Authenticity on Ailse 3
“Could I have been a parking lot attendant?
Could I have been a millionaire in Bel Air?
Could I have been lost somewhere in Paris?
Could I have been your little brother?
Could I have been anyone other than me?”
-Dave Matthews
A few weeks ago, I stopped at a small, quiet restaurant in rural Tennessee. The place had a rustic charm, with its walls covered in old signs and photos that had once been black and white but were now faded somewhere between nicotine yellow and dull orange. It was the kind of place that Cracker Barrel tries hard to imitate but never quite captures. Just inside the door, I was greeted in a thick Southern drawl by a short, heavyset woman with grey hair and bifocals that made her eyes pop.
After I took a seat, a second woman came to take my order. Well, calling her a woman might be a stretch—she was more of a girl, young and fresh-faced, but nothing remarkable. Unlike the older woman, her voice was noticeably absent any Southern accent. In fact, nothing about her stood out. She looked and acted like any girl you’d find anywhere else—home, or otherwise. Out of curiosity, I asked where she was from. With a smile, she told me she was born and raised right there in town.
As I finished my coffee and got back on the road, I found myself thinking about the contrast between the two women—the older woman, grounded in age and experience she carried in her presence all of the things seen and unseen that lay hints of a person’s origin, while the younger, appeared largely devoid of any real identity. What stuck with me was the younger woman, and how she seemed absent of any and all cultural features and individuality. She was a blank slate, a representation of something I’ve been noticing more and more: the death of authenticity.
The modern world is full of people adopting roles that aren't really theirs, taking on identities that don't quite fit. The younger waitress, with her oversized sweatshirt could’ve been from any small town. She wasn’t unique. The clothes she wore, the way she presented herself—it was all a uniform.
Everything you need to know about uniforms is in the name. They are designed to hide individuality, to make one indistinguishable from all. Modern culture is nothing more than a series of uniforms, where people take on symbols, styles, and behaviors that were never theirs to begin with, presenting themselves as part of something real when, in fact, it’s nothing more than a simulation.
Everywhere I look, I hear Baudrillard’s words—the echoes of simulacra and hyperreality growing louder with each passing day. His essays aren’t just theoretical musings; they’ve become our reality. We live in a world of simulations, where the original is so deeply buried that it’s impossible to find.
The world, whether we call it reality or simulation, is saturated with a lack of authenticity that is nearing critical mass, though there are still a few isolated places off the beaten path where it hasn't fully taken hold. But it’s only a matter of time. I’ve said before that you can track the death of a culture by the loss of its accent and my ears seem only to hear the same dull inflections everywhere I go. And so, I find myself questioning what parts of our world are still genuine.
How does one distinguish what is real from what is just a simulation of something else?
Even in my fiction, which is deeply influenced by the Southern Gothic tradition, I feel a lack of authenticity. I can’t tap the same veins as Faulkner or O’Connor, and I’ll never have McCarthy’s depth, because the world they wrote about, the experiences they were rooted in, are alien to me, and we all know the old South died with air conditioning, so I’m just chasing ghosts.
But it’s all too fast, we are physically and mentally transient, we are surrounded by non-places, non-ideas, non-concerns, and non-lives, that change before you have time to get your barring. True culture, the kind that grows organically, can’t thrive when everything is constantly in flux. A forest becomes thick and deep because it has stood there, unchanged, for centuries. Trees don’t reach great heights overnight, but we no longer give them time to grow. Our culture today is more like cheap pine—harvested quickly, sold off, and replaced with something artificial.
What this means is that people are navigating a world that feels less and less authentic. The entire world is turning into a giant gift shop—a place where things are sold to represent an idea of a place or culture that no longer exists, if it ever did. It’s Disney World, it’s Epcot Center. Tennessee becomes a caricature of moonshiners and bootleggers slapped on a T-shirt. Where you can buy moonshine at the store, but it’s not real moonshine. It can’t be. It’s packaged in a factory, slapped with a label, and sold at Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price, while they tell you it’s something authentic when it’s anything but.
That’s the story of our world now.
When you travel, you’ll notice small differences in how modern culture is expressed, but at the end of the day, they’re all the same. The variations are slight, it’s Coke or Pepsi… it doesn’t really matter. Both are just different flavors of the same garbage, designed to appeal to everyone and no one at the same time. The question of what’s truly authentic is one I find myself grappling with constantly, but it’s not one I expect to answer.
Every relationship, every song, every book, every TV show, movie, and news headline is manufactured to simulate something else, to create the illusion of authenticity that no longer exists.
What we’re left with is copies, of copies, of copies, of copies, and we just want to believe if we dig deep enough, we will find something real.
-TJS
I’ve only recently subscribed here and aren’t too familiar with your corpus, so I’ll need to go back and read. But, goodness, I could quote from just about every line in this post, and it would sum up my sentiments on modern life. I’m currently working on a piece that describes modernity not as liquid but rather as liquidated. The premise is we marvel at our wealth today and wonder where it came from. Well it’s always been there, just in fixed asset form (to carry on the business analogy). We act as the generation of inheritors of a great enterprise who liquidate the business for a quick buck, i.e., we are monetizing all the old fixed things and relationships that once gave meaning to life. Swapping priest for psychologist, sanctifying suffering for a happy pill, love for tawdry pornography, friendship for likes and follows, etc. I used to poke fun at my grandmother for bemoaning bottled water. How could something so natural be commercialized and sold? I think she was onto something.
Anyways, the above is really beside my point. I’m 25 and see more than most in my generation what has been lost. I don’t think I’m necessarily special, but I do think my circumstances are. I grew up in what was once a little farming community in Jefferson County about halfway between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. If anyone knows Alabama, they’ll know Jefferson County is the ballast of the state with just about 700,000 souls. When I was born, our community had about 1,000 people living in it. Now, I think it’s something like 20,000 or 25,000. I can still remember when one of the major roads in town was still dirt (the other was and has been a two-lane highway for time out of mind). I still remember the families who have all left but whose names adorn the gates of cookie-cutter subdivisions that Mr. Horton’s company has built. I remember before the goliath Target/retail center was built, it was the poor section of town. I remember even before we had a McDonald’s. There were two stores in town-- my great grandfather’s general store and Billy’s grocery, a gas station. Just about any parcel of land you pass by in town, I could give you its history. Even the land my own family owned, most of it’s gone. A few thousand acres heartily fought and won and settled before there was an Alabama is now just 80 acres of rocky dirt.
I started a new job a few weeks ago, and one of the women in the office grew up in my town. We were putting things together and realized that my great grandfather had gifted her family some plots in my family’s cemetery (this was the greatest honor he would bestow on folks). Her own parents are buried there, and at the Resurrection, her folks are some of the first saints I’ll see which is neat. I digress. But, in a joking way, she asked me if I was too good to move back. Without thinking and without grace or tact, I responded that’s it’s not home anymore. I quickly apologized and attempted to explain myself, but before I could she just nodded solemnly and said she understood.
This long comment is to say that it’s all gone and never to return. As a boy, I got a taste of the old continuity. My children will never know the quail and dove hunts at neighbors’ farms, they’ll never know what it’s like going down the road to their grandparents’ house, they’ll never know what going to town means (for town is everywhere now), they’ll never know the feeling of knowing they’ll be buried in the soil that raised them and their father, they’ll never know the litany of stories and trials and joys that lay beneath the foundations of those cookie cutter homes and strip malls. Sometimes I wonder if it would’ve been better to have never tasted the old way at all. To be ignorant of it all, like my friends in Birmingham, friends who have some distant antecedent that made the fateful decision to throw the old way off. My only consolation is that maybe this is our Lord’s way of acquainting me with the pilgrim’s life. Just as I drive or walk through where I grew up, I’m haunted by shadows of what once was, I can walk through this world in anticipation of that which is to come. That’s the consolation-- that that which has been taken from me pails in comparison to the glory and majesty of the City of God which has been promised to me through the work of Christ our Lord. Some may find this to be cope, but cope or not, it is true. It must be true, for what recourse do we have if all truly is dust and all truly is vanity?
Maybe that’s what old Southern souls can write to in our age. What does one do in the rubble and with the rubble when the rubble is all you’ve ever known, only hearing stories of what the rubble once was? Well, we can take the route of Quentin Compson, I suppose, but I think there’s a better answer out there that Faulkner didn’t find, that Percy maybe didn’t find in full. Maybe that’s the place of the Southern writer today-- someone who can uniquely investigate and write to that end.
I actually went to Auburn and know exactly what you mean. The wealth, not only in Auburn, but in Opelika, Smiths Station, and even getting on out on 280 to places like Waverly is breathtaking. Don’t even get me started on Lake Martin. Knowing the “growth” that Lee County has experienced over the past couple of decades, I can only imagine that you feel this more than me. In many ways it came out of nowhere for you, whereas, my town being so close to Birmingham, it was sort of expected to eventually happen.
But I think you’re exactly right that we were better as an obscure backwater. Now, we’re all rich and have the wind in our sails while the rest of the country pretty much languishes. I can’t help but notice we’re losing something of greater value than money. The same thing that happened to my community, to Lee County, has happened thousands of times over the South. Add up enough of those instances, and you have a lost people. A rich people, sure, but a lost people. And if we’re lost, in the end we’ll lose both our wealth and ourselves. This ought to be a lesson we learn from both New England and the Midwest. But we’re too wealthy to heed their past.
Just carry the fire and try to find others who do too. That’s all we can do I think.