[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.
is up my own ass head first. It seems to be a real favorite place in America for Americans to inhabit. Sorry for being a butthead (pun intended) but I can’t sleep and you put this up there and it is first right now and it just called to me.
It’s too damn bad that you’re a woman and I’m a woman (and post-menopausal) because when you say things like that it makes me want to have your babies.
Yeah…me too
that your problems in having them might be just a tad different than mine.
just a bit eh? :o)
A guy can dream though, can’t he?
I’d have to say my perception of America is probably different than others since I reside in a city, and come from a culture, that is both American and Mexican in root. My experience tells me that America is what’s familiar to me, such as the 16 de Septiembre Fiestas Patrias that brings my community together, or watching as lines of fellow Americans stand in line to vote on election day, or the fact that I woke up to hearing the church bells ringing for the first time in 10 years in my hometown parish this past weekend. Most would say that it is Mexican-American, but for me, it’s home. Thanks for the thought provoking diary, Addison. Perception is everything.
Sitting with my bubbe in her kitchen, eating her chicken soup with kreplach and playing the yiddish card game pisha paysha.
Somewhere in every American’s background are the incredibly brave immigrants* (or slaves or indentured servants) who managed to survive a horrendous journey and the terror of being in a place and among people they knew almost nothing about.
I consider myself unbelievably lucky to have known two of my four immigrant grandparents.
* probably none braver than the ancestors of native americans
A baptism at my great grandparents church in rural Oklahoma.
After walking 2 miles down a dirt road there is a little white church. The baptism took place in a nearby brook… I remember the preacher dressed in white along with the baptees having to wait by the edge of the water until the water moccasins swam away.
The church was burnt years later by “Evangelical Christians”.
I was driving from DC to SanFran. Stopped in Hayes on a Fri night because it was like America from an old movie — high schoolers driving up & down Main St, over and over again. Stopped in a bar called ‘The Saloon’ and had a drink.
Hours later, at the KS-CO border I stopped for gas and reached for my wallet. Oh crap … I realized I’d left it at The Saloon. Panic — all my credit cards & money — agh, drove back at top speed and managed to sneak in before closing.
When I walked in, the bartender handed me my wallet. Would not take a reward. Nothing was missing!
I had planned to pick Kansas City as my quintesentially American place (of the places I’ve lived so far), and your comment on Hays, Kansas as I scrolled down the comments confirmed my choice.
When I lived in Kansas City my manager for several years was from Hays, Kansas. One of the finest people I’ve ever worked with. We partied together with our wives the night Clinton won his first election and 12 years of Republican presidents were over. He loved to drive around with the sun roof on his car open, playing Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen. He was optimistic, sentimental, and generous to a fault. Not always the most knowledgeable person, but certainly always well-intentioned.
Another side of America was also in Kansas City, my father-in-law. He lost his father while a child in the depression, and as a teenager had to eke out a living by being a travelling sheep-shearer with his brothers across the mountain west. He joined the Marines during WWII, and later was a merchant seaman.
He didn’t like being told he couldn’t do something; he eloped with my mother-in-law when he was 20 and she was 16.
In the 1950’s he got an education in electronics on the GI bill, and ended up with an up-and-coming company called IBM, where he worked until he retired as a service engineer on those room-sized archeo-computers with vacuum tubes and tape drives. He believed in living frugally and saving, and invested in rental property in Kansas City. My wife was the only child he and his wife had, although they later adopted a boy born out of wedlock, and took in two nieces.
Sounds like Norman Rockwell stuff, but the story gets darker and more complex, which is why it reflects America so well. He was a Baptist, and as the denomination became more conservative, so did he and my mother-in-law, drinking from the Kool-Aid proffered by Jerry Falwell and friends. He was a strong supporter of Ronald Reagan, and believed that everyone else in poverty should pull themselves up by their bootstraps like he had, to become a “success.” His extended family, by most definitions, would qualify as “poor white trash” – the nieces they took in had a father in jail for murder, and one of them would later go on to appear on Jerry Springer with her mother! He was going to raise them above that.
He also kept from my brother-in-law that he was adopted; my wife and I had vigorous arguments with him and my mother-in-law over this to no avail. Finally my brother-in-law’s wife found out about the adoption accidentally from a distant relative, and all hell broke loose in the family for a time. The Baptist insistence on truthfulness (something alien to an Italian-American Catholic like me who was used to a culture of “little white lies”) was in perpetual conflict with the huge unspoken lie at the heart of their family. Very American, no?
He was very upset about the “decay of American morality” under Clinton, and died of cancer before the 200 elections. He tinkered with his will over the years, threatening to cut people out as they disagreed with him, but in the end he just left everything to my mother-in-law. His death of bladder cancer could have been prevented, except that the doctor treating him kept misdiagnosing it as prostate trouble. By the time he got a second opinion it had spread and he was in “Stage 4” cancer. Ironically, he had vigorously supported legislation to limit medical malpractice awards, and now our family is involved in just such a case.
He thought I was crazy to waste my chemistry degree in the environmental field; there were much better paying jobs to be had at the local manufacturers of pesticides and herbicides. He agreed with his buddy Rush that environmental laws were “wacky” and continued to use various banned pesticides and herbicides that he had stockpiled long after they were no longer legal. Ironically, some of these chemicals have been linked to the type of cancer he died of. I warned him as much years before, but what did I know, right?
The more I think about this, the more I think I could expand it into a novel – there are lots of additional stories I could go into from my days in KC, but certainly these two men that I knew in Kansas City captured many streams of American life in their stories…
I was staying in a Motel 6 in Hays when I watched Nixon’s resignation speech. Gives me a real special feeling about the place.
If you’ve seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show, you’ll remember that after the wedding Brad and Janet are driving along in a horrendous thunderstorm before they find the castle – and on the car radio is Nixon’s resignation speech! I also heard the speech on a car radio in a thunderstorm at night, while our family was driving back to Philly from a day at the beach in Wildwood, NJ.
Hey addison! I’d be really interested in the posts that you found most intriguing from the other two places that you posted this thread — I’ve always admired your ability to hang at RedState — I like to read your stuff over there!
All competed in my mind for this question. All are beautiful places filled with wonderful people.
Finally I have settled on the most American place I’ve ever been – a website called Daily Kos. It is a place with many kinds of people who see the world differently yet share a commonality. A place with a certain freedom of expression, yet dominated by aggressive young men. An attitude of ‘We’re number one, and I’m better than you!’
the battlefields of lexington and concord. what could be more american than that?
on any given day, any courthouse in America. Raw democracy for better or worse.
It’s so hard to pick…
Is it some of the more interesting places I’ve seen…
Is it where kids hang out on the porch swing and act silly?
Is it the green grass and shady trees that have always called me home from my travels?
Is it the early morning beauty of sky meeting the sea?
But when I think of my most American experience, I always wind up thinking of the time I hitch-hiked cross crountry with a dog and a day pack, and all of the people I met along the way. Old hippies, truck drivers, silly people who dared each other to drive cross country in drag, the old man from Nebraska who was driving back from a visit to old friends in PA.
I had always sneered at Las Vegas. . .until I actually stood on one of its corners and stared at New York City rising on one corner, and ancient Egypt over at that other corner, and Paris over there. . .and I burst out laughing and laughed and laughed at the sheer unmitigated fun and gall of it. It seemed so damned American in every which way, the bad and crass and the imaginative and the good-humored, the rich and the poor, and the beautiful and the ugly of it. I loved it and hated it and still smile to remember it.
One time I traveled with my bf to his relatives’ house in the backwoods of Arkansas. Cars on blocks in the yard. Dirt floors. Black, pot-bellied stove. Outhouse. And the neighbors came over that Saturday night with their banjos and guitars and we all sang country western songs and hymns, and it seemed pretty damned American to me.
I live in the Kansas and Kansas City that people have described above, and I recognize everything they said about it.
(I love your “update” Addison.)
NYC, hands down.
Full of hope and love and dreams and strivers and artists and culture and musicians and diversity and injustice and greed and conflict and hate. Repository of native Americans, descendents of the Revolution slavery and recent immigrants, both legal and not. Full of possibility and crushing defeat.
NYC is America distilled, concentrated, sweetened, 95 proof and it burns going down.
NYC is artifice and brutal reality.
NYC IS AMERICA.
I remember the ‘old’ Stillwell Ave station — when Brooklyn was the world.
Manhattan is America and the rest is a pale imitation or refutation.
But I’m from Jersey, and I’m a typcial east coast elitist.
I don’t know how many other people can relate to this, but I grew up in multicultural, multilingual, multinational Miami, Florida, and even after living in Alaska and Arizona, loving NYC and NOLA, and visiting much of the rest of the country, I can still make a good case for South Florida being the most ‘American’ place I’ve ever been. (While disclaiming that by saying it should be read loosely b/c I don’t believe in absolutes.)
When I think of America, I usually think of the idea of it first. The core concept. The notion that a person isn’t owned by anyone other than themselves; that the peculiar circumstances surrounding a person’s birth ought not determine or limit their accomplishments in life; that groups of very different people can find ways of living together cooperatively and make diverse communities greater than the sum of their parts.
Now, I’ll usually be the first one to pipe up and talk about how bugfuck crazy Floridians are in general. Not only is South Florida a violent kind of place, but it’s also a creatively violent kind of place. If someone goes all Road Rage on you in Miami, they’re more likely to do so with the reproduction of a 14th century Samurai sword than a regular old handgun — but you’ll see regular old handguns everywhere, too. The local governments have turned corruption into an art form; poverty is picking the last shreds of meat off the bones of the inner city; the schools are shit — Miami has Issues.
Despite all these things, I almost always had that sense of the “concept of America” while growing up down there, no matter where in the city I was:
Like downtown, among the hustle and bustle of capitalism so thick in the air you could smell it bubbling up even through all the bus fumes. People in suits and Beemers doubling their fortunes; people in rags on the streets washing windows for money to get through the night; the middle class trudging through pretending not to notice anyone else. All of this in front of the downtown courthouse — the irony. I used to skip high school and take the MetroRail (which we called the MetroFail back then) to the big downtown library, right next to one of the gazillion art museums. I remember one day having some lunch from a street vendor, then wandering into the museum and unexpectedly catching a Picasso show on tour, then getting a screaming deal on a forest green silk teddy. And then, at night, downtown lights up like a midway and there’s that section of the MetroRail track that’s lit up in rainbow colors and it looks fucking amazing wedged in between the skyscrapers with the fat full moon hovering right over it…
Or the beach, where I was born. Yep, born right there on Miami Beach, 6th floor of Mount Sinai in the middle of the night, looking out at the Atlantic, no air conditioning in the hospital room back then, my mom was in labor for 3 days in June and never let me forget it. My first trip to the beach after birth was to South Beach when I was a month old, way before MTV made the place trendy. It was a surfer beach then and my dad’s from SoCal. I was surfing by the time I was 3, and throughout my childhood I made friends on the beach from all over the globe. I learned to say things like “wax”, “bullshit”, and “got a light” in lots of different languages. All through my youth, no matter what else was going on, I’d go to beach at least once a week even if just to stick my head in the water and gaze at the horizon. Such things are good exercises in perspective, and I was always subtly aware of that water being the very same water that my family on both sides risked everything to cross to come from the old country. I was also always subtly aware of the fact that my cultural ancestors had massacred the natives of those shores in order to claim the land. The contradiction is America.
Or take the suburb where I grew up. It was right near the Miami International Airport. Solidly middle class. PTA meetings, bake sales, gossip, soccer teams, bike rides. Little League Baseball in the summer, hot dogs & Cokes, 4th of July fireworks down at the golf course, Lisa’s dad having an affair with Jennifer’s mom. Christmas trees sold by the Optimist Club in a tent across the street from the Piggly-Wiggly, that summer that dumbass Kelly shot himself in the head. Smoking pot with the local cops when they were off duty, getting an ice cream from the Dip n Deli, window shopping all the small businesses along the main thoroughfare. The party we threw every spring on the Miami River when we closed off our little downtown streets (including the Circle that no one from out of town could ever seem to navigate anyway), hired live bands, saw old friends, and everybody wasted away again in Margaritaville.
That’s a peek at my America. And wow, it’s been 10 years since I’ve seen it. It might be time for a trip home.
Nothin’s changed.
It’s my Miami, too. Born but not bred here (living in the Redland as I type) as parents followed jobs around the USA.
But it’s home to my candidate for the “most American place,” which I’ll post on down the thread.
Late to the party as usual. When I thought about this I realized that each place offers something of the unique American experience. I would also say Manhattan for its American energy and melting pot qualities. But I’d have to say that lately the blogs have offered more in-your-face American flavor than any one spot on the map.
Well, there are two ways I can answer this: based on the ideals of America, or based on the reality of America.
The reality of America, well, frankly can probably be summed up pretty well by Sacramento, where I live. You’ve got the state gov’t here, and it’s smack in the middle of downtown yet somehow the people in charge manage to keep themselves utterly isolated. You’ve got a few rich developers getting the full attention of the city council, while the rest of us get largely ignored. Housing for normal or working class people is getting expensive or being shoved out toward the suburbs while the city tries to “urban renew” itself into tacky buildings with shiny facades. It’s really a hugely diverse city… but for the most part, the poor and people of color have very little leverage over anything, and less so with each trendy nightclub or loft-dwelling that opens up, often with taxpayer subsidies. The small businesses, which have survived relatively well here, are finally losing, while the city spends its money encouraging Abercrombie to move downtown. Underneath all of that, you’ve got huge (and growing again) methamphetimine problems, poverty, gangs, so on and so on. The city doesn’t know what to do about it, so it largely pretends it doesn’t exist — which is doable if you live out in some suburban tract home and only come downtown to work.
That being said, I love my city, and most of the people I meet here are wonderful, well-meaning, and generous.
My parent’s backyard barbecue when I was a child. The barbecue usually consisted of my fathers fat and juicy hamburgers (sorry vegetarians), my mother’s baked beans and potato salad followed by watermelon. Sometimes there was an apple or cherry pie thrown in for good measure.
What makes this so American is that my father was a descendent of American Indians, French traders and Irish immigrants. My mother was an immigrant (who obtained her US citizenship as a young adult) of Scots-Irish ancestry. America isn’t a place but a people. A very diverse gathering of the world’s people.
You all know by now that I’m a baseball fan. And the ball park is my idea of the most American place I’ve ever been — from the sights and sounds to the smells and food.
From the game itself to the fans in the stands. To the idle joy of hot summer days and lazy moonlit nights spent cheering for the home team.
From the mega-parking lot awash in that ultimate symbol of the USA, to the “Star-Spangled Banner” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Cars and sing-alongs, that’s American.
From the breathless anticipation of watching a well struck ball float over the fence to booing the man in blue behind home plate who keeps going blind. All-American passions of fervor and democratic derision arise in one’s chest.
Start to finish, in every sense, it’s the most American place I’ve ever been.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to depart and make ready to go to the ball park for tonight’s 7:30 game.
Play ball!
Which park are they playing in these days? From Joe Robbie (Pro Player?), you can throw a rock and hit the apartment I lived in during Hurricane Andrew, right there off County Line Road. I used to deliver pizza and make out with my girlfriends all over that neighborhood. ::wistful sigh::
Have fun, Limelite!
I went as a child and I’ve taken my own children. I have mixed feelings about the place, and America, too.
when it’s so cold your nostrils stick together when you breath through them.
Ellis Island
That place for me, exemplifies what American is. The names of my Grandfather Sylvio, from Milan, and my Grandmother Mary, from Ballina in County Mayo are engraved on the wall there. To think that each of them came across alone, so young, to Manhattan. That’s courage. That’s American to me.
I read this diary earlier in the day – saw MilitaryTracy’s spot on reply – and decided to try to see later in the day if I had an answer in me worth writing.
I feel very alienated from traditional American cultural – perhaps the result of being part of an Italian family, or being raised Catholic in a predominately Protestant culture – perhaps seeing the civil rights battles while growing up, or being part of the social movements of the time. I often most at home in another country – Spain, Italy.
That said, after reading the above comments, I think I vote for the Venice Beach boardwalk, and of course, Venice and Santa Monica public beaches. There’s an egalitarian feel; a mix of ages, languages, races, and classes; a place where people can enjoy themselves without spending much money; dress code very, very casual, (eliminating many social markers, and those that retained seem silly and pompous); yuppies, tourists – American and other – inner-city kids, recent immigrants, each walking on the boardwalk, listening to the pan-pipe music from Peruvians, Caribbean steel drums, the inevitable one-man band, the drum circle, enjoying the less-polluted air of the beach and the freedom of being on foot and away from the damned automobile.
There are musicians, artists, fortune tellers, political activists, street-corner politicians and preachers, petition signature gatherers, marathon trainers, body builders, basket ball players, roller-bladers, cyclists, tai chi practitioners, surfers, swimmers, the Shul on the Beach, the annual Hari Krishna festival, designer dogs, some interesting – and a lot of shoddy – things for sale.
I still like MilitaryTracy’s answer best.
And thank you BooMan for the spellcheck feature.
A baseball field. Any baseball field will do, but for my example I’ll use Everett Memorial Stadium, Everett, Washington, home of the Aquasox, a short season A affiliate of the Mariners. Hard bleacher seats, real grass, fresh air, ads for local merchants, corny between-innings entertainment, bad renditions of the National Anthem by earnest high school kids, friendly small-town people, and kids just out of high school on their way to the major leagues who haven’t been spoiled by success yet. Nothin’ like it anywhere.
The Corn Palace, Aberdeen, South Dakota. You won’t find anything like that anywhere else either.
The main drag on a Friday night. Kids out cruisin’, enjoying their love affair with their cars.
Mount Rushmore.
Disneyland — the original, thank you, and none of the knockoffs (including the California Adventure park just across the plaza).
A jazz club at one in the morning.
Standing by the side of the road watching a Fourth of July parade.
Anyplace where people will lend you a hand because you need one. Or as the words to “Iowa” from “The Music Man” say,
We can be cold as the bulb of a thermometer in December
If you ask about the weather in July,
And we’re so by-God stubborn we can stand touching noses
For a week at a time and never see eye-to-eye . . .
But we’ll give you our shirt
And the back to go with it
If your crops should happen to die.