THE boomers of Dogpatch saw their project as harmless tourism, doing nothing but good. But tourism is not so harmless. Tourism isn't just entertainment, a way to spend idle hours and extra cash. Tourism is a practice of identity formation. The tourist "attractions" are part of a dynamic of cultural iconography. Tourism offers a means by which people can assess their world and define their own sense of identity. It is social orientation in a Hawaiian shirt and sandals. And for all its potential to educate and relax, it also can elicit behaviors that smear real comprehension, obscuring sight like sweat on your sunglasses lens.

The first postmodern gesture ("avant la lettre") was a malicious irony: The first railroad to run in Newton County, Arkansas, was the one laid in 1968 at Dogpatch. The county was the poorest in the state but the track didn't link it to the trade along some trunk line of the Illinois Central or the Southern Pacific. Instead, the railroad ran in a circle around the circumference of Dogpatch USA, a fabulistic hillbilly funland. The irony wasn't lost on the people in the area. The editor of a local paper wrote: "Thanks to Dogpatch, Newton County now has a railroad -- no train yet, just a railroad. All over the country railroads are diminishing and here in Newton County one is being built for the first time. Can you top that?"

Tourist attractions, ultimately, are icons of place, and touristic messages and meanings are communicated through the sense of and experience of place. Tourists attach different beliefs and attitudes to different kinds of places. Tourism and touristic modes of knowing have become more important as increasingly in the cyberspace of contemporary capitalist culture the aesthetic realm intensifies and mediates the material realm. Tourists are the "unsung armies of semiotics," off in search of "Frenchness," or the typical Italian, or examples of whatever preconceptions they have regarding different ethnicities. The essence of tourism is a search for authenticity, and they find it to their satisfaction by seeking caricature and purchasing experience.

The distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic is essential to tourism, and this fact was quickly recognized by the people in area around Dogpatch. The local debate was filled with discussion of the issues of simulation and authenticity. It was a vernacular folk-deconstruction carried out in the pages of the local small town newspapers.

Just before Dogpatch opened, the Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times reported on construction progress and puzzled over the theme park's weird identity, using a convoluted logic and lay-lit-crit vocabulary that would pass muster in a contemporary classroom: "The layout of the town is a new idea and is completely original. Al Capp has never before drawn the entire town. The stage setting for the musical comedy and motion picture 'Li'l Abner,' were frankly artificial and fragmentary. Hence, Dogpatch USA at Marble Falls, will be a new creation itself, the first Dogpatch to ever exist. Physically, then, the park will originate, not reproduce, Dogpatch."

The masterful blurring of the lines between the authentic, the replica and the lampoon is, to me, Dogpatch's claim to a place on the national register. When Dogpatch opened, it featured craftsfolk from the Ozarks displaying and selling their skills and products. It presented them in a stereotyped context of moonshine and overalls. Not only was Dogpatch the "authentic" version of the cartoon place, but was also presented at the same time as a version of a real, historic place. The issues were so confusing that in another article, a Dogpatch official said, "the objective of Dogpatch was 'to restore the culture of the days of the past, maintain the culture of today and provide recreation for all age groups without destroying any of the natural beauty of the valley.'" The equating of Dogpatch with genuine mountain culture was also evident in a statement by Capp: "You don't meet a nicer batch of people than here in the real Dogpatch." The "real" Dogpatch? In the same breath, Capp added, "Until today I had thought of Dogpatch as sort of a pleasant re-run of an old Bob Burns movie. But now -- isn't it the most fantastic thing you've ever seen?"

But what were you seeing? The trade magazine Amusement Business in 1967 had already picked up on the weirdness. "The Marble Falls setting and some of the old buildings at the site already looked remarkably like the comic strip scene."

Which came first? The Marble Falls setting or the version in the newspaper? And which version makes the other valid? Does "Li'l Abner" make Marble Falls the "real" Dogpatch? or does Marble Falls, because it looks like "the comic strip scene" make Li'l Abner a legitimate version?

SHACKS and cabins were carefully constructed. Fiberglass goats grazed on shingled roofs. College kids were hired, dressed up, and throughout the summer Li'l Abner, Daisy Mae, Mammy and Pappy Yokum, and a half dozen other Capp creations came to life, as the actors performed scripted skits, puffing corncob pipes. The park was Arkansas' bid for national attention. It was such a source of pride that former Arkansas governor and arch-segregationist Orval Faubus was appointed its first general manager. They saw Dogpatch going head-to-head with Disneyland. the "high Disneyland kind."

In the 1969, Dogpatch was visited by celebrities from Petticoat Junction and run by a former Arkansas governor. By the late 1970s, Dogpatch was the site of the regional arm-wrestling championship and was renting itself out for weddings. By 1980, it was bankrupt. Today, 16 years after Capp stopped drawing his strip, Dogpatch's better days are far in the past. Dogpatch Cave, where Lonesome Polecat and Hairless Joe used to brew Kickapoo Joy Juice, has been sold off and has reclaimed its original name of Mystic Cave. Gone are the live bear acts, the mule-drawn swing, the antique car museum. In a roped off section of the park, one of the original newsmaking goats lies rainstained amid the rubble of a collapsed roof, a broken horn nearby, like a poacher was interrupted in mid-mutilation.

But there are indications that the fortunes of Dogpatch are beginning to look up. Forty-five minutes to the north is the throbbing pump of the region's tourist boom, the glittering neon capital of neo-country: Branson, Missouri.

"No doubt about it, Branson has been a blessing," said Melvin Bell, who has owned Dogpatch for six years. Mr. Bell bought the park from a group of investors who bought it after the park had been seized in bankruptcy by a Memphis bank in 1980.

"We're on the route to Branson, so we have all the tour busses coming up Scenic 7. Dogpatch is becoming the place to stop."

Mr. Bell said that the fact that the "Li'l Abner" cartoon no longer runs has had a negative effect on Dogpatch, but its legacy should be good for a few more years.

"Most of the people who go to Branson grew up with Li'l Abner," Mr. Bell said. "So from that standpoint and for the next 10 or 15 years, I would imagine, you've got people who are familiar with it and once they see it, they want to stop.

"From now on, we're going to be more aggressive."

ON the first day of Dogpatch's 1993 season, two young girls, about 11 or 12, were holding small Zebco fishing rods. These trout ponds were there before Dogpatch, and they will be here if Dogpatch is scraped from these Ozark hills, because they are the heart of this attraction, itself a celebration of feigned authenticity, a simulation of fishing. The reels are locked up , and the line is tied in a knot on the end of the rods, and the fishing line is crimped and windblown. The girls are the first of the season to angle for some of the 40,000 fish waiting to be caught in Dogpatch Pond. A nearby display on the Life Cycle of Dogpatch's Ol' Mr. Trout shows the stages of growth from eggs, to fingerlings, to adult: "Life Cycle Ends When Ol' Trout gits caught!"

The girls neither cast nor reel. Instead they dangle unweighted brass hooks into the shallow water. More than a hundred trout thrash in the shallows, splashing all the way almost to the edge of the stamped sandy shore and the bench where the girls' family sits. The fish speed open-mouthed toward the bare hooks, only to veer away a split second before biting. A Dogpatch employee comes up with some canned corn. One girl baits her hook, drops it in and two seconds later a three pound rainbow trout is bending her pole. She backs up a couple steps and drags the fish onto the sand. The employee, sweating in a tight red shirt, picks up the fish. He tries to pull the hook loose. But it won't come.

The guy grips the line and pulls with increasing force. He is no longer trying to finesse the barb. He wants it out. He'll bring guts with it if he has to, which he might, because the fish has swallowed the hook. He reaches a finger into the fish's mouth, but he still can't reach the hook. He's squeezing so hard now that his unsunned arms are shaking. Watery blood is running out of the fish's gills, down his arms, like he's squeezing a sponge. Finally there's a rough sputter of ripping cartilage, a pop of bone, and the shiny hook pops out, loops, and catches his finger. He pinches out the hook, returns the pole to the girl, then at the side of the pond runs the trout onto a stringer. He stakes it in the sand, pushing the stake with his foot. The trout floats belly up. The guy stands up, plucks his gripping shirt from where it has hiked up. The second girl is still trying, sweeping the rod tip through the water, back and forth, her corn gone, lost in quick hits where she failed to set the hook. Her rod tip in the water zips through the pack of fish, more hundreds now, an impossible to count thrashing mass of dark green backs and pale bellies and swift lengths. It's like she's trying to slash them with a switch, punishing, impatient, trying at least to snag one with the naked hook. Come on, bite it, she says. Bite it. The guy in the shirt says he doesn't have anymore canned corn for bait. They're out. That's something they still got to put on their list and they'll have more he's sure by tomorrow or Monday. The fish floating at the end of the stringer spasms and flashes and then is still, and still belly up, leaking blood into the water, and the girl's brass hook shines brightly as it jigs through the dark fish, and she's whipping the rod back and forth going faster because her mother is saying hurry up, we're going, and she knows they mean it because now they're helping her grandmother up from the bench and so if she wants to get one she's got to get it now, and she's saying Come on, bite it. Just bite."