Slouching Towards Bethlehem

1. American Dream's Dark Side: Disorder and Violence in the Golden Land.

the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.

California's harsh reality. The San Bernardino Valley, east of Los Angeles, is depicted not as a coastal paradise but a place haunted by the desert wind, fostering unease, suicide, and divorce. It's a final destination for those seeking a new life, often finding it shaped by tabloid fantasies rather than reality. This is where Midwestern ways clash with a harsh landscape, leading to peculiar cultural grafts.

The Miller case. The murder trial of Lucille Miller in San Bernardino becomes a tabloid monument to this new, distorted lifestyle. The case, involving adultery, insurance money, and a staged car fire, reveals a middle-class world where violence and blackmail become commonplaces, mirroring plots from pulp fiction and film noir. The dream of prosperity and a better life devolves into a sordid, predictable tragedy.

A culture of wanting. Lucille Miller is portrayed as a woman who wanted too much – a new house, parties, status symbols – and was ultimately driven by "love and greed." The trial exposes a community where the pursuit of the good life, as seen in movies and newspapers, leads to a breakdown of traditional values and a chilling disconnect from reality, culminating in a crime that seemed both shocking and strangely inevitable.

2. The Counterculture's Fragility: Lost Children in the Haight-Ashbury.

At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing.

Social hemorrhaging. San Francisco in 1967 is presented as the epicenter of societal breakdown, where missing children gather, calling themselves "hippies." This is not open revolution but a quiet atomization, a country where families disappear, and adolescents drift, shedding past and future, ignorant of the social games that once held things together. The center is not holding.

A vacuum of meaning. The children in the Haight-Ashbury are often young, earnest, and disconnected, seeking community in a social vacuum. They experiment with drugs, talk vaguely of nonviolence and love, but lack a coherent ideology or understanding of the world they've dropped out of. Their vocabulary is limited to platitudes, reflecting the society's own self-doubts.

Vulnerability and manipulation. The Haight-Ashbury scene is depicted as fragile and easily exploited. Children are vulnerable to drugs, violence, and manipulation by activists seeking to harness their energy for political ends. The dream of a peaceful, loving community clashes with the harsh realities of street life, revealing a generation unprepared for the world and waiting for someone to give them the words or direction they lack.

3. Hollywood's Empty Fantasies: The Illusion of Power and Freedom.

He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.

The Hollywood monster. Hollywood is often seen as a destructive force, stifling creativity and poisoning the soul, a "System" that ruins talent. This romantic vision persists, even as the old studio system collapses and independent production becomes the norm. The industry itself perpetuates the myth, blaming external forces for its creative shortcomings.

Fantasy over reality. The stories surrounding figures like Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire, reveal a fascination with absolute personal freedom, mobility, and privacy – a secret American desire. Hughes, controlling a vast industrial empire from behind locked doors, embodies this dream, becoming a folk hero despite being the antithesis of official ideals. His story highlights the gap between what Americans say they want and what they secretly desire.

Didacticism over style. With the supposed freedom of independent production, many American directors choose to focus on "issues" or "problems," often rehashing outdated or obvious themes. This didactic approach, lacking in style or originality, results in films that feel calculated and uninspired, suggesting that the problem isn't the "System" but a lack of imagination and a comfortable reliance on clichés.

4. California's Elusive Identity: A Land of Boom and Loss.

Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

A frontier's end. California, particularly the Central Valley, is portrayed as a place where the westward movement ends, a land of immense potential but also profound melancholy. It's a place where families have been for generations, marked by a sense of having outlived their finest hour, haunted by the past while grappling with rapid, often jarring, change.

The Valley's character. The Central Valley towns, like Sacramento, share a peculiar insularity and a paralysis by a past no longer relevant. They are farm towns transformed by defense industries and subdivisions, losing their original character and raison d'être. The wealth generated by agriculture and aerospace contrasts with the monochromatic flatness and a pervasive indifference to the outside world.

Lost history. The rapid development means the real past is being paved over and replaced by a manufactured one. Old stories and ways of life disappear, unknown to the new inhabitants. This loss of connection to history leaves a void, symbolized by abandoned ranches and vandalized family graveyards, highlighting the transient nature of identity in a place constantly reinventing itself.

5. The Necessity of Self-Respect: Facing the Uncomfortable Truths Within.

innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

The illusion of self. Self-respect is not about external approval, reputation, or superficial virtues like good manners. It begins when one is forced to confront oneself honestly, without self-deception. This confrontation, often triggered by failure or disappointment, reveals the gap between the person one pretends to be and the person one is.

The internal audience. Without self-respect, one becomes an unwilling audience to an endless review of one's failings and betrayals. This internal torment cannot be soothed by external comforts or distractions. True self-respect comes from accepting responsibility for one's actions and choices, a quality once called character.

A developed discipline. Self-respect is not innate but a discipline, a habit of mind that requires facing fears and doubts, weighing immediate comforts against larger, intangible ones. It involves recognizing that anything worth having has a price and being willing to pay it. This discipline allows one to discriminate, to love, and to remain indifferent, freeing oneself from the need to please others and the resulting alienation from self.

6. Keeping a Notebook: Not Fact, But How It Felt to Be Me.

Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

Compulsive recording. The impulse to keep a notebook is a peculiar compulsion, not primarily for factual record but for something more personal. Early notebooks reveal a predilection for the extreme and the invented, suggesting that the distinction between what happened and what might have happened is less important than the feeling evoked.

Subjective truth. The notebook is not about observing others but about capturing how things felt to the writer. Overheard dialogue, impressions of people, or random facts serve as triggers to remember a specific mood, a moment in time, and the person one was then. The details, even if embellished or inaccurate, are chosen because they illuminate an internal state.

Connecting with past selves. Keeping a notebook is a way to stay in touch with the people one used to be. Forgetting past selves – the loves, betrayals, whispers, and screams – leads to them reappearing unannounced, demanding recognition. The notebook serves as a lifeline to these former selves, a reminder of who one was, who one is not, and the continuous process of becoming.

7. The Burden of Home: Navigating Family and the Irrelevant Past.

The question of whether or not you could go home again was a very real part of the sentimental and largely literary baggage with which we left home in the fifties; I suspect that it is irrelevant to the children born of the fragmentation after World War II.

The weight of family. For a certain generation, "home" in the Central Valley represents a vital but troublesome distinction from the life built elsewhere. Family dynamics are difficult, oblique, and rooted in a shared, often unspoken, history. Communication is coded, revolving around local concerns like property and the misfortunes of acquaintances, creating a sense of unease for outsiders.

Generational shift. The concept of "home" as the source of all tension and drama may be specific to those born before the fragmentation of society after World War II. Younger generations, growing up cut loose from traditional family structures and community webs, may not carry the same burden or understand the romantic degradation associated with breaking from the past.

Loss and disconnect. Returning home highlights the disconnect between the past and the present. Familiar places change, memories blur with handed-down stories, and the sense of belonging feels increasingly tenuous. The inability to fully share this past with one's children underscores the irreversible shift in how life is lived, leaving a sense of melancholy for what cannot be given or retrieved.

8. Morality's Primitive Core: Loyalty Over Abstract Ideals.

Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

Beyond abstract good. In the harsh landscape of Death Valley, abstract notions of "morality" feel suspect. True morality is found not in ideals but in primitive social codes, like the promise not to abandon the dead to coyotes. This "wagon-train morality" is rooted in loyalty to those one loves and the basic instinct for survival, learned through cautionary tales of those who failed in their primary loyalties.

The danger of conscience. Claiming the primacy of personal conscience is seen as arrogant and potentially insidious. History is filled with madmen and murderers who justified their actions by saying they followed their conscience. In a world that can appear as a Hieronymous Bosch painting, relying solely on individual conscience can lead to destructive impulses.

Factitious moral burdens. The frequent use of the word "morality" in public discourse often assigns factitious burdens to straightforward political or policy questions. This self-indulgence allows people to assuage private guilt in public causes, transforming personal desires into moral imperatives. This self-deception, however, leads to hysteria and trouble, obscuring the pragmatic realities behind actions.

9. Places of the Mind: Seeking Meaning in Landscapes of Despair.

to like a place like that you have to want a moat.

Landscapes of isolation. Certain places, like Alcatraz Island, appeal to a desire for isolation and detachment. These ruins, devoid of human vanities and reclaimed by nature, offer a sense of being cut off, a moat against the complexities and demands of the outside world. They are places where one can observe life from a distance, finding a peculiar peace in their emptiness.

Disorientation and rebirth. Driving through the Sonoran desert to Guaymas is a journey of disorientation, a deliberate attempt to escape oneself through heat, deceptive perspectives, and a sense of oppressive reality. The desert strips away the familiar, leading to a feeling of being shriven, reborn upon returning, highlighting the transformative power of confronting difficult landscapes.

Memory and loss in paradise. Hawaii, despite its image as a tropical paradise, is steeped in a mood of war and loss. From Pearl Harbor to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, the landscape is marked by reminders of conflict and young lives lost. This history, intertwined with the island's economy and social change, creates a complex emotional resonance that goes beyond mere leisure, engaging the imagination with the indelible events of the past.

Last updated: May 7, 2025