Photo by David Burnett, National Geographic
Yet another dispatch from the sci-fi front, this time brought to us by none other than Disney and Co.:
Disney World, Orlando Beyond Disney - National Geographic Magazine:
The Theme-Parking, Megachurching, Franchising, Exurbing, McMansioning of America: How Walt Disney Changed Everything
Everything happening to America today is happening here, and it’s far removed from the cookie-cutter suburbanization of life a generation ago. The Orlando region has become Exhibit A for the ascendant power of our cities’ exurbs: blobby coalescences of look-alike, overnight, amoeba-like concentrations of population far from city centers. These huge, sprawling communities are where more and more Americans choose to be, the place where job growth is fastest, home building is briskest, and malls and megachurches are multiplying as newcomers keep on coming. Who are all these people? They’re you, they’re me, and increasingly, they are nothing like the blue-eyed “Dick and Jane” of mythical suburban America.
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I think the snob who wrote the article needed to do a little more research to balance it. The demeaning “kind of literary time-share” remark about Kerouac’s house in Orlando doesn’t inform the reader that it’s now a literary landmark and writers’ retreat and in no way a McMansion, condo, or time-share. The magazine also took myriad pictures of it, but since it didn’t fit their snobby focus, the house ended up on the cutting room floor. Pity.
Bob, it sounds to me that it is you that is being the snob attributing some mystical elitist status on Kerouac’s residence. A status I am sure he’d totally abhor.
I think you miss the point. I think the “focus” of the article is in a sense to point to the absurdity of the project contrasted with the irony of Kerouac’s vision.
“…he scorned “the middle-class non-identity which finds its perfect expression … in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time.” Whereas Disney was looking for control, Kerouac personified the American urge to defy control.”
James Howard Kunstler calls it the biggest misallocation of resources since the second world war.
Kerouac’s house is just a bunch of bricks, timber and mortar. It’s largely meaningless in this context. Let it go.