I’m sure in your mind’s eye, during this quarantine, you’ve thought about lots of places to visit around the country. Have you ever wanted to visit Tucson, or Atlanta, or St. Louis, or Portland? For that matter, is there anywhere in these United States that stimulates a sniff in your curiosity? Not to worry, you can personally visit everywhere now. Not “virtually,” as you might online. No sir, America will come to you in the flesh! That’s right, you can see everywhere in this country and never depart the Tennessee Valley. In fact, you don’t even have to exit your car. For instance, if you drive along U.S. 72 from County Line Road in Madison to Church Street in Huntsville, you will endure a stretch of eyesore some 19 miles long! Screaming ads, posters, signs and billboards will direct you to corporate box stores, tattoo joints, creepy loan shark parlors, squat and gobble corporate “restaurants,” and ambulance-chaser lawyers the whole way. And that’s not all. Each of these attractions comes built on football-field size concrete slabs. Oh, and as a consolation prize to ecological awareness, each comes with piles of mulch and a stick on their Wyoming size lots. We are to believe they will become trees. Actually, they slow down parking lot traffic, the better to prevent liability claims. Get it? They slow down your snatch and grab “shopping” experience so you’ll go to another place in their strip “mall” on the spur of the moment.

I remember one place tore out an entire hardwood forest. Then they realized they had no “trees”, so they planted twigs. Then they didn’t allocate money to water the twigs, which died. You can’t make this up. People lament the lost beautiful courthouse of Huntsville. Or they’ll mourn the loss of yesteryear’s pastoral road approach to Florence, at the other end of the Valley. The courthouse was torn down and replaced by a brown box. The quaint stretch to Florence was replaced by the unregulated sleaze and signs along some 9 miles of U.S. 72, which now looks exactly like the stretch of 72 into Huntsville, And thousands of other places given over to corporate America in all the other cities of this fine land. God’s gift to the blind. 

Just ask yourself this. Why are our special, memorable places more and more surrounded by these elongated cultural voids? These zombie zones made for money grow relentlessly, without a care for history, for nature or for posterity. What do you want to show people when they come here? It gets harder to find worthwhile places, as you must foxtrot between stretches of blasting billboards and unregulated, standardized, ugly “architecture.” Picture historical downtown buildings disappearing between flat glass-and-concrete edifices; an encroaching sandwich of shame. Buildings say what we are, what we value. Are we unique, with picturesque places you can see nowhere else? Nope. We all have given our cities over to a long strip dedicated to corporate greed. Nobody wants to live there, but they grow everywhere, chewing up our history, natural beauty and culture every day.

 — John William Davis is a retired U.S. Army counterintelligence officer, civil servant and linguist. He was commissioned from Washington University in St. Louis in 1975. He entered counterintelligence and served some 37 years. His published works include “Rainy Street Stories: Reflections on Secret Wars, Terrorism and Espionage” and “Around the Corner: Reflections on American Wars, Violence, Terrorism and Hope.”