The Invisibles

I remember looking around at this perfectly indistinguishable tide of temporary residents coming to check their fake street addresses for mail. Their ethnicity, national origin, culture and social character were almost completely cloaked and hidden by seamless layers of generic, mass-produced, media-marketed suburban anti-culture.

What a place to hide!

The perfect place, in fact. If you're a dummy and you try to go hide out in the middle of the desert, they're going to find you in about two hours with one of those infrared, heat-seeking satellites like they used on Che Guevara.

Just go to Richardson, slap a baseball cap on your head and some bling. You're the invisible man!

So that was the genesis of my theory of the Dallas suburbs as the antimatter of human geography. Check me on this, but I do not believe that any other city in America can touch us for having quite so completely indistinguishable an expanse of generic suburbia. In a place like Chicago you can tell the old suburbs from the recent ones, the Polish 'burbs from the Italian 'burbs.

But we are surrounded by suburbs all built within the same snap of history's fingers, a borderless maze of franchised retail places that all look the same and apartment complexes and single-family residential neighborhoods that all look exactly alike. The only way to find your way around is with GPS. Dallas suburbia is where somewhere ends and nowhere begins—human outer space—a place to make yourself up as you go along.

So you think I'm putting the suburbs down, right? Oh, please, no, not at all. Stick with me here a minute. I think the Dallas suburbs are where we will create the race of people who will conquer the universe.

Say you need to build a small colony on a platform out in the vicinity of the star Acubens. Things are going to be a bit Spartan at first until the community gets going. People will basically be living in titanium tubes and boxes, watching 1970s reruns on TV and eating flavored felt.

You can't send a bunch of 10th-generation Westchester County people out there who get all wobbly in the head and nauseated because someone is going to repaint the belfry on the chapel. "Oh my word, what if they get the hue wrong? We'll have to commit mass suicide."

You can't have people like that in outer space. They'd never last. They're locality wieners. You need people who have the courage to shed tradition and abandon place itself, people who can slap on a gimme cap and some bling and become whatever they need to be.

You need a race of people who have been toughened up to life in Nowheresville. People whose idea of a meaningful landmark is Starbucks. People for whom an address is a code registered with Mail Boxes Etc. People from Frisco!

Harvey Graff's book is fascinating for me, because I am fascinated, as is he, by cities, and the city I happen to know most about is Dallas. I love my part of Dallas. But I know in my heart of hearts that my part of Dallas, Old East Dallas, is a refugee camp for people who are hiding out from the real Dallas.

Frisco.

The outermost suburbs are where the future is being forged. While it makes perfect sense for Graff to study the old city—in line with his earlier work, informed by his own experience—some other kind of academic should come study the suburban fringe, the nowhere of Dallas.

Yeah, yeah, I know all about James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Manmade Landscape. Read it. Loved it. Very important book.

I have written here before about the more recent book, The Option of Urbanism by Christopher B. Leinberger, about how all the kids are going to move back into the city and live the Seinfeld life. Great news. I believe it. I'm all for it.

But Kunstler's book is a requiem. I'm sorry, but what can I do? Leinberger's book is a real estate brochure. Sure, the rich kids will move downtown for a while. What about the rest of humanity?

People, the vast mass of people, will live in more and more generic and mass-produced environments in fewer and fewer truly unique locales, because that's the relentless math of population growth, pollution and politics. A chicken in every pot and a unique code on every titanium tube.

I'm not embracing it. I already told you, I'm a refugee. But don't you think we should get past the sentimental notion that an absence of place is automatically a bad thing? Why is it bad? Is a sense of place like a limb or an eye?

So if you believe that, do you think it's a good thing for people to know their place? What are you, English? We are Frisco! We are free! We don't need no stinkin' sense of place!