Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Opening Narration

Portrait of a small suburban street.  This is the world homecoming G.I.s built after witnessing death delivered on an industrial scale.  Small.  Quiet.  Ordinary.  Well behaved to the point of being boring.  Green manicured lawns stretched out like slumbering cats.  Polite little houses, all standing in a row.  Two trees per yard.  A streetlight keeping watch on every corner and smoke panting up out of a thousand chimneys like the soft plumes of faraway trains.  There's something of a carousel quality to it all.  Been here before.  Seen this already.  But this is where men who'd gone to fight the first fully mechanized war tried to forget about it.  A war without horses.  A war dedicated to the patron saint of internal combustion.  Where cannons drove themselves, and gasoline was as good as gunpowder.  A war governed by bombs and bigger bombs and bigger bombs until the bombs had grown so big there was fear they'd crack the planet like a nut.  These poor boys came home looking for a quiet not even the churches could portion.  Hushed corners of America had to be built to suit, named Southmoor, or Westmoor, or Moormont where former soldiers tried to drain their heads of all the noise of the frustrated, frightened century.  The jangled century of hate and heavy industry and fascist wars.  If you've ever stood on a quiet suburban street in the middle of the day and noticed the hushed picture has something of a cemetery quality to it, you may consider who it was built for, after where they'd been, and what they'd seen.  Men who thought they were running away from the machines, but ended up in the same place.  Like a ride on a carousel.  Because their homes and streets were milled at a rate of thirty houses a day in a distilled twenty-six step process.  Manufactured on the same scale, using the same principles and converted energy of industrial war engines.  You see, a hungry beast built this peace and quiet.  A hoggish, greedy entity that shows up once humankind starts playing with machines.  A type of pig.

 

. . . and even though this is 1987, there is still something hungry on Eastmoor Road.