Man. Myth. Morland.: Gates of wrath

I believe that we have entered a kind of slow-motion cultural meltdown, owing largely to our living habits, though many ordinary Americans wouldn't agree. They may or may not be doing all right in the changing economy, but they have personal and psychological investments in going about business as usual. Many Americans have chosen to live in suburbia out of a historic antipathy for life in the city and particularly a fear of the underclass that has come to dwell there. They would sooner move to the dark side of the moon than consider city life.

My aunt and uncle had lived in their house for twenty some-odd years before moving about a month ago. They custom-built a McMansion out in Moorpark, on a desolate cul-de-sac which, as much as I hate to admit it, affords a spectacular view of the nearby mountains and valleys. On a clear day, one can see the Channel Islands. Moorpark actually has an approximation of what Kunstler calls Main St, though it’s hardly within walking distance of almost any of the town’s residences.

I visited it on Sunday. The house itself isn’t bad – it’s not gluttonous in size and thankfully stops short of being ostentatious. They have a very nice, spacious back yard, which bucks the sardine subdivision trend of offering a few square feet of grass to placate prospective homeowners’ qualms of claustrophobia. But hot damn it’s far away.

I can almost reconcile this. When one is wedded to a car in a suburb it seems sacrificial and unnecessary. Jumping in your horseless carriage to head down to the mall, simply to park it and walk around has always seemed a little counter-intuitive to me. Shouldn’t, as Kunstler argues, the stores just be placed more conveniently and evenly, so that one needs to drive or walk, but not both? But when my aunt and uncle decide to move out to a housing development in the middle of nowhere (a 15-minute drive from even the nearest supermarket) their dependency on the automobile becomes an utter necessity, like a pioneer farmer clutching his trusty Winchester rifle to his side. A grandiose simile, I know, but a certain threshold is exceeded: the car is a tool without which one cannot live, not a wishy-washy convenience item used to save (albeit significant) quantities of time. There does not exist the luxury of alternatives: the paltry population density out there can’t support any modicum of pubic transport. The American frontier is alive and kicking.

But as my nuclear family exited the newly-built “community” Sunday night, I spied a blight which I happen to find particularly offensive: gates. Out there, an hour’s drive at least from anywhere with appreciable crime, there is the perceived need for gates.

If the car is a Winchester slung over the shoulder of a cattle rancher, its myriad faults outweighed in certain fringe situations by its benefits, then these community gates are handguns in the nightstands of suburbia, redundant and superfluous, gleaming assassins of altruism.