the future belongs to us
Like many planned cities of the postwar period, Palm Desert has an implausible yet familiar history. Inhabited by the ‘Ivilluqaletem until the US took their land and splintered them into reservations, the area was labeled Sand Hole on old maps. Ranchers started pumping groundwater there to grow hops, then sold the land to businessmen, who pumped more water to grow grapefruits and date palms. General Patton set up a military installation nearby to prepare troops for the desert battles of North Africa. After the war, an aviation promoter named Cliff built it into a resort city with the financial assistance of a successful ventriloquist, a silent film star, and a car-tire tycoon. During the war, he’d been the military governor of Dakar.
You wouldn’t know all that from a fleeting highway view, but you’d still get the picture. From the road, the place looks like an artificial oasis sagging under the weight of history and the landscape it has long defied. You don’t have to consult the graphs and plots, the newspapers and reports, the heat charts and the water tables, to know that’s pretty much what it is. Those golden, hegemonic days when men dreamt cities out of the desert seem more myopic than miraculous now.
Some of the landscapes we passed through seemed similarly implausible. We drove along the All-American Canal, which diverts the Colorado River into agricultural projects in what was once some of the driest land on the planet. We drove past the Salton Sea, an ancient lake whose current iteration was formed by a canal failure in 1905. The lake was a yachting destination in the 50s and 60s, frequented by the Beach Boys and the Rat Pack, but it became poisonous due to agricultural runoff and saltier due to evaporation. Heaps of dead fish piled up, followed by heaps of dead birds. Now it’s shrinking rapidly. Those agricultural chemicals on the lakebed will be exposed as it recedes, adding toxic particles to all the windblown sand and dust.
M and I had been driving to LA for several days, from Louisville to St. Louis, Tulsa to Santa Fe, then south toward the border and through the Imperial Valley. Forty years ago, the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard drove these same southwestern roads, marveling at the “artificial paradises” set against the immense void of the desert, a place “where the miracle of the car, of ice and whisky is reproduced each day: a marvel of easy living mixed with the fatality of the desert.” In his 1986 travelogue, America, he theorized that “American culture is heir to the deserts, but the deserts here are not part of a Nature defined by contrast with the town. Rather they denote the emptiness, the radical nudity that is the background to every human institution. At the same time, they designate human institutions as a metaphor of that emptiness, the work of man as the continuity of the desert, [and] culture as a mirage and as the perpetuity of the simulacrum.” He meant this primarily in a symbolic sense: that American culture operates as a system of signs and images that do not refer to the world but rather to other signs and images, in a disorienting series of further simulations (“the perpetuity of the simulacrum”). For him, the desert supplied both the unlikely backdrop for this hallucinatory culture, as well as a metaphor for its ultimate vacuousness.
Baudrillard’s pronouncements have aged much better than any of his critics might have expected, as the country’s visual culture has drifted further from reality.¹ Still, his abstractions overestimate the symbolic at the expense of the real. The desert is not merely a void upon which culture dances like a mirage but a widening arena of crisis: the federal government recently proposed cuts that would reduce water from the Colorado River by up to forty percent for California, Arizona, and Nevada. “The fatality of the desert” and “the continuity of the desert” describe not just aesthetic qualities but physical processes: pumping and diverting water, replacing native people and palms with imported ones, planting and building in improbable places and unsustainable ways. The desert is not just a “mythic operator” for the country’s heedless consumerism but the literal end result. What’s miraculous is not that such easy living was possible but that it looked like a mirage for so long, rather than a gradual process of extraction.
That process is not coming to an end any time soon, but the country is showing signs of strain. The environmental crises are clear, if ignored, but there’s a cultural fatigue as well. Following I-44 and I-40 from St. Louis, we loosely traced Route 66, the old scenic byway that was decommissioned in 1985. Much of the Route is still drivable, but it’s not always clear if you’re on it or not. Every now and then a Historic Route 66 sign appears, so faded in the sun it looks like the very history it sought to commemorate. Towns along the way look like they were bombed or evacuated. The Route is less a road than an old ley line, marking out a former site of cultural potency. The Nat King Cole single, the hitchhiking GIs, the neon motel signs—the midcentury still looms large in American iconography, but it’s impossible to get a sense of. The best we could do was drive past gas stations and assisted living facilities to see the world’s largest ketchup bottle, take some photos, and get back on the highway.
I get the appeal of that bygone kitsch. I even feel it myself, especially compared to the modern Interstate, which has no amusements of its own, just the iconic ugliness of the interchange and a history of obliterating neighborhoods. Still, it seems unwise to put too much stock in those relics, not only because their quaintness belies a long apartheid, but also because we still live under that same regime of images. The slogan for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign was Let’s Make America Great Again, evoking those high-imperial years before oil shocks and Vietnam. Make America Great Again—a bit more menacing—evoked that evocation. There are few better examples of “the perpetuity of the simulacrum” than American political rhetoric, which is always nostalgic for a previous version of nostalgia. It hearkens back not to America but to Americana, a history of objects rather than events. Released from chronology and pumped full of sentiment, history becomes a modular fiction that’s useful for all kinds of political ends. The durability of nostalgia for the midcentury makes sense for a wide range of ideological reasons—wanting to feel good about a war again, let alone win one; wanting to return to a more structurally racist and patriarchal era; wanting to have furniture that isn’t made from particle board; &c.—but it also lines up neatly with the childhood memories of the gerontocrats. Presidents Clinton, Bush, Biden, and Trump were all born in the 1940s. The past three US Congresses were the oldest of all time. The desert encroaches; so does dementia.
“We will always be the people who defeated a tyrant, crossed a continent, harnessed science, took to the skies, and soared into the heavens, because we will never forget that we are Americans, and the future belongs to us.” This was the President on the Fourth of July, on the 250th anniversary of the country, but we’ve been hearing more or less the same thing for the past ten years. It’s still kind of funny to parse his phrasings, which sound like they were written by a first grader or a Freemason, but as far as a convincing national myth goes, it’s just totally out of juice.
At times the President seems close to admitting this himself. During Memorial Day proceedings a month before, he seemed bemused at the sameness of it all—“My fifth time and, uh, it never changes”—and quoted scripture with an almost Stalinist cynicism: “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful servants,” to describe the US soldiers killed in his war on Iran. The rest of the speech featured a typical procession of patriots and facts dredged up from Wikipedia: “It cannot be by chance alone that the very first service member laid to rest here [in Arlington] in this place of supreme sacrifice was a union soldier by the name of Private Christman […] Beside him are more than 18,000 other young men named William. Over 20,000 named John, over 13,000 named James joined over time by Isaac, Elijah, Earls, Hanks, Helens, Juans, Margarets, Marias, Donalds… not too many, heh heh.” The scripted portions of his remarks sound AI-generated, and might well be. They make sense; they convey information; but there is no connection between the speaker and his words, between the occasion and his affect.
The difference between rhetoric and reality has long been an animating force in American politics—hopes for what America could be always excusing what it has been—but lately it seems to have collapsed. All the President cares about is power and money, and he doesn’t pretend to care about anything else. His Great American State Fair, an expo on the National Mall to commemorate the 250th anniversary, was so sparsely attended and half-assed that it looked more like an exhibition of the end of American pageantry. AI-generated posters in empty booths, befuddled Trump loyalists, a ferris wheel drifting pointlessly over grass. Even the Fox News anchors had a hard time lying about the crowds.
Nostalgia may have been part of the initial draw of Make America Great Again, but you don’t hear the full slogan much at all these days. Long since shortened to MAGA, it describes an attitude toward the present, not the past. It’s no longer an imperative but an adjective. Sure, they’re still trying to put the slaveowners back on their pedestals and accusing the Smithsonian of “improperly honoring” the founders, but they don’t really care about the past, about what happened or why. They just want people to feel good about the horrors of our history so that they’ll feel the same way about the horrors of our present. The regime is not executing citizens in their cars and bombing elementary schools halfway across the world to bring anything back.
The malaise is atmospheric and the myths are as exhausted as the landscape. While officials were droning on about some made-up past, they were making the country look more like it does from the highway: homogenized and consolidated and dependent on gas. What’s left of the natural landscape still changes, from grassland to shrubland to desert, but the artificial one looks the same everywhere. The same crops, the same companies, the same shapes on pylon signs. The red prism, the green sunburst, the yellow scallop shell. The billboards have more regional variation—ads for the Uranus Fudge Factory (“The Best Fudge Comes from Uranus”), evangelical threats (“After you die, you WILL meet God”), and Indian caricatures peddling moccasins and junk (“Authentic Southwest Gifts!”)—but they all suggest the same country. Jejune, menacing, perverse.
Toward the beginning of our drive, in a town called Lebanon, we came upon a quaint Main Street so surrounded by power lines and drive-throughs that it felt like the hidden headquarters of some post-apocalyptic settlement. M took a Zoom call while I zoned out into a vintage television that had been converted into a fish tank. Above it hung a landscape painting of a lake in virgin wilderness. Leafy trees framing the water, a snowcapped peak off in the distance. Its style was more Thomas Cole than Thomas Kinkade, but it was clearly a depiction of no real place. Beneath the painting, an older man played Battleship with his daughter, perhaps on a custody visit.
That painting followed me for the rest of the trip. I couldn’t get it out of my head, like a bygone object people dream about in dystopian novels. Those landscape paintings all look like parodies of a country rather than depictions of it, like funerary objects devoid of grief. One of the worst things about all these nostalgic simulacra is that they obscure an actual country that is no less bizarre, but whose strangeness comes from chance encounters and historical contingencies, not just the morbid symptoms of some endlessly recycled story.
The best parts of our drive were convergences of the real that had nothing to do with myths of the road or the west or the country. Like the oldest bar in Arizona, where the bartender fixed us a pint-glass margarita—shaken with orange juice and topped with Grand Marnier—while a drunk did karaoke in the other room, shouting his way through “The End” by The Beatles. Or the local-interest bookstore in Mesilla, one of the last Mexican towns to become part of the US, where I bought a history of barbed wire and M found an old Spanish-English phrasebook from the 50s, made for farmers and domestic laborers. Or the hike up over the abandoned pit mine, where sotol flowers were so swarmed with moths and wasps and bees that the plants seemed to move of their own accord.
In New Mexico, we visited the ruins of a pueblo that had been conquered by the Spanish, who converted the place into a misión. They built a large church on the ruins, which is now a ruin itself. A park ranger told us that usually there would be four or five preservationists maintaining the adobe walls in order to stabilize the original brickwork. This year there were none. “For some strange reason,” he said with a knowing look. The pueblo site contained 20 kivas, cool underground rooms made by the Pecos people and likely used for ceremonies and crafting. Two of the kivas had been reconstructed so that visitors could climb down into them. As we were walking back to the visitor center, a dozen French-Canadian men rolled up on matching motorcycles. There was something delightful in watching them take turns descending into the replicas, leather vests disappearing into that mystical subterrane, the simulation of a deeper and lesser-known past.
When we finally got to LA, I went for a run up the beach, jogging through Santa Monica Pier. It was early in the morning and all its rides lay still. I ran past seats shaped like great white sharks and a numbered ferris wheel car emblazoned with an octopus. Reaching the other side, about to descend back down to the beach, I heard the voice of Zoltar. “What are you waiting for?” came a voice from inside one of the booths. I couldn’t tell which one. I stopped and looked around, while the voice insisted on reading my fortune. “Come on over! For a small fee, Zoltar will give you a wealth of wisdom!” It was as if the voice was coming from some earlier attraction, now long past, but without any trace of nostalgia at all, just the automaton hailing its newest audience, which at that moment happened to be me and the three Chinese girls taking selfies with the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. sign.
This was more like it, more like America. A fortune-telling machine that never sleeps, in the middle of a dormant carnival, in the hyperclarity of the beach, casting about for tourists and lost souls. What was I waiting for? I kept running up the beach, as far as I could, toward all the lots still unrebuilt from last year’s fires. Some futures no one wants to face, not even me.
ben tapeworm
1. Well, some of them. One of my favorites: “There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. […] It is as if another planet is communicating with you.” Others remain undefeated examples of the excesses of French theory: “There is nothing funny about Halloween.”; “The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach.”