Keen On

What is the most American town in the USA? Las Vegas comes to mind, of course. And Memphis, with its uniquely American church of Graceland. Or one of Springsteen’s forgotten beach towns in New Jersey. Imagine rolling Vegas and Memphis and one of those sad NJ boardwalk places into a small Missouri town that you’ve never heard of. That’s Branson, Missouri, the 12,,638 person self-styled “city” in the Ozarks that is the annual host to millions of mostly white American visitors. a guide to Branson? For a cultural guide to Branson, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi has a 13,000 word essay in this month’s Harper’s entitled “The Branson Pilgrimage”. And as the Princeton educated, Brooklyn based Kroll-Zaidi confesses, it’s a piece about his own surreal experience of trying to gage the soul of the American nation by visiting Branson multiple times of the last ten years. And like his Tocquevillian essay, my conversation with Kroll-Zaidi tries to make sense not just of this weird “beach town” without a waterfront, but of the contempo