Big box suburbia is an alienation factory

This essay by Asad Raza over on 3 Quarks Daily kinda blew me away just now. Drawing from imagery from "Brazil" and "Goodfellas," and draws from the source material for "American Gangster," to paint a very ugly, sobering picture of America today.

One sentence that i'm afraid that i will be co-opting to scrawl anywhere i can is, "Big box suburbia is an alienation factory." It's a very succinct metaphor. Fuck it. That ain't no metaphor. It's concrete fact. Raza nailed it.

Weird that it seems that Juliana Hatfield coined the phrase "alienation factory" as when i googled that alone, it turns up mostly in her song lyrics. Nicely dystopian. I never really gave her or Blake Babies a chance, and still doubt her music would suit me.

Read that essay. Edifying.

By the way, another sentence that has me grinning maniacally is, " The new frontier is the first frontier, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, and our representatives act as gangster-cowboys there while we exult in the televised fictions detailing the same." I've seen that sentiment elsewhere, but i like the way that sentence is constructed.