Deconstructing Joe Suburb: A tool for NWCW matchwriters By Mike Jiran, NWCW President and lifelong New Jerseyan
Note: This is written strictly OOC, a tool to help everyone here understand the IC fan base of NWCW. It can’t be written IC, because if it were I would be praising the people of New York’s suburbs. But I’m not.
There is a stereotype of the average New Yorker. It’s not a very good image, and it's not really a good stereotype either. He is crude, he is arrogant. He is sophisticated, he is self-loathing. The stereotypical New Yorker is a contradiction, and that proves one thing: you cannot stereotype the average New Yorker.
New York, after all, is not the greatest city in the world for nothing. It is the indefinable nature of the New Yorker that makes him/her a breed apart from the rest of the nation. In a city of nine million, you will find nine million individuals. Common bonds may unite some, but it is no coincidence that New Yorkers love to argue. Diversity in mind, in body, in heart is what makes Father Knickerbocker’s children the proud family that they are.
But fold out that handy-dandy “New York and Vicinity” map once more. Here, beyond the 5 boros, you will find the mutant spawn of the city’s native son, Robert Moses. This branch of the Knickerbocker Family Tree is far more homologous than its relatives in town. This is the group we call the Suburbanites. This is the clan that makes Peter Minuit and Peter Stuyvesant roll in their graves that they ever built New Amsterdam. This is the fan base of NWCW.
Ironically, this group has never been stereotyped like their cousins. The irony lies in the fact that a stereotype applied to them would be far closer to accurate than any you could ever apply to New Yorkers. And so for the good of NWCW, in terms of continuity on the cards…seems what I write is a little disjointed from what other people write because I know the crowd better (or should I say I know them all too well)…I will try to deconstruct Joe Suburb.
Suburbanites live in a complicated class structure. Or so they think. It’s hard for an outsider (or a skeptical insider like the author) to believe that there can be so many social strata within what really amounts to the middle class on the bigger scale.
The classic suburbanite, the middle of the middle class, has a middle-management desk job, a nondescript single-family house on a nondescript street where the other houses are equally nondescript, if not identical, one or two nondescript cars (usually beige or green and Japanese-branded, and more often an SUV or a minivan than an actual car). He has a nondescript trophy wife who is nauseatingly content to be uneducated and subservient. The happy nondescript couple has two to four children, ideally split equally male/female, separated in age by nice, even two-year intervals.
That there is our baseline. We will call them the Joe Suburb family.
Now on to the upper-middle class, or the Kings of Passaic. Yes, we shall call this the King family. It is far more patriarchal than the Joe Suburb family. Glen King, the father figure, has an upper-middle management desk job, a company car (usually beige or white; usually a luxury SUV), and a pseudo-luxury ride (a Lexus perhaps) in the 2-car garage. That garage is built into a gypsum board/vinyl siding/fake brick pseudo-mansion that is entirely too big for its lot. To distinguish it from the rest of the neighborhood, the house is painted a pastel color. Too bad the others are too. Mrs. King is wasting a mind that could do some real good for society. She is better educated than Glen, and she studied something intellectual, unlike him…he has an MBA, which has made him his fortune but as Billy Joel asks, “is that all you get for your money?” Mrs. King could have much better but she has allowed herself to become a trophy wife…this is even worse than Mrs. Suburb, who isn’t even educated (her parents said girls don’t go to college). She stays home playing chauffeur for her 4 to 6 bratty kids who are too good for mass transit. They once played soccer, but as that became more accessible to the masses, she converted them to lacrosse. They are no doubt bound for Seton Hall University. Or if their father makes the right friends, they could sneak in to Yale.
On the other end we have the lower middle class. Let’s say the Levitt family…they no doubt live in Levittown, Long Island. This family is much more egalitarian than the others. Both adults work in lower middle management or (gasp) sometimes in a blue collar job. But never a union one. They’d be drummed out of the neighborhood. This family is typically smaller than the others…1 to 3 kids, tops. The female head-of-household is much more independent than her counterparts in the other families. She and the male head-of-household almost sorta love each other and damn near respect each other. But not quite. This is the only family of these 3 where they’re not plotting each other’s demise. The vehicles tend to be older but better cared-for than those in the other families. They are actual, ballsy colors too. Black, red, blue, occasionally yellow(!) However, they do live in Levittown, and so their house is just like everyone else’s.
Now these three have very much in common. They all mistrust one another, as well as fellow members of their mini-class. They are all very acquisitive, and the drive to get more material goods is very strong. Politically, socially, economically, they are all conservative…although just HOW conservative they are goes up exponentially as you move up the mini-class ladder.
The only thing they dislike more than one another is the city. They are too good for it, in their own minds. They’d sooner buy a book about New York’s cultural significance than actually go there and risk having to touch someone who has ridden the subway or worse [gasp] ride it themselves. When they do take a trip “into New York City” as the New Jerseyans and the people in Connecticut say it, or “to the city” as those living in the State of New York would phrase it, they are more than likely to try to take their cars.
So what does this mean to you, the writer? Well here. Basically, they like anything that makes them feel smart. That means they will boo any genuinely witty comments.
Some things they will react favorably to: Product placements, use of advertising taglines in conversation, buzzwords/catchphrases from big-budget movies, rap references (another thing, the people of suburban New York have managed to “whiten” rap to the point where they can like it while still being racist.), the song “Born in the USA” because they misunderstand it, likewise for songs such as Simon and Garfunkel’s “America.”
They will boo: assertions of civil liberties, individual expression of thoughts, acoustic guitar music, anything written by John Lennon, especially from his solo career, people who question the consumer society of modern-day America, people who do not wear major-brand clothing (after all, they wear their Abercrombie and J Crew stuff so they stand out…too bad everyone else had the same idea), anyone who points out the presence of crime in suburbia at levels quite likely higher per capita than those in the city.
These people like to think everything is always good in their little towns. There is no crime. There are no drugs (this one is actually true…they’ve all been used by the same people with “DARE” stickers on their SUVs). Case in point: The little town of Scotch Plains, NJ. The place: Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School. The date: 09/11/01. Not 25 miles away all hell has broken loose, and although many students have family and friends that work at the World Trade Center, the school board decides not to tell anyone. In fact, no one is allowed to even use cell phones to make sure their friends are all right. The rationale when something bad happens is “If we pretend it didn’t happen, then it didn’t happen.” That is why the same town is currently throwing the book at a group of teenagers accused of sexual assault: they forced the people to see reality. And that is one thing that will be booed more than anything else: forcing the contented little sheep of white suburbia to realize that they live in a real world. No brain, no headache. If you give them a brain and a subsequent headache, you will pay.
There you have it, Joe Suburb in a nutshell. Sure, laugh. You desere to laugh. Because I'm the one who has to live with these people, day in and day out. The soulless, drifting livestock of the world.
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