I did something a little out of character recently. I bought a video game and I played it from start to finish. I don’t remember the last time I did that but it was probably in the early 2000s. Maybe even in the 1990s. I played the Universal Paperclips ‘game’ from start to finish in 2017 – but that was free and I feel like that was almost more of an inoculation against the coming AI storm than a game. I’ve noticed that those who played it have a very different view of AI and automation than those who did not.
The game I just bought and played through – Where the Water Tastes Like Wine – was from around that time. It was a melancholy sort of game but it suits the mood of the world and in particular of the United States of America about right now. In the game, you are a wanderer who meets a dire wolf/devil figure and plays a game of cards – and of course you lose. Your punishment is to wander the roads and railways of America and collect stories. There’s a tarot card twist in it that isn’t really explored. The soundtrack is roots American music harkening to blues, jazz, psychedelic rock, ragtime, and more.
The game sort of feels like a welcome book end as I close out the Vagobond portion of my own personal journey. The game title comes from a song (Going up to Country by Canned Heat) that was inspired by the song that inspired me to hit the road from an early age The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Those lyrics always made me want to jump a freight train (I did), hitchhike across the continent (I did), and tell stories around campfires in the hobo jungles (I did). That combined with The Kids Book of Games for Cars, Trains, and Planes kind of set me on my path. Well, let me actually throw some other nudges – being a young kid on tour with my dad’s band, my dad pulling us out of school dragging us to Mexico and Mendocino, before my parents divorce finally exploded us all over the place moving from town to town and state to state. But that part was messy. The romantic part was my aunt and uncle living in a truck camper and playing shows at schools all across America.
Then there were the books. Mark Twain’s adventures in California and Hawaii. The Beatniks. John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Travels with Charley. I’ve gone on about all of this before. So I won’t do it here, I’m here to talk about this damn melancholy game that somehow found me and caused me to live a portion of my life with it.
It’s not a particularly exciting game. In fact, I’d say the game play is boring. The soundtrack is amazing but repetitive. The stories you collect aren’t all that great but it’s kind of fun to connect them with other stories, real stories in our world and imagine how they grew. And yet, I was deeply compelled to play it and to finish it. The thing is – those stories – all those American stories – they were ugly as hell. And lived by millions of Americans in the last couple of centuries.
Men who joined the service, fought for their country and then were abandoned by it as happened to those who fought in the revolution, the civil war, and every war since. Farmers who did everything they could only to have the banks prey on them and steal their land. Migrant workers, beaten and killed to prevent them from organizing to demand a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. Native American people displaced and shuffled around by the government that promised them security in exchange for their land. Pioneers who moved and built their dreams only to have them stolen by the same government that sent them in as shock troops. A sharecropper who has been jailed and run down and there are others. What do they have in common? They expose the big lie. The story that America is built on.
The American Dream.
That’s what this game is really about. People from all walks of life chasing the American Dream they’ve been told exists and in the end finding that it’s empty. There is no security. There is no happy ending. There is no American Dream – it’s a lie.
That message rings true to me. I look at America and I don’t even know what I’m looking at any longer. Who are these people and what do they want?
I recently wrote about the country I come from. It’s not America. It’s Pacifica.
My country is different than this thing America that all these ‘Americans’ are trying to make great again. The Chinese landed in my country well before the vikings set foot in Greenland. The Spanish built missions up and down the coast before England even had a foothold in New England. French fur trappers were wandering the coastline and mountains before the US had gone as far as Michigan. There were rancheros in the south, advanced indigenous civilizations along the coastlines and in the far off Hawaiian islands, and the cities of my country welcomed those African Americans who wanted to escape reconstruction. The Beatniks and the Hippies found their home, Jazz found a haven, and the gold rush brought people dreaming from all over the world. My country isn’t some white nationalist place – it’s a place where there are many colors, many languages, and many civilizations all figuring out how to work side by side. There’s always been a Mexican restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, and an Italian restaurant in my hometowns because all three of those groups have always claimed them as their hometowns too. The Beach Boys, Jazz, and the Grateful Dead all fit on my country’s soundtrack along with good old roots music from all those Okies that came to California looking for a better life when the bankers stole their homes and farms.
Okies, miner forty-niners, Oregon trail pioneers, these are part of the tapestry of my country as well. Salmon fishermen and bear country. The indigenous tribes of the Northwest and Alaska, the descendants of the rancheros, and all those people escaping from post Civil War reconstruction or the civil rights violations that kept moving west – and finding their homes. High tech, aviation, Hollywood, the space industry, and so much more.
But I digress again. The game was depressing. I don’t disagree with the conclusion. I think my country is different though, if only it could free itself from this lie that is ‘America’. The Pacifican Dream is something different. Maybe I’ll start defining it down the road.