Jean Baudrillard’s description of America as a “primitive society” with no “ancestral territory” of historically accumulated meaning immediately brings to mind photographer Edward Burtynsky’s widely-memed image of sprawling Exxon gas stations and McDonald’s franchises assembling into an alien and artificial landscape. Energy, cars, and products circulate suspended in a fluid state of perpetual anticipation that overrides the blood-soaked history of territorial clashes.
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