The Cynic Express(ed) 2.06: Balking at 'Balkanization'

     A few months behind in my Atlantic Monthly reading, I was surprised to discover a characterization of my current hometown of St. Louis as Balkanized. The actual text reads :"Joel Kotkin, a Los Angeles-based urban-affairs specialist, calls the secessionist trend that has already Balkanized St. Louis and other American cities the 'urban confederacy movement'" Robert D. Kaplan's essay, entitled "Travels into America's Future," preceded his book on the same subject, namely that America sprawls and that the face of urbs and suburbs are mutating.

     Wowzers. Balkanized. Made like the Balkans region, which includes nominees for the Nobel War Crimes Prize from Serbia, Bosnia, and such. I think that the judgment is a little harsh. After all, we here in Maryland Heights have not shelled Creve Coeur in almost two weeks, even though the less-than-human residents of "Broken Heart" insist upon calling "krehv cur" "kreev cor." And that time we surrounded Bridgeton and refused to let food or medical supplies in-we did that all in fun. The carnage hasn't even spilled into other regions, like St. Charles. Yet.

     As for the secessionist trend, I should hardly think that any of the municipalities in the St. Louis area want to break away from St. Louis or the United States. Heck, we can't even give St. George, with its three squad cars covering what, a mile? Mexico won't take them. Canada balked at the prospect, although I am sure the revenue generated by the Court System in St. George, open from 10 to 2 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the local constabulary's dedicated monitoring of St. George's single multi-lane street and one stop light had some draw. Is there really a confederacy movement, just like in the mid 1800s?

     Actually, the only case of overt desire for secession comes from Milwaukee's Alderman Michael McGee, who in the late eighties and early nineties-nineteen eighties and nineties, mind you-wanted his district to secede from Milwaukee proper and form a city of its own, alone in the middle of Milwaukee. The city was to be called "King's Paradise," but it, like so many other inner city utopian ideals, never came to pass.

     How ironic, or perhaps not, how people abuse the language in the opposite way of Orwell's great fears. Orwell thought that things like his double plus ungood Newspeak would be used to glaze over warfare and cruelty. Instead, commentators who like to darken the Boston skies and national news stands characterize the simple suburban migration and the realignment of the power distribution with the name of a region wherein sects of people commit atrocities like serial rape and genocide against former neighbors. Certainly, the St. Louis metropolitan area looks like a piece of glass with a hole in the center and cracks spider-webbing outward from Missouri's second largest city. The little municipalities have not clashed against each other.

     I know the topic of suburban sprawl and its sociological impact upon America remains a pretty dry subject, of little interest to even those who read the East Coast slicks. Juicing it up by comparing it to an inflamed region where civil war burns, or even by comparing it to our own American Civil War by tossing off terms such as urban confederacy and secession, do not serve to make it any more enticing to readers. And jamming so many heavily-loaded words dulls the senses. In the end, the proud and clever piece of writing and thinking starts seeming a whole lot less like something with a point and more like George Carlin's "Words You Can't Say On TV" skit, an almost mindless collection of obscenities and genitalia slang. So divorced from their sources as to be meaningless.