September 4, 2000


Features

Never Mind the Bollocks
BY BILL BOISVERT

Here's the new Republican Party

The Battle of Philadelphia
BY DAVE LINDORFF

Working It
BY DAVID MOBERG
Will unions go all out for Gore?

Black Radicals Regroup
BY SALIM MUWAKKIL
Detroit hosts the Black Radical Congress.

Mad Sheep Scare
BY TERRY J. ALLEN
Farmers, scientists and the USDA square off in Vermont.


News

Cleaning Up
BY HANS JOHNSON
Missouri, Oregon consider campaign finance initiatives.

Star Strike
BY BEN WINTERS
Actors demand a better deal.

Renegade or Redeemer?
BY STEVE ELLNER

Hugo Chavez leads Venezuela into a new era.

The New Front
BY KARI LYDERSEN

American anti-abortion groups crusade in Ireland.

Profile
BY TED KLEINE

Johnny Lira is in their corner.


Views

Editorial
BY DAVID MOBERG
Big money problems.

Appall-O-Meter
BY DAVID FUTRELLE

A Terry Laban Cartoon

Dialogue: The Balkans
More Conspiracy Theories?
BY EDWARD S. HERMAN

A Humanitarian Crusade
BY DIANA JOHNSTONE


Culture

A Man for All Seasons
BY HOWARD ZINN
Francis Wheen's Marx: A Life.

Interstate Rambler
BY PHILIP CONNORS
On the road with Larry McMurty.

England's Dreaming
BY JOHN GHAZVINIAN
History falls off the back of a lorry.

Under the Influence
BY JASON SHOLL
Sadie Plant writes on drugs.

Vanishing Act
BY
JOSHUA ROTHKOPF
Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man.

Presidential Dance Parties
BY GREG SMITHSIMON

 

Interstate Rambler
By Philip Connors

Roads: Driving Across America's Great Highways
By Larry McMurtry
Simon & Schuster

208 pages, $25

What in our collective imagination remains as American as driving? Certainly not baseball, with its transient mercenaries and wild-card playoffs, nor apple pie, which instead of cooling on the countertop is now deep frozen in the supermarket, shipped from some industrial bakery in Terre Haute or Tuscaloosa. Nor even, one suspects, Mom, who messed up the mythology when she dared to work outside the home.

Consult the fevered wanderings of our national literature: Sal and Dean's jaunty joyrides in Jack Kerouac's On the Road or the high-speed desert crossings of Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays. Don DeLillo drove in his first novel, Americana, in which David Bell drops out and roars West "in a low cloud of crematory smoke," thinking: "There is nothing more thrilling than the first days of a long journey on wheels into the slavering mouth of an incredible and restless country." Even Vladimir Nabokov, an expat whose third language was English, conjured a double Humbert who left America's highways "defiled with a sinuous trail of slime."

None of this is meant to suggest that Larry McMurtry's new travelogue, Roads, is in a class with the best of the nomad novels. McMurtry, in fact, has already written his, Lonesome Dove, in which the men - and I mean men - drove not convertible Mustangs but herds of cattle from atop the saddles of horses, from Mexico to Montana. I mean only to point out that, at least as far back as Huck Finn's great Mississippi River interstate, American writers have been obsessed with the road and that, as this book shows, its possibilities and permutations remain ever renewable.

 

 


In These Times © 2000
Vol. 24, No. 20