Maybe it's more the accumulation of little signs that signifies insanity...I'm beginning to wonder whether at this point we can say that American culture has.... Maybe it's more the accumulation of little signs that signifies insanity...I'm beginning to wonder whether at this point we can say that American culture has lost its collective mind.

I made one of my rare visits to the local corporate market just now. Ironically enough, this one is built to progressive design principles that fit in well with my upscale, extremely dense urban neighborhood: it has fairly limited parking which is underground; it has a beautiful entrance portal better than you'll often find on grand public buildings of the past; and that stunning entryway is right on the sidewalk facing Wilshire Blvd., the real main street of central LA.

Inside, of course, it's the usual story, with stony, overpriced produce and the typical iterations of famous names interspersed with house brands. I needed to pick up a small jar of mayonnaise to take with my fiancée to her parents' house for her father's 81st birthday. They live in deep suburbia, and even the most minor purchase involves a long and tedious automobile excursion. So I walked around the corner to the store.

While I was waiting at the checkout line, I cast my eye on the purchases the fellow ahead of me was putting on the conveyor belt, and I was shocked--shocked!--to see that he was buying two potatoes and a cucumber, and that they were individually shrink-wrapped!

Forget the waste of resources and the multiplication of garbage that this involves: what worries me is that we have, as a culture, become so fearful of the life around us that we must devote considerable energy and resources (most of both taken from others, of course) to wrap our foods in emblems of sterility.

Can you spell "obsessive-compulsive disorder"? Sure you can.

Perhaps we're just trying to deny to ourselves that in America it's brown hands that feed white mouths, but I think it goes much deeper. Our fixation on gated communities, free-standing houses amid moats of lawn, hermetically-sealed cars where the only sounds we can hear are commercial playlists we control; our persistence in believing that the world belongs in its entirety to each of us individually; our penchant for destroying common space because we as Americans cannot bear to share (though we force others to share their labor and their birthrights at disadvantageous rates, and often at gunpoint)...we isolate ourselves deeper and deeper in an solipsism whose imaginary walls not only imprison us in an ultimate and futile boredom, but also confine our public policy so that we force all around us to emulate our insularity. (Why else would zoning variances be required when one wants to build real, traditional neighborhoods?)

The individually shrink-wrapped couch potato: America's man of the future.

It's just plain nuts.