In 1962 Malvina Reynolds released her song “Little Boxes” – used as the theme for the Showtime series “Weeds” – and it’s a song capturing the fear of being ordinary, at least in part. The fear of having a ticky-tacky little job, after getting a ticky-tacky education, moving into a ticky-tacky little house, in a ticky-tacky development, and basically being a ticky-tacky person… just like everybody else.
The song expresses something of the often unspoken angst in white America post WWII. If you watch the above video and listen to Malvina’s lyrics pay to how you feel. I characterized it as a fear of being nothing special… just like everyone else, of being ordinary, of being boring or bland, “Square”, generic, blah. I’d be curious what you hear.
Malvina was born in 1900, which if my math holds up, means she would have been 62 years old when this song was written and released. She knew America before the interstate freeways. Before the ubiquity of the automobile. And before the G.I. Bill spawned planned communities, often coupled with red-lining zoning laws spreading suburbs – like cancer – as tumors growing on the edge of America’s cities. “Planned community,” was generally code language for an intentionally white neighborhood. Toxic city planning further fragmented and homogenized this nation’s already segregated neighborhood life. I know something about this, as I live in one of the planned communities built in the 50s & 60s, and while the demographics have diversified and the “red lining” rules are no longer on the books, our neighborhood continues to wrestle with its segregating birth narrative.
Its no wonder, “Little Boxes” was something of a hit. There was a fear that one was just like everyone else. Nothing special. The fear was real. Our places were designed for sameness; and if all one’s neighbors are white, middleclass, heterosexual families then, they’re really not racist, right? They’re not classist? Not homophobic? its just that all their neighbors “happen” to look like them and share similar values. BTW, the “growth of the suburbs” is whiteness speak for “White Flight.”
At any rate, and whatever you want to call it, the white church of the 50s & 60’s ate this stuff up. By the 1970s the American evangelical church largely adopted the Homogeneous Unit Principle in church growth studies unleashing a whole generation of Christian leaders who were taught to pursue sameness, further perverting the notion of loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves.
I’m struck by the connection of the growth of the suburb with its inevitable commodification of place, and the loss of a sense of personal identity, linked to feeling neither unique nor special. It seems that when people manipulate their context so that only people who look, believe, behave, and value similarly can inhabit a place it may have a negative impact on them. They may not feel very especial… their life may even feel a bit ticky-tacky.
Clearly, I’m ranting a bit. I guess this is what happens sometimes when I heard an old song.
Peace, dwight
I’d love to find some time to talk through this some with you, Dwight – beyond a comment on a blog. I feel very much two ways about this. I think this question of “sameness” is deeply cultural and there is a sense in America that you do not fit in in our culture unless you have this concern, and desire (anxiety, really) to set yourself apart. There’s a sense in which having this anxiety just is part of fitting in in America. We exercise our sameness by being individuals. It’s the non-ironic membership in a club, society, church, union, demographic segment, etc., that actually sets someone apart.
And thinking about the design aspects of sameness, in class I show students a picture of a suburban cul-de-sac and ask them what’s wrong with this. Inevitably they say that the houses all look the same. And then I show them a slide of a Hausmannian Boulevard in Paris, and a street of Victorian rowhouses in London, or some brownstones in Manhattan or San Francisco and ask them “Really? If sameness is such a problem why could none of us afford to live in any of these places?” I think there is something deeper here than just “sameness” that is a problem – I express it as a problem of orientation: the places we live (or the lives we lead) have a problematic sameness because they are not oriented around larger meanings and patterns.
To live in a house identical with all your neighbors can be a source of pride if it is in Paris or London, well-designed places which are deeply enjoyable and (mostly) functional as cities; to be stuck in a mushroom field development in an old farmer’s field with twisting streets corresponding to nothing is a different thing altogether.
Likewise, culturally if we are all anxious to be individuals and not parts of a family, clan, team, nation, church, etc., and we cannot acknowledge a larger meaning supervening on it all to which we conform (or at least with which we negotiate) then it is no surprise that, in our idiosyncratic aloneness (which is like others’ aloneness) we end up leading anxious “lives of quiet desperation”. (Ironic, I know, given Thoreau’s original use of the phrase, but here we are.)