I heard Don McLean's full-length version of "American Pie" on the oldies station yesterday and realized that exactly 50 years had passed since a small plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper crashed in a storm in Iowa. February 3, 1959, the day the music died. The three men Don McLean admired most Went West on that fateful day. Buddy Holly would have appreciated the subtle irony of McLean's lyrics: that'll be the day that this'll be the day that I die.
The imagery of the song conveys a loss of innocence in the decade that passed between the plane crash and McLean's great breakout hit. Asked what all the references were, what the song meant, Don just said the song meant that "I'll never have to work again." McLean was born a year before I was, and I know what he was writing about. It's all there, James Dean, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, the last Candlestick concert, Altamont, Janis Joplin ("I saw a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some happy news, but she just smiled and turned away..."). All the formative icons of my own youth. We had that one somnolent decade, the Fifties, the era one Beat called "The Air Conditioned Nightmare," and then America started happening at warp speed. Race riots, Vietnam, four dead in Ohio, the breakdown in trust between rulers and ruled.
I kind of felt for James Howard Kunstler, the Clusterf**k Man linked to the right, as I read through his latest paean to a Gone America a couple of days ago. He always writes as if he's trying to summon some idealized future into existence, but I think what he's doing (as another almost exact contemporary of mine) is trying to invoke a vanished past. He wrote about his recent trip to Montgomery, Alabama and the "asteroid belt" of chain stores, strip malls, "muffler shops," fast food joints. He was even a little hard on the old town center around the Capitol, depicted in my own photo of Dexter Avenue up above, taken from the street in front of Dr. King's Baptist Church. It's not all that bad around the state house, I didn't think, but I do know what he means about the asteroid belt and the faded green and ocher color of the land around Montgomery. It was approaching Montgomery from the east on old U.S. 80 five years ago that I first realized that my sketchy recollections of the Old South had no counterpart in contemporary reality.
I owe to Mr. Kunstler the data bit that about 70% of all manmade structures around us in America were built (or thrown up) since about 1950, so the America that Buddy, Ritchie and the Bopper said goodbye to a long time ago has been fundamentally altered in the decades since. Not just the music and the simplicity, but the basic look of the place is very different. I grew up in a subdivision built right at the beginning of the post-War boom, so in some ways I never knew anything else. I understand what the Celebrated Mr. K is writing (and grousing) about, completely, this uglified look of the American Crapscape. Still, I don't think it does much good to live in a fugue of constant revulsion, to exist in an emotional war with your senses as you drive around America and take it all in. James is just one of those exquisitely aware souls who reacts (violently, almost) to the depredations of modernity, to the abolition of beauty. For better or worse (and it's decidedly worse), this is what we came up with when we decided to "develop" the suburban areas of America. It's hideous. Almost all of it is an unrelieved horror, punctuated only by the enclaves of the wealthy, where Nature is allowed a tenuous continuity. (You see, it's not that we don't know what's pleasing to the senses; we just don't think it's important for anyone who can't afford it.)
You have to take from that what you can. The aesthetics are intellectual, that's for sure. You can glean something of an understanding about how humans relate to one another, the kinds of habitations they will build for one another to live in (to wit: a maximized return on investment achieved by building dwellings at the lowest possible level of acceptability), and how we relate to Nature, that is, by completely obliterating all sign of it. That is something to know, however. Something you pick up during your journey of life. As Thoreau said, a single Truth is enough for the seeker.
Not strange, then, that we look always for that transcendent moment of grace. Even when February makes you shiver, you're glad for the great ones who made the journey with you, and made it all a little easier to take.
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