A cow's tongue is dry and rough, and to finally stand close to a cow after passing thousands on a drive through, say, Wisconsin or Nebraska is a humbling experience. Their girth is enormous. You wonder how long it would take to eat one.

On top of their heads is a bony knob, singing out for touch. They don't care for petting, however. They know their purpose. Hold out a handful of hay and their tongues stretch out like elephant trunks, curling around their bounty and sending them back to work. Their bodies are assembly lines.

A step forward and they could do you harm, but they don't. If they had any sense they'd save themselves from the slaughterhouse and rise up tank-tons of ribeye and flank and sparerib and trample our fattened souls into detritus. Good fertilizer for the grass.

Go visit your county fair. It's a cheap date—free parking, corn on the cob, shiny tractors you can touch. The games are easy and food trailers open a few flaps to lapse sleazy with trans-fat, refined sugar and artificial colors. Corn dogs cooked by ethanol. Machine guns spitting bb's. Goldfish counting their circles in little bowls, dreaming of death, praying for toilets instead of cats.

The goods of rural America, through some perverse algorithms of the global economy, are made in China. I bought a camouflage cap brandished with an American flag and eagle's head, gold bars and, in case you don't get it, the initials U.S.A. God bless America, it only set me back five bucks.

A man in the grandstand wore a camouflaged shirt that read, "Ha! Now you can't see me!" Self-awareness grows clumpy and mottled at the county fair. You hear it in the winking country songs, a ritual of covers. In the beer tent the band plays AC/DC and the smoke singes lazy morals.

The meager midway blinks nonsense, girls hunching their shoulders over doughy breasts, girls wearing too much eyeliner, girls punking out to look different, all looking the same, guys like dogs in panting pursuit hoping for a lick and a nuzzle and far too many getting some. Babies bloom in the night.

We came for the cars, though. Four score were tugged in on trailers, lined up in rustbucket dreams of NASCAR fame only to be penned in like cattle and pitted against one another. Old models, graffiti-tagged, the sad castaways of our fickle ad-fueled vanity dreams.

Dreams of escape, rolling through foreign landscapes trying to outrun something you can't, the skies cloudy with family and burdens, holding on to those weights of your own invention because the heavens are much too scary, only to end up in Postcard Pretty, Scared Shitless, USA. These dreams are too much to stand. Isn't there someone to ease the load for a short while?

And when it's all over, when our apocalyptic fantasies rest fulfilled with the oink-moo-bray of a lone wheezing engine, the people waddle off under an umbrella of fireworks, pinks and oranges trying hard to blot out the stars in hopes of matching the throbbing metropolis an hour to the north.