American Pharaoh
"even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea"
The southernmost city in our state is Cairo, Illinois. Population 1700, lower than the average sorority girl Instagram follower count. Cairo was named for its resemblance to the Nile Delta in Egypt, that civilizational cradle, because it sits at the convergence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The entire region is sometimes called Little Egypt. Nearby Southern Illinois University, which is dying as career optimization pushes midwest youth towards community college and Big Ten schools, bears as its mascot the Saluki, a royal dog often found mummified in pharaoh’s tombs. The residents of the mostly rural area americanize the pronunciation of their city as “Cay-ro”.
Charles Dickens only takes his plots to America once, in his 1842-1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit, and it's to write about Cairo. Dickens speaks about the city with great disdain. Protagonist Martin, seeking fortune in America, buys a house in Cairo unseen, and when he arrives the house is a shack in inhospitable wetlands full of mosquitoes and he immediately contracts malaria. Land developers in the 1830s sought to recreate the success of frontier city Chicago and speculated that Cairo’s rivercrossed location would make it a thriving transit hub with high land values, as America expanded west. Dickens regarded Cairo as a doomed wasteland speculated upon by greedy businessmen, and gave his fictionalized Cairo the mocking name “Eden”.
And the city was doomed. Cairo often floods, nearby St. Louis eclipsed its role as Mississippi port. Today Cairo holds decaying unsellable mansions, pleasant to browse on Zillow and imagine a refined Victorian life, but not pleasant to actually purchase and enter the reality of refurbishing a house in a flood plain in a tiny rural corner of the midwest. Cairo, like the tombs of the pharaoh, is a ruin of another time.
A front-camera video of a girl in her early twenties, username glamdemon2004. She’s filming herself in her apartment, sitting on a couch in front of wall posters. She speaks in an articulate accent halfway between old money coastal elite and California valley girl. Either way it signals that she’s not from the middle of the country. “I think we place way too much emphasis on looks when it comes to building confidence, because some of you guys have not read a book in years, don’t know how to do your taxes, have no sense of identity outside of the internet, can’t speak in public, and yet every morning, there you are, looking at yourself in your full-length IKEA mirror going You’re So Hot! You’re The Prettiest Girl In The World! Okay and? Even if that were true, and let’s be honest, ehhhmmm, who cares? Spell pharaoh. Tell me what the FTC does. Name a single hobby of yours outside of media consumption. Exactly. Not hot.”
American Pharoah was the 2015 winner of the Triple Crown: the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes, and was the first horse to complete a Grand Slam by adding a victory at the newer Breeder’s Cup. His career was total domination. Of the eleven races he competed in, he won nine. He was named after his sire, Pioneerof the Nile, who placed second in the Kentucky Derby in his day, and his damsire, Yankee Gentleman. The middle of America and Egypt, an American emperor of the desert. Like any pharaoh he met the obstacles put in front of him and found victory. Unlike a pharaoh, whose role is to guide his people for decades and set up a graceful reign for his son and his son’s sons, the challenges faced by American Pharoah were short. Running eleven races, each just a few minutes long, meant that he spent around thirty minutes of his life racing. The race begins and American Pharoah runs, not understanding the stakes of the moment, what it means to be competing for a “triple crown”, only knowing how good it feels to blow past the horses next to him, to keep up the speed until his rider tells him it’s over. And the joy and pride the humans felt in him after his triumph, the adoration from the crowd, he understood that. The spelling of his father’s first name, Pioneerof, is not an error. The Jockey Club application form for the horse’s name was limited to 18 characters, so the strategic choice was made to omit the first space in his name. The spelling of “Pharoah”, for the son, was an error. No individual accepts responsibility for the error, but after submission into the permanent records of The Jockey Club it could not be changed. His Triple Crown blanket was printed with the correct spelling of pharaoh, thus misspelling his name.
George Washington, American Pharaoh. Desert Eagle. We all know of the pyramid topped with an all-seeing-eye on his one dollar bill. And his giant obelisk pushing 555 feet into the sky of the city named after him. But now, buried in a marble pyramid on the banks of the Potomac. The first president buried at the head of the line, and every president after buried in a new pyramid behind him, along the gentle river that pushes out to the austere Atlantic. Each president in their lifetime invents images to be carved into their pyramid to explain their legacy, images in hieroglyphics, for one cannot say the language Americans will wield thousands of years in the future. Two hundred fifty years post-1776, tourists visit the line of pyramids to pay respect to their pharaohs, after a quarter millennium of American rule. Forty pyramids in a line, connected by a perfectly sidewalked walking trail. Families enjoy picnics on the grassy banks of the river and look on. On the other side of Washington D.C., in an anonymous warehouse in Northern Virginia, the thousands of servers of AWS US-East-1 silently churn.