excerpts

A suburb is a working-class prison. It's designed to indoctrinate you to the way of life it espouses: 2.2 kids, car, dog, picket fence. Wife or husband, depending on your preference. Mortgage, credit card bills. A whole catalogue of goods, necessary for your psychological health. A whole catalogue of pills, necessary for your psychological health. All priced just high enough that the only cost of happiness is wage-slavery. Indentured servitude to a lifestyle. We know we're supposed to get a house and a high-paying job because that's what our parents have. We know we're supposed to knock up some poor broad because, well, we're here aren't we?

But there's an odd, post-modern awareness of the American dream now. Everyone knows that Leave It To Beaver is not an accurate representation of life at age x (x being, you know, the age you give up on all your dreams and settle down.) Stupid, identical homes sitting on lots in California where it never snows and nobody ever dies and no one's ever worried they won't make their car payments this month? We know this is horseshit. Pop culture has swung completely around, and now we are bombarded with messages about how incredibly naive the idealized 50s world of Leave It To Beaver really was. But nobody's got anything better to offer us anymore. There's a gaping void in our collective consciousness. All of a sudden irony is in vogue, and now we're undermining everything our parents were taught to believe. But nobody stepped up to the plate to try and find a new dream for us.

So now we have no dream except the nightmare of the destruction of the old one. Pass me a pipe bomb I guess.