About This Land

hello, stranger –

it's the end of the second week of the year, and so far so good. i've been keeping my nose to the grindstone pretty well, sticking to the “Dry January” thing (for the most part – i had a tall glass of scotch on the rocks the other day, but that was a sort of “brake-glass-in-case-of-emergency” type of moment), and it appears the world hasn't descended into a fiery hell pit of chaos and despair this year just yet. and if we're on the brink of it i wouldn't know, because i quit watching the news too.

not that i'm an advocate for sticking your head in the sand about what's going on in the world. i never have been. but as time has gone on and i’ve found myself turning to the late night comedy shows more and more to stay informed, i’ve realized that i become almost instantly aggravated whenever i try turning on one of the major networks to catch up with the latest about the unraveling circus that is the state of the current political landscape in America. at least the comedy shows come with the appropriate punch lines.

i used to be a lot more tempted to scroll through YouTube and click on any clip that caught my eye, and get my fix of infotainment from the big show. but as time has gone on i began to realize i was doing it more out of some hidden pleasure at being enraged rather than informed, and i just don't need that shit in my life right now, so i quit.

for now, anyways.  as a political junkie, i know that there’s an an inevitable gravity to it all – especially this year – and it probably won't be too long before i'm pulled back into the bleacher seats of my couch, playing my dutiful part as an alarmed citizen, spewing my outrage and venom at the tv screen, yet helpless to do anything about it except buy whatever pharmaceutical products or hair transplant systems or Caribbean cruise getaways that the network’s advertisers are pushing. and that seems to be just all that game is about, at the core of it anyways.

but for now i’d rather spend that time diving into some old books. i recently unpacked a few large boxes filled with them, that had been lying in wait to be rediscovered. as i sorted through them i began to realize that there was a standard size for many of the smaller paperbacks, looking as if they were intended to be able to fit in your back pocket. it gave me pause and got me thinking of a time not so long ago, when that’s what entertainment was and there was actually a market for such a thing.

the one i'm reading now is Travels with Charley.  Steinbeck writes this from back in 1960, and it's a wholly different world back then, one that we’d barely recognize today.  he loads up his supplies and his dog and drives his little camper up to Maine from New York, and then West through the twisting back roads and rural countryside of an America that's in the middle of a major growth spurt.  interstates are new, and mobile homes are the wave of the future. he camps along the way, and makes coffee to share with strangers, and just sort of rambles Westward through a countryside that's in a transition out of one era and into another.

what's been striking about it is his implicit but ever-present reverence for the land. he doesn't even really speak directly about it as such, but you just get the sense that this is a man who has nothing but respect and awe for the enormity of the country and its landscape, and total humility about his role in it. there is a love for the land and the people inhabiting it that saturates the pages, and need not even be spoken.

boy how far we've come since then. one era was replaced by another, and then again by another. Steinbeck marveled that an airplane could slice across the country in a couple hours the same distance it had taken him weeks to travel by truck. these days instead of a book in someone's pocket, you'll find an iPhone with a computer 1000 times more powerful than the first space shuttle. anyone who wants to can pull up Google and have a map of anywhere in the world in the palm of their hands in seconds.

but a map and the land are not the same thing. and you can’t see what's going on around you when you're staring at a screen.  there was a time when the land was once the thing - the big thing, the only thing that really mattered.  you belonged to it, and so did your life. and now these days it seems like basically just wallpaper to most people, if they even see it at all.

yeah, it's quite the transition indeed. i look at these books and think back to elementary school when the bookmobile would come around twice a year so the kids could order their paperbacks. i remember sitting on different colored benches in the kindergarten classroom, learning the ABC's and how to share toys, and singing “This land is your land, this land is my land” with the rest of the children. it seemed pretty standard back then, to instill lessons about inclusion and fairness and mutual respond into the little kids of this great land of ours.  from the redwood forests, to the gulf stream waters, this land was made for you and me...

i don't know if Woody Guthrie's folksy anthem is still sung in the schools anymore. i hope so, but have my doubts. the kids today are probably just glued to their tablets, playing pokemon or something, and justifiably learning to navigate this brave new world they’ll be forced to inherit. and i can only imagine the giant shit that the talking heads at Fox News would take if they were ever to realize that a song about unity and inclusion and sung by school children had undertones of protest about the lopsided nature of the distribution of land and wealth in this country. i can just imagine the cries of “socialism!” bleating out from every screen they could get on...  as probably would - i imagine - the outcry from far left activists about the insensitivity towards the history of treatment towards the indigenous peoples who were actually here first, for that matter.

don't get me wrong, i'm not equivocating the two here - i know the difference between genuine protest and the manufactured outrage of oily tv personalities masquerading as the news in order gin up fear and division among the public, and score political points for their bosses. but that’s a whole different discussion.  my point here is that it's just noise i don't need right now – or ever, really – coming from a thousand-dollar device in my pocket where a dime store paperback really should be.

so that's where things stand right now my friend – i hope things are good on your end as well and i’ll reach back out again soon. until then, be good...