Mall Of America Quotes

Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.

Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average, the total walking of an American these days - that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls - adds up to 1.4 miles a week...That's ridiculous.

Everyone in America is extremely concerned with hydration. Go more than five minutes without drinking, and you’ll surely be discovered behind a potted plant, dried out like some escaped hermit crab. When I was young no one would think to bring a bottle of water into a classroom. I don’t think they even sold bottled water. We survived shopping trips without it, and funerals. Now, though, you see people with those barrels that Saint Bernards carry around their necks in cartoons, lugging them into the mall and the movie theater, then hogging the fountains in order to refill them. Is that really necessary?

I couldn't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to 'confront [my] mortality' bore a striking resemblance to the mall.

On average the total walking of an American these days--that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls--adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That's ridiculous.

Drenched in café au lait stucco, the mall was bordered by an example of America’s most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot

Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota.

Our battlefield is on the street and in the heart. The mass shootings in churches, schools, movie theaters, and malls are the opposite face of the same coin: too many guns, too little preventive intervention. This is a mental health issue, a security issue, and the greatest moral issue in America today. Where are the voices of our religious leaders, calling down the failure of legislators and government to face this blight? If this is not a pro-life issue, what on God’s earth is it?

When I emailed an archive for a picture of what was arguably America’s first shopping center, the librarian wrote back with the needed links and added, “As a child of the 1990s, I’ve got many a fond memory of the mall, including the fad kiosks (pogs, especially).

Cruise through the gargantuan sites—YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo!—and it’s as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web’s aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America.

Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.

Now here’s a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days—that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls—adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That’s ridiculous.

Everyone in America is extremely concerned with hydration. Go more than five minutes without drinking, and you’ll surely be discovered behind a potted plant, dried out like some escaped hermit crab. When I was young no one would think to bring a bottle of water into a classroom. I don’t think they even sold bottled water. We survived shopping trips without it, and funerals. Now, though, you see people with those barrels that Saint Bernards carry around their necks in cartoons, lugging them into the mall and the movie theater, then hogging the fountains in order to refill them. Is that really necessary? I think as I stand behind them with an aspirin dissolving in my mouth, fuming.

You’re just propagandists of a different ilk—for making the world flat, turning everywhere into copies of suburban America, studded with malls.

Unlike the God whose name begins with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis. Can you imagine that? Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb—silenced, driven away, enfeebled. Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin. Feeble—but not dead, not wholly extinguished. Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days that place will be pulsing with life again. Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons. The god knows how to take care of that place. It will never be what it was before—but nothing is ever what it was before. It doesn’t need to be what it was before. You’ll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived. This is nonsense. What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time. There is no such form and never will be any such form. Everything here is on the way. Everything here is in process.

On average the total walking of an American these days—that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls—adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day.

At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies—cotton—was America’s primary export. The richest men in America lived in the Mississippi River Valley, and they made their riches off our stolen bodies. Our bodies were held in bondage by the early presidents. Our bodies were traded from the White House by James K. Polk. Our bodies built the Capitol and the National Mall. The first shot of the Civil War was fired in South Carolina, where our bodies constituted the majority of human bodies in the state. Here is the motive for the great war. It’s not a secret.

The culture of the Old West, if it ever really did exist, had been tamed and replaced by the uniformity of the Walmart–strip mall–McDonald’s homogenizing of America. It was happening in Minnesota, too. Hell, it was happening everywhere in the world.

Now here's a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked further than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days--that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls--adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day, That's ridiculous.

Mindlessly do the bells of secular celebrations jingle for Christmas. Meaninglessly do carols repeat their tinny joys in all the malls in America. No richer than soda pop is every sentimentalized Christmas special on TV. Fearless is the world at play with godly things, because Godless is its heart.

stand here today as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure, that it will prevail, that the dream of our founders will live on in our time. Barack Obama At the Lincolm Memorial concert on National Mall in Washington, January 18, 2009, two days before his inauguration as US President.

I told her stories. They were only a sentence long, each one of them. That’s all I knew how to find. So I told her broken stories. The little pieces of broken stories I could find. I told her what I could. I told her that the Global Alliance had issued more warnings about the possibility of total war if their demands were not met. I told her that the Emperor Nero, from Rome, had a giant sea built where he could keep sea monsters and have naval battles staged for him. I told her that there had been rioting in malls all over America, and that no one knew why. I told her that the red-suited Santa Claus we know — the regular one? — was popularized by the Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. I told her that the White House had not confirmed or denied reports that extensive bombing had started in major cities in South America. I told her, “There’s an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we’re all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there’s nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.

To we moderns the sensation of being in a constructed environment is so ubiquitous as to be invisible—in the cocoon of our strip malls and automobiles, we are like the fish that cannot feel the water through which they swim. In Cahokia’s day it was different. A thousand years ago it was the only place for a thousand miles in which one could be completely enveloped in an artificial landscape.

What nobody anticipated fully was that both politics and religion would adopt the characteristics of the modern marketplace, that this would bring them into contact with each other, to the detriment of both, and that they would meet inevitably in the heart of Idiot America. Today, with the rise of the megachurch faithful and the interminable meddling in secular politics by various mall rat Ezekiels whose theological credibility is calculated by the number of vacant parking spaces they have on a Sunday, we have a market-deformed politics influenced by a market-diluted religion. Niches are created and products tailored to fill the niches. While modern evangelical Christianity has undeniable historical roots, its explosion over the past thirty years is a triumph of the Gospel According to Wal-Mart.

Drenched in café au lait stucco, the mall was bordered by an example of America’s most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot. Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisment for the pursuit of happiness.

The idea that America is one great shopping mall, and that all anyone wants to do is, you know, grasp their credit card and run out and buy stuff is a stereotype, and it’s a generalization but, but but as a way to summarize a certain kind of ethos in the U.S., it’s pretty accurate. [...] Language like that, the wounded inner child, the inner pain, is part of the kind of pop psychological movement in the, in the United-States, that is a sort of popular Freudianism, that, that has its own paradox which is that the more we are thought to list and resent the things of which we were deprived as children, the more we live in that anger and frustration and the more we remain children. For young people in America, there are very mixed messages from the culture, that, there is a streak of moralism in American life that extol the virtues of being grown up and having a family and being a responsible citizen, but there is also the sense of… of . Do what you want, Gratify your appetites because of … of when I’m a corporation appealing to the parts of you that are selfish and self-centered and want to have fun all the time is the best way to sell you things, right?” ZDF German Television Interview

American cold war culture represented an age of anxiety. The anxiety was so severe that it sought relief in an insistent, assertive optimism. Much of American popular culture aided this quest for apathetic security. The expanding white middle class sought to escape their worries in the burgeoning consumer culture. Driving on the new highway system in gigantic showboat cars to malls and shopping centers that accepted a new form of payment known as credit cards, Americans could forget about Jim Crow, communism, and the possibility of Armageddon. At night in their suburban homes, television allowed middle class families to enjoy light domestic comedies like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver. Somnolently they watched representations of settled family life, stories where lost baseball gloves and dinnertime hijinks represented the only conflicts. In the glow of a new Zenith television, it became easy to believe that the American dream had been fully realized by the sacrifice and hard work of the war generation. American monsters in pop culture came to the aid of this great American sleep. Although a handful of science fiction films made explicit political messages that unsettled an apathetic America, the vast majority of 'creature features' proffered parables of American righteousness and power. These narratives ended, not with world apocalypse, but with a full restoration of a secure, consumer-oriented status quo. Invaders in flying saucers, radioactive mutations, and giant creatures born of the atomic age wreaked havoc but were soon destroyed by brainy teams of civilian scientists in cooperation with the American military. These films encouraged a certain degree of paranoia but also offered quick and easy relief to this anxiety... Such films did not so much teach Americans to 'stop worrying and love the bomb' as to 'keep worrying and love the state.

She was familiar with a certain type of American crazy. Gun crazy was normal to her, shooting-kids-at-school or putting-on-a-Joker-mask-and-mowing-people-down-in-a-mall or just plain murdering-your-mom-at-breakfast crazy, Second Amendment crazy, that was just the everyday crazy that kept going down and there was nothing you could do about it if you loved freedom; and she understood knife crazy from her younger days in the Bronx, and the knockout-game type of crazy that persuaded young black kids it was cool to punch Jews in the face. She could comprehend drug crazy and politician crazy and Westboro Baptist Church crazy and Trump crazy because those things, they were the American way, but this new crazy was different. It felt 9/11 crazy: foreign, evil.

Trip Advisor: Travel America with Haiku [Texas] Grackles roosting, sentinels on miles of phone line. Don't Mess with Texas. Austin rush hour, "Go down Mopac. You don't wanna mess with I-35." Athens, Texas, Blackeyed Pea Capital of the World. Yup, just another shithole. Killeen, Texas, Kill City, Boyz from Fort Hood. Spending every paycheck. Texas A&M;, Aggies football, the wired 12th man. Too lazy to plant in the Spring. Fredericksburg, Texas. Polka Capital of Texas but I could swear I saw Hitler there. Ft. Worth, Texas, Where the West Begins and a great place to leave. San Antonio, Texas, Fiesta! Alamo City! Northstar Mall! I've been to better tourist traps. Dallas, Texas, D-Town, City of Hate. Don't miss the Galleria. Lubbock, Texas, Oil wells, Hub of the Plains. Stinks like an armpit. Waco, Texas, The Buckle of the Bible Belt. Lossen it up a notch. Neck dragon tattoo, piercings, purple haired kindergarten teacher. Keep Austin weird.

And then we went out to see the town. I was particularly eager to have a look at Gatlinburg because I had read about it in a wonderful book called The Lost Continent. In it the author describes the scene on Main Street thus: “Walking in an unhurried fashion up and down the street were more crowds of overweight tourists in boisterous clothes, with cameras bouncing on their bellies, consuming ice-creams, cotton candy, and corn dogs, sometimes simultaneously.” And so it was today. The same throngs of pear-shaped people in Reeboks wandered between food smells, clutching grotesque comestibles and bucket-sized soft drinks. It was still the same tacky, horrible place. Yet I would hardly have recognized it from just nine years before. Nearly every building I remembered had been torn down and replaced with something new—principally, mini-malls and shopping courts, which stretched back from the main street and offered a whole new galaxy of shopping and eating opportunities. In The Lost Continent I

If you are an evangelical reading this book, then I would ask you to look around and see what your witness has wrought. The nation is polarized. The candidates you back want to take us back to a mythical time—apparently the 1950s—that honestly did not exist. The bile and hatred of some of the leaders you emulate make it impossible for people to believe whatever witness you have left. While you are clinging to God and guns, mothers are clinging to pictures of children who have been shot dead in classrooms, in streets, in malls, in cars. More people go hungry today than ever before. Inequality is mounting. Calls for law and order mean more Black and Brown bodies dead at the hands of the police. The nation’s infrastructure is failing. Disdain for science has left America behind during a pandemic, while the rest of the world moves forward. The president you followed slavishly declared “American carnage” in his inaugural speech. Look around. You helped make this carnage we now experience. All of these things have occurred because evangelicals, through religious lobbying and interference, supported the political structures that curtailed, limited, or struck down truly important issues. The polarization we are experiencing in government has stymied progress. That polarization has taken on a resemblance to ideological and theological battles. Your nationalistic evangelicalism is hurting others. Your racism is actively engaged in killing bodies and souls. My analysis and prognostications may be dire, but it is never too late to make amends.

There was major u.s. imperialist support for Italian, Spanish and German fascism before and even during World War II, as opposed to support for fascism at home. Fascism was distinct from racism or white supremacy, which were only "as American as apple pie." Neither the ruling class nor the white masses had any real need for fascism. What for? There was no class deadlock paralyzing society. There already was a longstanding, thinly disguised settler dictatorship over the colonial proletariat in North America. In the u.s. settlerism made fascism unnecessary. However good or bad the economic situation was, white settlers were getting the best of what was available. Which was why both the white Left and white Far Right alike back then in the 1930s were patriotic and pro-American. Now only the white Left is. The white Left here is behind in understanding fascism. When they're not using the word loosely and rhetorically to mean any repression at all (like the frequent assertions that cutting welfare is "fascism"! I mean, give us a break!), they're still reciting their favorite formula that the fascists are only the "pawns of the ruling class". No, that was Nazism in Germany, maybe, though even there that's not a useful way of looking at it. But definitely not here, not in that old way. The main problem hasn't been fascism in the old sense – it's been neocolonialism and bourgeois democracy! The bourgeoisie didn't need any fascism at all to put Leonard Peltier away in maximum security for life or Mumia on death row. They hunted down the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement like it was deer hunting season, while white America went shopping at the mall – all without needing fascism. And the steady waterfall of patriarchal violence against women, of rapes and torture and killings and very effective terrorism on a mass scale, should remind us that the multitude of reactionary men have "equal opportunity" under "democracy", too.

In America a child can no longer visit the place where she was born a shopping mall stands there instead. In America a grownup can no longer see the school where she learned the art of growing sad a freeway goes through there now an overpass her memories of brick turn to glass the suburb goes from white to black and time speeds up so much she has to stay young forever and reset the clock every five minutes just to know where is there and there is everywhere because she lives in time and not in any space! In our country here the future is in ruins before it is built a fact recognized by postmodern architecture that grins at us shyly or demonically as it quoted ruins from other times and places! There are no buildings in America only passageways that connect migratory floods the most permanent architecture being precisely that which moves these floods from one future ruin to another that is to say freeways and skyways and the car is our only shelter the architecture of desire reduced to the womb a womb in transit from one nowhere to another!” Saddened by his own vision and sensing smugness in the audience, Wakefield is revolted by his desire to please the foreigners. He coughs. He is portraying his own country now for the sake of… what? Applause? There isn't any. He veers down another path. “The miracle of America is of motion not regret in New Mexico the has face of Jesus jumped on a tortilla in Plaquermine a Virgin appeared in a tree In Santuari de Chimayo the dirt turned healer a guy in Texas crasahed into a wall when God said Let me take the wheel! And others hear voice all the time telling them to sit under a tree or jump from a cliff or take large baskets of eggs into Blockbuster to throw at the videos the voices of God are everywhere heard loud and clear under the hum of the tickertape and all these miracle and speaking gods are the mysteries left homeless by the Architecture of speed and moving forward onward and ahead!” Wakefield throws his hands into the air as if to sprinkle fairy dust on the room; he is evoking the richness of a place always ready for miracles.

Two other highly vocal FMSF Advisory Board members are Dr Elizabeth Loftus and Professor Richard Ofshe. Loftus is a respected academic psychologist whose much quoted laboratory experiment of successfully implanting a fictitious childhood memory of being lost in a shopping mall is frequently used to defend the false memory syndrome argument. In the experiment, older family members persuaded younger ones of the (supposedly) never real event. However, Loftus herself says that being lost, which almost everyone has experienced, is in no way similar to being abused. Jennifer Freyd comments on the shopping mall experiment in Betrayal Trauma (1996): “If this demonstration proves to hold up under replication it suggests both that therapists can induce false memories and, even more directly, that older family members play a powerful role in defining reality for dependent younger family members." (p. 104). Elizabeth Loftus herself was sexually abused as a child by a male babysitter and admits to blacking the perpetrator out of her memory, although she never forgot the incident. In her autobiography, Witness for the Defence, she talks of experiencing flashbacks of this abusive incident on occasion in court in 1985 (Loftus &Ketcham, 1991, p.149) In her teens, having been told by an uncle that she had found her mother's drowned body, she then started to visualize the scene. Her brother later told her that she had not found the body. Dr Loftus's successful academic career has run parallel to her even more high profile career as an expert witness in court, for the defence of those accused of rape, murder, and child abuse. She is described in her own book as the expert who puts memory on trial, sometimes with frightening implications. She used her theories on the unreliability of memory to cast doubt, in 1975, on the testimony of the only eyewitness left alive who could identify Ted Bundy, the all American boy who was one of America's worst serial rapists and killers (Loftus & Ketcham, 1991, pp. 61-91). Not withstanding Dr Loftus's arguments, the judge kept Bundy in prison. Bundy was eventually tried, convicted and executed.

Deandre Felton was a good boy, his family and friends agree. He was also a leader. But on this night in September of 2012, Deandre and his crew were bored. The mall was closed, but he and his boys were high on drugs and still wanted to have fun. So Deandre came up with what was not a new idea, but fun nevertheless. They decided to beat someone up. They had just come from a local park where Deandre and fifteen others beat up two girls, sending one to the hospital with a broken arm. Then Deandre decided to blow off a little steam and play the Knockout Game. He knew the game was usually pretty safe—for the attacker, that is.1 In Meriden, Connecticut, victims aren’t likely to carry concealed weapons, nor do they fight back. As one player said in Philadelphia as his victim begged for mercy: “It’s not our fault you can’t fight.” Deandre and his crew found their victim a few minutes after leaving the mall. Soon Deandre and his confederate DeShawn Jones were peeling off from the group, heading for a guy walking home from work. Alone. We don’t know his name or race or anything about him other than he was The Wrong Guy. With their friends lurking less than one hundred yards away when Deandre and DeShawn attacked, the guy fought back. He pulled a knife. Soon Deandre was dead and DeShawn was on his way to the emergency room.

A democracy is understandably boisterous and subject to the prevailing social and economic whims of the nation’s bulging populous. Politics based upon mass appeal reveals an unseemly side, and a degree of pronounced vulgarity permeates American social and political culture. Make no mistake, Americans are loud, brash, and biased. The constitutional right to free speech and the established right to assemble enable pornography shops to do business wherever they please and allow virtually any organization to parade downtown. Part of what makes America beautiful – the right for people to do and say anything they please – also contributes to that distinctly Americana crust of crudeness. American cities reflect American’s propensity for vulgarity. Most of the cities built to satisfy America’s capitalistic needs are either boring or an outright eyesore. America’s cities contain oversized high-rises, sprinkled liberally with drab shopping malls, and dotted with ugly concrete edifices that stifle nature’s beauty. A nation’s functional architecture reflects the populations’ intrinsic values. Corporate conglomerates undertook most of the expensive new construction in America, and its boxy steel and glass structures are utilitarian in nature. Recent attempts at city planning and urban renewal cannot erase the tackiness and blockiness that accompanies so much of America’s tedious urban sprawl.

Tampa was a city with a perpetual inferiority complex. For a while, the local flacks had called it America's Next Great City. Then somebody had stumbled over the comedy of that title. Tampa had the Bucs, and that was good. Tampa had hockey, the Lightning, but hockey was a B sport in the South and always would be. Tampa had great seafood, its own branch of Cosa Nostra, too many malls, the world's best airport, and lately, Ybor City.

Go out the north exit of Nakano Station and into the Sun Mall shopping arcade. After a few steps, you'll see Gindaco, the takoyaki (octopus balls) chain. Turn right into Pretty Good #1 Alley. Walk past the deli that specializes in okowa (steamed sticky rice with tasty bits), a couple of ramen shops, and a fugu restaurant. Go past the pachinko parlor, the grilled eel stand, the camera shops, and the stairs leading to Ginza Renoir coffee shop. If you see the bicycle parking lot in front of Life Supermarket, you're going the right way. During the two-block walk through a typical neighborhood, you've passed more good food than in most midsized Western cities, even if you don't love octopus balls as much as I do. Welcome to Tokyo. Tokyo is unreal. It's the amped-up, neon-spewing cyber-city of literature and film. It's an alley teeming with fragrant grilled chicken shops. It's children playing safely in the street and riding the train across town with no parents in sight. It's a doughnut chain with higher standards of customer service than most high-end restaurants in America. A colossal megacity devoid of crime, grime, and bad food? Sounds more like a utopian novel than an earthly metropolis.

There are a lot of Jesuses running around these days. There is the Jesus who wants you to find a good parking spot at the mall. There is the Jesus invoked at music awards, and the one raised like a flag to celebrate capitalism and affluence. There is the Jesus drawing lines about who is in and who is out. And there is the Jesus on both sides of the picket lines. There is the one in the slums, and the one in suburbia, and the one in Africa, and the one in America, and the one in Calgary. There is the Jesus who told Mother Theresa to touch the lepers and love with her hands. There is the one who lead the bravest and kindest of men and women all the way to the end. And then there is the Jesus who supposedly inspired manifestos of hate, crusades, murder, and wars. And then there is the Jesus who likes everything you like, and hates everything, or everyone, you hate and is quite pleased with everything about you. I like that Jesus best sometimes.

It is certain that there are genuinely moderate Muslims, perhaps a substantial number, who do not seek to impose Islam on this country and the world through violent jihad. However, they are conspicuous by their silence regarding the more problematic doctrines of Islam. To the extent that Muslim ‘leaders’ and lobbying organizations in the United States even address the issue, they offer nothing more than vague, tepid condemnations of terrorist violence and heated denials that the behavior of Islamic terrorists has any connection with Islam. Where is the Muslim outrage in this country over the supposed few who hijacked their religion? Where is the Million Muslim March on the Mall in Washington, D.C., sending a message to all Muslims in the Arabic world condemning the killing of human beings in the name of Allah? Where is the cry to raise the consciousness of the rest of the Muslim world about their hijacked religion?

I’m guessing you’re a little freaked out and planning on bolting the first chance you get. I understand that, I really do. Believe it or not, I was in your shoes a while back, so I know how you feel,” he said. “But here’s the thing. When you run, I’m going to chase you. And now that I have your scent, I can track you through a cattle stampede at the Mall of America during a Black Friday sale. So run as fast as you want. I will catch you.

The European sensibility is not that of an American. Americans are obsessed with the future. The past appears trivial. The battle site where the Civil War began is in Manassas, Virginia. There is now a shopping mall there. Things are remembered in America, but not with the anguish and pride with which Europeans remember things.

Viewed from the aisles of a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, plummeting nutritional diversity might seem like an overblown threat. We live in a time, after all, when you can find calzone in Tokyo, fajitas in Rome, and sushi in the Mall of America, and when high-end supermarkets stock organic beef, micro brews, heirloom tomatoes, kale, matcha smoothies, and once-exotic cereals like quinoa, amaranth, and spelt. But this apparent embarrassment of riches obscures a poverty of nutritional content and genetic diversity.

And to say that the citizens of those rival domains did not always see eye to eye was a bit of an understatement, because each represented the antithesis of the other’s deepest values. To the engineers and the technicians who belonged to the world of the dam, Glen was no dead monolith but, rather, a living and breathing thing, a creature that pulsed with energy and dynamism. Perhaps even more important, the dam was also a triumphant capstone of human ingenuity, the culmination of a civil-engineering lineage that had seen its first florescence in the irrigation canals of ancient Mesopotamia and China, then shot like a bold arrow through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution to reach its zenith here in the sun-scorched wastelands of the American Southwest. Glen embodied the glittering inspiration and the tenacious drive of the American century—a spirit that in other contexts had been responsible for harnessing the atom and putting men on the moon. As impressive as those other accomplishments may have been, nothing excelled the nobility of transforming one of the harshest deserts on earth into a vibrant garden. In the minds of its engineers and its managers, Glen affirmed everything that was right about America. To Kenton Grua and the river folk who inhabited the world of the canyon, however, the dam was an offense against nature. Thanks to Glen and a host of similar Reclamation projects along the Colorado, one of the greatest rivers in the West, had been reduced to little more than a giant plumbing system, a network of pipes and faucets and catchment tubs whose chief purpose lay in the dubious goal of bringing golf courses to Phoenix, swimming pools to Tucson, and air-conditioned shopping malls to Vegas. A magnificent waterway had been sacrificed on the altar of a technology that enabled people to prosper without limits, without balance, without any connection to the environment in which they lived—and in the process, fostered the delusion that the desert had been conquered. But in the eyes of the river folk, even that wasn’t the real cost. To

Nation after nation declared independence from the Soviet Union, and for the first time, the world truly saw the stark contrast between the free world and the totalitarian misery of the Eastern bloc. The West was dominated by skyscrapers, shopping malls, and supermarkets stocked with five of everything; the egalitarian East? It was dominated by dreary ghetto-style block housing, bread lines, and censorship. The contrast was clear. This should have been the end of socialism. It should have been consigned to the dustbin of history. But it wasn’t.

Hydraulic fracturing has been used safely in over a million wells, resulting in America’s rise as a global energy superpower, growth in energy investments, wages, and new jobs," added Mr. Milito in the statement. Environmental groups have countered that the isolated incidents of contamination confirm their fears about the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing. John Noël, of the group Clean Water Action, said in a statement that the report "smashes the myth that there can be oil and gas development without impacts to drinking water." Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the EPA study, "while limited, shows fracking can and has impacted drinking water sources in many different ways," according to the Beacon Journal. The EPA report acknowledges that the findings may be due to a lack of data collected, inaccessible information, a scarcity of long-term systematic and base-line studies, and other factors. Bloomberg reported that EPA couldn't come to terms with energy companies including Range Resources Corp. and Chesapeake Energy to conduct water tests near their wells before and after they were fracked, meaning if the agency did find instances of contamination, it was harder to prove that fracking was the cause. "These elements significantly limit EPA’s ability to determine the actual frequency of impacts," the agency said in a fact sheet released with the report.

People never expected to find you at the corner of State and Main, on Fifth Avenue, or in the Mall of America. But they do expect to find you on the Internet.

But how many senators, representatives, and justices are on our currency, have monuments on the National Mall, have their names on towns, cities, counties, states, or figure prominently in Hollywood movies, television, or cable series? Congress and the Supreme Court can be in or out of session. The president is the Energizer Bunny™ of the American government.

When America Cuts My Daughter’s Hair" every chair in the strip mall salon where she rents a little space of her own reflects a face waiting to make a change. Another mother next to me rips an ad for the full Hollywood wax & here the best graffiti: DON’T DO DRUGS, BE SAD. They’ll grow back, my own mom on the bangs I butchered more than once. Do you think America is pretty? This skinny blonde kid who never really has to ask if she is, asks me as we walk more hot city blocks because by now we’ve chopped the pecans to protect the power lines. I think America is pretty. A pierced Xicana with one side of her own do done in deep brown waves, the other buzzed tight & dyed a bright chemical green. America fits the description & when she’s done holds up her small mirror in the big one turning my girl around so she can see herself. You can call me Erica, she says if you like, but we like America better here.

It has been a frustrating game thus far and [the natives] blow off steam by spending money. Happily there is retail at every turn so the crow doesn’t lack for buying opportunities, and it’s the same everywhere Bravo has been, the airports, the hotels, the arenas and convention centers, in the downtowns and the suburbs alike, retail dominates the land. Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.

One day I went to the mall with my older daughter, we went to American Eagle, we picked what we need it and walked toward the register, we were waiting in line, other cashier said "mam, I can take you here" by the time I walked around to other site, two young girls cut in front of us, I did not say anything, I told my daughter in Albanian that was rude of them, like the girls understood what I said and they turned their head around talking to each other saying "She don't even speak English" they turned their heads back and giggled. My daughter who is born here, she witnessed the disrespect and the racism, she got real ma and want to fight the girls, I told her "Don't" she said "why?" I said "Because I feel bad for them" My daughter said "mom," what they did to you was rude, "not just they cut in front of you, but they mocked you for being foreign" I said to her, "honey not all parents teach their children the way I taught you, and that's why you don't fight with those kind of people, they are the one with problems not us." Sure they are not our problem now, but they become our problem in society, because this this young girls, one day they grow up to be a CEO or a manage, they can't make an ethical decisions, when it come to hire or fire people from work. Racism have to stop, unless you're native American,you are no diferent from me. I have the same right as everybody else. Don't forget we all are immigrants, some come to America 100 years ago, some 50 and some 25 years ago. I, Proud to be Albanian / American.

This is one of the few incidents that happen in my past life. One day I went to the mall with my older daughter, we went to American Eagle, we picked what we need it and walked toward the register, we were waiting in line, other cashier said "Mam, I can take you here" by the time I walked around to other site, two young girls cut in front of us, I did not say anything, I told my daughter in Albanian that was rude of them, like the girls understood what I said and they turned their head around talking to each other saying "She don't even speak English" they turned their heads back and giggled. My daughter who is born here, she witnessed the disrespect and the racism, she got real ma and want to fight the girls, I told her "Don't" she said "why?" I said "Because I feel bad for them" My daughter said "mom," what they did to you was rude, "not just they cut in front of you, but they mocked you for being foreign" I said to her, "honey not all parents teach their children the way I taught you, and that's why you don't fight with those kind of people, they are the one with problems not us." Sure they are not our problem now, but they become our problem in society, because this this young girls, one day they grow up to be a CEO or a manage, they can't make an ethical decisions, when it come to hire or fire people from work. Racism have to stop, unless you're native American,you are no diferent from me. I have the same right as everybody else. Don't forget we all are immigrants, some come to America 100 years ago, some 50 and some 25 years ago. I'm Proud to be Albanian / American

This is one of the few incidents that happen to me in my past. One day I went to the mall with my older daughter, we went to American Eagle, we picked what we need it and walked toward the register, we were waiting in line, other cashier said "mam, I can take you here" by the time I walked around to other site, two young girls cut in front of us, I did not say anything, I told my daughter in Albanian that was rude of them, like the girls understood what I said and they turned their head around talking to each other saying "She don't even speak English" they turned their heads back and giggled. My daughter who is born here, she witnessed the disrespect and the racism, she got real ma and want to fight the girls, I told her "Don't" she said "why?" I said "Because I feel bad for them" My daughter said "mom," what they did to you was rude, "not just they cut in front of you, but they mocked you for being foreign" I said to her, "honey not all parents teach their children the way I taught you, and that's why you don't fight with those kind of people, they are the one with problems not us." Sure they are not our problem now, but they become our problem in society, because this this young girls, one day they grow up to be a CEO or a manage, they can't make an ethical decisions, when it come to hire or fire people from work. Racism have to stop, unless you're native American,you are no diferent from me. I have the same right as everybody else. Don't forget we all are immigrants, some come to America 100 years ago, some 50 and some 25 years ago. I'm Proud to be Albanian / American.

Throughout America, Main Street has run to the suburbs and hidden in the malls, but New York still wears Christmas on its sleeve.

The dying mall has attracted some odd tenants, such as a satellite branch of the public library and an office of the State Attorney General's Child Predator Unit. As malls die across the country, we'll see many kinds of creative repurposing. Already, there are churches and casinos inside half-dead malls, so why not massage parlors, detox centers, transient hotels, haunted houses, prisons, petting zoos or putt-putt golf courses (covering the entire mall)? Leaving Santee, Chuck and I wandered into the food court, where only three of twelve restaurant slots were still occupied. On the back wall of this forlorn and silent space was a mural put up by Boscov, the mall's main tenant. Titled "B part of your community", it reads: KINDNESS COUNTS / PLANT A TREE / MAKE A DONATION / HELP A NEIGHBOR / VISIT THE ELDERLY / HOPE / ADOPT A PET / DRIVE A HYBRID / PICK UP THE TRASH / VOLUNTEER / CONSERVE ENERGY / RECYCLE / JOIN SOMETHING / PAINT A MURAL / HUG SOMEONE / SMILE / DRINK FILTERED WATER / GIVE YOUR TIME / USE SOLAR ENERGY / FEED THE HUNGRY / ORGANIZE A FUNDRAISER / CREATE AWARENESS / FIX A PLAYGROUND/ START A CLUB / BABYSIT These empty recommendations are about as effective as "Just Say No", I'm afraid. As the CIA pushed drugs, the first lady chirped, "Just say no!". And since everything in the culture, car, iPad, iPhone, television, internet, Facebook, Twitter and shopping mall, etc., is designed to remove you from your immediate surroundings, it will take more than cutesy suggestions on walls to rebuild communities. Also, the worse the neighborhoods or contexts, the more hopeful and positive the slogans. Starved of solutions, we shall eat slogans.

President Trump’s Fourth of July celebration on the mall was the first in almost seventy years. He recounted great moments in our history: the Revolutionary War, the fight by the suffragettes to get the vote, and the work of the civil rights movement. Donald Trump doesn’t just believe America is great; he believes America is the most exceptional nation in history. It was vintage Donald Trump, the man who came from the outside, selected by the forgotten men and women of America, reminding us that American success is a choice worth celebrating, that American innovation is worth encouraging, and that America’s military is always worth honoring.

For its critics, America thus represented polar opposites but at the same time was also squarely in the middle, signifying the banal and mediocre, associated with notions like “stupefying” and “dreary.” In the late eighteenth century, it was the unimaginative small towns of New England; in the nineteenth century, it was the deplorable social conditions in the industrial metropolises like Chicago and New York; in the twentieth century, it was life in America’s suburbs, and finally the dullness of the shopping malls and exurbs. With a way of thinking going back to the eighteenth century at least, America was not only alien and different to European observers, but also inferior. This contradictory trope of modernity as barbarism is a constant of negative European perceptions of America.

Whatever hospitality the Mall of America officials had extended to us abruptly ended as soon as we began to disrupt capitalism—one of whitemalegod’s prized drugs.

One life is the same as another, and a day here is a day anywhere, except there’s no bank or grocery store, no mall or Panera Bread. There’s nothing commercial, actually, and also no town or church or house. There

It’s not much different from life in a city, Chelsea explains: you wake up, you work, you eat. One life is the same as another, and a day here is a day anywhere, except there’s no bank or grocery store, no mall or Panera Bread. There’s nothing commercial, actually, and also no town or church or house. There

Bathed in a late autumn glow, Springfield doesn’t seem like a community ravaged by meth despite its reputation as a paradise for tweakers (chronic users). The Battlefield Mall—named in memory of Wilson’s Creek, a famous Civil War battle

The newer tactic of scattering bodies on city streets, as happened when Joaquín Guzmán’s goons pushed thirty-five bloody corpses (twelve of them women) off two trucks on Manuel Ávila Camacho Boulevard, near a shopping mall in the prettier part of the port city of Veracruz one day in September 2011, to terrorize their adversaries... Guzmán, known as El Chapo (Shorty) for his small stature, ran the largest airborne opera- tion in Mexico; he owned more aircraft than Aeromexico, the national air- line. Between 2006 and 2015, Mexican authorities seized 599 aircraft — 586 planes and 13 helicopters—from the Sinaloa cartel; by comparison, Aeromexico had a piddling fleet of 127 planes.... One Zeta atrocity I knew nothing about took place in 2010, in the small town of San Fernando, south of Reynosa. A roaming band of Zetas stopped two buses of migrants—men, women, and children from Central and South America, who were fleeing the violence in their countries. The Zetas demanded money. The migrants had no money. The Zetas demanded that the migrants work for them, as assassins or operatives or drug mules. The migrants refused. So they were taken to a building in the village of El Huizachal, blindfolded, their hands and legs bound, and each one was shot in the head. Seventy-two of them died. One man (from Ecuador) played dead, escaped, and raised the alarm... The gory details of this massacre became known when one of the perpetrators was arrested, Édgar Huerta Montiel, an army deserter known as El Wache, or Fat Ass. He admitted killing eleven of the migrants person- ally, in the belief (so he said) that they were working for a gang hostile to his own. A year later, near the same town, police found 47 mass graves containing 193 corpses — mostly migrants or passengers in buses hijacked and robbed while passing through this area of Tamaulipas state, about eighty miles south of the US border... But in the early 2000s headless bodies began to appear, tossed by the roadside, while human heads were displayed in public, at intersections, and randomly on the roofs of cars. This butchery was believed to be inspired by a tactic of the Guatemalan military’s elite commandos, known as Kaibiles. A man I was to meet in Matamoros, on my traverse of the border, explained how the Kaibiles were toughened by their officers. The officers encouraged recruits to raise a dog from a puppy, then, at a certain point in their training, the recruit was ordered to kill the dog and eat it.... When the Kaibiles became mercenaries in the Mexican cartels, the first beheadings occurred, the earliest known taking place in 2006: a gang in Michoacán kicked open the doors of a bar and tossed five human heads on the dance floor. Decapitations are now, according to one authority on the business, “a staple in the lexicon of violence” for Mexican cartels....

Recently my wife and I visited the Mall of America. I noticed that there were Bloomington police officers everywhere, in ones or twos, watching the crowds, patrolling the hallways, doing what cops do. Everyone looks young to me these days, but I doubt that any of the ones I saw were even alive when I and my compatriots directed traffic, or fought with drunks, or watched Harmon Killebrew hit one of his monster homeruns. I wonder if they’d like to hear about what used to go on here? I asked myself. Probably not, I answered, after a moment’s thought. So, I just sat on a bench and waited for my wife.

Commercially [America has] had the last word, and over the past 40 years the American market has been the primary powerhouse of the [fashion] industry - giant malls, massive department-store chains, numerous large cities. It’s changing now, though: China and other Far Eastern countries are becoming the leading players. No where is it clearer that we are in the last days of the American Empire than in the fashion industry. Fabrics and designs are being tailored to the requirements of the Eastern market. The big brands are spending fortunes expanding there, and although many Middle Eastern women are hidden behind burqas, their wardrobes contain some of the most ravishing Western fashion.

Classification and then reduction, the mind’s strongest weapon against conscience, if it wants to relieve your conscience to kill innocents, it would classify them within a group and include with them those who deserve death in its view, then reduce all the small details into generalities, and ignore them. As it will not fail a trick, to make the killing of children and women an inevitable necessity, towards a higher goal and a better world. Thus began the story of Baibars himself, nearly twenty years ago, when the extremist organization decided to classify the entire American people as one group, ignoring that the number of Muslims killed by Muslims themselves was many times greater than those killed because of American policies in the Middle East, and then decided that the destruction of their opponents in the Middle East. The destruction of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Their minds reduced all the details; a child playing in his father’s office, a girl waiting for her mother’s return, a wife on the plane eager to meet her husband, their conscience did not hesitate for a moment to kill thousands of innocent people, for the sake of their ultimate goal. And so did America itself, when it decided to avenge its murderers, categorized, reduced, and shot everyone. Its pilots saw neither the children nor the families in the homes they were about to demolish over their heads. So did Hitler, Napoleon, Hulagu, and every serial killer known to mankind. It makes you like a pilot driving a plane, throwing a bomb over the houses, not seeing the trace of what it did on the ground, and if he carried it with his hand and walked in the streets, and watched the children, women, the innocent, who would fall dead from this bomb, he would not detonate it, but he only sees houses that look like matchboxes from the sky, general picture, no details. Satan’s most powerful weapon for controlling the mind, or the most powerful weapon of the mind to control us, and at some point, it masters it, to the point where it no longer needs to justify, reduce, or categorize anything, kill your opponents, and all their offspring, destroy them, burn them, leave none of them. Since many minds are tools in the hands of Satan, it can manipulate them as it wants. Since its working mechanisms have become known to him, Baibars decided, why not? Why do not we make them tools for good. He used Satan’s own style, manipulated everyone, and at times, reduced, but according to his laws, do not reduce the innocent. He is not afraid, he made his decision in the war, and whoever made this decision must bear the consequences of it. He wished time would go back a thousand or two thousand years and freeze there, where the wars between human beings were fought with swords and arrows, at that time, not many innocents fell, only soldiers who made their decision in advance to war, to kill, knowing that they might die. Everyone had the time and the ability to think, make decisions, and even escape. While today, most of the victims of wars do not make a decision, they pay with their lives without anyone asking them if they want to be part of this war at all. Cities are bombed and destroyed over the heads of their inhabitants, and most of them reject this war from the beginning. When someone detonates a bomb in a mall, he does not ask the victims of his bombing about their political stances, their religion, and even if they want to be part of this war, and so do the planes, they do not ask, and their victims have no opportunity to make a decision. As for him, Baibars, he made up his mind It is to fight in defense of those who did not have the opportunity to take it.

At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies - cotton - was America's primary export. The richest men in America lived in the Mississippi River Valley, and they made their riches off our stolen bodies. Our bodies were held in bondage by the early presidents. Our bodies were traded from the White House by James K. Polk. Our bodies built the Capitol and the National Mall. The first shot of the Civil War was fired in South Carolina, where our bodies constituted the majority of human bodies in the state. Here is the motive for the great war.

In the last two decades, Stern and Helen had their share of friends relocate to Florida to escape state income and inheritance taxes up north. As far as Stern is concerned, no amount of money is worth the change. With swamps and alligators inland, and the gated communities and shopping malls in the traffic-clotted towns along the coasts, the state seems to Stern like a giant penal colony for America's elderly, where the residents--like characters in a famous play--have all been blinded by the sun and do not realize they are actually in hell.

In this respect, I think it is important to own up to the fact that perhaps some of our worship habits are a missed opportunity; that we fail to draw on the formative riches of the tradition and thereby shut down channels for the Spirit’s work. I think we need to be honest that Christians in North America (and elsewhere) have perhaps developed some bad habits in this regard. We may have construed worship as a primarily didactic, cognitive affair and thus organized it around a message that fails to reach our embodied hearts, and thus fails to touch our desire. Or we may have construed worship as a refueling event—a chance primarily to get what I “need” to make it through the week (perhaps with a top-up on Wednesday night), with the result that worship is more about me than about God, more about individual fulfillment than about the constitution of a people. Or we may have reduced gathered worship to evangelism and outreach, pushing us to drop some of the stranger elements of liturgy in order to be relevant and accessible. In all these cases, we’ll notice that some key elements of the church’s liturgical tradition drop out. Key historical practices are left behind. While we might be inclined to think of this as a way to update worship and make it contemporary, my concern is that in the process we lose key aspects of formation and discipleship. In particular, we lose precisely those worship practices that function as counter-formations to the liturgies of the mall, the stadium, and the frat house. We also lose a sense that worship is the “work of the people”—that the “work of praise” is something we can only do as a people who are an eschatological foretaste of the coming kingdom of God. In short, we lose the sense in which Christian worship is also political: it marks us out as and trains us to be a peculiar people who are citizens of another city and subjects of a coming King.

I’m a short, fat Jewish guy,” Shapiro had famously remarked on any number of occasions. “If scores of other short, fat Jewish guys flew planes into buildings, shot up malls, and chanted death to America, I’d expect to get closer scrutiny by the TSA. To fail to notice this pattern and keep a closer eye on me, you’d have to have your head in the sand. But I wouldn’t blame the TSA agents for this scrutiny. I’d blame all the fricking short, fat Jewish guys trying to destroy civilization, who are making me look suspicious. Radicalized Muslims are the least tolerant people on Earth—especially when it comes to women, other religions, and other cultures—yet they cry the loudest at any perceived intolerance on the part of the West. And we’re stupid enough to let them put us on the defensive.

If you’re a parent, you already use this technique instinctively. What do you do when your kids won’t leave the house/park/mall? You say, “Fine. I’m leaving,” and you begin to walk away. I’m going to guess that well over half the time they yell, “No, wait!” and run to catch up. No one likes to be abandoned. Now, this may seem like a rude way to address someone in business, but you have to get over that. It’s not rude, and though it’s direct, it’s cloaked with the safety of “No.” Ignoring you is what’s rude. I can tell you that I’ve used this successfully not just in North America, but with people in two different cultures (Arabic and Chinese) famous for never saying “No.

Year after year, sprawl shows itself to be hugely inefficient and a money-loser for local governments. Town halls scramble to get more tax revenue to pay for the schools and the water and sewer pipes extending to the new development, often by welcoming in big-box strip malls and office parks. But the books never balance, and the result is higher taxes, busted budgets, and more unsustainable sprawl.

My sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free childcare for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn't pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some kids' moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from the local mall. My sister-in-law was livid.

CURRENTLY, about fifty million square miles of land on the planet are ice-free, and this is the baseline that’s generally used for calculating human impacts. According to a recent study published by the Geological Society of America, people have “directly transformed” more than half of this land—roughly twenty-seven million square miles—mostly by converting it to cropland and pasture, but also by building cities and shopping malls and reservoirs, and by logging and mining and quarrying.

[T]he current system in place evaluates us less as citizens and more as customers or consumers. This is applicable even in foreign policies in the sense that the US foreign policy supports or attacks other countries not based on their values and methods of governance but based on whether these nations allow or block America’s corporate interests on their territories. This perhaps explains why the US supports some of the most undemocratic regimes (customers) and destroys and bombs other secular and diverse nations that do not allow mega malls, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coca Cola, Amazon, you name it, to plunder their lands and populations.

The Nation of Islam is the best known Black Muslim group, though its actual numbers may be no more than 100,000. However, many blacks who are not, themselves, Muslims have great respect for the group’s leader, Louis Farrakhan. Users of the Internet arm of Black Entertainment Television, BET.com, chose him as the black “person of the year” for 2005. Mr. Farrakhan was elected over Oprah Winfrey, then-Senator Barack Obama, Robert L. Johnson, who started BET, and the victims of Hurricane Katrina. “An overwhelming percentage of our users agreed that Minister Farrakhan made the most positive impact on the Black community over the past year,” explained a BET spokesman. What did Mr. Farrakhan do to deserve that honor? He received heavy news coverage twice that year. Once was when he promoted the theory that whites blew up the New Orleans levees to destroy black neighborhoods. The other was when he organized a “Millions More Movement” on the National Mall to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Million Man March. On that occasion, Michael Muhammad, National Youth Minister for the Nation of Islam declaimed: “We want to say to our young brothers of the Crips and the Bloods that we are one family. The real enemy doesn’t wear blue, but white, even when he’s butt naked.” Ayinde Baptiste of the Nation of Islam added: “We are at war here in America. . . . We need soldiers now. We need black male soldiers, we need black feminist soldiers, we need Crips and Bloods soldiers . . . soldiers in the prisons, soldiers in the streets.” The Congressional Black Caucus endorsed the event, and five black congressmen attended it.

Prisons exist to hide the fact that the entire system is a jail. Shopping malls conceal the reality that the whole of America is a shopping mall. America is a vast shop. It is not a nation. It does not exist these days to land men on the men and do “the difficult thing”. It exists to shop and do the easy thing. The purpose of America is to create maximum profits for the 1% who run America. Everything is designed to serve that end, and everyone goes along with it. One of the 1% is now the President. The middlemen – the politicians – have been cut out. America creates apparent perimeters around explicitly imaginary domains (such as Disneyland), but the truth is that reality no more exists outside the limits than inside the limits. The effect of the “imaginary” is to conceal the loss of the real. The more energy that America devotes to the imaginary – via Disney, Hollywood, “reality” TV (actually unreality TV), video games, virtual reality, social media, “fake news”, post-truth, and so on – the further the real recedes into the distance. Is it possible for America to return to the real now? Would it even know what the real was? How would it recognize it? America has become hyperreal. It’s not real at all. It is “more real than real” and also “less real than real”, the problem being that “more” and “less” would make sense only if there were a reality to serve as a comparison point. That’s exactly what is lacking.

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For fifteen years Daedalus labored, creating what looked like a trench warfare playground in the backyard of the palace. Fortunately, it was a really big backyard. If you put the Mall of America, Walt Disney World, and twenty football stadiums together, they would all fit inside the Labyrinth with room to spare.

In his book Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces, Jon Pahl argues that the consumer aspect of American Christianity is a kind of a feel-good cop-out of deeper truths. But for those who have been hurt by the church, who have been told their bodies are unacceptable in the eyes of God, or have witnessed other’s pain perpetuated by religion, it is nothing of the sort. It’s actually freedom. And it’s freedom that has been sought and found by religious outsiders for millennia. The saints we revere like Joan of Arc and St. Francis of Assisi, were difficult nomadic outsiders who created their own religious spaces when none could be found for them. Even the model of Jesus, walking smelly and dirty in the desert with his band of fishermen, all men, was a rogue, cast out by the religious authorities. But these thoughts can be cold comfort when you are the one deemed unacceptable, deemed sinful by the very community that by its very precepts ought to love you.

AIDS simply did not fit into this picture we had of our town. The TV stations and the Johnson City Press did a fine job parroting what the wire services carried about AIDS. But they never succeeded in treating the deaths of Rock Hudson or Liberace as being any more significant to our town than famine in the Sahel or plane crash in Thailand. You could shop in the mall, cut your hair in Parks & Belk, pick up milk at the Piggly Wiggly, bowl at Holiday Lanes, find bawdy entertainment at the Hourglass Lounge and never know that one of my patients was seated right next to you, or serving you, or brushing past you in the parking lot, a deadly virus in his or her body that was no threat to you, but might nevertheless cause you to stand up and scream if you knew how close it was. My problem was the opposite: I saw AIDS everywhere in the fabric of the town; I wanted to pick up a megaphone as I stood in the checkout line and say ‘ATTENTION KMART SHOPPERS: JOHNSON CITY AS A PART OF AMERICA AND, YES, WE DO HAVE AIDS HERE.

... but books made good company. My favorites were the Point Horror series, because I desperately wanted to be a teenager. I understood that that was when you really started living and being an American Teenager appeared to come with a certain glamour. When I was a kid it seemed that everything good happened in America. Like cheerleading and yearbooks and proms, Satanism and the Manson family. I pictured myself hanging out at the mall, at the drive-in, at the ice skating rink with friends with names like Stacy & Chuck and one of them would be murdered.