America may be at the peak of the latest materialistic cycle - Supersize homes, gigantic SUVs afflict a nation
Americans are a people with profoundly changeable opinions. Their lifestyle ideals, for instance, seesaw from extravagance to asceticism in bursts of 30 years or so. This peculiar national trait affects their architecture as it does everything else, repeatedly taking them from overblown ostentation to reactionary modesty and back again. Needless to say, America is once again at the peak -- at least, one hopes it's the peak -- of one of these materialistic cycles. As we preside over the dawn of the 21st century, the typical new house has bloated to more than twice the size of an average home of 1950, even though families have gotten smaller. In the past two decades alone, the average floor area of new homes has increased 40 percent. Along the same lines, it's become routine to see featherweight housewives wrestling gigantic 7-foot-high SUVs on half-mile grocery runs. Alas, it doesn't end there, either. In a shopping mall in a middle-class suburb in Portland there are three boutiques selling clothing, diet supplements and confections -- for dogs. Perhaps there is a point when too much really is too much. We've all seen that bumper sticker beloved by the terminally empty-headed: "He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins." Yet few intelligent Americans would argue that having a huge house and a couple of Escalades, much less a larder stocked with dog pastries, has actually made their lives any happier. Some might even own up to the contrary. Yet we seem unable to perceive the siren song of materialism for the commercial sham that it is. Frank Lloyd Wright once observed: "Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions." Today, it's not just the wealthy who are so afflicted. Rich and poor, old and young, left and right, Americans seem poised to become a nation of janitors?
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