Go to Final Check-Out

I am now the former grocery store critic for the Knoxville, Tennessee, alternative paper, Metro Pulse. For roughly 10 months I have pursued the truth about Knoxville in its supermarket aisles. Though I believe the truth is still to be found in these stores—in produce perhaps, or inadvertently buried in a bin on the bargain aisle—the press of more urgent and lucrative business pulls me away. I admit that at times it has seemed to me that this column, like Seinfeld, was about nothing at all. Few places feel more empty of meaning than a grocery store at mid-afternoon with nothing going on.

One of the things I learned in grocery stores, though, is that if nothing is happening in front of your eyes, stuff starts happening in the grey matter behind them. A trick that Alfred Hitchcock used in his movies was to hold an establishing shot of a building just a little bit longer than usual. As the viewer stares at this house he begins to wonder why he's looking at it, and then he wonders what's going on inside it, and before long he begins to wonder where the bodies are buried in it.

Grocery stores were like that for me. (I would watch the butchers emerge from the back room with the meat and wondered where it came from and why they wouldn't let me watch it being prepared. People in the deli department have nothing to hide, so what was it with these meat cutters?) In the way they seemed to operate off screen, below the radar, on autopilot, the stores seemed to me like mini-Knoxvilles. Nothing was happening, but that was just on the surface, because underneath everything is going on.

This town, like all towns, has a secret history, a secret past, and a hidden present full of subconscious fears, desires, resentments, ecstasies. Stare down that empty aisle long enough and the linoleum begins to shimmer strangely and you hear suppressed whispers and invisible footsteps.

In some stores those glimmers of truth manifested themselves clearly enough for me to believe I knew what was going on from the minute I walked in the door. Other places I knew about from experience as a longtime customer.

I was keenly aware from talking to owners and operators of these stores and from my experience with family members in the business that it takes a lot of hard work to make money in groceries, particularly in a small, family-owned store. Those small stores often had the most vivid atmosphere and personality about them, and I did my best to do them justice.

Even the supposedly faceless chain stores spoke to me with distinctive voices, and I know I wasn't the only one who heard them. In a couple of instances people reacted strongly to what I had written, in some cases angrily. It was clear that these stores meant something to these readers—they were not "just grocery stores" at all, but places they felt strongly about, almost as strongly as they felt about their own homes, their own neighborhoods.

I have enjoyed writing about these places that people care about, because it has given me a greater appreciation for my own feelings about Knoxville. I arrived here 25 years ago with no personal connection or history in this place. Now I periodically see someone on the street or visit a location in town that I haven't seen in years, and I remember how my life was going and how I felt at that time and I feel happy or sad or angry at the thought of it.

The place has developed meaning for me, and I think that's what makes a town a community. The sum of all its peoples' memories and experiences of the place, its ghosts and its schools and its grocery stores, creates a spiritual feel that, for better or worse, defines our hometowns in our hearts.

Big Lie, Little Facts, Bigger Truths

I feel isolated by my problem with lies. No one seems to care about lies, particularly lies by politicians. People expect lies from politicans, and fall back on reliance on what John Feehery, a Republican strategist, recently referred to as "the bigger truths."

Quoted in the Washington Post, Feeherty said, "The more the New York Times and the Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent. As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

The bigger truths outweigh the little facts, particularly when they will put your candidate in office. 

Of course, bigger truths in most people's moral universe are arrived at by examining all "those little facts" closely and arriving at conclusions based on those facts.

For example, since most people had never heard of Sarah Palin three weeks ago, most people conclude, as Feeherty does, that she is new. Similarly, when we look at Alaskan opinion polls with high ratings of Palin's performance as governor, most of us also agree that she is popular in Alaska.

When, however, we look at the fact that she did not, as the Republicans claimed, stop the Bridge to Nowhere, and that rather than battling such projects she was an avid promoter of $200 million in earmarked pork for Alaska, most of us would not agree with Feeherty that she could by any contortion of the truth be called an "insurgent."

In the matter of Palin's "insurgency," the Republicans respected the traditional connection between little facts and big truth only so far as they realized that they would have to make all the little facts lead to the bigger truth they desired to put in the heads of the voters.

So they made them up.

But obviously, for  Feeherty and for McCain and for the vast majority of most Republicans in the country this election season,  a "big truth" is not actually certified on the basis of the little facts, but by how far and wide you can disseminate it before the fact checkers get to it.

Spread the big truth wide enough fast enough, and the little facts become irrelevant. Once you get the desired big truth "out there," as Feeherty explains, the case is closed. To hell with the little facts.

Obviously, the big truth is simply the flip side of Goebbels' big lie. 

Most people in print are even more squeamish about comparing Republicans to Nazis than they are about calling them liars.

Maybe they're right to be squeamish. These people are only doing what politicians commonly do to get elected.

When you consider how many people have died for fairy tales like the weapons of mass destruction, though, you start to miss the application of morals to politics.

Food Club on the Parkway

The Parkway in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, wears me out. This is the road to Dolly Parton's amusement mecca Dollywood, the road to Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As you drive south towards it out of Knoxville there are hints of what is to come--billboards for the Elvis Museum and the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum, which features a disconcerting face with what appears to be three irises per eyeball.

Driving down the Parkway in Pigeon Forge is not like curling up with a good book. It's not like mindfulness meditation. It's not like Vivaldi or cool jazz. Parts of it are like "Surfer Bird" by the Trashmen, but "Surfer Bird" makes a more compelling, unified statement.

The Parkway takes bad taste and then filters out the intelligence. It's more like Soupy Sales than Jerry Lewis, Freddie and the Dreamers than Herman's Hermits, a chicken with its head cut off than a penguin. Gatlinburg is just as tacky, but is nestled charmingly in the mountains. The Parkway in Pigeon Forge is a relentless, garish strip, an eternal traffic jam, with no redeeming geography.

It aspires more to the grand gesture than it used to. As you enter the Endless Drag from the north you now catch glimpses of enormous commercial developments on your left, big concrete entertainment venues the size of Lenin's Tomb with exotic names ("Cirque de Chine"), and blocks and blocks of brand-new pastel-colored shops.

Before you know it, though, you are in the midst of the flying pigs, looming plastic dinosaurs, and hideously grinning sharks that line the Parkway proper. A lot of new stuff has popped up here as well since my last visit (1987). Adventure Quest's castle looks as if it was built with Legos, and I like the upside-down WonderWorks building. You can do it all in Pigeon Forge—drive 40-mile-an-hour go-carts, do indoor skydiving, get married at more than one site, play miniature golf at what seems like dozens.

You can even buy groceries.

Penetrate far enough into garishness and you start running into artifacts of vacations past—old-time souvenir shops, fudge and funnel cake shops, and stores after store selling products "As Seen on TV."

That's the section of the Parkway where the Pigeon Forge Food Club sits, right before Dollywood, between the Sevier County Bank and Pigeon Forge Traders Gift Shop (offering knives, swimwear, leather, plastic bears, and huge Support Our Troops lawn sculpture).

Like the surrounding stores, the Food City is a period piece. Its logo is displayed on a broad band of 1962-vintage corrugated plastic that runs the length of the store. Inside the door is a full rack of tourist brochures and three grab-the-prize-with-the-pinchers arcade games. The bargain products on the wall as you enter feature charcoal, fire starters, cook-out implements, and camping supplies.

There are similar displays at least two other places in the store, as well as bins of bargain rods and reels, swim gear, ice coolers, and a display of board games for killing time by the campfire. Along with the outdoors products there is also a definite party theme at work here, with a well-stocked specialty beer section and hard coolers like Smirnoff Ice Green Apple Bite and Mike's Hard Pomegranate Lemonade.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Pigeon Forge Food City, though, is how unremarkable it is. Outside the store it's Female Elvis Mud Wrestling, inside it's a quiet store in the country. You get the impression that aside from the tourists from Michigan there are plenty of regular people living in the surrounding hills who come into the Food City to stock their cabinets and refrigerators.

Prices are moderate. The store is large with rather low ceilings, but clean and pleasant with the usual amenities, reasonable produce and meat departments, attractive deli and bakery, and an operating pharmacy.

Where's a guy supposed to get a tattoo? Down the Parkway at American Rebel Tattoos Studio. Can I experience a 65-mile-an-hour hurricane here? No, visit WonderWork's Hurricane Hole simulator. Have you got anything on the dawn of Creation? No, but you can check it out onstage at the Biblical epic The Miracle. How about world-famous racing pigs? Go to Dixie Stampede.

But where are the people with the extra eyeballs that I saw on the billboard driving down here?

I'm sorry, sir, our shoppers all have just one per socket. Would you care for some grapes?