Thursday, April 20, 2006

Flight Man's Burden

Americans are, en masse, leaving the cities. With overpaid yuppie consultants willing to pay a million dollars for an apartment that they can "refuel" in, middle class people are having to move out to the suburbs (quelle horreur!) and even further, desolately shuffling along like the rows of wandering French refugees during the first days of the German occupation. Only their Nazis demand collaboration from Starbucks and various clothiers and a few trendy restaurants.

The Yuppie occupiers turn the cities, long departed by industry, into tourist wastelands, fit only for film school graduates, trustafarians and their colonial charges. Places like Buffalo don't even have enough people to be considered cities anymore. They're just hipster plantations, with underpaid pied noir locals farming irony and edginess in cheap bars, tee-shirt shops and record stores for their colonial administrator's to purchase and bask in the glow of their own unique selfhood.

Meanwhile, these poor refugee cubicle-dwellers are forced to give up everything, even their very dignity as they take public transit to work from their lonely frontier cabins in wastelands that don't even have a single independent movie theatre! They're forced to eat at McDonald's and live in townhouses next to teenagers who blast Creed from their customized street-cars. This is a place where Yoga means nothing! This is a place where overweight middle-aged people still define personality types as: "I bet he was the guy in high school who...." Yet, the refugees persist, knowing that these are the times that try men's souls. Who will help this lost generation?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They're just hipster plantations, with underpaid pied noir locals farming irony and edginess in cheap bars, tee-shirt shops and record stores for their colonial administrator's to purchase and bask in the glow of their own unique selfhood.

That's awesome, dude. Very, very apt metaphor.

Rufus said...

Merci.