Rotting Suburbs by Greg Teetsell 7 April-18 April 2011

Was back out by American River College here in Sacramento late last week, and, once again, today. The small commute out to American River College (“ARC”) is always full of insights. That is not a sarcastic statement. The insights arise largely from the steady rotting out of The American Dream of the post World War II suburban idyll visible enough should one care to look.

On last week's journey out to the college for various registration requirements and meetings, the decay in the pavement on College Oak rattled the already questionable rear suspension on my aged automobile. This decay seems to be related to the severity of this year's rainy season and, no surprise, deferred maintenance. To coin a phrase, maintenance deferred is maintenance denied. After concluding my business at the admissions office at ARC, I opted to take a little ride into the American Dream neighborhood near the college.

This area is quite similar to the place where I grew up, on the north end of Raleigh, North Carolina. The housing tracts by ARC are primarily one-story, 1950's-1970's California ranch style single-family detached, two-car garages, all set on near-quarter-acre plots carved out of once highly productive farmland. That area of north Raleigh was, prior to subdivision, sparsely populated as the land was not of the best agricultural sort, covered as it was in jackpine and scrub. Either useful agricultural land or otherwise, the squandering of resources on sprawl leads to the same conclusion as noted by US social critic James Howard Kunstler: a geography of nowhere created for the singular purpose of reducing all forms of human endeavor to that of a set of commercial transactions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ

So, I drive down one road into Utopia, a road crumbling and pitted, lined with endless plots of houses. One after another sundry forms of distressed properties became obvious even from a car window---be the dwellings recently vacated due to foreclosure or boarded up. Dotting the plots were freshly bulldozed pieces of property, not yet overgrown with wild flora varietals blossoming and scrub grasses or not, as randomly applicable. These were the sorts of houses of my childhood. Of TV reruns of US sitcoms filmed in the days when there really were the men of “Mad Men” making animated cigarette packages sing arias and sixty-second odes to “put a tiger in your tank” turned into anthems of success, burned into the minds of those of a certain age watching black & white cathode ray tube displays.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSL76TReYPI

One boarded up dwelling intrigued me, as it stood next to a freshly bulldozed vacant lot. The boarded up dwelling had the telltale signs that it, too, would go the way of it's immediate, long-time companion, once a feature on the now vacant lot nearby. Such vacant bits of land were the result of the houses being deemed “unsafe” by one or another municipal authority and demolished by court order as “judicially certified blight”. Such certification is usually the result of the roofs falling inward, full-on collapse. The dwelling I stepped out of my car to examine was showing signs of “roof sag”.

Parking my car on the street in front of this vacant house was crunchy. That is, the asphalt under the tires made a crunching sound, similar to that one would expect to hear when parking on the side of an unpaved road. The concrete curbing and sidewalks had landed all akimbo in this Utopia as the road paving had intermittently separated away from it's infrastructural cohabitants. .

Across the street a portly man in his early 60's or so sat on a lawn chair drinking something from a blue plastic coffee mug. He was speaking on a cell phone in a language I presume to have been either Russian or Ukrainian, as many recent immigrants from the European side of the former Soviet Union have taken up residence in this part of town. He eyed me a bit and then went back to his phone call. His house was of the same vintage, although well-kept. There was an older SUV with sun fade in the driveway. The mailbox in front of the man's house had a two-foot tall Christian cross welded down on top of it. One might safely presume that while the original adult inhabitants of these structures in Sacramento were watching Jerry Vale croon on one or another forgotten TV variety show, the older gentleman across the street going on and on about whatever on his cell phone was a youth watching his parents getting their skulls cracked open by Soviet Interior Ministry goons over matters of faith. Context counts, even for mailboxes.

I walked toward the vacant house, up the driveway. Once comprised of smooth concrete, the driveway I walked upon had been so not too long ago, but now was more a loose collection of of pale grey pebbles interspersed with irregular sections of what had once been---sections looking like states or provinces on a geo-political map of a mirror image of the planet so generously known to have given civilization Dinah Shore singing “See the USA in Your Chevrolet” or Bob Hope's theme of “Thanks For The Memories” playing under the Chrysler emblem.

The garage and every other opening to the dwelling had been sealed off with marine grade plywood and screwed down tight with hexagonal topped set screws, so an average slob with am average toolkit wouldn't be able to get into the dwelling. As a further measure, the plywood was caulked to make the seal more stringent. The exterior paint on the composite shingles of the place had faded and, in some places, there were large fractures in the shingles setting in. The house itself was probably 1800 square feet. I would guess that it had four bedrooms and, once, brimmed with all of the amenities of The American Dream including, but not limited to Formica countertops in the kitchen, sparkling linoleum floors and wall-to-wall plush carpet with washers and dryers in the now-sealed off garage. Quite possibly people not unlike myself had grown up here, with parents of a certain generation who voted for Ronald Reagan over Pat Brown in 1966 and left the living room when their children watched The Beatles or the Rolling Stones on the Sullivan Show.

All over the plywood there were notices plastered “KEEP OUT BANK OWNED PROPERTY TRESSPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.”

There was once a lawn.

http://www.yougrowgirl.com/category/explore/deep-thoughts/page/14/

There was once a back yard. There was a 1950's-early 1960-'s style brick barbecue, although most of the bricks from the chimney had fallen away. The front and rear of the property was covered in star thistle, with some dandelions and rose bushes gone feral here there and everywhere. Here there may well have been a child's swingset or a roundabout. There may have been happy times of hamburgers, corn-on-the-cob, a picnic table covered in a red and white checkered cloth. Laughter. Maybe tears from a child having one of those falls children have so full of fright at one moment, then tears overcome by some other activity in the next instance.

On the once lawn, there was another sign: “BANK OWNED PROPERTY FOR SALE. CONTACT LAW OFFICE OF SLEAZEBALL & RATTY...”

“There's a Ford In Your Future”. Perhaps no more than a mile from where I was last week, on Madison at the corner of Date Road, stands one of the largest Ford dealerships in the North America. The business is named Future Ford. Now this is a reputable business, as such automobile sales enterprises are, so allow it to be known that I am in no way pointing towards this respectable business as an example of any breach of business ethics, such as business ethics may or may not be extant. The lot is immense. Should the land upon which Future Ford sits be returned to agricultural use, many thousands of people in California alone would doubtless have greatly improved access to chicken deep fried in heavily salt-laden lard. However, there is all of that metal machinery waiting to be consumed. And much was consumed in the neighborhood where I was looking at a vacant dream overgrown with star thistle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMm-4ZnfQp0

As has been noted by many far wiser than me, the key to the entire way of life, all the way down to the paving materials and the clothing, was, and remains, oil, Texas Tea, that is. I closed my eyes, and the spirits arose: the families in their Dodge Monaco wagons with faux wood side panels, the young ones piling into the vehicles out of the vehicles, the Chevy Impalas, the Pontiac Catalinas, the Ford Galaxy 500's, the adolescents tuning the radios to AM Top 40. The older adolescents with cars of their own---$200.00 miracles in various states of repairs or fully operational, roaring up and down that street in the pre-smog device days of gearhead lore. The 1960 Chevy Biscayne's, fins jutted out astride this world of unbounded futures. And the screaming Top 40 jocks, the DJ's, shaman of consumption, of romance, masters of slight of mind tricks existing to sell suger-laden carmel laced carbonated beverages, as Marshall McLuhan so aptly understood them to be. I stood there, closed my eyes. I could hear all of that once again: high school football games, proms, first dates, break-ups, and, later, LSD, cannabis, and “today's youth in turmoil” mixed with the memories of the scent of freshly mowed lawns. And the cars. The freedom of the cars. Put A Tiger In Your Tank. See the USA In Your Chevrolet. You Can Trust Your Car To the Man Who Wears The Star.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5iypuYl4E0

Returning to the house, there really wasn't too much remaining for investigation unless I took leave of my senses by calling the above named law office for a tour of the place. Only a drooling punter would take a hulk like the one I was standing in front of as being a serious prospect for renovation. Tear-down material sooner rather than next month.

So, I turned to walk back to my car. My jeans had picked up quite a few seed spurs and such from the plant life. I picked the traveling seeds from the fabric. Just then a car drove by, progressing slowly down the pocked street and stopping in front of the house across the street. It was a white Chevy Malibu from the late 1990's---looked like a former rental car. There was a young woman with mounds of light brown hair in what I guessed to be her early 20's driving. All of the windows were down. The song was unmistakable from those opening keyboard notes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi2uB0yjDeo

I looked up and down the street. There were occupied houses, but mostly “bank owned property for sale” signs. Quite a few “for rent signs”. The song played, in that way of memories, when the audio quality was AM and sometimes not very good. The houses, the way of life passing off into piles of unpaid mortgages and crashing tax bases took on a new cast.

These eyes cry every night for you.
These arms long to hold you again.
The hurtin’s on me yeah,
But I will never be free no my baby, no no.
You gave a promise to me yeah and you broke it, you broke it. Oh, no.

These eyes watched you bring my world to an end.
This heart could not accept and pretend.
The hurtin’s on me yeah,
But I will never be free no no no.
You took the vow with me yeah.
You spoke it, you spoke it, babe.

I walked to the house next to the one I had been examining. It, too, turned up empty, only recently so from a quick visual scan of the place. A pit bull went berserk behind a chain link fence in a back yard adjoining this recently vacated dwelling. My boots made a bit more of the ruined slabs of sidewalk turn into small stones while walking down the sidewalk for a better look..

When driving in to look after my business at American River College I had seen a Shell station not far from Future Ford. The posted price for unleaded, self-service regular was $4.09 per gallon. She's real fine my 409. The nearest grocery store to where I stood must have been well over a mile, not counting the Russian specialty grocer operating out of a 1960's-1970's vintage “convenience shopping center” as the sole tenant, with the rest of the strip mall “for sale or lease”. The pitbull's barking had mutated into a full-on murderous rage as the mindless beast threw itself against the chain link fencing. $4.09 per gallon. Even dogs bred to be vicious fighters seemed to sense that the humans had reached some form of uncharted psychological discontinuity.

These eyes are cryin’
These eyes have seen a lot of loves
But they’re never gonna see another one like I had with you.
These eyes are cryin’
These eyes have seen a lot of loves
But they’re never gonna see another one like I had with you.

These eyes are cryin’
These eyes have seen a lot of loves
But they’re never gonna see another one like I had with you.

Such single family detached dwellings were, intentionally or otherwise, the penultimate units of consumption.

"...Mid-nineteenth century England was the subject of a far-reaching experiment in social engineering. Its objective was to free economic life from social and political control and it did so by constructing a new institution, the free market, and by breaking up the more socially rooted markets that had existed in England for centuries. The free market created a new type of economy in which prices of all goods, including labour, changed without regard to their effects on society....The rupture in England's economic life produced by the creation of the free market has been called the Great Transformation.

The achievement of a similar transformation is the overriding objective today of transnational organizations such as the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. In advancing this revolutionary project they are following the lead of the world's last great Enlightenment regime, the United States. The thinkers of the Enlightenment, such as Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx never doubted that the future for every nation in the world was to accept some version of western institutions and values. A diversity of cultures was not a permanent condition of human life. It was a stage on the way to a universal civilization. All such thinkers advocated the creation of a single worldwide civilization, in which the varied traditions and cultures of the past were superseded by a new, universal community founded on reason.

The United States today is the last great power to base its policies on this enlightenment thesis. According to the 'Washington consensus', 'democratic capitalism' will soon be accepted throughout the world. A global free market will become a reality. The manifold economic cultures and systems that the world has always contained will be redundant. They will be merged into a single universal free market.

Transnational organizations animated by this philosophy have sought to impose free markets onto the economic life of societies throughout the world....This is a Utopia that can never be realized; its pursuit has already produced social dislocation and economic and political instability on a large scale.

In the United States free markets have contributed to social breakdown on a scale unknown in any other developed country. Families are weaker in America than in any other country. At the same time, social order has been propped up by a policy of mass incarceration. No other advanced industrial country, aside from post-communist Russia, uses imprisonment as a means of social control on the scale of the United States. Free markets, the desolation of families and communities and the use of the sanctions of criminal law as a last recourse against social collapse go in tandem.

Free markets have also weakened or destroyed other institutions on which social cohesion depends in the US. They have generated a long economic boom from which the majority of Americans has hardly benefited. Levels of inequality in the United States resemble those of Latin American countries more than those of any European society. Yet such direct consequences of the free market have not weakened support for it. It remains the sacred cow of American politics and has become identified with America's claim to be a model for a universal civilization. The Enlightenment project and the free market have become fatefully intertwined...."John Gray, False Dawn (1999), Chapter 1, "From the Great Transformation to the global free market," pp. 1–3

...never gonna see another love like I had with you...

The refrain was audible as the young woman in the white Malibu drove off and the pavement crunched under the soles of my Chinese-manufactured Doc Martens Ironbridge boots.