eastside living LA

Are We There Yet? On the Road with Henry Miller, Part 2

By Eric B. Ross

Photos by Kathleen Hirai and Jason Alexander

Sixty years ago, Henry Miller saw it coming. His road trip of 1941 in a used Buick was a transect of the American dream and the product of that journey, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, is, as a consequence, as subversive a book as you will ever read.

If there was any car that epitomized the romance of the road it was the Buick. Named after its founder, David Dunbar Buick, who built his first car in 1903, the Buick company moved later that year to Flint, Michigan, where William Durant, one of the country’s leading horseless-carriage manufacturers took over the management. In 1908, he made Buick the cornerstone of his new holding company called General Motors.  

As Buick’s reputation for technical innovation and luxury grew, production soared until GM was on its way to becoming the world’s largest industrial corporation. Life in Flint was good by the fifties, when the Detroit area surpassed most other urban centers in median income and home ownership.  But, the U.S. automobile industry was already starting to face serious competition from abroad and, by the seventies, factories were starting to close. GM employment in Flint fell from a high in 1978 of 80,000 to under 23,000 two decades later. By 2007, one third of the residents of Flint were living below the poverty line. Of the very poor, one-fifth are below the age of five and, in two-thirds of poor families, there is no husband present. As of this moment, GM faces imminent bankruptcy. But, notice that no one is really talking about the citizens of Flint. We seem more concerned by the iconic significance of the American automobile, because it has come to represent whatever “freedom” we believe that American industrial capitalism offers. That was reflected in a quote attributed to GM’s president, Charlie Wilson, in 1952, just before he became Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense: “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” (It’s not quite what he said, but it’s the way it was remembered.)

The auto became the proxy for national well-being. The number of films, from Two-Lane Blacktop to Thelma and Louise, in which the car carries the psychic weight of the story is testimony to that. We all knew some local youth who could pull a car apart and put it back together in less time that it took his more erudite contemporaries to solve a quadratic equation and, whatever else you thought, there was something wonderful in that. Even Miller, who has no brief for U.S. materialism, cannot escape the influence of the almost religious quality of the automobile and is at a loss whether to compare the mechanic to a brain surgeon or a high priest. Even to even the most redoubtable iconoclast, to the inveterate automotive atheist, a driver’s license is the token of coming of age in the United States; the automobile the undisputed metric of adulthood. 

It’s just been a bad measure of the well-being of our economy. Listen to what Henry Miller says about economists. Well, actually, he’s talking about auto mechanics. “The thing I enjoy about visiting garage men is that one contradicts the other…Just when you believe you have the answer you find that you’re mistaken. A little man will tinker with your machinery for an hour and blushingly ask you for a dime, and whether he’s done the correct thing or not the car runs, whereas the big service stations will lay her up in dry dock for a few days, break her down into molecules and atoms, and then like as not she’ll run a few miles and collapse.” 

Bear with me a moment as I stretch out the paradigm. Larry Summers, head of Obama’s National Economic Council, is a big service station. So is Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury. But, the little guy who really makes your car run lives down the street. He or she and the people who stock the supermarket shelves, drive the buses and sell books at Borders are the ones who are losing their jobs. In contrast, it seems, if you run one of the big service stations, it really doesn’t seem to matter what you do. These are the people who have learned how to explore a car’s innards without getting a spot of grease on their hands and always mumble something about tightening or loosening the valves. But, as one of the mechanics told Miller: “We don’t believe in loosening them too much. But you wanted it that way, so we obliged you.” Summers, who was Bill Clinton’s last Secretary of the Treasury, left his last job as President of Harvard under a cloud. He believes that capital gains taxes should be cut to stimulate the economy – and so should unemployment insurance and welfare benefits. I personally don’t want him to touch my car.

Nor Geithner, who served in the Treasury under Summers and was director of the Policy Development and Review Department at the International Monetary Fund before becoming President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he was working at the time he failed to pay $34,000 in taxes. That, incidentally, is more than twice what the average worker at MacDonald’s earns in a year.  But, this bit of jiggery-pokery was dismissed as an “honest mistake” so he could become Treasury Secretary.

The way that Miller hands over his Buick to the manipulations of the garage mechanic tells us a lot about our society.  Sinclair Lewis got it about right in his novel, Dodsworth, published in the year of the Great Crash. Its protagonist, Sam Dodsworth, an engineer and inventor and the founder of the Revelation car company, is impelled to sell it to a larger corporation that, he knew, “with their mass production, would cheapen and ruin the Revelation and turn his thunderbolt into a standardized cigar-lighter.” Imagine what a hoot it would have been if Lewis had accompanied Miller on his journey across the States.  

But Miller had another idea. As he was driving from Pittsburgh to Youngstown, Ohio, it suddenly occurred to him “that I ought to have an American Indian by my side, that he ought to share this voyage with me, communicate to me silently or otherwise his emotions and reflections…Imagine the two of us then standing in contemplation before the hideous grandeur of one of those steel mills which dot the railway line. I can almost hear him thinking – ‘So it was for this that you deprived us of our birthright, took away our slaves, burned our homes, massacred our women and children, poisoned our souls…’”  

This is the constant theme of The Air Conditioned Nightmare: that the American dream is based on dubious assumptions about a vision of progress that devastates the landscape of the human soul. To question that definition is anathema to our rules and usually has been deterred by fear of being regarded as a communist, a homosexual or an extra-terrestrial. (That, of course, has changed considerably over the last decade. The Soviet Union is gone and gays are gaining rights, so basically we only have to be afraid that dissent will mark us as visitors from Andromeda). It makes Miller’s Nightmare the most subversive book of all his books, but I will bet that no suburban adolescent of the fifties ever tried to read it behind their parents’ back. We still think that copulation is more insidious than politics.

Where does that put the automobile? It became the embodiment of an essential contradiction in what our nation became as the pioneer moment faded into Hollywood myth. The car represented the triumph of mass production at the same time that it came to embody our sense of individualism. The irreconcilable tension between these two is the quintessential story of the United States. But it wasn’t really a tension. The reality was that the car could never give us personal liberation. Symbols, logos, brands never do. In the name of independence, all that the automobile did was lock us into and perhaps momentarily camouflage the perdurable perversities of modern capitalism. If you really want to express your distinctiveness, you would be better off having a tattoo on your forehead.

There’s the problem. The car embodies the grand deception. This country has never really allowed individual expression to go too far. A bit of chrome trim, the shape of a tail fin, perhaps. But don’t ask for much more. In a brilliant book, Peaceable Kingdoms, published in 1970, University of Pennsylvania historian, Michael Zuckerman, described the conformist limits to freedom in the New England town where “democracy” was born on the shores of North America. “A man could remain comfortably in colonial Massachusetts,” he wrote, “only as long as his actions and his ideas coincided with those of his neighbors.”  With the emergence of industrial capitalism, the comfort zone grew even more constrained, as industrial growth depended on a population of poverty-stricken immigrants, obliged and conditioned to comply with market demands for their labor. Paradoxically, the industrial system of which they were the motive power – which barely gave them a moment’s security – unleashed material production on a scale that offered them a stunning, if spurious sense of empowerment. They/we became captivated by technological innovation rather than social progress, so that, today, we fear loss of material status more than an affront to our conscience. That is what Miller’s journey in an old Buick was all about.  

An anthropologist who has recently returned to the States after 27 years, Eric B. Ross is currently a Visiting Professor of Anthropology and International Development Studies at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.  He is also the editor and chief author of The Porcupine, a new on-line magazine of irascible political commentary.

He can be reached at ross@iss.nl

www.theporcupine.org