The wonders of modern American life are, most of the time, utterly invisible to us, for the same reason that water is invisible to fish. What begins as extraordinary becomes, over time, ordinary, and, if it survives long enough, an object of contempt. Consider the case of the great American roadside hotel.
Outside of a shopping mall, there is probably no privately owned yet undeniably public space so familiar, so intuitive, so aggressively generic in the literal sense of that word as the American business-class hotel. I write this from a desk at a Hampton Inn, Hilton’s contribution to the genre, right off the Highway 79 bypass in rural Arkansas, but the other players in the market are equally familiar: Holiday Inn Express, Courtyard by Marriott, and other “upper economy” hotels, frequently located on the frontage roads of interstate highways, sandwiched between a Cheddar’s and a Chili’s and a Joe’s Crab Shack, or similar accommodations. Not quite a full-fat Holiday Inn, but a step up from Econo Lodge or one of those dodgy-looking independent operations that look less like an opportunity to catch a few hours’ sleep and more like an opportunity to catch syphilis.
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