Suburbia

 Watched an HBO show called “Weeds” last week. A show about a widow, who is a pot dealer in her up-scale suburban neighborhood. Heard a lot of good things about it, so got it on Netflix. Have to say I was a little disappointed. I suppose it had it’s moments, but it’s become so predictable to portray the suburbs as a bunch of desperate white people, who are utterly soulless. I guess because living in a nice house and having a job somehow sucks all the morality and decency right out of you. On Weeds, the voice of reason is provided by the drug dealing black family that sells the weed to the widow. All the employed white people are total basket cases, that are either secretly gay, cheating, or getting cheated on, or just have to be high all the time to deal with, I guess, having a job and living in a nice house.

This suburb bashing has been going on for as long as I can remember. Movies like Edward Scissorhands had montages of pastel colored “McHouses” with husbands all leaving and coming home from work at the same time, and Weeds has this same type of montage in the opening credits. Other movies like American Beauty, one called Suburbia, TV shows like Desperate Housewives, the list goes on and on, all with the same message: The Suburbs are soul-killing wastelands, that turn parents into secretly gay, serial-cheating, drug-addled lunatics, and children into zombie-like apathetic drug-addled whiners. Most of the Grunge movement in the ’90s was also based on this premise.