Growing up memorizing the capitals of all the states, learning about expansion and the civil war and reconstruction, you begin to develop this magical feeling about our U.S. of A. Then you get older and you start to see more of it, and then more of it, and then if you’re me a lot of it, and the magic fades.
One seeks and expects markers of a place and a people that differentiate them from their neighboring cities, states, etc., but one finds the same, mostly, on different scales depending on population density or special status; i.e. college towns or capitals *Pennsylvania: Harrisburg!*
You look here and it’s a subway sandwiches, you look here and it’s a monolithic court house, look over there it’s the highway, round the corner a Vons, block over the Starbucks, just right over there is the ford dealership, few blocks is the entrance to the housing development, downtown is the Bank HQ, and a hotel, oh and there’s a hotel over there too, and oop just passed the McDonald’s, just a town over are the outlets, and ooh look a park, and there’s the high school, and it’s that again and then one more time and again.
Hollywood, CA thinks it’s one of a kind but it’s not, it’s only in a way a prism by which the whole conglomerate image is refracted into the abyss of middle America. The thing is with stuff like “Girls Gone Wild” the cultural habitus forms upward not just downward. LA is to middle America as an S Class is to a 4Runner. Besides that it’s the same thing up and down.
The deep tragedy is the waste of natural beauty (people and place). It’s not even the industrialization and the– civilization, if you will, it’s that we’re all living these npc lives. Culture is such an ephemeral thing but it’s out there. I’m so tired of this 21st century drab. I’m sick of Rick and Morty.
Parangui sings of “cleansing the rivers and healing the land,” and I do believe that is called for and we’ll be thankful we answer that call, but we’re fools if forget about the spiritual transformation necessary. I feel like I’ve been on a path and was set on it the moment I was struck that Christian faith in Christ’s resurrection and the prospect of eternal life in heaven is a psychological phenomenon. Since then essentially the whole apparatus has fallen out.
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An aside
Dr. Peterson, it’ll never happen for me; for us. Glad it happened for you I guess and good on ya for making lots of money and all that, changing lives, changing mine, all that; it’s not gonna go that way with everybody.
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The apparatus really hasn’t reconstituted. Maybe I blame California. No that’s too harsh. Being in LA is brutal though, people, I tell ya. It’s not that it’s so run down or whatever, ‘course last time I was there I was in the vicinity of the Physical Place Hollywood for about a minute– then away I was, it’s that it’s all twisted up in the people. The residents are scary, cyborgs, indescribable, and the tourists, are pilgrims that reached the end…..
They built it far out into the ocean, they demanded both a ferris wheel and a rollercoaster, they said we need restaurants and we need carnival games! It stretches out a ways, but eventually you walk to the end of the Santa Monica Pier, and there’s nowhere else to go. Only back.
Pray for us. Pray for me. Pray for you.
p.s. the capital buildings. They are inspired the ones I’ve seen but they are all aspirational of past architectural, and spiritual, elements. It would be quite a thing to see a just outrageous capital building. But no, because we’re serious people!
p.p.s. maybe this essay is in fact too self serious, the thing is I’m irked! I am stricken when I see an empty space where once was an Abraham Lincoln statue. It confuses me. Your revolution is for what? Gay day in the park? That’s what it’s for? What? Can we find no better alternative?
p.p.p.s. almost forgot about the prevalence of airports in the states. Isn’t plane so fun?!
J.W. 