Word: suburbias
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...Revisit suburbia. Find a friend with a car and go get Slurpees at 7-11, french fries from McDonald's and pancakes at the International House of Pancakes (IHOP). Take pictures for your dorm room wall...
Between 1945 and 1955, the number of cars in America doubled from 26 million to 52 million. That boom, along with the highways that supported it, extended the strange and strained realm of suburbia. To absorb this mobility came drive-in theaters, drive-in restaurants, drive-in banks and, most important, the shopping mall--Main Street reconfigured for cars. Society was transfigured: the automobile brought America to a new frontier made up of Tinkertoy communities full of undefined relationships and spaces, with the car itself an extension of living room, playroom, bedroom, with the whole country viewed through the windshield...
...better or for worse, Suburbia is the U.S.'s grass-roots. In Suburbia live one-third of the nation, roughly 60 million people who represent every patch of democracy's hand-stitched quilt, every economic layer, every laboring and professional pursuit in the country. Suburbia is the nation's broadening young middle class, staking out its claim across the landscape, prospecting on a trial-and-error basis for the good way of life for itself and for the children that it produces with such rapidity. It is, as Social Scientist Max Lerner (America as a Civilization...
...fingers of Vietnamese who tried to claw their way into the embassy compound to escape from their homeland. An apocalyptic carnival air--some looters wildly driving abandoned embassy cars around the city until they ran out of gas; others ransacking Saigon's Newport PX, that transplanted dream of American suburbia, with one woman bearing off two cases of maraschino cherries, another a case of Wrigley's Spearmint gum. Out in the South China Sea, millions of dollars worth of helicopters tossed overboard from U.S. rescue ships to make room for later-arriving choppers. For many Americans, it was like...
...this age of limits was still in some respects an age of exploration. The '70s were when the '60s hit home. Head shops came to suburbia. Mom took yoga. And there were days when all the world was Oh! Calcutta! As experiments do, some ended in disaster, some in the cheesy solipsisms of the Me decade. All the same, by the simple pressure of new possibilities, lives were refashioned, and not just into life-styles. Women, gays, blacks all decided to take seriously that stuff about the pursuit of happiness. Every week, when Mary Tyler Moore threw her hat into...