ON THE ROAD TO ARMAGEDDON
KEROUAC 100
Happening by chance, yesterday, to catch the news that it was Jack Kerouac’s 100th birthday, it occurred to me that I can well remember the kind of world in which Jack Kerouac’s centennial would have been a much bigger deal than it is capable of being, today.
A full segment on the evening news would have been devoted
to his life and literature; he would have been a feature on “60 Minutes”; bookstores
(there were more of them back when I was a young man) would have been stocked
up with copies of “On the Road”, promoting a Jack Kerouac sale of some kind in
the weeks leading up to yesterday.
Minus the sex and drugs (although not necessarily the
driving), a miniature polity has a thing or two in common, it seems to me, with
Kerouac’s celebrated roman a clef. There is a “beat” element to even the most
conservative ephemeral realm and rolling these things along their trajectory can
often seem like continuously typing on a single roll of paper from beginning to
end.
Life, itself, can seem that way, too, I suppose.
The continuous roll of chaos and disorder upon which the third
decade of the 21st century is being written is taking its toll on
me, I don’t mind confessing, and I could frankly do without this endless
insanity. These times of crisis-upon-crisis are not easily adjusted to and it is
all wildly foreign to what I have been accustomed to in my lifetime.
One expects change, of course, and even welcomes it. But not
like this. This…this is just brutal.
As a child of the 1970s (and early 80s) I had the advantage
of growing up in a relatively stable era. I was oblivious to Vietnam (hostilities
had concluded while I was yet a toddler) and to the cultural revolution which
had just taken place, although even at a young age I could begin to make out
that some major shift had occurred.
The 1970s weren’t all disco, bell-bottoms, platform shoes,
and lava lamps. In any generation, the marks of previous generations can be seen, of
course, even felt and, in a way, experienced--particularly if you happen to be
the type of person who is acutely attuned to what came before you (as I think I
have always been).
What millennials will not instantly grasp about the 1970s is
just how much residue from the 1950s was still lingering about in those psychedelic
years and how much of an impact the culture of those earlier times had upon the
psyche of a child of the 70s.
In the 1970s, for example, there were still automobiles from
the 1950s on the road and we still went to drive-ins (restaurants and theaters).
Sure, we had color TVs by then, but we also had black and white TVs, as well. Black
and white TV. Can you even imagine black and white TV?
The lingering presence for years of black and white television,
in fact, made it very much less clear to us “youngsters” which TV shows were
current, and which were not. As a boy, I watched “Leave it to Beaver” and “The
Howdy Doody Show” just as my parents had when they were kids, not necessarily
realizing that I was watching old reruns from decades ago. Add 50s retro shows
like “Happy Days” and “Laverne & Shirley” into the mix and a kid from the
70s could be forgiven, I think, for being utterly confused as to which decade
he was growing up in.
In the 1970s, while my mother was shopping for her groceries
all at once at the supermarket, her mother was still having milk delivered to
her at home by the milkman and was making weekly trips to the
butcher, the baker, and the greengrocer at the IGA. I learned quite a bit about
the fundamental differences between the “boomer” generation and the “greatest”
generation, in fact, simply by observing the differences in the way my mother
and grandmother shopped for groceries.
It's perhaps a bit amusing to me to consider that my
grandmother’s way of doing it now seems rather more modern than my mother’s
way. We have returned, haven’t we, to a time of delivered groceries and to shopping
at specialized markets. How that pendulum swings.
There was no internet back then. Computers were strange, indecipherable
contraptions used by scientists and the military. Nobody had one of those at home. Looking
something up meant going to fetch an alphabetized volume of the encyclopedia
from the bookshelves and hoping what you wanted to learn about was in there
somewhere. The set of World Book encyclopedias I had to reference had been purchased
in the 1960s, however, so my information was always outdated. That didn’t
matter much, though. Everybody else had the same problem and the world wasn’t
changing so fast that we couldn’t fill in the blanks (for the most part).
The world of the 1970s, in fact, was not—technologically speaking—that
far removed from the world of the 1950s. We still dialed our telephone numbers
on a big clunky land-line telephone hanging on the wall. We still rolled up the
car windows manually with a crank (well, not my grandfather, bless him…he drove
a Lincoln Continental and enjoyed the luxury, therefore, of power windows). We
still got up from the sofa to manually change the channel on the TV. In school,
we wrote things on paper with pencils, which we sharpened, constantly, using
the single crank mechanism pencil sharpener provided to each classroom.
Political changes were another thing, altogether, of course,
although in saying so I find myself reminiscing about the fact that a Norman
Rockwell portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower enjoyed pride of place next to the
door of the principal’s office at my junior high school. Once upon a time, it
seems, it was the practice to display the portrait of the sitting president
there. After Eisenhower, nobody ever bothered to update it. And why should they
have when half the flags in our classrooms had only 48 stars?
As kids, we didn’t know too much about politics, of course.
We were led to believe that the president of the United States, no matter who
he was, was a “moron” because our parents were constantly saying so. But what we
all knew as a point of uncontestable dogma was that the Russians were the “bad
guys” and that if we were not vigilant about fulfilling our civic duties as
Americans, all those outdated 48-star flags hanging in our classrooms would one
day turn red. Our teachers actually told us that…that the flags would turn red,
and I puzzled mightily over how and why that might happen.
We were smack dab in the middle of the Cold War back then,
and although we were far-removed from the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, our
teachers had been scarred for life by it and seemed all but certain that
nuclear war was not only inevitable but imminent. We, therefore, as their pupils,
absorbed their anxiety during air raid drill after air raid drill when we were suddenly
jolted out of our studies by a loud, shrill siren alerting us to take cover.
I know the cliché image of schoolchildren ducking under
their desks will cross your mind at this point and perhaps that’s how it was
done in the 1950s and 60s but the drill was a bit different for us. By then,
apparently, they had decided that classroom desks weren’t going to protect us
from Soviet missiles and so a new system had been devised whereby we were all
sent into the cloakroom (don’t ask) to sit on the floor with our backs against
the wall “Indian style” while putting our hands behind our heads like perps
under arrest by Five-0. That, it seems, would
spare us third graders from nuclear incineration. Take that, Brezhnev!
As stressful as that may sound to those of you who are too
young to remember the Cold War, it must be said that those occasional air raid
drills in school were actually hilarious and, the truth be told, they were just
about the extent to which the threat of nuclear destruction affected our psychological
well-being. The Cold War of the 1970s and 80s, let’s face it, was a very cold
war, at least as far as any of us could tell.
We weren’t exposed to an endless bombardment of news and details
back then they way we are via the internet, cable news, and social media today.
We were, in fact, blissfully in the dark about just how close to global
destruction the world might have been at any given moment. Even though the USSR
had a nuke with my hometown’s name on it, therefore, our days were not spent in
fear, agonizing about what was coming next. We did what kids did to enjoy life
back then, which mostly centered around being outside in the neighborhood,
playing games, getting into mischief, and popping an inordinate amount of
Jiffy-Pop popcorn, as I recall.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s and the
Berlin Wall came down, it was nevertheless an immense psychological relief. It
seemed unreal, in fact. Suddenly, the big bad archnemesis of the “Free World”
was no more. The Soviet Union had come and gone with nary a nuke dropped on us
or them. Gorbachev turned out to be a good guy, and when he left, along came smiling
Boris Yeltsin. The “Evil Empire” was, unbelievably, gone…poof…and its blood red
flag was replaced by the red, white, and blue banner of a free and democratic
Russian republic. You could have knocked any of us over with a feather. It was
stunning to watch it all unfold…to see the USSR coming to an end on live TV
without a shot being fired.
We had won the Cold War.
From that moment on, the game changed. There was now only
one superpower, and it was us. The good ol’ USA. And we, of course, were the “good
guys”. We really had made the world safe for democracy, hadn’t we? Well, apart
from that pesky Middle East and a few other pockets of tyranny hither and yon,
but we would soon change that, wouldn’t we? Even China, to our amazement, began
playing footsie with capitalism (if not democracy). Communism was in extremis,
except in Cuba.
Now things would be better. A thousand points of light were illuminating
the promise of the 21st century. There was hope. There was optimism.
There was excitement. There was hubris.
When the new Republican president of the United States declared
that a “New World Order” had been established, he was right, and yet I couldn’t
help but find myself worrying that there might be some pushback against the term
“New World Order”.
There was. It became a great big bogeyman, in fact, which
haunted the paranoid imaginations of the John Birch lunatic fringe, and that
phrase would fester and magnify, out there, on the fringes of society,
unbeknownst to the rest of us as we soaked in the sunshine and blue skies of the
new day which had dawned.
I was a hopeful young man in my twenties, at this point,
happy with the way life and the world were progressing. We were becoming a
kinder, gentler nation (we really were, believe it or not). Persons different
from ourselves were becoming less and less our enemies and more and more our
brothers and sisters in a world that was becoming smaller and smaller by the
day. We were travelling more, exposing ourselves to new cultures and new ideas,
and we were happy to find ourselves becoming one, big, human family,
cooperating with one another for a change (or trying to, at least). We were all
becoming a bit more liberal in the Grunge era than we had been in the Reagan
80s.
Some like to cite 9/11 as the day that all began to change and they aren’t necessarily wrong, although the 2000 US presidential election was a damn good warm-up act. As earth-shattering as 9/11 was, however, the trajectory we were on was only interrupted by it. We would recover and go on to surprise ourselves at how marvelously progressive we had become by electing our first black president, a man with the middle name of "Hussein" (gasp). Not only that, but we would go on to re-elect him.
It wouldn’t be until 2020
that the trajectory would change, entirely, becoming a quickstep retreat backwards
into the dark ages.
Trumpism and the loud awakening of right-wing extremism, the
COVID-19 pandemic, and now the horrific opening salvo in Ukraine of Putin’s bid
to return us all to the brink of nuclear annihilation have come at us like a
non-stop succession of steamrollers such that one begins to lose sight anymore
of what “normal” used to mean. Since the election of Donald Trump, we have not
been able to come up for air. Since 2020 darkened mankind’s doorstep, it has been
nothing but crazy-upon-crazy.
Global strife and chaos seem to have become the new
definition of normal. It is one catastrophe after another, now, without respite.
“What next?” is the question each of us asks ourselves these days as we wait
for the next shoe to drop. Just how many shoes does this bizarre era in which
we now find ourselves wear, anyhow? Where did those thousand points of light
go? Whence our new world order?
What were we talking about? Jack Kerouac? How quaint. What a
badass he seemed to some at the time. The progenitor of the “Beat generation” (who
bristled at the thought of being labelled as such). “On the Road” had to be revised
to within an inch of its life to be published, so explicit and shocking was Kerouac’s
prose at the time, yet the man would go to his grave insisting that his Catholic
piety was the thing that really defined him.
The funny thing about Jack Kerouac is that he didn’t even drive
his own car on that epic road trip of his. He couldn’t. Jack Kerouac didn’t
know how to drive; his buddy drove the whole time. The man didn’t learn to
drive, in fact, until he was in his mid-30s, although even then he never
managed to get a driver’s license.
And like some insecure micronationalist trying in vain to artificially
inflate the grandeur of his lineage, his story changed through the years
regarding the origins of his family name. “Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac” is
what he styled himself, a descendant (so he claimed) of a French aristocrat named
Baron Francois Lebris de Kerouac. Gosh, don’t even the hippest of the hip do
such things?
Jack Kerouac, athlete, military man, conservative (yep…a
friend of Bill Buckley, no less), libertine, pious Catholic, divorcee, writer, beatnik,
and would-be aristocrat drank his way through life, living to the ripe old age
of 47 as a result. But he was breathtaking. Some guys just have that larger-than-life
quality about them, I guess, and Kerouac obviously had that.
Kerouac claimed that one day while in prayer as a boy, God
spoke to him and told him he would live and die in pain but would, in the end,
be saved because he had a “good soul”. I have no doubt that he was saved; God
does not create such one-of-a-kind masterpieces to go to waste, I’m sure. It
would be too strange if God didn’t enjoy the life of Jack Kerouac. More and
more I find myself of the persuasion that God is less impressed by chanting
monks and weeping nuns than we imagine him to be. The prodigal son types, after
all, with all their careless mucking about, are the ones he seems to gravitate to.
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