A culture of thieves

A suburbanite: One who grew up in suburban America, usually white (though not necessarily), enjoys quoting movies, and above all else, feels cheated out of a culture.

I grew up in smoggy suburban Sacramento California, with white bread for my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, 2% white milk to wash down the white chocolate chip cookies I ate after dinner, and white picket fences to keep all good white children from playing in the not so good black cement streets. Yup, that's where I'm from. Middle class white-assed America, where the pay checks were just big enough to feed your fat ass family in front of a forty inch T.V., but never big enough to afford that trip to a different city (as if the family would actually venture off their big comfy couches in order to see that every city's got a suburb, and oh yes, a motel six). No, we were stuck to our jobs, stuck to ourselves, stuck to our obligations as middle class citizens, stuck to the sticky streets of sweltering heat that engulfed the city because everyone seemed to own just one too many SUV's. And we all know, the bigger the car, the smaller the cock; so those in my suburb must have had microscopic genitalia, flaunting fronting forgetting their humiliation to instead bling bling themselves around town, causing the most awful pollution. But I digress. My town was not a very very very fine town. No my town was a cesspool of appropriations, a city of thieves, and a mass of white suburbanites who stole that which they so desperately lacked: culture. The suburbs were the next phase of something grotesque, something with an embedded vicious historicity, something that stands between the authentic and the counterfeit. The apocryphal character of a suburbanite has it’s framework, it’s architecture founded by the will to power (Nietzsche); I will take that which is not my personal creation to increase my own social standing, to make me more powerful, to show my mastery of domination. I will steal your culture, your authenticity, and your ability to claim territory, your notion of truth, to proliferate my own culture of parasites. Hitherto modern times, the classical suburbanite had to physically force oneself into another territory by plundering, raping, and stealing another’s culture. Now, all one has to do is go to the movies and there it is. Every stimulus one desires to become the bandits their families once were, everything one needs in order to feel powerful and dominate, to fulfill one’s own will to power, is projected on a 30 foot scrim at 24 frames per second. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Hollywood was created for the specific purpose of proliferating this type of thievery. And all it costs is ten dollars per visit and three hours of one’s time. It’s cheaper than a whore, and has more of a chance of birthing something brilliant and powerful. And speaking of whores, along with the dissemination of images, sound, and art from distribution conglomerates like MGM, Disney, Universal, Paramount, FOX, etc. came the ability to bleed culture to death, frame by frame, title by title, joke by joke, and drama by drama. And we suburbanites love it. Fuck, we go to three, sometimes four movies per week, just to keep up with the new suburban authority. If we didn’t, we’d be left behind to, god forbid, have to create a culture of our own. But it’s so easy in the theaters. We go into the dark curtain draped domes a blank slate, tabula rasa style, and come out somehow enlightened, informed, powerful. The narratives fit, they say that which we had always thought but could never formulate into words. We now have a better understanding of things that seemed so foreign at one point, we could never have dreamed of comprehending. We go back to our streetlights, our peers, our subordinates, with a feeling of authenticity, of righteousness and loquaciously verbalize our interpretations and critiques of these new and exciting cultural constructs. The re-contextualization of narratives, creating the Meta narratives of suburban culture, allows us suburbanites to materialize into real humans beings. Like Pinocchio once said, "I’m a real boy. I'm a real boy".
-Sid