Re: Dispiriting Suburbs?
On Oct 18, 2006, at 6:03 PM, Jesse Lemisch wrote:
I always disliked Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes…. all made out of ticky-tacky,” etc., as contemptuous of people, including
suburbanites, who live in those little boxes. I was therefore quite surprised in reading Bettina Aptheker’s excellent new memoir, Intimate Politics, to hear
that Reynolds was a Communist. It had been my experience that Communists, regardless of their other problems, did not insult potential
constituencies. But there’s no doubt that contempt for suburbia was very much a
part of the New Left.
Pete Seeger sang it too, and he was a Communist in some sense, no?
I thought that part of the point of encouraging suburbanization was
to break up the urban working class, and make it more atomized and
conservative. Is that not true?
Doug