I am on the road again for the first time in many years, returning to some places on the East Coast I had not seen since before the millennium turned. Being a Midwesterner, I always like Midwestern small towns because at least a few of them are trying to resist becoming what I term Gasoline Ghettos–those villages of motels, restaurants, and other tourist traps that now line the outskirts of virtually every major Interstate highway intersection.

The East Coast has a different appeal for me in the it is so old that Gasoline Ghettos often have a tough time muscling aside two-hundred year-old houses and shops. But I think what has impressed me most about the landscape of this trip is how much America is becoming alike.
Even on the East Coast now the Gasoline Ghetto is becoming the primary architectural style. And where there aren’t gasoline ghettos, the chains with their recognizable buildings and neon signs are everywhere. Whatever corporate marketi8ng department decided that all Pizza Huts or Best Buys should look the same should be consigned in the manner of Dante to a hell of sameness.

Before becoming disabled, I used to travel a lot, but I finally grew tired of what every serious business traveler knows as the “where am I now” syndrome that comes from staying in motels that all look the same no matter where you are so that one morning you wake up, look out the window and for a minute you have to think to remember where you are. So I started looking for bed-and-breakfasts or anything that wasn’t a chain. Once I stayed in a local motel so bad that in the morning there was a small snow drift inside the front door. But I knew exactly where I was.

When I started writing The Strange Death of Liberal America, I decided that each chapter would begin with a description of a place–a real place–because I felt one of the more insidious developments of the Republican Counterrevolution was that it was rapidly taking away the local and the unique. Everything is now owned by a chain and if everything is owned by a chain that makes all of us mere cogs in the wheels that those chains move.

Critics as far back as the late Lewis Mumford have been writing about the dangers of homogenization but I don’t think it really hit home until this trip. Because of my disability this is the longest trip I have taken away from home in five years and the only way I was able to manage it was to finally intimidate a certain airline into providing me with what is known as “handicapped” seating. I always though those seats were reserved for George Bush and Dick Cheney, but found out people like me that have trouble being shrink-wrapped into a seat in the middle of an aisle can actually avail themselves of these seats–although it practi8cally takes an Act of Congress to reserve one.

Two years ago on a car trip back from a college basketball tournament with my son it was he who was quite familiar with the ways of the Gasoline Ghetto, having ridden the team bus for four years and stayed in cheap motels. One morning at one of those ubiquitous buffet breakfasts, while my wife and I muddled through what for us was unfamiliar territory, he had a plate full in less than two minutes. When I asked him his secret, he said, “They’re all the same. After four years you get so you can do it in your sleep.”

Then he told us that the night before after a particularly embarrassing loss their coach refused to buy them dinner and instead went to the grocery store and bought bags of cold cuts and bread. The players decided they wanted to eat as a team so they proceeded to take over the motel lounge until the manager threw them out saying the lounge was for guests only. They protested they were guests (in fact the team probably buttered their bread fairly well the two nights they were there), but the manager would have none of it.

In Strange Death I wrote about the impact of the chains on intellectual creativity, particularly the media chains that have made being an innovator like Elvis or a Louis Armstrong or any kind of rap or hip hop artist an endangered species because they threaten that eternal soundtrack that runs in supermarkets, telephone hold backgrounds, motel lounges, and restaurants. Until my son talked about life on the road, I didn’t really realize how corporate chains have insinuated themselves into our minds.

Most Americans now live in suburban developments where the houses are churned out by computers and look the same whether in New York or Georgia or New Mexico. When we travel, we stay in a Gasoline Ghetto. In between we may listen to CD�s also turned out by the same conglomerates or one of those programmed radio stations owned by the likes of Clear Channel. Local or individual character is rapidly becoming extinct. You literally don’t know where you are.

What does this have to do with America? Think Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s warning that a very clever Michael Moore turned into Fahrenheit 9/11. But Moore missed the deeper message–although it does not diminish the power of his movie–that is, if you live in an environment of physical sameness, sooner or later it will metamorphose into an environment of intellectual sameness. Gasoline Ghettos become intellectual ghettos, for the minds no longer stimulated by the unique, the unusual, the imaginative lose the power to imagine. They atrophy the way any muscle atrophies that is not used.

Atrophied brains lead to people who are easy to manage, people who are willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt. Even more, those who protest or even engage in the intellectual equivalent of my son’s basketball team eating in the motel lounge will swiftly be dismissed.

We need to do all we can to insure that architectural uniqueness and independent voices do not die. This is also where the blogosphere comes in. Right now it is the only outlet for some of us. We need to fight to be sure it does not become the equivalent of a Gasoline Ghetto dominated by the equivalent of chains. Because when it does guess who will be wearing the chains?

Tags: architectural sameness, blogosphere, chain stores, Chicago, Clear Channel, clear_channel, college_basketball, creativity, Dick-Cheney, Elvis, fahrenheit_451, fahrenheit_9/11, gasoline_ghettos, George Bush, interstate highway, lewis_mumford, Louis_Armstrong, Michael_Moore, motels, ray_bradbury, The Strange Death of Liberal America, where_am_i_now_syndrome
Tagged with: architectural sameness • blogosphere • chain stores • Chicago • Clear Channel • clear_channel • college_basketball • creativity • Dick-Cheney • Elvis • fahrenheit_451 • fahrenheit_9/11 • gasoline_ghettos • George Bush • interstate highway • lewis_mumford • Louis_Armstrong • Michael_Moore • motels • ray_bradbury • The Strange Death of Liberal America • where_am_i_now_syndrome