On the Road in Search of Reagan’s America

by Kenneth Francis (November 2017)

Panel from America Today, Thomas Hart Benton, 1930-31

 

A few years after a retired Hollywood actor moved into the Oval Office in Pennsylvania Avenue in 1981, a thought occurred to this writer during a rainy night in London: flee Thatcher’s Britain and hit the road in search of Ronald Reagan’s America.

 

After getting a visa, international driving licence and boarding a cheap flight from Heathrow to Detroit, a change of airline then proceeded on a flight to Chicago. On arrival at O’Hare Airport, with enough cash for six months’ travelling and food, the plan was to drive to the west coast first, then back to the east coast before returning home.

 

On British television that year, one of the most popular programmes was Entertainment USA, a series broadcast by the BBC with Jonathan King as its host. This show, which ran for eight years, was a mega hit and presented entertainment news, interviews and music from the USA. Watching Entertainment USA was a good incentive to go see Reagan’s America. And leaving London and the rain was a better reason.

 

Inside the Chicago office of one such service for car delivery was like a smoke-filled room without the secret political gathering. A man behind a cloud of cigar mist, resembling the actor Lee Marvin, stood by the counter. Behind him were his two male colleagues, on the wrong side of 50, both sitting down reading newspapers. The Lee Marvin lookalike said: “Can you drive stick-shift?” Coming from Europe, the reply had to be: “Stick what?” “Manual gearbox,” he replied. “Tourists from Europe can usually drive ’em, but hell, I wouldn’t trust my guys with stick, no way,” he added. (One of the men behind the counter, who looked like he was soon to come into contact with a defibrillator, rolled his eyes through a puff of nicotine smoke.)
 

Stick-shift was not an option for such a long journey but an automatic vehicle was. Luckily there was one on offer, a big Oldsmobile (I was hoping for a Mustang, like the one Steve McQueen drove in the movie, Bullitt). There was a deposit to be paid and the car was to be picked up some five miles outside the city. The owner of the car and his family were moving to San Francisco. The car, not the coolest of vehicles, was an eight-cylinder type, built like a rhinoceros with receding seats one could sleep on. It had to be delivered within two weeks. With a tank full of free gas and a suitcase slung into the trunk, it was off to Route 66 before it became a decommissioned highway later that year. The first part of the journey was a 2,500-mile voyage through the American heartlands to a city where they used to wear flowers in their hair. The Heartlands are never specifically defined geographically, but generally depict those Midwest states beyond the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines. It’s also a cultural term, conjuring up images of classic movies such as The Searchers, North by Northwest, The Grapes of Wrath and other such gems of the silver screen and American literature.

 

But the roads and vehicles to such destinations to the City by the Bay, were not always that good. Huckberry online editor Liv Combe writes: “In 1903, there were only 150 miles of paved roads in the entire United States, and most of them were within major city limits, leaving vast chunks of the country unconnected. There were no gas stations and there were no detailed maps.”
 

American roads have come a long way since the bad old days of dirt tracks and noisy cars. From cloudy Illinois, over an 11-day drive through Missouri/Kansas/Oklahoma/Texas/New Mexico/Arizona, sunny California began to come into view on the horizon. The Route 66 journey had its fair share of semi-trailer juggernauts, but was mainly quiet for most of the way with little or no traffic, especially at night.

 

 

But ruins aside, the lively diners and drive-throughs off the highway served delicious pancakes, coffee and burgers. And the rustic small towns and ranches evoked Marlboro-Ad imagery, with tightly knit communities of hardworking folk just trying to get by from day to day, struggling with the questions of origin, meaning, morality, destiny and survival.

 

Meanwhile, as the Golden State drew nearer, Randy Newman’s satirical big hit would occasionally blast from the car radio:

 

From the South Bay to the Valley
From the West Side to the East Side
Everybody’s very happy
‘Cause the sun is shining all the time
Looks like another perfect day
I love L.A.

  

Celebrated in popular movies, songs, novels and short stories, Route 66 to L.A. was also known as ‘The Great Diagonal Way’ (because the Chicago-to-Oklahoma City journey ran northeast to southwest), as well as the ‘Main Street of America’ and ‘The Mother Road’.

 

After leaving Route 66, it was off to downtown San Francisco to a skyscraper carpark to return the valeted-and-washed vehicle to its rightful owner. San Francisco is a beautiful city, when viewed from above a hilltop. The crooner Tony Bennett once left his heart there:

 

To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars
The morning fog may chill the air, I don’t care

I left my heart . . .
 

—the entire trip clocking around 10,000 miles.

 

In Atlanta, a couple of weeks before leaving Reagan’s America, a 1960s ‘disposable’ Ford was purchased for $300, hitting the road again for the last time, journeying to the foothills for some final sightseeing. Along the way, a convoy of Hell’s Angles on Harley Davidson’s overtook my Sixties’ Ford jalopy. The cynical, 1969 anti-America movie Easy Rider was also a road-trip story in more ways than one. The blurb on the poster for the movie read: ‘A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it’. It should have read: ‘Two narcissist hippy stoners went looking for a perfect America that would see to all of their weed needs but couldn’t find it.’

 

America is a different place now. Just like the West (with the exception of Poland), there is a spiritual warfare between anti-theism, theism and worldview. Back in Reagan’s America, most people were too busy surfing on the wave of the president’s Tiger-booming economy, which turned out to be the greatest in American history. There was also an optimism and feel-good factor in almost every state visited.

 

The author James Nuechterlein wrote: “After weathering a severe recession, the economy, spurred by a controversial tax-cut program that Reagan steered through Congress with flair and skill, took off in 1983 on the longest peacetime expansion in American history. Leaving behind the stagflation of the 1970s, the economy grew steadily over the next seven years, while inflation, unemployment, and interest rates all declined.”
 

Echoing those sentiments in the New York Times in January 1990, Martin Anderson wrote that from 1982 to 1989 was the greatest, consistent burst of economic activity ever seen in the U.S. “In fact, it was the greatest economic expansion the world has ever seen—in any country, at any time,” he said.

 

During that period and beyond the economy, it seemed like conservative sentiment was ubiquitous. The Sexual Revolution of the previous decades was in burn-out mode but the last remining embers were still morphing. That Hippy/Glam Rock generation of Boomers were duped into thinking promiscuity/porn was about freedom and equality. It wasn’t. It enslaved them, making them docile sex addicts, distracted from the economy and political scandals, forever in a state of bondage.

 

Despite MTV videos occasionally screening sleaze in the subsequent Eighties, it was the last proverbial sting of a perverted, dying wasp that unfortunately rose again years later with the wall-to-wall, twerking degeneracy we have today as ‘music entertainment’. There is nothing more powerful than sex to enslave the masses, as a degenerate/demoralized people are easier to control. Anything-goes-sex might not literally make you go blind but it certainly dims one’s vision when political and social failings are a regular occurrence.
 

As for the failings of everyday fashion in Reagan’s America, it certainly was the decade that style forgot. Many young women had big, outlandish hair and wore shoulder-pad sweaters and skinny jeans, sometimes with legwarmers. The young men wore tracksuits or polyester polo-necks and straight-leg denims. Some had their hair styled in the then trendy mullet, which now looks hilarious, ‘complimented’ by a ridiculous-looking shell suit. The City stockbroker types wore double-breasted, pinstripe suits, as they chatted-up pretty women in bars and nightclubs.

 

In the yesteryear of Reagan’s America, there was also no anti-America, New Leftist, students rioting on the streets for more censorship, a ban on free speech, and constantly screaming ‘racist!’. Spiked magazine deputy editor, Tom Slater, wrote: “The idea that the Trump phenomenon is all about racism is as lazy as it is insulting. And the phrase white supremacy, thrown so often at Trump and his supporters, has basically lost all meaning.”

 

Also back in Reagan’s America, there was no Facebook or smartphones. Most people had to physically meet real friends face-to-face. And although the popular synthesized music was bland compared to the previous three decades, at least it wasn’t infused with ‘Smack my Bitch Up’ lyrics or tens of thousands of iPhone wavers at concerts filming it. Outside of music in the world of science and sociology, many hard facts weren’t politically incorrect and the word ‘racism’ was seldom mentioned on TV, radio or academia.

 

Even in the soulless, tacky shopping malls and on the local radio stations, to add to the sunny mood of Reagan’s America, there was a popular song at the beginning of the president’s second term in office playing non-stop called Walking on Sunshine. Despite all of this, America still had many social and health problems, as to be expected in a fallen world.

 

 

He was ultimately an enigma and a far better actor in public when he left Hollywood than when in 1951 he starred in Bedtime for Bonzo. Some six years after that movie, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road was published, another road trip with wilder adventures than mine. Kerouac, unbeknownst to most hipsters, was a Catholic and conservative. He was viewed as the ‘king of cool’ of hipster counterculture. The writer Greg Sorrell says of Kerouac: “He was a deeply religious, lifelong Republican, and he loathed the counterculture that arose in response to his writing. But he was also a broken and remorseful alcoholic undeserving of his role as a moralist, and he freely admitted it…”.

 

 

On the Reagan road trip, there are many fond memories beneath those soulful, Doo-wop skies over the vast desert plains off Route 66. Driving into the night, with the car window rolled down and the radio playing A Thousand Miles Away by the Heartbeats, the fragrance of the desert breeze was enough to induce slumber. What did a tiny spec of metal automobile, crawling slowly below on the desert floor, like a nocturnal lightning bug, look like from the night splendor of those starry constellations? A sky where the vastness of God’s Milky Way can be seen in all its miraculous glory. No smoke from factories or other pollution to spoil the view. Such a kaleidoscope is enough to trigger a seizure of vertigo. And no other landscape or skyscape could evoke such feelings of calm and awe. Back then in my Godless youth, the whole experience should’ve been nothing more than a Westworld robot gazing at the light of distant, uncreated nuclear fusion. But I must’ve intuitively believed in a Divine Creator. How could such a wonderful sight be nothing more than a cosmic ocean of meaningless particles flowing endlessly into the abyss?

 

And in 1960, the writer John Steinbeck also went in search of America with his pet poodle, which he wrote about in Travels with Charley. Steinbeck, who was famous for writing about the heartlands of America and its struggles of poverty, said he had a desire to see his country on a personal level.

Despite being cynical and looking for faults in America (what country doesn’t have faults?) he was also a talented, creative writer: “Against the descending sun the battlements were dark and clean-lined, while to the east, where the uninhibited light poured slantwise, the strange landscape shouted with color.”

 

In Steinbeck’s Magnus Opus, The Grapes of Wrath, he also wrote about another road-trip by the fictitious Joad family who leave Oklahoma after their farm is repossessed during the Great Depression. The family put everything they have into making the journey, traveling west on Route 66, a highway to hell with crowds of other migrants in tattered tents along the roadside, many returning from a failed trip to California. However, things were much different in the non-fiction world of the Fifties, Sixties and Eighties.

 

 

They also change to keep up with the times. Even the Amish community reluctantly use some technologies. Those who Kerouac spoke to and met were different to those Steinbeck and subsequently this intrepid tourist met. Love it or hate it, America is the most fascinating country in the world. The writer Dinesh D’Souza, who was policy adviser to Ronald Reagan, told the story of a friend in India who wanted to come and live in the USA. When asked why he so desperately wanted to emigrate, the friend said he wanted to live in a country where all the poor people are fat. It’s true, millions of people of all intellectual and physical shapes and sizes from around the world come to look for America. Simon and Garfunkel sang about those who both arrive and live there:

 

One day this personal great American odyssey might be repeated under a different president if Reagan’s following predictions are not astrological but instead come true with the help of God and the American people. On August 17, 1992, at the Republican National Convention in Houston, supporters of President Reagan held aloft signs, some with the slogans, “Stop The Liberal Media Lynch Mob!” (some things never change). Reagan said:

 

 

Let’s hope Emerson and Reagan are right and ‘Tomorrow’ will see better days for all those who come to look for America and those living there.

 

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Kenneth Francis has for the past 20 years worked as an editor in various publications, as well as a university lecturer in journalism. He also holds an MA in Theology and is the author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth (St Pauls Publishing).
 

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