death.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
They didnt want to be any more “embattled” than they had to be.
“the suburbs were living refutation of the crumbling ethos that had guided the crime-ridden, decaying urban centers. For embattled liberals, people leaving the cities for safer and cleaner outlying towns were racists and cowards who had no respect for shared public space.”
Having your population living within cities makes them easier to control.
Meh. Define ‘suburb’.
Tract housing makes me sick to my stomach. No individuality.
Misery loves company.
Which is why liberals hate cars and highways. Owners get to decide when and where to go. With public transportation, you go when and where THEY want you to go.
From article: One of the most glaring ironies of American life is that, a quarter-century later, the cities have metamorphosed into the suburbs -- sans trees and grass. The cities' fabled diversity has devolved into global chain stores and the electrolyte-enhanced water bottle and the branded baseball cap have become the accessories of a universal comfort and conformity. In a social and cultural sea change, the cities' rented apartments, once the guarantor of diversity and fluid, exciting movement, have been converted into exclusive co-ops and condominiums. Yet as the cities have become a new type of suburb, suburb-phobia has become an ever more acceptable cultural attitude. The suburban person is considered too meek, too asphalt-challenged to inherit the earth. In the urban centers, on the other hand, desperate ambition makes bad manners respectable, and the chic of perverse taste covers up Philistine cluelessness. The decent, suburban person is regarded as contemptible because he has not learned to reach beyond his talents and pick life's pockets.
It really is about a conflict of visions. For the liberal, anal retentiveness in "categorizations" (aka: bean counting) is mandatory in order to never bother themselves with the messy stuff and parts of actual "living".
In a city, people have extra-marital affairs, and amid the sheer volume of people, this is unnoticeable unless the cuckolded spouse murders someone.
In suburbia, an extramarital affair is noticed, and amounts to "news". Social punishments and and rewards are meted out at the individual level. Not so, in a City.
Just one example out of many as to why the Elite Left despises suburbia. Their dishonor would be far too easily addressed in suburbia, and no headlines would make the news giving them a platform upon which to make an "easy" million.
Suburbs and cars symbolize freedom and prosperity for the great unwashed. Can’t have that, thus saith liberalism.
It’s a farce. Go to any of the enclaves in Hamptons or Beverly Hills, East to West Coast and observe the Suburbanites in their splendid isolation and sincere imitation of Levitttown on Le Plus Grand Scale.
*Opus knows. That’s why it lives in Le Plus Wet Swamp.
As a country boy I agree with you on tract housing. However, to city dwellers those generic hive houses are a beautiful change from the environs of a city. Can’t say I blame them.
It’s not so much that they hate the suburbs as it is that they hate the middle class.
I don't think they have metamorphosed at all. I think the city dwellers use those symbols (designer water, ball caps) as a form of escape from the city and its dangers. How many people actually walk around the streets of NY or LA and just enjoy the sounds and sights except for tourists?
There were two overarching reasons for condemning the suburbs, during the '50s and early '60s, as the most rotten locale in civilized life: class and money. Most of the people leaving the cities for the suburbs in the 1950s were tradespeople, modest businessmen, teachers and the like. They were, in other words, members of the middle-class, the impassioned rejection of which has been the chief rite de passage of the modern American artist and intellectual. With the growth of suburban towns, the liberal American intellectual now had a concrete geography to house his acute sense of outrage.
It's impossible to imagine if all, or most of those people had not left the cities. The overcrowding would be a petrie dish of crime, anger and disillusionment. Just look at the crowded cities of Russia, France and India. People need room.
With the mental instability (insanity) that is consistently shown by Hollywood, why would I care one whit what these deviants want???
I prefer rural farmland or wooded spaces to soulless cities or overpacked suburbs.
From a business model perspective, why does Hollywood continue to make movies that tank at the box office? Saw “Australia” a few weeks ago, the first movie I have seen in a theatre in years. What a piece of crapola!
RATS hate them because they know they have NONE of the required skills/talents to live on their own. NONE of them could do the home/yard/car maintenance/repair/driving required to make it outside the city... and the know it, and hate you for it, and being able to live life on your own terms.
that sums it up nicely.
I'll add that in the liberal inner city, people believe that what's mine is theirs and have no qualms about taking that which their neighbor has earned. In the suburbs, or at least where I live, we still believe in property rights and will use deadly force if necessary to defend our castles.
Let’s take a survey of these losers in Hollyweird who look down upon us.
Does anyone really think that Brittney Spears has found happiness after chasing off her husband and her kids with her addictions?
Will Angelina finally find lasting happiness with Brad, who is just a number in a long string of failed relationships?
Will Tom Cruise find happiness in creating the perfect Scientiology wife?
Does Oprah really have anything going for herself besides boatloads of money? She has a pacified ‘kept man’ for marginal companionship and is still looking for something else in life.
Most of the big-name stars are losers. What’s striking when you watch ‘MTV Cribs’ or the old ‘Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous’ is how utterly lonely these people are. They have no real friends, most have party friends and employees but no friends. They have no one to hang out with in their mansions because they are such big losers no one wants to hang out with them.
Few people in Hollyweird have successful lives, with friends, family, and good relationships that give their lives meaning. Maybe that’s whey despise people in the middle class and go after the trendy causes like Enviromentalism.
I don’t know why they have been elevated to such a position in our culture. All throughout history actors have been considered pretty much the dregs of society.
Everyone hates the suburbs. That’s why no one lives in them and they’re all shrinking. /sarc
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