After Mt. Rushmore, Wall Drug and the Prairie Dog God, we wondered if there could be even more weirdness in western South Dakota.  Yes, there most definitely can.

We visited Delta-09, a Minuteman II silo, where we saw an actual nuclear missile.

It’s a weird place – a chain-link fence enclosure in the middle of the prairie, where they leave the gate open so you can enter and look into the silo.  There is a phone number you can call on your phone, and then punch in various numbers to get information about it.  We tried to do that, and couldn’t get it to work, and then realized we had just called an unknown phone number from a nuclear missile site, and the NSA now had our number, and ever since we’ve been seeing some suspicious vehicles in the rear-view mirror.

We quickly moved along to Mitchell SD, for a viewing of the Corn Palace.  It is undergoing one of its regular refurbishments, where new murals are made out of corncobs. 

It was cool to see the underlying layout sketched out before the corncobs are added, as in this picture, which seems to be of Willie Nelson:

We were a little more perplexed by this mural, until we realized it was a portrait of Michael Jackson, an attempt by the Corn Place to appeal to a younger audience through an homage to a 30-year-old pop tune.

But that is only the beginning of the weirdness in Mitchell. Right across the street is “Valticoty”, a gift shop in a castle, with a “kids jungle playground” and a “walk-thru ancient bible world.”  When we were perplexed by the name, the owner, apparently an eastern-European fundamentalist, told us it was from the initial syllables of the names of the Three Wisemen.  We moved along quickly.

While the Corn Palace gets most of the attention, one should certainly not miss the Tire Palace

nor the Cone Palace:

We left the Twilight Zone and drove to the Twin Cities.

On Monday we were in western South Dakota, which must have the greatest concentration of kitsch in North America.  We’re all familiar with Wall Drug, the fabulously irrepressible, over-the-top apotheosis of western tourist culture kitsch, which evinces a degree of naivete and guilelessness that is rare in today’s corporatized, polished, marketed-to-death tourist environment.  It is a reminder of an earlier era of tourism, when one person’s particular, antic vision drove the enterprise, and it has a unique character that differentiates it from the bland sameness of the mass culture tourist habitat.  Greta was psyched to enter the world of the jackalope, and was not disappointed by its manifestation (although we did think they had missed some good jackalope opportunities).

The juxtaposition of jackalope trophies with weird fantasy/erotic imagery.

Riding the giant jackalope.

The trophy wall. Greta wisely decided we should not bring one back to Eugene.

Practicing safe bison selfies. (Cf. http://jezebel.com/terry-gross-interviews-the-author-about-her-new-book-bi-1719997411)

The innocence and manic silliness of this low culture kitsch contrasted with the truly horrifying, high-culture kitsch of Mt. Rushmore.  I remember the Mt. Rushmore of 30 years ago – a simple parking lot adjoining a plain terrace, from which you could gaze up at the sculptures, ponder the meaning of carving large representations of your culture’s prior canon of greatest leaders on a mountain in the center of the sacred hills of the indigenous culture whom we had subdued, and then go back to your car.

Dan and Norman on our epic 1978 cross-country drive.

It too represented a certain innocence, a time when we believed in the rightness of empire and manifest destiny, but it was what it was, a curious relic of an earlier time and sensibility.

Mt. Rushmore as I remember it

I didn’t recognize the Mt. Rushmore I found on Monday.  A confusing array of roads and ramps leading to parking garages, a very high parking fee to the concessionaire, and an extended axis of pomposity and grandiosity which rivals Mussolini’s modifications to St. Peters. I wandered confused through this landscape, wondering if somehow I had forgotten what it was like, until the truth was revealed by an endless series of inscriptions detailing the generosity of the corporate sponsors.

At some point in the 80s, the triumphalist, end-of-history jingoism of the Reagan-Thatcher era intersected with the neo-classisist pretensions of bad postmodernism, to produce an environment that called to mind the Nazi Reichsparteitagsgelände of Nuremberg, where the scenographic design was used to reinforce the power of the state.  In contrast to the informality of the hills and the intentional asymmetry of the sculpture, a rigid axis crossed by a seemingly endless and repetitive series of screen colonnades had been constructed to contain one’s view, and focus all attention on the end of the axis, which is actually diminished and belittled by the bombastic banality of the surroundings.

The axis begins.

and goes on

and on

and on

and on

and on

finally.

You reach the end of the axis and looking over the low wall, discover an amphitheater sunk below, doubtless for the enactment of patriotic rituals. The echo of fascism seen in the formal design is reinforced by the omnipresent celebration of corporate sponsorship, and the union of oligarchic government and global capitalism is enacted in a manner that is eerily familiar; it appears that Albert Speer Jr. was employed as the architect.  Right at the end of the axial movement there is a juxtaposition of elements that could not be clearer in its meaning – one can only hope that a subversive designer put it there to make sure that we understood the meaning.

culminating in..

After this deeply depressing exposure to an image which captured what is most hypocritical and corrupt in our society, the carefree kitsch of Wall Drug was a breath of fresh air, a reminder that outside of the military-industrial-corporate hegemony, there are simple human impulses towards showmanship, entertainment and hucksterism.

Meanwhile, back at Wall Drug

2020 update:  Five years after this post, its prescience has, alas, only been borne out too clearly.  The difference between the US and Germany is simply that there the dictator and his followers constructed elaborate stage sets for the performance of their dominance, whereas here, the stage set was constructed by an earlier generation of oligarchs, and the tin-pot dictator could simply stroll in and claim it.