Maple Street. Elm. Oak. Moormont. Westmoor. Eastmoor. Different names for the same place. A tree-line little carnival of front porches, backyards, sweeping lawns, laughing children and polite little houses. The cost to get here? Perhaps we haven't quite done the accounting yet.

The next time you see a white plastic grocery sack floating down the street, you may consider that what you're looking at is a legacy humankind left to itself. Generations previous we climbed on a carousel, pushed the button, and began the ride. A ride we were hungry as pigs for. A ride which, left to its own devices, has no end. A ride that will keep spinning, no matter how many times we're sick over the side. No matter how full the world is of vomit. A ride we could stop, if only we'd all agree to push the button.

Out there, out there in the tangled knots of suburb streets, in the dollhouse void that is the Levitt brother's new way of life, out there is an enemy known as the white plastic grocery sack. A byproduct of our greed. A byproduct of our hunger. A byproduct of our amusement. It sits there in the streets waiting, tangled on fences waiting, drifting through schoolyards waiting, waiting with the patience of plastic, forever waiting . . .

Portrait of American run to its logical conclusion. Someday she’ll find herself in the same place as Billy, Jack, and the janitor. Cornered in the storm cellar of an old farmhouse by a white plastic grocery sack.

This is the dead end of the American experience.

Playing dead. Colloquial term for a universal phenomena. Exhibited by vertebrates and invertebrates alike. Seen on land, sea, and air. Practiced by birds, fish, snakes, possums, frogs, ants, spiders, ducks, rabbits, chickens, sharks, and even humans. Tonight, our study a specific strain of human – engineered sometime after WWII and manufactured on an industrial scale. Yes, tonight we are about to witness the modern suburbanite’s version of playing dead.