Sultan Knish
"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" Jack
Kerouac asked in On the Road That was the Fifties. That shiny car is
pretty beat up these days. It's supposed to get 100 miles to the gallon,
so long as the temperature never drops below 75 and the gasoline has
additives like the joy of children and the smiles of unicorns. And you
can't buy the car because you can't get approved for that loan. Instead
you ride a bicycle, pedaling furiously, dodging trucks delivering goods
from factories in Shanghai, on your way to a job that may not last.
"What do we want" is the ritual chant of every political assembly. The
RNC's chant is jobs. The DNC's chant is abortion. Both are solutions of a
sort. There are two ways to tackle unemployment. You can either make
more jobs or make less people. If you make more jobs then families will
make more little people and be able to afford them. If you make less
people, then singles will be more economically secure but unable to
start families.
"Whither goest thou, America," the pollsters and pundits asked the
country four years ago. And the answer was a superwide highway lined
with shovel-ready jobs and a new era in history. We drove on that
highway and went as fast as we could, and still we could not escape the
blight in every direction. The faster we drove, the worse it got. The
gasoline cost a fortune and there were no jobs to be found to pay for
it.
As night gave way not to morning but a sullen overclouded dusk, we
realized that we had taken the wrong road. We were no longer in America
anymore. Maybe we were in Mexico or Pakistan. It was hard to say where
exactly the dark highway had taken us, but the place we were at now was
not the place we wanted to be.
Down the road was a strange place rife with political corruption,
everyone had a hand out for a bribe and there was no longer a highway,
just a million dirt roads segregated by race and gender, by class and
creed, where all the drivers are angry all the time and the traffic cops
are there to spread the misery in equal proportion. It might be Russia
or Ecuador, it might be anywhere, but it's not America.
Here we are now in our car in the night. Outside the vista is strange.
There are shootings and mosques, and everyone around us is talking about
racism or abortion, about the 1 percent and the 99 percent, about
carbon credits and iftar dinners, about a great struggle between "us"
and "them" and we realize that we are the "them". On this dark road, we
are the enemy of a country that no longer looks like America anymore.
And the ones talking, they're the only ones who have jobs, and their job
is denouncing us.
What most people, regardless of political affiliation, really want to do
is go home to a country that works. No matter what we are told, most of
us still have a faint memory of a home lost in time. A place where
there were jobs and shiny cars and affordable meals. A place where there
didn't have to be a cop on every block or a bureaucrat behind every
desk. A place where everyone didn't spend all their time accusing
everyone else of taking more than their fair share. We used to call that
place, America.
It's dark out, and finding the way back to America isn't easy. Somewhere
along the way we forgot how to read maps or we were taught to read them
the wrong way. When we look at a map, we no longer see directions, we
see whom to blame because the directions aren't clearer. We don't know
what a mile is, but we know that our ancestors probably stole it from
somebody or manufactured it using pollutants and racism. We don't even
know what America is anymore, so how can we get there?
Somewhere along the road, we are coming to realize that America is not
just a place, it's also an identity. To get there, we cannot simply
drive until we reach the border, because borders are fluid things. What
was once Mexico became Texas. What is now Texas is becoming Mexico. The
borders of nations are legal entities but they are only roads. It is
where we go along those roads that matters.
The question that confronts us is not where are we going, but who do we
want to be? The public has been trained to ask politicians for things,
to wait until politicians promise those things, to disbelieve them and
then vote for them anyway. This is the road that we are on, and it is
little wonder that among all the twists and turns, between the hog farms
and the dumps, we ended up in this strange place. A place that really
isn't as strange as it seems because we have been headed here all along.
This dark road we are on now is what happens when the people who have
been trying to run our lives for the last hundred years finally got
their way. That darkness is there because they tore up the flag, burned
the Constitution and put themselves in charge of everything. This is
what they have been trying to do for over a hundred years. Now they have
finally done it. They have put out the lights and left us in darkness
and now they stride out grinning on an empty stage, beckoning us further
and deeper into the darkness until there is no way out.
The place they want to take us has no shiny cars, it has no cars at all
unless they are being driven by government types. It has no hope or
change, no freedom, no dreams and no fathers. In that darkness it takes a
village to badly raise a broken child and five hours of standing on
line to get Permit A to get Permit B to do Item C and then spend
tomorrow waiting on line for Permit D.
The men and women waiting in that darkness have blank faces and big rule
books. They have a law for everything, and you already broke a dozen of
them just by being born. They tell you that you can park your car here
by the side of the collapsed building. "There's no more road here," they
say, "and no gas to put in it. This is the dead end, where all roads
end."
They talk about the end of days when melting icebergs will flood the
earth. They mutter about the darkness in every heart that only
government supervision can restrain. They put the chains on your hands
and tell you that it's for your own good. Only when everything is
completely under their control, when nothing unpredictable can happen
and their change has changed everything so thoroughly that no other
change is possible, will they take them off. And by then you won't want
them to. By then you wouldn't know what to do without chains and a shiny
car that has nowhere to go because there are no more roads. Because
there is nothing at all.
Sometimes you get the strong feeling that there's still a big bright
road waiting for you. Down that road, the shiny cars flash by and there
are diners where the burgers are good and cheap and the music never
stops playing. Sometimes you can hear that music coming through the
darkness, piercing the dissonant jangle of torment, the hysterical
voices shrieking and mocking over the radio, distorted and digitzed into
inhuman noises. Sometimes you can smell the burgers, the meat and
ketchup, cutting through the soy and kelp. And you want to go there
because it feels like America... but you don't know the way anymore.
There is a secret to finding the way. The place you are going is the
place you want to be. Your journey is your identity. Your destination is
who you are. To understand a president you do not need to know his
biography or study his personality. All you have to do is look out the
window and you will know who he is and you will know his supporters are.
And then you have to ask yourself if you want to go where he is going.
And you have to ask yourself where you want to go and, to do that, you
have to ask yourself who you are.
America isn't a place, it's people. To find a place, we have to become
it. Going there is becoming. Finding it is finding ourselves. We are the
road and the car. America is us. It isn't a piece of paper, it's not a
birthplace on a birth certificate, it's a birthright. It isn't about
where you live, but about how you think. It is something that you either
are or aren't. When you let people who aren't American run America, if
you let them decide its future, then America ceases to be America. And
all that remains is a dark road and a shiny car that has been declared
illegal, because in the new America there are no longer cars or roads,
just light rail and feet.
America is a place where a great many people got together and decided
that it was time to run a country differently. Every other country had
kings, it had elected officials. Every other country ran your life for
you, here you would run your own life. And before you knew it the
country had so many shiny cars that it was the envy of the world. And
there were places to drive those shiny cars to because it was a big
country full of great people who needed great big cars to traverse it
all.
We are a small country now with small cars run by small men whose goals
are petty and whose egos push at the confines of their puny frames. We
are a country where the roads lead nowhere because the small men do not
want us going anywhere. And they don't want us going anywhere because
they are afraid of losing control of us. They have spent a great deal of
time and money herding us here, putting up fake direction signs. "Free
Health Care: Next Exit" and "5 Miles to Civil Rights" and "Turn Right:
Clean Energy Jobs." Now they have us here and they are terrified that we
will just drive away and leave them behind. That America will become
America again and they will be left behind in the darkness cursing us
and each other.
They are afraid, and you can see the fear in their eyes. You can see the
panic as they sow fear and doubt, as they strive to divide us and lie
to us, as they do their best to keep us from remembering that we have a
choice-- and we did not choose this.
The question to ask is not, where are we going, but who we are. It is
not a question of mere policy, but of identity. We are America. The road
is our road and our children and grandchildren will travel on it. It is
up to us to open the way for them. It is up to us to drive toward our
future.
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