This propaganda landscape was most likely made to impress audiences at the 1915 Pan Pacific Exposition, a world's-fair style advertisement of San Francisco as open for business after the 1906 earthquake.

A fascinating riff on Thomas Cole's five-image Course of Empire series, painted in 1836, this unsigned pastiche of 19th century romanticism only looks humble. In re-working Cole's masterpeice, the painting does something incredibly ambitious: it relocates the notion of American empire from east coast to west, and the aesthetics of empire from the Hudson River School to that of California modernism.

How did an anonymous image maker around the Pan Pacific Exposition become tasked with such an ambitious program? Simple: It was world war one. Europe was in the process of destroying itself. California boosters wanted to project fantasies of California as a safe haven from Europe and from America's own dark, Europeanish past. And they hired this curious artist to make the unkeepable promise of a landscape that would provide citizens once and for all a sense of escape from the cyclical hell of old world destiny.

Cole's Course of Empire of course embodies that hell. It recounts the turbulent cycle of an imaginary civilization from it's origin as a wilderness into a pastoral arcadia, then into a wealthy and powerful empire only to self-destruct and fall into post-apocalyptic desolation. What stands out in Cole's cycle besides the typical Romantic handwringing about the pursuit of worldly power is it's linear nature. There are five of these paintings in the series. The narrative describes civilation as doomed. They are a storyboard of inevitability.

This unlikely little painting makes such a worthy response because of the absence of linearity. It is a one-painting appropriation of Cole's entire cycle; all the stages in Course of Empire are forced to co-exist in a single, static, circular arrangement that doesn't trudge toward its fate but lingers in a perpetual present. On the left side of the harbor lies the Capitol of a classical civilization; just across the water on the right lie the ruins of that civilization; in between a group of acolytes await the return of their spiritual leader in the nirvana of pastoral innocence; the sky glows unnaturally above with the orange evidence of the fire that burned the civilization down. This is the life cycle of Cole's doomed empire pictured as Disneyland. History is emptied of fate and causality and remade as a collection of neutral, unrelated events that can be enjoyed for their style minus the drama. It's animated by the same forces that drive Las Vegas, where the hotel Venetian is Venice without the pesky flooding; and the hotel New York New York is Manhattan without the traffic, the noise, the racial conflict, and the crime. Time is simply place and lives on forever in a graveyard of reproductions, like Walt Disney's cryogenically frozen head. Native americans, competing animal species, and other conflicts in the landscape are erased, making it a safe, playground in which to imagine tourism and development.

That this sounds like contemporary real estate advertising is a sign of the success of the California fantasy. But the spectacular failure of other modernist programs to evolve western culture away from its violent past, like LeCorbusier's machines for living, shows how delusional it was, and maybe still is, for Californians to think they can simply detach from the darkness of history by leaning into style. When we look under the hood of post-historical diversity we see many of the same racial, class and ethnic feuds that we tried to leave behind. Our past just won't go away no matter how much Calgon we scrub it with. And we might be excused for thinking, like Michael Corleone, who tries to escape the mob because he's ready to stop robbing and killing, that "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

This California landscape, though, isn't just one element in a long line of broken promises to deliver western culture to a utopian place beyond its painful history. It is actually more telling than that. It foreshadows how people experience locality all around the world. As developed by white Europeans, California became a place where local authenticity was signified by the absence of local authenticity. Thus California became an everyplace and as a consequence it also became a non-place. Thanks to the geography-erasing quality of the internet, which was created just a few miles south of the Pan Pacific Exposition, the everyplaceness of the California landscape has been exported everywhere, so now everywhere is also on the way to becoming nowhere. But secretly, everywhere is still somewhere with all the old problems that somewhere has always possessed. And that captures the space-time continuum of this unusual California landscape in a nutshell: everywhere, nowhere and somewhere.