Have you found America?
Lives flow zero-sum to futility pursuing mind ephemera in flickering dim persistence.
Media detritus weaves culture as mind-montage, echoes tinnient our frayed and cherished memories.
Collaged in colloidal silvered cellulose, ink-smeared headers, crackly acetate audio, American annals precipitate culture to caricature.
Ouroboros marketers wield consumerist art blenders, modernity puréed to crass cliché.
Trail-blazing frontier heydays wane, bygone in these e-times. Parade of decayed decades fossilize sessile, 19th by 20th, in Hollywood’s hubristic faux follies.
Did you find America in fatherland’s flame or motherland’s mystique?
A poorly tended orphan, our nation coalesced to juvenescence, fluoresced at pubescence, in two tumultuous centuries. These long, pivotal, busy years occupy barely a blink, mostly a blank, in public percept.
Débutante as Papal gift to Spain, homeland’s less scenic circuit saw natives nulled, witch hunts, pious preaching, youthful rebellion, uncivil slavery, and can-do capitalism .. from which chaotic nonage wearily emerged The Union, bearing but a buck and a Bill of Rights.
Gilded Age founded selfish imperialism that inexorably begat soul-sapping world wars and two apocalyptic flash-bangs. The world took careful note. Capable of equally revengeful spite, of such Hollywoodesque it was not.
Post-war euphoria ebbed Cold War-soured till extinguished by futility in Asian-Arab crusades.
Premature news of our death was only slightly so, arriving delicious with heart-stilling irony by our own hand. Earth’s greatest empire slain by a home-grown virus. A virulent, highly-praised export variant. Best practice, world class, and best of breed.
Greed.
Which brings us where we stand in the smoking ruin that was America, why we might seek what it was, thus what we are .. or were.
"They’ve all come to look for America" – still searching, by the way. Not just a tribal ache but some clasping at the nationhood to which we long to belong.
No-one knows what America, or God, looks like, yet all are equally doubtless She is His.
“God bless America and nowhere else” resonates as classroom oath, not facetious doggerel.
That a combustion-fed tolled artery delivers pilgrims to the City of Ghosts in search of genesis is irony enough.
Irony traveled with those who, from the sea, sought a dream yet to exist, so founded a Mephistophelian metropolis before surging westward and ho. It led their descendants to pay the piper, and the turnpike, in return inutile quest to this Trimenjous Apple, seeing in it their seeding, as does indeed the entire nation.
Who seeks America?
The addled call LA home, in which honey pot limbo they stickily struggle.
Sophisticates came west, saw, then backscattered to bigger smoke.
Heartlanders with hint of shiny and a glint of eye know America beyond daily drear.
Geekocracy tweets & buzzes i-gadgetry addicted, e-Citizens understanding only The cYbeRst4tes oF am3ric4.
A-List adopt tinted orphans, flaunt fashion at flashbulbs, party bare-pussy, frame epoxy teeth in botulinum lips. Facile smiles, facial twitches, grate of guilt, harbor hysteria.
Invisible Hand devotees play mortgage Monopoly and Tea Party puppeteer on the side.
Is America the land sullied by our greedily covetous hand as pre-Columbian purity palls to polluted pestilence?
Do we seek America by filling it with people and place names, pander to progress, prostrate to prodigence? 300 million searching for … 400 million? Do we stop now or is eternal growth the plan? There’s a plan?
The world found America
International regard of us is a cautious affair. Knowing the beast too well World backs slowly towards the door, looks instead to lateral liaisons with Aspirant Asia, Gulf of Lucre, or Crown Prince Europe.
Oppressed and starving craved bounteous freedom in our virgin frontiers but their dreams mired in thread-bare hardship and genocidal slave-keep. Still they arrive. Over sea or beneath border to shatter hopeful longings, to languish as latter-day slaves to an imagined betterment.
Marketing, ever our game, drew migrants by symbols rendered as reality. Cowboy and gold rush cloaked ruinous labor. Coca Cola and Chevrolet bestrode dark steeds of economic imperialism, dazzling distant peasants while their birthright siphoned stateside.
Disquiet and delight greeted 9-11. Ensuing crusades blinded-not a media-savvy world that pierced indulgent embedded reportage and found only nakedly hooded prisoners of humiliation, evangelized Christian military madmen, or disillusioned patriot soldiers sacrificed before black-tinted mercenary convoys.
We, the Americans who seek this effusive illusion, live unwitting of it’s malignant extent or mischievous intent. We drive its cars, eat its burgers, bail its banks, laissez its faire, build its weapons of mass misconception, and quell deep-schism qualms at a reality slippery and thin as spring ice.
And ..
.. while septuagenarians work-as-retirement .. while all work longer and harder for less .. while middle class indebted afford neither health nor home .. while overpaid geeks squander gizmo-extravagance online .. while rich and famous parade fortune in all’s faces .. while obscene wealth screws from lavish fortress compounds a democracy that once served all ..
.. the fervent distraction of an entire nation asserts Vidal’s United States of Amnesia in comatose acquiescence to dreamland’s Gordian fabric.
A child puzzles why hordes throng in consumptive frenzy and frenetic confusion on the turnpike of life.
"Where are they going, Dear Parents?"
"To find America, young one, where else?"
"But that way is perfidious, a circus of illusion, the devil’s torment, bubbles of falsity.”
“Besides ..” the child ponders with naïve clarity, of which only our favorite observer is capable:
“America lies within."
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