The Dying Trees

The Dying TreesWaldie provides us with a collection of entries of suburban life in California. They are poetic in their own fashion, with many entries having meanings hidden deep with in. In a way, it reminds a lot of Jean Baudrillard’s America, which is a collection of his responses as he travels across the United States. Similar to Baudrillard, Waldie gives us these textual snapshots of suburbia: some of them are about the physical descriptions of the landscape, some of them about the history of the urban development, some of them are personal scenarios, etc.

In several of the entries, Waldie discusses how the houses were being produced overnight (figuratively speaking), and because of this they were being sold as a commodity. Their purpose was less habitual, and more like a kitchen appliance: they could be cheaply mass produced, sold within seconds, and could serve the basic functions necessary to the consumer. However as years have weathered on the houses, we are now beginning to see the problems with the fast mass production. Quantity came before quality, and where the initial costs of building the units was cheap, they are increasingly expensive to maintain. And as much as we would like to, we aren’t able to go to the store and pull another unit off the shelf.

There also seems to be this preoccupation with grief and death. Waldie is constantly discussing the death of his parents, and the feeling of solitude in the house once they are gone. He discusses the death of an infant due to the lack of investment in transit and telephone systems.

Waldie also paints us a picture of our submission to the giant department store—aka consumerism (155). He discusses the construction of the May Co. building and the surrounding housing units that have trees planted in each of their yards. As the trees grow taller and taller each year, the view of the store becomes obstructed until its façade is completely out of sight. And then the trees begin to die all at once, and we slowly see the May Co. building once more. We see the overwhelming power consumerism has had in the past century. With the birth of suburbia came also the birth of the department store. And as years came by, we kept submitting ourselves to the store until we were completely lost in the gimmick, the low prices and the convenience, until we could no longer see the objective of the store because the obstruction from the ‘trees’ we had planted. But once the trees die, as the economy dies, we finally get a glimpse of what had happened. Mass consumerism was both the birth and now the death of the modern economy. And now we are standing there, along the giant row of tree stumps that leads up to May Co., with no money in our pockets to replace the trees, and we stare at the 16 foot light up ‘M’ logo as we say to ourselves “Huh, so that’s what happened.”