American Offal

We don't have to live in a dirty hole.

A short distance past the Monteagle exit on I-24 between Nashville and Chattanooga there stands a billboard. It’s one of a menagerie of billboards expressing the most batshit crazy ideas available outside of the kind of total hermeneutic bubbles featured amongst those standing in front of the local CVS raving about Jewish aliens exercising mind-control via 5G technology.

“***CRISIS!!***”

It begins with a hook, as befits any good entertainment. Then, “BIDEN, FIX THE DAMN BORDER!” it says, as though the Biden might happen by, notice the sign, and feel suitably chastened; below that, “DRUGS * CARTELS * ILLEGALS”—a grab bag of scary-sounding problems.¹ Finally at the bottom lies a triptych of trite: 2020 | TRUMP | KEEP AMERICA GREAT!”

I suppose perhaps credit is due to the sign’s gnomic creator for sticking to his guns all the way through Biden’s term, though the fact the sign is addressed to Biden and says 2020 suggests perhaps a not-quite balanced mind. The surrounding environs suggest blindness; there’s nothing especially great about the collection of squat buildings that surround this mountaintop communiqué: certainly not the dilapidated picnic shelter (?) to the left, nor the sagging vinyl Monteagle Church of Christ sign a bit further down, neither indeed the tin-roofed house on the other side, emblazoned with the words “RV AND OVERNIGHT HOOK-UPS” in giant, rotten-tooth yellow letters. And the billboard itself is as welcoming as a moist brown stain on your hotel pillow.

One of my favorite places in the world lies just a few miles off this exit—the University of the South and its tiny village of Sewanee, Tennessee. The campus is beautiful; the town consists of little more than a bank and a post office and a handful of little restaurants, yet somehow there’s enough packed onto the top of this mountain² to make a full life seem plausible, though I have admittedly only tested the proposition for one sweet two-week writers’ retreat a few years ago. The proximity of Monteagle is a net positive—it’s not the loveliest town but it has everything Sewanee lacks, most notably a grocery store. Someone told me once that Monteagle has been the focus of a long battle between hippies and rural reactionaries,³ and while the hippies seem to be winning based on the nature of the stores in the town’s little business district, the first view most people get of Monteagle virtually cries out poverty, carelessness, and nativism.

If I lived in Monteagle I would be pretty upset by this. I only have the misfortune of driving past it every time I visit my family; I find it risible but too stupid to be offensive. Its bumper-sticker brevity belies a whole host of questionable assumptions: that Biden was solely responsible for the U.S. border; that his policies—and not Republican intransigence—demonstrably led to drugs and cartels and… illegals? pouring into the country. Of course the fact that the sign is five years out of date is a nice touch, but for my money it’s the word “damn” that really makes it. Don’t know who needs to hear this but billboards, folks, are a different medium for communication than barstools.

This is not the only piece of ugliness in the broad swath of red land between the blue oases of Atlanta, Chattanooga, and Nashville. I doubt any freeway in the South is free of this sort of trolling. Aside from the direct political jabbing there are also ubiquitous anti-abortion signs, notable for their manipulative photos of fully born children, as well as huge flocks of ads for gun shops, none of which are at all subtle about who they are marketing to: the same people, presumably, who are visiting the Trump Store just outside Winchester.

Yes, I said Trump Store.

There are at least four of these monstrosities situated in the region once hotly contested between Braxton Bragg and William Rosecrans. Whether they discredit the mean, half-empty plazas in which they have come to roost depends on your appetite for Chinese buffets and Army recruitment offices. They sell exactly the kind of garbage you would expect—hats and ties and t-shirts and bandanas and various other bits of loudly Trump-branded detritus. What it is is trash, bound to wind up in an American dump or drifting dismally across an American landscape like Indian-manufactured tumbleweeds.⁴ It’s hard to think of any other question when you spot one of these nightmares from the interstate than, “Do Americans have any taste at all?”

You can see the utter lack of discernment in aesthetic issues not only in that hideous billboard, but in the whole approach to how we build and maintain our country—slapdash, seemingly on the arbitrary whims of individuals and in the service of their ill-informed political orthodoxies. Is there no civic pride in Monteagle, Tennessee? Or Winchester, or Murfreesboro, or any of the other unlovely colonies of fast-food restaurants and gas stations that cluster around freeway exits like mushrooms around cow patties? The collaboration of Americans in Trump’s project is cringeworthy and horrible, but the complacency has always been there. It’s the Chevy on blocks in front of the house. It’s the broken plastic toys scattered in the yard. It’s the lichen-coated satellite dish on every sagging roof. For God’s sake, people, let’s start with cleaning up after ourselves, shall we?

These aren’t exactly poor people either. Whoever is responsible for Monteagle’s welcome mat owns a fucking billboard. I make a reasonably good living and I own exactly zero billboards. And they apparently have enough money that they can afford leave a hideous, out-of-date political grunt in place of the mint they could probably get from leasing the space to actual businesses in town—their actual neighbors! It’s not a lack of cents that causes people to behave like this; it’s a lack of sense.

It doesn’t have to be an ugly country. Alabama is one of the most poorly run places in the western hemisphere but it’s a state with great natural beauty, from Mobile Bay to the Talledega Forest to Monte Sano Mountain. Unfortunately its stewards were in short supply before 2025; now stewardship is downright frowned upon. Caring for things where there’s no profit motive is viewed as a feminine trait; a weakness.

But the rest of us have to drive through this shit. I’ll never understand how willing people are to poke chopsticks into their own eyes rather than spend a dime improving something they don’t own directly. When I walk through Atlanta I have to step over human beings on the sidewalk. Why? Did we lose a war? Well no; people are simply too chintzy to fix it. Not as long as any benefit potentially propounds to someone else. To me this is worse than cruel. It’s self-defeating. People would rather live in a cesspool if it means everyone else lives in a cesspool.

Of course, for the likes of our short-fingered king there is no cesspool. Trump travels in a hermetically sealed tube—from golf course to airport to airport to golf course to airport to gold-paneled room to airport and so forth. The man’s knowledge of America comes exclusively from TV; he’ll never see the homeless encampment under the overpass and he’ll never see Monteagle’s tacky welcome, much less Monteagle or Sewanee. These places simply don’t exist as far as he’s concerned. His is the most American complacency because of its near totality.

As I say, I can’t afford a billboard. But if I could, I would consider putting up a bit of Vonnegut: "There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president."

1. And an absolute trainwreck of categorical errors—drugs are the product of cartels, and there’s no such thing as “illegals.” There are criminals and there are undocumented immigrants, which are not the same thing. There is no class of people for whom illegality is intrinsic, and calling them illegals is just a cheap way to put a thumb on the scales.

2. It’s really a plateau and not a mountain at all but it sure as hell seems like a mountain when you’re white-knuckling the east-side descent festooned with well-used runaway truck ramps.

3. We can provisionally call them rednecks, though just as there are Log Cabin Republicans there are are also lefty rednecks.

4. A small, highly visible portion of Trump merchandise is proudly marked “made in the U.S.A.” though in fact even in these articles most of the materials are imported. The vast bulk of Trump trash is made in India.