Mcmansions, SUVs, Mega-Churches and the Baghdad Embassy: Life Among Dim and Brutal Giants
BY PHIL ROCKSTROH
A sprawling Mcmansion under construction. The styles increasingly resemble “bourgeois castles,” the compulsion to “ape one’s betters” so typical of those who need to flaunt their wealth to reassure their own sense of self-worth. Cost to the environment is also much larger than in normal construction.
In microcosmic mimicry of the plight of the besieged middle and laboring classes, my parent’s Atlanta neighborhood, as is the case with many others in the vicinity, is being destroyed, in reality — disappeared — by a blight of upper-class arrogance. The modest, post-war homes of the area are being “scraped” from the landscape as an infestation of bloated mcmansions rises from the tortured soil. These particleboard and Tyvek-choked monstrosities loom over the remaining smaller houses of the area, as oversized and ugly as mindless bullies, as banal as the dreams of petty tyrants.
In the surrounding suburbs, in a similar manner as mcmansions eclipse sunlight, throwing the adjacent houses into half-light, mega-churches eclipse the light of reason, leaving their congregations in an ignorant half-light of dogma and superstition. Of course, these true believer lunatics are wrong about everything, except, perhaps, for their elliptical apprehension regarding the arrival of proliferate cataclysms in the years to come. Oddly: Although they promulgate dire warnings on the subject, they seem gleeful at the prospect of widespread suffering. [Read more →]
