What's a Build Your Own America Kit?

How about a sorta divination matrix for a Build Your Own America Kit? Take the personal and cultural conditions that are most American and write them around the perimeter of one of those spin-the-arrow things they used to have for pre-digital games. Maybe: innovation opposite corporate slavishness, enthusiasm opposite victimhood, appetite opposite provincialism, faith opposite certitude, politically correct self righteous liberalism opposite know-nothing christian conservatism ... I'm being sloppy here, but sorta like that. In another concentric circle write the most American products: pop music, cars, guns, electronic gadgets, high journalism, comic books, junk food, talk radio, opinion, pornography, self-sufficiency mags, high-tech military stuff, etc... On a third concentric circle you write the things you are interested in producing: poems, essays, songs, foods, stuff like that. Then you spin the arrow once and get, say, provincialism. You spin it again and get, say, talk radio. Your third spin produces song. Then you write a song about someone listening to talk radio in a samll town. Or three other spins tell you to write poem about a self-righteous smartypants liberal finding Jesus. THis was more coherent before I started writing it. THe idea is that you basically make your own recombinant DNA for Home-Built Americans.

Or maybe a set of paper dolls and clothes that allow you to mix and match what is not mixable and matchable in America: a middle American guy with gun and an Obama T-shirt. High campiness possible here, too, which feels like maybe what America most is. I love how iconic things become ironic things when you change their context. The Marlboro man reframed is Brokeback. The Village People play straight, but the context makes them queer, doubly, for playing straight. Black conservatives are endlessly fascinating. I met a Navajo man in Boston, long black brain, silver and turquoise, boots, eariongs, all that, but turns out he was a manager at the Massachusetts MV. That was very American. I once saw a 6'8" very muscular man with long blond braids and ahuge yellow handlebar mustache wearing very wworn buckskins and fur walking down Newbury street. I figured he was either some kind of fetishist or an honest to Thor Viking. Where else?

FWIW.

V.