I'm glad my beans and corn piss this dude off.

Not paying for weed treatment... Dude ya spray those fuckin chemicals allll over your lawn because nature exists only to be tamed. What's a climate change?

Link to avoid being a lib

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    it's the cultural outgrowth of America's fantasy of yeoman farmer self-sufficiency that persists as an aspirational class signal

    • MoneyIsTheDeepState [comrade/them,he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      It's also tied oddly deeply into US concepts of masculinity. The meme didn't start with King of the Hill - I don't know when it started, but it's never quite gone away

      • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        also intimately tied to the popular but delusional notion of a single-family home as an investment vehicle.

      • Changeling [it/its]
        ·
        2 years ago

        It started with how the theft and appropriation of land in the colonies was sold to colonizers as a form of freedom and self-actualization. Regional industries all had associated imagery which associated masculinity and freedom with rugged labor which made use of the land. Think pelters, log cabins, homesteaders, family-owned plantations, and later on, prospecting. At each step, the imagery of rugged men conquering the open wilds to secure their own self-made destiny was used to cover up what was really happening: class liquidity made possible through enslavement, genocide, and mass theft.

        This was prominent even after this sentiment was used to convince men to go participate in the world wars. The Napoleonic romanticization of the bayonet the charge being blown away by the realities of modern mortar fire and trench warfare made no difference. Or at least, by the time the post-war period was cemented in our minds as a form of American theology in the 80’s, this idea of freedom and masculinity involving the conquering of nature was again prominent. I think a lot about how Mr. Wilson’s garden is portrayed in the 1990’s Dennis the Menace movie. Mr. Wilson is an asshole who’s obsessed with his garden at the expense of all else, but his entitlement to control his own lawn down to the very last flower is portrayed as sympathetic and valid.

      • emizeko [they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        but the flex is "I have so much land/wealth, I can just let this productive land around my house be ornamental"

    • UlyssesT
      ·
      edit-2
      24 days ago

      deleted by creator

    • quarrk [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I think it’s more to do with petite bourgeois mindset. An unkempt yard breaks the illusion of wealth and thriving within your economic class. It forces petite bourgeois individuals to confront their tenuous class relations. Most of them are one or two paychecks away from a truly proletarian existence, and they can’t emotionally deal with that, so they set up these rules to enforce the illusion.