MrMiracle's blog

Satire is one of my favorite literary genres. It serves the essential function of violently exploding our comfortably unexamined preconceptions, which allows us to then reexamine them and really change, and at its best it does so with a subtlety and artfulness that flabbergasts and delights. A Cool Million is a shining example of bitterness, anger, and outright contempt being channeled productively into satire. 

 

The novel surgically dismembers each and every aspect of “The American Dream;” any notion of American Exceptionalism living in a reader’s head will either be destroyed or emerge stronger than ever for having grappled with it. It creates a cartoon America that functions first and foremost on Murphy’s Law: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. It exposes how much ideas like social mobility, the rags-to-riches-myth, and even the dignity of the Office of the President of the United States depend on simple dumb luck rather than any inherent power of the American spirit. 

 

And as a central American myth, The Road is not safe. Travel in this novel means entering a den of pickpockets and con men, risking death, imprisonment, and even enslavement. West’s Road deliberately challenges the popular conceptions of the day. Rather than the mystical scrying-pool-of-the-nation popularized by the travel writers of the era, any information gained during travel in A Cool Million is more likely a grifter’s lie than a nugget of honest, down-home truth. The Odyssean sea of challenges presented by Steinbeck is transformed to a sadistic deathtrap from whose maw no man or woman emerges whole. The various cultures America contains are reduced to brand names: All-American prostitutes themed for their region and Rustic Country Dwellings bought and shipped whole to New York design showrooms. 

 

Though the perils of the road trip and the falseness of the American Landscape are just two tiles in the vast sea of misery that is America in A Cool Million. The real target here is The American Dream. The Horatio Alger myth that “anyone can make it in America.” The point of the book is to shout, angrily and with little flecks of spittle flying out, that rhetoric is just words. Saying that “America is the greatest country on Earth,” or “Anyone can make it in America” doesn’t magically make poverty or crime disappear, it doesn’t alter the rules of probability just because the dice were rolled on American soil. And the probability is that your life is going to be horrible and you will die alone, no matter what passport you carry.

 

A good, concise message. And a true one, even if it is a little depressing.

Know your audience. This is a key tenet of demographically targeted advertising. And that is what these books are, they’re advertising for parts of America that could really use your tourist money right about now. And since it’s the depression, everywhere could use the tourist money right about now. And so these guides exist, advertising the various tourist destinations the fifty states offer the discriminating middle-class adventurer. And if this advertising is going to work it has to not only make Maine, or Mississippi, or wherever, seem attractive to tourists, it’s to identify which tourists are going to be drawn to the offering of each particular state and tailor their guide to appeal to that tourist.

And so despite the similarity between these works in terms of their format, divided into sections discussing the history, geography, etc. of the state in question, each takes on a distinct voice and style to suit a particular type of tourist. The guide to Maine for instance, is incredibly erudite and academic. Its descriptions of the history, geography, flora, and fauna of the state read like a textbook. The flora and fauna are arranged like birdwatcher’s almanac, long lists of esoteric species. The discussion of the geography breezes through the geological history of earth, dropping the names of eras with ease, not bothering to wonder whether its audience knows what the Pleistocene Era is. It discusses the history of the state with an eye to evidence and fact. There is a long discussion of the use of red ochre between various native civilizations of the northeast. There is a comparison made between the tools and weapons of the people of Newfoundland as compared to the Eskimos. Essentially, it presents Maine as a place for the erudite thinking man, and the man of nature. Essentially, it advertises itself to anyone who fancies himself a bit of Ernest Hemingway.

Mississippi’s guide, on the other hand, opens, in defiance of the otherwise very similar format, with an introduction titled “What is Mississippi?” Throughout this introduction, and in a tone that carries across much of the actual book, Mississippi is presented as an experience. It is a place that wears its culture and history on its sleeve, a place that, to use a parlance anachronistic for the 1930s, one can ‘get into the groove of.’ It directly references Faulkner in the text, and, though I am unfamiliar with his work so I could be misinterpreting this, the attempt to include in all the numbers and information what its authors clearly feel is the freewheeling spirit of Mississippi.

I’m honestly not sure how much these guides can really tell us about American attitudes to travel in the 1930s, but it certainly says something about the development of such advertising mainstays as “branding” in the 20th century.

As a child, I spent countless hours in the backseat of my parents minivan, an early-90’s Nissan Access, crossing America’s highways en route, generally, to visit relatives for holidays. My memories of that time include watching the power lines following the highway, and imagining some character, either a super-powered version of myself or some established mythic figure of the popular culture, running along the wires like a tightrope, effortlessly keeping pace with the powder-blue beetle my father rocketed across the country. What my memories do not include is any impressive encounters with any of the points between our origin and our destination. That’s not entirely true, there was a ferry between New York and Maine that was somewhat enthralling, but mostly for its incredible ability to carry cars across water than any aspect of the ferry itself.

 

What I am driving at here is that my family roadtrips represent the eventual development of the trends discussed in the Jakle reading on the automobile’s effect on tourism. Travel was, especially from my miniature perspective, a destination-focussed affair. Celebration was made of favorable traffic conditions, high speeds and quick arrivals. Stops were perfunctory and necessary. McDonalds for a meal. Gas. Snacks or books to stave off the boredom of the passengers and the monotony of the driver. Sighs were heaved upon arrival and our distance and time elapsed recited to the impressed relatives. Cheaper than flying or trains, the road was simply that thing we had to get past as fast as possible.

 

Jakle essentially opposes the position of Agee, that Americans traveled for the hell of it and the automobile was merely a tool to make that possible. The car, argues Jakle, changed the fundamental purpose of and attitude toward travel.

 

In the middle of these, commenting on both but challenging neither, is Berkowitz’s meditation on the function of vacation for those who now found they could take them. If the Jakle collects the spirit of my own middle-class tourism experience, Berkowitz collects it from the perspective of my father.

 

A middle-aged middle-class middle manager, my father had grown up filled to the brim with heady and important road narratives. Certainly some of that was informed by the Depression-era narratives we discussed, but mostly as they were filtered through the 1950’s and 60’s. A teenager in the 1970’s, my father had absorbed Alger, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson and not least the globetrotting and gallivanting of his own college-age older brother which drove him to view the open road, and by extension the splendor of  America and Nature, as holy places, which should be visited often to renew the spirit.

 

As my father grew into a suit-and-tie family man, the emphasis was greatly placed on that desire to “renew the spirit.” These road trips, more than the family functions waiting on the far side of them, were essential to the boosting of his spirits, the rejuvenation of his spirit, and his continued effectiveness as a gray-faced office drone. 

 

As the Berkowitz piece aptly demonstrates, corporate culture knew that workers, especially those like my father, required such escapes as a useful release valve to allow them to cope with the pressures of work and remain productive employees. Without his two week paid vacations my father, a naturally energetic adventurer who had in his youth dreamed of being an actor, would have long ago abandoned the corporate drudgery for a tiny apartment in New York City and a shot at Broadway. But because his comfortable middle-class existence afforded him the luxury of travel , of that rejuvenation of the spirit, he was able to endure his slavery. 

 

In that anecdote of my father, gaining perspective and courage with each dink of the odometer, and myself listlessly imagining endlessly running supermen, is the symbolic fulfillment of the promises of all of these pieces predictive statements. For some, the travel is the thing, as Agee promises. It allows the American worker to remain content in the capitalist structure that in its gentle way squashes his truer ambitions, as Berkowitz explains. It is a meaningless race, the endless watching of miles tick away behind you and your destination loom larger ahead, as Jakle implies. The middle class is a simple yet complex thing, and remarkably unchanged in seventy years. It is very easy to have a true notion about its nature, and yet it is always possible to determine yet another explanation that is as true as every other seemingly authoritiative aspect. Like a multi-aspected Hindu god, the middle class is at all times both the chaff and the wheat of the American system, an expression of its deepest complacencies and foolishness and the fulfillment of its highest aspirations and principles.

Waiting for Nothing by Tom Kromer is an account by the author of time he spent among the indigent, riding the rails and learning of life among the road. It is told in a brusque, repetitive, simple style which attempts, at its best, to conjure up an understanding of the harsh reality of the road. He seems to be attempting to paint a somewhat sympathetic portrait of the “Poverty Gypsies” of the depression. He makes some attempt to draw on the tribal notions we’ve discussed concerning the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath. He attempts to instill in the reader the notion that these are a “people” a group bound together, with rules if not laws and traditions if not rituals.

 

But what was inescapable to me in his attempt to paint it this way was how constricted and contorted that interpretation seemed to be. The hobo world he depicts is, first of all, overwhelmingly male. The “stiffs,” as he refers to those who live the lifestyle he has adopted, are all men. If women or children show up they are some “stiff”’s wife or child. And then they are often seen as baggage, a liability that it is nonetheless the duty of the stiffs to protect.

 

This combined with the language, which at its best captures the brutal spirit of the road but at its worst sounds like a childish tough-guy put-on, put me more in the mind of an American male power-fantasy.

 

American men are supposed to be strong and self-sufficient. We are the inheritors of the wild west, and of the Revolutionary War. Our ancestors were man enough to know when they were being controlled and strike out in their own way. Now, as any society gets on in years and builds big enough social systems, there are going to be those men who are, in fact, wholly dependent on those systems. While a cushy middle-class life may seem like paradise to someone who has slaved for their daily bread, men raised that way but told they need to be tough and self-sufficient like cowboys often have a certain amount of insecurity about their manliness.

 

And then Poverty can take on new dimensions to them. Rather than simply being a way to live, poverty becomes symbolic. It becomes a symbol of manly self-sufficiency, if a man can live on only scraps and beans, he is truly a man. Throughout the twentieth century we’ve seen examples of middle-class men attempting to put on poverty as an attempt to authenticate themselves and their masculinity. From the proletarian posturing of the sixties and seventies to adopting the flannel shirts and ripped jeans of the white working class during the grunge era of the early nineties to the gangster-rap aesthetic of the early 2000s, American men seek to associate themselves with the downtrodden as a way of asserting their own masculinity.

 

This, I would assert, is largely what Kromer is displaying in Waiting for Nothing. Obviously there’s some honest assessment of a way of life, but it’s wrapped up in a macho posture that honestly gets in the way of his story. The grunting caveman-language of the narration is often superfluously simplistic and repetitive, attempting to use the repetition to reinforce the brutality of the world, but largely succeeding only in establishing Kromer as a chest-beating alpha male.

The readings of this entire course, specifically The Grapes of Wrath and all the other works which have focused on the dustbowl migration (in particular the selection from American Exodus), seem to present us with a picture of the death of a particular class of people, a particular way of life, which has existed not only in America but in the whole (well I say the whole, but I’m sure I could be proved wrong) of the world since time immemorial: the lifestyle farmer, the subsistence farmer, the farming “class.” Those who work the land “with their hands” as Steinbeck put it.

 

And now, in the future, we can see what it has wrought. Most of the world eats the fruits of industrialized agriculture. Grown by a man in a tractor rather than one who walked the fields and felt the dirt etc. etc. Subsistence farming exists as either a relic of the lucky or tenacious few who have held on to their ancient rights or an affectation of those seeking a nostalgic return to a past to which they are otherwise unconnected. Its produce sold at farmers’ markets and expensive country hotels. As a quantifiable mass, as a class of people as presented by these works, they are negligible in modern America.

 

Where did they go? Well, the final chapter of American Exodus seeks to tell us. They went, it says, to the cities. In droves, apparently, they clogged the freeways into Los Angeles, and once they were urban, they were of the urban poor, and so were their children (this may account for the preponderance of fair-haired, strong-backed beauties that appeared in that city in the fifties). They went either to the cities or they became nomads, following the seasons and the crops to wherever they could get wage work doing the only thing they had ever done. And so they became part of the “agriculture workforce,” similar to factory workers or office workers, a quantifiable part of the modern economy, and susceptible to the vagaries of the market like any of those groups. 

 

This is in line with an almost Victorian view of progress, a nineteenth-century view of America, where old-world conventions like subsistence farming fall away before the bold efficiency of mechanization.

 

However, at the actual time the technology comes to be that makes that vision possible, the country is steeped in pastoral/communist mythology and views this as the destruction of something ancient and beautiful by the small-minded and greedy.

 

Which, in some ways it was, I suppose. But the Victorian view is more optimistic, don’t you find?

Hopelessness.

This is the primary feeling these stories of the road impart. Whether it is the romanticized, personal hopelessness of Asch’s piece, the cold, statistical hopelessness of Hickock or the self-absorbed, restless hopelessness of Pyle, it is all hopeless. All of these writers are so oppressed by what they see on their journey, and if all is as they describe it is certainly oppressive. Wasting poverty, underfunded government relief, decay.

The stories Pyle brings forward are often listless laments for the ‘old days’ when apparently everyone had money and nobody ever welched on a debt. Asch presents beaten-down working men from attractively exotic, but still white, Eastern European backgrounds laboring for the betterment of humanity at the cost of their own lives. And Hickock gives us shame and stress against the backdrop of a shamefully broke and overstressed municipal government. No one has a solution, there are only more and more artfully presented details of the problem. Only Asch comes out and says he found nothing worthwhile and it was all terribly depressing. But his is also the only one with a clear end available. Perhaps Pyle and Hickock conclude with depressing suicide notes, having determined from their travels that there’s nothing to be done.

These readings have actually strengthened in my mind my grandfather’s long-held and oft-challenged belief that Roosevelt and the NRA did next to nothing for the depression, but that the vast expanse of ruined Europe as a market for American goods was the thing that pulled America back from the brink. Although it could just as easily been the unrestricted government spending on the war that did it. Congress is less likely to pinch pennies when there are Nazis to be shot than when there are U.S. citizens starving. It just has more of a dramatic thrust. And that’s the thrust of these pieces as well: there is no story, no drama in the dustbowl or the depression. There’s just pain without purpose or end in sight. The bourgeois nihilism of the twenties given monumental physical form in the thirties. Just as depressing, but much more deadly.

No wonder the forties and fifties are seen as such a naive and booming time. America had bottomed out and then found Jesus. Not Jesus, really. More like Mammon, but when we could give ourselves the narrative of beating back Hitler and then sitting back and enjoying the thanks the world was surely offering us we felt we had a better handle on the universe. In the bad times just before, when the whole nation was staring oblivion in the face,we had a much less simplistic view of ourselves and the world and much less to show for it.

Charles Dickens’ famous Christmas morality tale, A Christmas Carol, features in it’s middle, during Scrooge’s encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Present, a scathing indictment of the Victorian practice of “workhouses.” These were institutions set up for the London poor where the homeless were given hard beds, meagre food and backbreaking labor to keep them off the streets and out of sight of polite society. Early on in the story, when confronted with poverty before his face and presented the opportunity to alleviate it, Scrooge cries in his curmudgeonly way “Are there no workhouses?” During his encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Present, the Ghost introduces Scrooge to two allegorical children who are orphaned and will soon be dead. Scrooge meekly asks if they have any family who may alleviate their suffering. Disgusted with Scrooge’s meagre compassion, the Ghost throws his earlier words back in his face, embracing the children and bellowing “Are there no workhouses?”

In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the road is the workhouse. Rather than being the secret to American greatness, the road in this story is a prison. It is the place society has shuffled off those it feels it does not need so that they will not clog up the public square, or the courthouse. The refrain of those people who encounter the migrant Okies is that they should go. Go away. There is no work here. There’s no place here. Get back on that road. Get out of my sight.

And the road, like the workhouse, is the only option for the dispossessed. At each new place some reason to leave presents itself early and forcefully. The burning of Hooverville. The starvation at the weed patch. Tom’s second murder. Each leaves no choice but to return to the road.

And the road, it seems, is poisonous.

The longer the family remains on the road, the longer the great tribe of dispossessed farmers remains on the road, the more the family, or the tribe, begins to rot. The conditions will destroy the weak of constitution, like grandma and grampa. The hard life will drive away those who, rightly or not, think they can have a better life alone and settled, like Connie and Noah.

The road is poisonous to this group of people. It will kill them, and their tribe, and their way of life. The life of the sedentary farmer, who farms his own land and lives off it, will vanish, at least for a time. It will be returned to, but by those who are taking the example of this destroyed people, not its rightful heirs. Those will all have died or become the other type of people. The type the system appears to want. Consumers, if we want to inject an air of politics into the discussion.

But I don’t think The Grapes of Wrath is a story about politics, though the language occasionally indicates a political symptom and a political cure. I think this is an essentially moral story. It is a story, like A Christmas Carol, about compassion. All the polemic language that caused the right of the time to repudiate the book as communist propaganda, and the left to embrace it as an endorsement, is rather a broad appeal to basic human compassion.

These people are starving. People shouldn’t starve. But when saving people from starving requires the sacrifice of that which people deem necessary to their own survival, rightly or not, they will come up with excuses why these people, perhaps, should starve. They’re not really people. There aren’t really all that many of them. Many more might starve if they didn’t. But the fact remains that people are starving, and capitalists and communists alike can agree that people shouldn’t starve.

It is the natural human response to suffering to seek a person, or a thing, to blame. Whose fault is it? Who can we shoot?

 

This is the among the more poignant notes of the early chapters of The Grapes of Wrath. Farmers, when confronted with their eviction notices, threatening to shoot the messenger, and when the messenger says it is not him, but the bank that has cast them off, they threaten to shoot the bank, and are at last defeated when it is revealed the bank is no one person who can be shot.

 

There is an Indian film, Mangal Pandey: The Rising, which tells the story of an Indian rebellion against the ruling East India Company. An Indian seepoy soldier, Mangal Pandey, befriends a British officer, and asks him what the Company is and how it could be defeated. The officer compares the East India Company to the antagonist of the Indian epic poem the Ramayana, Ravana, who is described as having a hundred heads. No single killing stroke will destroy Ravana, just as the East India Company cannot merely be killed by a ragtag mutiny.

 

The ability to blame a single entity for suffering can be a balm to that suffering, and can rally support for its defeat. The horror of the Holocaust is mitigated somewhat by the knowledge that it was Hitler’s fault and Hitler was defeated. Bolshevik revolutionaries galvanized support for their campaign by castigating the Russian royal family, laying the blame for all the hardships of the Russian people at their feet.

 

Without the soothing salve of blame, people are lost, they feel powerless and impotent. The farmers of the dust bowl ran from their ancestral home, tails between their legs, because they could not fight a piece of paper and a board room in New York.

 

Even today we can see the effect a lack of blame can have on a society. The most recent economic crisis left people and politicians baying for the blood of those responsible. But who was responsible? President Bush and his tax cuts? Wall Street fatcats? Clinton’s “welfare state”? How are they responsible? And what is the appropriate punishment?

 

But as all these questions are mulled over, life goes on. Those who have lost their homes must find a place to sleep, and without a clear enemy to oppose, the fight goes out of them. Not every man can be Muley, doggedly fighting until the last on principle. Life must go on. WIthout someone to blame, there is nothing to fight, it is merely the motion of the tides, which we must follow without complaint or question.

There is a pervasive myth in America that packing up the car and just hitting the road for a few days, man, is a cleansing experience for the soul. One leaves the banality and inauthenticity of the City behind and rediscovers the “real” America.

 

Discovering the “real” America is, at least, the stated goal of virtually all of these pieces. There is a desire to capture the fundamental nature of life in America, and the unquestioning acceptance that this is not to be found in the cities of greatest acclaim or merit.

 

Wild, the Brit hoping to experience the “real” America as a foreigner, gets encouragement for his trip on the basis of his boast that he will “ignore Hollywood and New York!” Anderson makes a great show of traveling by bus, famously the shoddiest and the poorest of mass transit systems, to get the most authentic traveling experience. Asch winds up in a jail cell and talks with a convict about Life. All of the stories take for granted that the answers to the Big Questions are found only in the grubbiest and dirtiest corners of America.

 

Well, except Wild. Wild uses that assumption as the setup for, frankly, a pretty funny joke and an ascerbic assessment of the value of the road and it’s wisdom. After describing his family’s (himself, his wife, his daughter, and their German Nanny) dreadful experience of being crammed into a trailer for five months he ends his first chapter with: “So much, it seems, depends on personal comfort. We did not see much of America, for our eyes were on the ground.”

 

This could be interpreted as either a self-parody (playing up a sort of aristocratic English character who is too put out by the conditions of life on the road to appreciate its lessons) or a somewhat smug rejection of the concept of therapeutic or educational road trips (“it’s all very well to play at being a traveling Oakie, but in the end you are just putting yourself out for no reason”). 

 

This made Wild’s by far the most intriguing of the stories, whether he intends to gently tease or dryly demolish the Alger myth.

 

It could be argued that Asch’s piece, too, rejected the myth of the redemptive power of slumming it on the road, but I would say rather than outright rejecting it the Asch piece tries to subvert or invert (whichever applies) the myth, essentially trying to say that the “real” America is to be found out there, but it isn’t good or pretty, it is beaten and stupid and it will lead us to war.

 

Which turned out to be pretty much right.

 

So the Asch piece may have some merit as the uncanny event of a writer predicting a social trend with any kind of accuracy.