Picking up a book that covers the years when I came of age in an American suburb, I figured I’d know plenty about what I was getting into. I thought I’d be reading mostly to confirm my own biased view of what it was like to grow up where and when I did. How wrong I was. It is a book like Riismandel’s that helps to give me a new lens on a topic I think I know something about. In this case, it is the idea of productive victimization that shakes me into a new way of looking at the world. Riismandel explains the term, writing “Rather than simply be imperiled, suburbanites responded by leveraging their endangerment through a process I call productive victimization. In actions posed as necessary to defend home, family, and neighborhood against new threats, suburbanites actually increased their control of local spaces and the people in them and further entrenched the suburban family as the paradigm of American values” (pp. 6-7). So, by positioning themselves as victims of society when they don’t get their way, suburban Americans only increase their power and influence. It’s one of those things that makes you sit and think and stop and stare right as you are starting to get into the book. I knew I wouldn’t be able to put this one down because that idea has so much explanatory power.
Early on, Riismandel discusses the Three-Mile Island meltdown and explains how confusion about what was actually happening in the reactor near Harrisburg led to compounding human errors on the site of the reactor itself. As a result, the competing perspectives of local government officials, company spokespeople, local and national reporters, and expert scientists became jumbled and led to mass confusion about how to best inform the public about a) what had even happened, and b) what they should do to seek safety. People who can operate the machinery involved in a nuclear power plant recognize that its operation requires distributed institutional knowledge that may be difficult to understand in a setting such as news conference. As Riismandel explains, this complexity led to many in the area to express NIMBYism out of fear. Although this response is entirely reasonable, it becomes a problem when the idea of NIMBYism is used as a cudgel to prevent any kind of governmental project to happen. Because the failure of an incredibly complex system, people end up not trusting the government or valuing expertise. You can see how these developments primed the pump for Reagan’s famous quip about the nine most terrifying words in the English language. Moreover, Riismandel quotes The New York Times’ William Glaberson on how NIMBYs were strategic in how they would vanish after making their voices heard. In contrast to other kinds of political organizers, suburban NIMBYs come with built-in clout, so they and their concerns are taken seriously from the start, and they don’t need to sustain any kind of momentum once they reach their goal. They can simply fade into the background until the next cause rears its head. In that way, the Three-Mile Island meltdown and its public response provide a clear example of how productive victimization operates.
In the chapter on the carceral suburb, Riismandel uses the kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh to explore how suburban fear grew into the home security industry. One of the most illuminating cases in this chapter comes when Riismandel contrasts the public response to Walsh’s murder with the murder of nearly 30 children in Atlanta only a few years prior. In Walsh’s case, the idea that a neighborhood watch of white adults and cops driving around in the suburbs, peeking into people’s windows was commendable. In Atlanta, the idea that a neighborhood watch of Black teenagers with baseball bats (because the cops wouldn’t come to their neighborhood) was terrifying, and further evidence of urban decay. You can see the racist double standard from a mile away.
I was glad to see a section on southern California Hardcore in the book. It’s handled well, with all the usual suspects included (MIDDLE CLASS, BLACK FLAG, CIRCLE JERKS, DESCENDENTS, YOUTH BRIGADE, etc.). There’s even discussion of Flipside, Maximum RockNRoll, and The Big Takeover as well. In this section, Riismandel strikes a solid balance between being informative to someone who might not know about these bands and treating the music and scene with a depth of knowledge that shows he knows this information well. This chapter also addresses arcades and malls as places where teens rubbed up against the social norms, including the paradox that mall managers needed teens to be feeding coins into machines in the arcades, but if there were too many teens all at the same time, chaos might ensue. In the eyes of suburbanites, both hardcore punks and coin-op loving mallrats present a threat to the social order merely by wanting to get out of the supposedly safe suburban house to find a community elsewhere.
In the final full chapter, Riismandel hits on a powerful idea when discussing the PMRC. Having established that Reagan’s America was deeply distrustful of government solutions, that meant the suburban family needed to be its own problem solvers and the suburban home needed to be the laboratory where those problems were solved. So, no experts in “medicine, science, education, or public policy” could help suburbanites with the problems they faced. It was all down to “proper consumer choices;” in other words, what you could buy is the only thing that could ever save you (p. 145). If nothing else, the folly of trying to purchase your way out of a social or personal or health problem should be the lasting critique of the late 20th century American suburb. There are experts in fields of inquiry for a reason. They have dedicated their lives to studying the issues that make us human. We should listen to them.
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