A Letter to the Religious Right

Nearly forty years ago Jerry Falwell Sr. emerged on the national stage, a happy warrior and leader of a movement that would become the Moral Majority. It was a movement that seemed at once to stand outside, over and above, what it considered to be a degenerating culture, demanding that it reform itself. At the same time, it was engaged, with its feet planted firmly on the ground and determined to win over not just the hearts and minds of the public, but seats in the House and the Senate.
   Even for those of us who couldn’t quite get on board with their agenda, Falwell’s movement was difficult to criticize. Here were Christians who took their faith seriously enough to take it, as it were, to the streets. I was 20 in 1980. I had been raised in a Methodist church and religious faith has always been important to me, something I have never quite relinquished even during slack periods when doubt and indifference overtake me. I was a “deacon” of the ecumenical church at my small liberal arts school. I thought briefly of going into the ministry (a bad idea Im very glad I never acted on) and thought more seriously about studying academic theology (something I wish to this day I had done).
   As a Methodist I absorbed the ethic of doing good works (“Do all the good that you can, wherever you can, whenever you can.”) As a college student I thrilled to my undergraduate dose of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Christianity I was attracted to was concerned with social justice. The historical Jesus I knew was the Jesus whose concern was always the poor, outcasts, the marginalized, including women (especially widows who had it very bad in his day). It continues to be baffling, in fact, how anyone can read the gospels and come away with any other portrait. It was a faith that claimed for Christ the whole of human experience, the repair of the world so that the community of man would mirror the Kingdom of God, nothing less. The faith of Falwell and the religious right, in contrast, seemed to takes its stand on a narrow beachhead of personal salvation and private behavior, still more narrowly circumscribed to the area of sexuality. It seemed, and seems to me now, an enormous retreat.
   But Falwell and his movement made its mark and it clearly resonated with millions who felt that the values that had built America were being shuffled off.  It captured the attention of Ronald Reagan, and was a vital component of the conservative Republican revival. In any social history of late 20^th century America, the “religious right” had earned a chapter all to themselves.
   In time, there would be slips in the façade that seemed to confirm what some of us thought of the movement—as when Falwell suggested that the 9/11 attacks were America’s retribution for a culture of abortion and homosexuality. Now, in the aftermath of the ugliest political campaign in our history, a humiliation of international proportions in which you the public leaders of the “religious right” fell (with some notable exceptions) one by one into line with Donald Trump—today I and people like me, of every shade of faith and skepticism, wonder, quite literally, how you look yourselves in the mirror.
   Where does one begin? It ought to be entirely sufficient to mention simply that the candidate you backed has exhibited—not just during his campaign, but throughout his adult life and career in the public eye—every sort of behavior that decent parents admonish their children to avoid. A loudmouth, a braggart, a bully, a crybaby who is insulted easily, yet easily and breezily insults, a compulsive liar. And you know the laundry list of recent revelations—the jilting of contractors and employees, the claims against Trump University, the bankruptcies, the failed casinos and businesses—you know the list and you ignored it all. Of course, there is the famous Access Hollywood tape that captured your candidate’s distinctive style with women; that’s the one that caused Paul Ryan and other Republicans to be (briefly) shocked, shocked, and prompted Ralph “Family Values” Reed to pronounce Trump—using that conscienceless, value-free label so emblematic of baby-boomer moral neutrality—“inappropriate.”
   But honest to God, who is so sweetly naïve as to have been honestly surprised to learn that this man is a coarse, crude, vulgar reptilian? Boys will be boys—right?—and now the episode barely registers (a measure, itself, of political degeneracy). But some things do stand out and retain their capacity to take the breath away (at least for those of us capable of shock and shame). Trump’s mockery of a disabled reporter is one—perhaps because it was captured on video and replays itself in the mind like a traumatic memory. Maybe you take your lead from Ann (“Godless: The Church of Liberalism”) Coulter who rationalized that Trump was merely mimicking a “generic retard.”
   Is that how you explain this to your children?
   Or take Trump’s astonishingly, brazenly dishonest description of an altercation that took place, late in the campaign, during a rally at which President Obama was speaking. A veteran stood up and began heckling the president; predictably, some people in the crowd booed, attempting to silence him. But Obama lightly scolded the crowd and insisted the man, who served the country, had a right to have his say. The exchange was, of course, videotaped and can be viewed online.
   Later at his own rally—also, of course, videotaped and easily accessible--Trump described the exchange saying the President was “screaming” at the veteran, and called Obama’s behavior a “disgrace.” 
   Spend even just a minute or two to meditate on this: Trump made a patently false, publicly defamatory pronouncement about the President’s behavior during a rally that he knew (as all of us know now about virtually everything that doesn’t happen in the deepest warrens of our own homes) would be videotaped and widely available on the web. He made this statement (at a rally he also knew was being recorded) either not knowing what the President actually said or did; or he made it knowing exactly what the President said and did, and lied anyways. In either case--and this is really the important thing--he didn't care.   

   Do you care? Evidently not. Are you ashamed of not caring? I guess not. Does it matter to you what this behavior, when it is endorsed or overlooked by moralists such as you, does to the entire understanding of public truth? Evidently not.

   Spare me, spare all of us, your prevarications about Hillary Clinton. Drop it. There are countless ways you might have approached this travesty of a campaign without endorsing Mrs. Clinton and salvaged your integrity.

“We the public leaders of the contemporary Christian conservative political movement (the so-called `religious right’) urge Americans of faith to vote their conscience. However, we feel obligated to state that this entire campaign, and these candidates—both of them—are the rotten fruit of a political culture that is shot to pieces. This ruin has been a long-time in the making, with blame to go around on all sides (however much we as conservatives may feel that the great bulk of blame lay on the other side) and is ultimately rooted in a larger, broader culture degeneration which the founders of our political movement first began to point to nearly 40 years ago. Whatever the outcome of this election, Christians of all shades of belief must come together afterward to work to repair our democratic Republic.”

But no. Listen to William “Book of Virtues” Bennet on Fox News who said that Republicans who opposed Trump “suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country.” How else to translate this except as follows: manners, civility, the norms of civilized discourse, are all an elitist affectation, unrelated to the substance of our politics, and irrelevant in judging the fitness of any candidate.

   On that note, by the way, would any of you dare to look anyone in the eye and say that your candidate would have been as gracious in defeat as Hillary Clinton was, and as Barack Obama, who endured eight years of nihilistic obstruction, continues to be? Right…Don’t even bother. Just move on and let that one go.  
   Mr. “Death of Outrage” Bennet was clearly cashing in on the current stock, lately risen so high, around the notion that “elitism”—which evidently includes commonplace and traditionally understood instincts toward civility and truth-saying—is what afflicts our politics. Yet nowhere among the conservative media outlets have I read anything remotely as sympathetic to Trump’s supporters as Larissa Macfarquhar’s article, “In Trump Country,” in The New Yorker—that citadel of the Manhattan literary and intellectual elite.  Read it--there is not a trace of that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger condescension that sometimes characterizes liberal-left attitudes toward the underclass; it is an authentically sympathetic, even admiring, portrait of Trump supporters in rural West Virginia.
   By the way, I believe that your candidate should—as Mrs. Clinton suggested—be given a chance, despite my foreboding. He’s big on infrastructure (name a candidate who isn't) and everyone will smile if gets some bridges repaired. And, let us acknowledge: the man likes to build things. The nation needs a grand project (the interstate highway system, the Apollo space mission) to inspire it again.  So maybe your candidate will incite some clever entrepreneurs and engineers to throw a great string of gondolas across the West Virginia mountains, creating a monumental statewide park that will attract millions of tourists, hikers and campers to that beautiful state, employing tens of thousands of state residents and helping to rekindle a national awareness of Appalachian history and culture. And maybe he will couple this great national project with a massive infusion of public dollars for mental health and substance abuse treatment to battle the off-the-charts opioid epidemic there. 
   (I just made that up sitting at the laptop. You tell us what the New York City real estate mogul with the trophy wives intends to do for those people in Larissa Macfarquhar’s portrait.)
   Maybe he will be successful, or less disastrous than some of us fear. Perhaps inertia and the stuck forces everywhere (inertia plus stuck forces = “reality”) will rein in the man’s crazier impulses. Perhaps he won’t launch a nuclear war on a whim when he has a bad hair day and can’t find his I-phone. Perhaps someone sane will urge him to give the heave-ho to the unsanitary figures around him (Roger Stone, Steve Bannon). Maybe he will surprise us all, and all of the drama on Facebook and Broadway theaters will be shown to be so much foolishness.  Perhaps, who knows, your man will end up someday engraved on the side of Mt. Rushmore, his trousers down, seated on the crapper and studying his I-phone, his brow furrowed in mid-tweet—a final, enduring, case-closing rebuke to elites everywhere: This is who we are, get over it.
   Or not. Where will you hide your shame when it becomes clear that those tiny bones he tossed to the working class during the campaign will be all they will ever get, as your man stocks his cabinet with billionaire businessmen? Shamelessness. That’s the key to getting by for the next four years with your candidate who was forced to shell out millions to striving regular folks defrauded in his “University,” and as the revelations about his many conflicted interests emerge. Reach for the most shameless excuses as his curious crush on Vladimir Putin evolves, with ominous consequences for the NATO alliance and the Baltic states you would otherwise be howling at Democrats for having “lost.” Shamelessness is what will enable you to hold your head up when the peculiar childishness of this man’s temperament begins to unnerve the closed circle around him, and he careens from one drama to the next, punctuating the reality show with angry, semi-literate tweets composed at 3 am and aimed at whoever has not—in the Trump parlance strikingly reminiscent of a first-grader coming home from school in tears—been “nice” to him.
   Shamelessness, no need to hide anything. After all, you hold all the cards. The executive branch, both houses of Congress, a majority of governorships and state legislatures—all this along with your gerrymandered congressional districts, your multi-million-dollar megaphone at Fox News, the Koch Brothers, and legions of one-percenters determined keep employed those legislators in Congress whom Garrison Keillor called “Christian pirates with their hands on the tax levers.”
   Many of us—whose patriotism you would readily impugn if it was advantageous to do so—do indeed feel profoundly afraid for our country. Resentment toward our fellow citizens who voted for Donald Trump is not the way out, but for you, the leaders of a movement that has claimed for 40 years to champion the cause of character, integrity and values in our politics, there will be no forgetting and no forgiveness.
   There is a tremendous liberation that comes with finally seeing things as they are, at finally seeing you and your “movement” in all its naked shamelessness for what it is. Moreover, some of us will hold on to an assurance that, in fact, you are not the future. Now when the attendant of the man of God had risen early and gone out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was circling the city. And his servant said to him, "Alas, my master! What shall we do?" He answered, “Fear not, for there are more of us than there are of them.”
   There are more of us than there are of you. Here is the nub of what I have to say: you will never, ever again lecture Americans about the need for character and integrity in our leaders without being met by the rolling thunder of derisive laughter followed by the silence of contemptuous disregard. You have won another battle, congratulations. You have lost your war.

American Story: Thirty Days by Greyhound and a Meditation on Patriotism

I’d done a year and a half of college, done okay, sort of, but must have felt that it was a path that was being mapped out by someone else, so that summer in 1980 I mapped out my own course, a bus trip across the country by Greyhound, staying at youth hostels, and lit out. I was 20 years old.
   I remember plotting it out over a map of the United States spread out before me on the floor of my bedroom in the suburban home I grew up in. I would go to New Orleans, then up to St. Louis, out across the Rockies to Colorado, then to Salt Lake, then to San Francisco. Id turn back east stopping at the Grand Canyon; make a stop in Ohio to see my grandparents. And then I would come home. That’s how I decided it, just like that, sitting on the floor and looking at a map. I would do this using a Greyhound Bus Ameripass, which in 1980 allowed you to travel for 30 days, wherever and as much as you needed to, for $300, staying in youth hostels along the way.
   It was a humidity-sodden day in July—the kind of day in D.C. when everyone seems to be somewhere else; the kind of day that feels like you could lose it like so much soggy lint in your pocket—that I boarded a bus at the depot in Silver Spring, Maryland, the neighboring town to my own Bethesda, Maryland. Silver Spring, then, was (at least in my memory) a smoggy, congested concrete attachment to the nation’s capital, surfeited with carry-out joints and failing strip malls. This was just how I remember my departure on this adventure of mine across the country—humid, non-descript, a lost little day in mid-summer. The bus depot manager was a moon-faced fellow in a baseball cap from whom I bought the Ameripass that same day, but I told him I was headed to my first stop in New Orleans. I’d be taking the regular bus south to Richmond—it left two or three times a day—and all of the dozen or so other passengers waiting in the dingy little station were heading either to Richmond or to points north of there along the way. I would be switching buses several times in several stations in the old confederacy before reaching my destination; it was early afternoon when the bus departed and the plan was for me to arrive in New Orleans mid- or late-afternoon of the next day, something more than a 24-hour journey. But when the bus was ready to board the moon-faced manager called out “New Orleans” as if I was heading, maybe, across town or across state. I was in gym shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt carrying one large grimy yellow knapsack stuffed with clothes, a smaller pack with books, a camera, snack food and the like, and a waist pack where I carried cash and my packet of bus tickets.
   It was a young man’s adventure, the kind of thing undertaken with not much more forethought or cautionary planning than I have just described, and it’s easy to look back now and say that I was, perhaps, more than usually immature. I had tried the college thing—both my brothers had gone off to schools before and were now graduated into the world—and while I hadn’t done badly, it hadn’t been a good experience. I had taken the second semester of my sophomore year off, come home to live with my parents, and worked at a drug store (a local chain then called “People’s Drug Store,” that would be bought out later by CVS). There was a plan in the works for me to attend a different school in the fall, but truthfully I wasn’t much focused on that; what I wanted to do was get out from under what felt like everyone else’s script and scout around the great world of my own country.
   It was an idea born of books I had read—especially, as a teenager John Steinbeck’s "Travels With Charley," "Grapes of Wrath," "Tortilla Flats" and "Cannery Row"—and an ethos I had absorbed from other writers and poets and singers and songwriters, the idea that to discover the country you had to go out and visit it, and in visiting it you would be transformed yourself. So that your own self-discovery was intimately linked with your discovery of what it meant—or some small piece of what it meant—to be an American.
   Something like that. Contemporary sophisticates may think that a tad melodramatic, but it’s a theme that runs deep in American literature. But I’ll confess up front, it’s really not such a dramatic narrative I have to tell—there are some high ights, but viewed from a certain vantage point it can look mostly like a kid in sneakers and a t-shirt on a bus, drinking a shitload of beer wherever he was able. (And I should add that the reader will have to trust me; I have no documentary evidence of this adventure, neither pictures nor the diary I carried have survived, and some pockets of this excursion have blurred with time.)
   But I have today, almost 34 years later, a great affection and respect for my younger, adventurous self, and it was a journey that has stayed with me. It did change me, and it was one in which I did come to know my amazing country more intimately. This is an American story.

 ************
It went mostly as planned. I toured the French Quarter in New Orleans, then stayed two nights in a dormitory at Tulane and rode the streetcar up and down the Garden District; spent one night in a homeless shelter in sweltering St. Louis (it was something like 111 degrees) because I arrived on a Sunday and the hostel was closed (so that didn’t go quite as planned); spent four nights in Boulder, Colorado, trying to absorb the fact that people there casually walked around doing their business with those mountains in their backyard; spent a couple of nights in Salt Lake, treating myself to a Holiday Inn (what I mostly remember is how clean the city was, and my amazement that there were non-Mormon churches, plenty of them, there.) From San Francisco, I hitchhiked north to the wine country, and south down the coast to Carmel (receiving a ride in a pick-up truck I will never forget). Turning back east, I stayed in Flagstaff, Arizona where the youth hostel at the time was atop a bar-café called Charlies; because of its proximity to the Canyon, it attracted young people from all over the world as well as students from Arizona State, and folks from the town--it was a lively place at night and in the morning you could hitch a ride to the Canyon, 90 miles north.
    I learned a lot that summer and I wonder why it feels slightly embarrassing to say that one of the things l learned was to love my country. Certainly I thought I loved my country before, or would have said so if someone had asked me—after all, I had said the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school and sung (or lipsynced) the National Anthem at ballgames, and had been told through twelve-plus years of American public school that I had everything to be grateful for being born here. But getting to see the colossal land of my birth or a fraction of it, gave me a physical, sensual sense of the country I hadn’t had before. I suppose it may have first come to me with my first glimpse of the Rockies; it was a breathtaking source of wonder to awaken in Boulder, Colorado and step outside and see a mountain—not the little green hills we call mountains back east but a great, jagged-tooth eruption of God’s earth tipped at the top with snow—looming over you. It will humble anyone’s provincialism. Standing on the grounds of the youth hostel in San Francisco on Fisherman’s Wharf at night, looking out at the twinkling lights of the city, I marveled at the distance I had travelled, and at the vastness of the country, aware for the first time and in a way that has stayed with me, that we are part of something that is larger than our own narrow ideas about it.
   But “patriotism,” the word we attach to the virtue of loving and appreciating one’s country, seems to be badly abused—overvalued, on the one hand, and valued in the wrong ways. Certainly, anyone who does not appreciate the enormous advantages of being born an American (material advantages, certainly, deriving from the world’s most colossal economy, but more importantly the advantages of freedom and the rule of law written into our founding documents) is an ingrate (and needs to get out and see the world); anyone who begrudges praise for the bravery of young people who serve in wars, even those we may think are seriously misguided or even morally wrong, is seriously lacking in humility and a capacity for respect; and anyone who doubts or rolls his eyes at the mention of the beauty and majesty of our country is lacking in imagination (and needs to get out of his house and visit America).
   So let us stipulate that patriotism is a virtue, and deserves a day—at least one!—devoted to celebrating and expressing this virtue. But forgive me if I dare to suggest that among the virtues—kindness, compassion, the ability to forgive, a capacity for acknowledging when one is wrong and owes an apology, loyalty to friends and loved ones—it strikes me as one of the lesser ones. Who wouldn’t be suspicious, and wary, for instance, of someone who was proud of being a patriot—and even had deeds of valor to his credit to prove it—but neglected his children, or treated animals or weaker humans with cruelty?
   Years ago Joan Didion wrote in an essay, “On Morality” that she distrusted the use of the word “morality” in any but the most concrete sense, distrusted its use as an abstract ideal and as a weapon to attack those who didn’t live up to it. I feel roughly the same way about patriotism, about love of one’s country. To me it means something real—that awareness that struck me when I first saw the Rockies, or looked back across the country from the wharf in San Francisco, of the vastness of the country, the realization that it was larger than my, or anyone’s, imagining. I carry it around with me, this awareness—just as I carry around with me the awareness of my name (though I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my name, or boasting to others, “I am Mark!”).
   Four centuries ago an Englishman observed that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” Today, it seems this refuge is turning into an ideological snipers nest. Candidates for office are asked about “American exceptionalism,” are asked, “Do you think America is exceptional?” and the answer—the only, obvious, acceptable, answer—is “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Unless you think enough to say, “Well, yes, I do think America is exceptional, and so I think America has a burden to live up to exceptional standards.”  People of the left—standing outside the status quo and typically demanding a change, typically demanding that America do better—have always been suspected of “blaming America first.”
   It seems easy enough to respond that people who agitate for the end of the death penalty, or for universal access to healthcare, or for amnesty for some undocumented immigrants, or for a tax policy that is fairer to the less well-off, or for policies that are protective of our natural resources, are arguing from their own awareness of what it means to be American, from their own inborn sense of what America should live up to—just as are those who march for the rights of the unborn, or for school choice, or social conservatives who believe that too much of American popular culture is noisy, celebrity-obsessed and borderline pornographic (causes with which I share some sympathy).
   But today there is an industry of right-wing megaphones working the theme that liberals just don’t get America, or worse, just don’t like it. Ann Coulter, for instance, has built an entire multi-million dollar enterprise around this shtick. Her latest screed is against proponents of amnesty for immigrants illegally residing in our country in a book colorfully titled, “Adios America: The Left’s Plan to Turn America Into a Third World Hellhole.”
   It occurred to me that Ms. Coulter or anyone seeking a picture of our possibly bleak future should contemplate not the “illegals” coming over our border, but the face of a white man legally born in the United States—the 21-year old gunman who shot nine Charleston, South Carolina churchgoers at a Bible study. I suppose this young man might be able to name the author of The Declaration of the Independence, and possibly “Huckleberry Finn.” But I doubt seriously he could say who wrote “The Scarlet Letter,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Leaves of Grass,” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve”; doubt seriously he could say the historical significance of Plymouth Rock, Jamestown, or Williamsburg, let alone Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Pearl Harbor, or Selma, Alabama; doubt seriously he had ever visited a National Park, or could even name the state where the Grand Canyon is.
   Illiterate, or anyway sub-literate, bereft of any knowledge of our history, literature or geography, he is only nominally American. Jobless, mentally ill, vaguely aware that he is somehow falling behind, he does not have a high school education, but he does have enough information, gleaned from surfing the Internet, to determine that it is someone else who is the cause of his troubles. And he does have access to a gun. There are countless young men just like him. Who is to blame for this waste of a generation? Is he the face of our country’s future? 
   To carry your country around with you--that is the beginning and end of patriotism. It deserves its day on the 4th of July, but we need to drop it as a metric for judging others; we should be suspicious of those who noisily proclaim their love of country--no less than we would be of someone who went around loudly and repetitively proclaiming how much they love their wife, and accusing others of not loving theirs.
   Two of my favorite writers and thinkers are Andrew Sullivan and the late Christopher Hitchens—both of them Anglo-immigrant writers who never declined to extol the virtues of America. But Hitchens had this to say on an interview show when a caller asked him to say whether America is the greatest country on earth: 

"I think I like America most on all the days when people are not going around `USA! USA! We're number one! We're the greatest!' I prefer the days when they don't do that. It's a matter of always think of it, never speak of it."

But then Hitchens reflected and added, "Of course, objectively as well as subjectively, the American Revolution is now the only revolution with a fighting chance of survival and success: the idea that you could create a multicultural democracy over a vast expanse of the earth's surface that could possibly be emulated by other people.” 

******

I was on my way back from the Canyon, my last day there, hitching south back to Flagstaff, and I had gotten started late because I had lingered in the Canyon for a few hours before heading back up and by the time I got to the lip and began hitchhiking back it was late afternoon. The traffic going south from the Canyon is on interstate 180, which breaks southeast toward Flagstaff about 45 minutes in, at a little spot on the map called Valle; but some of the traffic continues due south to Williams, and my first ride dropped me at the intersection with Flagstaff still the better part of an hour away.
    The traffic had seemed to slow—most of the families had headed back to wherever they were going earlier in the afternoon—and I looked around at a vast desert around me as the sun began to set. There was, I think I remember, a building of some kind in the middle distance, but it was pretty lonely out there and a sense of foreboding began to build as I scanned the empty highway for southbound traffic. Darkness was not far off.
   It’s a moment that has stayed with me, as defining as any of the other more dramatic points along this journey—arriving at night in New Orleans, seeing the Rockies for the first time, the ride in the pick-up along the Big Sur, the Canyon, looking out at San Francisco at night from the Wharf—but to anyone viewing the scene they would see only a guy with a knapsack and his thumb out over an empty highway. It was an entirely interior moment, but I have never forgotten it, and have come to believe in it as a kind of hinge in my life.
   It was, simply, a decision not to panic, a determination not to be scared—although I was. That’s all I can tell you. I had come this far, I had charted this journey on my own, I had staked a claim of sorts on a vast, vast country, and now I felt myself to be a different, older person than when I had left—and somehow I would work this out. (In truth, I’m not sure what I could have done had the situation really gotten desperate; there was, maybe, that building in the distance—it might have been a post-office or some such thing—and there may have been a payphone there; maybe I thought I would stand on the highway and force someone, or a truck, to stop. Who knows? ) Anyway, I stuck my thumb out and waited. It did start to darken, but of course in time a ride came and I arrived back at Charlie’s well before nightfall.
   Maybe a lot of the most important moments in our life are like that moment of mine on the desert highway—private, interior transitions and epiphanies that can scarcely be conveyed to any others. A few weeks after returning home, I was off to a new school experience, a little bit more mature, more confident that I was capable of writing my own script. I had changed.
   Someday, I would like to recapitulate this adventure (although now I’m not sure I could deal with 30 days on a bus!). I’d like to travel a northern route, through the Great Lakes region, the iron range of Minnesota, the Dakotas, the great Northwest. I’d like to visit my country again.
   At the conclusion of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Chief Broom, newly escaped from the institution to which he had been harnessed his adult life, contemplates the open road and the continent that surrounds him. “I might go to Canada eventually, but I think I’ll stop along the Columbia on the way. I’d like to check around Portland and Hood River and The Dalles to see if there’s any of the guys I used to know back in the village….Mostly, I’d just like to look over the country around the gorge again, just to bring some of it clear in my mind again.

“I been away too long.” 

 Me too.