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Most of all, it is the lawns which are sinister. Fuji green and expansive, they are a visual relief to the freeway and its accompanying tunnel vision. Even ahead of the golden arches, they are welcoming as the approach of a new urban sign-value. The frenzy sites of a decaying Christian culture where reclining lawn chairs, people in the sun, barbecues and summer-time swimming pools can give off the pleasant odors of an imploding Calvinist culture, playing psychologically at the edge of the parasite and the predator.  And the Fuji green lawn? That has already been chemically sprayed to prevent the return of the animal kingdom. And why not? The suburban lawn can be so pleasantly malevolent because it is the aesthetic playground where three bourgeois ideological values intersect: a happy celebration of private property values; the ascendant sign-value of leisure time activity as the prime morality of post-liberal society; and the principle of exclusivity (from sexual relations to family recreation) as the rising star of Christian culture at the end of the twentieth-century. Indeed, in the old days, lawns were only for English aristocracy who could afford their maintenance. Today, all of this has been swiftly reversed, and we all do obedience to the lawn, that is if we have not paved it. This is a nice irony given the history of paving stones in the struggle for bourgeois freedom. In the suburban suicide sites - on those chemically glowing lawns - the struggle has been won. In advanced capitalist society, the majority of us live in suburbs. Effectively, this relegates the old sociological paradigm of city/country, along with the fortress mentality, to the trash can.
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The postmodern suburb ushers in the new (cosmetic) style of "real imitation life." Its appearance was signalled by the movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where progressively the pods grow the physiognomy of the everyday American, complete with the cloning of the shopping mall mentality. Here each comes equipped, at least nominally, with a Harlequin life programed to Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled. Each person in his or her own way "born again," the better to imitate the Way. Not that the Way need be religious or fundamentalist, but rather a way of life that grows on you, feeds from you, parasites you. It's the postmodern suburb, therefore, as a perfect ideological screen: lasered by flickering TV images, inscribed by shifting commodity-values, and interpellated by all of the violence, love and bickering voices of Mommy-Daddy-Me. 