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.   TOP HOME SUBSCRIBE MAIL   In These Times © 2000 Vol. 24, No. 20