The Real America

I’m planning a big photo project but have been struggling to find a purpose for it. Of course the thought crosses my mind to go out and photograph The Real America but before it gets to the other side of that road, the words “Robert Frank” run it over and smash it into roadkill. But it won’t quite go away. So I think about Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson and Ken Kesey, and especially William Least Heat-Moon and “Blue Highways.” From the Wikipedia:

He outfitted his van … and embarked on a three-month soul-searching tour of the United States, wandering from small town to small town, stopping often at towns with interesting names. The book chronicles the 13,000-mile journey and the people he meets along the way, as he steers clear of cities and interstates, avoiding fast food and exploring local American culture.

I love that book, but I’m not going to do that either. Oh, I’ll ride the blue highways, but I don’t see myself doing a lot of soul searching, or trying to capture The Real America. What’s to try, anyway? Anywhere you point your camera in America you capture something of The Real America.

For much of my photography career I’ve titled my body of work “Disconnection.” That evolved from the belief by many top pros that having a strong connection with one’s subjects was a major determining factor in the ultimate quality of the work. And so it is, on average, but I realized that’s not me. I’m not a connected person. Quite the contrary, my tether to society is severely torn and frayed. So I chose instead to embrace my Disconnection and shoot with that as the over-arching theme of my work.

An over-arching theme, however, is not a purpose. I’ve had a purpose for all my projects. But I don’t have one for what I’m doing now and plan to do on a big scale in the near future. I’ve been struggling to find one, to no avail. So I’m thinking I should lean into my Purposelessness just as I do with my Disconnection. Disconnected and Purposeless. That’s me in a nutshell.

When I was in South or Central America, people would ask me where I was from and if I said I was an American they would get huffy and point out that they were Americans too. The correct answer was that I was from the United States. But although they were generally well-educated about our colonialist history and tendencies, they still couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that we had colonized that part of their identities as well. People from the United States are Americans. Everyone else in the Americas is some kind of hyphenated American, be it South, Central, or Meso. Apparently Canadians don’t even count as Americans, which probably suits most of them just fine.

The same kind of language has been colonized more granularly within the United States. White people are Americans, people from other backgrounds are hyphenated Americans. That’s not my belief, but that’s how the language has been colonized by the people with the power.

In politics we hear a lot about the Real America and Real Americans from the racists and Xenophobes who dominate the Republican Party and the more outlying right wing radical organizations, as well as just plain folk. I’ve been around and know that The Real America is everywhere on American soil, and Real Americans are mostly those who live here. Anyone that was born here is a Real American. Anyone who is from somewhere else and has become a citizen is a Real American, at least if they think of themselves as such. And maybe anyone who lives here illegally but considers themselves to be a Real American is a Real American. I’m not the best person to judge.

I spent Memorial Day weekend in southern Ohio. It was my second dry run for the upcoming project. As per usual, I didn’t have much of a plan other than to visit some Indian mounds. Other than that, I camped in a parking lot for an off road vehicle trail system and explored the surrounding countryside and small towns like normal.

Southern Ohio doesn’t have just any old mounds. It was the center of the Hopewell culture and the mounds around Chillicothe were recently recognized as a World Heritage Site. But I’ll do a separate post about that.

When I started to look at what else there was to do, I found there was a World of Outlaws sprint car race outside of Chillicothe. Surprisingly, I’ve come to genuinely like sprint car racing. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but that’s not really the kind of question I concern myself much with. Of course it started out as a photographic interest, but it’s gone beyond that. Once I spent some time observing the lifestyle and started getting to know the drivers and asking questions about the racing and how the races were won, it became a lot more interesting. There are a lot of levels to think about.

At the race, I found I had some sympathy for the rural white vision of The Real America. It was a humid late spring night. The crowd was well-lubricated and so was I. The engines were growling and the dust was flying. Children were everywhere and people in the crowd were laughing and talking. There was a communal feeling that everything was good and right, that this was the way things should be. That this was The Real America.

Of course that kind of feeling is fleeting and I’ve felt the same thing surrounded by inner city Blacks and Puerto Ricans on 4th of July in Coney Island, but that does not mean that it’s not real. The fact that the feeling for a Ream America is real and that most everybody has felt it at one time or another is what makes it such a potent propaganda tool for bad actors.

The Real America myth is probably related to the findings detailed in this article which explores people’s perceptions of when America was greatest. Turns out that most people think that America was greatest around when they were 11. That makes sense as that is probably the best time in most people’s lives. So probably something similar is happening with people’s sense of The Real America. Their Real America is defined by some balmy night at a public event – fireworks, baseball game, sprint car race or whatnot – and Real Americans are whoever else was at those events. But then they became teenagers and found out how shitty so much of what goes on in America actually is. Then they are manipulated into believing that people who weren’t at those events are not Real Americans and the places where those people live are not The Real America.

Look at the above photographs of the street festival in New Straightsville, Ohio. Perhaps the idea of The Real America was ingrained this very day into the psyches of the children that were there.

But I wasn’t there long before a storm rolled in and shut it all down, which could probably serve as a good metaphor for what’s coming for this version of The Real America. I got a beer and sat for awhile at a shelter in a public park next to the jumping castles and tried to wait it out, but got bored after a short while and got the hell of Straightsville, riding back into the storm and a very different metaphor.