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SORRY PARADISE
Or...At What Price Wall Mart?
Convenient? Sure. Cheap? You bet. But what about the hidden costs? The ones not measured in dollars? The ones that cost more than money?
And it's not just Wall Mart. It's the course we've charted on the road to tomorrow. One characterized by the enhancement of profit at all cost. Function over form. Straight lines over curved. Hollywood movie endings scripted by focus groups. The rights of the individual subverted for the greater good of the state.
Just how we got here and what it means are questions for the ages and ones I can't begin to address. Instead I've sought to explore some of the things we've lost in a part of the world I've become quite familiar with; the rural American West.
While many factors have contributed to the destruction of the fabric of the rural West over the past fifty years, none have had more impact than Eisenhower's Interstate Program initiated in the late 1950's and, some years later, the advent of the large corporate farm. With respect to the former, the engineers hired to reroute the older meandering transcontinental routes chose, in deference to the flight of a crow, to bypass altogether the small towns served by the older roads. Almost overnight motels and cafes closed down, never to re open. While out in the agriculturally rich valleys of the West and in particular California's San Joaquin valley, the birth and rapid rise of the massive corporate farm has had the effect of putting out of business all but the largest of family farms. Instead of a local economy serving the needs of a multitude of small property owners, we now have an economy tending to the needs of transient field hands mired in poverty as they work the large corporate farms comprised primarily of absentee owners. The exodus of the middle class has here created a vacuum manifested today by crumbling commercial districts, leaning, run-down homes and overgrown, unkempt public parks.
My interest in going back to discover the modern day ruins left in the wake of this progress was not motivated by some sort of anti-progress, pro-Luddite bias but rather the unlikely combination of elegance, singular beauty, surprise and funky unadulterated humor I discovered among these rotting places. Either in their architecture or the planting of substantial trees and shrubs, the creators of these once vital, now largely moribund ruins displayed a vision of the world seemingly endowed with high hopes while at the same time appearing unafraid of courting the silly. What these trail blazers lacked by way of naiveté was more than made up for by their prodigious energy and chutzpah. And while many of the theme motels and cafes sprinkled across the hard scrabble terrain of the desert West were guilty of pandering to the Hollywood myths of the West, they did so with the same devil-may-care exuberance that characterized the very figures and occurrences they alluded to. So what if they advertised "world famous hot-dogs" in reference to cuisine whose reputation rarely left town.
While the rest of the West is increasingly looking like the East as the Staples, Home Depots, Targets, McDonalds and other corporate franchises dominate our landscape, an examination of the older architecture, even in carcass form, reveals an element of surprise and unpredictability not found in the circumspect, cost effective, "value engineered" architecture and planning of today's big box franchise chains. Nor the sense of place and individuality. These old places were the real deal. Indigenous Regional architecture comprised of local materials that can at best only be mimicked today.
The photographs of "Sorry Paradise" bring to sharp focus a part of the American West that is quickly fading. Some of what makes the West the West and not somewhere else can be discovered in these places. Not just in the specifics of their locales, but in the more subtle details that comprise their whole. The indomitable spirit borne of big sky and endless space helped shape these details and they in turn helped shape the West.
These pioneers of yesterday gamely participated in the march of progress only to be rudely left behind. As I stepped carefully among the ruins of their dreams, avoiding the broken glass mixed in with the burnt rubber, eyes cast outward to the desert beyond, it still seemed possible, despite the passage of time, to recapture some of the aspirations and hopes these makers of modern day ruins must have had when they first set down with pencil and paper and made their plans for the future.
Tim Goodman
November, 1994
Berkeley, California
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