Road Trip Ressurected
Feb. 7th, 2004 05:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueThe main downside to marriage is that you stop existing for about a year and a half. During that time, most of your energy goes toward developing the structure of the partnership and figuring how to work in it. Reflex and common sense do you no good without established ritual, and it takes quite a while to develop these routines, responsibility divisions, and communication styles. During this year (or more) when you do not exist, a lot of things fall through the cracks. At the very least, important plans must be postponed; in the interim, what was just a grand adventure can become something else entirely.
In the two years since I wrote The Manifesto, the $500 Road Trip has taken on greater social significance. THe America I intended to see no longer exists; it has instead become a nation more divided than at any point in its history. This division has not occured along geographic or even racial lines; it is a split of purely ideological differences, and as such there can be neither compromise nor invasion.
We live in a time when people are terrified of change but hate the way things are. Security has become the main national currency, and so we are frozen; creation is anything but safe. There is no room for friendship or debate; any stranger is an enemy. Instead of a nation, we are a number of autonomous collectives, unconnected to the fate of others.
Nowhere is this more clear than in the political arena, where voters judge laws not by their content but by who made them. The entire country has fallen into groupthink, for disagreement is intolerable in a world of controls, a world where you don't have to speak to your neighbor, a world of personal filters where I never have to read an opinion that contradicts mine because my computer lets me choose what I see. We're facing the return of dynasties, where your name is more important than your abilities. Honesty has been replaced by divine right.
We're fighting a war, and it's a war that ended 30 years ago. It's a war that ended with the reunification of Vietnam, but we still have soldiers fighting it and we still have protesters fighting against it. These are the people in charge of our government, officials and voters so eager to out-American each other than they don't stop to think what that means.
As for people of my generation, we mostly don't vote at all - certainly not more than once every four years. We were born after Watergate, and so we never trust the government. It's all corrupt, and if a politician seems to do something good it just means he has a better press agent. Spin is assumed; so is dishonesty. Cheating. The few times I've seen someone get excited about a candidate, it's as a tool to defeat another one. Instead of facts, ideas, records, it's "the lesser of two evils." Why vote if you lose either way?
It is in the face of this political gap, this wage gap, this generational, religious, spiritual, urban/rural gap that someone needs to search for America. Not an imagined, nostalgic, Coca-Cola-and-whitewash America or flag waving and George Washington, but a real, contemporary America. Is there a unique culture that unites us, or are we simply a country out of habit and the happenstance of geography? Does America exist, and if so, in what form?
The litmus test must be The Road Trip, a final, blazing attempt at open, face-to-face communication. We will be people entirely without power, without the ability to affect or ignore our surroundings. As strangers without agendas, perhaps we can safely be shown the truth. In this journey of seedy motels and hole-in-the-wall diners, we may find a hidden community of thoughts and habits, or we may discover that there is no melting pot - just a collection of loose, stony gravel.
In the two years since I wrote The Manifesto, the $500 Road Trip has taken on greater social significance. THe America I intended to see no longer exists; it has instead become a nation more divided than at any point in its history. This division has not occured along geographic or even racial lines; it is a split of purely ideological differences, and as such there can be neither compromise nor invasion.
We live in a time when people are terrified of change but hate the way things are. Security has become the main national currency, and so we are frozen; creation is anything but safe. There is no room for friendship or debate; any stranger is an enemy. Instead of a nation, we are a number of autonomous collectives, unconnected to the fate of others.
Nowhere is this more clear than in the political arena, where voters judge laws not by their content but by who made them. The entire country has fallen into groupthink, for disagreement is intolerable in a world of controls, a world where you don't have to speak to your neighbor, a world of personal filters where I never have to read an opinion that contradicts mine because my computer lets me choose what I see. We're facing the return of dynasties, where your name is more important than your abilities. Honesty has been replaced by divine right.
We're fighting a war, and it's a war that ended 30 years ago. It's a war that ended with the reunification of Vietnam, but we still have soldiers fighting it and we still have protesters fighting against it. These are the people in charge of our government, officials and voters so eager to out-American each other than they don't stop to think what that means.
As for people of my generation, we mostly don't vote at all - certainly not more than once every four years. We were born after Watergate, and so we never trust the government. It's all corrupt, and if a politician seems to do something good it just means he has a better press agent. Spin is assumed; so is dishonesty. Cheating. The few times I've seen someone get excited about a candidate, it's as a tool to defeat another one. Instead of facts, ideas, records, it's "the lesser of two evils." Why vote if you lose either way?
It is in the face of this political gap, this wage gap, this generational, religious, spiritual, urban/rural gap that someone needs to search for America. Not an imagined, nostalgic, Coca-Cola-and-whitewash America or flag waving and George Washington, but a real, contemporary America. Is there a unique culture that unites us, or are we simply a country out of habit and the happenstance of geography? Does America exist, and if so, in what form?
The litmus test must be The Road Trip, a final, blazing attempt at open, face-to-face communication. We will be people entirely without power, without the ability to affect or ignore our surroundings. As strangers without agendas, perhaps we can safely be shown the truth. In this journey of seedy motels and hole-in-the-wall diners, we may find a hidden community of thoughts and habits, or we may discover that there is no melting pot - just a collection of loose, stony gravel.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-08 12:16 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-08 12:25 am (UTC)-R
Re:
Date: 2004-02-08 12:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-08 02:31 am (UTC)On a side note, you're an incredible writer. Make this into a travel journal book/reflections, a la Tony Horwitz, and you'll have a best seller.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-08 07:04 am (UTC)-Romie
(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-08 06:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-09 02:03 pm (UTC)however, i will provide safe harbour to you in your voyage should it bring you eastward. i will fortify you and your fellow travelers with food and drink, and provide you with a faithful beast to guard you as you sleep.