Nouns & Verbs

by Campbell McGrath

  Eugene V. Debs saw the whole assemblage as tribute to the laborers that built it, among them Elias Disney, Walt’s father, driving nails into the prototypical Magic Kingdom.

  Henry Adams came back twice to plumb its mysteries; William Dean Howells found nirvana reflected within its Golden Door.

  Frederick Douglass addressed the “Race Problem in America” on “Colored People’s Day” when the vendors sold watermelon in naked mockery.

  Thorstein Veblen invented socioeconomics to explain the daily spectacle out the window of his office in the newly christened University.

  Frederick Jackson Turner announced the closing of the American frontier in his famous derivation from 1890 census data,

  the first to use punch cards for rapid tabulation,

  the binary egg from which the computer was hatched,

  thereby yoking the past with the future,

  that century with this,

  the Information Age with the vanishing Era of the Heroic Individual,

  whose incorporation into the body politic was symbolically recapitulated in this act of appropriation, quantification, and mythopoeic enshrinement.

  Which is why cowboys blame bureaucrats and not barbed wire for their troubles.

  Which is why IBM was once the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.

  Which is why thirty million people visited the White City in the half year it was open.

  Which is why we speak of it as a watershed.

  Which is an uncomfortable metaphor alongside the Great Lakes.

  •

  Since Noah’s ark, no such Babel of loose and ill-joined, such vague and ill-defined and unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts and experimental outcries as the Exposition, had ever ruffled the surface of the lakes.

  Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question whether the American people knew where they were driving.

  Chicago was the first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start there.

  —Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

  •

  Anyway, six months later they

  demolished it,

  or let it go to arson,

  every pergola, proscenium, colonnade, and cornice,

  so much unfinished confectionary,

  so much frosting on a cake of illusion.

  Beneath the facade the White City was built not of brick or granite but of sculpted plaster over lath and beams,

  a temporary contrivance unfit to weather the winter, meant to look beautiful but not to last,

  as if they’d constructed Disney World from Lego blocks and Lincoln logs and tore it all down at the first sign of rain,

  as if it were merely a form of mass hallucination,

  a collective vision of a heaven so imminent

  its electric glow lit the contours of the century’s horizon

  with the glitter of a thousand elysian fields,

  as it still does, in reverse, for us, looking backward,

  a quixotic flame like a firefly encased in viscous amber,

  a token of everything we have become in a dialect we no longer speak,

  a beacon as perfect and irretrievable as a dream.

  •

  Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine languages, Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from his knapsacks—ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes—which he arranged in front of him like chessmen. Returning from the missions on which Kublai sent him, the ingenious foreigner improvised pantomimes that the sovereign had to interpret: one city was depicted by the leap of a fish escaping the cormorant’s beak to fall into a net; another city by a naked man running through fire unscorched; a third by a skull, its teeth green with mold, clenching a round, white pearl. The Great Khan deciphered the signs, but the connection between them and the places visited remained uncertain; he never knew whether Marco wished to enact an adventure that had befallen him on his journey, an exploit of the city’s founder, the prophecy of an astrologer, a rebus or a charade to indicate a name. But, obscure or obvious as it might be, everything Marco displayed had the power of emblems, which, once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused. In the Khan’s mind the empire was reflected in a desert of labile and interchangeable data, like grains of sand, from which there appeared, for each city and province, the figures evoked by the Venetian’s logogriphs.

  —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

  •

  City of concrete, city of illusion, how to decipher such dialectical ambiguity?

  How can I reconcile my affection with my anger, my need to criticize with my desire to praise?

  If there’s only one Chicago, which is it: Thorstein Veblen’s or Milton Friedman’s, Gene Debs’s or Mayor Daley’s, Studs Lonigan’s or Bigger Thomas’s,

  the White City, the Gray City, the Black city abandoned to sift through the ashes?

  If no man is an island, why was Daniel Burnham buried on one?

  If even this utopian visionary elects for himself eternal isolation what hope can there be for any commonweal?

  What does it mean that Louis Sullivan ended in impoverished oblivion, tormented by the shadows of the skyscrapers he designed?

  Can it be a mere coincidence that the balloon-frame building method was invented by a man named Snow—

  or else Augustine Deodat Taylor,

  depending on which source you credit?

  Have I mentioned that the Museum of Science and Industry is in fact the last vestige of the Columbian Exposition,

  the former Palace of Fine Arts at the great fair, the only one of the White City’s temples built of actual stone?

  Or that Lincoln logs were invented by John Lloyd Wright, first son of famous Frank?

  What sort of diminutive Oedipal revenge is this: Laius stabbed to death by a toothpick, modernism brought down by Lilliputian arrows?

  How can I account for my love of this place?

  Is it simply nostalgia, that I was born here, that my son, so soon, presumably will be?

  Could it really be as simple as fathers and sons, that ancient, atavistic, blood-weary principle?

  What voice is this that issues from the deep well of the past?

  Who calls to me from that vast assemblage?

  All this, all this—

  and what?

  Benediction for the Savior of Orlando

  Signs and wonders: Jesus Is Lord Over Greater Orlando

  snake-tagged in cadmium on a vine-grown cyclone

  fence along I-4 southbound north of downtown

  is a credo that subverts the conventional wisdom

  that Walt Disney is the messiah and his minions the christened

  stewards of this place, that the Kingdom to Come shall be Mickey’s,

  that the bread of our communion will be proffered by ATM

  and the wine quaffed without taint of sulfites

  or trademark infringement, all of which is certainly true

  and yet too pat, too much like shooting mice in a barrel

  when there are nastier vermin to contest

  and purgatories far worse than Disney’s realm of immortal

  simulacra suckled at the breast of Lake Buena Vista.

  There is, for one, Orlando itself,

  Orlando rightly considered, Orlando qua Orlando.

  Nobody, anywhere, could honestly propose Orlando

  as a fit model for human habitation,

  city with the character of a turnpike restroom,

  city with the soul of a fast-food establishment,

  sanitized and corporatized, homogenous and formulaic.

  Orlando is the holy land of the branded and franchised,

  Orlando is the Jerusalem of commodified delight,

  Orlando, Orlando, so many Orlandos

  I commence to feel downright Shakespearean,

  but here is no Rosalind to dignify our tale,

 
no Touchstone to transform its tragedy to farce,

  because Orlando is the Florida I fear to conceive,

  Florida ordained like the antechamber to that afterworld

  where jackal-headed Anubis prepares his embalmer’s instruments

  to pump our veins with tincture of liquid sunshine

  until we are reduced to somnambulant acquiescence,

  a citizenry mummified within the cambric of material satiety,

  within the gated stucco walls of economic segregation

  and the hairy stucco arms of Armed Response security,

  a people determined to rev our outboards and troll for bass

  in the shadow of the form-glass temples to corporate profit

  while the fill ponds grow heavy with duckweed and algae

  and the golf courses burn with viridian fire

  through seasons of rain and seasons of drought

  and the metropolis spreads ever outward the bland picnic blankets

  of its asphalt dominion, landscape drained of spontaneity and glee,

  bones boiled free of communal gristle—is it any wonder

  the children of this America rise up with guns

  to wreak a senseless vengeance,

  the very children that might have saved us,

  the ones we had relied on to assemble in fellowship

  and attend to councils of greater wisdom

  than those to which we have given credence?

  Perhaps the children were absent from school the day

  these lessons were offered or perhaps

  the lessons have been censored from the curriculum

  or there was no curriculum or the schools

  had been demolished to make room for the future,

  a serial cataclysm of vinyl and asphalt,

  a republic of bananas and Banana Republics,

  where cars are the chosen and credit cards the elect,

  where Judge Judy balances the Scales of Justice

  and the anthem of our freedom is sung by Chuck E. Cheese.

  Here I may testify with absolute conviction:

  Chuck E. Cheese is the monstrous embodiment of a nightmare,

  the bewhiskered Mephistopheles of ringtoss,

  the vampire of our transcendent ideals.

  Every Chuck E. Cheese’s erected across the mall-lands of America

  is another nail in the coffin of human aspiration

  and every hour spent in one takes six months off your life.

  No, no, no, it’s not a theme restaurant or family amusement center

  but a vision of infernal despair enjoined in plastic flames,

  the clownish horror of the place is unspeakable,

  yet I feel that I must speak of it, for I have been

  to the birthday party of Emily, turning five,

  the birthday party of Max, turning eight or nine,

  of Max again, of David and Doris, of Myrna and Roberto,

  I can bear witness to its odors of chocolate milk and floor cleanser,

  the Formica falsity of its processed cheesefood pseudopizza,

  its banquet tables arrayed with pitchers of lurid orange soda

  and the kids in the arcade room playing air hockey

  and whack-a-mole and teaching one another to cheat at Skee-Ball

  to win a screel of coupons to redeem for tiny, chintzy prizes,

  the worst sorts of craftily packaged trash—stringless

  army parachute guys, malformed monster finger puppets,

  Chinese yoyos that self-destruct at the flip of a wrist—

  a rainbow-colored peep show designed to entice the youngest among us

  to invest their lives in a cycle of competitive consumption

  and then the animatronic hoedown commences its banjo jangle,

  the hairy rodent orchestra chirring their cymbals onstage

  as the gray rat-man emerges from his curtain redolent of mildew,

  the incubus, the secret sharer, Chuck E. Cheese himself,

  and the baby children scream in dismay and the larger children

  gag with disinterest and the parents pay no attention at all

  while employees with the fear- and candy-glazed eyeballs

  of medium-security inmates stutter their pre-scripted remarks

  over a public address system in whose interstitial silences

  one may discern the voices of the lost upraised in prayer.

  We’re having a great day at Chuck E. Cheese—

  Hear us, help us, grant us benison,

  Pick up your food at the counter PJ—

  Comfort and guide us, lead us to salvation,

  Everyone loves family fun at Chuck E.—

  Bestow the mercies of your blessing

  Cheese for your safety wear shoes at all times—

  Upon our souls, we beseech Thee,

  Last call for pickup PJ last call—

  Lord of our fathers, Almighty God.

  Nagasaki, Uncle Walt, the Eschatology of America’s Century

  Like all good stories it starts with a bang: August 6, 1945.

  Little Boy, Oppenheimer’s aleph, Hiroshima, the bomb.

  America’s Century begins in fire and ends,

  like any respectable act of creation, in something

  resembling ash, Alamogordo to Ragnarok, Genesis

  to Nagasaki, the black rain wherein we are forever united

  with those whose bones we jellied to magma,

  siblings minutely differentiated by the fact

  that what the burgeoning clouds bequeathed to us

  was not death but Oldsmobiles and wall-to-wall shag,

  family sitcoms, Rock Hudson melodramas,

  Quisp and Quake and Shake ’n Bake. I’m talking about m-m-

  my generation, boomers and boomlets and Watergate babies,

  vassals of Dumbo, victims of disco, Disney’s demented

  suburban spawn held in thrall by Herbie the Love Bug

  and Dan’l Boone and frozen dinners in the family room.

  For his is the land of Salisbury steak and crinkle-cut fries,

  his the encampment holding hostage our dreams,

  his the painted desert toward which an ever younger legion

  flies to fight and die willingly among the ruins

  littered with no plastic cactus. Poor, lost Los Angeles.

  Fifty years since the war invented the automobile and it

  keeps spreading like an oil slick or fungus,

  some deviant flora or insect brood corrupt with radiation,

  the Things and Its our fear became those first flush years

  of the Atomic Age. Amazing, this vista, the miles we’ve logged

  from the very first split-levels and miracle appliances,

  Levittown to Orange County, the mouse-eared multitude

  inching into adolescence as the great consensus waned,

  Perry Como supplanted by Elvis, Route 66 replaced by I-40,

  Interstates invented by Ike to match the autobahns

  he bombed to rubble. And the ’60s were born with a whole

  lot of shaking and died in the trip wires of Tet,

  the ’70s churned in a funky inferno—burn, baby, burn—

  lost souls in sandals and government scandals

  preempting the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family,

  and soon they’ll be enshrining the ’80s

  like the happy daze of the ’50s before them

  as a fun-loving decade of armed intervention and capital gains

  overseen by a firm but avuncular Cold Warrior,

  a smiling Sandman smelting our stolen ideals to slag.

  Burn, baby. Burn. But what will we do for entertainment

  now that Uncle Walt is gone, Elvis has left the building,

  even the Commies have thrown in the towel?

  Where can we turn for self-definition if Lookinglass has landed,

  Iron Felix fallen, the Titan of the Carpathians

>   crumbled to chalk on the Victory of Socialism Boulevard?

  We’ve invested so much in World War III it seems a shame

  to miss it, killer satellites and high-tech graphics

  to grid the incoming contrails, feral survivors

  roaming the wasteland in jacked-up desert dune buggies.

  For those reared in the shadow of the Fat Man

  anything less than global thermonuclear destruction

  seems laughable, wimpy, unrealistically naive.

  I couldn’t begin to count the versions of Armageddon

  cast up like driftwood on the shallow bar of my youth:

  gamma waves and bacterial plagues, deep-space visitations,

  killer rabbits run amok in Night of the Lepus.

  No screenplay apocalypse, no scenario for world holocaust

  could fail to provide me with suitable amusement.

  The greenhouse effect? Let’s grow oranges in Alaska!

  Nuclear winter? We’ll wear fur coats!

  How many Saturdays did I roam the solitude of Rock Creek Park

  whacking the heads from the carpet of May apples

  that rose like miniature mushroom people from the loam each spring,

  the last man left alive, alone with my trusty radio,

  stockpiled SpaghettiOs, and Raquel Welch in her mink bikini.

  My favorite survivalist parable was that classic of the genre,

  The Omega Man: Charlton Heston as a macho scientist

  marooned in a barbed-wire penthouse bastion

  while the devious albino minions of Brother Matthias essay

  to toast him like a cheese puff with their flaming catapult.

  To a battalion of prepubescent fifth-grade boys

  assembled on my birthday for pizza and then a movie

  at the military hospital where my father saw patients

  its peculiar logic was irresistible—wandering the streets

  of the virus-riddled city, submachine gun in hand,

  torching the cowled and cowering enemy, looting at will

  from abandoned stores in a consumerist fantasy spree.

  Even the recovering soldiers back from Hue and Da Nang

  napalmed hairless as rubber lobsters strolling the lobby

  in mint-green sanitary gowns during intermission

  couldn’t dim our heroic bloodlust. Eventually, of course,

  the bad guys contrive to harpoon unlucky Charlton

  in a fountain, Ahab and the whale rolled into one,

  his blood embodying a second chance for the hippie kids