Word: towns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Trost attributes this search for the unique tothe college town atmosphere...
Alas, I found no such variety. What I found instead was an increasingly homogenous and media-saturated country, one utterly devoid of places with real individuality. We drove through town after town, always seeing the same thing: a depressed downtown area dotted with closed shops and "For Sale" signs and an area on the outskirts of town where Wal-Mart, Taco Bell and other such stores existed in all their banal, sterilized splendor. There was a stretch in Minnesota and Wisconsin where there were definitely more Pizza Huts than grocery stores...
...downtown areas of all these towns and cities were once bustling centers of local commerce, replete with local stores and an individual character. Now those centers are modern-day ghost towns, with all the consumers having fled to the gold rush of national chain stores on the outskirts of town...
...that same glorious throne at a local mom-and-pop store. And, thus, the consumer is better off. Who am I to stand in the way? By criticizing this trend, I am not trying to advance a socialist agenda, I am merely lamenting the disappearance of small-town America, the America suggested to me by Norman Rockwell paintings...
...what about my image of small town America? Perhaps I am a little too naive, a little too romantic in my notion of what the American West should be like. But it seems that it couldn't always have been this homogenous. Yes, Wal-Marts are now ubiquitous, and that Taco Bell chihuahua exhorts people across the nation to eat gorditas, but it wasn't always so. Besides strip malls, chain stores and other such monuments to consumerism, the other factor contributing to the increasing uniformity of America is the combination of cable TV and other forms of media saturation...