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 ...
Liberals may not like the burbs but they sure do love their exclusive gated communities.
and he sums it all up nicely with:
“But, then, Hollywood is the most illusion-soaked, soul-hardened and materialistic suburb in the world.”
If the Liberals stopped screwing up the cities, more reasonable people might choose to live there. But living in the city is just a pain because of all of the Liberal programs.
You can’t rent an apartment in a place you like because most of the people are locked into rent-control deals and can’t move. So people never move up the real estate ladder, and entry-level apartments are scarce.
You can’t walk the streets because the police are not permitted to roust out the bums or to break up the groups of marauding kids, because that would be an infringement on their civil liberties, don’tcha know.
You can’t go for a drive because it costs an arm and a leg in tax just to park your car.
You can’t ride the subway because you are forbidden to carry a gun to protect yourself and the police don’t particularly want to ride the subway, even with guns.
Oh.
/rant over
Despite what people on this thread say, I’ve found that to my adventures to the suburbs left me with the conclusion that they’re not these bastions of individuality, but rather, they’re bastions of just a mutated form of collectivism which hides behind social conservatism (Which in its purest form, recognizes that people are different and is tolerant towards others differences but prefers traditional values). Everybody in the suburbs I visited had to do things a certain way and drive cars that look just like each other.
If you drove an art car or god forbid, you decided to commute to town using a bicycle or a motorbike instead of a car, you’re seen as some sort of pariah amongst your neighbors. Even though the politics of the people in the city are screwed up, people aren’t afraid to be individuals in the city. That’s something that’s sorely lacking in the burbs. It’s just a shame that their social individualism doesn’t match with their economic individualism.
You're right again! And they hate our values too...
Suburbs represented the success of capitalism. So liberals hate them. There, that was simple.
Bingo. The Left hates the middle class, or “bourgeoisie”, as Marxist snobs call them. Also, the suburbs are full of people with stable marriages and loved children, people who attend church and have a lifestyle which is the antithesis of that of the libertine Leftist elite and the criminal urban underclass.
It could just be that living in one of the few cities that has trees and truly beautiful architecture that is both preserved and currently being REALLY restored, the soul of the city just shines. We all have our problems with various vagrants, but you learn to deal with it. Even those of us who are conservative like to have beauty around us. The other point that the author does not make is that there are a number of smaller municipalities adjacent to city lines that have all the advantages of living in the city with better road repair. I admit to sleeping in one such place, but it's still considered city by suburbanites who think a trip to the main drag's various eclectic shops is something exotic.
Agreed.
You try living in an apartment with nine children, IF you can get anyone to rent you one. Aesthetes can vomit themselves to death, for all I care.
Yeah, Levitown is really the beginning of liberal hatred of suburbs, and that was kind of legitimate. But they haven’t gotten over it, there’s plenty of suburb out there that isn’t ticky-tacky houses.
You prefer identical boxes stacked on top of each other in high-rises?
I will be skipping this movie.
Especially after seeing the truly ingenius film, “Slumdog Millionaire”, which leaves you SO GRATEFUL for America!
There was one thread a lot time ago where Freepers responded to some liberal pinhead’s rant on suburban city planning. As I recall he wanted planners to do away with culs-de-sac because his opinion was that it allowed people to isolate themselves from society.
As usual, the liberal operates to control or limit people and their choices. You can bet if they could get away with it they would have us drive electric cars with a short range. Good for keeping the masses in one place.
Urban row houses, town houses and brown stones, which we find charming today, were all 18th and 19th century forms of 20th century suburban tract homes. It's all relative.
Nope. Dislike apartments, too. I grew up in 'em.
Apartments don't pretend to represent individuality. A home does. At least, it should.
Born and raised in close-in Atlanta suburbs, lived in a small town in NJ, then in midtown Atlanta (actually Virginia Highlands/Virginia-Briarcliff), then in NW urban Atlanta, then in an older suburb just outside the city.
Never have experienced any of this supposed anomie and pressure to conform, unless you count when I lived in Princeton NJ on an all-Italian street and the little old black-clad widows used to glower at me because I wasn't going to Mass on Sunday morning (hey, I wasn't Catholic then!)
Where you are is what you make of it. We are screaming nonconformists, and nobody in our current VERY suburban neighborhood (first platted in 1970) has ever raised a fuss. We drive weird cars, build strange projects in the driveway, train dogs in the yard, etc. We have FIVE (count 'em! FIVE) amateur radio antennas sprouting amongst the trees in the back yard. One of our neighbors has a Harley. Another one collects cars. Another one is a woodworker (his shop spills out all over his driveway) and makes the most beautiful hand-turned bowls you ever saw.
We want to move out to the country because I need more room for my horses and my dogs, but I will really hate to leave my neighbors.
They are still sure their Great Society would have worked, if only those damned racist cowards had stayed in the cities and kept paying their taxes. ;)
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