Born in 1947, I grew up in Syosset, N.Y., adjacent to what I think was the first Levitown. My Dad was one of The Iron Men of Metz. He came back with a shot up arm, a chest wound that narrowly missed his heart, a Purple Heart, and PTSD, which wasn't named that until decades later--and that I and siblings thought was normal. Many U.S. corporations made fortunes off that war, arranged by the drunkard scumbag Churchill and FDR behind closed doors.
Oh Daniel, it is my generation too. We played in playgrounds, stayed out until dark, sat at a table and then ate a frozen TV dinner on a new TV tray. All the adults I knew didn’t talk about the wars. Oh, maybe something vague, but never something about their personal experiences. Those were saved for nightmares. Those were saved for quiet tensions in the eyes. Those were saved for molesting children. On the outside America looked so clean and prosperous. On the inside children bore the terror and moral decay and wives turned a blind eye. I pray for God’s forgiveness. I pray for God’s forgiveness. I cannot forgive...
I grew up in Levittown PA, child to two parents who also grew up in Levittown, whose fathers fought in two different wars and drank and cheated and beat their kids. My own father silently drank himself to death starting at the age of 13, fueled on by NAFTA and having to work at 5 different GM plants before given early retirement due to his liver disease.
I grew up in Levittown, PA in the 70s. By then, the luster began to fade, so we moved out to further away suburbs where the pain of Vietnam could be escaped ... but it wasn’t
I wonder if we will ever learn that wars kill, maim and traumatize soldiers and their families (for years or decades into the future) it is a putrid rot in societies. All these rabid warmongering voices of people that never have been near one, how to change their minds ? (I just read the wonderful book of John Pilger 'Heroes' - someone spoke the TRUTH!!!)
My grandfather and great grand father served in the world wars. In fact abuse was so strong that my maternal grandfather joined the military to escape the abuse. The idea of a levittown really is an 'American dream', but the reality is something different. That the ghosts of past haunted many men and then they haunted the children and grandchild. "War is hell" I think Patten said that, why would we ever want to send anyone to an earthly hell. Why do we create it? Why after knowing what it does to people that we continually glorify it? This poem, this prose, reverberates the truth that few acknowledge.
My uncle was a drunk and lived a hobo-like existence (he caddied and hitchhiked to Florida for the winter to caddy down there). Mom mom's shame was painfully obvious. But we were never told his story. I didn't learn his story until I was 20, and from an older man who was his HS classmate. Turns out, he was a shy sensitive kid ( and gay) who at 16 was caught breaking into the local hardware store one night. He was given the choice of jail or the army and chose the army. He suffered a head wound in Korea, became addicted to morphine pain killers, and came home a junkie. As a gay man, he was regularly beaten and was once stabbed and hospitalized.
But it was the local judge and the army that killed him, and my entire family pretended that none of this ever happened.
Similarly, as a kid, my friend's older cousin would sit all day on the stoop nodding off and drooling on himself - the neighborhood kids knew something was badly wrong with him but we never were told what by the adults. Turns out, he was a Vietnam vet and a junkie.The entire neighborhood pretend none of this ever happened.
Levittown? I think we're only scratching the surface here. There is an interesting and complicated interaction between war, race, real estate, and oil. (For instance, if you're going to have huge suburbs you're going to need oil to get to them. You going to need a white picket fence to remind yourself of the racial proprieties -- also of divine intervention to save you from bank failure (_It's A Wondeful Life_) -- which otherwise might come to the surface given the Soviet-style design and development aesthetic of the Letvittowns. It might be interesting to go out to the present-day Levittowns and see if the people are any crazier there than those elsewhere. I doubt it.
Some of my relatives went to World War 2. They seemed to be no more damaged than anybody else, but I suppose it was enough. The suburban thing -- the atomization of community in the Atomic Age -- that went well beyond Mr. Levitt's work. In my family there was an uncle who fought in Italy who later broke all the furniture in his crappy subLevitt house about once every two or three years. But for others it was "the Good War". Another uncle went to the Philippines and bought Japanese heads from the head-hunters in backwoods Mindanao for a quarter each. And now, as is the way of things, they're all gone, but the burbs remain, at least until the Apocalypse we call talk about.
Used to work around the PA one, at an emptied-out US Steel complex, in a swamp across from Trenton. A huge chunk of super highway just collapsed below here; from folks bypassing North Philly, on way up to lovely tree-lined suburbs. We'd ended-up staying in Bristol (racism, here, you could almost slice into with your razor). Nobody had specifically to lower overpasses to segregate, since SEPTA was more to ensure purchase & unremitting maintenance of >3 car families, via EZ Credit & PayDay Loans (hard to explain, tearing out our streetcars & 120mph GG1 electric train-sets in 1948. Look up Robert Moses? 1st thing you notice, is a total lack of Black folks in ANY union W4 work-place. Philly's an easy .223 shot to the south, Dilbit bomb-train tankers & carcinogenic red-lined towns line the Acela corridor up through OLD refineries, so I'd driven a woman from Wewahitchka, FL up to Newark, in 1991 & were humming "Green Acres" wondering if there'd been a FREE BMW & cocaine sale or melanin depleting Itis plague had ripped through daisyland (as folks from Westy call anything north of Bristol?) These monstrosities were bastions of petit-bourgouis "ethnic" union, almost-honkies; mass produced from lethal tickytacky, all in a row... for a VERY specific reason
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." LBJ
You're right to focus on suburban living as perverse. The American Dream dream of nuclear family suburban homeownership, taken to be so 'natural' is in fact on of the strangest ways to live across all of human anthropological history. It seems to be built on a mythic idea that a middle class can be a small landed aristocracy, with their decorative green lawn in front of the Manor house, and plantation labor provided by alienated labor across the whole world to deliver daily necessary goods and food to your doorstep. The only thing that allows this arrangement is cheap fossil fuel energy and violent extortionist Empire. We are still building Levittowns, but it cannot last.
Liberals see ANY connection between New Deal Dixiecrats & run-away AGW as heresy! That, once Henry Wallace & Ken Galbraith Democrats had been crushed, streetcars & interurbans replaced by freeways to ofay concrete suburban sprawl & unions, returned to reactionary white, male NORMALCY, toxic red-lined sacrifice zones were overshadowed by jam-packed interstates & jets replaced trains for ACTUAL Protestant, straight, petit-bourgois Caucasian beneficiaries of bulldozing Black businesses. As substance-abusing white flight suburbanite hippie kids, gentrified unionized Black & Latinx workers out of red-lined family homes; discovered cocaine, compound interest & BMWs... stopped miscegenating, to accepted papa's junior partnership, sneeringly brainwashed yuppie dopplegangster duopoly ensued?
“Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime but middle class suburbs are incubators for apathy and delirium”.
Cyrill Connolly
A slum with a nice façade to keep people quiet, away and occupied !.
Really, what and why ?. OK.. on it's way (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq-gYOrU8bA) not a bot...
It's a bad scene altogether, no matter where you look. But we tolerate it anyway.
Born in 1947, I grew up in Syosset, N.Y., adjacent to what I think was the first Levitown. My Dad was one of The Iron Men of Metz. He came back with a shot up arm, a chest wound that narrowly missed his heart, a Purple Heart, and PTSD, which wasn't named that until decades later--and that I and siblings thought was normal. Many U.S. corporations made fortunes off that war, arranged by the drunkard scumbag Churchill and FDR behind closed doors.
Oh Daniel, it is my generation too. We played in playgrounds, stayed out until dark, sat at a table and then ate a frozen TV dinner on a new TV tray. All the adults I knew didn’t talk about the wars. Oh, maybe something vague, but never something about their personal experiences. Those were saved for nightmares. Those were saved for quiet tensions in the eyes. Those were saved for molesting children. On the outside America looked so clean and prosperous. On the inside children bore the terror and moral decay and wives turned a blind eye. I pray for God’s forgiveness. I pray for God’s forgiveness. I cannot forgive...
I grew up in Levittown PA, child to two parents who also grew up in Levittown, whose fathers fought in two different wars and drank and cheated and beat their kids. My own father silently drank himself to death starting at the age of 13, fueled on by NAFTA and having to work at 5 different GM plants before given early retirement due to his liver disease.
I moved.
All those unprocessed traumas - handed down from generation to generation. Still shaping our world.
I grew up in Levittown, PA in the 70s. By then, the luster began to fade, so we moved out to further away suburbs where the pain of Vietnam could be escaped ... but it wasn’t
I wonder if we will ever learn that wars kill, maim and traumatize soldiers and their families (for years or decades into the future) it is a putrid rot in societies. All these rabid warmongering voices of people that never have been near one, how to change their minds ? (I just read the wonderful book of John Pilger 'Heroes' - someone spoke the TRUTH!!!)
This is very true and disturbing. My family was in New York and sold their farm to make way for this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York
My grandfather and great grand father served in the world wars. In fact abuse was so strong that my maternal grandfather joined the military to escape the abuse. The idea of a levittown really is an 'American dream', but the reality is something different. That the ghosts of past haunted many men and then they haunted the children and grandchild. "War is hell" I think Patten said that, why would we ever want to send anyone to an earthly hell. Why do we create it? Why after knowing what it does to people that we continually glorify it? This poem, this prose, reverberates the truth that few acknowledge.
Tecumseh Sherman said War is Hell during the US Civil War.
Thanks for the clarification, I wasn't sure which general said it and didn't look it up while writing, appreciate this sir. :)
Beautiful in its truth and power xxx
Yes, beautiful writing.
That was beautiful
The pretending part hit home for me.
My uncle was a drunk and lived a hobo-like existence (he caddied and hitchhiked to Florida for the winter to caddy down there). Mom mom's shame was painfully obvious. But we were never told his story. I didn't learn his story until I was 20, and from an older man who was his HS classmate. Turns out, he was a shy sensitive kid ( and gay) who at 16 was caught breaking into the local hardware store one night. He was given the choice of jail or the army and chose the army. He suffered a head wound in Korea, became addicted to morphine pain killers, and came home a junkie. As a gay man, he was regularly beaten and was once stabbed and hospitalized.
But it was the local judge and the army that killed him, and my entire family pretended that none of this ever happened.
Similarly, as a kid, my friend's older cousin would sit all day on the stoop nodding off and drooling on himself - the neighborhood kids knew something was badly wrong with him but we never were told what by the adults. Turns out, he was a Vietnam vet and a junkie.The entire neighborhood pretend none of this ever happened.
It's still not alright, eh?
BRAVA!
Levittown? I think we're only scratching the surface here. There is an interesting and complicated interaction between war, race, real estate, and oil. (For instance, if you're going to have huge suburbs you're going to need oil to get to them. You going to need a white picket fence to remind yourself of the racial proprieties -- also of divine intervention to save you from bank failure (_It's A Wondeful Life_) -- which otherwise might come to the surface given the Soviet-style design and development aesthetic of the Letvittowns. It might be interesting to go out to the present-day Levittowns and see if the people are any crazier there than those elsewhere. I doubt it.
Some of my relatives went to World War 2. They seemed to be no more damaged than anybody else, but I suppose it was enough. The suburban thing -- the atomization of community in the Atomic Age -- that went well beyond Mr. Levitt's work. In my family there was an uncle who fought in Italy who later broke all the furniture in his crappy subLevitt house about once every two or three years. But for others it was "the Good War". Another uncle went to the Philippines and bought Japanese heads from the head-hunters in backwoods Mindanao for a quarter each. And now, as is the way of things, they're all gone, but the burbs remain, at least until the Apocalypse we call talk about.
Used to work around the PA one, at an emptied-out US Steel complex, in a swamp across from Trenton. A huge chunk of super highway just collapsed below here; from folks bypassing North Philly, on way up to lovely tree-lined suburbs. We'd ended-up staying in Bristol (racism, here, you could almost slice into with your razor). Nobody had specifically to lower overpasses to segregate, since SEPTA was more to ensure purchase & unremitting maintenance of >3 car families, via EZ Credit & PayDay Loans (hard to explain, tearing out our streetcars & 120mph GG1 electric train-sets in 1948. Look up Robert Moses? 1st thing you notice, is a total lack of Black folks in ANY union W4 work-place. Philly's an easy .223 shot to the south, Dilbit bomb-train tankers & carcinogenic red-lined towns line the Acela corridor up through OLD refineries, so I'd driven a woman from Wewahitchka, FL up to Newark, in 1991 & were humming "Green Acres" wondering if there'd been a FREE BMW & cocaine sale or melanin depleting Itis plague had ripped through daisyland (as folks from Westy call anything north of Bristol?) These monstrosities were bastions of petit-bourgouis "ethnic" union, almost-honkies; mass produced from lethal tickytacky, all in a row... for a VERY specific reason
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." LBJ
*chuckles* no, I'm building a home in the Smoky mountains natnl. Park this time, where it's not gonna be too far from my childhood home in the subs.
You're right to focus on suburban living as perverse. The American Dream dream of nuclear family suburban homeownership, taken to be so 'natural' is in fact on of the strangest ways to live across all of human anthropological history. It seems to be built on a mythic idea that a middle class can be a small landed aristocracy, with their decorative green lawn in front of the Manor house, and plantation labor provided by alienated labor across the whole world to deliver daily necessary goods and food to your doorstep. The only thing that allows this arrangement is cheap fossil fuel energy and violent extortionist Empire. We are still building Levittowns, but it cannot last.
Liberals see ANY connection between New Deal Dixiecrats & run-away AGW as heresy! That, once Henry Wallace & Ken Galbraith Democrats had been crushed, streetcars & interurbans replaced by freeways to ofay concrete suburban sprawl & unions, returned to reactionary white, male NORMALCY, toxic red-lined sacrifice zones were overshadowed by jam-packed interstates & jets replaced trains for ACTUAL Protestant, straight, petit-bourgois Caucasian beneficiaries of bulldozing Black businesses. As substance-abusing white flight suburbanite hippie kids, gentrified unionized Black & Latinx workers out of red-lined family homes; discovered cocaine, compound interest & BMWs... stopped miscegenating, to accepted papa's junior partnership, sneeringly brainwashed yuppie dopplegangster duopoly ensued?