A German soccer fan walks into a Buc-ee’s and discovers abundance

The World Cup tourists helping me see America

When Freddy — a German soccer fan road tripping across the southern United States for the World Cup — arrived in Fairhope, Ala., this week, he wrote “I’m in a place right now that’s so beautiful I’m probably about to make 50 posts about it.”

Passing through Gainesville, Fla., he noted “the houses are insane wow.” He reviewed his 1 a.m. Waffle House stop: “Great food, great prices, and friendly staff. 10/10.” On Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tenn., an American told him it was the “perfect sniper spot.”

His itinerary is a consumer-America fever dream. He’s experienced Taco Bell, Walmart, tubing in Georgia, an alpine rollercoaster, Wendy’s, Chili’s for the N.B.A. Finals, Auburn University, country music, Chipotle, and a shooting range inside Bass Pro Shops.

Over the last week, Freddy has been live-posting his gradual radicalization by American normalcy as the FIFA World Cup unfolds across 11 U.S. cities (Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle) as well as Mexico and Canada.

And he’s not alone. Elsa, a Swedish visitor, began her trip in Indianapolis — “the land of the free.”

“Indiana is exactly how I dreamed America would be,” she wrote. “Small towns, wide open spaces, cornfields, barns, cute houses, diners, water towers, friendly people, great food, American flags everywhere, and so much more!”

She wrote that she screamed upon seeing a yellow school bus.

“Okay so Amish people are real,” Elsa reported the day after she discovered ranch dressing.

“Why did no one tell me ranch sauce is like crack? EUROPE WE NEED RANCH ASAP.”

Flying over the Rocky Mountains, she claimed that the plane’s Wi-Fi was faster than the connection she has at home. “What are we doing wrong in Europe?” she asked. “The U.S.A. has completely radicalized me within 48 hours.”

A third tourist, Fiago, reported being awestruck by Chicago’s architecture and by American patriotism.

“I respect how proud Americans are of their country,” he wrote after stumbling upon an oversized American flag, noting that a similar display would be “unimaginable back home in Germany.”

These three visitors are experiencing the country without irony. They are soaking up the infrastructure, the scale, the sheer Americanness of it and generally finding it incredible. They keep stumbling onto the things that most mainstream American commentary treats as cringe, and concluding instead that those things are great.

There is a genre of American self-criticism, popular disproportionately among urban, college-educated people, that treats the built environment most Americans inhabit — dotted with chain restaurants, broken up by highway interchanges, lined with big-box stores and vast parking lots — as evidence of civilizational failure. Certainly, the United States underinvests in transit (which Freddy notes), overbuilds parking, and produces pedestrian environments that range from hostile to nonexistent. These are costs borne by people all over the country, but the aesthetic critique and the policy critique are not the same thing, and they tend to get run together in ways that muddy both.

There is a difference between preferring Lisbon to Dallas and believing that Buc-ee’s is a catastrophe. The United States is blessed with abundant land and cheap energy. It prioritized mass car ownership and the interstate highway system. And we Americans have optimized within that framework. We’ve made consequential tradeoffs, but we’ve also built a landscape that does not exist anywhere else on Earth: vast distances, enormous rest stops, gas stations that function as retail destinations, fast food engineered for scale and consistency and, in the case of the Crunchwrap Supreme, one-handed highway consumption. The hexagonal, griddled burrito is a solution to the challenge of eating while driving with only one hand and, since its launch in 2005, has done a bang-up job.

Waffle House, as Freddy pointed out, is a prime example of America’s success at the thing it chose to be. The chain is famous for staying open through hurricanes and blizzards, to the point that FEMA uses the “Waffle House Index” as an informal disaster gauge. (Green: Waffle House open. Red: Waffle House closed. If the Waffle House is closed, something is very wrong.) The franchise has developed a taxonomy for hash browns — scattered, smothered, and covered — and at 1 a.m., jet-lagged Germans discovered that the 24-hour roadside diner rules.

The cosmopolitan critique of all this is that it represents the capitalist wasteland America chose instead of a better pseudo-European approach. But instead of viewing it as deprivation, Elsa, Freddy, and Fiago are experiencing it as plenty. These visitors see it as scale, variety, and a kind of democratic excess that doesn’t exist anywhere else. A gas station with dozens of pumps and a smokehouse and a beaver mascot is a fabulously quirky experience that gives the all-American road trip its character.

Fiago’s observation about patriotism is the most revealing dispatch of all. In Germany, conspicuous national pride is stigmatized for well-known historical reasons, which is why he notes that a flag that size would be unimaginable at home. His encounter with the flag gave him the impression that it represents a country of people who are proud and glad to be where they are.

That feeling is not evenly distributed in America right now, and the flag is beginning to represent, to some, a similar kind of shame that Fiago pointed to.

Over the past few decades, a slice of American elites has drifted into what you might call cultural semi-detachment. Though they reside physically in the United States, they are aesthetically and aspirationally elsewhere. They organize their lives around farmers’ markets, independent shops, wine bars, and walkable neighborhoods. I’ll be the first to admit that I love all these things, and I think it is genuinely good to fight for them in the communities where they make sense. But when this slice talks about America’s landscape beyond liberal, urban bubbles, they tend to do so with a kind of weary embarrassment and a clear distinction between that America and their America.

The collective delight of the World Cup tourists is a precise map of what the semi-detachment class checked out of. What they’re finding novel and wonderful is exactly the America that its most prominent spokespeople spend the most energy apologizing for.

None of this is an argument that our transit isn’t disappointing. A lot of what makes Buc-ee’s feel necessary is that American infrastructure created a landscape where you can drive four hours and encounter nothing worth stopping for until suddenly you encounter everything at once, stamped with a grinning beaver logo.

These are policy failures with real costs.

But Freddy, on Lookout Mountain, treats the “perfect sniper spot” comment as an odd and funny aside rather than a referendum on American gun culture. He is experiencing this country as a sometimes weird, often impressive, and occasionally baffling place, rather than as an ongoing argument about what America should have been instead. Certainly, this is the privilege of being a tourist. Freddy, Elsa, and Fiago get to appreciate the landscape without being trapped in it, and without having to confront its political, social, and economic realities. Enjoying the novelty of late-night hash browns is not the same thing as living with its inequalities, political volatility, and violence.

Still, their collective delight is revealing: Instead of just responding to novelty, they are highlighting parts of American life that millions of Americans also love but that are often disregarded by those who speak for it — elite influencers such as politicians and public intellectuals. The gap between how that America gets described and how it actually gets experienced by the people in it is a failure of observation masquerading as sophistication that comes off as condescension.

The urbanist policy agenda that argues for better land use and walkable density where appropriate is worth fighting for, but it doesn’t require treating the existing landscape as a moral embarrassment, and the habit of doing so has costs. It narrows the coalition and drives the country further from success and closer to abandonment, mistakes a preference for a principle, and produces commentary so practiced in American failure that it has lost the ability to see American strangeness clearly.

In doing so, it has lost the ability to see America clearly.

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Weekend letter of recommendation:

• The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa is the best museum I’ve visited in quite some time. It’s worth the trip. Actually, Tulsa in general is worth the trip.

  • Speaking of Oklahoma, I beg you to watch this video by Gentner Drummond’s wife, Wendy. Drummond is running for governor and recently got in some hot water. I won’t reveal more before you watch.

• I’ve been playing a lot of ping pong. It’s pretty fun.

• Two book recommendations for you:

  • “The Topeka School” by Ben Lerner.

  • “Sunburn” by Chloe Michelle Howarth.

• Buc-ee’s peanut brittle is excellent.