This is the first preview of the autumn print MISC, which will have a kids & families theme:

THERE ARE TWO kinds of families in the U.S. today.

There are real families.

And there is “The Family.”

Real families come in infinite assorted colors, shapes, sizes, and styles. A few of these variants even superficially resemble, at least in appearance, the look of “The Family.”

“The Family” is available in only one factory-set configuration. Married middleclass parents (dad works, mom doesn’t); one to four obedient children; house, car, picket fence, pets. “The Family” can be ordered in a small choice of colors—but no mix-n’-matching is allowed.

Real families have arguments and conflicts. Pieces of them sometimes split off, and some of those pieces sometimes combine to form other real families.

“The Family” is a command/response unit of military precision. Kids happily obey mom, mom happily obeys dad, dad happily obeys his boss, and everybody happily obeys their political and religious authorities.

In real families, people have sexualities (active, budding, frustrated, confused, etc) and ambitions (ditto).

In “The Family,” mom and dad have mated for life (though they don’t mate very often). Male offspring’s sexualities are always hetero, and are always successfully suppressed. Female offspring have no sexualities.

Real families really exist.

“The Family” doesn’t exist. It never did exist. It was a fantasy developed over the years (particularly the post-WWII years) by advertisers, housing developers, and social engineers. Persons living in real families were pressured into wanting to live up to the ideal of “The Family,” and were often ostracized (by their surrounding communities or by other family members) when they didn’t or couldn’t.

Even in the 1950s, there were pregnant unwed teens (more, proportionately, than there are now). There were hoodlum boys. There was racial turmoil. There were abortions (clandestine and often harmful to the women’s health). There were drugs. And, yes, there were homosexuals.

In spite of its nonexistence, “The Family” holds a mighty influence on the American imagination.

Anarchists call for its vilification and derision.

Politicians call for its defense; even while they pursue economic policies that hurt real families.

Art-worlders and white mall gangstas like to imagine they’re offending it.

Radio demagogues invoke its preservation to justify the harassment of gays and lesbians, the censoring of music, the banning of strip clubs, the imposition of school dress codes, and the war on drugs. “The Family” long ago replaced racial “purity” as bigots’ favorite excuse (though the “war on terror” might have now jumped into the #1 slot).

Civic planners still use it as the basis for suburban zoning and building codes, in which single-family homes (ever bigger, ever further apart) exist in isolation, strung together by sidewalkless roads, which in turn lead to strip malls anchored by “Family”-oriented chain stores.

Second- and third-tier TV channels mount one-hour drama shows extolling its wholesome American virtues (whilst being filmed on the cheap in non-union states or in Canada). Yet even these shows find the need, for the sake of compelling storytelling, to regularly acknowledge the difference between their characters’ messy real lives and their far simpler ideal lives.

THE ADVOCATES, marketers, and critics of “The Family” all presume its existence, at least tacitly, at least as an ideal.

But what if more of us recognized its nonexistence?

What if we each looked at our own past and/or present families and admitted they weren’t, aren’t, and could never be anything like the sterile abstraction that is “The Family?”

We could stop expending so much time, energy, and money either building up or tearing down something that was never more corporeal than a magazine lifestyle concept. We could build communities real families could more likely thrive in. We could demand wages real families could live on, and schools where the offspring of real families were welcomed and encouraged to excel.

We could remember that even families that try (often too hard) to become “The Family” are actually real families, with real idiosyncracies and diversities. We in the urban arts scene could stop ridiculing those families and start encouraging them to express their own weirdnesses.

Go ahead and call this a dream. Call it unrealistic. It’s still more realistic, and more likely, than “The Family” ever was.