What:  Christopher Hitchens rents a Corvette and drives Route 66 from Illinois to California.

    If you know who Christopher Hitchens is, the above sentence is about all the description you require of this Vanity Fair essay from November 2002.  If you don’t think you know Hitchens, you still might.

  He’s the lumpy, acid tongued British guy (although he’s an American citizen now) often filling the role of talking head on any number of political talk shows.  He usually sticks out on those programs because he’s one of the few with the wit, intelligence, academic and professional background to make him possibly worth listening to.  He’s a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, a prolific author, and is usually a visiting professor somewhere or other.

    This particular essay is worth the read if for no other reasons Hitchen’s hilarious observation that driving a Corvette across the country attracts plenty of guys, but women?  Not so much. 

   

Because Hitchens writes on so many subjects with such comfort and ease in this piece, it’s easy to assume the essay is unfocused and scattershot.  Going over it again though I see a very basic outline.  He begins simply enough – with the importance of the number 66 and the most famous Route 66 song, “Get Your Kicks on Route 66.”  He writes about the road’s history and current condition.  He tells about his car, the Corvette.  Then he begins his trip, making all manner of cultural, historical and political observations along the way.  Some are quite funny, like when he says this about what he sees at the Grand Canyon:

“I saw, clustered around the telescopes on the rim, the largest concentration of that special tourist species – those who wear shorts and shouldn’t – that I have ever witnessed outside Disneyland.” 

    Up until the end, the piece seems a pretty simple travelogue, but he finishes with a flourish, merging the past songs of Route 66 with America’s history and contrasts them to recent songs of Route 66 and America’s present.  His conclusion is that Route 66 couldn’t survive by being the authentic Route 66, so it had to become the fake Route 66, and even then, it’s nearing it’s end.

“All travel is saying farewell.  Most voyaging in the United States has become either impossible (by rail) or a misery and humiliation (by air) or a routine (by roads with no individuality).  No poet has yet attempted to say what this defeat means for the American idea.  Bu the melancholy is all around us, transmitted on frequencies that nobody can possess.” 

    Reading this has convinced me to include another essay by a European intellectual named Umberto Eco.  His long essay, “Travels in Hyper-reality” is about his visits throughout America and his observation that America is (at least at that time in the 1970s) fascinated with the fake – or rather that it’s fascinated with the authentic and the only way to give recreate the authentic is to create something fake.  I’ll try to explain it on its own page.  I don’t know if Hitchens was borrowing from Eco at the end, but his observations certainly reminded me of those made by Eco a few decades ago.