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Sunday, December 14, 2008

This Land Is Your Land: America In The Eye Of The Beholder

1944 Nazi propaganda poster. Unknown if irony of Nazis satirizing Americans for being racist was intentional.

I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space, in the marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts on the road; looked for what was nearest to the nuclear and enucleated universe, a universe which is virtually our own, right down to its European cottages. I sought the finished form of the future catastrophe.

- Jean Baudrillard, America