{"id":1069,"date":"2008-10-02T22:06:36","date_gmt":"2008-10-03T05:06:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/?p=1069"},"modified":"2008-10-02T22:10:05","modified_gmt":"2008-10-03T05:10:05","slug":"landfill-or-i-cant-stand-it-warning-foul-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2008\/10\/02\/landfill-or-i-cant-stand-it-warning-foul-language\/","title":{"rendered":"LandFILL — or, I can’t stand it (warning: foul language)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dave Winer<\/a> pointed to a SoCal news video that another blogger has on their site<\/a>. Twelve minutes of pain. Must see, click through<\/a>. In response, I commented the following:<\/p>\n

Just watched the “meltdown” news video you linked to, above. Oh my god. The waste, the waste of it all. Lives, land, stuff, potential. LAND! LandFILL.<\/p>\n

Astonishing. (Like, literally. I’m a-stonied, rigid with gob-smackedness.)<\/p>\n

“Inland Empire,” my pointy little ass. Highways, gasoline (cheap, then; not now), more subdivisions, super-duper square footage, more oil, more cars, on and on. And what’s left on those streets? People who themselves are on the financial edge, living (if you can call it that) in “communities” (fuck me – what a bunch of crap!) where almost every other house on the street is abandoned\/ handed back to the lenders.<\/p>\n

And some of those people thought that the bad ol’ city with its “crowding” (actually, density) was the enemy. Wow, were they wrong.<\/p>\n

PS: can’t even walk to the grocery store in the “Inland Empire.” How sustainable was that to begin with?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Originally posted as a comment<\/a> by Yule Heibel<\/a> on Scripting News<\/a> using Disqus<\/a>.<\/cite><\/p>\n

After I wrote that, I wrote some more, but decided against cluttering up Scripting<\/a>‘s comments board and instead took it to my own blog here.<\/p>\n

Man, I haven’t cursed this much in text in ages<\/strong>…<\/p>\n

PS: My anger and sadness comes in part from feeling that these people who abandon their homes like this have no one to draw on, link to, connect with. No community, no nothing. There’s no one to draw close to — and how could there be, in *wastelands* such as “Inland Empire”? *Waste*-land.<\/p>\n

It’s infuriating to see that atomizing people in this way, dis-encouraging them from some sort of organic relationship to place\/ community, and telling them instead that *suburban isolation* and all this other bullshit of Stuff-hood (which lands in the dumpster) is the American Dream — that this has been sold as some kind of *goal*.<\/p>\n

What the hell kind of community can you have in an Inland Empire? The “community” of new age religions or evangelical-isms? Same old, same old: no fucking history! And by the same token, actual neighbourhoods\/ communities have been left in a trashed & destroyed state (see NOLA), so that political willpower and ability to move toward change also gets dis-focused and confused. Wipe out the history, wipe out the memory. Abandon ship, leave your crap, fill the landfill.<\/p>\n

It’s enough to make one think there’s method to this madness.<\/p>\n

Ok, I’ll leave your comments board now, enough ranting. But that video really riled me up. Usually don’t swear this much.<\/p>\n

Pernicious. Inland Pernicious.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, yeah — it’s a rant.\u00a0 But you just have to watch this news clip<\/a> to get it.<\/p>\n

Ok, back to your regular programming.\u00a0 Move along, nothing to see here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dave Winer pointed to a SoCal news video that another blogger has on their site. Twelve minutes of pain. Must see, click through. In response, I commented the following: Just watched the “meltdown” news video you linked to, above. Oh my god. The waste, the waste of it all. Lives, land, stuff, potential. LAND! LandFILL. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3196,3193,3192,3195,3191,3194],"class_list":["post-1069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-disaster","tag-financial_crisis","tag-foreclosures","tag-meltdown","tag-suburbs","tag-unsustainability"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}