THE ROVING
EYE Election kicks on Route
66 By Pepe Escobar
ON
ROUTE 66, NEW MEXICO - If the United States of
America ever had the ultimate Main Street, that
would be Route 66 - The Mother Road, as John
Steinbeck coined it; the graphic illustration of
the American Dream, Utopia finally achieved.
Mustang convertible, top down, the desert
wind blowing in our face, the stereo spewing out
legend after legend, sun to the left, moon to the
right, larger than life cobalt skies, astonishing
starry nights.
Route 66 was the 20th
century equivalent (born in 1926) of the 19th
century Santa Fe trail, which started in Missouri and
colonized the West
via Kansas and Colorado up to Santa Fe, New
Mexico; 66, after starting in Grant Park, Chicago,
ended up on Ocean Avenue, in Santa Monica, staring
at the Pacific Ocean 2,400 miles, three time zones
and eight states later.
As much as Mad Men
- the best American TV has had to offer in ages -
is retelling the history of the 1960s, 66 keeps
retelling a perpetual trip to glory days past, way
beyond a Steinbeck Grapes of Wrath script,
with special emphasis on the non-stop traffic jam
of the affluent post-war 1950s all the way to its
sedimentation as the symbolic American West
asphalt river.
Yet 66's agony in fact
started way back in 1954, when president Dwight
Eisenhower, extremely impressed with the German
autobahn, created the basis for the interstate
highway system; 66 then became road kill for five
different, efficient, monotonous interstates.
In America's collective unconscious
though, this whole business goes way beyond
Kerouac's On the Road, which was all about
a fast car, the beckoning Pacific seashore and a
woman at the end of the road. Route 66 is now
classic American History, an Ode to Joy
perpetually re-enacted in memory lane, with
Beethoven replaced by the Shangri-Las.
Route 66 turned into a myth even before
America became as generic as a supermarket shelf.
Those were the pre-Walmart/mobile phone days when
motels did not accept reservations, there were
real barbers and real pharmacies, cinemas were
temples and not sardine cans in multiplexes,
everybody drank tap water and the summers were
longer because of drive-in cinemas.
To hit
66 now - when the American Dream itself is just a
memory, no matter how Barack Obama and Romney may
digress about it - is the equivalent of a tour of
the Crete labyrinth or the Mitt ruins of
Persepolis. It's like the eternal return of a pop
Rosetta stone. The interstates gobbled 66 all up.
The earth ate some stretches of the road alive.
Some others simply disappeared in the middle of
the desert.
Yet much more than in the
Disneyfication of all things 66, it's under the
shade of a gigantic mesa kissed by the majestic
skies of New Mexico that the Mother Road weaves
its obstinate magic; the middle way for Dharma
buns soaked on ghosts and dreams.
Those
infinite skies So the antidote to the
billionaire orgy of negative ads spewed out by
both the Obama and Romney campaigns - and their
frenetic mad dash in both Ohio and Pennsylvania -
may well be a drive on 66. It's like singing a
slow blues to a vanished America - that ghostly,
dilapidated ring of neons, abandoned garages,
carcasses of all kinds of vehicles and most of all
diners who serve everything from a killer huevos
rancheros to homemade cherry pie.
Navajo
trading posts contemplating those interminable
Union Pacific trains chugging along; the bowels of
the earth in Technicolor at the Petrified Forest;
and then Gallup - the indigenous Mecca,
essentially a street parallel to the railroad
tracks (the street is the old 66), crammed with
pawn shops where many an unfortunate Navajo still
leaves his precious turquoises for the cash to
finance his next shot of whisky.
In my
archeological tour of these living fossils, I
couldn't help becoming an electron up and down
Central Avenue in Albuquerque where, in one of
those diners, I learned from Armando - a tattooed
Latino with a fabulous rockabilly haircut who
welds muscle cars - that "I don't get into
politics and religion"; therefore, he doesn't
vote. For all the desperation of both campaigns in
securing the much-vaunted "Latino vote", Armando
spells out a predominant young Latino feeling
regarding the One-Party system; they never had
them, and they already lost them.
Obama
has put on quite a show dangling the promise of
immigration reform. Romney for his part never
fooled anyone because Latinos know he's always
been an immigration mullah. Still, a poll by
Latino Decisions shows that Latinos all across the
US support Obama by a whopping 73%, compared with
Romney's 21%. And this despite Democrats in the US
Senate killing the Dream Act in 2010 that would
allow undocumented students a path to legalize
their situation.
Obama will easily carry
New Mexico by at least nine points. It's less an
endorsement than a lesser-of-two-evils mindset -
with the exception of magical, progressive Santa
Fe, art capital of the US Southwest, the Western
Shangri-La, bearing one of the largest
concentrations of magnetic energy on earth, but
still not immune to the crisis; homeless people
and foreclosures abound.
It isn't easy to
find one's path among a tsunami of healers,
"philosophers", religious leaders, clairvoyants,
acupuncturists, reflexologists, skull realigners,
aura readers, ayurvedic practitioners, Gurdjieff
fanatics, multi-purpose Buddhists and art gallery
gurus. Still, options abound. And cool nuclear
physicists working at nearby Los Alamos - where
the atom bomb was invented - never fail to commute
to Santa Fe to dance salsa at El Farol.
It's that old New Mexico magic. This is
arguably America's coolest - as in mellowest -
state; when afflicted with the blues, from the
existential to financial, Americans could do worse
in terms of restarting the dream.
Reasons
to live in New Mexico (there are hundreds) include
the amazing open spaces and open roads, no
hurricanes (just awesome thunderstorms),
spectacular sunsets, a wealth of red rocks, no
traffic jams, Southwest culture (all of it), the
best Mexican food in the land, the scent of
sagebrush after it rains (no pre-election rain
though), Navajo jewelry (bought from the artists
themselves, not galleries), nightly Indian dances,
all those beautiful trains, and those starry skies
that made D H Lawrence weep with joy (he had a
ranch 20 miles north of Santa Fe). As for Santa Fe
itself, whatever happens it won't become a new
Miami - as depicted in Tom Wolfe's devastatingly
funny new novel, Back to Blood.
Drenched in burgers, bourbon and blues -
not to mention nostalgia - Route 66 may go on
forever. But what if a particle of that original
American Dream of yore still existed, under those
infinite New Mexican skies?
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