Happy 100th birthday, Route 66! Yes, that scenic byway that runs from Chicago to Santa Monica, California – 2,448 miles of pure America — hit the centennial mark and looks pretty darned good considering it was marked for execution half its lifetime ago.
Instead of a death sentence, this vein that cuts through the heart of America persists, just as America has for 250 years: reinventing itself and rebelling against generations of nostalgia-bathed geriatrics to define its own purpose and future, brick by brick — or paved mile after paved mile.
Sure, there’s plenty of old-timey glory to be had, but this super roadway toward a sunset strip offers so much more: a glimpse into the past with the wheels always treading toward the future. And if you follow it west, it goes right into the horizon of a sun that never sets until you want it. And even then, perhaps it’s somewhere in the cool desert under a canopy of endless stars winking you a goodnight through the neon glow of a roadside motel or trippy little teepee. The Mother Road offers what Americans have always been looking for: adventure, discovery, possibility, and a path of unwritten rules (speed limit be damned). Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.
But this isn’t about Route 66. It’s about the type of country and the type of Americans it represents.
We are empire builders in every sense of the world, and if you’re ashamed of that, then you need to reassess your priorities, man. Because doggone, how could you not always be in love with the team that suffers the foolishness of the world and ends up shaking the whole thing down until it’s safe for the beaten and scared – or threats are at least behind us – and then carries on as if it was NBD? And all the while we’re blasting rockets into space, curing diseases, feeding the world’s hungry, writing great literature, creating great art, and writing the Great American Songbook. We build skyscrapers, railroads, fleets of aircraft, and TV dinners. We invented Hollywood, football, pantyhose, and pinup girls. We make muscle cars. We play golf on the moon.
What good is an empire if you don’t use it? Yet here we are – the U.S. of A. with our hotdog cookouts where men wear low-cut sneakers and grab beers from sweating coolers under the Maple tree, and wives in gingham and soft brown hair corral barefoot children, sticky from ice pops and marshmallows and lemonade made with too much sugar. Here is the Empire of the true believers: the road doesn’t start or end here. Each man knows from where he came and wishes to go. These are parents whose own childhoods were unburdened by the weight of the future and the fears of old men. Couples who fell in love with each other and the American Dream. When it comes to realizing that love — of God, family, and country — it cannot be held back. It’s akin to closing the back cover of a book that blew your mind, and the only thought that bubbles to the surface is, “This must be shared.” And so it is with building the American Empire.
Who has lost faith in the American Dream? When “proud” is a proxy for love, it’s easy to see who is invested in the long-haul, full-speed-ahead, ride-or-die America of the past, present, and future. If one man is making that drive by way of the Main Street of America or any other highway or byway, backroad or country road, in a Corvette alongside Tod Stiles or riding shotgun with Hunter S. Thompson, the Empire is unmistakable. It is belief in the project of America rather than the political projects subject to the whim of office-holding power. To Democrats, there is nothing to be proud of — nothing to love — when the levers of power aren’t being pulled by “your team.”
So it goes, why invest in the American Dream, become part of the Great American Project, the American Empire, if your entire viewpoint and love is dependent on political power? You don’t. You don’t see the point beyond one being wholly consumed by a constant feed of hateful slop, shoveled into every eye, ear, and mouth hole until the consumer is conditioned to crave it. For the leftist, the defiance and the satisfaction both depend on the project of destroying the American Empire rather than on recognizing its awesomeness.
We live in the most culturally and environmentally diverse nation, yet are largely unified under the principle of being, well, American. To paraphrase John Candy (R.I.P.) We like us — and we like being American. This is a land still waiting to be discovered and shared, and welcomed to, where you can stake your own little corner of it somewhere – practically anywhere. We are kind and without prejudice to strangers until the moment you badmouth the very things that make this the best place on Earth — our trust in goodness, and our ability to do good, if imperfectly. We unapologetic Americans don’t care about how others denigrate us to feel morally superior; that’s our superpower. The down-on-America types contribute nothing to this scenic adventure, but they do expose a shallow and unprincipled life by so easily and flippantly turning on a nation and its people who gave the world so much in exchange for the self-important applause of fellow pompous status-seekers.
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that those who still love America despite the politics of the thing are having more kids, according to the Institute for Family Studies. There might be something about being absorbed in shoveling slop to such an extent that the idea of being without it drives a person to be an anxiety-riddled mess, the weight of the synthetic fears smothering any optimism for the future.
People mercilessly attack the very idea of America as a chimera or a worn-out fable for silly-headed children and misty-eyed, faded patriots. But America and the American Dream endure — if not as the Promised Land, then as the Land of Promise. And whose to say what that promise is, exactly?
Maybe we don’t want someone to tell us the answer (what’s up, Alexa?) but to go forth and discover it on our own — and even if we don’t find it, we take pleasure and pride in seeking it ourselves. Because the truth is somewhere down that road, but first you have to get in the car and drive. And what a drive it is. That’s the dividing line. Those who see the miles of mountains, desert, grassland and plains, swamps and valley, forest and seashore, and stand in awe at what God has so graciously given us, and we want so desperately to share that sense of wonder. There is nothing that can satisfy that urgency like having children and wanting them to see and discover and experience what we have been so generously given for 250 years. Even through war and famine and desolation, Americans have conquered — not nation building for its own sake, but conquered to spread the American ethos: the unbound spirit of searching for an American Dream that never dies in the hearts of those who believe in it.