Cultural Black Holes

Perhaps the best story The Onion has ever done, a family found alive in the suburbs:

Upon discovery, the family was rushed back to civilization. Attempts to reassimilate the Holsapples into metropolitan living with a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago and dinner at a nice Peruvian restaurant were met with resistance.

“When we got to the museum, the family became quite agitated,” psychologist Dr. Allan Green said. “Jay kept calling all the modern art ‘weird’ and Meredith said, ‘If we wanted to look at art, we could just go to Deck The Walls at the mall.’”

Green feared that the family was not ready to rejoin urban life after having received little or no cultural stimuli in the suburbs for nearly a decade.

Indeed, the suburbs are cultural black holes, sucking dry everything interesting about mankind. In its place: cars, gigantic streets, parking lots, bigger cars, 23¢ off toothpaste, carefully manicured street medians, stores that are 150 yards or more from the street, even bigger cars, and rows and rows of lawns.

Surely the epitome of suburban life is the lawn: an utterly useless and void patch of grass. Too small to use as a field for recreational activities. Just big enough to warrant the purchase of a gas-powered lawn mower. A facade of country living at best, the suburban lawn drains time, money, and resources from its owners, giving nothing in return.

Futhermore, lawns push everything farther apart. Lawns cover more surface area in the US than irrigated corn. Farther apart means more time spent in cars, driving around. Arcade Fire put it well in their album, The Suburbs, where this lyric is found in two songs:

First they built the road
Then they built the town
That’s why we’re still driving around
And around and around and around and around
And around and around and around and around
And around and around and around and around

Less time in real places. With real people. Two things the suburbs were engineered to keep us away from.