About World's Fairs

Last night's broadcast of the final part of PBS's documentary on Chicago focused on the 1893 Columbian World's Fair, and the fair sounded like it must have been really splendid. It seems highly unlikely, though, I'll get to go to a world's fair myself, and if I do, I don't think I'll want to visit the American pavilion.

The United States hasn't hosted a world's fair since 1984, when the Louisiana World Exposition - basically a bloated jazz and crawfish festival - was held in New Orleans and closed seriously in debt. The reason for this can be explained in one simple word - EPCOT. The EPCOT Center at Walt Disney World in Florida is more or less a permanent world's fair, although not a very good one. The pavilions of the few nations represented are mostly knick-knack souvenir stands, the exhibits are cynical celebrations of corporate America that don't inspire awe the way the corporate exhibits of world's fairs of yore used to, and the American pavilion offers a psuedo-patriotic show full of Hollywood jive. And yet, because of its permanence and - gasp! - its popularity, EPCOT pretty much killed the world's fair in this country.

There have been world's fairs elsewhere, of course - in Vancouver in 1986, in Seville in 1992 (to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's invasion - er, discovery - of the Americas), and Lisbon in 1998 - but unless you have extra spending money and, in most cases, a passport, they're pretty much out of reach. It's just as well, because we Amercians aren't prone to heralding our accomplishments when we have to share a midway with others to do it. At the Seville fair, for example, so little time and effort was given to the American pavilion, that it was regarded by fair-goers as the least impressive of the pavilions representing major nations. It was chintzy, cheap, and rather crude. Kind of like an Oldsmobile.

This is the kind of exhibit that could have only been built with corporate money, which makes sense; it turns out that the United States is the only country in which the taxpayers' money is not spent for world's fair pavilions. It's the law. Every American pavilion at a world's fair of recent memory has been built out of corporate funding. So the side of America you're likely to see in these instances is a version of America in which corporations are always noble, civic-minded companies that bring wonderful products to the free markets, not the the evil, pollution-inducing ripoff artists they are.

Buit at least there is still an exhibit representing these United States at every world's fair, right? Think again. At the Berlin World's Fair in 2000, American companies wouldn't foot the bill for a pavilion this time around, so a small kiosk the size of a hot dog stand with an interactive computer display inside represented Ameirca in Berlin. World's fairs have always been about optimism in the future and pride in your nation's standing in the world, but when the most powerful nation on earth reduces its role in such an event to a brief afterthought, it's not hard to understand why the United States has become so irrelevant in the arts, education, and science even as we crow about our military might and our popular entertainment culture.

You could say that I love my country, although quite frankly, I don't like it very much.