Alienated
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I get it. People are as likely to encounter a Martian space ship as they are to see one tree left in Asheville. Pretty clever way to endorse the current tree-canopy ordinance and the open-space reforms recently approved by the City Council.
So if we don’t develop on previously unbuilt steep slope sites in the city limits (which would densify the city, which is a good thing), are we supposed to bulldoze acres and acres of forest outside the city to make cookie cutter tract housing? You can’t have it both ways.
When “alt weekly” newspapers came on the scene in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, they were about challenging the status quo and speaking truth to power.
And the same can be said about the comics and cartoonists of that era too.
All of this is to say that it is profoundly disappointing to read the Mountain Xpress comics each week and find the same perspective over and over again— one that adopts the views of the city’s misanthropic, bourgeois real estate owners.