The Road to the Right

                In the aftermath of WWII there was rift in American culture.  While the majority of Americans immersed themselves in the boom years following the war, a small cultural and literary movement mounted a protest to the suburbanized swirl of hula hoops, sit-coms, and mass marketing.  They eventually were called ‘The Beats,’ after author Jack Kerouac’s play on the word beat.  They became the cultural icons of the era, laying the groundwork for the iterations of the ‘counter-culture’ that followed.  They stood for a rebellious and idealized search for individual truth.  In On The Road, the main characters, Sal and Dean, go roaring across the country looking for “it.”   Rules were made to be broken, and the promise of a better world was only over the horizon.  Looking back on that period from the perspective of a President Trump and Proud Boys terrorizing Portland under police protection, the road looks a lot different than it did when Neal Cassady was driving a Cadillac a hundred miles an hour through the fields of Kansas.

                Road Lit was always a white male fantasy world.  There are so few examples written by women that each of them stands as the exception that proves the rule.  Only one road work, and it’s stretch to even call it a road work, was written by an African American.  It popularized the notion that it was the birth-right of every white male to take to the road, to somehow think of themselves as special.  The women, drugs and lack of responsibility were all part of the show.  Everything and everyone was fodder for the trip, but the trip never delivered the promised vision.  America never became the sacred land the Beats thought it could be.  Their original impulses to resist capitalism and crass culture of post-war America put their politics firmly on the left, but the privilege of their narratives drives us in a different direction today.

                Today, the ‘road’ is closed, but the internet is wide open.  America sustained a couple hundred years of narratives of limitless escape.  From the frontier to the wilderness, Americans, particularly white male Americans, could just leave.  There was always another adventure, another wife and job that would finally make everything okay and confirm just how individual and special the traveler was.  Sal ends up on a lonely pier in New Jersey romanticizing the America he failed to grasp but he felt was still out there to be found.  Today that trip takes place on the internet by people who never leave home.  Sal’s America was a fantasy, and their America is a digital fiction of air brushed porn and social media promising what no one can ever have.  Sal’s road led from the old culture of the East Coast to the opening of the West.  Today, geography doesn’t matter.  Those of us who followed in the footsteps of the Beats wanted to believe the gospel.  We wanted to believe we were resisting the establishment, even though the Beats sold their work and Kerouac ends up drunk on a bus to his mother’s house in Florida belittling the Beatniks, and presumably the Hippies, that followed.  In the end, it wasn’t the trip, it was the privilege that mattered.

                Today it is that privilege, the ingrained entitlement of white men to have a freedom and uniqueness just because they are white men, that is the political legacy of the road.  Escape is never an answer.  The rise of white supremacy in American culture and the grievance agenda of the Trump presidency is, I’m afraid, a logical extension of Sal and Dean.  The men driving and creating the hateful politics of the right believe they are entitled.  They should have the right to their own trip and their own vision, even if it’s nothing more than the pornographic fantasies of an Incel chat room.  They are no more willing than Kerouac’s characters to put in the work it takes to be real.  The fantasy that looks so appealing in On The Road, is pretty tawdry and worn in the age of internet.  White male privilege is a byproduct of the post WWII culture.  The Beats were never like the generation before them who never were allowed to think of themselves as all that special.  How dare women and people of color take that uniqueness away from them.  How dare anyone ask that they do what the Beats never did and take responsibility for what the do.  It’s no surprise then, that they follow the most relentlessly empty and vacuous politician in our history.  It’s no surprise that they see in him a model for political action.  Trump, who is nothing that he claims to be, is a perfect bookend to literary movement that never delivered what it promised.