[This was posted at Daily Kos and Red State. Considering my recent posts here I thought it’d be interesting to at least plop this diary into the discourse here too.]
I have a question that I, myself, cannot answer. I’m reading Jean Baudrillard’s America and — amidst his reflections on the “desert” of American culture (not to imply sterility, necessarily, but lack of reference) and his assertions that we are the last primitive culture, I started thinking along contrarian lines. I agree with his view of this country, but nevertheless a French philosopher cannot have gotten our country 100%, right?
So in developing an antithesis through which to view his thesis I came upon the question: what is quintessentially American? What is the single most American thing I can think of. I couldn’t. I couldn’t without falling back on cliches or places I knew couldn’t possibly contain the idea of “American.”
So I’m asking Y’ALL: in respect to its presence, its people and its purpose, what is the most American place you can think of? Is it a town? A store? A monument? A geographical region? An ecology? Something else?
And why?
Update [2005-9-11 3:57:17 by Addison]: I think I’m ready to answer my question. I went to a county fair once, one with rides and animals and giant produce. But, of course, I got a little bored of all that. I wandered off into the adjacent woods, took out of a flask of Maker’s Mark whiskey, a pack of Camel Lights, and laid down supine on the forest floor. I took a sip of the whiskey, a drag off the cigarette, and just listened. Listened to the whirrs of the carnival rides at the fair. Listened to the undecipherable hum of a thousand conversations. Listened, now a few sips into the flask, to the cacophony of beeps and shouts and grinding of a county fair. But then I honed in on something different. A low hiss. This periodic ebb and flow of a humming hissing zooming noise. The state highway that passed by the fairground. People flying by this great grouping of people celebrating God knows what and for God knows why, people in their cars on their way to God knows where. And that, at that moment, in a dark abandoned glade between a fairground and a highway, was America. And I think it remains that, to me, to this day. Thanks for helping me remember that.