Gerry Ford was a decent man, as politicians go, a Midwesterner, as am I. "The country I come, from, is called the Midwest" is a line from one of Bob Dylan's better songs. I'm betting they fly the flags at half-mast when Bob dies too. Hey, votes is votes. But, Bob made me prouder of being a Midwesterner than Gerry Ford ever could. Though, that is where the man's heart was, like Johnny Carson, and Truman, and so many others, like Jimmy Hoffa, David Letterman and Al Capone.
Midwesterners, perhaps above all other Americans have a more positive sense about America. They are generally happy to see you, and they expect you to be happy to see them too. Or, that is how it used to be. There is something quintessentially real about the Midwest. I heard a saying this past year I'd never heard before. It is so flat; you can watch your dog run away for a week or more.
I returned to the Midwest after an absence of thirty-five years this past summer with my wife, who had never been to my youthful home. We drove, the whole way, off the Interstates, and spent months slowly working our way out of Maine, into Massachusetts, her home, then through the Berkshires, Upstate New York, Niagara Falls, Pennsylvania, down the hilly east side of Ohio, across to Columbus, and back up the west side of Ohio through the first American flat land my wife had ever seen, but looked so much like home to me, and then on into Michigan, The Land of Lakes.
It was in the flat land of Ohio when it struck me. Every small rural town we had passed through was nearly vacated, boarded up buildings of turn of the century and newer vintage, and so few local residents on these small town Main Streets. When we got to my hometown, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, I was astonished, bowled over, and dismayed.
Bloomfield Hills in 1966 was something for me as I had remembered it as a progressive upper middle class suburban Utopia. Then it was what was referred to as an automotive executive suburb, approximately thirty miles west from Detroit out Woodward Avenue. It has since become The Land of Strip Malls, Condos and MacMansions on a quarter acre.
Up until 1966, I lived then less than an eighth of a mile from Cousins' Farm, which was six hundred acres of paradise, and a place where I spent many hours of my youth, the Redwinged Black Birds, Blue Racers, Painted Turtles, the Whitetail Deer, huge Barn Owls, the wild strawberries, an apple orchard, a small lake, several frog and pollywog filled ponds, Pine groves, ducks of all kinds, shooting stars, and the cows in the pastures. I saw the best meteor of my life one full moonlit night with Chris and Steve Chudik on Cousins' Farm. If I told you about it, you wouldn't believe me. It's all gone now of course.
And, of course 1966 was a long time ago, and I knew that when my wife and I tried to find our way around. I did manage to get by Walnut Lake where I learned to swim and to sail, and the house my father had built, and designed, the only New England Colonial built for perhaps hundreds of miles around. It was small and unpretentious except for the style, which was I guess outrageous in Michigan, and had been changed in its character over the years, but still I had fond memories to recollect and share with my wife. When we drove by the house, my wife asked, Do you want to get out? No. And we drove right by, because I knew no one in the whole neighborhood I knew then would still be living there forty years later. I wouldn't live there if you paid me to live there today.
America for the most part has lost the rural character Gerry Ford and I shared as it spanned our two distinct generations. I have lost my own rural character, as of course had Gerry. Though I'm all white now, in the Midwestern way no one calls me, Mr. Robertson, today, except my wife, who only calls me, Mr. Robertson, when she is displeased with my love of ice cream and my lactose intolerance. All right, Hun. I'll take a walk. Yes, I know it's too late for that now. And off I'll totter not unlike Gerry the last few decades we saw him.
I didn't always live Midwestern. I lived Out East too, and went to school in Boston, Haviland Street around the corner from Berkley School of Music, on Beacon Hill, Garden Street, and in Charlestown too, on Pearl Street. When we took our trip this past summer, I looked around Boston too. The Boston of the Sixties has long since disappeared. It is wholly condo-ized now with lots and lots of bulletproof glass, and a whole industry built around iron grates, alarm systems and, alarm system-warning stickers.
After a seventeen years absence from Boston, and a forty year absence from Bloomfield Hills, nothing much looked the same. Oh the streets were still there, but the feel was all gone. I didn't feel as much like a man without a country, as I felt like I had returned to my country and re-arrived in the midst of a Great Depression.
Or perhaps my feeling was something of an anti-reconstruction period after the Civil War, Reconstruction backwards, for America now has fifty times as many debt-ridden economic slaves now as the South had virtual slaves then. The time of the Emancipation Proclamation, rescinded as it has been by plastic Libertarian economic forces, would have fond memories both before and after for those who could remember then, if anyone lived that long. For the many millions of jail cell prisoners, the drug-addicted, murdered and bullet crippled blacks and whites in America, no doubt many more than a few would choose to be in bondage on a southern plantation over their current living hell. But slavery is immoral, if it no doubt provided a better standard of living for some than that which they have found today in our more modern and humane world. The slavers today now all drive black limousines, and work in towering fortresses of glass in The City That Greed Built and its copycats.
The problem with a progressive, industrialized, automotivized, plasticized, digitized and modernized world, is that you cannot begin to plan for the better future we had all hoped for simply because reality is so complex, nothing works out the way you expected it to, which seems to give us some lessons to consider about being in so much of a hurry to achieve all these goals, which seem less dubious and more dubious as distinctions, like landmarks on a highway with all the other traffic headed the wrong way, blaring their horns, and, the road signs for some unknown reason all turned backward.
We are all fallible, groping in the darkness, but some oppose what appears to them to be The System that destroyed their world. And, at a great risk, and with supple idealism, and, despite a craggy reality, they decided, they dared when they knew their world was ended, to clear away its ruins, and to be so bold as to build a new society of hope, risking clashes and distractions, bringing forward yet another notion of superb modesty, equality, prosperity, vastly hopeful, with a largess of boldness, and a well-reflected affirmation of their utterly blind instincts, they then heralded the destruction of the old, to usher in the new. Only later would we find these visionaries in the darkness had been confused when we hailed them for their recklessly myopic bravery.
My wife and I immediately left the Birmingham-Bloomfield Hills area, and drove west until we arrived at the Lake Michigan shore, and on Friday, Saturday and Sunday we drove along the still beautiful Lake Michigan shoreline, Memorial Day weekend, 2006, 82 degrees, and, no one was there. I mean literally, for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday we spent on Lake Michigan's beautiful near white sandy beaches, with waves rolling in pleasantly, and, no one was there. My wife said it looked to her like the Cape Cod of her youth, and I've no doubt it did. But, there wasn't a sailboat in sight, not a motor boat, not a sun bather, not a family with kids, nor even two lovers, other than the Misses and me. I mean it quite literally; no one was there. We couldn't just park anywhere we wanted with a grand water view; we literally could park in any parking space we wanted, because no one else was there.
We drove into the U.P. over the Mackinaw Bridge that Sunday. If you've never been over the Mackinaw Bridge, should you ever get the chance, it is an experience you'll never forget, no matter how hard you might try to forget. The Bridge was built in 1955, as the brass commemorative on ramp sign read so, quite ominously. The Mackinaw is a suspension bridge four miles long, and who knows how high. At the top of the Mackinaw Bridge you're so high in the air, the air seems to thin, and, even in broad daylight you can see stars in the sky, or, at least I saw stars.
When they build bridges today, they don't make them anywhere near that high, and they put a railing along the sides, one that blocks the view to some horizontal degree. When they built the Mackinaw Bridge, they used a single cable along the edge, and not a very big cable either. It obstructs nothing of the view. In one direction is Lake Huron all the way to the northern horizon, and in the other direction is Lake Michigan right to the southern horizon, not that you'll want to look, because it is an incredibly long way down in the downward direction, and the cable doesn't block your view of how far down it is one mite. The experience is best likened to taking off on the Space Shuttle over the tip of Florida strapped to the nose cone of the fuel tank, because though it may seem so, you're not actually going into orbit with the Space Shuttle. You are going to have to come back down the other side too to land safely in the U.P. I only know the lakes are there because that is what my wife said, and I asked her several times on the way up and over not to say it any more. As I was driving, I was far too busy to bother with the view, dealing with the metal grates that made the car swerve back and forth more than The Bridge itself swayed back and forth in the wind, and, on the way down I was also busy wondering if the toll booth collector had a defibrillator. Two bucks, and worth every penny one way, there being no U-turns allowed on the way up The Bridge, and no chance of ever even considering going back over the other way.
So, having seen it already once, rather than drive back over The Bridge we drove back to Maine through Sault Saint Marie and then Canada. I only bring this up to dutifully report that I didn't see a single terrorist in Canada, this despite the massive buildup of Homeland Security Troops and armaments on the American side of the DMZ. The new Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, intent upon doing his part for Homeland Security in Canada has promised but not yet delivered to the Canadian Border Patrol some old 32 Specials the Mounted Police used to use when they were still mostly mounted.
But, I am feeling good about America! If our country is the last superpower on the planet, we are indeed headed into a Golden Age of Certainly Something or Other.
I read about it every day on the Internet, about the great scientific discoveries being made. Did you know they've found the aging gene, and we're all eventually going to live forever? I read how the economy is recovering, and steadily growing quarter after quarter with new record highs in the stock markets almost every day, though by volume it is a much smaller stock market than it once was, apparently about one one-thousandth what it was in 1999. I read how the many wars our country is fighting to bring democracy and rid all these backward places of tyrants and despots, how they are all going well, or, at least not, not well. I read how marvelous it is the Democrats have taken back both the House and the Senate, though I still worry just a little the House and Senate are both still entirely controlled by politicians. There is even talk of bringing back the integrity in government, when I didn't even know they ever had it. There is talk of regulation by the SEC that sounds a bit meddlesome but probably couldn't hurt if it doesn't actually do anything. The Gold Standard that I've always been curious about is being talked about again, but mostly only by crackpot Libertarian economists who think the world is about getting a fair shake and some wholly undue respect for economists. And heads between your knees Civil Defense drills seem to be on the way back too. We had those when I was a kid, and, prayer in the public schools too, which was common in my days as a school child because no one then knew when nuclear war was going to break out, end it all, and under those circumstances prayer all the time and everywhere seemed a pretty good idea if no less stuffy than it is today.
I am feeling good about America again, and in a Midwestern sort of way after our trip this past summer. America has a lot to offer the rest of the world, if they could only pay for it, and some other country couldn't make it cheaper.
My wife and I are trying to plan a trip around the world some time in the next few years. But I don't think we are going to fly at all, or at least I'm not flying at all. I read on the Internet, that for security reasons, I'd have to take my shoes off, which for me says, if you have to take your shoes off to fly, you're likely going to end up in the drink, and that's not how I want to get around the world. I swim well enough; it's getting me and my wife out of the plane I'm worried about. I flew in 1968, twice, and they didn't ask me to take my shoes off then. And we didn't end up in the water then either.
I stood in my yard as a seven-year old with my family, quite a few neighbors in Michigan and watched Sputnik go overhead. I remember a childhood friend showing me the first transistor radio I'd ever seen. It weighed probably three or four pounds. My next door neighbor was a electronics repairman, televisions, radios, phonographs, when FM radios weren't put into automobiles and were seen as somewhat subversive, which was communist then, not terrorist. I remember when an automatic transmission was a novelty, and the smallest bottle of water you could buy was five gallons. I still remember the smell of a mimeograph machine. I even remember my father going off to work in Detroit in a coal-fired steam-engined train. My brothers and I used to put copper pennies on the track, to see them flattened as big as silver dollars. Back then, living outside Detroit, I remember the excitement when every year the new automobile models would start showing up in the neighborhood. It seems to me now, in fifty-seven years a kid can do a lot of growing up.
And, while Michigan keeps trying to recapture that time, it also seems the Automotive Age is very likely coming to an end. I don't doubt there will still be automobiles, but I think every year now fewer of us will drive them, like horses and carriages, and more so like that steam locomotive my father took to work; they're going to start going away. They already have.
Everyone has a computer now instead, and they are all the rage, or they were, and from my perspective, it even seems possible the computer too will come and go. I can only guess what will replace the computer when it fades in its practical utility as it turns into the digital advertising machine it is destined to become. It might come down to just the pharmaceuticals required to make us all feel good about ourselves and our age.
Since 9-11 there has been quite a bit of hysteria about airline security, but honestly, I'm pretty sure a smaller percentage of the public has flown every year for a couple of decades now, and I expect that trend will continue too. There just isn't anywhere to go, or, perhaps there is no reason good enough to get there by air and, be strip-searched somewhere along the way. Before our trip into the Midwest, I'd gone on line and seen what had become of my old neighborhood. It took an immense effort to get there after all these years. It took us six months just to drive out of Maine; there was so much to see and such a great distance in between seeing it.
And nowadays anyway, it is simply far more travelicious to sit down with a good old book and read about what it was like decades, scores of decades and millennia ago. Still, my wife and I are trying to plan a trip around the world, by boat and rail, some time in the next few years. I'll be into my sixties by then, probably still being regularly stunned how old a kid can get in all those years, and, we will probably still be trying to plan a way to get around the world. I'll see it all on line first, of course. I know it will take an utterly Herculean effort and likely close to a decade for us to get around the world. But, I'm in no hurry.
I'm feeling good about America, so good, I would like to go with my wife and take a good long look at her from the outside, by boat and by rail. When we get back, if we get back, my wife and I will then be better equipped to make that decision about whether or not we want to take that live-forever cure that is in the works. It seems like a no-brainer, but looks can be deceiving, and, planning for such the futuristic future I have learned, isn't likely to provide a realistic glimpse of all the unintended end results that might meet us there.
It would be my philosophic contention; neither politics, religion, science, logic nor mathematics, progress, decay, nor primitive are built into reality. These are all mental constructs we overlay upon a reality we can only almost feebly imagine. Leading a planned life is best likened to spending a very long time considering and drawing up a complete mental plan as to how to herd cats across a stream in the dark. It is a good enough rule to go by, and a good enough reason not to hurry into anything regardless of the temptation.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
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