Media America ends behind Memphis, Tennessee. The parking lots in front of the large Elvis Memorial in Graceland are full. Fans of the “King” even come in buses. But then it's over. Just a moment ago, there were cities. But to the south there are only patches, lined up along the mighty Mississippi.
The parking lots here are empty. The streets too. The sun glows over a lush green landscape, crisscrossed by fields where huge machines are harvesting cotton. It's just before the US presidential election. These are days of decision. It's important for the whole world.
No election posters anywhere
It's not important for the people here. There are no election posters anywhere. No rallies. Not even the signs in the front yards that accompany every sheriff election in the USA. There are more essential things, like in Adamsville, where the annual homecoming parade marches down the town's only street. Or in Clarksville, which has seen better days, when the Delta blues was invented here.
In Gulf Shores, a town of 15,000 people in Alabama, the beefy V8 engine of the huge Ford F-250 Super Duty pickup truck burbles its 390 hp idling in the motel parking lot. The driver has been sitting comfortably behind the wheel for half an hour. He is watching a film on his cell phone.
Evening has long since fallen over the beach town on the Gulf of Mexico. The blazing heat of the day has given way to a gentle breeze. Half past eight, just under 25 degrees.
But the Red Roof Inn is still filled with the whooshing and humming of the air conditioning that runs here 24 hours a day. The mechanic in his truck also only turns off the engine when asked. He looks surprised. "Sorry, man, I'm sorry," he says, "I forgot."
Yawning empty streets
Habit. The average annual temperature in Alabama is 19 degrees Celsius, ten degrees higher than in Germany. Between May and October, it is rarely cooler than 25 degrees, but usually much warmer. During the day, there is no one on the streets here, just as in the villages and towns along the Mississippi.
Whether in Clarksdale, the birthplace of the blues, which today seems like a lost place, or in Montgomery, the pretty capital of Alabama, which was the center of the black civil rights movement 70 years ago, all life takes place in very cold apartments, shopping centers and offices.
There is only one means of transport for getting from one to the other: the car, which is usually so big that a powerful German Volkswagen SUV "Tuareg" looks like an East-German "Trabant" next to a truck.
It's all so different
The United States is different from Europe, but its south is even more so. The area below the Mason-Dixon Line, named after the surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, is large, hot and much emptier than the areas on the east or west coast.
Dixieland stretches from Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina in the north through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana and Florida. 70 million people live here between the Appalachians in the north, the mighty Mississippi in the west, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.
Help for the poor
The proportion of the black population is more than twice as high as in the rest of the USA, as is the poverty rate. Even in wealthy states like California, there are people who live in cheap motels as “long stays” because they cannot afford an apartment. But nowhere is the phenomenon as widespread, nowhere do so many people get by in furnished 28 square meters with the support of local authorities or aid organizations, as in Dixie.
In recent years everything has become incredibly more expensive, says Terrence, who lives in the "Days Inn" in Calhoun, a small town between Atlanta and America's music capital Nashville. The glamour of the two metropolises is nowhere to be seen here. Even the noise of the big election battle for the White House does not reach the former capital of the Cherokee Nation, which was forcibly relocated by the federal government over the deadly "Trail of Tears" 200 years ago.
Only a few rainbow flags
Apart from a few rainbow flags and Kamala Harris signs in Atlanta's alternative district of Cabbagetown and a few bumper stickers with the phrase "Trump is my President", the South is sparing itself the election campaign that is being fought so fiercely in Germany.
As far as Alabama, Mississippi and the other states between the Ol' Man River and the Atlantic are concerned, the dispute between the former incumbent and the current Vice President Harris is decided.
Apart from Georgia and North Carolina, which may be on the verge of collapse, Trump will win everywhere. Inexplicably, says Clifton, who used to own a liquor store in Chicago up north and is now in New Orleans to write a book about the real America and its sins.
The dreamed history
The middle old man approach differs from the usual "My country - right or wrong" that Americans can always agree on: Even if things go wrong, even if things go wrong - loyalty to the country is above all else.
"And so we imagine a history that we don't have," says Clifton, who is a staunch supporter of the Democrats and annoyed with their presidential candidate. "Trump is of course impossible," he says, "but Kamala Harris? Until recently, nobody knew her." And since she became a candidate, nobody has found out what she is actually up to.
The writer, who explores the planet Trump in the south because he believes that slavery, which was abolished just 159 years ago, was the basis of the USA's rise to world power, does not want to have to choose between the two. And thanks to the US electoral system, he doesn't have to: As sure as Trump will win in Louisiana, Harris will certainly cross the finish line first at home in Massachusetts.
The wealth gap
It's the mood's fault. "You can barely afford to live anymore," says Bill, who drives an Uber taxi in Memphis. Compared to Nashville, everything in his city is just about bearable. "But you have to live half an hour outside of town if you don't have $2,000 to spare for rent." According to EU calculations, the USA has weathered the major crises of recent years far better than Europe.
The wealth gap between the old and new worlds widened by 18 percent because the USA switched to crisis management more quickly and decisively and, thanks to its large technology companies, is in a different innovation league to the EU states. But that doesn't make US citizens happier with their government.
Lloyd, a proud “Cajun” who offers tours of the swamps with their alligators and snakes in the German-founded town of Kraemer on the “German Coast” in Louisiana, is experiencing climate change on his doorstep. "We used to have a big flood once every ten years," he says, "now the water comes every year." Even in the swamps, where people have learned to live with the water, it's causing reflection. "We have to adapt," Lloyd says. But how? When?
No one on the European way
No one is prepared to go the European way, with electricity that only comes from the sun and wind, with state apparatuses that are becoming more and more powerful and hope one day to be so powerful that they will have the power to completely dictate social life.
All the issues that Germany is at each other's throats about every day are irrelevant here. The “restructuring” of the economy with billions donated by taxpayers. The transport revolution, which is supposed to mean that no one flies anymore, no one has a car anymore and everyone only uses trains and buses, has practically no chance of being taken seriously in the USA. But what is the alternative for America?
TO BE CONTINUED
