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 ...
Just watch your zoning. Yanks are moving in around here and changing the zoning on people with dogs, horses, and rifle ranges. “Safety,” you know, and “it’s for the (1.2 per 4,000 sq.ft.) chillun.”
My father was a truck driver around 1950, hauling cattle and pigs to East St. Louis with his uncle. Some of his most interesting stories date to those days, and fortunately, he still remembers a few!
Gotta love those icky animals!
One night my hubby and I came home from an evening of shopping to find newborn twin fawns in our kitchen.
Our son thought they had been abandoned and brought them home.
After a nice photo shoot session (they were adorable!) we made him take them back to where he found them.
Mama came in the middle of the night and moved them.
“Just watch your zoning. Yanks are moving in around here and changing the zoning on people with dogs, horses, and rifle ranges. “Safety,” you know, and “it’s for the (1.2 per 4,000 sq.ft.) chillun.””
There’s no zoning here, so you can’t stop your neighbor from turning his yard into a used parts junkyard, or a meth lab.
Rural has its drawbacks too.
Meth labs are illegal everywhere :-). Junkyards are the price you pay for the right to have a rifle range or paint your house chartreuse. Tradeoffs ...
We get icky animals like snapping turtles and malodorous toads and bugs the size of my shoe. Nothing cute like fawns.
In the 80's, one night every car on the street was hit and various little things were missing. My mother gets this phone call from a neighbor who's dog is in the middle of the street licking what looks to be a block of government cheddar cheese (the good stuff that they used to distribute). So we looked in the van that was called "the cattle truck" and sure enough, the block of cheese my grandparents got for us was missing. Mystery solved. Small price to pay for being in this part of town.
For major league baseball you obviously have to go downtown (or watch on TV), although there's been talk of moving the team to Gwinnett County or putting a AA team there. If I want a botanical garden in a conventional sense, there's one in downtown Atlanta. But I would rather walk in the Chattahoochee National Forest and see the plants in their native setting. I can't throw a rock and hit the river from my front door, but it's less than 1/2 mile away.
Downtown is less than 15 minutes from my door if I need to go there . . . in fact I work there. But I don't need to go there for much of anything else, unless I feel like it. We went down to the Civic Center to see the King Tut exhibit, we take in an occasional ball game, and the rest of the time pretty much whatever we want is right here.
What, you don't get raccoons, skunks, coyotes, Canada geese, bullfrogs, rabbits (that eat my flowers), opossums and various other rodents? Welcome to life in St. Louis. Although, the coyotes have been hanging out more in Ladue where the far more wealthy people live. Drives them nuts.
U-hem, have you ever heard of rowhouses/townhomes? Usually not popular with the poor people you speak of.
You do realize that the most popular places for immigrants and the poor these days is not the central city, but in older suburbs?
Nobody who lives in the West Village, Upper West Side or Brooklyn Heights is spending their time wishing they were living in the crabgrass frontier.
ESL has always been a problem! That song dates to the 1890s at least, Frankie & Johnny era anyhow. Brady was a famous bad man after the Civil War. Got shot in his saloon by a sheriff named Duncan (I think.)
My dogs deal with all chipmunks, rabbits, and the occasional possum. Never seen a raccoon or a skunk here. We do have a couple of red foxes but they keep to themselves. Canadas fly over, Labs bark, Canadas keep flying.
I meant in the house.
We do have a phenomenal Botanical Garden that takes hours to get through if you've never seen it before and it's on the south side. In the 1850's it was somebody's country estate and he donated it to the city as a botanical garden. The land has never been developed other than as the Garden. The best part - it's free for St. Louis City and County residents on Saturday mornings. I didn't go today as it's raining, but I spend a lot of time there.
And the symphony, as I'm in the chorus, I hang out there a lot.
It just depends on what you are into. I probably won't ever live on acreage due to an allergy problem. I cannot be around freshly mown grass. Even here, on weekends in the spring I have to stay inside with all the lawn mowers going.
And I’m very happy for all of them.
They also hate capitalism, which also made this country.
In reality, the reason they hate the middle class is that the middle class is what’s stopping them from socializing the economy. As long as the economy works for the middle class, they can’t get their Marxist agenda thru. Once the middle class is gone, they can. So the trick is to destroy the middle class without getting the blame for doing it.
City wage taxes.
Exorbitant property taxes.
And...Horrific schools that the city dweller is forced ( under police threat) to support.
When we lived downtown, we didn't even have a lawn or a lawnmower, just 1 1/2 acres of trees that grew slap up to the house (I had to trim branches when they got in the gutters). It was Mrs. Barnett's back cow pasture and grew up in trees after she stopped keeping cows. We bought it from her when she was about 90 years old and built a cabin right in the middle. We had to sell it when we outgrew the cabin, and a free spirit potter bought it from us and is still down there happily firing clay in two big kilns set up among the trees.
Of course some of the trees generate pollen, but I don't know if it's the allergy kind.
Actually, in the early 20th century it was an ideal place to live.
BTW: I live in suburbia, albeit with a bit more character than certain other areas of New Jersey. Zoning laws and colonial landmarks help. :)
Somebody must have cleaned out the badmen and the saloons.
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