The neighbors are afoot with their gasoline driven machines. When I walk with my guide dog at twilight they’re still at it, fouling the air, obscuring the birds, working mindlessly but without the muscle of Buddha.
One guy has a weed whacker which sounds like 42,000 mosquitoes amplified by a 70watt Marshall amplifier. He could play with “The Clash” except of course he has no genuine outrage. He thinks his taxes are too high and that all politicians are liars and that’s enough in the idea department to claim world citizenship.
Asleep I can still hear them. The bastards have entered my dreams. They’re mowing the orgonocity of my nautilus. The dream mowers are rectilinear, dim, unfeeling, plodding, stinking of fuel and hypo-minty deodorant.
Gadzook! The American lawn! A pastoral jail with commodity fetishized pre-bagged toxins and ride ’em cowboy tractors and little white baseball caps.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that Americans spend 3 billion hours annually mowing their lawns. One thinks inevitably of all the things they might be doing instead but if I tread there I will be susceptible to the charge of intellectual snobbery. Ah but occasionally some “I.S.” feels good. Although his article isn’t about the depredations of lawn mowers I like Tom Vanderbilt’s essay over at Slate: “Lawn Pox: Children’s Play Equipment and the Decline of the American Yard” Mr. Vanderbilt’s vituperations are about the dread sprawl of overdetermined, plastic play devices that he sees in every suburban and ex-urban yard–all of it in iridescent oranges and reds and collectively modeled on the playlands at McDonalds.
He notes that children don’t actually play on this crap. They’re all in the house playing Nintendo. He wonders if Americans no longer believe in community playgrounds. We know the answer of course. The playground is a dangerous place. Of course this is likely to be true. There aren’t enough stay at home moms and cops on the beat to keep the old time swingsets free of meth addicts.
My point such as it is has to do with the fortress of the home, the manicured lawn its pastoral invitation, the unexamined sentimentalization of the English garden superimposed on American frontier fantasies, each further influenced by the suburban super-ego and the lawn equipment industry. Why not grow wild grasses, pachysandra,lilacs untrimmed, plenty of trees, force some germinal natureback into our lives?
Of course smarter people than I have written about these matters of American pastoral and the cowboy rancher at home next door. Michael Pollen and Debrah Tall come to mind.
I’ll merely add that when you’re blind and hoping for some walking joy and all the little ball cap wearing Bubbas are erasing the soundscape you feel the stultifying and sleepwalking misery of the business.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Astroturf, I dream of astroturf that never needs to be cut. If it were not for my neighbors who would freak out if I installed astroturf I would get rid of the lawn in a heart beat. You forgot to mention one other thing about power tools used to groom lawns: the noise reaches a peak when you are about to eat dinner.
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Gas-driven lawn mowers and weed whackers were invented by Donald Rumsfeld during the Ford Administration to begin the sapping of Americans’ brain power by bombarding them with repetitive noise; then leafblowers were added in early Bush 44 years, to extend the season of mindless noise. The results of these brain-sapping exercises were implemented at Guantanamo Bay and countless other ‘black sites’ (along with far more horrible tortures) for ‘work’ on foreign-type people. Meanwhile, the garden-based ear-torture devices were an integral part of American Life, rendering huge swathes of the populace incapable of voicing any opposition to anything. Could Obama take a tip from Germany, and forbid any mechanical garden machinery operating on Sundays? Might even be a ‘bi-partisan’ handshake across the aisle. (Unless Sarah Palin likes shooting moose on Sundays)
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