The Real Thing

In 1975 Umberto Eco wrote an essay titled Travels in Hyperreality, covering his journey across the United States to find 'the real thing', by which he meant the absolute fake, for this was the consequence, he suggested, of America's own quest for profound authenticity.

This intuition was similar — and in fact prior — to those of Jean Baudrillard, cited in my previous post. (Grok 2 seems a bit better at drawing the Italian semiotician than the French one, by the way.)

So that we might better comprehend this key reflex within the American mindset, Eco refers us to the hyperbolic formula embodied by the word 'more'. 

 

One can never have enough in America, one is always on a trajectory towards extra…

"The announcer doesn't say, for example,'the programme will continue' but rather that there is 'more to come'. In America you don't say 'Give me another coffee', you ask for 'more coffee'; you don't say cigarette A is longer than cigarette B, but that there's 'more' of it, more than you're used to having, more than you might want, leaving a surplus to throw away - that's prosperity."

So, I guess, don't argue with the MAGAs that America is already great, for it is always going to need to be ‘more’ great — even when the mechanism is a kind of bogus nostalgia — forced onward towards a greatness that is in fact surplus to requirements, readily disposable, a greatness that is ultimately indistinguishable from absolute crapness.