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Southwestern lawns and political theory



Writing as I did yesterday about Hoover dam and the hydraulic theory of history, I came to think also of the American institution of lawns.

In other countries, homeowners have plots and they do various things to garden and decorate their plots. But in America, everyone seems agreed on the proper way to decorate your plot: blade after blade of grass regularly mowed to keep all the blades to a uniform height, the congeries of blades as dense as possible to convey a sense of lushness, as much like your neighbor's as possible -- except a darker green -- to lull him with your conformity to type while also driving him mad with envy.

Michael Pollan wrote back in 1989 that the standard issue lawn was like the interstate highway system, or fast-food franchises. Together, these innovations make "the suburbs of Cleveland and Tucson, the streets of Eugene and Tampa, look more alike than not."

The love of lawns goes back a long time. Gatsby, in Fitzgerald's novel, sends a gardener over to Nick's place to mow his grass in accord with West Egg standards.

And this brings me back to Hoover Dam. The early stirrings of a plan for a dam at that spot, and a unified multi-state system of irrigation for the southwest in general, roughly coincide with Gatsby's fictional lawn parties on Long Island. It was in 1922 that the then Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, brokered a deal among the governments of the seven states that laid the basis for the system, and laid the groundwork too for the name it would eventually acquire.

The irrigation capacity of the federal government, although expressed at those meetings in a manner friendly to ideas about federalism, was used to unify the country in much the same way  Wittfogel's ideas would lead us to expect. And allowed the westward expansion of the Long Island style lawn.

The above photo is of a lawn in Phoenix.

Now: is this not wretched excess on the face of it?

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