When I was in the fourth grade, I went
to Disneyworld for the first and only time. For the most part it was
a pretty standard experience. Like all kids, I was both totally pumped and completely
shit-scared on Splash Mountain, I was just as shit-scared on the It's
a Small World ride for completely different reasons, and I somehow
realized, even then, that the Epcot Center reflected a kind of
techno-optimism that already seemed passe, even to a child in 1996.
But my first view of Disneyworld was
Main Street USA. This isn't exactly a hallmark attraction, but it's
what you see when you first come through the gate, and its
equivalent, which I'd experienced much younger, is also what you see
when you first come through the gate at Adventureland in Altoona,
Iowa, where I had my formative funnel cake and log-ride experiences.
And maybe that's because the welcoming
experience is designed to be a comforting, familiar Americana,
reproduced at 3/5 scale. It is an imagined America of the sort that
Ronald Reagan invoked in his speeches about the horse-and-buggy days
in Dixon, Illinois. We want to believe that at some point in America,
there was this transcendent and indivisible notion of community.
Nowadays, we think of the 1950s. But when the first Disney park
opened, in the actual 1950s, the time of nostalgia was the 1910s, a
time when Main Streets were indeed more vital, when small towns were
still served by the railroad. And even
in the 1910s, in the era of Fords and suffragettes, nostalgists
invoked some kind of vaguely Jeffersonian or Jacksonian ideal.
It's hard to escape this particular
cultural delusion. Both left and right political currents continue to
appeal to “Main Street,” despite the fact that this is by and
large a hologram.
Sure, there was a Main Street in my
hometown – the “Main Street Cultural District” as it was
eventually re-branded. What was “cultural” about it I never quite
figured out. What it actually is and was is a strip, a few blocks
long, of largely characterless early 20th Century
buildings, occupied by an American Legion hall, full of shops selling
things like quilting supplies and diabetic footwear, and a clutch of
bars at one end under the shadow of a coal-burning power plant -- an
area I remember from my childhood as a vaguely sinister but somehow
thrilling strip smelling of stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer,
filled with the sound of clacking billiard balls and the roar of
trucks from the nearby lumberyard.
Maybe the people in the 1950s or 1910s
thought differently. But even in the 1910s... that was when Sinclair
Lewis wrote Main Street, the
landmark work about the hypocrisy and loneliness of life in a small
Minnesota town, considered a classic, but increasingly little-read as
that world becomes a memory of a memory.
Yet fewer books
have had a greater impact on me. His store-by-store description of
the Main Street of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota on a hot summer day, as
experienced by the young doctor's wife, Carol Kennicott, of the
rotten bananas in the shop-windows, the feckless locals at the saloon
door, the rusticated masonry designed to provide a semblance of
architectural manners. More than anything else, this seemed to be
something that related to what I knew.
At that age, 15 or
16, I devoured books that seemed to get to that idea, reading nearly
forgotten writers like Sherwood Anderson and Thomas Wolfe and Booth
Tarkington – writers whose books I found on dusty library shelves
and under cats at used bookstores. And I didn't just love them
because they spoke to my experience, I loved them because they seemed
to see through the veil in a way that contemporary writers didn't
(and still by and large don't, but I'll leave that for another day).
We
look to the Main Street iconography nowadays because of the spiritual poverty
and hopelessness of the present, in the same way that people of Lewis' and Anderson's day looked to Main Street because it seemed to represent a purer America than the industrial cities. And more often than it ought to, it
forms the backbone of a grotesque and reactionary politics.
So I decided to go
back to where it all began – not in person, but through the
all-seeing eye of Google Street View. And not to Disneyworld's Main
Street USA, which is probably the same simulacrum it has always been
and always will be, but to the basis for Main Street USA, Walt
Disney's hometown of Marceline, Missouri.
I knew what to
expect. Few areas of America have been as thoroughly depopulated over
the past 100 years as Northern Missouri, an area of soil too poor to
compete with the rich black loam of Northern Iowa and Minnesota, and
rangeland too constricted to compete with the plains of Kansas and
Texas. Lacking in substantive industry, mineral resources other than
a sulfurous coal only suited to steam engines, or towns of any size
to serve as hubs, largely isolated from major transit routes, and
without the mountains and lakes of the southern part of the state
that attract droves of tourists, Northern Missouri, along with
adjacent areas of Southern Iowa and Western Illinois, has become a
dead zone.
What one sees in
Marceline, Missouri, is a town, like many others, destroyed, with a
vacated town square, American flags fluttering outside abandoned
shops.
Meanwhile, in
Anaheim and Orlando, and at the versions Disney has exported to its
properties in the greener pastures of the Far East, it is still a
place of parades and baton-twirlers, barbershop quartets and soda
fountains. Somewhere in the distance, "In My Merry Oldsmobile" or "Daisy Bell" plays.
Most of the clientele has never seen a quartet sing in a barbershop, never been to a soda fountain, and the songs that are playing were hits before even their grandparents were born. But the nostalgia is not their nostalgia, it's the national nostalgia. And like most nostalgias, it acts as a cover for the fact that we have given up hope.
