The Suburban Uncanny

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-suburban-uncanny

by byproxy • 7 years ago

23 9 7 years ago

nerdponx• 7 years ago

I guess we now know how the Salem witch trials happened.

What's striking about the story is that the panic did not (apparently) start with the public. It started, bafflingly, with investigators and the police.

kachurovskiy• 7 years ago

This is so out of touch with most of the world's population. In post-soviet world having a tiny 1 bedroom apartment on 10th floor with yard overrun with parked cars is the best middle class can hope for. Even in the western Europe having an American-sized garage is almost outside of reach of the row house owner. A large lot with a 4br house and a double garage is such a far away dream for most families.

knolax• 7 years ago

I've lived in both tiny apartments and suburban homes and I can tell you the former is much more desirable. This can be evidenced by the ridiculous housing prices in American cities. Suburban __homes__ are nice but they are surrounded by nothing but other suburban homes. In many cases it's not even possible to leave without a car because the only thing connecting the suburbs to the rest of the world are motorways. After a while living in these conditions take a toll, especially for the stay at home mothers the article describes.

closeparen• 7 years ago

Which might explain why Americans, with all this uniformity and expansive private space, were uniquely eager to make up stories about what must be going on behind their neighbors' facades.

zamfi• 7 years ago

Frankly this makes me a little happier to live in the present. As much as ubiquitous surveillance is terrifying, it also makes this kind of bullshit on the part of those in power harder to get away with.

Forge36• 7 years ago

Coincidentally there is a second thread relating this on the front page >Why people confess to crimes they didn’t commit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20182282

brifee• 7 years ago

This seems like a similar phenomenon to the anti vax movement. I currently only pay glancing attention to the anti vaxers. I believe they're crazy and write it off because it has very little to do with my life. I imagine I would've done the same thing during this satanic cult scare. Mass hysteria coupled with conspiracy beliefs are a thing in America.

Crye• 7 years ago

I was just imagining the same thing, and it's not hard to relate it to similar stories conspiracies happening today. QAnons belief that there is an underground network of famous child pedophiles. Of which are secretly being arrested by the current white house administration.

It's easy to disregard these stories as wild fantasies, while at the same time there is a growing groundswell of people who fully believe it.

shameshame• 7 years ago

I wonder how much of this was a result of the "born again" evangelical movement. I watched my parents in the 80s go from apathetic Catholicism to fervent Protestants. During which things got weird. Suddenly Satan was real and things like Halloween were up for debate.

The Suburban Uncanny

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