Left the American RV Park and Kamp in Murdo, SD, this morning. Not much of a camp. Not sure of the emphasis on “American” in the name of this park. It certainly did not distinguish itself in any particularly “American” way. I didn’t see a single American flag, and at the very least if you’re going to call your RV park the “American RV Park,” then you have to have an American flag. Nope. Not a one.
Also pretty interesting is the deliberate misspelling of the word camp. Obviously, who ever thought of doing this had a different result in mind. Perhaps swapping the c for the k was intended to show a bit of camp or cutesy or maybe the intent was to be deliberately satiric, for such a thing is certainly possible even for a [k]ampground in the middle of the great red state of South Dakota. The irony here is that the misspelling is an unintended reference to leftists and revolutionaries of the sixties. In broadsides and alternative press newspapers, writers would routinely misspell America for Amerika, American for Amerikan to express a kind of skepticism about the meaning of the word. Using the word Amerika is intended to debase or discredit the original word, to associate it with controversial or repugnant political philosophies. I think of Marx’s Das Kapital (communism); or the Ku Klux Klan (racism). So Kamp is really some kind of debasement of camp. Not really a camp in the normal sense, whatever that would be. Also, if this is a Kamp, why aren’t there Kabins?
In any case the park was no more than a functional part of a good night’s sleep. Note the concrete pads:
Call and Response 