On Rimrocking Right

Of course we would all like to "believe" in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home.

—Joan Didion, "On Morality"

The Big Empty. The Great Basin of the Intermountain West, where no rivers run seaward and no rattlers sun leeward. Mapped the Sage Desert, Sage Plains, Great Sandy Desert, the Oregon Desert, or by just that more ominous genus of the Outback, Desert. There are 215 miles of small sage and scrub juniper and bunch grass and mesquite and tumbleweeds and bullet-pocked road signs for pronghorn antelope and burros and cattle and bighorn sheep and ruts for old Borax wagons between Lakeview, Oregon, where I'd been warned to get gas, and the slot machines for regressive taxation in Winnemucca, Nevada. No cell coverage. No FM radio. The only AM of the Country/Paleo-Talk ilk, and I'd been listening to florid madmen lassoing the wide open white steppes like killjoy cowboys, fomenting about building walls and selling baby parts . . . before hearing—and wouldn't you know it—Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee" trumpet the silent majority's unease with the longhairs makin' a party out of lovin' while burning their reefer and their draft cards.

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Let's go back half an American century. To Abraham Lincoln in political ventriloquy, as a Disney-like gesticulating mannequin at the 1964–1965 New York World's Fair. Buried within later, more famous presidential tidings were the auguries of ambitious demagogues in gratification of their ruling passion he'd warned of at the age of 28 before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, in 1838, seven weeks after a rabid rabble of his fellow citizens had killed a regional newspaper editor for promulgating anti-slavery positions. In defiance of those who having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations, young Lincoln implored let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.

Let's go back to Selma and Watts and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! Governor George Romney predicted the self-inflicted "suicidal destruction of the Republican Party," and a little girl picking daisies under nuclear cumulus helped prove him (at least for a short spell) prescient. The year before at the raucous 1964 Republican Convention in San Francisco, which Norman Mailer deemed "murderous in mood," Barry Goldwater (who'd carry but five Southern states and cede two-third majorities in both the House and the Senate) swore the country would not "stagnate in the swampland of collectivism." California governor Pat Brown was there and felt "the stench of fascism is in the air." Seventy percent of the delegates deemed the recent Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. "A new breed of Republican had taken over the GOP," observed Jackie Robinson.

In 1965 the Medicare Bill passed, so did the Voting Rights Act, while our first troops landed in Vietnam, and Congress stipulated a ten-thousand-dollar fine for immolating a draft card.

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As it happens I am on Oregon SR 140, at Doherty Rim, that 8 percent grade, that finger to the angle of repose, in a yellow 2013 Volkswagen Beetle, and it is July, and I am high. Some 6,240 feet in fact. I cannot seem to make the spinning steering wheel work, and my merry-go-round stomach threatens to fly right out in front of me, but there is no traffic, so far, in the Forbidden Zone, as long-haulers must eschew this route, though some big rigs chance it at their risk—at my risk—and if I ride the brake straddling the center line I can try to forget the dizzying fact that there are no guardrails between me and the lurching possibility of rimrocking right, though out...