Main Street USA

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 20^th 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.

Travelers' Conversations

You're on a long trip somewhere, and after a day on the road, you've finally come to a place where you can rest -- maybe it's a coffee shop, or a bar, or the common area of a hostel. The fact that it is a place popular among other travelers is its sole distinguishing characteristic. It doesn't matter what the specifics are, and it certainly doesn't matter what country you're in. This could be Cambodia or Costa Rica, Antwerp or Agra. What matters is the company that you're among.

You have settled in. Maybe your coffee has arrived, or a glass of the local beer.

Suddenly, you realize that someone is looking at you.

"Oh, hey, you're reading that book? Oh my god, I loved it but not as much as I loved The Martian. Have you read The Martian? So much better than the movie, right? Oh you haven't read it? You have to!"

And with that, the book goes on your lap, and you politely smile and nod in assent, neither really agreeing nor disagreeing, nor really giving a shit.

"Oh you were in Laos too? How long? Just a week? I was there for two."

A man with dreads rolling a cigarette in the corner pipes in. "Yeah, Laos was cool. I was there three weeks."

They begin to compare notes. "Yeah, I went on this trek." "Of course I went to the Four Thousand Islands." Another chimes in. "Ohhhhh, well I was supposed to go to Si Phan Don" -- using the Lao name, a surefire way to establish credibility -- "but I had stopped over at this gorgeous riverside temple, and I just couldn't bear to leave."

The variations of this game of one-upsmanship are endless. The most places you've been, of course, is the main competition, but there are countless others. Whether you went somewhere or really went somewhere, really experienced it. The allotted minimum of time needed in a certain place. The roughest country bus rides, the spiciest meals, the foulest local hooch, the friendliest locals, the wildest parties, the most miserable hangovers (contrasted with whatever intense activity they were supposed to be doing that day, which usually involves having to climb a mountain), the most unspoiled beaches, the most overrated destinations, all one great footrace towards some very nebulous and very Eurocentric notion of "authenticity."

There is also, of course, the conflation of a brutal tight-fistedness and transcendence. These conversations tend to be long gripe-fests involving flight deals, discounts, haggling skills, hand-wringing about how much someone overpaid for something, the most exorbitant tourist scams, the best way to avoid said exorbitant tourist scams, and of course beefs with "dumb tourists" (which can generally be interpreted to mean most anyone other than the person speaking).

Somewhere, typically around beer number three, the ethnic divisions start to show. This is where you meet the Japanese tourist who tells you the Rape of Nanking never happened, the Brit who defends his arrogance and pettiness by saying "you don't understand English sarcasm," the German who mutters something about Muslims, the American who loudly and bitterly complains about the lack of vegan and gluten-free options.

When I'm in this situation, this is typically the point where everyone else goes to the club, and I go to bed.

And it's the point where, when I go up to my hotel room and stare at the ceiling, then at my phone, then back at the ceiling. In my cheap room, I can hear the water run through old pipes, see the headlights sweep across the walls, again and again.

I'll be thinking about my own attempts to try to escape the fucking chokehold of late-capitalist expectations, about my own frugality and the very Protestant way in which I see it as a sign that I'm winning, about my own gripes as I travel, about my annoyance at the sanitized tawdriness in Amsterdam, the unsanitized tawdriness in Phnom Penh, about my self-consciousness about my American traits -- the terminology I use, the tendency to act like a big kid while drunk -- about how I get just as pissed at the people I consider to be the dumb tourists.

But then I wake up in the morning. I see the steeple of a Medieval church cutting across the sunrise, or smell baking empanadas from a back alley kitchen entrance, or hear the sounds of drums in a Chinese temple. And in that moment, the breeze crossing my face, it is mine and mine alone.

Mark Fisher and the Haunted Present

In 2017, Mark Fisher took his own life. This was something that was little-noted at the time. Like all too many people, it was only in death that he got the renown he deserved, especially outside his native Britain. 

Like most people, I was late to the party. I only read his landmark work, Capitalist Realism, last year, and found it to be a flawed but ultimately prescient book that described so much of the contemporary cultural landscape, even if obliquely. And it was just recently that I read Ghosts of My Life, a collection of essays on politics, music, film, and literature that describes our cultural landscape so perfectly, less through any kind of overarching vision than by hitting various touchstones, each of them with an elegant and precise critical eye.

If there is a theme, it's his notion of hauntology, a term he cribbed from Jacques Derrida, whom he admits is a frankly impenetrable writer, but which can loosely be described as a nostalgia for a time when a future seemed possible. In a world of incipient climate change, increasing global political uncertainty, and an economic recovery that seems tenuous at best, we are ultimately haunted by the futures that could have been.

This seems like a pretty abstract, even abstruse notion. And yet the more I think about it, the more I have to conclude that we live in an essentially hauntological era.

What we as a public are offered as a route forward is cold comfort. Neoliberal capitalism seems to suggest that progress is purely therapeutic, with physical wellness, self-care, positivity, and mindfulness offered as personal panaceas, an Instagram mentality that means next to fucking nothing when you look at how little is in your bank account. The only social thought given is a sort of woke neoliberalism in which it doesn't matter if you're gay, trans, whatever, as long as you keep buying, keep clicking. In which public shaming of the problematic and cancel culture are the only accessible avenues of justice.

Meanwhile, reactionary ideologies in the form of Trumpian conservatism, Putinist traditionalism, Salafist Islam, and Hindu nationalism allow for a sort of cathartic, collective rage, permitting solidarity, so long as that solidarity is done in the name of the oppression of others. And on the eastern edge of the Asian continent, Xi Jinping's China and Singapore under the People's Action Party (along with authoritarian governments in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines, as well as the essentially-colonized petits régimes in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar) marry exploitative economic theories with brutal political repression and icily efficient technocracy, suggesting that the only way out of the world's current quandaries is through state capitalism.

What Fisher suggests is emphatically not that the past was better (we all know it wasn't), but that the hope that the future would be more enlightened, more rational, more equitable has been decimated. The examples he cites include the music released on the Ghost Box label (Belbury Poly, The Focus Group, etc.) with its samples from 1970s educational films and hypnotic analog synths, or William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, a series of minimalist electronic samples played on modern machinery until they quite literally destroyed themselves as they played.

This same hauntology, Fisher believes, is found in older media too – in films like Memento and The Shining, in '90s jungle music, in the novels of J.G. Ballard which show the human tendency towards base violence triumphing over technological intervention, in the Joy Division albums made when Britain seemed to be teetering on the brink of collapse.

And I see it in the contemporary trends towards ambient music and lo-fi hip-hop. Being an American, my points of reference are more likely to be Ariel Pink, Danny Brown, Death Grips, Laurel Halo, Earl Sweatshirt, Chromatics, or SZA, all of whom seem like their frantically trying to assemble something out of the disused, analog bits of a not-too-distant past. Or in the viscerally disgusting and eerily familiar VHS world of Adult Swim shows like Tim and Eric, or the work of filmmakers like Panos Cosmatos, Nicholas Winding Refn, and Alex Garland who conjure up the imagery of '60s and '70s sci-fi.

 

You could say I'm cherry-picking examples from my own cultural sphere. But isn't it a major feature of the top of the charts too? Really, what's that different about The Weeknd, Drake, or Lana Del Rey, and all of their pop songs composed of distorted fragments of past hopes? Or all the Soundcloud rappers for who try to palliate their anxiety with Xanax and MDMA, only to be left as isolated and fucked up as ever? What's different about the way that young-adult dystopian novels and their filmed versions depict the tragedy of inheriting a world in which promise has been destroyed?

When there is hope, it exists purely in the realm of the magical, the unknowable. We watch Marvel movies because hope on our Earth seems so alien, witchiness and astrology trend because the world around us seems so grim, and mediocre young men buy into the Jordan Peterson bullshit because his brand of pop-Jungianism seems to give them a secret code, and gives them any easy target for blame in feminists and academic postmodernists.

People still have their dreams, after all.

And the horror of the failed present is never stated outright, it is merely alluded to. It is haunted. 

It strikes me as no coincidence that the last golden age of the ghost story was in the late 19^th Century. It was likewise a time of ultimate transition, as the Western world moved from an agricultural to an industrial basis of production, as the urban proletariat became cemented as an entity, as the basis for empire-building were transformed from a primitive, irrational desire for brute conquest to a coldly rational expansion of state and market power.

And in our new Gilded Age, we too are surrounded by ghosts.

Let's Talk About Why Netflix's "Street Food" Sucks

I always give TV shows I watch five episodes to prove themselves. There is so little time on this planet, and especially little time to do the things I love, and so life is too short for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I know that many members of my rough age cohort are less forgiving, but I figure five episodes should give the creators some time to prove themselves, and prove the worth of their characters or plots.

After finishing season 3 of Fargo (which slaps, by the way), I moved onto Netflix's latest venture into becoming the Xhamster of food porn, Street Food. I was interested, not just because I'm an enthusiast for street food the world over, but also because the first episode featured the current doyenne of my adopted city of Bangkok's street-food scene, Jay Fai, queen of the crab omelette.

I should have known what I was getting myself into. You know exactly how everything's gonna go down. Start with a dramatic drone shot of an exotic Asian landscape or a vaguely cyberpunk Asian cityscape, all fluorescent-lit slums and smog-spewing scooters, and then zoom into a market scene of chickens in bamboo cages, elderly women beaming over ropes of garlic. You'll have the local food expert (most likely speaking in English) championing the working-class vendor (most likely speaking in their native language), followed by the inevitable story of personal struggle -- child abuse, poverty, beloved fathers dying of cancer, addiction in the family -- with the vendor eventually tearing up, cameras gleefully rolling.

By and large, food TV is designed to be comfort food in every sense of the word. And to watch it is an act of passive consumption, also in every sense of the word. The high-class version is designed as a marveling at the exoticism and luxuriousness of the products, lurid shots of immaculate sea urchin, the riotous colors of a bowl of Singaporean laksa, a Provençal grandmother lovingly making an aioli in a mortar and pestle. Conversely, the low-class version is a fat fuck shoveling triple cheeseburgers topped with crispy pork belly, gorgonzola, and foie gras into his goateed mouth to guitar riffs (and you can probably guess which fat fuck I'm alluding to here), or some polite, chipper woman with a Colgate smile crafting chemically enhanced product-placement atrocities out of Cool Ranch Doritos and frozen gnocchi.

When there is anything that disrupts the comfort, it's either giddy reality-TV drama of the sort accompanied by dramatic judges' table sound effects (the last place where vocal synths are still used without irony) or maudlin descriptions of personal tragedy. You know, prepackaged feels -- just add water.

Of course, the producers could address how the personal setbacks and disasters reflect social realities and the often unspeakable poverty of urban-slum Southeast Asia. They come, at various points, annoying close to actually saying something -- they could actually open the discussion a bit, and talk even for a minute about the wealth gap in Thailand, religious tensions in India, or the fact that Suharto, who's mentioned as a big fan of the vendor in the Indonesia episode, oversaw the murder of one million fucking people -- but that would be a buzzkill, so any kind of larger issue is barely even mentioned in passing. Jiro Dreams of Sushi, perhaps the glossiest, most opulent food porn ever made, took a beat to discuss how Japan's rapacious appetite for fish was draining the ocean, and placed a critical emphasis on the pressures placed on sons in traditional Japanese society. But in Street Food, nope, instead you just have the tear-jerker story, the actual tears, followed shortly thereafter by the story of individual triumph, told with swelling strings and slow-motion, high-definition onions sizzling in a wok.

The great lie is that we live in the "golden age of television." Sure, The Sopranos ushered in a new era of high quality television liberated from network standards-and-practices doofuses, and likewise liberated from the time constraints of conventional cinema, and I love The Wire, Mad Men, and all the rest just as much as everyone else does. But as more and more shows compete for the "prestige" audience -- including the "prestige documentary" audience, the Wild Wild Country and The Jinx audience -- the result is more and more recycling of prestige tropes instead of actually good television. You get tired, recycled material -- shows like House of Cards and Making a Murderer – that are filmed beautifully, but which have no originality of purpose, no meaningful content, no soul, as sterile and as packaged and as focus-grouped as brands of detergent.

Street Food fits firmly into this rubric. It's like they took the more provocative, more imaginatively produced, more socially conscious food programming pioneered by Anthony Bourdain, David Chang, and Eddie Huang, and turned it into a garish, melodramatic parody. Regrettably, as occurs whenever I encounter any kind of low-caliber creative work, it makes me question whether the things it's imitating were any good to begin with.

This is where I would normally implore you, the reader, to go out and eat some good street food for yourself, and in Bangkok, this is a luxury that we take as a given. My one, sole, remaining hope is that decent food programming actually inspires viewers to go out and explore, but I know full well that the vast majority of viewers who are watching a sushi maestro place a single pristine piece of mitsuba on a glistening pile of salmon roe will be staring at their flat-screen between swigs of Pepsi Max, their television the sole source of light in their living room as the sun goes down, the pixels reflecting off of the half-eaten Chipotle burrito on the glass-top coffee table.

This may sound like a cheap shot, but it's not intended to be one at You the Consumer (and certainly not a shot at the street vendors of the world, bless their souls) so much as Them the Producers. I can't blame people for wanting a bit of escapism, after all, we all do (however that may manifest itself), but I also know that anything this brutally symptomatic of late-stage capitalism is bound to depress the hell out of me. And now that I've watched my five episodes, I'm ready to move on.

The Doomer Meme: A Case Study by Someone Too Old to Comment

It used to be a sign of getting old that you could no longer keep up with new albums as they were being released. I suppose that in the era of Spotify, this is less of an issue than it once was.

Now, the sign seems to be that one can no longer keep up with the meme economy.

I only just became aware of the Doomer meme, which apparently has been making the rounds of the fuck-my-life Internet for the past few months. And has become the topic of a whole Subreddit which seems to consist of sad young men with a fondness for walking around dark places late at night.

The original version, first seen September 16, 2018

As in the Book of Ecclesiastes: nothing new under the Sun. For at least as long as the period known as the “modern,” there have been subcultures that are reliant on the fundamental tension between a vague sense of hope that fails to coalesce into any kind of coherent vision and a more overwhelming sense of impending doom. When I was in high school, there were emo kids. Before then, goths. All the way back to the Dadaists, and before them the youth across Europe with Goethean pretensions who dressed like the titular character of his 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, and perhaps all the way back to Diogenes the Cynic, who jerked off and shat himself in public and then said something along the lines of “sorry for being REAL, you fucking sheeple!”

Some wallow in self-hatred. Others plot grand unworkable theories of human past and future, whether fascist, Maoist, Salafist, or whatever, to invoke some specter of power in the face of powerlessness. And some move on, get married, have kids, live happily ever after.

This is just an iteration in the era of late-capitalist accumulation and climate change, and as far I can tell a relatively small one, one which will in all likelihood barely if at all be remembered by history.

On the one hand, I'm tempted to view this as mawkishness and sentimentality – emotional bathos deployed in lieu of genuine connection – but that's a cheap shot, and ultimately one that comes off as condescending, and much to my horror, condescending to my younger self. For some reason, I'm paying attention. Maybe it's the fact that people are finding a common experience revolving around an inability around a sense of personal failure and misery that doesn't actually seem to fetishize that failure and misery, but instead seem to genuinely want to get better in the face of insurmountable odds. Maybe it's the fact that these seem to be people who realize the bullshit of late capitalism but haven't found a way to articulate it, especially given the absolute drought of humanistic education at the present moment.

And what triggers the most empathy is the having tried and tried again, and still failing. There's the tendency to turn inwards into poorly defined concepts of self-improvement, or into chemical self-medication, or into its close cousin technological self-medication. Which is something that comes so, so close to something that could have happened to me, and that kind of did happen to me.

Particularly, it's the nightwalk concept that actually interests me – another subject that has its own Subreddit – which given the isolated young men with poor prospects that seem to be attracted to this particular form of communication, often tends to be the aggressively bland streets of suburban and exurban and small-town America.

And I can so distinctly remember the vibe of isolated walks around a town in Iowa, tract housing and highway bypasses, a Panera and a Long John Silver's and a Hobby Lobby, the cardboard signs for discounts on 30-racks of Natty Ice and cartons of USA Gold cigarettes, the frigid fluorescent lights over rows of Monster energy drinks, the flash of an old boxcar – Denver, Rio Grande, and Southern – an iconic design from another era, a poem from the past, the bilious lights coming on in the old hotel downtown, peering into the lives of its residents, an ancient man with a bottle of Cutty Sark in the window, a mentally disabled woman in her 30s with a hacked-off blonde bob and a stained pink hoodie, seeing them look out into the February night and wondering what the fuck they saw in it all.

The only difference is that instead of listening to Soundcloud rappers and Spotify ambient mixes, I was listening to a Limewire'd and burned CD of Godspeed You Black Emperor's F#A# (infinity).

I avoided the worst. I didn't become an insufferable gamer, a vile political reactionary, an otaku. I became someone who more or less passes in polite society. But there's a performative quality to it, and nothing will shatter the mask more than, say, listening to a song I like on Youtube, only to have it followed up by an ad with a cheerful voice telling me to buy Head and Shoulders. And at the end of the day, I find a greater sense of kindred understanding in a W.G. Sebald novel, a Joan Didion essay, or a Joy Division album than anything else.

Nation Without a Name

Ask the average American what they know about Taiwan. The first thing you'll probably hear is something along the lines of “where your shit comes from,” vague memories of “Made in Taiwan” stamped onto the plastic undercarriages of the Matchbox cars they had as kids.

And of course many will know about the country's occupation of a gray zone in international law, the fact that it doesn't officially exist as an independent entity, the legitimate government of the Republic of China in the eyes of certain old Kuomintang stalwarts, the group marching under the banner of “Chinese Taipei” at the Olympics, a requirement for awkward phrasing for all but the 17 of the world's recognized sovereign states who still regard the Taipei government as the legitimate single China.

Until not very long ago at all, my response wouldn't have been much different. Because to Western eyes, the country is a cipher, a country people know, but seem to know little about, and even fewer visit.

Which means that like all ciphers, it can be visited without preconception. TripAdvisor can only take you so far. Without knowing all that scaffolding that typically constitutes “nationhood” in the popular imagination – an awareness of traditional culture, literature, film, pop music, cuisine, iconic architecture, and natural scenery – you're at a loss.

Even after spending some time in the country, it was hard to create a cogent metaphor, a unified image. I suppose Taipei 101, one of the world's tallest buildings, and the tallest from its construction in 2004 until the completion of the Burj Khalifa in 2010, functions as something of a national landmark. I didn't go.

Instead, I explored the back streets of Taipei, the dizzying night markets where patient queues serve as a rough metric for quality and local reputation, the neon alleys of Ximen pulsing with Mandarin pop music, the banyan trees and decrepit arcades of the older quarters, the grand shopping boulevards of Da'an, the mouldering mid-century architecture, a legacy of the importance of Taiwan in the old Japanese colonial empire, the militarist aspirations of both early Showa Period Japan and the corporatist governance of the country in the wake of the Chinese Revolution.

Outside the city, the West Coast of the island forms a great megacity, town after town blending into one another, apartment complexes and light industrial parks punctuated by tiny fields of rice and pineapple between them, never either fully urban or fully rural, managed with the mindset of a nation with a bare minimum of arable land.

And the East Coast is wild and rocky, cut apart by steep canyons between high mountains of heavily warped schist and gneiss, a testament to the country's position on multiple fault lines, a landscape the Japanese army lost countless men trying to build roads across, still remote enough for there not to be a public transit route that crosses the mountain ranges that divide the island.

That lazy old line from geography textbooks, “a land of contrasts.”

With transportation being dirt-cheap, I managed to get in quite a few miles. To the little town of Jiufen, supposedly (although apparently not) Hayao Miyazaki's inspiration for Spirited Away, with its black beamed tea-houses and hanging red lanterns that dance in the anabatic winds that blow up the mountain off the Pacific. To Shifen, with its waterfall, its fire balloons, its train going down the middle of the street to save space in the narrow gorge of the townsite. On a boat across Sun Moon Lake, where branches full of cherry blossoms hung low over turquoise-bright water. Over the Zhuilu Old Road, through the Taroko Gorge, where I clung to a narrow cliff face over a 1000-meter drop to the valley floor. Up rough trails through forests of palms, bamboo, cedar, laurel, and pine as I ascended higher and higher, and through Taiwanese aboriginal villages where woven-rattan walls still enclosed yards of clucking chickens, the faces of the forest gods carved into trees, the birthplace of the Austronesian peoples before they migrated south and west as far as Madagascar, east as far as Easter Island. On a rickety train through the half-abandoned coal mining towns above Ruifang, where old murals of merry citizens living the legacy of Sun Yat-Sen were left to gather grime along the railway sidings, where at the little free library on the station platform, about 30 books were made available to take or borrow, the only one I recognized being a Chinese translation of the Marquis de Sade's The 100 Days of Sodom.

I ate incredibly strange meal after incredibly strange meal. Noodles with pig intestines, boar in numerous forms, shoved into fatty sausages and served on skewers with cumin, massive sugar apples and durians, sausage stuffed with mullet roe, a stew of beef tendons and tripe, smoked shark, raw duck, the hearts, livers, and gizzards of geese, a sweet green bean drink, country millet wine, “lovers' tears” algae, pig blood cakes, lotus greens, some kind of funky identified slop wrapped in sticky rice that apparently merited a 20-minute wait in the eyes of the locals, raw squid with mayo, “mountain pepper” that tasted less like pepper than Kix cereal soaked in limoncello, venison stir-fried with celery, multiple kinds of fern, and the national dish, stinky tofu, both in its fried form (edible, if not something I'll seek out again, a testament to the egalitarianism of the deep fryer) and its stewed form (which smells like wet dog and has a texture like overcooked scrambled eggs).

But beyond the concept of Taiwan, I also had to address the larger concept of China.

When Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek's armies crossed the strait to what was then widely known by the old Portuguese name, Ilha Formosa (the beautiful island) and its outlying islands, the Pescadores (the fishermen), they claimed to be the sole legitimate inheritors of this very old idea, the idea of China.

The National Palace Museum sits on a high slope in the Taipei suburb of Shilin, and it's where the treasures of the Forbidden City were either absconded with (according to the People's Republic government) or preserved (according to the ROC government), and carefully arranged in rotating exhibits, only a fraction of the museum's vast holdings being shown at any one time.

Anyone who's ever dealt with the influx of Mainland Chinese tourists in Southeast Asia knows the score. Like Americans in Europe in the '50s, suddenly finding themselves moneyed, they behave, by and large, like absolute pigs. The Ugly American has become the Ugly Chinese in this part of the world. Sure, you could blame Mao Zedong's seizure of the Nanjing capital in 1949 and the chaos that ensued in its wake, but the truth is that Chinese civilization had been in decline for centuries... what Mao inherited was a culture on the verge of exhaustion.

Yet in the National Palace Museum, you see wonders you couldn't imagine... delicate jades, intricate strolls, pottery in the most gorgeous shades of cobalt-blue, celadon, saffron, vermilion, and aquamarine, with detail on a level that almost makes you think they had 3D printing technology to achieve this degree of mechanical intricacy. The realization hits that Ming Dynasty China was the most refined civilization the world has ever seen, and in all likelihood, ever will see. Nothing like this will probably ever exist again.

Then, a tour-group member comes by and is taking a video of the every exhibit on her phone, not even bothering to look at the damn art.

I thought of Napoleon on Elba, the man who commanded armies now stranded on an obscure island, of Thibaw Min, the last king of Burma left to rot in a port town in India, living off a government stipend and occasionally appearing in ads for cigars.

I boarded a plane at Taoyuan International Airport, did a little light duty-free shopping, looked through my notes and my few photos. Schist canyons, Tang Dynasty scrolls, boiled goose hearts.

And I thought of the dialogue in Calvino's Invisible Cities between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, whose relics I'd probably seen:

“Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks.

'The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,' Marco answers, 'but by the line of the arch that they form.'

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.'

Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch.'”

The Politics of Horniness: A Study in Internet Anthropology

It seems strange to me how people seem to forget that it has its own anthropology. Given the infinite number of niches one can occupy, it seems inevitable that communities arise, each with their own vocabulary, strictures, taboos, cultural patterns, and general ethos. And one obscure Reddit community, for instance, can reflect something odd about the cultural landscape at the present moment.

DuckDuckGo is a particularly useful search engine for online ethnographic research. Not only do you not get your more fucked up searches mingled with your Google search history, but given the anonymity of it, you aren't forced into a filter bubble. Furthermore, the search algorithm is just screwy enough to send you to the wrong place sometimes.

I don't even remember what I was looking for, but I knew it had nothing to do with feet, or with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and yet first page of search results, there it was. WikiFeet, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Huh.

It was a remarkably active community. Which made sense -- if there are active forums dedicated to leaked nudes of celebrities, revenge porn posted by grumpy exes, upskirts of Korean secretaries, the bikini shots of girls of questionable age, etc., then the population of foot fetishists, which is larger than many imagine, would concordantly have its own forum for porn that isn't porn as such, but is consumed pornographically. Especially given the fact that most people aren't particularly bothered about covering their feet.

I wasn't quite sure what I was expecting, but it was mostly innocuous shots of the young congresswoman at official functions.

What was less innocuous was the comment section, and what I found so fascinating is that despite the fact that, according to at least one recent survey I'd seen, Americans as a whole had a generally positive impression of the representative (although men surveyed leaned slightly against her, with 52 percent having a "strongly" or "somewhat" unfavorable perception), the dedicated foot fetish community had a decidedly different opinion.

“Why do Socislists [sic] ( OPPS [sic] I MEAN LIBERALS ) look like this. While Conservative Women Actually look Hot.”

Of course, she had her defenders too, and there were also a few old souls who actually were able to separate her ideology from her feet, but interestingly, she didn't seem to have any fans of her politics who disliked her feet – granted, a quick overview of the forum suggested that its users skew strongly rightward (I thought about doing a detailed analysis of this, but the idea of putting together an Excel sheet based on a fetish website was unspeakably depressing) – but this shows that Internet denizens on the left are likewise largely unable to separate their political stance from their dicks.

This is nothing new – how long have Fox News et al been propping up archetypally blonde conservative commentators? Or how long have thirsty right-wingers lusted after Mediterranean bombshells in the IDF armed with Uzis?
 
As I was preparing this piece, I was informed by an acquaintance that there had been an actual incident in which a supposed quasi-nude of AOC was actually debunked by the Wikifeet community as a fake. The investigator who reported his results to Vice went into frankly clinical levels of depth. And it makes you wonder why this level of forensic scrutiny isn't being as applied as it should be to things unrelated to things that give Internet men a funny feeling in their pants.

Of course that happened, I thought.

But alas, all of these things have been exacerbated. We live in a world in which a mass shooter in New Zealand screams “Subscribe to Pewdiepie!” and the head of the Gambino Crime Family was killed not by a rival mafioso, but by some 24 year old QAnon dork.

And just today I found out that Elon Musk released a Soundcloud rap about Harambe. Shut the fuck up.

This is of course the danger of being extremely online. Everything is real, everything is false, and above all else everything seems a parody of everything else.

Perhaps this truly is the modern incarnation of the Athenian agora, as those early '90s net-optimists said it would be. But it isn't in the way they thought it would be. Because let us remember that in those open squares under the sunny Peloponnesian sky, while Plato taught his pupils that he had nothing to learn from the mountains and city life made man free, most of the gawkers around him were probably watching a guy eat dog turds for drachmas.