April 24 -- Many wondrous things have sprung from the human
mind: penicillin, hovercraft, the hammered dulcimer, zero-coupon bonds. But
when humankind strikes out, it strikes out in a big way.
A case in point: the lawn.
The lawn is arguably the most foolish, destructive, annoying
entity on Earth. Lawns consume such a gigantic portion of California’s water
usage that getting rid of them could single-handedly solve the drought problem.
Well, maybe. Well-maintained, comely lawns—nurtured by noxious
chemicals—destroy natural habitats and discourage larks and hummingbirds and
magpies and snowy egrets from stopping by, and make neighbors’ lawns look ugly
and stupid and proletarian.
Lawns consume enormous amounts of manpower. That money could be
better spent on higher education or tasty snacks. And because people often get
home from work late in the evening, the sound of their mowers puncturing the
stillness infuriates their neighbors, resulting in bawling infants, ruinous
lawsuits and many, many homicides. This is also true of lawn mowers that
puncture the primaveral stillness.
Uncut lawns ruin a neighborhood’s image, because broken bottles
and trash and corpses start to accumulate on them. Not taking care of one’s
lawn is one of the most explicitly antisocial activities a human being can
engage in. Such negligence indicates that the homeowner is a slob. And the
whole point of lawns in the first place was to get mankind to stop being a
slob.
The history of the human lawn is reasonably straightforward.
Early men cut down the high grasses so that they could see the saber-toothed
tigers coming. They didn’t do it for aesthetic reasons—because early humans, as
noted, were slobs. Occupants of feudal castles also chopped down the high
grass, fearing that if it was left untended they would not realize that Birnam
Wood had come to Dunsinane until it was too late.
The point is, lawns originally had some social function: They
helped ward off predators. But from that point on, lawns became purely
ornamental. Rich people had lawns—more like pastures—because they wanted to
show that they were so wealthy they didn’t need to grow crops on their land.
But then the lower classes got into the act, because they thought a patch of
green in front of their hovels would make their ugly daughters seem more
marriageable.
“It’s not a lawn,” they would tell suitors stopping by for
stewed tea and moldy scones. “It’s a meadow.”
Soon everyone and his brother had lawns, and most of them looked
absolutely terrible by mid-August, because only farmers had a scythe to chop
them down—and farmers, who do not believe in lawns, never lend out their
scythes. Eventually the rotary lawn mower was invented. It is easily the most
idiotic machine ever. Over the years, millions of people have derived immense
pleasure from the flat iron, the cotton gin and the eight-track tape player.
But no one ever got any fun out of a rotary lawn mower.
Most famous civilizations got along just fine without lawns. The
Franks did not have lawns. Neither did the Hittites. Socrates definitely did
not have a lawn, nor did Sargon the Great. Interestingly enough, it was ornate,
ostentatious lawns that helped bring about the French Revolution, because the
sans-culottes thought the aristocracy had planted all those lawns in Versailles
just to make fun of their hideous, fallow fields.
The lawn—like the ice box, the weekly newsmagazine or the
harpsichord—is basically a useless vestige of a bygone era. Mankind would be a
whole lot better off if lawns had never been invented. They are wasteful, phony
and ubiquitous. Let’s replace them with tarmac right now.
Joe Queenan’s Moving Targets column www.wsj.com
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