This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 07 Oct 2008, by Robert Sutor.
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07 Oct 08
Matt KramerDriving Through a Political Season: Metal Detectors and Crabtoberfest
By Bill Barich
(The first in a series of essays leading up to the election by Bill Barich, as he undertakes a road trip inspired by John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley.”)
I am on the road to rediscover America after having lived in Ireland for eight years. This morning finds me in Luray, Va., near Shenandoah National Park. There has been an accident, I am sorry to report. When I tried to turn off the shower in my Best Western room, the cold water knob snapped off in my hand. Fortunately, the manager stemmed the tide, but I can’t help feeling that such strange occurrences are gathering their energies from the wired state of the nation.
There’s a fever on the land, and it both excites and upsets me. Some friends speak to me of the coming apocalypse — financial collapse, dogs howling at the moon, the scorched earth of Mad Max and Cormac McCarthy. Other friends are sanguine, still play golf on the weekend and remain on cordial terms with their brokers. I don’t know what the line is in Vegas. I’m here to learn.
My model is John Steinbeck, another California writer. He lost touch with the country, too, after living abroad and roaming widely. That’s why he set out to write “Travels With Charley,” published almost 50 years ago. In Dublin I read a Steinbeck biography, and then his road book. I remembered it as a charming tale, but it has a subtext of darkness and foreboding I’d missed in my light-hearted youth. He was explicit about his concern in a famous letter to Pascal Covici, his editor.
America suffered from a wasting disease, he wrote — a kind of sickness that didn’t exist in the hard times of his 1930s youth. “There were wishes but no wants. And underneath it all the building energy like gases in a corpse. When that explodes, I tremble to think what will be the result. Over and over I thought that we lack the pressures that make men strong and the anguish that makes men great. The pressures are debts, the desires are for more material t -
Robert Sutor"My model is John Steinbeck, another California writer. He lost touch with the country, too, after living abroad and roaming widely. That’s why he set out to write “Travels With Charley,” published almost 50 years ago. In Dublin I read a Steinbeck biography, and then his road book. I remembered it as a charming tale, but it has a subtext of darkness and foreboding I’d missed in my light-hearted youth. He was explicit about his concern in a famous letter to Pascal Covici, his editor."
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