Siren Song

The road is eternal,
its yellow line a perpetual exclamation of freedom.
Oh, to be the wheels that chase that line,
that race away…to forever.

The open road has always been synonymous for freedom. Long before the automobile, the road was a lure to our species. We wandered out of Africa just barely upright and looking to straighten our stride. Down through the centuries we just kept on going. We never seemed to be satisfied with where we were. We just had to keep trying to find out, where else we could be.

We spread all over the eastern continents and when we got to the edge of the Atlantic, dove in and swam to the other side. Once there, we wandered the plains, the frozen mountains and burning deserts till the migration ended. After that there was just a country to build. So, we settled down, soaked our itchy feet and for many years our wanderlust lay dormant.

Now, it came to pass that the period following World War II was a boom time for our country. America went back to work full time, our industries thriving and our farmlands abundant. People left the cities in droves and snuggled into suburbia. We had proven to the world, and ourselves, that we were the big kids on the block and finally we had the money and the cars to enjoy it.

We also had discovered something even more precious, leisure time. We took a breather and when our vacations came we just had to show our kids what it felt like to be mobile. We had to show them that freedom was not just ‘living’ in the USA’. Freedom was also the open road!

Not just any road, Route 66, the "Mother Road”. US Highway 66 was established on November 11, 1926. She cut diagonally across the middle of the U.S. like an exploratory surgery from Chicago to Santa Monica., 2,448 miles of wide open spaces and sheer American beauty.

Originally, the escape route west during the dustbowl of the thirties, the revenues she generated spawned small towns and roadside attractions. She was lean and flat on the horizon, which made her a popular truck route and she had her share of natural wonders like the Painted Desert and the Grand Canyon to dress her up some.

The more fashionable she became the more wealth she generated. All sorts of strange and wonderful sights sprang up alongside her, like mushrooms after a heavy rain. The Cadillac Ranch, the U-Drop Inn, the tee pee shaped Wigwam motels, and Red’s Hamburgers, the first drive through eatery. The wonders she inspired on her way west paved the way to her reputation as the ultimate appetizer plate of pure Americana.

She’s been immortalized in song, on TV and in literature. Bobby Troup wrote his best-known song,
“Get your kicks on Route 66” as he rode her west to California and Ray Charles sang “Hit the road, Jack” to honor Jack Kerouac, who cruised “The Main Street of America” several times when he was On the Road ,with friends Neil Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. She became a major symbol of the new American way of life.

Alas, there were dark clouds on her horizon. President Eisenhower, inspired by Germany's high-speed roadways during World War II, predicted a similar system of roads for the US, and in 1956 signed the Interstate Highway Act. After only 30-years in existence, Route 66 was placed in the ICU and she never fully recovered.

“The Main Street of America”, was officially decommissioned from the US Highway System on June 27, 1985. She was replaced by various legs of the Interstate System which bypassed the countless small towns and roadside attractions that made her so popular. Leaving them to wither and die on the vine.

This also marked a change in the culture of our road trip holidays. These new highways were meant to be rode fast so instead of stopping to smell the roses, we started chasing the exhaust of our fellow travelers. No more vacillation on our vacation. The destination became the new sensation.

The Mother Road still lives on, even though she doesn’t always appear on the maps of today. Portions of her have been designated a National Scenic Byway and given the name "Historic Route 66". It’s not possible to ride her continuously east to west or vice versa. However, the remaining eighty percent is still drivable with precautious planning and a pinch of patience.

This is good news because our species is still driven by a primal urge to look for the greener grass at the other end of the block. Maybe that’s the problem with America today. We don’t have any horizons to look to anymore. Perhaps the next time we hear that siren song we’ll stop to realize that we don’t need to “democratize” another country. We just need more dreams to pursue. We need new roads to chase.

Open letter to the American Middleclass!

Just who are they calling Joe anyway? Do they really think they can take the vast and diverse collection of individuals that make up the mighty middleclass of America and dilute us down to a beer drinking, can crushing, bulls**t spouting jingoist? Ready to sit up and beg for their guidance?

YEAH, THEY DO!

Do they think they can turn the once greatest power in the world into a third world country teetering on the brink of financial and physical ruin by giving major corporations huge tax breaks for outsourcing American jobs and industries all the while not paying to maintain and repair our country’s crumbling infrastructure? Leaving us with few industries, rising unemployment and falling bridges, broken roads and tunnels? Expecting us worker bees to watch the upper 1% get richer while we work our asses off to pay the difference?

YEAH, THEY DO!

Do they think they can get rid of the watch guards; of our economy, our environment and our safety and appoint wolves to watch over the sheep while they rape our resources, deregulate our safety and turn our once mighty dollar into funny money? Do they think they can deny the pure logic of science and embrace the emotional confusion of religions that reject reality and deny the benefits of research that could put an end to medical problems that have plagued mankind for centuries and help to prevent this planet’s inevitable demise at their hands?

YEAH, THEY DO!

Do they think we’ll keep watching our young Americans die in their OIL WAR! All the while knowing that Saddam Hussein was never a threat to America or American interests? He just controlled 11% of the worlds oil resources’. SO THEY LIED TO US, lied to the world and preemptively invaded a sovereign country. Killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi women and children and costing the lives of 4,124 young U.S. soldiers and another officially reported 30,182 seriously wounded young American casualties. Do they think that we can keep spending billions every month for the honor(?) of being stuck in this desert standoff and all the while instead of admitting their mistakes and bringing our young men and women home to safety they stand looking at Iran just licking their lips in anticipation?

WHAT CAN WE DO?

We need to show them that we resent their condescending attempts to homogenous us. We are not half cooked scrambled eggs all runny and weak. We are a very hearty stew of mixed beliefs, competing philosophies and diverse tastes! We are not joe six pack, joe the plumber or even average Joe the middleclass schmoe. We are the many we are strong and oh so very tired of their contemptuous, patronizing attempts to diminish all the differences that make us tough American citizens.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

We need to show them they should stop stabbing us all in the back and just lean over and kiss our collective ass! When you look at the damage of the last eight years it’s easy to see that our supposed leaders have been America’s greatest enemies. They have used the subterfuge of terrorism and safety to do as much damage to our democracy and our freedoms as they possibly could. Even though it meant destroying our economy and the entire planet in the process.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

We must remind them that ever since it’s inception, our country has taken in all of the races, cultures, religious dogma, political agendas et al that color our planet and struggled to blend them into the consummate example of the best and the worst that mankind has to offer. We, middleclass Americans, are the heart of this multiracial, multicultural and multinational cross section. We are the fuel that drives the engines of our economy. We are the workforce they expect to stay productive while they increase our hours, shrink our wages and take away our benefits. More importantly, we are the voting force that can keep them from screwing things up anymore than they have already .

IS IT TOO LATE?
YOU BE THE JUDGE!

They’ve had laws passed which state that they can control any and all dissent with unrestrained violence if need be! They have financed and increased the research and manufacture of non-fatal but highly effective weaponry used to control large crowds of disgruntled people. They have secured vast parcels of land in remote areas and built sturdy containment camps to incarcerate millions of dissident individuals! Since late September 2008, just a few weeks before this Presidential election, U.S. Northern Command’s 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has been deployed to active duty on American soil for what is expected to be a permanent mission to respond to possible domestic or foreign terrorist attacks on American soil and to control crowds of American citizens in the case of mass civil unrest.

WHAT CAN WE DO?
VOTE!
VOTE AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT!!!
BECAUSE IT DOES!!!!

Kerouac’s Ghost Haunts the Bars of St Petersburg FL

The road ended here. Actually, just about four blocks away from where I sit right now at my computer. Jack Kerouac was taken from his home at 5169 10th Avenue North to St Anthony’s Hospital here in St Petersburg FL, where he died from an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis of the liver. Alcohol finally gave him his ultimate road trip on Oct 21st 1969, at the age of 47. He always said that St Pete was "a good place to come to die". Some say he was cursed when he said that, cursed to haunt the bars in St Pete, much like Davy Jones haunts the seven seas! So on the 39th Annual Celebration of his final road trip, all you barflies all over St Pete stay alert and when the time is right, raise your glasses to the King of Beats! And say…
…here’s to you, Jack!

Born on March 12th 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts his French Canadian parents named him Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac. His ancestry would have an influence on him throughout his life. A child of two cultures, he did not learn to speak English until 6 years of age. Jack’s early adult years found him be-bopping between wandering America’s highways and byways as an itinerant, and staying at home with his mother. The cultural shifts of post-war America were forcing him to define his own place in society, ultimately causing him to refuse the repressive morals and limiting social ethics of the American fifties. These rebellious values led him to drugs, alcohol and the road. Even though Jack’s tenacious devotion to these three muses ultimately lead to his death, it also fired the boilers of his creativity and forged the works that are often cited as some of the great literary mechanisms that helped lay the foundation for the counterculture of the sixties, much to Jack’s dismay.

Jack’s first novel, The Town and the City, published in 1950 was well received but did not bring him fame. Even though he wrote persistently his rebellious philosophy and his experimental writing style did not mesh well with the structured publishing estate, and he struggled to get his next novel into print for six years. Finally, after drawing from a number of earlier drafts, he created what is now the classic beat saga, On the Road.

In one of the many tawdry tales that populate Kerouac’s mythic legend, it goes down that he completed the first draft of the novel during a three week period of ‘spontaneous confessional prose fueled by Benzedrine and coffee’. The reality being that he outlined the work over the course of several years. After many rejections, Viking Press purchased the novel but demanded major changes before going to press. On the Road was published by Viking in 1957.

Jack’s writing style was driven by his love of Jazz and had a quick conversational cadence. Some say it was meant to be heard by the ear more then read by the eye, and along with the works of Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes and others, formed the literary structure and irreverent and caustic guiding philosophy of the Beat Generation. Kerouac's best known works are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur and Visions of Cody.

A few critics wax psychological about his “inability to enjoy personal success” and his “quest for spiritual cleansing” and some have said these demons overcame him in his later years revealing hidden prejudices and inflexible conservative ideals. At the end of the road, he was living back at home with mom and his third wife Stella and was buried in his home town of Lowell, MA. which holds a festival each year honoring his memory.

As with a great number of world altering artists, true recognition of his literary and social contributions would elude him during his life and only really manifest itself years after his death. Today, he is heralded as one of America's most vital and significant authors influencing the work of many of our cultural and literary icons from Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and the Beatles to Ken Kesey, Lester Bangs, Tom Robbins and Richard Brautigan. He was without doubt a great American novelist and poet, and the leading figure and spokesman of the Beat Generation, which he named. The 50th Anniversary Edition, an uncensored and unedited version of On the Road was released by Viking Press September 2007. And so, here on the 39th anniversary of when he last beat feet on the street…
Here’s to you, Jack!

Send in the plumber!

A lot of people scrambling around out there trying to determine just who the hell, Joe the plumber really is. Isn’t it obvious? He’s a red herring. As Alfred Hitchcock would say he’s a McGuffin. What is a McGuffin? It is a plot device that motivates the characters or advances the story, but the details of which are of little or no importance otherwise.

Joe the plumber is a ringer brought in by and for the McCain campaign. He's right out of central casting! A McCain product placement at a Obama event just in time for McCain to spin it at the debate. Ah, hackneyed political melodrama at it's most banal. "Joe the plumber" talking points were being unleashed like noxious gases before the debate was even over. Talk about telegraphing your next punch, how many times did McCain chant his name, 23...24?

The ’plumber’ symbol is very much like Palin’s, ‘joe six pack’, weak attempts to fool working class average joe Americans into thinking that the Republicans aren’t Republicans at all but are actually populists.

That’s why they brought in Sarah Palin. Basic, simple Sarah fresh out of the Alaskan wilderness toting her gun and evangelical credentials. Guns, god, and wink, wink, nudge, nudge!! Then they turned her loose to be an attack dog, which is normal for a VP candidate. However she wasn’t trained at all. No time! She had to hit the road running and snapping, the lipstick-ed pit bull!

All teeth and no nuance can turn real nasty really quick! Innuendo was trumped by desperation and her spirited rallies turned into vicious mobs which she and McCain couldn’t even control. Her technique was so raw that even the major conservatives gave her the thumbs down.

You got to figure the Republican elite never expected to win this go round any how. Not after 7 years of ‘W’! They also knew the economy was going to tank. It allowed their Hail Mary play for their standard destroy government at all costs mania. I think they figured that any Republican candidate was going to be a sacrifice play this go round. They had to pick the one with the least to lose.

Let’s see, who should it be?! The maverick(?). The war hero, the one who was too old to make the next go round. Think back in early primary season, McCain actually lost way back then. Then amazingly the old warrior rises from the battleground and now trudges on to his very own Alamo. Then pick a power mad newbie of no real consequence to be his toady and send them both out looking for windmills!

Now, just days away from Election Day, they stand. The old warrior and the ruined novice, their backs in a corner and nothing to lose. It is a very frightening scenario! This whole campaign has been a powder keg from the very beginning. This whole campaign season, starting way back before the primaries, has been straight up crazy and not a good crazy either. Not a “god, this is so crazy it’s almost funny” kind of crazy but a “fearful, anything can happen kind of crazy“! The kind of crazy that makes you turn your head away in embarrassment and sometimes in disgust.

This race for the white house has laid waste to my already dim opinion of our two party cistern. I haven’t voted since the ’68 election. That’s neither an apology nor bravado. It’s just a fact. However, if there was ever a time we needed our democracy to work it is now! The United States of America is coming apart at the seams. Our standing in the world is dangerously low and we are right on the cusp of losing the rest of our freedoms. I fear our time is running out.

Of course Joe the plumber was a plant. Just one of a number of very desperate actions taken by a dangerous faction of political people who are so beyond desperation they are bordering on anxious restless despondency. Some were talking, SCORCHED EARTH! (Praise be Armageddon!). Some said let’s plant a ringer at a Obama Rally. Luckily, they went for the ringer (a lot less to clean up).

However, we don’t have time for anymore melodrama. In these fragile economic times millions of dollars are being spent to throw lies and worse against the wall to see which will stick. I know that we’re primates, but this is beyond ridiculous.

Our once powerful nation is surely becoming a third world country. Our infrastructure is in shambles and our culture has devolved. We need to decide as a nation, just what is America’s direction in this new millennium. In order to do that we first need to settle this 50/50 split that seems to render any hope for decisiveness moot. It has become a vicious circle. I do know that even though we seem to be in the toilet. We certainly don’t need any more plumbers.