Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet HomeOn page 165 of Kunstler’s text he states that Americans in the twentieth century were becoming more and more preoccupied with “acquiring a product called home… Here was a neat little semantic trick introduced by realtors as they became professionalized: the prospective buyer was encouraged to think of his purchase as a home.”

This was undoubtedly due to the steady rise in marketing and advertising that occurred in post-World War II America. Large ad agencies were ready and able to sell the American dream to returning veterans and they, in turn, were ready to buy. Looking over the advertisements of the day, so many of them promise a sense of home: a perky housewife folding laundry next to her new General Electric washer/dryer set, Betty Crocker biscuits in the oven warm the heart and the home.

Unfortunately, dreams and reality are two very different things and the post-War family, at least in large part, never got their home. What they got was production. Kunstler tells us that the average American family moves every four years, and looking back on my life, I’d say that sounds about accurate. But it proves a point, that despite the general mobility of the American citizen, one wouldn’t be so quick to leave a house if it were indeed a home. A house is easy to leave, a home not so much.

Instead, America (let me rephrase that, most of America) continues to live in “houses” rather than “homes.” Maybe it’s our own fault. We’ve let the mobility of the continuously moving “frontier” nation that always strives for something better get in our heads and stick there. We can trace capitalism through history, and call it bad names, but inevitably we’re still hoping for more space, more land, more stuff. Home may be somewhere out on that metaphorical “frontier,” the problem is we just can’t seem to get there.