Brockton: Hipster Colonies

In my last post I mentioned that there are no hipster colonies in Brockton.  The reader of this blog may ask what constitutes a hipster colony.  In my delusional understanding, a hipster colony is a neighborhood or community of pretentious pseudo-adults that are not natives to the urban centers where they have settled.  They stand out based on behavior and ignorance to their surroundings in regards to the realities of crime, culture, and environment.  The hipster, believing that they live in a society without class, violence, and racism, will leave their doors unlocked, go out all hours at night as they at home amid crackheads, gang-bangers and overeager cops, and instruct their neighbors to improve the community.  These colonies exist in places like New Orleans, see Treme or the Wire, for Baltimore.  David Simon's shows are a perfect reference here, think about it as is the Steve Zahn character in Treme.  Other places such as these exist in most American cities.

When urban crimes happen to these colonists, they always seem amazed that these things can happen in this day and age and plead ignorance.  There is no explanation beyond stupidity or arrogance.  The world is not how you envision it, it is how it is and has been...hard.  Hipsters do not think about these things, especially with Obama in office, he cured all social problems with his shatneresque diction.

Thankfully Brockton is not attractive to hipsters, who are busy turning once hard neighborhoods in Brooklyn into safe places deviod of their culture for one that values specialness, irony, plaid, and holden caulfield.   

Brockton: City of Champions

It is not hard to imagine the life of this city’s native son, Rocky Marciano, probably the toughest boxer to ever live and the one who was never defeated in the ring.  He defeated a 75 to 137 years old Joe Louis according to the barbershop in Coming to America.

Brockton has its champion of the Ring and is a champ when it comes to gerrymandering, its 9th Congressional district is a stunning achievement.  It is an archipelago of noncontigious spaces that would make a corrupt southern legislature blush.  I will not mention the party that it favors, but it is not a difficult guess who benefits from high-concentrated urban decline. 

Urban decline is not romantic in a place like Brockton, a place that time forgot.  There are no hipster colonies here, no one here chooses to live in poverty.  The factories are gone, likely away to cheaper labor, thanks NAFTA.  It is the real manifestation of my fictional Cranbury, Connecticut if Dickens, Conrad and Lovecraft teamed up on a project.  Think the Who, Led Zeppelin, and the Stones.  In New England the sad mill towns that immigrant labor fueled have become museums and the new nearly inescapable ghettoes.  None of this is said to be ironic in the hipster manner and insult those of us who want more out of life than self-indulgent smugness.