The Bell Curve of Garbage

When Gertrude Stein returned to Oakland in the 1930s and found her home was gone, she famously quipped, “there is no there there.” It’s hard to imagine what she’d say about the Bay Area today. It’s impossible not to reflect with similar sentimentality when I return home to Virginia. My childhood house is still standing; the barn has collapsed, the land has been subdivided, and a cheap tract home sits where our chickens once roosted in a white out-building reminiscent of a Wyeth painting.

My grandparents recently passed away and their own farm is being eyed by real estate developers. It’s near the heart of Virginia Horse Country, much of which has been absorbed into the lifeless suburbs of Washington, DC. Of course the farm doesn’t need to be developed. It’s a fully capable farm. But there’s nothing historic about it; and today’s working farms are corporate factories with concrete warehouses.

Built in the 1970s, it’s a handsome Colonial reproduction. As a young architectural aficionado I’d sit on the bright shag carpeting of any room comparing the crown molding in my Elements of Design book to the details that circled above, shaded in the colors of the Nixon era: Harvest Gold, Robin’s Egg Blue, Pea Green. To date, the house is a time capsule of a decade quickly becoming history relegated to more books than memory, entirely untouched since it was built. At nearly 4000 square feet, any sane family should consider it more than enough. But today’s families don’t want wainscoting and a formal library; they want endless square footage and an open concept full of stainless steel appliances stretching to the front door.

What will likely happen is what’s happened in my own hometown two hours away where handsome estate houses sit amid the cul de sacs of indistinguishable McMansions that have eaten up their respective farms. Nearby are the cavernous concrete warehouses brandished with Tyson or Perdue. When you enter the idyllically named town of Pleasant Valley you pass its iconic schoolhouse and abandoned train station, but as you turn and approach the crest leaving the quaint village you’re faced with miles and miles of these factory farms belching steam, launching big rigs headed for I-81.

Pleasant Valley’s train station hasn’t seen service in over half a century, nor has the larger station in the nearby city of Harrisonburg. Both will soon receive a makeover with an obligatory coffee shop, maybe a brewery and a weekly farmer’s market filled with the cultivations of upwardly mobile hobbyists. Neither will ever see a train again; the tracks have been stripped for bike trails.

I don’t even need to say the word for you to know what I’m talking about. It’s both lost all meaning and become ubiquitous with America. It doesn’t just happen to our city’s cultural neighborhoods; it is happening to the heritage of an entire nation: the proliferation of sameness, driven by the age of social media and marketing algorithms that mine our data and merchandise mediocrity, coaxing us to strive for the swell of a press-board Bell Curve.

Never resigned to let what works work, we refuse to allow history to live in America. Instead, we memorialize it in historic districts. We don’t have artist colonies; we have loft condominiums named for the artists that once worked in those buildings. We don’t have Black, gay, or ethnic neighborhoods; we have flags adorned with Civil Rights leaders, rainbow crosswalks, and street signs with Chinese characters. We designate our authentic heritage with these tokens to quell the insecurities of those who’d rather forget who they’ve replaced; to tell them authenticity isn’t necessary when diversity has been brandished on a NPS marker. Too few people want to live authentically, and those who do are pummeled into submission by Big Box department stores and fast casual chains. At one time the authentic would flock to the distant corners of this country: Key West, Provincetown, rainy cities like Seattle and San Francisco, or Savannah or Charleston. But this sameness has found its way there too where bloated vacation homes in a style that can only be described as universal overshadow the legacies that the 21st century generation has deemed fit to be salvaged, often restored to unreal geometric perfection. It’s expected; there are no surprises.

These places are great repositories of history, but at best, that’s all they are now. When you start digging into their pasts and considering what it had been like when they were authentic, when they inspired some of America’s truly great early- and mid-century artists and writers, well that’s a sad rabbit hole to fall down. Provincetown’s and Key West’s artistic legacies are million dollar tiny homes and art colonies fashioned out of long unused fishing piers that only the most wealthy can afford to sustain. Once the inspirations for Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Jared and Margaret French, and Paul Cadmus; what now passes for art in these places is motel art doled out by wealthy retirees and, of course, the immediately ephemeral works of Instagram influencers hustling a Lululemon sponsorship.

Today’s society has even sanitized and monetized cultural misfits and ethnic minorities. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is part of a multi-billion dollar franchise studded with millionaire stars being lauded in a MasterCard commercial as a groundbreaking moment in Civil Rights. Drag queens, once raunchy underground performers, are now the stars of reality shows and headliners at children’s birthday parties. In either instance, the authentic realities of those communities are still being ignored. What has MasterCard or Disney done to curb violence towards Black people? What are mothers who hire drag queens like they’re circus clowns doing to challenge the proliferation of laws aimed at banning drag performances altogether?

As always, when authenticity rears its head, neither will even bother to look in the rear-view mirror.

America’s cultural consensus has always been in its status quo, but when the cultural mileposts were authentic, those who had less strived for more, and those who had more were interesting. Now the American Dream is to be a YouTube personality and sell an auto-turned single to Apple Music. It’s an air conditioned summer house where a family can stream Netflix from somewhere else, and the kids can play Minecraft.

A commercial for Kenzie’s song Paper has been running ad nauseam on Hulu. Of course, I had no idea who she was. No one did. That’s why she’s advertising her single during commercial breaks. She’s an 18 year old alum from the television show Dance Moms. The song is aggressively bad: the lyrics, her lack of vocal range, the expressionless look on her face that tells you she’s a child star in the age of social media. I mentioned this to an old college friend who has written music and now writes music with her daughter who has an amazing voice, and she immediately knew what commercial I was talking about. She and her daughter had had their own fits every time it aired. Her daughter will likely have a successful career in academia someday, but she’ll never make the kind of money generic pop stars make because she refuses to sell her soul on TikTok. But what’s worse is, she’ll only ever reach those with an academic interest in music. Because America’s status quo is no longer confronted by authenticity, freshman auditions for music programs are largely spent weeding out prospective students whose relationship with music is limited to American Idol.

Generation after generation, we look back at the past through rosy glasses and lament how much better things were. That hot take is universally criticised because, in many cases, they simply weren’t. But it’s time we start looking at the things that were, particularly art and culture. Well crafted oil paintings languish in gallery windows while bananas duct taped to walls sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. What’s even worse than that mere price tag (and the blatant money laundering in the professional art world) is the attention that these shams absorb. We are headed for an artistic and cultural dark age, if we aren’t already actively entrenched in it. But it’s flipped. While the Dark Ages, at least as they are popularly understood, were a rejection of progressive values finally enlightened by the Renaissance; ours is one driven by a false progressivism set out to look authentic online while pillaging it in the real world. It’s depressing to consider exactly how much worse it can get, but it probably will. After all, we’re no longer in the Wild West of the dot com era, we’re only in its Roaring Twenties.