The American Swamp
Cities of Isolates
Through the American interstate, a disjoint, a paradox - one that opens to reveal the nation’s heart. Drive along any of them, and witness the dizzying celebration of the pursuit of the individual trajectory’s speed, slow motion drag racing along the tracks a normal country would build its trains. We see the individualism of America play out. Every hour or so, you’ll pass a car broken down on the shoulder. Maybe someone is outside is, head stuck into the engine, leaning up against the side, hunched over the steering wheel and tapping on their phone for help. No one stops, no one would dare. They dropped out of the wilderness. The dream of the car, to be far from the tyranny of a one-track train, pilots of our own destiny. To stop for another is anathema to this freedom, to strike against the flow of celebration with the messy horizontal entanglements we left behind in the old world, with the old language, the old customs.
Baudrillard writes in America, of the experience he had while on the Salt Lake Flats, seeing vehicles tested in land speed records. Each individual vehicle, a vector of speed operating under a vector logic of movement for movement. Each car ceases to be a pod encasing the driver and becomes a particle in the great sea.
“Traffic” - when these particles go from isolated trajectory to the makeup of a mass fluid. The state steps in here, the Eisenhower Interstate System cutting across the nation’s cities and countryside, police patrolling to ensure signage is followed, leading the tide.
As such, the roadway is a tightly restricted system of flow regulation. The interstate is not a free space, the desert or steppe that brings one to mind with the industrial-chariot technology of the automobile, it’s a single ribbon of road that goes across the continent, with occasional diversions off to smaller, regional highways. Across its entire length, police patrol ensuring that the exact limits are followed - stay between a rather narrow range of speed, follow signage, orderly movement along the flow of traffic. Each vehicle must be licensed, ensured, driven in only one fashion, along a narrow set of rule. In the interstate each individual is completely convinced of their own isolation and in doing so, becomes the ideal particle - an isolate amidst a fluid greater than it could ever comprehend, beyond itself.
The energy put into this continent-spanning megalith is almost impossible to comprehend. Many photos have been circulated, a single cloverleaf interchange compared to be the same dimensions from the sky as a single neighborhood in an old world city. A great tract of land is cleared, set aside, and then covered in a monumental stonework, all for the purpose of millions of mechanical marvels to burn great quantities of combustible fuel in a tightly regulated flow, one in such volume that the management of these mechanical beasts becomes a questions of herds, fluids, rather than individuals. Business as usual of course - the scale of this American commerce, something we scarcely appreciate.
Sea to Shining Sea
Phil Spector idles in his gothic castle, overlooking the sunbleached city hazed orange against the pacific. Engineering the 1960s, that mono “Wall of Sound”, a form of mixing built for consumer radios and record players, he carved out his own slice of liquid capital to rot in his mausoleum until he dies that lonely death so common to his caste. There are countless like him - throw a dart at any top 40 chart a few decades or more into the past and it’ll wash up any number of desiccated corpses lining the hills and shorelines, mansions built removed from the city like Upper Egypt, a second city far from the beating heart of the world, for old stars to fade out.
Los Angeles is a city of death. It was since the beginning, when it was the funeral of American expansion. The infinite promises of the new world, those seeded in the Age of Discovery, and planted as substratum for the mercantile empire growing from New York died in that city, as the Glanton Gang looked over the Pacific shore - this is it, huh? High desert, mountains, and then - nothing. A vast hemisphere of death, water with a few sparse islands, and then, the old world again.
The grand mausoleum became the nation’s capitol after the same contraction occurred economically. Once the frontier was thoroughly enclosed, it was only a matter of time before something new had to be found. We see the desperation begin to creep in at the beginning of the postwar era. The atomic age brought with it a horizon opening and then revealing abyss. Space opened up and showed itself only as a portal from death onto us, Oppenheimer’s ritual more poignant than almost any other comment on the matter. Threats of extinction came over the horizon, pollution, radiation sickness, the missile-decadence of the space race. No one describes it better than The Fury from Metal Gear Solid 3, the valkyrie from beyond the atomic horizon, death, destroyer of worlds.
The frontier before this was a beyond of harvest. The dream of the yeoman and later the robber baron was of unclaimed land and resources - shoot at a rabbit and strike oil. Chart out into the plains and strike gold. The end of this, when America collected itself within its borders to such a degree as to fight a war against anyone but itself, was the end of the harvest ecstasy. The nation was built.
After this, an era of explosion, America became a nation of implosion.
Yet the horizon never died in the atomic age - simply inverted. No longer a place of harvest, the horizon became an event horizon of death. From it, emerged The Fury, the spaceman descending from the black nothing, bathed in atomic fire - the next frontier, only a realm of death and violence. To this frontier, the response wasn’t fear, but glee. Oppenheimer looked upon it with horror when he quoted Vishnu, but the rest looked upon it in ecstasy. America found Bataille’s black sun.
The new discourses of America in this postwar era were all of annihilation. The atomic frontier became the same as feudal war, the space of endless wastage around which grand national rituals were built. The defense industry emerged to create weapons for wars that everyone knows will never happen - they don’t need to. They exist on the atomic frontier, hurling missiles into the howling abyss for the orgy of it all. The consumer economy became the same. Planned obsolescence, suburban consumerism, the monuments to resource destruction in the grand exurbs built where scarcely a frontier town could survive along the sunbelt, all of it an orgy of destruction in service to the atomic frontier’s event horizon.
The rest of the world looked upon America and saw it - the greatest black hole ever discovered. America had created a black sun to swallow not only the excesses of its own libido, but that of the entire planet’s. Hence, the next era of America began.
America rebuilt its global relationship then, not as exporter, but as the universal importer. The American Dollar became the world reserve currency, as trade found the perfect direction to flow. The worshippers ascend the temple steps, placing offerings onto the altar - oil, plastics, food - and the priests then spark their torches. They bless the worshippers with small tokens and kisses as the atomic fire steals matter away to the shadows. Every product can find a buyer in dollars, it all flows to be destroyed in one continent-wide sacrifice, and in return for their participation, a perfect currency to circulate across the globe.
Fermentation
Baudrillard writes in America - “The entire society, including its active, productive part - everyone - is running straight ahead, because they have lost the formula for stopping.”
Each car is an isolate monument to that controlled individuality, constrained by the rigid structure of the society at the same time as it’s a fully isolated, autistic capsule of the self.
Each individual in America is a cell to be supersaturated. The six hundred pound food addicts make the perfect example, ballooning up long past what anyone in human history achieved by the great surpluses of the nation’s bounty, its unique formulations of sugars and oils.
Like corn syrup or palm oil, new formulations are imposed from the top-down to create supersaturation of each cell at levels once impossible. As the physical body is bloated by new advances in food engineering, the economic body is bloated by the epidemic of predatory lending and bad credit. For creditors, each loan has no consequence - the business model of a creditor is built around selling a repackaging of the issued debt, rather than collecting. For debtors, each loan is a grease towards those autistic bubbles of the self, extensions of the body in lieu of a social existence - the suburban home, the personal car.
It was only a formality that caused this situation to ever lead to a market correction. There is nothing in the American national economy that would require the debts underlying mortgage backed securities to be actually paid off. The contractors who built the homes fulfilled their function of burning raw materials at the pyre of consumption. The creditors who printed the money converted that debt into spendable capital when they sold it, and each round of repackaging and selling squeezed out another round of liquid capital from the asset. The devaluation of the securities, and the foreclosure on their underlying loan was only a formality. The original promise was in fact true - to fulfill the American Dream. This dream goes beyond the old world conceptions of debt and obligation. The debt needs to be paid back no more than corn syrup needs to fulfill any nutritional or even caloric requirement - as the current popularity of zero calorie options shows. The function is to take material and transmute it into a consumable form, and then to dump it into the liquid mass of the body, letting the cells soak it in and digest it - the universal sink. The petrodollar is produced as a byproduct of it all, like ethanol produced as yeast digest sugars.
The Essence of Jazz
With chaos comes mutation. It’s said life emerged from a “primordial soup” of ten thousand things in a liquid medium where particular movement eventually gave birth to the substances capable of self-reproduction and further mutation - life.
America too, is a land of mutation. In its early days - the export years - it scorned it at all costs. The stereotype of an American was that of Chicago, rational gridlock streets, steel towers rising up into the heavens. An optimistic German, an engineer who approached the world as a set of Euclidean problems to be solved and if there’s time, those solutions succinctly proved. So many of the great Americans in these early years took on this steel-eyed perspective, contributing linear, direct results to the fields respective to them. The crowning jewel of this mindset was the event which tore the world apart, opening that black hole that led America to go from export to import - the Manhattan Project. The nation’s whole productive capacity was realized towards one end, the last great export of the Enlightenment nation’s rational minds - the ritual to tear that era apart and fold it inverse.
Twenty years or so after the implosion, when the import-society had fully settled in, the first celebration of mutation exploded outwards. LSD was the secret sauce of the era, a chemical which produces, more than anything, a schizoid hyperconnectivity between all things. Revolutions occurred in every field as the creative impulses to mutate and change rippled out from the end of the world (California).
What occurred in America, from the 1950s and since, is an explosion from within of newness. Not of the old modern newness, before the war, with sleek lines of steel and geometry, but explosive mutation, the circular swooping curves of Salvation Mountain, painted in the consumer technicolors by the untrained whims of an artist “outside” the conventions once established.
An old Miya tweet remarks on the ghetto as the engine of mutation - two headed animals born in toxic waste, children in Indian slums with the face of Elvis, Bone-Thugs n Harmony refinding the soul of opera - life is compressed to its utmost, in both density and speed. Chance of mutation raises exponentially with every day.
In America we find the same scenario. The universal donor economy brings all energies to their total compression, a new primordial soup of the whole world - people of all nations, currency, resources, pools at the bottom in a great soup of particular chaos. Mutations occur by the second, each one accelerating more.
It’s only natural that the internet should emerge from America. The next layer of humanity, information sharing increased exponentially for the second time, multiplying over itself in the same way it did with the development of the printing press. This could only blossom from America, as the compression of matter sparked off a reaction that would have taken eons in the old world.
As autistically isolated as the American self is, American society is greater than the sum of its parts. The air of the nation is a nation alive with electricity, movement sparking movement, a constantly dynamic mix. For each individual, a micromovement in politics, culture, economics, and from each micromovement, a quantity squared, as each one inspires exponential deviations upon itself. Within this, we find the beauty of the nation - a great swamp, a humid jungle teeming with yes, filth, decay, but from another perspective - life. The smell in the air is the smell of both lotuses and mushrooms, the smell of more species per square mile than any other part of the world, and the smell of more species being born per day than at any other place or time in history. At the bottom of everything we find the great swamp - America - and in that swamp, blooms humanity’s primordial soup.
Bibliography
Interstate I-94
America, Jean Baudrillard
The Essential Phil Spector
Time for My Stories podcast, Felix Biederman & Matt Christman
The Trinity Nuclear Test
Metal Gear Solid 3
After the Law, Nick Land
The ingredients listing on several dozen items in a convenience store
The Discography of Bone-Thugs & Harmony
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (personal experience)
@BPD_GOD
A weird swamp I found behind a rest stop on I-94