FW: Fwd: NYTimes.com Article: Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia

[Frances Morey]

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 An interesting article sent me by Dave Shapiro. 


. 


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The article below from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by daveinaustintexas@yahoo.com.


This column from the Sunday New York Times is more than a sociology lesson. It's must reading if you want to get a grip on America politics because the central cities and the suburbs don't turn-on to the same issues and don't always vote the same way.
Dave

daveinaustintexas@yahoo.com


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Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia

April 4, 2004
 By DAVID BROOKS 



 

We're living in the age of the great dispersal. Americans
continue to move from the Northeast and Midwest to the
South and West. But the truly historic migration is from
the inner suburbs to the outer suburbs, to the suburbs of
suburbia. From New Hampshire down to Georgia, across Texas
to Arizona and up through California, you now have the
booming exurban sprawls that have broken free of the
gravitational pull of the cities and now float in a new
space far beyond them. For example, the population of
metropolitan Pittsburgh has declined by 8 percent since
1980, but as people spread out, the amount of developed
land in the Pittsburgh area increased by nearly 43 percent.
The population of Atlanta increased by 22,000 during the
90's, but the expanding suburbs grew by 2.1 million. 

The geography of work has been turned upside down. Jobs
used to be concentrated in downtowns. But the suburbs now
account for more rental office space than the cities in
most of the major metro areas of the country except Chicago
and New York. In the Bay Area in California, suburban Santa
Clara County alone has five times as many of the region's
larger public companies as San Francisco. Ninety percent of
the office space built in America by the end of the 1990's
was built in suburbia, much of it in far-flung office parks
stretched along the Interstates. 

These new spaces are huge and hugely attractive to millions
of people. Mesa, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix, now has a
larger population than Minneapolis, St. Louis or
Cincinnati. It's as if Zeus came down and started plopping
vast developments in the middle of farmland and the desert
overnight. Boom! A master planned community. Boom! A
big-box mall. Boom! A rec center and 4,000 soccer fields.
The food courts come and the people follow. How many times
in American history have 300,000-person communities
materialized practically out of nothing? 

In these new, exploding suburbs, the geography, the very
landscape of life, is new and unparalleled. In the first
place, there are no centers, no recognizable borders to
shape a sense of geographic identity. Throughout human
history, most people have lived around some definable place
-- a tribal ring, an oasis, a river junction, a port, a
town square. But in exurbia, each individual has his or her
own polycentric nodes -- the school, the church and the
office park. Life is different in ways big and small. When
the New Jersey Devils won the Stanley Cup, they had their
victory parade in a parking lot; no downtown street is
central to the team's fans. Robert Lang, a demographer at
Virginia Tech, compares these new sprawling exurbs to the
dark matter in the universe: stuff that is very hard to
define but somehow accounts for more mass than all the
planets, stars and moons put together. 

We are having a hard time understanding the cultural
implications of this new landscape because when it comes to
suburbia, our imaginations are motionless. Many of us still
live with the suburban stereotypes laid down by the first
wave of suburban critics -- that the suburbs are dull,
white-bread kind of places where Ozzie and Harriet families
go to raise their kids. But there are no people so
conformist as those who fault the supposed conformity of
the suburbs. They regurgitate the same critiques decade
after decade, regardless of the suburban reality flowering
around them. 

The reality is that modern suburbia is merely the latest
iteration of the American dream. Far from being dull,
artificial and spiritually vacuous, today's suburbs are the
products of the same religious longings and the same deep
tensions that produced the American identity from the
start. The complex faith of Jonathan Edwards, the
propelling ambition of Benjamin Franklin, the dark,
meritocratic fatalism of Lincoln -- all these inheritances
have shaped the outer suburbs. 


At the same time the suburbs were sprawling, they were
getting more complicated and more interesting, and they
were going quietly berserk. When you move through suburbia
-- from the old inner-ring suburbs out through the most
distant exurbs -- you see the most unexpected things:
lesbian dentists, Iranian McMansions, Korean megachurches,
outlaw-biker subdevelopments, Orthodox shtetls with Hasidic
families walking past strip malls on their way to shul.
When you actually live in suburbia, you see that radically
different cultural zones are emerging, usually within a few
miles of one another and in places that are as
architecturally interesting as a piece of aluminum siding.
That's because in the age of the great dispersal, it
becomes much easier to search out and congregate with
people who are basically like yourself. People are less
tied down to a factory, a mine or a harbor. They have more
choice over which sort of neighborhood to live in. Society
becomes more segmented, and everything that was once
hierarchical turns granular. 

You don't have to travel very far in America to see
radically different sorts of people, most of whom know very
little about the communities and subcultures just down the
highway. For example, if you are driving across the
northern band of the country -- especially in Vermont,
Massachusetts, Wisconsin or Oregon -- you are likely to
stumble across a crunchy suburb. These are places with
meat-free food co-ops, pottery galleries, sandal shops
(because people with progressive politics have a strange
penchant for toe exhibitionism). Not many people in these
places know much about the for-profit sector of the
economy, but they do build wonderful all-wood playgrounds
for their kids, who tend to have names like Milo and
Mandela. You know you're in a crunchy suburb because you
see the anti-lawns, which declare just how fervently
crunchy suburbanites reject the soul-destroying standards
of conventional success. Anti-lawns look like regular lawns
with eating disorders. Some are bare patches of dirt,
others are scraggly spreads of ragged, weedlike vegetation,
the horticultural version of a grunge rocker's face. 

Then a few miles away, you might find yourself in an
entirely different cultural zone, in an upscale suburban
town center packed with restaurants -- one of those
communities that perform the neat trick of being clearly
suburban while still making it nearly impossible to park.
The people here tend to be lawyers, doctors and professors,
and they drive around in Volvos, Audis and Saabs because it
is socially acceptable to buy a luxury car as long as it
comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy. 

Here you can find your Trader Joe's grocery stores, where
all the cashiers look as if they are on loan from Amnesty
International and all the snack food is especially designed
for kids who come home from school screaming, ''Mom, I want
a snack that will prevent colorectal cancer!'' Here you've
got newly renovated Arts and Crafts seven-bedroom homes
whose owners have developed views on beveled granite; no
dinner party in this clique has gone all the way to dessert
without a conversational phase on the merits and demerits
of Corian countertops. Bathroom tile is their cocaine:
instead of white powder, they blow their life savings on
handcrafted Italian wall covering from Waterworks. 

You travel a few miles from these upscale enclaves, and
suddenly you're in yet another cultural milieu. You're in
one of the suburban light-industry zones, and you start
noting small Asian groceries offering live tilapia fish and
premade bibimbap dishes. You see Indian video rental
outlets with movies straight from Bollywood. You notice a
Japanese bookstore, newspaper boxes offering The Korea
Central Daily News and hair salons offering DynaSky phone
cards to Peru. 

One out of every nine people in America was born in a
foreign country. Immigrants used to settle in cities and
then migrate out, but now many head straight for suburbia,
so today you see little Taiwanese girls in the figure
skating clinics, Ukrainian boys learning to pitch and hints
of cholo culture spreading across Nevada. People here
develop their own customs and patterns that grow up largely
unnoticed by the general culture. You go to a scraggly
playing field on a Saturday morning, and there is a crowd
of Nigerians playing soccer. You show up the next day and
it is all Mexicans kicking a ball around. No lifestyle
magazine is geared to the people who live in these
immigrant-heavy wholesale warehouse zones. 

You drive farther out, and suddenly you're lost in the
shapeless, mostly middle-class expanse of exurbia. (The
inner-ring suburbs tend to have tremendous income
inequality.) Those who live out here are very likely living
in the cultural shadow of golf. It's not so much the game
of golf that influences manners and morals; it's the
Zenlike golf ideal. The perfect human being, defined by
golf, is competitive and success-oriented, yet calm and
neat while casually dressed. Everything he owns looks as if
it is made of titanium, from his driver to his BlackBerry
to his wife's Wonderbra. He has achieved mastery over the
great dragons: hurry, anxiety and disorder. 

His DVD collection is organized, as is his walk-in closet.
His car is clean and vacuumed. His frequently dialed
numbers are programmed into his phone, and his rate plan is
well tailored to his needs. His casual slacks are well
pressed, and he is so calm and together that next to him,
Dick Cheney looks bipolar. The new suburbs appeal to him
because everything is fresh and neat. The philosopher
George Santayana once suggested that Americans don't solve
problems; we just leave them behind. The exurbanite has
left behind that exorbitant mortgage, that long commute,
all those weird people who watch ''My Daughter Is a Slut''
on daytime TV talk shows. He has come to be surrounded by
regular, friendly people who do not scoff at his daughter's
competitive cheerleading obsession and whose wardrobes are
as Lands' End-dependent as his is. 

Exurban places have one ideal that soars above all others:
ample parking. You can drive diagonally across acres of
empty parking spaces on your way from Bed, Bath & Beyond to
Linens 'n Things. These parking lots are so big that you
could recreate the Battle of Gettysburg in the middle and
nobody would notice at the stores on either end. Off on one
side, partly obscured by the curvature of the earth, you
will see a sneaker warehouse big enough to qualify for
membership in the United Nations, and then at the other end
there will be a Home Depot. Still, shoppers measure their
suburban manliness by how close they can park to the Best
Buy. So if a normal healthy American sees a family about to
pull out of one of those treasured close-in spots just next
to the maternity ones, he will put on his blinker and wait
for the departing family to load up its minivan and
apparently read a few chapters of ''Ulysses'' before it
finally pulls out and lets him slide in. 


You look out across this landscape, with its sprawling
diversity of suburban types, and sometimes you can't help
considering the possibility that we Americans may not be
the most profound people on earth. You look out across the
suburban landscape that is the essence of modern America,
and you see the culture of Slurp & Gulps, McDonald's,
Disney, breast enlargements and ''The Bachelor.'' You see a
country that gave us Prozac and Viagra, paper party hats,
pinball machines, commercial jingles, expensive orthodontia
and Monster Truck rallies. You see a trashy consumer
culture that has perfected parade floats,
corporate-sponsorship deals, low-slung jeans and frosted
Cocoa Puffs; a culture that finds its quintessential means
of self-expression through bumper stickers (''Rehab Is for
Quitters''). 

Indeed, over the past half century, there has been an
endless flow of novels, movies, anti-sprawl tracts, essays
and pop songs all lamenting the shallow conformity of
suburban life. If you scan these documents all at once, or
even if, like the average person, you absorb them over the
course of a lifetime, you find their depictions congeal
into the same sorry scene. Suburban America as a
comfortable but somewhat vacuous realm of unreality:
consumerist, wasteful, complacent, materialistic and
self-absorbed. 

Disneyfied Americans, in this view, have become too
concerned with small and vulgar pleasures, pointless
one-upmanship. Their lives are distracted by a buzz of
trivial images, by relentless hurry instead of
contemplation, information rather than wisdom and a
profusion of unsatisfying lifestyle choices. Modern
suburban Americans, it is argued, rarely sink to the level
of depravity -- they are too tepid for that -- but they
don't achieve the highest virtues or the most demanding
excellences. 

These criticisms don't get suburbia right. They don't get
America right. The criticisms tend to come enshrouded in
predictions of decline or cultural catastrophe. Yet somehow
imperial decline never comes, and the social catastrophe
never materializes. American standards of living surpassed
those in Europe around 1740. For more than 260 years, in
other words, Americans have been rich, money-mad, vulgar,
materialistic and complacent people. And yet somehow
America became and continues to be the most powerful nation
on earth and the most productive. Religion flourishes.
Universities flourish. Crime rates drop, teen pregnancy
declines, teen-suicide rates fall, along with divorce
rates. Despite all the problems that plague this country,
social healing takes place. If we're so great, can we
really be that shallow? 

Nor do the standard critiques of suburbia really solve the
mystery of motivation -- the inability of many Americans to
sit still, even when they sincerely want to simplify their
lives. Americans are the hardest-working people on earth.
The average American works 350 hours a year -- nearly 10
weeks -- more than the average Western European. Americans
switch jobs more frequently than people from other nations.
The average job tenure in the U.S. is 6.8 years, compared
with more than a decade in France, Germany and Japan. What
propels Americans to live so feverishly, even against their
own self-interest? What energy source accounts for all
this? 

Finally, the critiques don't explain the dispersion. They
don't explain why so many millions of Americans throw
themselves into the unknown every year. In 2002, about 14.2
percent of Americans relocated. Compare that with the 4
percent of Dutch and Germans and the 8 percent of Britons
who move in a typical year. According to one survey, only
slightly more than a quarter of American teenagers expect
to live in their hometowns as adults. 

What sort of longing causes people to pick up and head out
for the horizon? Why do people uproot their families from
California, New York, Ohio and elsewhere and move into new
developments in Arizona or Nevada or North Carolina,
imagining their kids at high schools that haven't even been
built yet, picturing themselves with new friends they
haven't yet met, fantasizing about touch-football games on
lawns that haven't been seeded? Millions of people every
year leap out into the void, heading out to communities
that don't exist, to office parks that are not yet
finished, to places where everything is new. This
mysterious longing is the root of the great dispersal. 


To grasp that longing, you have to take seriously the
central cliche of American life: the American dream. Albert
Einstein once said that imagination is more important than
knowledge, and when you actually look at modern mainstream
America, you see what a huge role fantasy plays even in the
seemingly dullest areas of life. The suburbs themselves are
conservative utopias, where people go because they imagine
orderly and perfect lives can be led there. This is the
nation of Hollywood, Las Vegas, professional wrestling,
Elvis impersonators, Penthouse letters, computer gamers,
grown men in LeBron James basketball jerseys, faith healers
and the whole range of ampersand magazines (Town & Country,
Food & Wine) that display perfect parties, perfect homes,
perfect vacations and perfect lives. 

This is the land of Rainforest Cafe theme restaurants,
Ralph Lauren WASP-fantasy fashions, Civil War re-enactors,
gated communities with names like Sherwood Forest and
vehicles with names like Yukon, Durango, Expedition and
Mustang, as if their accountant-owners were going to chase
down some cattle rustlers on the way to the Piggly Wiggly.
This is the land in which people dream of the most Walter
Mitty-esque personal transformations as a result of the
low-carb diet, cosmetic surgery or their move to the Sun
Belt. 

Americans -- seemingly bland, ordinary Americans -- often
have a remarkably tenuous grip on reality. Under the
seeming superficiality of suburban American life, there is
an imaginative fire that animates Americans and propels us
to work so hard, move so much and leap so wantonly. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that those who ''complain of
the flatness of American life have no perception of its
destiny. They are not Americans.'' They don't see that
''here is man in the garden of Eden; here, the Genesis and
the Exodus.'' And here, he concluded fervently, will come
the final Revelation. Emerson was expressing the
eschatological longing that is the essence of the American
identity: the assumption that some culminating happiness is
possible here, that history can be brought to a close here.


The historian Sacvan Bercovitch has observed that the
United States is the example par excellence of a nation
formed by collective fantasy. Despite all the claims that
American culture is materialist and pragmatic, what is
striking about this country is how material things are shot
through with enchantment. 

America, after all, was born in a frenzy of imagination.
For the first European settlers and for all the subsequent
immigrants, the new continent begs to be fantasized about.
The early settlers were aware of and almost oppressed by
the obvious potential of the land. They saw the possibility
of plenty everywhere, yet at the start they lived in harsh
conditions. Their lives took on a slingshot shape -- they
had to pull back in order to someday shoot forward. Through
the temporary hardships they dwelt imaginatively in the
grandeur that would inevitably mark their future. 

This future-minded mentality deepened decade after decade,
century after century. Each time the early settlers pushed
West, they found what was to them virgin land, and they
perceived it as paradise. Fantasy about the future lured
them. Guides who led and sometimes exploited the
19th-century pioneers were shocked by how little the
trekkers often knew about the surroundings they had thrown
themselves into, or what would be involved in their new
lives. As so often happens in American history, as happens
every day in the newly sprawling areas, people leapt before
they really looked. 

Americans found themselves drawn to places where the
possibilities seemed boundless and where there was no
history. Francis Parkman, the great 19th-century historian,
wrote of his youthful self, ''His thoughts were always in
the forest, whose features possessed his waking and
sleeping dreams, filling him with vague cravings impossible
to satisfy.'' 

Our minds are still with Parkman's in the forest. Our
imagination still tricks us into undertaking grand projects
-- starting a business, writing a book, raising a family,
moving to a new place -- by enchanting us with visions of
future joys. When these tasks turn out to be more difficult
than we dreamed, the necessary exertions bring out new
skills and abilities and make us better than we planned on
being. 

And so we see the distinctive American mentality, which
explains the westward crossing as much as the suburban
sprawl and the frenzied dot-com-style enthusiasms. It is
the Paradise Spell: the tendency to see the present from
the vantage point of the future. It starts with imagination
-- the ability to fantasize about what some imminent
happiness will look like. Then the future-minded person
leaps rashly toward that gauzy image. He or she is subtly
more attached to the glorious future than to the temporary
and unsatisfactory present. Time isn't pushed from the
remembered past to the felt present to the mysterious
future. It is pulled by the golden future from the
unsatisfactory present and away from the dim past. 

There's a James Fenimore Cooper novel called ''The
Pioneers,'' in which a developer takes his cousin on a tour
of the city he is building. He describes the broad streets,
the rows of houses. But all she sees is a barren forest.
He's astonished she can't see it, so real is it in his mind
already. 

Mentality matters, and sometimes mentality is all that
matters. The cognitive strands established early in
American history and through its period of explosive growth
-- the sense that some ultimate fulfillment will be
realized here, that final happiness can be created here,
that the United States has a unique mission to redeem the
world -- are still woven into the fabric of everyday life.
The old impulses, fevers and fantasies still play
themselves out amid the BlackBerries, the Hummers, the
closet organizers and the travel-team softball leagues. 

Suburban America is a bourgeois place, but unlike some
other bourgeois places, it is also a transcendent place
infused with everyday utopianism. That's why you meet so
many boring-looking people who see themselves on some
technological frontier, dreaming of this innovation or that
management technique that will elevate the world -- and
half the time their enthusiasms, crazes and fads seem
ludicrous to others and even to them, in retrospect. 

We members of this suburban empire still find ourselves
veering off into world crises, roaring into battle with
visions of progressive virtue on our side and retrograde
evil on the other, waging moralistic crusades others do not
understand, pushing our movie, TV and rock-star fantasies
onto an ambivalent and sometimes horrified globe. 

This doesn't mean all Americans, or even all suburban
Americans, think alike, simply that there is a prevailing
current to national life that you feel when you come here
from other places with other currents. Some nations are
bound, in all their diversity, by a common creation myth, a
tale of how they came into being. Americans are bound, in
all our diversity, by a fruition myth. 

Born in abundance, inspired by opportunity, nurtured in
imagination, spiritualized by a sense of God's blessing and
call and realized in ordinary life day by day, this
Paradise Spell is the controlling ideology of national
life. Just out of reach, just beyond the next ridge, just
in the farther-out suburb or with the next entrepreneurial
scheme, just with the next diet plan or credit card
purchase, the next true love or political hero, the next
summer home or all-terrain vehicle, the next meditation
technique or motivational seminar; just with the right
schools, the right moral revival, the right beer and the
right set of buddies; just with the next technology or
after the next shopping spree -- there is this spot you can
get to where all tensions will melt, all time pressures
will be relieved and happiness can be realized. 

This Paradise Spell is at the root of our tendency to work
so hard, consume so feverishly, to move so much. It
inspires our illimitable faith in education, our frequent
born-again experiences. It explains why, alone among
developed nations, we have shaped our welfare system to
encourage opportunity at the expense of support and
security; and why, more than people in comparable nations,
we wreck our families and move on. It is the call that
makes us heedless of the past, disrespectful toward
traditions, short on contemplation, wasteful in our use of
the things around us, impious toward restraints, but
consumed by hope, driven ineluctably to improve, fervently
optimistic, relentlessly aspiring, spiritually alert and,
in this period of human history, the irresistible and
discombobulating locomotive of the world. 




David Brooks is a Times columnist. His new book, ''On
Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the
Future Tense,'' from which this essay is adapted, will be
published next month by Simon & Schuster. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/magazine/04EXURBAN.html?ex=1082123979&ei=1&en=3216f62bde58ff9e


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