Reading through some of the posts already written, I see that several people have beaten me to spelling out the main feeling I had upon reading this article. It seems that the author has a dual rhetorical axe to grind, focused both on suburbia and on consumerism, and he did his (lamentable) best to construct a Big Observation that would enable a diatribe against the two. The clue for me was in the code jargon used, and some of his word choices were particularly baldfaced.

I was dismayed to find the sylvan harmony of the scene constantly disrupted by garish blights...

"Sylvan harmony?" Really? Even apart from the pretentiousness of the phrase and the sepia-toned nostalgic nonsense that it connotes, the neighborhood he describes represents nothing of the sort. The real beast would be an unmolested forest in which the various flora decided among themselves (in what is incidentally a most unharmonious process of ruthless competition) who would occupy which space and for how long. It would involve a lot of weeds under that "mature canopy," and it would be the kind of place from which you returned with a lot of unwelcome souvenirs in the form of ticks, mosquito bites, and more. No, what he is describing is one American version of a bonsai garden, nature carefully constrained into a form pleasing to the landscaper's eye. Nothing wrong with that. But certainly nothing to idealize, either.

Gone are the kinds of things that defined my own childhood...

Again, the warm memoriam of a time gone by, told in a voice faintly tinged with that third bourbon of the night.

"We don't need yer change here, mister, yer newfangled bright-colored kids' toys and such. When I was a kid, we played with rocks. We'd make believe this rock was an airplane, and this one was Barbra Streisand. Then we'd whack 'em together so that her nose broke the plane in half. If we did get a toy, it was plain metal, painted gray if you were lucky. With sharp edges that cut you sometimes, just to keep you tough. Only the sissies got lockjaw anyway - no big whoop."

Later, we come to the second head of the mythical beast the author sets out to slay: rampant capitalism and its attendant materialistic evil:

Yes, it's the aspirational spending race brought to the lawn.

It couldn't be something simpler, like a parent looking for a safe play alternative that would keep the kids within manageable range, could it? No, it's gotta be an Important Larger Trend that carries a faint aroma of Societal Decay and/or Decadence. As a rickety buttress for his point, he adds the caricature of a $122,000 personal playset, as if to imply that every snot-nosed kid in the neighborhood was getting one. But quickly he returns to the main evil at play here, namely the supposed decline of

the meaning of the outdoor space as a pastoral enclave in a larger natural setting; the civility and beauty brought by the carefully considered arrangement of plants, trees, and shrubs...

So really, it's all about some kind of Victorian ideal that has vanished into the ether? Ultimately, what the author describes is the displacement of one human-imposed aesthetic by another, and he is kvetching about it like a grumpy old man - sneering at Elvis as a poor and debased substitute for Count Basie, Cormac McCarthy as a pale shadow of the talent of a Hemingway. Nowhere does he evince any sign of recognizing that his assignation of value to the old rules of the landscape and the new totalitarianism of the suburbs is entirely arbitrary - that there are many to whom his idealized "sylvan" neighborhood is an equally banal desecration as compared to the anarchic real environment it replaced.

I wish the article were better-written, because I sympathize with some of the prejudices within. I can't say that I'm a fan of ugly, molded-plastic kids' toys. I harbor a certain nostalgia for backyard wiffle-ball games in which one touched second base by getting a faceful of branches from the small pine tree that served that function. I have no small amount of distaste for the culture of fear that has created suburbia (gotta get away from that big, bad, dangerous city) and made impossible the free wandering I did with my childhood friends to fish in the river, hunt crawfish and build mud forts (might be child molesters or terrorists out in them woods). Fond remembrance is fine as long as it is done with a wink at oneself in the mirror and the knowledge that the memory is gauzy, smoothed-over and clouded in its selectiveness. But I find no such awareness in this article. Rather, all I find is ham-handed snobbery. I would bid the author laugh all the way to cashing his paycheck for this nonsense, but I get the impression that he lacks the self-awareness to appreciate his good fortune in getting paid.

LOL, indeed. Posts like this are what what keep me reading through the mounds of dreck.

Thanks.