BUC-EE’S AND THE INFINITE AMERICAN SPIRIT:

The evangelism of this American cultural bastion is ongoing, wielding rhetorical weapons of excess and hospitality and good-old-fashioned economic impact, all softened by its tendency to burrow within customers’ hearts. At its head is the beaver: naturally industrious, instinctively pressured to pursue productivity, representing an American ideal of indomitable economic fruitfulness. At the same time, Buc-ee himself appears both stupid-looking and overjoyed, happy not to the point of contentment, but of hysteria. A silly, goofy thing that is disarming in its unseriousness. It gazes up and to the right, somehow warmly inviting us to copy its watching. The subject of its focus is unknown, and maybe doesn’t matter (or, at least, Buc-ee’s is indifferent to its significance). It seems as likely to be staring down a hurtling, imminently earth-splitting asteroid as to be welcoming the second coming of Christ.

Buc-ee’s, a near-highway megachurch and pilgrimage destination for the uniquely American blend of comfort, commerce, spectacle, and hometown folksiness, stands unrivaled. It singlehandedly creates family memories, feeds our most desperate attempts to fill various God-shaped and antisocially created holes, raises up some of our most disavowed and disaffected, hooks us on sugar and stupid white-labeled landfill filler, and puts smiles on millions upon millions of traveling American faces. Paradoxical cultural phenomenon, beloved landmark, bona fide megastore, and bearer of the American spirit, I salute you.

The European mind cannot comprehend the wonders of Buc-ee’s. However, as the video division of America’s Newspaper of Record highlighted in 2022, a California couple moving to Texas discovered that you can immanentize the eschaton: