So tonight I found out about the proposed right wing Disneyland in Oklahoma. Sorta.
Oh my GOD I'm putting this thing in my fucking video game. Are you fucking KIDDING me I already have a fucking Route 66 motif going on in-between all of my games Oh My Fucking God oh my fucking god. Holy shit thank you so much for bringing this stupid piece of shit nightmare theme park to my attention. This is like. SO FUCKING PERFECT. It's like, SO FUCKING CLOSE to Afton, Oklahoma, too, which is where the finale of my last game was set. 17 minute drive. I mean what the fuck.
Okay, hang on, let me explain why this is perfect. So Route 66 is this perfect encapsulation of the American destruction of "places to fucking go" that the midwest sort of exemplifies in my mind (if you've ever been to Marion, Ohio, or god forbid the suburban sprawl, you'll know why I say that the midwest exemplifies it). Route 66 is this road with a bunch of small towns with friendly small businesses to stop at. And it has this history around the dust bowl that's interesting, and all of these towns were supported exclusively by the fact that Route 66 stopped at it. And then they built the I-40, which completely skips over all of these towns, and they all fucking died. Economically they all withered away and nobody goes there anymore, save for people who want to "do route 66". But people just driving in-between states? They don't see the towns anymore, they take the Interstate, which is a straight shot through. So you literally ONLY get tourists. You can actually watch it happen on the population maps of all these towns, too, you've got an increase in population up until the 1950s, the I-40 gets built in 1956, and then boom, everyone fucks off since the town can't support businesses anymore.
So, the result of this in part is this further commercialization of our liminal spaces. Like, on the I-40, all of the places to stop at aren't owned by small businesses, it's always some chain, and it's hostile. It's all gas station shit, they're trying to get you in and out as quickly as possible. And you can feel the difference, too, you stop at these small towns and it's a business by, like, some guy who likes Route 66 and they're always nice, and they're always welcoming, and it's a liminal space just like gas stations and airports as you know them, but it isn't hostile. And that's what's weird about Route 66, is that it's absolutely, at this point, an attempt by large corporations to destroy small businesses, and they've mostly succeeded. There are some holdouts but these towns are, like, 150 population towns with nothing but closed small businesses and maybe an antiques shop, which is one of the only types of business that can economically survive on Route 66.
If you've ever wondered why "liminal space" has this reputation where it just means "creepy location", this is why. It's because most liminal spaces are hostile chain-businesses. The general store in Rabbit Hash, KY, for example, is also a liminal space, but it doesn't have any such reputation because it's actually fucking pleasant to be at. So Route 66 becomes this symbol of the further commercialization of the spaces we're allowed to exist in, of the mallfucking of America, in its death at the hands of the I-40 and the thousands of corporate chains that immediately set up shop at the points the I-40 does stop at, driving everyone else out of business. It ultimately becomes defined by how all of the corporations immediately seized on that opportunity to build one hundred thousand of the same business copy-pasted ad infinitum along the new interstate. Route 66 is a monument to its own death.
And so to build a stupid, fuckoff, chintzy theme park based on that dead culture, to go and completely fucking misidentify the problem as being "a lack of patriotism" is so goddamn poetic. Because classical America, the thing Boomers are all nostalgic for, is like, "Going to the general store and I knew everyone in the store and Ms. Johnson who worked at the counter used to give me a penny candy when I was 3". It's entirely small-town "spaces to exist in that aren't actively hostile". Spaces which capitalism, more specifically corporatization, ended up fucking killing at some point in the past. The theme park is literally a fake little town center because they miss a time when people who lived in a town owned the businesses in the town, and you could therefore go to places that were trying to be vaguely pleasant to be at instead of profit-maximizing. And now this cocksucker is spending two billion dollars to sell a façade of an un-mallfucked America to people who never had it in the first place? Dear god is that something. To try and sell you a version of the country whose throat they slit, and by they I do literally mean the specific guy who is funding the park, who made his money literally making chain pizza places that drove out local businesses which he is doing ON THE ROAD THAT IS A FUNCTIONAL SYMBOL OF THE CORPORATIZATION OF AMERICA is so fucking poetic. It's an aggressively corporate vision of something whose ONLY VALUE is in not being corporate. By definition they can only provide a hollow shell of what they're promising, because what they're promising is "a nice place to be in", but they're building a theme park which HAS to try and get you in and out as quickly as possible to even work. You can't stop and chat with the cashier, they'll have people in line behind you to deal with. You certainly can't stop and have a 30 minute conversation with whoever owns the store, and THAT'S THE THING THEY'RE NOSTALGIC FOR. Not the surface-level shit, not the fucking architecture, the actual human connection. The minimal connection to where one lives, to ones' community, that used to exist and now basically doesn't. The last remnants of even theoretically being able to feel connected to the place you live that were, eventually, wiped the fuck out by corporatization and now your community looks like everyone else's community and even the businesses are owned by the same nine corporations. And Route 66 is a powerful symbol of that corporatization and they're building corporate nostalgia-bait for the times before corporate nostalgia-bait nothing-places, a stupid self-consuming paradox of a location.
The problem isn't that "people aren't patriotic", it's that there's nothing to be patriotic about! What the fuck is there in this country that I'm supposed to love? The fucking Denny's? The ten thousand Wal-Mart stores? Seventy quadrillion square miles of fucking asphalt & corn? What have we built that I should fucking love? We let capitalism eat the entire goddamn country & now there's nothing, and it hasn't even brought anyone any fucking benefit! Now people don't have access to the shit they need, and they could! And what, I'm supposed to be fucking patriotic? That's the fucking problem? Seventy thousand miles of asphalt & people don't have food & we're at war always & insulin is too goddamn expensive & I can't even get fucking estrogen & for goddamn what? Infinite fucking Little Caesars' locations copy-pasted across a desolate fucking landscape?
And they don't get that. They don't. You don't build a theme park called "American Heartland" if you know what people are actually nostalgic for. And even if they got it, even if they might do a good job providing people a dose of connection to a local community, which they clearly will not, it wouldn't sell. A generation of kids raised on YouTube rich boys throwing their money around & asphalt nothing don't care about that. I don't even care about that enough to go to a theme park, and I have the sensibilities of a 50 year old. I don't remember feeling connected to America, or to my hometown. It wasn't a thing when I was a kid. I don't miss it because I never had it to begin with. Most people my age don't even know that connection to the businesses in your community ever existed. It's nostalgia-bait for a dying generation. It's Agamemnon trying to sell a façade of Troy to Cassandra. It's fucking fascinating and ironic and powerful in its utter mediocrity as an actual location against the backdrop of what it represents. And it's clear to me that this thing is going to leave a beautiful fucking corpse.
Sorry for writing a fucking essay this shit hit me HARD. I mean WOW.
