Wine-Dark America

Orlando is waiting for us all

How much do we really know about the vaults and caverns which lie somewhere under the structure of a great nation; about these psychic catacombs in which all our concealed desires, our fearful dreams and evil spirits, our vices and our forgotten and unexpiated sins, have been buried for generations?

—Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

Whenever I think of Kerouac, I think about how by the time his book had seeped into society and all the 20-year-old Boomers were putting it in their rucksacks and hitting the road, he was already over it, well and truly over it—a reactionary middle-aged man living with his mom down in Orlando, probably screaming at the TV set.

“I’ve got to figure out how I could possibly spawn Jerry Rubin, Mitchell Goodman, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg..." he wrote, self-searchingly that cataclysmic year of his death, 1969. "All because I wrote a matter-of-fact account of true adventure on the road (hardly an agitational propaganda account) featuring an ex-cowhand and ex-footballer driving across the continent north, northwest, midwest and southland looking for lost fathers, odd jobs, good times, and girls and winding up on the railroad."

In the end, Kerouac's books were about having a tight crew cut and loving America and looking for God and being a kind of misfit by accident. The true hidden lineage of wine-dark America, the America of the lonesome railroad whistle and the good green smell of the pine forests is Melville→Wolfe→Kerouac (whose first novel was a transparent imitation of Wolfe’s 1929 Look, Homeward Angel) and I guess that sickly frog Proust. Proust and Melville are considered acceptable today in polite literary company, Kerouac and Wolfe are not.

At root, Kerouac was a conservative, a Catholic, and a Republican. Like Dostoevsky, maybe it was his intimate knowledge of the underbelly and the subterranean dregs that fueled his return to God, and respect for order and normal life.

The freeballing counter cultural leftism that associated itself with Kerouac was an unnatural appendage sewed on.

It was sewed on by others. It reminds me of the Bernie Sanders ad, and how the American Communists in the 1930s did patriotic-soft-culture-front for the Comintern, and to some degree the American radicals in the 60s made a big deal about how they were patriotic in their own way, Abbie Hoffman wore the flag etc—they did that not because they were actually patriotic or loved America, but it was a tool to convert people to their cause. They didn't actually believe in a country, a nation.

I think it's a big problem that right-wing people actually love America and left-wing people either don't love America, or pretend to love America to gain converts while quietly having the goal of abolishing all borders.

I keep finding myself drawn to this line from Orwell's great essay, "The Lion and the Unicorn":

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. It is the bridge between the future and the past. No real revolutionary has ever been an internationalist.

Deep down, the left wing in countries like the USA and Sweden is a kabuki because it is built on, as Orwell put it, “Kicking against a system theoretically that you are practically very well satisfied with."

Let me try an analogy, I don’t fully have the words to describe what I mean exactly, so it's going to be a bit of a stretch:

While they're both ostensibly about gay life, there is a vast chasm between the gay life of Brokeback Mountain and the gay life of Shortbus.

Both are “countercultural” and “transgressive” but one is tinged with the shadow and patriotism and the hidden and one is open and distinctly left-wing political.

In a way Kerouac was kind of like the many closeted gay men in positions of power in Washington DC over the decades who move in straight-laced, conservative circles, and have a strong preference for their sexual life to be an illicit, seedy hidden little thing, rather than to be "out" building a queer movement to be "self-expressed.”

The limits of so-called American "freedom" and "self-expression" was also repellant to Joan Didion—a Goldwater Republican—as she made her way through the needley monuments and ruins of California counterculture.

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I spent election night at a big gala party in Stockholm—a collaboration between the right-leaning and the social-democratic think tanks. If you squinted, it looked kind of like a Free Press event, but the “heterodox” turn has not really made it to Sweden yet, probably one or two years delayed like everything else. The Ukraine and NATO question, Russia fears, and the question of "European values" still predominate—something something climate, something something LGBTQ, democracy.

The pressure had been building on me for weeks. I try to never bring up politics at a dinner party or drinks or among family, but people were asking me over and over "who will you be voting for?" and I told them neither, I wasn't voting for either of them and then people would get silent and weird—gasp, gasp—not using your democratic right, your valuable American vote, in the most important election of all of our lifetimes?

The election party—a bad night—I spilled my beer all over the ancient old man in a suit sitting next to me, there all alone, scribbling in his little moleskine notebook (I would rather have spilled a beer on almost anyone, anyone else); I got annoyed during the video clips and montages at how funny and quirky and stupid they found American voters—like looking at my own world through the fishbowl lens of imperialism. I couldn't follow the jokes and layers of irony in Swedish. There was a quiz on American history and some wonky, extremely-America-knowing Swedish guy won—he even had a podcast, in Sweden, about the intricacies of American government.

Back at home, a fight with my girlfriend about politics. Not a big fight, just a brittle little argument. She thinks I'm too populist, too contrarian and right-wing. She’s right. But I always want to point at the frothing mob behind me and say, You think I'm bad? You should really see how the people are talking back home. Compared to them, I'm a moderate!

Woke up the next morning after pissed off and hungover and foggy outside and for some reason craving fast food. I had woken up in the middle of the night and watched an interview with Trump's old friend Dana White, the UFC guy—he said he had never once seen Trump drink water. He stays up all night eating cheeseburgers, Milky Ways, drinking Coke, he works for 48 hours at a time—like some kind of sober, American-trash monster. Vegetables might kill him.

I opened Foodora and ordered McDonald's delivery at 11 AM—the first time I've ever ordered fast food delivery in my life. It was an incredible meal. Sometimes for an American far from home, McDonald’s is an elixir of the gods. I worried that maybe it was subliminal, bending myself toward power, toward dear leader. I felt sad for unclear reasons and in a foul mood, but also kind of giddy.

After the election, I got a host of new subscribers from my pre-election essay Is America As Soul-Sick as It Looks?—in it, I wrote about America being sick in the head and Sweden being kind of OK. I guess it resonated with the new lost-lefty doomerism.

I feel a deep urge to alienate and disappoint these new subscribers, to alienate any group that would embrace me as a member.

I did not vote for Trump or Kamala, I did not come to Sweden because of Trump or politics (I came for love, I was shipwrecked and marooned in Ultima Thule by the sirens) and I didn't particularly care whether it was Trump or Kamala.

There is almost no kind of person I like less than Americans who have come to live outside of America during the Trump era and make vague allusions to having left America because of the Trump or “the fascism.” I meet these types occasionally in Sweden—they're always people with distinctly upper-middle-class California, the Pacific Northwest or New York accents—they are never actually "vulnerable" and they are definitely not "vulnerable populations."

I'm not sure I can bear listening to another liberal or leftist or European asking how this could happen, America is so bad, how this could be America, where are all the decent people. Oh there are none!, they cry out, half the country has gone nazi. Maybe? We'll see? The leftists blame the liberals and the liberals blame the leftists and the Europeans just can't believe we'd elect such a horrible indecent man, smoke is blowing out of all the ears, the brains are popping out the tops of their heads.

Our mistake was simply loving too much, being too empathetic, not knowing we lived in such an awful country, Rebecca Solnit whines in a delusional op-ed, expressing the sentiments of millions of stuck-up whiners. Please God, spare me, spare us, just this once.

The leftists are even getting the old band back together blaming the "neoliberal democratic party" and the "Bernie could win" when several elections showed Bernie definitely could not win.

The Swedes call what is happening in America now "nationalism." I can tell you for sure there are dark sewers filled with shit right underneath the purported "decency" of Sweden. The Swedes sublimate their nationalism into soccer and and a smug kind of "we are the best" superior view of themselves as the most democratic and equal, but I think all the nationalism is right there underneath, barely concealed, as it is in all Germanic nations. Just because a man takes out his anger by aggressively riding his road bike while wearing spandex instead of getting into fights at the bar doesn't make him not aggressive.

If Sweden is not for Sweden, who will be for Sweden? America? Are we supposed to be Europe's daddy forever ad infinitum, the place where you go bang on the door to get money and also the place you psychoanalytically equate with violence, sexuality, fun, all the good and bad things in life?

The Democrats are now racing to bury the body of wokeness—if you confront them about it, they’re empty handed and say, did it ever exist, really, there's no wokeness in the room with us right now, what are you talking about crazy?

If you want anything good, they said, like healthcare or Medicaid, you have to put up with the people we've decided to make a backbone of our coalition. That's the rules.

Call it wokeness, call it whatever you want, but the Democrats made a pact with it and no one ever forgets anything. It's gonna be all revenge from here on out.

America is not leftist or even that liberal, it's never going to go for walkable cities and a polite little social democracy—too many warring identity tribes. And in the end, we don't all want to be the same, we want to be left alone to do our own thing.

It's not an awful country, it's a wonderful country, and I promise you, the leftists main problem is not loving too much, it's being delusional about what country they're living in.

At some point, it starts to seem like the leftists are trying to put a square peg into a round hole. It just doesn't fit. It won't ever fit.

It's not in America's DNA.

America is not that complicated, people over-complicate it with all their fancy ideas about how things should be. All the over-the-top 80s punk anthems were basically accurate about America: drive a car, party hard, eat cheeseburgers and burritos, argue with your wife out in the suburbs. That's it. That's what it is. If someone steps out of line or creates a moral scandal, stone them in the public square, unless they're on your team, then stone the people who are stoning them.

When you look at the American culture wars since 1945—it's always the same story repeated over and over again in a hundred little flashpoints and mini-dramas.

Each new incarnation of the American left rises and says, hey everybody, we’re a fun multicultural mass movement, we’re for rock n roll or jazz or hippie music or punk and we’re out here in the streets, a grand coalition of young people, black people, women, queers, and left-wing unionists and we’re for self-expression, cultural revolution, anti-racism, feminism, and having abortions.

A grumpy suburban right rises to meet it and says noooooo, we don’t care what you do in your bedrooms but don’t put it in our face, we’re for building families, entrepreneurship, being normal, economic libertarianism and focusing on America’s many enemies abroad.

All you have to do is try to read Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge, Reaganland, or Nixonland, to see how fast this story gets old and repetitive.

A central moment that I think not enough people talk about: Biden and his advisors convinced themselves that he was the second coming of FDR and would pass the New New Deal. They needed an economic crisis so they laundered the transitory covid economy as the Great Depression 2.0. A little white lie, no one would notice, it was all for the greater good, just expand the welfare state. Big mistake.

I’m open to being completely wrong. Maybe all the other most important elections have just been dress rehearsals for this one, the last election. Maybe I'll rue the day. Maybe the 1930-33 alliance of convenience between the private equity tech founders and the scrappy, racist street-fighting nazi perverts is actually here. Maybe it really will be, First they came for the undocumented Venezuelans, and I did not speak out, for I was not an undocumented felonious Venezuelans.

Me personally, I'm sick of it all, sick of politics. It's just endless action and reaction, each side always building on the unbearableness of the other. From what I've seen, the people who've been most determined to "resist Trump" for nine years have only made and strengthened what they claim to hate. Shadow-work. We have to embrace and accept our shadows.

I have been consciously trying to become more and more apolitical, to approach people as individuals and not on the basis of whatever it is they purport to believe. People are always lying to others and to themselves, they're always reacting towards or against something anyway, it's all passing away. I want to be more and more like those early 20th century quietists who only cared about painting and poetry and their family and eternal things.

I find myself increasingly agreeing with the post-crack-up, washed-up version of Kerouac, when he writes things like:

I think I’ll drop out—great American tradition—Dan’l Boone, U.S. Grant, Mark Twain—I think I’ll go to sleep and suddenly in my deepest inadequacy nightmares wake up haunted and see everyone in the world as unconsolable orphans yelling and screaming on every side to make arrangements.

In a way Kerouac's story is the way of all American flesh—the pilgrim’s progress from the bright lefty-avante-garde dawn of Greenwich Village and San Francisco to the final destination, Orlando. It's basically Orlando all the way down, as far as the eye can see. I'm coming, I'm halfway there.

Orlando is waiting for me, it's waiting for us all. Endless sunshine and orange juice and palm trees. I love Orlando. I love Florida. I love the sprawling, weird suburban American cities like Virginia Beach and Tampa and Houston—where a little bit of the old mystery remains and it seems like you might actually stumble on a hidden door.

I love America because I started to accept America, but I can only love America when I’m away from America because I love the America of my dreams and memories not actually-existing America, I don't want to fight against anything anymore, I have learned to love big brother, I will stay down in my dark basement bashing my head against a poster of dear leader on the wall screaming, Respect Mr. Trump! Respect!

I love our magick kingdom.