Hello Everyone:
Yours Truly is back after a fairly restful and very toasty Labor Day weekend. The weekend was not entirely peaceful thanks to the latest eye popping headlines regarding disparaging comments made by the president about military personnel killed in action. For someone who prides himself are doing more for veterans and active duty personnel, allegedly calling them "suckers" and "losers" is lower than beneath contempt. Even more mind boggling is today's headline in nytimes.com, which details how the Trump campaign spent more than $800 million out of a $1.1 billion cash advantage at the beginning of the summer. Anyone's guess is as good as Yours Truly. The Candidate Forum just wants to remind American readers to Text VOTE to 30330 and make a plan. Onward.
Today we take a trip to the suburbs. The word suburb conjures up the picture of nice single family homes, lush green front gardens, children riding their bicycles, and happy families living in relative safety and comfort. This concept is at odds with what suburbs originally connoted--dens of inequity. The Leave It to Beaver (1950s t.v. comedy you can google) is the image that the president invokes when declared himself the protector and savior of the suburbs.
The image of the suburbs currently being broadcast across the conservative media is a place that is under attack by lawless mobs, being overrun with low-income housing that threaten to substantially depress home values. Never one to miss an opportunity, Mr Donald Trump tweeted,
I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered of financially hurt by having low income housing in your neighborhood (theatlantic.com; July 31, 2020; date accessed Sept. 8, 2020)
He continued,
Your housing prices will go up based on the market and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy! (Ibid)
This pair of declarative tweets follows a a New York Post op-ed by former New York state lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughy, arguing "that presidential challenger Joe Biden's proposed housing policies threaten the 'value of their new home, the size of their property tax bill and the character of the town they now call home" (Ibid). In yet another, sexist sounding tweet, the president proclaimed,
The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better (
theatlantic.com; July 31, 2020)
The message is pretty clear. The president is attempting to portray the suburbs as a place under an imminent threat in order to provoke racist fears of white voters. His tweets imply that VPOTUS Joe Biden (D-DE), mysteriously aided by New Jersey Democrat Senator Cory Booker, will completely destroy the fabric of their tidy existence with diversification promoted by the Fair Housing Act, which the Gentleman from Delaware pledged to expand. Using the term "Suburban Lifestyle Dream," the president invokes the caricature of an idealized homogeneous past, think white-bread 1950s suburban family comedy. The image was the product of Hollywood than reality but it is historically instructive to understand how suburbs and suburban have been used as a backdrop for depicting racial, ethnic, and economic divisions across the American landscape.
The Trumpian image of suburbs as the idyllic place of decency is ironic. "The word suburbs goes back to medieval times, when it developed a highly pejorative connotation to refer to areas outside the walls of London or other cities where unseemly institutions-- gambling holes, bordellos, slaughterhouses, and the like--were relegated" (Ibid). The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as places that "...early on were associated with 'immoral or licentious practices.'" (Ibid). Common 17th-century expressions suburban lechery and suburban sinner meant prostitution (Ibid).
The suburbs gained a more favorable reputation in 19th-century when upwardly mobile Londoners moved to the semi-rural areas. The arrival of the newly upwardly mobile brought with them an aura of respectability. In this case, respectability was equated with "closed-minded and complacent" (Ibid). The monotonous and bland description of suburbia was popularized in the United States following World War II.
Ian Bogost observed in
The Atlantic, "the scorn toward suburbia was illustrated throughout popular culture, as in 1962 Malvina Reynolds 'Little Boxes,' about the cookie-cutter nature of suburban housing developments:"
Little boxes on the hillside/Little boxes made of ticky-tack/Little boxes on the hillside/Little boxes all the same... (
theatlantic.com; July 31, 2020)
The uniformity of American suburbs stands in contrast to the diversity of the cityscapes and their diverse populations. "White Flight" of the fifties and sixties created the image of the suburbs as place of refuge from the big, bad, dirty cities. Journalist Eugene Scott argued in
The Washington Post "whatever racial and ethnic homogeneity the suburbs may have had in the past has been decidedly transformed. And the economic picture is shifting too, as suburban regions become home to more and more low-income residents" (
theatlantic.com; July 31, 2020).
Therefore, in order for the president's American "Suburban Lifestyle Dream" to work, all to their complex demographic history would have to be deleted, replaced by a more simplistic concept of the suburbs as a place of refuge from the real or imagined chaos growing out of the police brutality protests. It is a worldview founded on shoulder shrugging There's goes the neighborhood dismissal of the racial diversification of suburbia. That diversification, in the Trumpian worldview, has become an existential threat to the hallowed suburbs and anxiety-ridden Caucasian voters are the intended receivers of that message. Will it work?
The racist dog whistles from the president and his surrogates are a complete mismatch for current events, "since polls show that suburbanites have
not been supportive of the administrations's handling of the Black Lives Matte protests and race relations in general" (
theatlantic.com; July 31, 2020). News accounts of unarmed peaceful protesters being suddenly tear gassed by the national guard and federal troops; the murders of pro-BLM protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin complicate the black-and-white idea that the Trump campaign seeks to promulgate. On Election Day the reality of people living in the "Suburban Lifestyle Dream" may have something to say about the Trumpian fictional narrative.
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