Zuzu's petals!
I've got lots of things I want to post about (I've been a bit lax lately), but instead of any of those, I'm going to talk about Treehugger's take on It's a Wonderful Life instead. Everybody's seen It's a Wonderful Life, right?
Okay, I can appreciate the article for being a bit cheeky and turning an unsentimental eye to a very sentimental film. And some things resonate. In the harsh light of history, the idyllic picture of small town America painted by the movie didn't turn out to be quite so idyllic. Pottersville, ironically, might have stood a better chance at survival. Like Jim Kunstler says in the linked article...
Now the weirdest thing is that Pottersville is depicted as a busy, bustling, lively place -- the exact opposite of what main streets all over America really became, thanks to George Bailey's efforts -- a wilderness of surface parking, from sea to shining sea, with WalMart waiting on the edge of every town like Moloch poised to inhale the last remaining vapors of America's morale. Frank Capra could imagine vibrant small towns turning their vibrancy in the direction of vice -- but hecouldn't imagine them forsaken and abandoned, with the shop frontsboarded up and the sidewalks empty, which was the true tragic destiny of all the Bedford Falls in our nation.
But Lloyd suggesting that George should jump is hitting below the belt. He's a good guy. He meant well, anyway. We all meant well. And the commenters take him to task. One comment I thought was particularly good:
Kunstler has a point, but we have to put it in perspective. It's a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street both reflect the collective impatience with the severe housing shortage which gripped the nation in the forties: remember all construction had come to a stop in the Depression and then the war severely restricted building new dwellings. The suburban boom was a reaction to this pent-up demand, and as we all now know the solution was pretty bad for our energy future. But the problem was real, and the solution put forth in the movie was individual ownership versus monopoly capitalism--remember that slums were real, too, and we shouldn't romanticize the crowded substandard living conditions of the renting class. The thrust of the plot is that people ought to get out from under Potter have more financial autonomy--the historic rise of the middle classes has everything to do with building private equity, and having the working stiff own a piece of the economy was a good thing. So let's not be beastly to George--remember HE chose to live in the inner city and rehab an older structure. But we need to make a sequel to the movie: Potter is dead, with a holly stake through his heart, but now the good people of Bedford Falls find that the downtown stores are all boarded up, the center city is crime-ridden, all the commercial real estate is on the strip by the federal highway: Bailey Park is an aging inner ring suburb while the surrounding countryside is littered with McMansions in cul-de-sacs. The future George sought to avert has happened anyway: the rich are richer, the poor can't afford houses, and the town is a decaying hulk. The Bedford Falls library has faced such severe budget cuts, they've had to lay off Mary! What went wrong? We needed realistic civic planning and true costing for our energy usage! Not everything can proceed from economic individualism--or the marketplace. In fact, the "invisible hand" can seem imbecilic at times. Damn, if only we had listened to Lewis Mumford! But if Potter had been in charge, things would have been worse: he'd have put a phosgene gas plant next to the slums and made the town park a private hunting preserve.
As much as we might yearn for it, we have to acknowledge that the small town dream of Bedford Falls didn't work. It's in our best interest to try to understand why. Because we need to find something that does.
comments:
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tinkerer
writes:
hm. Way to heavy for my brain tonite. I'll revisit it another time.
Actually, I just wanted to drop by and wish you a very Merry Christmas, Squirrel. :> Hope you got your iPod!
Hugs!
Submitted 2006-12-26 03:18:35
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flying squirrel
writes:
Merry Christmas! And Happy New Year too. :D
I'll talk about iPod adventures when I actually get it...
Submitted 2006-12-31 00:36:52
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tinkerer
writes:
We just had our home tournament over New Year's Eve weekend (our team was one of two hosting, whew! I spent three days non-stop at the rink!). One of the baskets for raffle had an iPod in it. Needless to say, it had at least three times as many tickets as any of the others! Some kid from Montana won, much to the chagrin of our locals...
Supposedly the Blue iPods are the most popular, with Green a distant second. Which color are *you* gunning for? ;>
Hope you had a happy New Year, too, Squirrel. I just suppose I did, even if I ended up back at the rink *again* for a fifth day running...
Oh, as for the Bedford Falls thingy, I think it has to do with the fact that small towns are a social effort, and people are simply not willing to put community over self--especially now that the whole world is open and easily accessible to them. An entire shift of standards and core values will need to take place, and that won't happen until the last boomer has died or major destruction (or realistic enough threat of destruction) of current lifestyle takes place. Or maybe Michael Lutin is right and it will be after Pluto finishes its transit through Capricorn (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2006/12/lutin200612)
*shrug* It is what it is...
Submitted 2007-01-02 00:20:27
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flying squirrel
writes:
I got a black, 2GB, first-gen iPod nano. You know, the scratchy one.
The okay deal I got on it turned out to be less okay, since the 4GB version of the first-gen nanos showed up on the Apple refurb site for $10 more than I paid. But that's boxing week for you...
I went with first-gen because you can install iPod Linux (http://ipodlinux.org/) on it. You can't do that on the new ones. I'm thinking I'll probably end up doing that, since the whole iTunes syncing thing for podcasts isn't working as well as I'd hoped...
I was looking at the Bedford Falls thing as more of a lesson in urban planning than anything too deeply philosophical, but you're right of course... urban planning is just a manifestation of deeper ideals.
Submitted 2007-01-04 11:53:36
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