Earnest Hemingway said they were filled with “wide lawns and narrow minds.” Despite the fact that more people move to the suburbs year after year, movies such as American Beauty and Revolutionary Road show harsh view of suburban life, where suburban families are never happy or well adjusted.

The author of the book Revolutionary Road, Richard Yate, had this to say about suburbs.

Suburbs are “invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves…. A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.“

Think about that last sentence. “A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.”

I love what Wall Street Journal writer Lee Siegel had to in response to Yate’s quote:

For what might a neighborhood that had been designed to accommodate a tragedy possibly look like? For a man running down the street in desperate grief to fit right into the landscape, he would have to be hurtling through a place where vampiric towers blocked out the sun and corpses hung from the lampposts.

Is that really the place where Yates thinks we should live and raise children. He wants us to live in a place where “a man running down these streets in desperate grief” is not out of place and is quite common and accepted?! Does that make any fricken sense at all?

I remember back from my days working at PBS watching a show called POV, which devoted an entire episode to trashing suburbs. Considering all the the genuine problems in our world, I was shocked that PBS found the time to focus on such a sterile and mundane topic. People are not wrongly dying in suburbs. People are not starving in suburbs. People are not being oppressed in suburbs. Very few crimes are committed in suburbs. And public education is usually much better than those of urban or rural school systems.

But what made the POV episode so pathetic was that it used a 16 year old girl as evidence against the suburb. Apparently the producers of the POV episode did not know this, but 16 year old daughters hate everything their parents do. Even if she and her parents lived on the French Rivera, she’d bitch about it. To a 16 year old girl, growing up in a safe environment and receiving a quality education means absolutely nothing. Why? Because her parents are idiots and everything they do is necessarily wrong.

If you want to live in a place where it’s common for men to run in desperate grief. That’s your right. If you respect and decide to follow the opinions of 16 year old girls, that’s also your right. Of course you’re an idiot as to both. But being an idiot is also your right.

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Anyone who smokes should not be given an oxygen tank and an Amigo to ride around on. Smoking or oxygen, it’s your choice. Maybe death panels would be a good thing.

I hate diesel trucks. Not semis. It’s those ginormous and deafening trucks guys with small penises drive.

Speaking of vehicles I hate, I hate those ginormous RVs. You know, they’re about the size of most houses were from the ’50s except they’re on wheels. At least I found one that was aptly named. It was called the Intruder. It was definitely intrusive. If you loving living in a house so much, stay at home.

The U.P. is one of the few places on earth you can walk around in public with a water stain on the butt-crack of your shorts and not feel self-conscious about it.

Convenience stores in the U.P. have stuff you can’t find anywhere else.

It is possible to spend a week without the internet.

Five miles is long fucking way to walk when the terrain is rough.

Despite all visual evidence to the contrary, the Tahquamenon River does not taste like root beer.

Pumping gas then going into the store to pay is sort of cool.

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I can’t help but think about the mentality of the guys (yes, they’re definitely men) who launch these minor fireworks. What kind of guy does that?

Well, he’s probably been drinking a tad. He’s almost certainly wearing a t-shirt of some sort. And yes his pant/shorts are made of denim.

But I can’t also help but think he has some sort of inferiority complex. Everyone in the entire country gets together to watch fireworks. But he can’t be a part of that. He has to launch his own inferior fireworks at the same time in a sad and desperate attempt to say to those around him, “Hey, look at me.”

I imagine him yelling to his wife, “Hey, Brandeen, check this one out.” She politely turns her head to watch him launch it before turning back to watch the real fireworks.

The guy probably makes his kids watch too. If they’re old enough they probably go to a friend’s house to watch the fireworks. Just to avoid dad’s drunken cry for attention.

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The person should be stripped completely naked, taken deep into the Amazon rain forest, securely hung from a tree by his feet, his hands securely handcuffed behind his back, his body covered with copious amounts of honey, and then left alone.

In a perfect world Dick Cheney would die in this manner.

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This does not make any sense at all. It’s simply mean spirited. I have to wonder how Glenn Beck could rationalize this.

Some people have said they’re doing it to weed out all of the applications they get from people who don’t want to work, but still need to send out applications to keep their benefits. But that plan wouldn’t work, in fact it’d have the opposite affect. By telling people who don’t really want employment that you’ll never hire them, you’re ensuring more of those types of applications.

I’m not one to propose new laws, but I really think that employment discrimination against the unemployed should be illegal.

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Do you know what would really make me happy?

My mind started racing about all the great things in my life that made me happy. Being a poor college student I thought about how happiness doesn’t come from the stuff we buy, but from enjoying what life gives you and what we make of it.

My mind never could have guessed her answer:

Matching furniture.

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Interestingly, (to me at least) the book doesn’t say whether his landing in Russia was an accident or was Jor-El’s intention all along. Krypton society always seemed a little totalitarian and monolithic to me. (I got to the end, never mind.)

Anyway, Superman grows up to be the perfect Communist taking its tenets to heart. After Stalin dies he takes over the Soviet Union and turns it into a “paradise.” He captures Brainiac and modifies it to run all of Soviet society. Everything runs perfectly, people always have food, crime and war are essentially eliminated, and while it doesn’t say this explicitly, I assume the train schedules are pretty accurate. Soon all countries other than the US join the Soviet Union to benefit from Superman’s rule.

As you can imagine, some people don’t like Superman’s rule. He still runs the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state exactly like Stalin, except he never kills anyone. He has surgery performed on dissidents to make them fully happy and compliant. Accordingly, a resistance movement arises.

Superman is perplexed by the resistance. There is no poverty, there is no crime, there is no war (other than terrorist activities committed by the resistance), and he handles nearly all human and natural disasters. What possible reason could anyone have to be unhappy with his rule? He considers members of the resistance to represent chaos and anarchy. In his mind there can be no rational explanation other than a form of insanity. Hence, Superman’s medical solution to it.

Thinking about the situation, it is true that humans are never collectively happy. In any given group of people, in nearly any situation, some members of the group will love, hate, or be indifferent. It could appear that we as humans simply lack the capacity to ever be happy.

However, I have a different take it on it. I think we have a natural propensity to be different and to reject the status quo. That’s one of our strengths as a species. While other species focus on very narrow niches, e.g., panda bears, we can thrive nearly anywhere on this planet in nearly any situation.

I’m sure there are millions of people who grew up living off the ocean as fishermen to move inland and farm. There are millions of people who rejected their spiritual upbringing for materialism, and vice versa. In fact it’s almost expected for young adults to reject their parents’ course and do their own thing.

Such “rebellious” acts ensure our continued existence on this planet, because unless there is a complete catastrophic disaster, there will always be some humans somewhere who will survive and adapt to the new circumstances.

So anyone who thinks that humans can never truly be happy is missing the point. Our unhappiness is actually a manifestation of an inherent strive for something different. That strive exists even when everything seemingly works, because when it eventually stops working, the group that broke off to try something different will survive.

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Yes, even a liberal such as Trudeau thinks that our news, news about our lives, our cities, our politicians, should be locked up, controlled, and filtered by large corporations.

Former British home secretary David Blunkett is now saying that Australia is set to enter an age of “‘information anarchy’ if the traditional media don’t lift their game.” Here’s more,

The rise of the new media, such as online sites, blogs, and Twitter, has resulted in the demise of many of Britain’s newspapers, he says.

Australia would go down the same path unless the media and consumers choose to back traditional journalism, said Mr Blunkett, who has enjoyed a somewhat rocky relationship with the media during his political career.

“We are sleepwalking into a situation where people believe that the free-for-all for information and the uploading of information from iPhones … is actually the alternative to properly edited and moderated news,” he said in an address to Canberra’s National Press Club on Thursday.

This would result in “information anarchy”, said Mr Blunkett, who confessed to disliking social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

“The challenge for all of us is actually to be able to do better than … something that rapidly erodes the standards and the professional commitment of the traditional media.”

News consumers also needed to challenge themselves not to rely heavily on non-mainstream media, he added.

Mr Blunkett said he believed many people were ignorant of the dangers of information technology

Yes he’s another person who thinks that unless our news is filtered through corporations it is worthless, and even worse, dangerous. Ooooh… I’m reading news on Twitter, Anarchy in the Midwest dude!

And I find it hilarious that he blames us. First, I’m not a consumer of news. I read news. I hear news. I analyze news. I interpret news. Never once have I ever consumed any news. Calling someone who listens to news a consumer demeans the entire system. It reduces our news to nothing more than a profit endeavor, no different than selling sugary carbonated drinks.

And the reason us “consumers” are dumping traditional safe media, is because it’s not filling our needs. Traditional news media is boring and out of touch.

A great example was the whole Birthers movement. There was not a single ounce of evidence that Obama was born outside the US. But because traditional news sources require the presentation of both sides to every issue, the Birthers movement received copious amounts of press it never deserved.

Being dogmatically unbiased is not the way people operate in the real world. That’s why Fox news is so popular. That’s why blogs are so popular. That’s why the internet is so popular. People are allowed to find news that fits their beliefs without being forced to wade through crap.

If you read a newspaper, the writing is so fricken sterile you swear it was written by a machine. It makes the music of Brittany Spears seem soulful.

The internet has changed news. We are no longer obligated to follow the news we’re supposed to follow. We can find information about the stories that interest us. And even more interestingly, we can publish stories and views that interest us. We’re in control now, not the media. And unless some very draconian laws are put in place, we’re never going back to the old ways.

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