Report fromEl Dorado By Michael Ventura I’m not suggesting a nostalgia for that time. It was repressive and bigoted to an extent that is largely forgotten today, to cite only two of it’s uglier aspects. But in that environment America meant America: the people and the land. The land was far bigger than what we’d done with the land. This is no longer true. Nowthe environment of America is media. Not the land itself, but the image of the land. The focus is not on the people so much as it is on the interplay between people and screens. What we’ve done with the land is To go from a job you don’t like to watching a screen on which others live more intensely than you...is American life, by and large. This is our political ground. This is our artistic ground. This is what we’ve done with our immense resources. Wehave to stop calling it “entertainment” or “news” or “sports” and start calling it what it is: our most immediate environment. This is a very, very different America from the America that built the industrial capacity to win the Second World War and to surge forward on the multiple momentums of that victory for thirty years. That was an America that worked at mostly menial tasks during the day (nowwe work at mostly clerical tasks) and had to look at each other at Illustrations by Stuart Mead Graphic Design by Connie Gilbert 4 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1989
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