follow the green paper road

The S.0. and I recently drove all the way from one end of American consumerist culture to the other. Our journey down that green road began in Madrid, New Mexico. Madrid is a touristy, arts-and-crafts former ghost town in the northern New Mexico mountains. We leaned its history from an O.H. (Original Hippy) who ran one of the shops, looked like a skinny, aged Andy Warhol, and by his inconvenient existence refuted the contention of our Republican trolls that all them former hippies have learnt their dad-blamed lesson. Thirty years ago, he told us, he and several other ''pioneers" had found the old mining town abandoned in the mountains and had moved in. It was his job, he told us proudly, to impede progress; to make sure that the town never incorporated and never had a mayor or a police force. We walked around the town and, although I'm not a member of the Writer's Guild and hence don’t have to describe it as ''quaint," I can’t really think of any other appropriate adjective. We had just come from Santa Fe and I should now comment on the irony that old hippies have become such good shopkeepers and small-time Capitalists in their dotage.

Not all 21st-century capitalism is so small-time, of course, an ugly truth we were reminded of sixty miles down the highway at Clines Corners. We stopped in at the huge, nightmarish truck stop/tourist trap at the comer of I-40 and Highway 285 in search of a Dr. Pepper and a restroom break. We found archetypal screaming kids shooting each other with archetypal plastic rifles, septuagenarian RV wanderers spending their children's inheritance on cheap crap, and scores of American nomads with the faces of zombies and the bodies of rhinoceroses. In the men's room two travelers arbitrated a disagreement that had begun with an apparent road rage incident. The guiltier party blamed his highway rudeness on incessant spousal nagging. Our own search soon proved fruitless. If we wanted a drink at Clines Corners, we would have to buy in from the resident Subway, in their approved, clumsy, prone-to-spill-on-long-drives paper cups. There wasn't a bottled Dr. Pepper to be found.

At two ends of a brief stretch of the ubiquitous American highway we found America. It was a synecdoche, this small part representing the whole sordid glory of our culture. This is our land: blissed-out hippie salesmen, families of unruly children and bickering parents, and everywhere the oppressive fluorescent lights offering nothing you want but determined nevertheless to sell you crap you don't at a price you can’t afford.

spacedark