Stepping into rural America is like entering another reality.
The place I visited was a small town, O’Fallon, MI. I remember it from my childhood as a place of wonder. Perhaps it was because I only visited on few occasions, and the sprawl had not yet consumed all of the empty spaces. Now, all life, all originality, was absorbed by mundane chains of stores and restaurants that sprawled across the plains. They seem to stretch into infinity, continually repeating. If one continues to drive, they may well pass the same store, same restaurant, over and over again. Endlessly, the same emerges and disappears on the horizon. It produces a sense of deja vu that embodies the echo — a feeling of being trapped in a maze in which at every turn, you arrive at the same crossroad. An aura of hopelessness hovers like a fog that unconsciously saturates all aspects of life.
There seems to be no chance to make an impact. You are trapped in the repetitive constructs. All variance is absorbed, and those who exist there must feed the repetition in order to survive. For you do not only consume the echo, you become the echo. You must succumb to it; else, you risk becoming an anomaly that the system will not permit. Few manage to escape, but most are not so lucky.
Every restaurant entered has a staff that repeats the same corporate slogans, the same hopeless introduction. Below that programmatic behavior is a real human being, but they are shackled by the chains they work for, they must be the brand. There is no ability to individualize in such a place, as all must be absorbed. The sullen expression on the waitress’s face is a hidden cry for help, and I want to answer, but I sadly realize there is not much I can do. Cognitive firewalls prevent the truth from finding its way to the surface, and generation after generation myths are passed down that are required to survive in such a place.
I now live in a realm that is entirely the opposite, yet in so many ways, it is the same. The “individualized” coterie in large cities like Austin, San Francisco, New York, etc. embody a different kind of deja vu. It is not the same as the rural echo, which is based on the repetition of space and corporate development. So much is visibly different. Chain restaurants bleed away in the large cities and instead become bespoke, hip, and vibrantly local. However, that is what is seen on the surface. The larger cities may have transcended the endless horizontal sprawl by building vertically, but they are enslaved by a new form of echo, the ideological echo, the vertical dimension.
People here are not trapped in the material plane as much as in the plane of ideas. Deja vu is experienced as one speaks to another, as socialization becomes a new form of liberation. Yet, in the end, many of the thoughts discussed are echos all the same. There are no corporations pushing one to say the words, there is no training involved, these people willingly echo. They believe they are more elite because they have lifted themselves above the repetition of space, but they are enslaved by the repetition of thought. They embody the echo chambers that plague social media, which, like a virus, finds its way into physical socialization. Everything is echoed, and nothing is produced. It’s the same in rural Missouri or bustling Austin, but by different modalities. Space is the mode of repetition in suburban life (horizontal) and ideology in urban life (vertical).
The grand illusion is that the people within progressive and gentrified areas believe they have transcended spatial banality, which they may have. But they embody deja vu more purely. The material plane acts as a series of symbols that reinforce the echo, but in the ideological plane, there are no physical symbols, just ideas. There is no excuse to subscribe to echos once spatial repetition is left behind. Our liberation, promised by wealth and vertical freedom, imprisoned us even more. Instead of taking this liberation and becoming individualized, we assimilate into a myriad of ideological hives that grow and harden over time.
I feel there may be more hope in rural areas than I initially believed. Freedom can come much easier for those in physical shackles — simply break them. But for those who have become imprisoned in their own mind, it is a much harder task. When shall we wake from this delusion?
