Killer on the Road

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Many long, blood-drenched and greedy years ago, before Vietnam, before Watergate, before Iran-Contra and Enron and Wall Street wars for profit, Jack Kerouac watched America going by and asked, “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”

America went on a long roadtrip, Jack.  We’ve put a lot of miles behind us, but we’re no closer to where we want to be than we were when we started.  It’s been a rough trip.  There were a lot of potholes on the Silent Majority Tollway, but we managed to make it through NixonLand relatively intact.  Back then, many of us thought the worst part of the journey was behind us, but we discovered otherwise.  

The Check Engine light started flashing on the Ronald Reagan Expressway, but the Gipper just grinned, cranked up the radio, and we got our first earful of the tirades of some shithead named Limbaugh as he bellowed on and on and on and on about blacks and feminists and unions and liberals destroying everything in sight.      

By the time we took the Thousand Points of Light Exit we were burning a lot of oil, the transmission was shot, the radiator was steaming, and something was on fire in the trunk.  In other words, major repairs were required, but Poppy just had Gomer fill ‘er up, clean the windshield, kick the tires, and off we went again.  

I remember Poppy weaving through traffic on the Out of the Loop Interstate,  glancing nervously in the rearview mirror and then at the map on his lap.  He didn’t have a clue where we were going, he just liked being the driver, and ended up getting us lost somewhere in Arkansas.  So Bubba hopped in and drove for awhile, but he got pulled over by a Texas State Trooper and hauled into court.  Hangin’ Judge Scalia impounded the car, we all spent 30 days in the slammer, and by the time we got all that sorted out, Bubba’s driver’s license had expired and we had a new driver . . .

Killer on the road, his brain was squirming like a toad.  

It still is.  I don’t even want to talk about all the shit that happened on the Cheney Turnpike, so I won’t, other than to say that way back when we first started this roadtrip, Jack Kerouac and some of his friends tried to warn us that politicians and prudes and preachers of conformity would fuck us all up to a fare-thee-well . . .

We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land.  We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell across the night.

Sorry Jack.  America should have listened to you.

Hunter S. Thompson tried to warn us too.  He warned us they’re all assholes, they’re all killers on the road, it doesn’t matter if the sign on the fancy desk said Cheney or Bush or Falwell or Dobson or Norquist or Quayle or Reagan or Nixon.  A rightwing asshole is a rightwing asshole.  A liar is a liar.  A killer is a killer.

Hunter said it all about Nixon . . .

Jesus!  How much more of this cheap-jack bullshit can we be expected to take from that stupid little gunsel?  Who gives a fuck what he says?  If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark.

That says it all about Nixon, it says it all about every one of those lizard brain knuckle-draggers, high and low, from the Beltway to the Bible Belt to the last babbling Birther in Bumfuck, Idaho.