America Explained

Celebration, FL, is a prefab community near Orlando. It was created by Disney.

Yes, that was a little Stepford Wife chill you felt just there.

It strives very hard to create the perfect little Smalltown, USA, and it mostly succeeds. It is beautiful, especially when you sit near the prefab lake in the prefab town square that was designed to look like a place that Scout and Atticus would call home.

As you enjoy your iced tea (from Starbucks - retro only goes so far), you sit back in one of the big wooden plantation rocking chairs the town has placed around the prefab lake and you look up...

A skywriter is helpfully pointing out that "Jesus Loves U." And Jesus must also love emoticons. I was driving, so I couldn't take a picture of his first message: "God + U = :-)"

This was my quintessential American experience. I sat on the edge of a man made lake in a prefab town that was trying to make me nostalgic for a past I never experienced, drinking iced tea from one of the biggest corporate chains in America, and then a skywriter pooped religion on top of everything.

God Bless America.

I was on the edge of a profound understanding of this country, but then I started jonesing for gravy and it was time to go.