The process of consuming these materials creates the Suburban consequence of waste. Volcanically growing islands of landfill - so vast that there is now a global import-export industry for trash, for all that abandoned technomass; and we live in an ever more micro-toxified environment.
Cyborg: an organism that is a self-regulating integration of artificial and natural systems.
Suburbia is also a spiritual wasteland, a place where the wonder of nature is desecrated ubiquitously with corporate logos and all the artifacts of late technological society.
I myself was sitting in my front yard today, where I have kept an organic garden through a struggle against the homeowners association. Everything edible except my leeks are out now, leaving a few pansies, geraniums, heather, and the toughest of the marigolds. I also have one feral red onion. The soil is resting and matted with the red clover I planted in early fall. The breeze was blowing on my face and the apple and birch trees were dancing. There was a squirrel making circles with her tail on top of the bluebird house. A wren was on an old Haitian drum. Cardinals and mourning doves pick in the wheat straw I used for winter mulch.
I am surrounded by people who never see these things, even though it is all around them. My grandson and I look at the moon through binoculars on the front steps at night. No one else here seems to be doing these things; but they are spending plenty of time buying more technology... and nowadays struggling to balance the demands of obligatory middle-class consumption with a growing pre-volcanic debt.
Max Weber called this phenomenon "disenchantment." Commoditized culture is manipulative and utilitarian (not to mention highly bureaucratic). One of the main political identities of Suburbia is commodity "consumer."
Not surprisingly, the one truly integrated space in the US is consumer space... the mall.
It is this extreme instrumentalism - the old joke about the dog having no use for anything it couldn't mate with, piss on, or eat - that leads directly to our loss of enchantment with nature... precisely because nature is free-of-charge, and therefore without value. Worthless, and often worse... dangerous... hence, suburban germophobia, hatred of "weeds," the association of nature with dangerous disorder.
The post-Freudians called psychic connection to things beyond ourselves "cathexis." Audre Lorde called it erotic energy, "that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge."
Commoditized, instrumental culture has separated us from these deeper, non-rational psychic connections; and I will argue that inherent in this process of separation - this disenchantment - is a collective narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).
I am highly suspicious of the whole notion of individual personality disorder, but I'll table that critique here, because NPD can serve a heuristic purpose.
General guidelines for NPD are (1) grandiose sense of self-importance, (2) preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, perfect beauty, idealized love, etc., (3) belief that one is "special" and explicable only by others who are almost-equally special, (4) obsessive need for attention and admiration, (5) powerful sense of entitlement, (6) instrumental attitude toward human relations (using others, or taking advantage of them), (7) low index of felt-empathy (feigned empathy is in the repertoire of manipulation), (8) feels excessive envy and suspects envy of others for him/herself, and (9) displays of arrogance... there are a few others. Psychiatry says that any five of these suggests NPD.
Not only are these characteristics not abnormal in Suburbia - or even the general American culture - they are cultivated as norms by our ideology of social Darwinism, and ceaselessly reinforced by commoditized culture through brand-name status competition, advertising, and the cultural norms of the gender hierarchy (masculinity and femininity).
Another aspect of NPD, that is also intrinsic to American Suburbia's worldview, is a hair-trigger perception of victimization. This is the twin of a sense of entitlement.
This is the most dangerous aspect of the Suburban character. Within the intellectual barricades of middle-class belief in their own meritocracy, any challenge to the myth that Suburbia is a social outcome of (natural) Market TM forces is conflated with the Dark World vestiges of propaganda from the Cold War, from the Negro threat, and now from "terrorism" and the demographic attack of the "illegal immigrants."
The suburban populism that Lassiter describes - which emerged as a struggle to prevent school integration by busing - adopted the color-blind language of Dr. Kings speech on "the content of their character," and reiterated their claim that their rights were being violated... the spatial segregation of suburb and ghetto was rewritten as class, not race, in order to provide Suburbia what Lassiter calls "color blind racial innocence."
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