Yesterday I joined friends for a trip to Great Adventure. Their website advertised twelve roller coasters, one the tallest in the world, rides rides rides! Fun fun fun! America! America! America!

We met outside the Food Network Studios for a corporate bus. I asked my friend the Food Network chef where Food Network people go for lunch. Haha! I’m funny. We drove ninety minutes until we saw the World’s Tallest Roller Coaster, only to drive ninety minutes more through a god damn safari park (they shouldn’t do that to elephants).

On the way in I’d been reading about Wal-Mart in the latest Harper’s. It’s not online, but here’s a little excerpt (See here for more on monopsonies). Suffice it to say that the article centered less on labor policies than the effect of its dominance on the free market, a dominance that enables it to micro-manage the mechanics of every product on its shelves.  For example, Coca-Cola was set to release a new product; Wal-Mart asked the company to change the formula. These changes aren’t always better for the consumer, and are doing more to discourage competition than create it. On a political level, Wal-Mart has pressured its suppliers to back causes, candidates, and policies, thereby interfering with the machinery of democracy in a way that corporations have rarely before had the chance to do.

So I’m all creeped out, and then I say something, and a friend of mine who loves Wal-Mart says, “What’s the matter?” And I say, “You can’t shop at Wal-Mart anymore,” and she says, “Oh that reminds me, that soap you like? That they sell in bulk there? Wal-Mart quit carrying it.”

And I know what this means, because I’ve just read the article. One out of every five sales in America happens in a Wal-Mart; with sales like that it’s an impossible market to ignore. The soap manufacturers are going to discontinue this product, or they’ll change the formula to meet Wal-Mart standards, and sooner or later, the only soap in the whole world that I’m not allergic to is going to be taken off the market. Great. I’ll be the girl with the pustular rash. Or the girl that stinks the most, whichever.

After ninety minutes of safari, we finally head in. On entrance, after security, they’re blaring marching band music. I mean, as loud as a jet plane. The park I went to as a kid, Cedar Point, actually hired bands, you know, like with people, and instruments. If you hated them you just kept walking. I have to read my friend’s lips to discover that she too finds the music oddly volumed.

We find relief at the first roller coaster, Batman & Robin, because here, there is no sound, no sound at all. Not even the sound of screaming park-goers: the ride is fucking closed. The next roller coaster, I forget the name, is closed too. They’ve been pushing these $30 gizmos called flash passes, by which we can “schedule” our roller coaster rides. The park isn’t very busy, and I suspect that they shut down some of the rides to make the other lines longer, thus to sell more flashpasses. It’s odd, all these closed rides.

So here we are in “Gotham,” which except for its three roller-coasters is built in around an Americana theme that looks more or less like a late-20th century strip mall (how cool would it be if they actually built a gotham section? Do I ask too much? More than a lot?). We pass by a Papa John’s Pizza, a neo-colonial hot dog stand, a closed Bavarian beer garden (they closed the fucking beer garden?). Papa John’s? I don’t know why this bothers me. It’s jarring, I want the fantasy world intact. I want it to be Gotham, or I want it to be some idealistic America that never really existed in the first place, I want it to at least know what it is, but what I get is a shopping mall with a fucking Papa John’s.

I don’t even like Papa John’s in the real world. And at $60 a ticket, I want to leave the real world behind.

We wait for an hour and a half to get on another Batman-themed roller coaster. For most of the line, we stand amid a painted view of Gotham’s skyline, fake barbed wire and fake industrial corrugated walls, but at a certain point, they just quit with the charade, and we look out onto a weedy plot of grass littered with soda containers and cigarette butts. This might be the most gotham thing of all. The ride we wait ninety minutes takes an eternity to load each train (on account of the separate entry for flash pass users), and so when we are done being spun around and up and over and back and through, with the car ahead of us still loading and unloading, we dangle over a kaleidoscope of discarded chewing gum. Great Adventure my ass.

Humanity is just awful, when taken in quantity. So much litter, so much chewing gum (stop, people!), one after another of fried food stands, and Papa Johns Papa Johns Papa Johns. All this against a backdrop of fake America. They play the music that loud to try to drown out the obvious. We are pigs. Faster, cheaper, more more. I want cheese doodles and I want to pay 99 cents for them! 89 cents! 79 cents!

Where are the Willy Wonkas? They’ve been bought out and merged and re-packaged and suffocated in the merging and brokering and corporate power deals. I don’t want cheese doodles. I don’t want Papa John’s. I want to go someplace that I’ve never seen before, that looks nothing like I’ve ever seen other place look, that has food like nothing else I’ve ever eaten. I want a big bottle of the One Soap in the World to Which I’m Not Actually Allergic. But Wal-Mart sells Dove.

I also want to ride the world’s tallest roller coaster, but everyone else is too chicken shit. Anyway, it was closed.