The Experiencing Belgium desk has temporarily re-located itself to Central Ohio for Experiencing Familium under a big sky for who knows how long. It's been ten years abroad in a self imposed exile of sorts and two years since I visited here last. Times change and things here are more than visibly worse.
From Dollville to Bru-town's Villette to Plasticville I am still dedicated to writing down my experience and reporting on various structures of the world a la Samuel R. Delany (read it but only in hardcover!) - it's not a book about baseball players despite what you've been told. Excersize your right of freedom of the press by reading that book if you can. If you don't use your freedom (of the press or others - especially religion - if it's middle eastern) you just might loose them if you haven't already.
Actually I am just posting today to set up my blog and claim some more staked out virtual real estate space on the web while it still is there in all its glorious vastness of ether to make claims on for free. Space ain't the final frontier - cyber space is - but you already knew that didn't you my little electronic pioneers.
Why am I naming this small corner of Blogistan as Plasticville when perhaps Cyberville is more like it? Well Blogistan was already taken though Cyberstan ain't all that bad either. Plasticville relates some how to Villette by Charlotte Bronte about a thinly veiled old time Brussels in the very early days of dubious land refered to as Belgium that was the absolute if not dim beginings of what would be later known as the European Union - Much to France's regret.
Plasticville the actual place is a "community" - or rather a real estate investment exploitation program in Central Ohio who prey upon the naive swallowers of the American Dream - First time home ownership in little boxes of plasticky ticky tack starter homes. As there is no Big Government anymore - just Haliburton and the like as Big Corporate Governance - there is no body of protection for hard working families who just want to own their own home - even if it is in a sell out cantonment of a condo life without any of the benefits of a condo (except here someone mows your lawn) and certainly all of the inconveniences of a condo. Whatever happened to having your own plot of ground and a little cabin of sorts to go on it - even if the cabin was entirely made of plastic? Indeed this chunk of real estate investment appears to made entirely out of plastic, hence the name, Plasticville. If this place is refered to as something Plastic then the times that this place takes place in should be known as The Age Plastification. Indeed living in this over priced plastic shack has me feeling like I have been laminated. Condomized in a condominium full of silly rules. Dogs on a leash or line behind the house (no fencing here!) leads to endless yapping... No vegetable gardening only flowering plants allowed - seems rather unpatriotic if we as a Nation are AT WAR on Iraq and/or Terrorisms. Wasn't Victory Gardening once and American passtime and virtue to take our minds off our young sons and daughters dying abroad for dubious reasons?
Things that make you go hmmm Plastic is a petroleum product and where is our current government more obsessed by - somewhere off where there are large oil spigots within Israels greedy and bloodthirsty reach. From the Experiencing Belgium desk I have written of the Concrete Conspiracy and here my fellow readers we will examine the Plastification Conspiracy. For example why is this cute (from a distance) little house made to look like some piece of the old American styled Tim Burton nightmare of Suburbian Dreams found at the end of tram lines or off the super express freeway? It looks all old American, Cape Cod fishery, replication of a Sears brand home from before the war to cracker box shot-gun shacks of a post World War II variety. Which if you know anything about the history of American Architecture then this house is from the begining a rip-off of the actual McCoy. De-volution in the style Devo the pop band with plastic hair band once sang of - that being we are all caught up in Evolution in Reverse. Not exactly what the Creationists had in mind either.
So here we are in Plasticville - somewhere along the off shoots of Tornado Alley and this lump of Plastic domesticity is set up on a concrete conspiracy slab. Now where exactly is Dorothy supposed to run to in the event of an actual Tornado passing by over head? Now-a-days Auntie Em's is so fat there is only room for her corpulence to seek shelter in the bathtub - alone. Ironically the bathtub is made entirely of... you got it... Plastic. Where were all those blessed building codes and land ordinances to protect the little people of Oz? (Otherwise known as the mythical middle economic classes)... No basement spaces mandatory or enameled steel or cast iron tubs for self preservation in the even of an act of Allah almighty God's judgement in the form of a airy Tornado.
Plasticville housing is brought to you by your local Midwestern chapter of the Military Industrial Complex and is therefore exempt from all local building and zoning laws - especially those costly ones intended by compassionate and ethical governence for your protection from cost cutting corporate greed. My guess is these houses at Plasticville are so cheaply made that the profit margins on these shacks is huge. Then if exacting those profits weren't enough the lenders devised a scheme to steal even more money from the harder working lower economic classes with loan scams that in the end took not just my former neighbors dreams but their actual homes away. Now how all of this is supposed to be good business in the long run I'd like to know. Suddenly politicians are unavailable and the conservatively elected governance is nowhere to defend those people who blindly put their faith in the Republicans. Then again the Democratic opposition is nowhere to be seen either because they are nearly as right minded politically as those who they are supposed to oppose. Unrestrained Capitalism will always eat itself in the end.
Here in Plasticville you can observe just that. In a neighborhood which only a few years ago was picturesque old Ohio farmland you now have boarded up foreclosed homes, For Sale signs on every street. Plastic siding and roofing already showing signs of fatigue. Gardening is down right impossible as the farmland was cleared so precisely so as not to leave one centimeter of plantable topsoil - a fact which is apparant in the newly lain sod which will not really grow or yield even a green color. Nevermind state regulations which do not permit builders to remove the topsoil layer without putting it back. Meanwhile here in Plasticville the topsoil remains in large mounds which look like Ohio burial mounds behind the cantonment unseen by the passing state route out front. More evidence if you needed any that unrestrained Capitalism will always in the end eat itself into non-existance. Perhaps then the Buffalo will return along with the once native Trumpeter Swans of old Ohio.
Stay tuned and check back later for more musings and postings from Plasticville, Ohio, U$A
