February 28, 2009
 
On the Road


(On the Road First Edition)
 
The Visiting Dog left without a backward glance, happy to be back with his real Mistress, who has returned from a week in the islands. I watch him prance off down the hall, happy as a clam. Sara I was moving a little bit slower, since the trip had taken its toll, but I envied her.
 
I don’t know about you, but I think we could all use a vacation. The news is too depressing. Nothing extravagant. That seems not to fit the mood. I am not exactly thinking of a Jack Kerouac-style high-octane drug-fueled rage across the country. But based on expense, it would probably be something by car.
 
When the last portion of I-40 was completed in the late 1980s, Charles Kuralt quipped:

“Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.”
 
That isn’t true, of course. There is plenty to see from the interstate; you just do so as if you were in a low-flying jet. You may remember Charles from his “On the road” segments that were hosted on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkeit. They ran for a quarter century, starting in 1967, the year my cohort of Americans started hurtling along the interstates on our own.
 
Kuralt went to all sorts of places and talked to all sorts of people, and he did it long enough to wear out six motor-homes. He was out on the road in the last really big recession, the one the reached its depth in 1982. The official dates for that event were July 1981 to November, 1982. Determined to wring out the inflation caused by the oil shock of the 1970s, Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker slowed the rate of growth of the money supply and raised interest rates.
 
The federal funds rate, which was about 11% in 1979, rose to 20% by June 1981. The prime interest rate, at the time a highly important economic measure, eventually reached 21.5% in June 1982.
 
It was awesome: a bold but limited strategy, calculated to absorb some short-term pain but kill the inflation that was killing the economy. It worked.
 
That is one of the reasons Paul has been asked back to help the Administration, even if that ever-so-smart Larry Summers is cutting him out of the pattern. Volker’s strategy worked. Of course, that was back when the Fed seemed to have some tools to deal with the crisis. That shock is starting to look like a cake-walk in comparison with what we have now. The Commerce Department released the numbers for the last three months of 2008, the ones that wrapped around the end of the last elected circus. The estimates of the downturn had been gloomy, being in the vicinity of four percent.
 
The real numbers were a shock. Commerce said the economy sank like a stone, contracting by half again that amount, to 6.2%.
 
I missed that recession. I was off fighting Commies in Hawaii at the time, narrowly missing the future President, who left the tranquil islands in 1979 to seek his fortunes in California. Charles Kuralt was often in the Islands, coming and going on international assignments, and I wonder what it might have been like to have crossed paths with the teenaged future president, and the then-46-year-old Kuralt at the Arthur Godfrey Terminal of the Honolulu International Airport.
 
At least two of us probably would have been drinking, though it is certain we all would have been smoking.
 
Ah, the might-have beens!
 
I don’t know if Charles would have driven the few miles of the interstate that exists on Oahu. It is a curious thing, the Interstate highway in the islands. Even though Hawaii is separated by thousands of miles of ocean from any other state, the "Interstate" system is really the shorthand name for the official National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
 
As such, it is intended to serve military needs as well as civilian traffic. Oahu certainly has military needs in abundance, since Oahu is a fortress island, bearing one of the heaviest concentrations of military forces on the planet.
 
In particular, the local Interstates help tie together the multitude of military bases scattered all over Oahu, with the huge Pearl Harbor naval complex and Hickam AFB connected by H-1 to a naval ammunition storage facility and a former naval air station to the west, and the Fort Ruger National Guard (former Army) base inside the magnificent Diamond Head crater to the east; by H-2, to the Schofield Barracks army base and Wheeler air field; and by H-3, to the Marine Corps base at Kaneohe Bay.
 
The early push for building H-3 was from the military, which had problems moving troops across Oahu en route the sea and airheads for further transportation to Southeast Asia. The local politicians latched on as a superb works project, and being a government project, the war was over for more than two decades by the time H-3 was completed.
 
Hawaii was a great place to ride out a recession, and by the time I got back to the Mainland, things were starting to take off again. Maybe Washington is the place to try to endure the current downturn.
 
The bad news from Commerce is going to make the debate on the budget even more acrimonious. This morning, the President reiterated his claim to a mandate from the voters to make sweeping changes, and he is in the process of trying to cement his vision so firmly that it cannot be undone.
 
The last cast of Clowns that came to town tried to do the same thing, which is how we lurch from one extreme to another, with the swing of the pendulum threatening to tear us apart. The new approach obligates us to a future that runs two years past the maximum term limit he could server, assuming he is elected again. The other one attempted to dismantle as much of the government as possible, in the hope that it could never come back.
 
Of course the mandate was actually to solve the immediate problem. There appears to be broad agreement that the assholes whose unregulated financial shenanigans should be bailed out to save our society, but somehow brought under control. That people who need help out to get it, at least until things turn around, and that education is a good thing.
 
Other than that, we seem to be split down the middle on the question of the fundamental changes to our society that will provide some sort of universal health care, and the balance of state socialism and capitalism red in tooth and claw.
 
The President is quite straightforward about his desire to use this opportunity to make irreversible the vision he has for a fairer society that spreads the money around. Speaker Pelosi, just back from a taxpayer-funded junket to Rome, seems quite indignant that anyone would disagree.
 
It is not my vision, but what the hell. I am a lucky bastard, and I can’t quibble about that. I think a Jack Kerouac-style road vacation might be in order to clear my head of the toxic miasma here by the Potomac, sort of take a Charles Kuralt approach to see what people think about our collective future.
 
Divided as we are, maybe a trip across I-40 would be way to go. The big highway is the major east-west superslab, running from North Carolina to the Pacific Ocean near Santa Monica, California. It neatly divides us, north and south, blue and red.
 
This would not be a trip in the Hubrismobile. The precision engineering and high-test requirements are not right for a drive in Middle America. This sort of trip is tailor-made for the Crown Vic Police Pursuit Bluesmobile with its 4.6 liters of regular-gas guzzling V-8 power.
 
Out west, I-40 parallels the path of legendary Route 66, which was a major path of the migrants who fled the  Dust Bowl and the man-induced climate change of the 1930s. More miles of Interstate 40 pass through Tennessee than any other state. The section of it that runs between Memphis and Nashville is often referred to as "Music Highway," from the legendary Delta blues that are indigenous to those parts, and which gave birth to Elvis Presley.
 
I have a pal who is semi-retired out there, in a place called Cordova, and that might be a place to let the Bluesmobile to rest overnight. Charles Kuralt would have liked the place, I think, since little Cordova was subject of a hostile take-over by the much larger city of Memphis a few years back bringing the sleepy suburb into the tax system, metropolitan schools and transit system as part of a greater good that a lot of folks didn’t seem to want any part of.
 
Motorists traveling on Interstate 40 can’t miss the three magnificent crosses near the Appling Road exit; the truckers on the highway termed the vista as “Fort God,” since the center cross is 150 feet high and flanked by the other two crosses that are nearly that high.
 
The crosses are on private property, so even if someone might be offended, their presence is protected by the Constitution. At the foot of the monument is the large complex of the Bellevue Baptist Church. It is one of those mega-centers that I see periodically from the highway, but this one had a pastor who preached things that brought in a flock that enthusiastically threw their faith to the heavens. 
 
The Reverend Adrian Rogers is dead now, but his name is often invoked as a commentator of extraordinary insight. His most famous quote turns up frequently on secular discourse these days, and it is worth contemplating.
 
"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."  
 
I don’t know what Charles Kuralt would have thought about that, but I suspect he would have approached it with thoughtful warmth and the spirit of humanity. He did those kinds of stories all the time, on those out of work and down on their luck through no fault of their own. He probably would have offered them a drink, though he was a practical if quixotic man and I doubt if he would have left an open tab at the bar.
 
It is said that Charles smoked and drank too much. I think it is better said that he drank and smoked more than you do. But something he understood was an intrinsic ambiguity in the human spirit.
 
He was dead for a couple years before it was revealed that he had a second family that he visited when out on the road. The revelation of the long-term relationship exacted a toll on his image and reputation, but by then of course he didn’t care. I blush at the presumption of imaging how he would feel about the massive change that is contemplated for us all. He might have just shrugged and gone on to happy hour at some joint down the highway.
 
I imagine I will do the same thing, though when the dust settles on this current crisis we will be left with the wreckage of a lot of dreams, and a bar tab that the young people are going to chafe at paying.
 
I blush to presume for them, too, but it occurs to me that they may decide not to.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com