Adjacent the Bazaar is the wonderful Ag-Hort building, full of too-ignored ag and horticulture exhibits such as champion corn and Christmas trees. The crop art is here. This year's winning work is by Zambian Obrien Shipeka, a 22-year-old who has never been to the U.S., let alone a fair. This 2009 collection includes an anti-birther entry, which has attracted national attention in the form of unsolicited approval from Rachel Maddow, Gawker, etc. Despite an anti-AIG entry, this year's political crop pales in comparison to last year's election-heavy artworks. (Teresa Anderson's entries have long been politically charged.)

Alan Carpenter's 2009 award-winning "Self Portrait with First Ladies," features the artist flanked by Mrs. Ronald Reagan and Mrs. George W. Bush, themselves flanked. It is well more than a stunt Obama birther entry or a standard celebrity portrait.

Carpenter is working beyond many of his peers. This is not his first take on a First Lady nor his first curious entry. "I'm interested in First Ladies because they're kind of second-hand celebrities who are largely manufactured," he told me later, by phone. Carpenter's fascination with celebrity goes back to his days as a child in rural Iowa. Of his first entry, "Kitty Carlisle, 1915 – Infinity," he said, "When I was a kid, she was on TV but we thought, who the hell is Kitty Carlyle?" He tells me of his 2009 entry: "Every self-portrait should have a parrot and a monkey." I assume the vast majority of those viewing Carpenter's work, like me, don't understand this reference. Carpenter says the $20 bounty he receives with this year's ribbon will be invested in next year's seeds-or "a bigger magnifying glass."

"Have you ever wondered what it's like to work a backhoe?" boomed the emcee at the AFL-CIO building. The fair's labor temple is now metaphortastic. Most of the individual union carts are abandoned. "Fun Fact: The International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftsworkers was Organized in 1865," said a sign-the only thing on one cart beside an abandoned, unused tampon. The AFL-CIO might do better getting visitors to appreciate the fact that it is union labor that handles the 5,000 or so tons of waste the fair produces (much of it human).

Outside the hall, uniony types, looking every bit the hard-workers they probably are, mill about in good humor, enjoying the free space. Things could be worse; not 100 feet away is the Leinenkugel's beer barn.

In his state fair essay to end all state fair essays, Foster Wallace wrote that part of the attraction of the crowded fair was the crowd itself: "Rural Midwesterners live surrounded by unpopulated land, marooned in a space whose emptiness starts to become both physical and spiritual." The Midway is the best place to obliterate emptiness and ground zero for people watching.

Strollers, the breadth and depth of style of which seem limitless, pick through the herd, jolting now and then on an Achilles tendon. So many Jon Gosselin impersonators. Bendy young girls on the grass like stacks of giggling folding chairs. Awkward boys striving to be cool, adopting fashions Kanye can barely pull off; it's too painful to look at them. Teen girls test out the limits of their new sexuality, clearly not yet comfortable with the furtive ogling they will come to endure for the next ten to twelve years. Fitzgerald called them "mysterious girls, young and reckless." They are shadowed by boys of every age. (Hopefully sexting hasn't replaced sweaty-palmed rides on Ye Old Mill... yet.) Senior citizens, with startling frequency, wear the whitest possible tennis shoes. And then, of course, there is the flotsam and jetsam of men and women clearly in some stage of the repayment portion of their respective deals with the devil.

All of these people mingle in the "great get together." But Minnesota is home to same-sex marriage opponent Michele Bachman, one of the nation's largest gay populations, a 7th Congressional district where many believe 9/11 was an inside job, a robust tea party movement, the longest-ever contested election, America's largest, but mostly segregated, Liberian, Somlai and Hmong communities (Nick Schenk's Gran Torino script was originally set in Minneapolis) and Bret Favre. So the idea that anyone here gets together in any way other than "spatially" is absurdity on a stick. Walking the Midway reminds me of New York.

In the 1945 film State Fair, it is said, "That's why you go to a fair, something new." But the Minnesota State Fair now runs, like so much else in America, on the low-mileage fuel of nostalgia. That may sound critical; but a surprising amount of what people generally enjoy is nostalgia-based. In Minnesota's case, a healthy fair, no matter the basis, is a blessing. Things aren't as good elsewhere. This year Wisconsinites saw the mayor of their fair's host city beaten with a pipe. Michigan, once home to the nation's oldest fair, canceled it and became "the poster child for how bad things can get." Worse, there's New England, where one cannot even experience a true state fair, left instead with the lame Eastern States Exposition.

Yet here you can find still small town deeds and small town doers. Recognition is due to 2000 Como Ave., a house along the trudge back to Iowa where many fair-goers park for free. For the last few years the residents here have, in the truest spirit of the fair, put out a large thermos of cold water and paper cups with a sign inviting everyone to "enjoy." I did.

Previously: Very Recent History: The French Dip

Abram Sauer writes about things that are far away.