For all of the things that speak to contemporary life in Carmel, Indiana, there is also that charm of middle America that underlies everything. This is the heartland, and it seems impossible to get away from that idea. People like John Mellancamp would sometimes come public with their Indiana connections, and make entertainments designed to change the way we think about the middle of the country, but it takes less than a generation before they become equated with it. It’s a very large part of the iconic version of the U.S., and embracing or avoiding it both seem like powerless attempts to control a myth.
However, those who visit are often the ones who have the best chances at defining something new for the rest of us, and there are plenty of places in Carmel where hotels can offer hospitality while you investigate the myth of the midwest. If you’re like most, you’ll be so caught up in the charm that you’ll forget the purpose and wind up enjoying yourself. But if you like to live in tangents, then you might enjoy knowing that one of the first automatic traffic lights in the country was installed here, in 1924.
This is significant for a number of reasons, and not all of them are possible to list, but essentially, this light would be the opening for modernity, and also serve as its immediate closure. This is the light of the future, and its promise is so great on the heels of the Industrial Revolution, that it carried a certain gravity. What was open here was unknowable, and the Great Depression a couple years later only sealed the notion that technology might be turning in a direction we don’t have any control over. The popularity of Einstein’s theory would soon make this even more apparent, and essentially create a paralysis in thought and action. So today, when we hear about the elimination of lights altogether in favor of roundabouts, we see an eternal return to the moment before, the moment just before, everything changed forever.
Tags: Carmel where hotels, elimination of lights, one of the first automatic traffic lights