Under the Tyranny of Cities

Both movies deal with the depravity of suburbia

one reason that Frank handicaps his and April’s attempts to get out of the stifling suburban life

They spoke to me both because I was white and suburban and because I wanted the fuck out of that world.

"Flyover" country

Feminists. Urban (sneer.) Suburban (sneer.) How sick can someone get of THAT? I've been sick of it all my life. Even at the height of my leftism it didn't occur to me that living in a filthy, dangerous city would be good. While I didn't relish the thought of the inconveniences of really urban life (at the same time admiring those who engage in agriculture and brave those inconveniences to provide the ACTUAL necessities of life), there is happily a middle ground here in the United States and other affluent, free-market cultures. We have the option to take in a Broadway play and be home in bed by one AM. But it goes beyond that. How very far we've come that the scales have actually tipped - and in the WRONG direction from what our founding fathers intended for our liberties and our prosperity and happiness. Harken to Thomas Jefferson for a moment, a little sanity injected into the sneering hatred of the urbanites for those of us who choose a better life (with zomg a backyard and a patch of - gasp! - GRASS!)

To James Madison Paris, Dec. 20, 1787

DEAR SIR, -- My last to you was of Oct. 8 by the Count de Moustier. Yours of July 18. Sep. 6. & Oct. 24. have been successively received, yesterday, the day before & three or four days before that....

.... I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe. Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.

Jefferson was a prophet as well as a statesman.

The map makes it abundantly clear that we ARE under the tyranny of the population of overcrowded **cities** and have become, possibly irretrievably, corrupt.