Hometown

How easily are we marked by the visual and cultural landscapes of the places where we come of age. Growing up, I couldn't wait to get the hell out of Atlanta. Yet in every place I lived afterward I found myself longing for the rolling hills and tall hardwood trees of the Piedmont Plateau.

I've heard it said that Atlanta's a fast buck town. You can come from nowhere and be somebody in Atlanta in no time. Maybe that's true. There's no historic district the way there is in more genteel Southern cities like Savannah and Charleston. The developers own the city and they're too busy blasting away the past to make way for progress. It's a city in love with its own mythologies--the Phoenix that rose from the ashes after Sherman's army burned it down, the "City too busy to hate," "the New South" (forward-looking, progress-oriented as opposed to the old "backward" South).

Atlanta is only the latest incarnation in the city's nomenclature. Bordering no major waterway, the city is a pure phenomenon of the mid-nineteenth century. Originally called Terminus, it was the end of the line for the railroads. For a while, it was called Marthasville after one of the governors daughters, before the city fathers decided that it had too much of a provincial ring. It's uncertain whether Atlanta is a derivation of Atalanta or a reference to the city of Atlantis. There are two axes to the city's identity. The one driving forward with irrepressible energy, the rough and ready railroad town morphed into a modern transportation hub, the indomitable spirit to rebuild itself from the ashes and bend nature to its will, sprawling outward with no natural boundaries to constrain. The other, more Southern, languorous, the part that knows what it's like to be occupied and is committed to the principle of noble failure because to have succeeded would have somehow meant compromising one's ideals, the part that looks inward and back in time to a mythological past that has to constantly re-invented to serve the needs of the present.

So, what monuments might exist in such a place as Atlanta? It is always a challenge to find some spot tourist-worthy to take out-of-town guests when they come to visit the city, which is how I one day found myself at the CocaCola museum, a most interesting tour of modern American iconography.

The visitation experience is somewhat like an interactive science museum. Lights are dimmed and there is a progression through the Coke memorabilia section. This wistfully recreates '30s and '40s soda fountains and country store Coke signs, with the unforgettable illustrated period-look in the ads, smiling, plump-faced Norman Rockwell-type American girls and boys. It harks back to a time when life was simpler and better, and to values and a way of life worth fighting for. Ten years later, in one of my favorites scenes in the cold war satire, Dr. Strangelove, Colonel Bat Guano refuses to shoot the CocaCola machine to liberate some change, even though nuclear war is at stake. The message: Commerce is sacred.

We then journey from the past into the stylized Future with robotic soda fountains dispensing improbably colored, exotic Coke-family libations from around the world, with neon laser lights and proto-techno whooshing sounds. Commerce is not only good, it is Global, messaging is picked up in the film section

Back then, Roberto Goizueta was still alive and the CEO of the CocaCola company, the scion of a Cuban sugar planting family who went on to head the world's largest sugar-water distributor. In the film short, he looked to be in his early sixties, tall, sleek and cosmopolitan in a dark suit. He spoke in a sophisticated sort of accent common to rich people from foreign parts educated in top American universities--the high priest who was going to initiate you into the mysteries of the Global Brand.

Cut to panoramic views of smiling natives from around the world happily sipping CocaCola: camel herders against the backdrop of the Egyptian Pyramids, Nepali children in the mountains, Africans, Asians, perhaps even some French staged against the Eiffel Tower. These scenes are set to the nostalgic, old-timey Coke jingles I remembered from my childhood: "I'd like to buy the world a coke," "Have a coke and a smile," "Things go better with Coke," "Coke is it," "The Real thing."

I immediately felt better. Want to feel connected? Need a socially acceptable upper? Looking for something genuine or do you just want to be happy? My answers were all there. I wasn't from some two-bit railroad town; I stood at the grand cathedral of commerce, a member of the global family of consumerism, worshipping the transubstantiation of sugar water.

I think I stopped at the gift shop on my way out the door.