America you become to me more incomprehensible and more disgusting every day. Is there anything, anything authentic about you, or has it all been gobbled up by the Whore of Babylon, turned into national historic sites, mini-malls, empty restaurant parking lots? I look at the people running around in you and I confess I do not understand them. Does anyone want authenticity anymore? Or does everyone desire a thin plastic coating over their world?
"On the Road" for all its vacuousness deals with this, the search for "American authenticity which was forever somewhere else" (Robert Stone). Nothing is achieved and there seems to be no point to all their crazy excited criss-crossings of the country. But that is exactly what a search for authenticity in America is destined to be like.
I am living in a hotel right now and will be living here for the next 3 months. Yes this is weird. It is a chain hotel, that is to say there is nothing authentic about it, it came from a big distant cookie cutter like everything else around here and serves its upscale cookie cutter clientele well I imagine. I bring this up though only to give you an emblem of inauthenticity: a kokopelli on the wall.
Of course this is a pretty common one--you see it everywhere. My question is: what in the blazes is a nation-wide prefab hotel chain doing appropriating an image from Anasazi rock art? Is this right? Do you think this is right? Do you find this quaint, charming, or does it make you want to empty the contents of your stomach on the spot?
America's answer is that it doesn't care. It sees nothing wrong with this. And that is what is wrong with America.
Posted by Alan at May 25, 2003 10:12 PM