Holy Land: Micro Curriculum 1
D.J. Waldie's Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir was on the $2 rack at work, which I swiped for free because I work there. A short while later I finished Joan Didion's Where I Was From, stunned to find that she cited this little book I'd come across (and wrote a news article about it, and remained its enthusiastic supporter).
I was expecting a dour, programmatic[1], one-note takeaway of the suburb as a monotone place where hope decays. From its Introduction, I did not get that. Waldie seems to resist both the pastel overtones of "suburb as polite, quiet paradise," and of suburb as exclusively nightmare.
Maybe you wouldn't regard a house like mine as a place of pilgrimage, but my parents did. Perhaps their one big move ... had been enough. Their lives afterward seemed to be about that, too - about the idea of enough.
Despite everything that may have been ignored or squandered here, I believe a kind of dignity was gained. More men than just my father have said to me that living here gave them a life made whole and habits that did not make them feel ashamed. They knew what they had found and lost.
-- pg. vi
It does not seem like Waldie ignores suburbia's many, many glaring problems or dark histories. Like Didion in Where I Was From, he's at times painfully direct about all the cash grabbing and bigotry behind how many suburbs were created, and are now maintained. But he doesn't engage in the facile dehumanization and vilification that many accounts of suburban life do.
This kind of anger at the suburb is both extremely understandable, and true, and is also a little too close to the way that a conservative might describe the city: as a blight, a place that isn't home for human beings, a place that because it has problems must be defined exclusively by them.
I now think that however justified, peddling exclusively in this anger is an exercise in training a certain kind of thought pattern in exclusion of all others. To only think in terms of righteous rage is also, implicitly, to believe that a truly good thing wouldn't sour like this thing has soured for you. We are angry because a good thing wouldn't have done this; a good system wouldn't have hurt people, an actually good effort would never have these problems. I think of Ursula K. Le Guin's words on the idea of "should" and "deserving":
For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
In the late eighties, rural towns north of Sacramento were trying to build upscale housing to attract bougie suburban newcomers. Lincoln, CA was one of the only towns in the area trying to build and attract low-income housing and residents. Over thirty years later it is now the home of my sister and my brother-in-law (South Placer’s Where the Money Is, Sac Bee, Aug. 26, 1989).
It touches me that these pockets of location, however recent they are as villages, do have histories. I'd randomly searched the Sacramento Bee archives for newspapers the day of my sister's birth and the day before. That was how I found the article about new housing in South Placer, and where I saw Lincoln listed as the only area with low-income-housing development. Seeing the indirect (and opportune, serendipitous) line of influence from then to my sister's housing now, it ached something in me.
Micro-Curriculum 1
- Where I Was From (Joan Didion)
- Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (D.J. Waldie)
- The Stepford Wives (Ira Levin)
- How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood (P.E. Moskowitz)
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jane Jacobs)
A Joan Didion word. She uses it a lot in a chapter of Where I Was From and I'm delighted in its succinct description of a certain kind of worldview. ↩︎