Warning, that was a spoiler.

Anyhoo, doesn't it just cement the connection between emotional retardation (and the inability to withstand normal human company and interaction such as we see in autism, SCA membership, or being a genetically fucked up oracular freak) and the Hobbit fantasy of living in a suburbanized little nest-home?

In his book Seattle: Past and Present, Roger Sale alludes to this in his discussion of the attitudes of pioneer Arthur Denny and the mythologized farewell speech of Chief Sealth. It is, ironically, those with excessive sensitivity to the human presence who are most environmentally insensitive:

A bad city is not one that cuts down trees, builds buildings, and paves streets, but one that tries to forget that indeed a city is being built. The ecology of an urban area is as important and often as mysterious as the ecology of the wilderness in which the Indians moved and lived. Often people came west fleeing urban life and never realized that cities are even more essential here than farther east. They came to build a sweet little nest out there in the west so they could let the rest of the world go by. The result, we know, is often nests that are not sweet, suburbs and freeways, people neither going nor staying but twitching with restlessness, despoiling the land with a wantonness all the more destructive and saddening because unintended.

Environmentalism is not nature-worship, but awarness of the reality of your environment, and rejection of a fantasy world, whether it be flowerd, light-soaked cottages or a cul-de-sac with giant jeeps in the driveways and strip malls that run for fifty miles. Conservatives today cling to the hope that if we just built a few more freeways, another sub-division, and lay down one more oil pipeline, the fantasy will come true. It's weird how soft and child-like they are in their dreams.

Oppoisite of that was last night's Capitol Hill Block Party with Sleater-Kinney playing under a traffic light in a densely-populated neighborhood that is everything that the Pre-Raphaelite, nature-deifiying autistics fear.

I want to sink the Floating Bridge. Let them stay on their side of the lake.