Excerpt: To Re-Imagine America

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



Whenever he spoke of New Orleans to someone he almost always found himself speaking of San Francisco, too, although Southern hospitality was hardly a blessing bestowed upon San Francisco.  But what the two cities shared was a feeling of otherness, of being elsewhere, as if they had somehow by accident become detached from some other country and, drifting awhile, had by chance attached themselves to the shores of America.  Well, Savannah was like that too, he thought.  All three of those cities, profoundly differing from each other, and possessed of their own peculiar and unique characters, each retaining its own distinctive quality of grace that inevitably brought you out of yourself, that left you feeling, for a little while, that you had inadvertently strayed outside the prescribed commercial confines that bound your countrymen.  You could re-imagine America as a hot circus tent, he thought, full of mirrors and bright, hypnotic lights to draw and captivate your attention.  Yowling, gravel-voiced barkers, the smells of stale popcorn and elephants and straw and dust, the ubiquitous soap salesmen with their swaggering, gimcrack patter and not a thought in their heads beyond separating you from your coins.  But coming into San Francisco, or Savannah, or New Orleans, was like slipping through unseen rips in the canvas and out of that other house of mirrors that was America.