You'd have trouble finding a more apt symbol for American dysfunctions than the lawn. Replaces diversity with monocrop that requires poisons. Utterly unproductive waste of land. Separates the public into isolated units. Ugly. Etc. etc. getpocket.com/explore/item/t…
All right, the actual news today is too depressing to contemplate & I don't feel like doing Real Work, so I'm gonna yell more about lawns on here. You've been warned -- mute if necessary.

So, let's talk about the absolute tragedy of 20th century US land use.
For most of ... well, history, people lived in settlements, in close proximity, sharing public spaces & facilities. In post-war America, we decided to go a different way. We decided to chip away, erode, & eventually all but banish public space. But the thing is ...
... public spaces & facilities provide lots of useful services! If you're going to get rid of them, then each individual homeowner basically has to recreate them. Replace public parks with lawns & play structures. Replace public festivals/gatherings with backyard BBQs.
And so on. The idea was: you don't need a public. As an American capitalist consumer, you can recreate everything you need about it on your own private estate. (That's where "lawns" originated -- giant rich-people estates.) Your nuclear family is self-contained, self-sustaining.
Two important things to add about this: one, it was not organic, a simple response to the unique character & demands of Americans. It was driven by business interests -- road builders, home builders, chain-stores eager to sell individual BBQs to every single suburbanite.
Second & most importantly: it was driven by racism. The point of escaping the public & moving everything behind private property lines was, though it created a wan, empty substitute for the public, *at least you could exclude black people*.
This is what @hmcghee's whole (excellent) book is about. Her central parable is about communities draining their public pools rather than integrate them. White Americans basically chose to destroy the public realm rather than share it.
The results obviously hurt the excluded minorities, but *they also hurt the white people*. When you move the public into private spaces, you get inequality. Not everyone can afford their own pool. Most people just lost access to swimming.
Most people ended up in suburbs with shitty private simulacra of public spaces & services -- and it's been going on so long they don't even remember what they've lost. They don't know there's another way. They don't know that there can even BE a robust public.
Which brings us back to the lawn. You lost public spaces, where people can gather & encounter one another & learn to live together & form actual communities. In exchange, you got this: that weedy, labor-intensive brown patch in front of your house, which is empty 99% of the time.
Thanks to capitalism & racism, we traded the public for the private, thus ensuring massive inequality, atomization, loneliness, isolation, declining trust in public institutions, & a whole generation of suburban men who need militia cosplay to feel like a part of something.
And to make it work, we covered everything in pavement & made daily life utterly dependent on 2-ton machines which poison & kill tens of thousands of us every year -- machines to which we've developed hostage-style attachment.
In conclusion, fuck lawns, thank you for coming to my ted talk. </fin>

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More from @drvolts

22 Mar
US public schools teach the concepts of political equality and multiethnic democracy as cereal-box truisms, founding principles of the US. I wish instead it would teach them as radical, revolutionary aspirations, permanently hostile to entrenched powers & demographics.
"Embedded in the founding documents of this country are concepts that, if taken seriously, are poison to the entrenched elites who run the country. The idea of America is permanently dangerous to the reality of America." I feel like school kids would vibe with that!
"Being a good American, in the deepest sense, means being a threat to the economic & political elites who run America." C'mon, kids would eat that up.
Read 4 tweets
22 Mar
As we're all aware, lots of people have dedicated their lives to scolding the left over "wokeness" & related issues. My favorite part of their articles is always where they hand-wave at the rising tide of reactionary illiberalism & violence from the right. They can't ignore it...
... but to take it too seriously might raise questions such as, "if that's going on, why are you talking about THIS?" So there's a real art form: you acknowledge it enough to check the box, but not so much it renders your focus absurd.
It's this drek from Thomas Frank that got me thinking of it. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Read 9 tweets
21 Mar
For months I've been harping on the point that Dems are on a clock -- they have a small window in which to make real changes & that window may not come again for a decade. And it's not just losing the House in 2022 that will close the window ...
... it's this weird political moment we're in. Trump's crimes & the insurrection are still on people's minds, though fading quickly. Dems are still united around policy, though that's fading quickly. And Biden is still in a weird honeymoon period in which ...
... the RW media machine can't seem to get anything to stick to him. But that will fade too. Whether it's the border BS, the BS about his fitness, some other BS -- something will work, get the press frothing, & get "partisan squabbling" squarely back in the news ...
Read 4 tweets
21 Mar
The Republican position is that Democrats should try harder & waste more time pursuing the cooperation that they will inevitably not get. And press just eats it up!
Here's why Collins is mad: @WHCOS refuses to take her stale bad-faith routine seriously. She's used to being lavishly praised for it.
Read 8 tweets
21 Mar
Just been rewatching the Captain America movies, alongside Justice League. It's not just that Marvel is better at character & dialogue. Even in terms of pure action, Marvel is just so, so much better at situating you in space, conveying the kinetics of force & impact & motion.
Honestly, the scene in Civil War where Cap and Black Panther chase Bucky through the tunnel is just a f'ing wonder. You never lose track of where you are. You get a visceral sense of how fast & agile they are. It's both awesome to watch & *emotionally* engaging.
And there's like 2 seconds of slo-mo in the whole thing.
Read 4 tweets
20 Mar
Yeah, this is such a good pod. Even beyond Cuomo, it's great at showing how we have been trained to mistake toxic masculinity for "leadership." And it's not based on results. Leaders who are assholes *perform worse*. Being a dick is not effective.
I have, I'll just say vaguely, a close-up view of the business world, and it is gobsmacking how much time & emotional energy *everyone* has to devote to navigating around the tender egos of white men who fashion themselves mini-Pattons. It does not help get things done.
One thing both research & common sense show is that superior performance comes from internal motivation, not fear of external threat. You want people to perform well for you, you treat them well, acknowledge their strengths, encourage their initiative -- SEE them.
Read 7 tweets

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