The Suburbanization of America

Indianapolis

One element of suburbanization in the current culture is the elimination of local distinctions. All suburbs become indistinguishable from each other, though there may still be large scale differences according to which commercial interests have not yet "globalized" themselves. Particular contexts have come to have a sort of fetishistic significance: Los Angeles signifies a certain glossy sophistication, a certain kind of sandwich must be associated with Philidelphia, New York signifies one kind of pizza, Chicago another, one can't really get a good tan unless it comes from Malibu. Also, as signifiers are fetishized, they are also fantasized, reduced to some essential fantasy of themselves, such as "country estates" that have no dirt, don't stink of cow shit, aren't troubled by hailstorms, and don't need to be husbanded to preserve their productive capacity. This fantasy endangers the true agricultural estate, as it assumes that actual agricultural land requires no more husbanding than the fantastic one, and should be as clean and trouble free. What, afterall, does Applebees do to its steak to make them so tender, more tender than a top sirloin has any right to be? It is another example of fantasy replacing reality, enabled by our great and generous corporate conglomeration.

Michigan

I was looking forward to my first sight of Lake Michigan. I had thought to stay the night in Michigan City, but I could hardly find the city, let alone a decent cafe or a place to stay. I thought perhaps I could stay at a campground near the lake...there was one on the map, but it was closed until April. I thought about going to Chicago to one of the hostels there, but avoiding large cities is part of this journey for me, and they were mostly pretty expensive anyway ($30.00 a night). Drive north almost half the state, which is not so difficult as it may sound. Tried to find an open campground, without luck. Drive through a thunderstorm, wandered around in rural eastern Michigan, which has an almost criminal dearth of road signs. Finally gave up and hit a semi-major highway heading east and found a "roadside table" where I slept in the car for a few hours.

On the road again an hour before dawn, east and south to Newaygo, an old...what?...lumbering town, now cute tourist downtown in an area whose attraction is recreation (hunting, fishing). Coffee shop/espresso bar in a nice old brick building, whose morning populatioin seemed to be "local gals," who seemed to be mostly shop keepers.

Along with irrurality, the gradual suburbanization of America is turning all zones of residence into a suburb of some urban center. This seems to happen differently depending on the state of occupaton of the surrounding countryside. In Michigan it takes the form of turning family farms into subdivisions. In areas that had minimal population, such as the San Francisco Bay area, large tracts of land that had little or no population, and little or no connection to the urban center, were purchased and turned, wholesale, into "towns," complete with "downtowns" (read shopping malls), police departments, and freeway offramps. Michigan must do with its old system of county roads, and former rural centers (like Columbiaville, where I'm staying), are turned into convenience stops (gas & Mc Donalds), while the farmland is divided, 100 acres at a time, into bedroom communities.

Lapeer

There is actually a fairly decent cafe in Lapeer, MI...at least, it has free wireless, which is, of course, one of my prime requirements. There seems to be no funk to be found in Lapeer. It is, I suppose, too much of a bedroom community, a suburb of Flint (25 miles) or Detroit (71 miles). My host tells me that Detroit is a wasteland, most of the money having moved out into the expanding metropolis, into Dearborn Heights, Livonia, Southfield, Royal Oak, Warren, Farmington Hills, Sterling Heights, the (mostly) usual roster of meaningless town names that are euphemisms for "suburbia."

Here's a song I thought up as I passed through the pastoral landscape slowly succumbing to the developer's knife. To the tune of "O Come, O Come, Emanuel":

O come, o come Peak Oil
and ransom captive farmland soil,
that mourns 'neath subdivision here,
until the price of gasoline comes dear.
Rejoice, rejoice, Peak Oil
shall come to thee, o farmland soil.