Jack Kerouac vs Norman Rockwell

I recently saw two idiots saying idiotic things, but in the course of their idiocy they illuminated something crucial about the American mix I think people have overlooked.

The first idiot -- one with a (D) behind their name -- criticized a politician on the other side of the aisle for wanting to be buried in the same family plot as six other generations of his family, saying such a desire represented white supremacy and patriarchy.

The second idiot -- surprise, surprise, this one with an (R) after their name -- retaliated in kind, claiming the other side viewed anyone who wasn’t a placeless interchangeable worker with suspicion.

And when I read this exchange, the little light came on.

What is the quintessential American literary form?

The road story.

We can cite Jack Kerouac’s On The Road as the category definer, but it existed long before then.

Every story about Columbus is a road story.

Every story about pilgrims is a road story.

Every story about pioneers pushing west is a road story.

Every story about a wagon train is a road story.

Every story about country bumpkins going to the big city is a road story.

The Grapes Of Wrath is a road story.

Lonesome Dove is a road story.

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is a road story.

Even Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a road story despite traveling by raft on the Mississippi.

The road story is about what’s over there.  It’s a story of deliberately leaving the familiar and setting off into the unknown.  It’s a story of not just discovery but self-discovery.

What did you find in your travels?

What did you think about what you found?

What does that tell you about yourself?

The American continents were settled by people looking for something else.

They arrived here tens of thousands of years ago, populating North and South America with a population primarily derived from what we now refer to as Asia.

In the last millennia, people from Europe learned of the existence of the American continents.  The very first were Lief Ericson’s band of Viking colonists who came looking for something new, something better.

They faced a tough time of it especially against well organized native resistance and eventually gave up and returned home.

The next batch came from Spain after a misguided Italian navigator learned the hard way that the world was much bigger than he thought.  The Spaniards came prepared and in force, and with exceptional cunning struck at native Mesoamerican civilizations at their weakest points, hastening their collapse and conquest by a far smaller invading force.

Other European nations came soon after, a few in relatively benign form as traders and explorers, far too many as colonists willing to take territory by force.

The latter group found an ally among the microbiological world.

As a result of a devastating plague that swept through both continents, disrupting native cultures by killing off between 90%-to-98% of any local population, the European colonists with more robust immune systems soon flooded a continent with a native population in complete disarray.

By the time the indigenous cultures recovered to the point they could mount well organized resistance, it was too late.  The colonists already established numerous beachheads and began pushing westward, ignoring the humanity of the native people they encountered, driving them off or killing them whenever they felt challenged to superiority.

The Americas soon filled with Europeans who either came voluntarily or were sent by their masters to take what wealth they could wrest from the continents.

In either case, the result was the same.

They came.

They saw.

They conquered.

And some of them began thinking about what they had done.

In the end the native peoples -- particularly in North America -- were isolated away from the predominantly northern European population.  Where the northern Europeans encountered the blended Spanish / native cultures of Mexico, they either drove them out or subjugated them to marginal roles.

When they needed cheap labor they imported chattel slaves from Africa, or allowed immigration from impoverished southern and eastern European countries, or imported laborers from China who would work for a fraction of the cost of northern Europeans.

In all those cases -- voluntarily or involuntarily -- the road story became the story to tell the experience. 

And in all those cases, even those of the enslaved, the point of the road story was clear:

You’ll never know until you go and find out.

So we have baked into the American soul this peripatetic psyche on a never ending quest to see what’s over the next hill.

Nobody summed it up better than and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe in their musical, Paint Your Wagon.

“Where you going?
I don’t know.
When’ll you get there?
I ain’t certain.
What’ll you find?
I ain’t equipped to say,
but who gives a damn --
we’re on our way.”

. . .

When I grew up in Appalachia, I noticed an interesting difference between the roads on the North Carolina side and the roads on the Tennessee side.

In North Carolina they go around the mountains, long languid curves punctuated by the occasional hairpin turn.

In Tennessee they plow straight through the damn mountain, leaving a huge notch where the road passes.

The people who populated the North Carolina side were stopped by the mountains.

They encountered an obstacle sufficient large enough to make them stop their westward expansion and settle in the area, learning to cope with the obstacle as best they could.

Those on the Tennessee side were ornery bastards who wouldn’t be stopped by any old mountain, and when they decided to settle they just dug and blasted the mountains out of their way.

But in both cases, settle they did.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote on the plain and simple virtue of looking around, appreciating the good things in our lives, and saying, “This is nice.”

That’s what settlers do.

As opposed to adventurers / desperados / explorers / poets / prophets consumed with a burning desire to keep moving forward, the settlers find a place they like and cultivate it like a garden.

No one denies them that right and pleasure.

My wife and I garden.  We enjoy a 10x20 enclosure where we grow beans / tomatoes / cucumbers / garlic / zucchini / herbs.

It can be hard work and it typically involves a lot of dirt and mulch, but when we’re sitting at our table enjoying a tasty meal of freshly picked vine ripened vegetables, we forget the sweat and shit (literally) that went into it.

Settlers -- as opposed to colonists -- tend to either forget or deliberately overlook the stink and sweat and shit in their own communities.

You don’t need to be a rural farmer to think and feel this way.  We know a lovely older lady who often waxes rhapsodic about growing up in southern California in the 1950s, for her a truly “happy days” experience she never experienced again.

She was too young and too naively innocent in the 1950s to recognize the machinery that made her adolescence so blissful.

She never saw the gunk and grime and corruption that made her picture-perfect life so pleasurable.

There is a tendency among settlers to look back at their life through Norman Rockwell lenses.

They see only the good, the pleasant.

They don’t see the bad pain and suffering that made that good pleasantness possible.

They see nostalgia, not history.

Now there’s nothing wrong with wanting to conserve the good and pleasant things of the past.

But if you want them for yourself, you are morally and ethically bound to want them for everybody else.

And if somebody else paid in blood and toil and tears and sweat for your pleasure, you are obliged at the very least to see that their suffering ends, and ideally that they are compensated for what they endured for your benefit.

For most of his career Norman Rockwell embraced the exact opposite philosophy of Jack Kerouac.

While Kerouac strove forward, struggling to come to terms with the country he lived in and his place in it, Rockwell looked back with a wistful, nostalgic sigh.

Today’s progressives keep Kerouac’s spirit.  “Whatever it is we’re looking for, it sure isn’t this.”

Today’s conservatives want things not the way they really were, but the way they want to pretend they were.  A few are refreshingly honest enough to gloat in their attitudes of self-proclaimed superiority, but most just don’t want to recognize the horrible wrongs that were inflicted in the past for that thin strip of nostalgia they cling to.

Funny thing about Norman Rockwell, though…

Rockwell was married three times, the first one ending in divorce after fourteen years, the second starting three months after the first ended in 1930 and lasting until her death in a mental health facility in 1959.

During the latter part of this unhappy marriage, Rockwell sought psychiatric treatment from analyst Erik Erikson.  Erikson observed to Rockwell that he painted his happiness, but did not live it. 

This was the period where Rockwell painted his patented idealized vision of small town American, a place he desperately wished he could fully and joyfully inhabit.

After his second wife died, however, he married again, this time a much happier union.

Here’s where Rockwell’s career took a surprising turn.

While he never completely abandoned his nostalgic views, Rockwell began looking forward.  He painted representations of the ongoing manned space program, he painted white children encountering a black family in their neighborhood for the first time.

He painted six-year old Ruby Bridges being escorted into her school by federal marshals past a hateful white mob.

He painted James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner being murdered by the KKK for daring to register African-American voters in Mississippi.

Rockwell’s nostalgia served as a panacea for his personal pain.

Once that pain left his life -- and at precisely a time of life when many creative types look to bank off earlier success -- Rockwell looked forward.

The road beckons.

© Buzz Dixon