HGTV Dream Home
HGTV has left the snowy mountains of Colorado for a warmer clime. This is the new home site:
Quote on it from the video: “This homesite is amazing, but building a house here in this tropical environment will be a challenge for all involved.”
AMAZING? Just being next to the water on an island does not make something amazing. I can’t tell from just looking at a low-quality video still, but this site looks like it could be an incredibly fragile environment. Can’t you just picture this being a really important habitat for an endemic Florida spider? I’m not saying that it is, but I cannot just assume that it’s a great home site just because it has ocean views.
If it’s not terribly rich as an ecosystem goes, it looks like the original landscape has been completely obliterated. For what? A forthcoming lawn?? I can’t believe that people can watch a show like this without feeling terrible. Let alone think that this is their DREAM HOME. Even if it was rescued from a land fill, the location on the Keys alone does not make this my personal Dream Home site.
I think English is great in that we separate the words “house” and “home.” Americans are still so obsessed with thinking that we need big houses that we forget to make homes. And the ultimate house to be had is one next to the ocean, especially on an island? This logic is crazy.
I see these images of escape pushed into people’s psyches day in and day out. They’re used to sell EVERYTHING. Did you see the toilet paper post? And TV producers today keep pushing it over and over to get people’s attention, particularly during season finales and premiers. Don’t get me going on search engines and fast food companies ET AL that try to tell us that island paradise is the “it” state of being.
Am I the only one that remembers reading the articles that said the seawalls we’re building to allow us to live next to the beach are actually altering the flow of water and sand so much that they’re destroying the beaches? Here’s one of them. Here’s another with some graphics that explain it. (THANK YOU New York Times for making your archives free!)
Here are two more quotes on the Dream Home site from the video:
“A place where you might make your daily commute by boat,” and “a place where wasting your day away might be the only thing on your to-do list”
This is totally yawny.
Why do we forget about what we have in our own cities and towns? Why don’t we band together to make these better places? Why do we have to push out farther and farther? We need to turn inward. These feelings are only backed up by one last quote from the video: “We are as south as you can get.”
Apart from that whole Antarctica thing. But don’t worry, it’s coming to us.
We have to wake up America. Not only can we not see past the borders of our country, we also can’t see past the perceptions of who we think we are.
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Posted on September 12, 2007
Filed Under Beaches, Cultural Symbols, Islands, Television, Urbanity |
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