And what a land of equal opportunity this is! Seeing hundreds of my fellow countrymen in their cars makes it clear that, in America, no one is too intellectually challenged, differently abled, emotionally fragile, beset by anger management issues, encumbered by dementia, or burdened by obsessive-compulsive disorders involving personal communication devices, burritos, and Grande Caffe Lattes to have a car. (And, presumably, a driver’s license.) There may be discrimination in this country but not on the highways.
It’s better for everyone that these people are stuck in traffic—you don’t want them at home. Traffic jams ensure they’ll never get there.
And the cars are interesting. Pickup trucks have grown enormous. (Living in the country, I myself own a pickup, but its model year is 1984.) Today’s pickup trucks are full-size four-door luxury sedans except as tall as a house and with doorsills so high that you have to stand on a Prius to get inside. What are these pickup truck drivers picking up? The pickup beds are the size of a backyard aboveground pool and there’s never anything in them. Yet, in the next lane over, there will be a Fiat 500 with a mattress and a box spring bungee-corded to the roof, a backseat full of moving cartons and kitchen appliances, and a sectional couch hanging out of the hatchback. Do we need to introduce these folks to each other?
Also, where did minivans go? You see fewer and fewer of them. Almost every family used to have a minivan. They’re inexpensive and space efficient with room for six or eight kids in the back and all of their skateboards, terrain park skis, mountain bikes, lacrosse sticks, and a full-size soccer goal net. But minivans seem to have been replaced by much more expensive and much less space efficient SUVs with the kind of off-road capability I had no idea that ordinary parents needed. We know America’s average family size is getting smaller. Is it possible that parents are using SUVs to drive their children deep into the wilderness and feed them to wolves?
Suburban Sprawl—Beauty Is in the Me of the Beholder
I like suburban sprawl because it all looks alike. When we leave our rural home and “go into town,” we go to a commercial strip on Rt. 101A in Nashua, New Hampshire. It looks exactly like every other commercial strip in America—same big box stores, gas stations, franchise restaurants, car dealerships, vape shops, nail salons, and hairdressing establishments with “funny” names . . . Curl Up & Dye.
You’d have no idea you were in New England unless you happened to catch sight of the leaves turning orange in the fall on the couple of sickly maples that Target has planted in its parking lot islands. You could be anyplace—Los Angeles, Phoenix, Orlando. This cuts down greatly on travel expenses. No need to take a flight to Los Angeles, Phoenix, or Orlando.
Newspaper op-ed columnists, social critics, stand-up comedians, and other aesthetes often make derisive comments about suburban sprawl being all alike. What’s so bad about being all alike? People are alike. Why is it a bad thing when people eat and shop alike? People should be treated the same way no matter their gender, sexual preference, race, ethnicity, or religion. And what’s wrong with them being treated the same way at the same big box stores, gas stations, franchise restaurants, car dealerships, vape shops, nail salons, and hairdressing establishments?
Yes, suburban sprawl is ugly. Or is it? I’ve been to Venice. A great beauty spot, I’m told. All I saw in St. Mark’s Square was a waving field of selfie sticks from ten thousand Chinese tourists. The sickly maples in the Target parking lot are scenically glorious by comparison. And just try parking in Venice. There are limits to the off-road capabilities of even the best SUV. Bring your snorkel. (And get a tetanus shot.)
Parking is easy in the suburbs. Everything is easy in the suburbs. It’s the best place to grow up. You’ve got lots of other kids to play with (unless their parents have been feeding them to wolves).
In the suburbs, unlike the city, you’ve got places to play where you aren’t constantly being run over by Uber drivers. And, unlike the country, you’ve got fresh air and sunshine without your only friend being Lassie, who has to rescue you from a well every week. (I know about these things. We raised our kids in the country and, lacking a collie with a Mensa IQ, had to do it ourselves, standing on the back steps yelling, “Get the @#$% out of the well!”)
My only worry about suburban sprawl is that Internet shopping will drive malls out of business. Without malls where will suburban kids hang out? (Kids hate fresh air and sunshine.)
Malls are good places for kids—compared to the Internet. There are no “alt-right” shops at the mall. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t have a retail outlet where she sells socialism to young people. The “messaging” at malls is inclusive and all about good old-fashioned capitalism.
There’s no porn at the mall, if you don’t count Abercrombie & Fitch shopping bags. There’s not much that’s truly loathsome, unless you hate the Marvel superhero movies at the Cineplex as much as I do. At the mall the scope of evil is pretty much limited to shoplifting. Which is bad. But, according to Barnes & Noble, it’s something that Jeff Bezos has been doing for years. Would you rather have your kids hanging out at the mall or hanging out on the Internet? Zara is closed at 2 a.m. when kids are supposed to be asleep. The Internet isn’t.
Fast Food—It’s Fast and It’s Food
Anyone who complains about American fast food is too young or too dumb to recall the greasy spoons that came before franchise restaurants. You’d be driving down the highway, and everybody in the car was hungry, and you’d have to pull over to whatever was along the roadside with a big sign out front that said “Eat and Get Gas.”
And, depending on
