I know most of the entertainment channels plan to focus on the 250th, a nice round number, counting up from 1776, but as I'm telling my peer planners, that's not my gig. The Times Square ball has already been programmed. That's big corporate account PR stuff outside of my price range or market. However, Route 66 is in my ballpark or bailiwick or whatever we call it (arena?).
The “desert highway” trope is important, such as in my introduction to the “vane” in various lesson plans, where one might picture a rusted windmill, and say a gas station. Then came the rhyme with 1.06066… which was like a puzzle piece fitting in (Wittgenstein: to what?).
I’m not suggesting Route 66 itself is in Cascadia at any point, and yet as memes they share that property, of being memes, not official, off the grid in a sense. Route 66 was officially decommissioned in one corpus, but resurrected in another. This kind of stuff happens in anthropology. It goes the other way too: something alive and with agency in one subculture, will be seen as innocent of any agency in another.
