I lived in Seattle for a year during the ’90s. At the time, bookstores were in every neighborhood. Like a lot of people living there, I rode the bus. I love mass transit. One reason I love it is because I can read instead of driving.
A favorite book I read while riding a Seattle bus was Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality. This hyperlink sends you to This American Life’s episode about Eco’s essay. Eco was probably best known for writing In the Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum.
He is known in critical theory circles as being a semiotician.
Eco wrote about America’s hyper-detailed efforts to capture authenticity and recreate history without ignoring details. He called this reconstructive neurosis.
He mentioned a few wax museums in California that recreated the Last Supper. Eco talks about how the reconstruction will never create the feeling of being there.
Ira Glass walked through several of the wax museums. He says many figures are paired with others with no apparent connection.
Eco surmises this is because the USA is a country without a strong sense of history, so they aren’t expected to notice the lack of context.
He pointed at Florida and the southwest as the biggest offenders. We often one-up the original or magnify the original experience.
He also talked about how many people in this country try to shed the past and reinvent it in ways that borrow from it, muddling authenticity because we know it’s more of a reenactment.
Eco talked about the nouveau riche. I think about Trump’s gold toilets or anything that is his. Aspiring to look affluent when you don’t understand your references inspired the design of the Hearst Castle. Hearst Castle borrowed from the past, a hodgepodge of grandeur, resulting in a mansion that was the design version of a cry for help.
Florida is the home of Disney World, Legoland, Gatorland, Dinosaur World, The Coral Castle, Weeki Wachee, and we just lost Holyland.
We have Celebration and other New Urbanist places built to mimic the past.
One of my favorites is the Venus Project, which represents the future. Futurist Jacque Fresco developed it.
By the way, I have mentioned spots I enjoy going to and appreciate.
My father used to say Florida makes every effort to appear ahistorical. That thought bums me out, but I would love it if we could use that sort of a tabula rosa way, and we grew thoughtfully and looked beyond the bottom line.