“There wasn’t anything special about us,” says the collective narrator of the title story in Matthew Baker’s Why Visit America. “We were just an average town. Porch swings, wading pools, split-rail fences, pumpjacks bobbing for oil on the horizon.”
That’s Plainfield, a fictional small town in Real County, Texas. You could see it as a thinly veiled version of Leakey, the actual county seat of Real County, except for one thing: Plainfieldians don’t bleed red, white, and blue. “We were fed up with our country … We were anti-government, we were anti-corporate, but mostly we were normal people who couldn’t afford to buy an election and had come to understand that our votes didn’t mean shit.”
