Amerika

Modern people use the term retarded to mean a combination of insane and stupid. It was originally a euphemism for even less kind terms for the developmentally limited, but rapidly spread because it describes so much of our world. In fact, it ably describes most of our world in the equality-murdered West.

Right down the street from the tobacco shack rests a nice neighborhood full of normal houses. Or rather, when the Anglos lived there, it was this way; now it is much different. Since it is close to downtown and the university, this area prospered, and soon people from all over the world moved in.

At that point, the old conventions and notions of aesthetic were interrupted like a falling rock breaks surface tension. The old way was gone; the new way was… anything goes! It always is, by the way. People overthrow traditions to get them out of their way, and if they replace them, it is with something rigid and theoretical.

In any case, the little old houses, built after the war to house the new inhabitants of the city, came down one after another. The carefully-tended gardens and yards went away because instead the new owners built to within three feet of the property line. The two thousand square foot homes gave way to five thousand square foot modernistic boxes.

If you think White flight is bad, consider what happens when fools — people with ability but not commonsense judgment — take over. The remaining original owners shrugged, having seen another place fall prey to wumping, and bailed out with new microfortunes from the sales of their lots.

This began happening in the early 1980s, and by the end of the decade, few of the old houses remained; those that did were viewed as curiosities by their owners who wanted to play peasant for a day much like Marie Antoinette had a playhouse on the grounds of her estate.

The more intelligent new owners built up. They took off the roof, added a second story to the house and garage, and got themselves three thousand square feet without losing the pleasant orientation of a house in sane proportion to its yard. These were few however; almost everyone opted for new clean-lined industrial housing.

During this time, homebuilding underwent a renovation of its own. The old way of hiring craftsmen to make homes was replaced by interchangeable parts purchased at Home Depot, like windows and doors pre-cut and ready to nail into place. You built a frame, nailed on drywall, installed the parts, and there was a house.

Naturally these new homes were designed to smash down the natural world. Where the old ones had window air conditioners, the new ones were sealed with central air, basically filtering out any remnants of the organic. This enabled the neighborhood to tolerate more car traffic, noise, and population as they crammed people into these homes.

When the yards went away, so did the kids playing outside. Instead the parents drove them to play dates, play centers, and public parks, or had the nanny do it. Like the children, pets got sealed indoors and saw others of their species only on scheduled walks (also usually by the nanny).

Parents lived a new lifestyle. They left their jobs, which provided them the source of their pride in titles and paychecks, and went to restaurants, gyms, and shopping. Then they drove home, hit the remote on the garage, and drove in not to exit again except in the car the next morning.

At this point, the neighborhood went from having two ideas — “neighborhood” and “near the city” — to an extension of the city itself. The homes looked like offices or strip malls, just with more style. The occupants lived as if they were at work, sealed inside. They had nothing in common except those job titles and salaries.

We might say that retardation had taken over. What was once a place with a shared spirit to it had become yet another commercial space, as soulless as those places where you rent storage units to keep things you wish to forget but fear to destroy. There was no culture, and the idea of knowing anyone deeply was as alien as taking a lower salary.

In this way, humanity reasons itself into insanity and stupidity time and again. The intangibles are taken for granted, and the ego of the individualist takes over, at which point he remakes the world in his image, an empty and foreboding place with no shared spirit to force him to obey or surrender his own desires to the needs of a group.

To be fair, the new inhabitants were not as intelligent as the old ones. They had high test scores and good grades, and worked fancy new jobs with complex technical titles, but few of them could boil an egg without an instructional video. They were products of the system, “cogs in the machine,” albeit well-paid ones.

The lesson that a young writer might take from this was obvious: human egotism knows few bounds, and unless we have people in charge of enough intelligence to see a transcendent purpose, we focus on our desires and in doing so, exclude all that makes life worth enjoying.

Tags: insanity, progress, retardation