Instruments of the Apocalypse: Culture-Killers

There is a zen saying that goes something like this: "Wherever you go, there you are."

It's one of those things that has always intoned for me the importance of being good and true to oneself. It doesn't matter where you end up, because it will always be YOU there. Essentially, the world is what you make it.

I like thinking that. I take comfort in my internal locus of control, and I am a firm believer in the concept of reciprocal determinism (thank you Albert Bandura).

There just comes a time, however, when the life we bring to the party just isn't enough, where we find ourselves trapped in a place so lifeless, so insipid, so completely drained of color and originality that we begin to assimilate with the dreary landscape, becoming Bland Borgs of Boredom.

You wonder where this is?

Sadly, in my opinion, all you really have to do is take pretty much any random exit ramp from any U.S. freeway, and you've found it. The standard features are typically as follows:

McDonald's/Burger King
Denny's/Applebee's/Red Lobster/Olive Garden
Chevron/Shell/Texaco/Exxon/7-11
And of course the overly ubiquitous Wal-Mart and/or Target.

These are fixtures on the American landscape that we not only come to expect wherever we go, but we feel deprived when they are not there. How many times have I caught myself saying in the course of travelling: "Let's keep going until we find a McDonald's [or other familiar restaurant]." or "Oh there's [insert massive chain name here] at the next exit. We'll go there."

How common and trite we've shaped our world. How dependent we've all become on the mass-produced, stamped out of the assembly line predictability of these places. We've become saturated with the sense of security provided to us by nameless faces and faceless names who could care less who we are, so long as we're willing to keep filling their pockets with money if they offer us the right prices and the right names.

Of course many will say that American culture has always made itself a sort of walking advertisement for its own ingenuity; it should be considered a beacon and a blessing that we have been able, as a people, to create such monolithic symbols as Ronald McDonald and Sam Walton's great blue hope, because certainly- at least up until recently- you couldn't ever get Nachos Belgrande in Iraq! It just stops being a positive force for me whenever I feel like wherever I go, the only things that make those places worth being at are the same "comforts" I've left behind.

It's all starting to feel so homogenized and generic. Everything is sponsored by a massive company. There is no such thing as just an ordinary sports stadium named after its own team. It's just a building carrying the bannerhead of the biggest financial contributer on the outside, and when we hear the name Qwest Field (that's the Seattle Seahawks stadium for those not sure), instead of invoking the spirit of the team playing inside, we think of a fucking phone company. Yay!

So yes, wherever we go, there we are. Only I feel like I'm becoming more like the lifeless things that are there, and pretty soon it'll feel like there is no determinism to reciprocate, because both sides will eventually be the same.

And that, Congenial Readers, will really really suck.