Progress Hits Home — by Melissa Holbrook Pierson
by Melissa Holbrook Pierson
Orion Magazine
January | February 2006
[...] Our neural pathways were formed by millions of years of existence in communities of our fellows where daily congregation and rituals and exercises made us what we became, and thus whole. Then a few years ago, give or take, they thought up the fetishization of personal property and the automobile and the installation of industry at the tippytop of the rights chain, and bingo: no more meeting places and no more walking and no more breathing of air and viewing of sky and mythmaking to explain the experience. Now you drive to a slushy parking lot and gingerly step into Walgreens for a newspaper and some Rolaids and quickly back the car out after assuring the concerned clerk (he asked, after all) that you're fine today and equally concerned about his psychic well-being (you asked, after all). You then leave the site of what was formerly a heavily used sidewalk in front of a bank, a café, and a shoe store that your grandparents, lacking a car but living nearby, used to walk to. Invisible hands reached down and changed it all around like chess pieces, and you don't know whom to bite. No one else seems to have noticed.
The area was known as Montrose. In 1973, I-77 chanced to be connected to Route 21, and the minds of men were turning, turning. "There was nothing there, it was empty," explained one of these forward thinkers to the newspaper with pride. Empty—just space, grass, nothing that people could buy. Three hundred and sixty acres of uselessness. Then, in something like six days, the world was created. Between 1970 and 1990 the number of business square feet—planned, approved, built—in Montrose rose from one hundred thousand to about five and a half million. The forecast for the end of the first decade of this century is another three and a half million. ("Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be concerned, they therefore do as they like": Edward Thurlow, Lord Chancellor, 1731-1806.) From clay, fully formed, there sprang into being West Market Plaza, Rosemont Commons—appropriate home for that perfect manifestation of the commons ideal, the community Wal-Mart—Shops of Fairlawn, Builders Square, and Market Square, shopping centers built behind shopping centers, Sam's Club, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Super Kmart, Cost Plus World Market (indeed), Cellular One, Pier 1, Borders, T.J. Maxx, MC Sports, Old Navy, Pet Fair, Comp USA, Sears, The Home Depot, Taco Bell, Chipotles, Red Lobster, Romano's Macaroni Grill, Cracker Barrel, Boston Market, Bob Evans, Ruby Tuesday, Friendly's, Baja Fresh, more and more and more until you fall, sated, heart bleeping faintly, unconscious of the sky above or the ground below or whatever could matter except crawling back to the Camry and waiting for the bank of lights at Cleveland-Massillon Road to give you a left arrow so you can creep home, finally to transport the contents of two dozen plastic bags into the house which will, somehow, absorb it all. [...]
The big numbers only fit through the brain edgewise and so cannot in fact be processed. We are made for smaller stuff: what we see in the several yards around us, what it makes us feel. The emotional space to catch one's breath, the vacant apartment that might be lent to someone who will do something artistically big in it, the quietly forgotten corners of town that are not overnight sold and flipped half a dozen times in the weeks before transformation into the next hot neighborhood for the rich—there is only a sense that these things are gone never to return, but our sadness does not look for the reason. What is it but a stare at the galaxies above, unable in any real way to comprehend their distance, to know that the planet is about to add 3 billion more people? Not much easier to try to think of what this country alone will be like with 120 million more people, even if you imagine all of them competing for your parking space at the post office. We won't speak of the fact that you will never again be able to visit the lovely beach of your childhood, because you can't get near it. (And no, no simpler to think of the 2 million more scurrying humans soon to be paving over their own little piece of Great Britain, either; or the 3 to 8 million added to Australia; nor, certainly, the 300 million destined for India.) Perhaps the only thing that can be grasped by any one of us is the sight of bulldozers just down the lane, grading the former hay meadow and giving rise to a dream vision of thirty-seven new taupe vinyl-sided "homes" with white trim and yawning bays for several cars. Then we might begin to see the future. It is composed of permanent mourning and unhappy accommodation.
Once upon a time, only the king could place his fortifications on the highest ridge; now any king who owns an SUV can do the same. It seems to go against nature, but then so much does, lately. I don't think I will have the satisfaction of collaring one of the egos-on-a-stick who is planning to build his supersized mansion on the hill that was my solace, but if I did I would pummel him with a piece of Alan Devoe's 1937 Phudd Hill:
So green are these hills, and so round and so many, that they suggest the massive tumuli of some gigantic and immemorially ancient race of man. I have walked upon them and extracted from their timeless earthiness the profoundest peace which it is possible to know. [...]
Click here for the full Orion Magazine article.
Orion Magazine
January | February 2006
[...] Our neural pathways were formed by millions of years of existence in communities of our fellows where daily congregation and rituals and exercises made us what we became, and thus whole. Then a few years ago, give or take, they thought up the fetishization of personal property and the automobile and the installation of industry at the tippytop of the rights chain, and bingo: no more meeting places and no more walking and no more breathing of air and viewing of sky and mythmaking to explain the experience. Now you drive to a slushy parking lot and gingerly step into Walgreens for a newspaper and some Rolaids and quickly back the car out after assuring the concerned clerk (he asked, after all) that you're fine today and equally concerned about his psychic well-being (you asked, after all). You then leave the site of what was formerly a heavily used sidewalk in front of a bank, a café, and a shoe store that your grandparents, lacking a car but living nearby, used to walk to. Invisible hands reached down and changed it all around like chess pieces, and you don't know whom to bite. No one else seems to have noticed.
The area was known as Montrose. In 1973, I-77 chanced to be connected to Route 21, and the minds of men were turning, turning. "There was nothing there, it was empty," explained one of these forward thinkers to the newspaper with pride. Empty—just space, grass, nothing that people could buy. Three hundred and sixty acres of uselessness. Then, in something like six days, the world was created. Between 1970 and 1990 the number of business square feet—planned, approved, built—in Montrose rose from one hundred thousand to about five and a half million. The forecast for the end of the first decade of this century is another three and a half million. ("Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be concerned, they therefore do as they like": Edward Thurlow, Lord Chancellor, 1731-1806.) From clay, fully formed, there sprang into being West Market Plaza, Rosemont Commons—appropriate home for that perfect manifestation of the commons ideal, the community Wal-Mart—Shops of Fairlawn, Builders Square, and Market Square, shopping centers built behind shopping centers, Sam's Club, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Super Kmart, Cost Plus World Market (indeed), Cellular One, Pier 1, Borders, T.J. Maxx, MC Sports, Old Navy, Pet Fair, Comp USA, Sears, The Home Depot, Taco Bell, Chipotles, Red Lobster, Romano's Macaroni Grill, Cracker Barrel, Boston Market, Bob Evans, Ruby Tuesday, Friendly's, Baja Fresh, more and more and more until you fall, sated, heart bleeping faintly, unconscious of the sky above or the ground below or whatever could matter except crawling back to the Camry and waiting for the bank of lights at Cleveland-Massillon Road to give you a left arrow so you can creep home, finally to transport the contents of two dozen plastic bags into the house which will, somehow, absorb it all. [...]
The big numbers only fit through the brain edgewise and so cannot in fact be processed. We are made for smaller stuff: what we see in the several yards around us, what it makes us feel. The emotional space to catch one's breath, the vacant apartment that might be lent to someone who will do something artistically big in it, the quietly forgotten corners of town that are not overnight sold and flipped half a dozen times in the weeks before transformation into the next hot neighborhood for the rich—there is only a sense that these things are gone never to return, but our sadness does not look for the reason. What is it but a stare at the galaxies above, unable in any real way to comprehend their distance, to know that the planet is about to add 3 billion more people? Not much easier to try to think of what this country alone will be like with 120 million more people, even if you imagine all of them competing for your parking space at the post office. We won't speak of the fact that you will never again be able to visit the lovely beach of your childhood, because you can't get near it. (And no, no simpler to think of the 2 million more scurrying humans soon to be paving over their own little piece of Great Britain, either; or the 3 to 8 million added to Australia; nor, certainly, the 300 million destined for India.) Perhaps the only thing that can be grasped by any one of us is the sight of bulldozers just down the lane, grading the former hay meadow and giving rise to a dream vision of thirty-seven new taupe vinyl-sided "homes" with white trim and yawning bays for several cars. Then we might begin to see the future. It is composed of permanent mourning and unhappy accommodation.
Once upon a time, only the king could place his fortifications on the highest ridge; now any king who owns an SUV can do the same. It seems to go against nature, but then so much does, lately. I don't think I will have the satisfaction of collaring one of the egos-on-a-stick who is planning to build his supersized mansion on the hill that was my solace, but if I did I would pummel him with a piece of Alan Devoe's 1937 Phudd Hill:
So green are these hills, and so round and so many, that they suggest the massive tumuli of some gigantic and immemorially ancient race of man. I have walked upon them and extracted from their timeless earthiness the profoundest peace which it is possible to know. [...]
Click here for the full Orion Magazine article.
posted by Sean M. Madden at
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