[lbo-talk] US as Fantasyland

kevin island kevin_island2003 at yahoo.com
Wed Jun 21 13:32:41 PDT 2006


Are these theme communities the same as the New Urbanist developments championed by people such as James Howard Kunstler (http://www.kunstler.com)? Or is there just some degree of overlap? One of these developments (Seaside, Florida) served as the setting for The Truman Show. Creepily uniform. Perhaps a Seaside 2.0 could try to simulate diversity as well as community.

Kunstler rants, but his descriptions of air travel, suburban sprawl ("crudscape"), and other outrages (such as the eyesore of the month) can be fun.

K.

"B." <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:

So it's a bit like a Thomas Kinkade painting. "There is even a Thomas Kinkade-themed community of homes, 'The Village at Hiddenbrooke,' outside of Vallejo, California," says WIkipedia -- a nostalgia for a time that never really existed but which the American popular psyche is so good at inventing. -B.

Carl Remick wrote:

"[Best article on the Iraq war I've seen in a while.]

Living in a Fantasy At Home and Abroad

These places are better than simple gated communities; these are gated communities of the mind and imagination, the final step out of the 21st century into timelessness, into never-never land, a sweet and safe place which did not exist in any of the wonderful back-thens but have become such a large part of the American here and now. What a strange situation: a backward-peddling nation, unable to look at its present, much less deal with contemporary problems, physically constructing a series of back-lot movie sets for itself to live in.

___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk

--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!?

Get on board. You're invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail Beta. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20060621/373a299b/attachment.htm>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list