Tag Archives: The Onion

Would you put a “Museum for the Middle Class” in Schaumburg, Illinois?

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A 2004 Onion article imagined a “Museum for the Middle Class” in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg:

Photo by Tom Fournier on Pexels.com

“The splendid and intriguing middle class may be gone, but it will never be forgotten,” said Harold Greeley, curator of the exhibit titled “Where The Streets Had Trees’ Names.” “From their weekend barbecues at homes with backyards to their outdated belief in social mobility, the middle class will forever be remembered as an important part of American history.”

Museum guests expressed delight over the traditions and peculiarities of the middle class, a group once so prevalent that entire TV networks were programmed to satisfy its hunger for sitcoms…

During the modern industrial age, the middle class grew steadily, reaching its heyday in the 1950s, when its numbers soared into the tens of millions. According to a study commissioned by the U.S. Census Bureau, middle-class people inhabited great swaths of North America, with settlements in the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, and even the nation’s urban centers…

One of the 15 permanent exhibits, titled “Working For ’The Weekend,’” examines the routines of middle-class wage-earners, who labored for roughly eight hours a day, five days a week. In return, they were afforded leisure time on Saturdays and Sundays. According to many anthropologists, these “weekends” were often spent taking “day trips,”eating at chain family restaurants, or watching “baseball” with the nuclear family.

If there were such a museum, would it make sense to have it in Schaumburg? Here are a few pros and cons for doing so:

Pros: Schaumburg is a postwar suburban community incorporated in 1956. It is home to nearly 80,000 residents today. It has a large shopping mall within village limits and it has plenty of office space. (More on this in the Cons section.) It has access to multiple major highways and a train station on a line to Chicago, facilitating travel throughout the region. Locating a museum about middle-class life in a successful suburb makes sense given that suburban life is often associated with middle-class life.

Cons: Schaumburg is a particular kind of suburb, an edge city, with lots of retail and office space next to major highways. It is less of a bedroom suburb full of quiet single-family home neighborhoods and more of a suburban commercial center. It is less about a bucolic suburban lifestyle and more about easily-accessible stores and entertainment options. If a middle-class American life was about providing opportunities for their kids and having a single-family home, plenty of other suburbs could showcase this.

Perhaps the 2004 Onion was correct: the American middle-class of the turn of the twenty-first century might become a relic. If it does, where it is commemtorated will be interesting to see.

Onion: “Pretty Cute Watching Boston Residents Play Daily Game of ‘Big City'”

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The Onion says this about Boston:

Boston residents once again hustled and bustled their way into the nation’s hearts this week as they continued playing their adorable little game of “Big City,” a live-action role-playing adventure in which Bostonians buzz about their daily routines in a delightful hubbub of excitement as if they lived in a major American metropolis.

Inhabitants of real cities across the nation smiled in affectionate amusement as Bostonians put on their big-city clothes, swiped their Charlie cards for a ride on one of the MBTA’s trolley-like subway cars—charmingly called the “T”—and rushed downtown for “important” business meetings at the John Hancock Building, the South Boston Innovation District, and other pretend centers of global industry and commerce…

According to enchanted onlookers who live in actual metropolitan areas, Boston residents are particularly endearing when they get all dressed up for a night at the theater; eat a big, fancy dinner at the Prudential Center’s top-floor restaurant; and read The Boston Globe, whose reporters get to play a game of Big-City Journalist each and every day…

Sources went on to call the city’s darling nickname, “The Hub,” a great, hilarious touch, as though Boston were an actual locus of anything vital whatsoever.

I don’t know if Boston residents have an inferiority complex. But, the article also mentions a Chicago resident suggesting they also play “Big City.” This reference to Chicago might have a grain of truth in it; Chicago leaders and residents occasionally worry about whether the city is keeping up and is still a global city. Presumably, the only people who don’t have to play “Big City” are residents of New York City and Los Angeles – and this is perhaps how residents of the two largest US cities see it.

Classic Onion parody of family moving from the city to suburbs

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One of the classic headlines (2001) from The Onion: “Family of Five Found Alive in Suburbs.” A few bits from the story tracking a family that disappeared from Chicago and was found again years later in Buffalo Grove:

Rescuers discovered the five-person clan after a survey plane spotted a crude signal fire the family had created in a barbecue grill…

To protect themselves from the elements, the Holsapples fashioned a three-bedroom, ranch-style lean-to with brick facing and white aluminum siding. During their years on the acre-and-a-half lot, the Holsapples faced many hardships, including septic-tank backups, frequent ant infestation, and the threat of rezoning to erect an industrial park across the street.

“The Holsapples were in pretty bad shape when we found them lying lifelessly on their patio furniture,” paramedic Mary Gills said. “Their stomachs were bloated from years of soda and fast food, and they were all suffering from severe cultural malnutrition.”…

According to University of Illinois– Chicago anthropologist Dr. Arthur Cox, to survive such an emotionally, culturally, and spiritually barren place, the Holsapples were forced to “go native.”

“Much like those stranded in remote islands, the Holsapple family looked to the indigenous population to learn techniques for adaptation and survival,” Cox said. “Shocking as it is, one eventually becomes acclimated and then numbed to the theme restaurants, cinema multiplexes, and warehouse-sized grocery stores.

Interestingly, this is exactly the sort of story that opponents of suburbs might write: the family disappeared into a vast wasteland with no culture. The story contains a number of typical criticisms about suburbs: spiritually dead, no culture, out in the middle of nowhere (particularly when cities are considered to be the center of the universe), primitive life, mind-numbing, requiring the ability to shop and be entertained at garish facilities, and so on.

Of course, when it is written in this style, it all sounds quite funny.