Can America have a wonderful home life?

In an obvious dig at Hillary Clinton's recent best-seller, It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Bob Dole argued in San Diego last summer that it doesn't take a village to raise a child, it takes a "home." The former senator's point was that Mrs. Clinton's solution to the woes of our children is just another big government intervention into the private lives of ordinary Americans. What Americans need and want, Dole argued, was not more big-budget bureaucracy, but a return to the sort of small-town values and structures that had originally made us great as a nation.

This sort of "down home" appeal from the career politician formerly known as Deal-maker Bob may strike some as a bit insincere. After all, Dole has spent his adult life fashioning national and federal solutions to American problems, many of them necessary, popular, and effective. Still, the truth is that Dole's image of home is a powerfully evocative one and seems to speak to some deeply felt hunger within all of us, which may explain why it's become such a boilerplate staple of political speeches, Hollywood films, and classical literature.

From the Garden of Eden to The Odyssey to Walton's mountain, home has been a promise of rest and succor, a place where the prodigal and the pilgrim will always be welcomed, taken in, and nurtured. Time and time again home has been portrayed as the place where we could connect with our past, discover our true identity, and raise our children in safety. It is the dream of a land flowing with milk and honey that sustained a generation of Hebrews in the desert, the siren that guided Ulysses back from the Trojan War, and the central obsession of every protagonist in a Jane Austen novel.

Even more than this, however, the dream of home points to an underlying sense of the sacredness of place, to a fundamental need we have for sanctuaries where we can connect the human and the holy. Home is a symbol of the sacrament of place, an expression of our need to embody and celebrate the connections and relations that make us human.

This is why we've built temples, shrines, and cathedrals; villages, towns, and cities; museums, theaters, concert halls, and, yes, even cemeteries. These places, in some way, serve to humanize the spaces we occupy - to celebrate our own embodied humanity. Architecture, like literature, music, and art, is something profoundly human, something potentially sacred. As the builders of medieval cathedrals well understood, our spires, steeples, and arches are an act of worship no less holy than our psalms and prayers.

No wonder, then, that a place like home should be such a powerful image for us that so many of us find ourselves getting a bit weepy at reruns of "Little House on the Prairie" or moved by lace-curtain images of small-town America - picket fences and the corner drugstore.

This is probably all the more poignantly true for the growing majority of us now living and working in "Roadside America," that ubiquitous terrain of suburban sprawl: shoe-box motels, mini-marts and malls - places that were just thrown up this morning and look exactly like every other modular colony of prefabs springing up on exit ramps from central Maryland to western Montana. In the land where, as singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell notes, we are always paving paradise and putting up a parking lot, we find ourselves increasingly starved for real places - human places with stories and memories, places of beauty, places that nurture. From bedroom communities without sidewalks or porches to malls or casinos without sunlight or fresh air, we find ourselves sleeping and eating and commuting between places where we feel disconnected, disoriented, and starved for something soulful. Nowhere is our lack of a sense of place so scathingly described as in James Howard Kunstler's recent text The Geography of Nowhere (Simon & Schuster, 1993). In one particularly unrelenting passage he notes:

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading - the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the "gourmet mansardic" junk food joints, the Orwellian office "parks" featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sun glasses worn by chain gang guards, the particle board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandising marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call "growth."

This understanding of the land is a far cry from earlier times, when someone like Muley Graves, the tenant farmer in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, will not be driven off the Oklahoma land his family has worked for generations because for Graves this land is more than property. It's a sanctuary that holds his identity, connects him to his past, and gives him something to share with his children. If he is forced to leave it, he's afraid that he'll lose himself. To Graves this rotten piece of parched earth is holy ground, and the faceless bankers and managers plowing it under are as guilty of sacrilege as soldiers pillaging a temple.

Unfortunately there's a way in which it's growing harder and harder for those of us in Roadside America to imagine or hold onto such a rich sense of place. In part it's because we tend to see land primarily as property - and private property at that. The automobile and other forces have made us so rootless that we hardly ever stay anywhere long enough to get to know it - to develop any feel for a place that's more than knowing where to find the supermarket and the dry cleaning. So we should hardly be surprised when we don't learn to cherish the places we live in, though we probably ought to worry about the dangers of creating such disposable environments for our bodies and souls. It's hard to honor persons clad so badly.

Another part of the problem, which Winifred Gallagher points out in The Power of Place (Harper Perennial, 1993), is that so many of the places where we work, eat, and sleep cut us off from the larger environment of the world around us, isolating us from the rhythms of the days and seasons and distancing us from our neighbors and fellow city-zens. Locked in our little cubbyholes, we end up getting most of our information about the weather and local politics from the television - the cable is swiftly becoming our IV link to the planet. And too many of the boxes we inhabit and commute in look like carbon copies of each other. So few places are designed by architects in harmony with their environments or reflective of any real care or attention. Unlike the homes in a Jane Austen novel, no one would think of naming his or her house today - none of them have enough character to merit being given an identity. Every split-level ranch and two-story colonial is laid out with the same cookie-cutter monotony as the local Sears or Nordstrom's.

Another rather disheartening effect of this loss of a sense of place has been the rise of what Kunstler refers to as "capitals of unreality," completely prefabricated and encapsulated marketplaces passing themselves off as integral human communities. For although these highly touted and expensive vacation fun spots are often designed to resemble traditional small towns or villages, theme parks like Disneyland and Disney World (and Disney's various clones in Japan and France) are actually sanitized anti-cities - huge shopping places without real traffic, schools, museums, fire stations, churches, or poor people. The true predecessors of these places are the gated community and the suburban mall, not the city.

Disney and other major theme parks are not the only symptom of this malaise. Whether it's a completely enclosed Caribbean resort in some Third World country, a prefabricated ski city like Aspen or Vail, or a holiday at Las Vegas or Atlantic City, more and more of us seem to be escaping from the ordinary by going to places that have an eerie air of unreality about them, places without any substantial history, beauty, or community and with all the real charm and personality of an all-night truck stop. It' almost as if we are attracted to places that aren't connected to anything, that have no sense of the sacredness of place nor offer nourishment to our souls.

The great irony in all of this, however, is that it may well be our very hankering for home that is at the root of some of our current problems. Indeed, as Kunstler argues in both The Geography of Nowhere and his most recent Home From Nowhere (Simon & Schuster, 1996), much of our loss of a sense of place and inability as a culture to fashion and prize places that make life truly human is directly related to the distorted image we have of home and the way we have allowed our nostalgic attachment to a private domestic sanctuary to dwarf and undermine the construction of those public spaces that make real community possible.

As economist John Kenneth Galbraith implies in The Culture Of Contentment (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), it is the idolatry of the home as a private dwelling and the cult of individualism that have allowed us to construct bedroom communities, and pour creature comforts into suburban houses, and have left our urban and national infrastructures - our bridges, schools, airports, hospitals, and indeed the very hearts of our cities - without the necessary funds. Our zoning laws, tax codes, transportation systems - all of these, according to Kunstler, reflect a disordered attention to the private and a disastrous retreat from the public.

In other words, the danger we face at the present is not that we under-value the importance of the home, but that our nostalgic hankering for a white picket fence may well be masking an abandonment of our identity and obligations as citizens. Clearly our homes are important, but only as a part of the larger human landscape of our cities and towns. When we begin thinking of our homes as castles, as little fortresses to which we need to retreat from a belligerent and chaotic world, we have lost touch with our need for the public places and spaces that nurture and sustain those human communities we call our hometowns and homelands.

There must be a balance between our homes and villages. Real homes, places that nourish us and connect us to others and the larger world, need to be part of villages and towns. Real towns and villages need to be zoned and constructed so that there can be homes, schools, churches, offices, and stores, so that people can work, play, and pray in them. In Home: A Short History of an Idea (Penguin Books, 1986), Witold Rybczynski points out that our own contemporary understanding of home as a private dwelling for a nuclear family, a domestic retreat from the worlds of business and work, is a relatively modern concept, fashioned in response to changing economic, political, and social forces. Certainly the suburban home, remote and isolated from the city and often enough cut off from the very next house, is the child of the automobile and cheap gasoline. If we are genuinely hungry for places where we can have a balance of domestic tranquility, intimacy, and community, then we will need to pay attention to the public spaces in our lives and to our identity and obligations as citizens. As Dole would know if he had ever seen Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life," it takes a village like Bedford Falls to make a home.