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# America
- URL: https://memso.fit/america/
- Published: 2026-08-20T17:03:36.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-20T17:11:52.000Z
- Description: It's all California.
- Author: Memso
- Tags: Review, Print, Identity

I had recently gone on a trip that led me suspiciously close to the vacation home of an Edmund O. Schweitzer III, or as everyone in these fields prefers to call him: Ed. Driving my way through the forests of [freedom](https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/aryan-nations), I began to understand what Jean Baudrillard meant when he referred to the towns he passed by on the West Coast, and later the whole of America, as apocalyptic. The residences I passed by were just as sparse and likely in places that terrify every courier operating in this country. I was convinced if modernity were to collapse at this moment, these frontiersmen would be the meek who would keep on truckin' albeit with a hunger that was long overdue.

Speeding my way to this pioneer resort town, I was met with great irony when I found no parking near the dock. After finding a spot I made my way through the marina, a maze as intricate as it is an afterthought. Entertaining one too many beers, I kept reciting to my generous host remarks from Baudrillard's America. This country may not offer anything in the way of haute couture, but it does have vanishing points that leave both little and too much to the imagination. This is how Baudrillard begins describing the sights witnessed on his trip, both horizontal in the case of Los Angeles as well as the vertical "anti-architecture" of New York City. No matter which vanishing point you choose, humanity exists as a necessary pest getting in the way of a spectacular view. A desert contra Babel.

His earlier works should not surprise anyone of his grasp of religion, and yet it's refreshing to read from someone who can surgically describe the pathologies of protestant evangelization, of "manifest reality."

> And this indeed is the perfect definition of the simulacrum.

Baudrillard begins to trace this obsession Americans have with reterritorializing everything with the Anabaptists, who "having missed out on the original baptism, they dream of baptizing everything a second time." This mantle was, back in the 1980's when he took this trip, taken up by the Mormons who wish to potentially rebaptise anyone in their database of "twenty generations of living souls throughout the world" being made possible by "computer science, an intensely Calvinistic, Presbyterian discipline, which has inherited the universal and scientific rigidity of the techniques for achieving salvation by good works." He later contends the efforts of the Counter-Reformation "could never compete with this modernity."

I agree. If anything, the Catholic Church is now a sanitized hologram made to ease the blood memory of any Anabaptist who passes by their sterile 1960s-onward erections, all of which owe their form to Gaudí. All of corporate architecture made to augment a sense of community evokes his designs, and it's because the desert has no place for it and gets drier when too many of us congregate. This is the terranean context of America that spoke out to Baudrillard, and has now become impossible for me to ignore. My earliest memories were of vanishing points, of endless blue skies, and technicolor suburbs. The desert was nearby, with a smug aridity that kept us at bay, or wherever water and air conditioning were nearby.

There is also an intellectual desert in America, one that Baudrillard attributes to our obliviousness to History. I believe it is the source of our crises of identity as individuals and as a nation. On the Santa Monica pier, a friend I was traveling with made the point that America had no transitional phase from being a city (or colony) to a full-fledged nation. This process, to some extent, is what Baudrillard keeps referring to as History and the intrigue previous empires have had to undergo. America, on the other hand, did not fight over territory and, more specifically, the shape of its borders but rather over the definition of interstate commerce and its enforcement. The epic rendered unto any enterprising king was sublimated in the intrigue on Capitol Hill, and later in state capitals themselves, down to זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול.

Our history is one of corporations and their products, the rest of humanity their kingdoms and heirs. All of them have now collapsed under the weight of the only "successful revolution." Those that have acknowledged this flaunt their own Disneyland, competing against the others for the title of best simulacra. Americans who try to establish a heritage do so with the same vulgarity as an Epcot exhibit, hoping to distill identity with the same hyperreality mastered by Hollywood. Identity as special effect. It is an endless cycle of purity that, although not foreign to any protestant, engenders a vertigo that would ultimately disregard Europe at any point in time, זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול זול. This is because the history of Europe, and Europe itself, could never be baptized under due process, for they have already been baptized by blood.

The other option is to embrace the interior, or what is left of it, as a strange whiplash. An attempt to invest solely in authenticity, and a reconciliation of "the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself." This again becomes another puritanical spiral that must be sorted out in the corpus of democracy and inevitably produces just as tacky a product as the heritage movement. The true problem lies in how identity itself becomes ratified, and the act of ratification itself. Real identities are born out of violence; real borders are birthed from war. In exchange for taking a FastPass to imperium, the revolution will never ascribe a real American because that has now become the frontier.

The frontier of Europe evokes much of Baudrillard's lamentations as a Frenchman, where that peninsula is drenched in pixie dust. Despite all their tact for introspection, they constantly fail to live up to the "bit" as they say.

> America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version.

The only place that is able to deterritorialize as fast as America is Japan, where even in the 1980s it was "already a satellite of the planet Earth." Some jokingly will attribute this to radiation, but what is quantum physics if not the deterritorialization of classical mechanics? What really sets Japan apart from the other players in modernity is the sublimation of Shintoism into the worship of new technological and scientific marvels. It is why their kiosks are as organized and clean as they are; the products that reside there are deserving of the same veneration as the deities of Shinto. If anything, modernity was a godsend in the face of State Shinto, which was likely doing to Shintoism what democracy has done to American identity.

Where else can one get a sense of what an American should be than in California? Or a European or Japanese expat, or any immigrant who decides to settle where dreams are made? Where they don't have to dream, because it's over and available on all platforms. A place that has already depicted its demise, but because זול זול זול זול זול has the rights to it, now becomes alluring in contrast to the desert that makes up the majority of this country. The vertical metropolis of Blade Runner offers roofs to anyone who seeks to avoid soaking in the acid rain. The desert, California, and the American Dream punish you with an endless plethora of content that never quite quenches your thirst, leaving you in search of a sign that falls flat the moment you find it. Hollywood.