IN IL MO and into AR. Running south to skirt a massive winter storm sweeping out of the Rockies and across the plains, Update soon.
I was still a little mad at OK and MO when I set out on the first day of the return leg.
In part that was because southern IN and IL were restful and very nearly pretty.
Here they are, from the point of view of their rest areas.
These vistas soothed me.
I wouldn’t want to live in them really, because they lack the mountains which are so necessary to my health.
But even so, they’re a damn sight nicer than the flattish part of the West I currently inhabit, the place my house is, in Sand Rock.
I weigh these thoughts for the fun of it, but I know where I belong.
I have a quote for you now. It’s the description of a podcast episode.
Long before it became an archaic and filthy symbol of everything wrong with America’s broken cities, the New York subway was a marvel. In recent years, it has been falling apart. Today on The Sunday Read, a look at why failing to fix it would be a collective and historic act of self-destruction.
Here’s the truth of it.
Those precious New York elites look around at their surroundings, and they see archaic and filthy symbols.
If they were out here on the road with me, they’d be struck by parallel symbolisms. The subway is the same as the Interstates, which are equally broken, crowded, and dirty throughout much of the land.
They’d see the empty lot in OKC behind the motel, where all the old mattresses go to die.
They’d see the grasping venality of the roadside attractions in Missouri, and be hissed at by the scream of too many steel-belted radials in puddled masses of too much rain.
It would make them tense. It would make the other drivers around them tense, and they’d drive stupidly, aggressively, witlessly, because of it. All of them. Even me.
Failing to fix it … IS a collective and historic act of self-destruction.
No would-be about it.
Even better, let’s go back to why there’s an Interstate Highway System in the first place, and why it appeared when it did.
We have it because of militarism. At the time they said “Defense”, like they often do, but that’s natural bullshit.
President and former General Eisenhower wanted to be sure “we” could swap a lot of tanks, or nukes from one coast to the other in a hurry, and so on, in “our” new role as a world class Empire.
So they paved past Route 66 and everything it represented, an older, slower, simpler America. I don’t mean to imply that in some golden age America was perfect, not even just for white people. But Interstates are an unlovely and, er, concrete example of how civilization devolves itself in the name of progress.
It looks all sleek and modern and new, for awhile. Faster is better. Gleam, gleam, zoom zoom.
It’s not better.
It can’t be better because the reasons it exists in the first place are rotten and bad. They’re an Empire’s reasons, not the people’s reasons.
As I understand my own personal prehistory, it was a lot more common in the fifties for people to see their reasons and the Empire’s reasons as one and the same.
People flew flags and feared Reds like they were supposed to, like all good people did. And they had their reasons–a father with a high school diploma could raise a big family and have a nice house on a working class wage, and his wife would never even have to think about work beyond the home.
The rising tide of Empire floated more boats back then, and those who grew comfortable on those rising waters saw no reason why we shouldn’t invade Vietnam to push back the Ruskies or the Chinks.
The work that father did, for what we now whimsically call a living wage, scratched the Empire’s back while it scratched his. Patriotism made a certain economic sense.
But first his sons started coming back in body bags, or without a leg, or took to smoking dope. Empire incurs some hidden collateral costs.
Then they busted his union and took away any meaningful system of basic health care.
Doggedly, he voted for Reagan twice, and his wife, having had enough, joined a cult of lesbians, and his dick stopped working.
Real wages stayed flat for fifty years, starting then. The cost of living didn’t, though.
They gave him a phone because the narcotic of television wasn’t strong enough to block the pain of it, any more. His grandson became a venture capitalist.
Behind the motel in OKC, the stack of dead mattresses grew and grew.
They lied and lied and lied to him, always with a smile full of perfect teeth.
Missouri became a meth lab the year they put him six feet deep, just before he could cast a vote for Donald Trump.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Amen.