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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Monday, June 24, 2002
16:02 - Just going over some old chestnuts...
http://www.lileks.com/screed/olivegarden.html

 (top) link
I was reading the Olive Garden Screed again-- just dancing blithely down the park-path of halcyonity that is online journalism since last fall-- and a thought occurred to me.
"And from the Olive Garden it does seem very distant. Indeed, the whole messy and diverse concept of Europe seems very distant.
Around Birmingham, there is nothing but miles and miles of Alabama."


Apparently around Birmingham England, there is nothing but miles and miles of Belgium, Thailand and the Antarctic Ice Shelf.

Lileks' giggle-fit-inducing rejoinder notwithstanding, I had to wonder something: What does a British person think of the vastness of American territory? What must it be like, coming from a country where you can drive from one end to the other in a day, picking up an atlas of the Lower 48 States and trying to imagine what it's like to live in such a place?

The big cities are probably easy to imagine. Cities are epicenters of activity. Everything you need can be found in any city. A city in a country 3000 miles across isn't that different from London or Paris, not in terms of day-to-day living. It's when you start to get out into those big middle-of-nowhere regions on the map that it starts to get weird. Where do all those long, curving interstates lead to? What's out there in ... Montana? Utah? Kansas? What are people like there? Do they even speak the same language we do?

In fact, coming from England, where one can drive a hundred miles and find oneself surrounded by people whose accent is completely incomprehensible, no doubt it's terrifying to imagine what that difference can be, magnified a hundred times.

To a Brit, America must look the way Siberia or the Australian outback looks to us: a vast, unexplored wasteland, full of mountain ranges and rivers and forests and rampaging tribes of lawless natives, when you're lucky to find traces of humanity at all. It's the realm of loggers and trappers, mountain men and crazy religious isolationists. It's nowhere that a civilized person would go.

But that's just it: that's what's so extraordinary about America. You can travel 3,000 miles and find less difference in people's attitudes, language, and beliefs than you'd find in 100 miles of travel in England or Europe. You can go to the middle of Idaho or Nevada and find every evidence of the thorough penetration of infrastructure: well-maintained roads, post offices, tract homes, 7-11s, new cars, high-speed Internet. You're just as likely to find some blogging technologist in Butte, Montana as you are to find him in Silicon Valley. Rural America might seem eerily menacing to anyone who has seen Deliverance, but even the backwoods of Kentucky have clean restrooms in the gift shops of the Points of Historical Interest that dot the highways, and everybody speaks intelligible English and mows their lawns and washes their cars.

The uniformity of America is a phenomenon in and of itself-- it's not just a "default" condition, an inevitable result of people not caring enough about their regions' traditions to want to fragment into tribes and evolve into freaky mountain people. It's the result of the unique variables that led to America's formation in the first place-- this specific point in technological and political history-- coinciding with a vast territory being overrun by Europeans desperate for land (and willing to shove the existing native people into a ditch in order to get it), every one of those people bearing the same seeds of entrepreneurship that originally got this country moving. The fact that a burger tastes the same in Minnesota as it does in Arizona is not a failing on the part of America's people to all develop their own ideas about what's important; it's the natural result of a people's common goal realized at the personal level, the desire to succeed and to achieve. We're a people determined to maximize what each of us individually can do, and we happen to have an almost incomprehensibly big agar dish on which we can do it. With such a food-rich environment, small wonder we've become as productive and as greedy and as gluttonous as insatiable for more achievement as we have.

So when a Wal-Mart or an Olive Garden springs up in Butte or Birmingham, where some might see a sitcom parody of authentic culture or mercantile, I see another unprecedented phenomenon-- one of those things that seems weird and scary to anyone who didn't grow up in the middle of it, but which to us is the most natural thing in the world. It's not inherently evil; it's just different from everything that's come before.
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© Brian Tiemann