We probably wouldn't have stopped at Mount Rushmore. The whole idea of the place strikes me as sort of creepy, a cheesy melding of patriotic fervor, idolatry, and quasi-religious zeal. It strikes me, in fact, as profoundly un-American, as far as my definition of "American" goes; democratic republics, especially ours, should have no need to put up gigantic Ramses-like statuary to their leaders, no matter how great they might have been.
You could make a lovely mountain into a great paperweight, but can you make it into a wild, natural mountain again? I don't think you have the know-how for that... Maybe it's not too late to put an elevator under this whole shrine of democracy — press a button and the whole monument disappears. And once a week — say, every Sunday from nine to eleven — you press the button again and those four heads come up again with the music going full blast. The guys who got an astronaut on the moon should be able to to this much for us Indians...
Well, obviously you didn't go to those places because, spang in the middle of your trip, you realized the scenery all across the country was too similar -- and that, in fact, the Great American Road Trip was dead.
Just like this guy.
That's from the It's All About Meeeeeee school of journalism, in which a writer stretches his personal quirks into an Emerging Social Trend -- generally because the editor told him that nobody really cared whether John Q. Scribbler decided to stop going on road trips or looking for love or eating meat. If you re-brand it as a "trend", though, you're in.
The short version is that a guy who has made, by his own reckoning, three dozen cross-country trips states that he's off cross-country trips (and so is everyone else in the country) because a) gas is so high, and b) the scenery is too similar. As if people decided not to go to the Grand Canyon because they would be forced to eat at Dennys along the way, rather than good old-fashioned Don & Dot's Ptomaine Palace.
There's more, but it's basically just complaining that the country has grown in population and wealth since he was a sprat.
Posted by: Angie Schultz on July 8, 2007 01:16 PM
I suppose if your definition of "cross-country trip" is to drive from, say, Dallas to Fargo, then, yeah the scenery won't change a whole lot. But what a farrago of tripe and confused history that thing is. "Santa Fe, N.M., the new Orient"? "...the revolution in landscape painting that saw God in the American landscape, Manifest Destiny in the view from the dining car."? Ugh. "New Yorkers are driving their kids a mile to school."! The horror!!
Posted by: David Fleck on July 9, 2007 07:36 AM
In the second paragraph I encountered the phrase "But this time, the death of the c_a_r-bound family vacation feels real to me." Well, there is just no need to read any further, is there? He "feels," therefore it is!
Posted by: Andrea Harris on July 9, 2007 08:23 PM
By the way, whatever ant-spaminator you have installed refused to publish the dreaded short word for "vehicle" untampered-with, hence the underscores.
Posted by: Andrea Harris on July 9, 2007 08:24 PM
"Anti." You know.
Posted by: Andrea Harris on July 9, 2007 08:25 PM
Like Mr. Sullivan, we are rebelling against the vehicular hegemony, and therefore the c-word is banishéd from this blog.
Or maybe MT-Blacklist is showing its age. Anyway, c**-bound should have made it through, not sure what's up with that.
Posted by: David Fleck on July 9, 2007 10:42 PM