Weeds Are an Illusion

Weeds are many things, including big business. In fact, when I think of all the lawn care contractors driving through suburbia with pickup trucks full of chemicals, weeds make good small business as well.

But the label weed says nothing about the plants wearing it (except perhaps that these plants tend to have an invasive quality). Any plant growing where a human doesn’t want it qualifies. I’m not sure that an immaculate lawn without any dandelions is more beautiful than a naturalized field, but the collective ideal clearly favors the tightly cropped grass. My sense is that this all goes back to the time when the lord’s manor was an unattainable reality for the masses, and that without realizing it, lawns represent an collective unconscious compensation for “feeling less than.”

Weed speaks of our collective desire to control nature. With regards to human communities, labeling others “weeds” springs from a similar control frustration. Does not the war we wage on weeds resemble war in general. And if that’s true, what does it say about the use of the label terrorist.

(I realize that this analogical arc creates a parabolic whiplash, but sometimes these types of boomerang compositions are effective in a surprising way.)