11 May 2009: "Feeling trapped & meaningless. Sad abt suburban development."

This post is about manifest destiny. Humankind has long anchored the soul of its being as a species to the principle of the domination of nature. Carles shows us images of the contemporary way in which this transcendental imperative is pursued, by subjugating an inhospitable and irregular landscape and imposing upon it an extremely regular pattern of domiciles which incubate, propagate and spread with germ-like rapidity and organization. Hence Carles has his speaker say contemptuously and sarcastically, "feeling sad about trees being cut down and shit like that." The destruction of nature is just "shit" that needs to be processed so that human beings can establish their dominion. The sadness is pious yet gratuitous weltschmertz that crowns that dominion with the dignity that is supposed to derive from gracious sympathy with the ecological losers in man's war against nature.

The images of relentless residential development come primarily from the American West, the land annexed to human exploitation by the popular expansionist doctrines espoused in the 19th century, when land grabs forestalled crises of overaccumulation. Rows of single cells, independent yet fused in a larger organism guided by survival instincts. The first rule of this larger protoplasm -- let no cells break away and form a competing organism. Hence the suburban trap: "Fucking trapped in suburbia."

This cellular structure forms on a panoptic plan, where conformity and discipline is imposed not merely by the governing police apparatus but by mutual and perpetual surveillance of one cell on all the others: Note that Carles writes that "The police were called" before he has his speaker denounce "police brutality." And of course along with the surveillance inevitably comes social conformity, enacted and ingrained during the vulnerable years of adolescence:

h8 my local high school
h8 all the ppl who value ‘fitting in’
and don’t ‘get’ what life is all about

But the irony here is multifaceted. Carles' speaker is the one who don't "'get'" what is happening, that only within conformity can one escape the imperative to be different, to impose oneself on the social landscape, to do what humankind collectively has done to fashion suburbia in the first place as a testimony to its uniqueness among earth's species.

And the trap itself is not merely imposed by humankind's collective sociohistorical sense of destiny in the West. It is overdetermined by such homologous praxeological drives as the will to procreate on the individual, cellular level ("Not even sure if I will ever break free or if I will end up back in suburbia since it is a cost-effective place to raise a child") and pervasive status anxiety ("feel even sadder about poorer people who live in apartments, relieved that I have a spacious house").

Carles darkly intimates that the only escape from these cages within cages is wanton and willful destruction without cause or limits -- "I want 2 set this place on fire," his narrator asserts, presaging the impotent protest of terrorists everywhere. Such a fire would cleanse nothing; it would only further clear the grounds for the viral spread of identicla buildings, the triumph of the technorational will.