Over spring break, seven friends and I went backpacking in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Our adventure — traipsing through the foggy woods of North Carolina and Tennessee, climbing the highest peak in the Appalachians, stomping through over-full mountain streams — was a great success, and by the end I felt like Davy Crockett, Henry Thoreau, and Alexander Supertramp of Into the Wild all rolled into one, exuding mountain-manliness and sporting significantly longer chest hair.
Unfortunately, this badass trek was bookended by two unpleasant experiences that left a distinctly bad taste in my mouth.
The first occurred near the border of the park in North Carolina. In order to reach the wilderness, we first had to pass through a small Cherokee reservation squeezed between some steep hills. “Cool,” I thought to myself, “I’ll get to mix culture and nature.”
Wrong. What met my eyes in Cherokee, N.C., was not authentic indigenous culture; instead, I saw unappealing, commercialized sprawl. First was Harrah’s Casino — a towering glass monstrosity utterly out of place amongst the natural scenery. Next was a desolate strip of outlets offering generic mass-made junk cleverly marketed through the appropriation of Native American culture (“Moccasins! Tomahawks! Arrowheads!”). Third was a series of depressing and utterly out-of-place entertainment venues such as a moribund Santaland and a bizarre establishment called “Pan Fer Gold!” In a word, it was all crap.
It was with great eagerness, then, that I hiked into the woods. Five days later, though, nearly the same sight met my eyes.
We emerged from the woods in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., a town whose claim to fame is playing host to Dolly Parton’s inexplicable theme park, Dollywood. As we made our way along Route 441, we passed endless successions of Denny’s, McDonald’s, Hampton Inns, Days Inns, Subways, Texacos, and Home Depots. At one point, we saw in the middle of a strip mall a gigantic faux-Greek temple turned on its head. I didn’t dare guess what purpose it served. My newly nature-nourished spirit was sick.
No doubt much of my disgust at this endless blight of generic development was caused by its juxtaposition to where I had just been — after all, there’s nothing to inspire distaste for development like a walk through the woods. Still, in the days after, it was a feeling I couldn’t quite shake.
Maybe it’s simply the generic nature of these shopping districts that makes them so unappealing. No one would cite Route 13, for example, with its succession of chain stores and outlets, as Ithaca’s most interesting neighborhood. And sometimes shopping areas can be more interesting: during my recent summer in Istanbul I made a special point of visiting the sleekly designed Kanyon mall, and it was with no little enthusiasm that I visited for the first time over winter break the newly-yuppified mall near my hometown, the “Natick Collection.” Perhaps the real culprit, then, isn’t capitalism, but redundancy.
“But what’s so wrong with repetition?” you might ask. After all, companies like Barnes & Noble, Burger King, or Best Buy appear everywhere because they’re good at what they do. Supply meets demand.
Personally, I think it’s a bit of an aesthetic issue — huge areas of chain stores rob locales of their distinctive geography and, standing in the parking lot of an outdoor mall, you might have no idea whether you’re in Texas, Pennsylvania, or Alaska. A recent spread in the Atlantic Monthly envisioned what Havana might look like after the fall of Communism—American factories, cruise ships, and, yes, Wal-Mart. For those enamored of romantic Old Havana, this is a frightening prospect.
But there’s more at stake than regional pride. The homogenization of shopping — one of America’s nearest and dearest pastimes — only accelerates an already-troubling trend of conformity. Take, as an example appropriate for college students, the Facebook phenomenon — millions of young people identifying themselves through narrow categories such as “Political Views,” “Favorite Activities,” and “About Me.” Combine this with patterns such as the consolidation of media outlets into the hands of a few corporations, and you’ve got a disturbing development.
Of course, it’s not all bad — Facebook, as most of us will attest, is a blessing rather than a bane, and a corporation-tainted Cuba is preferable to one where hunger crises are common. Irked as some of us may be by the spread of the likes of Wendy’s or Bed, Bath & Beyond, there’s a case to be made for convenience and low cost.
Nonetheless, I’ll never forget my deep feeling of disgust in Pigeon Forge. There’s something unnatural about these vast expanses of commercialized anonymity, and I think I’d be fine never ordering another Gordita Supreme for the rest of my life. Remember that episode of South Park where Wal-Mart — a malicious, sentient, being — dies in the end, imploding and crapping itself in undignified fashion? I’ll admit I’m not averse to the idea.
Ted Hamilton ’10 is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences and a contributing columnist this semester. He can be contacted at thamilton@cornellsun.com [1].
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[1] mailto:thamilton@cornellsun.com