A Guide to the Hitchhiker's Galaxy

There are some people who are so interesting that I wish they could be my friend, but they are also so interesting that I’m afraid I would go nuts if they were my roommate. John Waters is one of these.

Most people know John Waters from the movies he’s directed like Hairspray and Polyester. For those who don’t know him, the IMDB plot summary of Polyester (1981) will suffice as an introduction:

“A suburban housewife's world falls apart when her pornographer husband admits he's serially unfaithful to her, her daughter gets pregnant, and her son is suspected of being the foot-fetishist who's been breaking local women's feet.”

Yeah.

John Waters has just written Carsick, a book based on his hitchhiking trip cross-country from Baltimore to San Francisco. Carsick includes three parts, the first two are fictional accounts of the best and the worst possible experiences he imagines he could have on his intended trip, and the third is an account of the trip itself. I know this from reviews of the book and from his appearance on “The Colbert Report,” not from having actually read Carsick.

Norman Power’s review in the New York Journal of Books includes this description:

“In ‘The Best That Could Happen’ Waters imagines a cross-country trip full of his favorite kinds of eccentrics, freaks, and amiable perverts, many of whom joyfully recognize him as their hero. There’s an escaped convict named Ready Whip and his girlfriend Polk-A-Dotty;…”

And so on.

I guess I’m kind of cheating by writing about book reviews instead of the book itself, but, truth to tell, I don’t expect to read Carsick. It interests me because it calls to mind my own hitchhiking past. My highway habit was born when I was a high school student in Lakeland, Florida, and I had a crush on a girl in Eustis, but no vehicle to take me there. Not much to tell about that except to observe that so much of what we do in life is driven by just this kind of passion. I recall Daniel Ellsberg saying, only half-jokingly, that he got involved in the anti-war movement because “there was this girl.”

My heavy-duty hitchhiking career really got underway in 1966 when I was in college in New Orleans. As soon as I got a break between classes, I took off on a hitchhiking trip to Mexico. I had never been outside the U.S., and going to Mexico seemed like the most exciting thing I could do with my break, so off I went. It was all very cool since, when I finally made it, I got to try out my Spanish and discovered that the Mexicans I spoke to could actually understand what I was saying sometimes. (Gracias to Mrs. Workizer, my high school Spanish teacher.) I also met two nice Mexican students from wealthy families who spent half the night driving me around to Monterey’s various brothels where we downed drink after drink. And, in anticipation of any questions you may have about further experiences in said brothels, the answers are all “no.”

On my way home, stopping off at the border town of Nuevo Laredo, I sat for a while in a bus station with some Mexican farmers. They were super-friendly (as almost everyone I’ve ever met in Mexico is) and, they were at pains to assure me that the U.S. didn’t have to be so afraid of Castro because, “Don’t worry, we Mexicans can protect you.”

I also met a thirtyish American dude who was, I think, hung over, but he may have actually been not yet hung over, but still drunk from the night before. He looked intently at me with watery eyes and said, “Don’t let ‘em get you, man. Whatever you do, don’t let ‘em get you.”

Who the hell he was talking about, I don’t know, but I just made my way to the American border as quickly as possible, not nervous about “them,” but not wanting to spend any more time being lectured to by a disheveled drunkard whose nose blew bubbles of mucous every time he breathed.

Back on the U.S. side, I picked up my hitchhiking sign, which I had stowed behind a gas station in preparation for the return trip. It turns out that more useful than a sign saying “Mexico” or “New Orleans” was my Tulane University laundry bag. Yes, I didn’t have a backpack, so, for my trip I had just thrown some changes of clothing and a couple of books into my laundry bag. When I placed it on the roadside where the university emblem was visible, I seemed to get picked up quickly, often by students from other schools.

Speaking of hitchhiking signs, John Waters had some innovative ones, including “Writing Hitchhiking Book,” ”Midlife Crisis,” and “I’m Not Psycho.” I have to wonder how reassuring this last one was to potential rides.

On my various hitchhiking journeys in the U.S., I often held up signs proclaiming my hoped-for destination, but once I recall using a sign that said “Scintillating Conversation,” and that seemed to work pretty well too.

The hitchhiker’s worst enemies are boredom and despair. My most disheartening experience occurred just south of Atlanta, near the airport, where I once held my thumb out for two or three hours to no avail. Still bitter about that.

I suppose that nowadays people would say that being picked up by a psychotic killer is the worst that can happen, never mind the boredom and despair. Somehow I didn’t worry about those things back in my student days and I never did have to face the heartbreak of being murdered on a lonely highway.

I did garner some informal education in my travels. Once I got a ride from Mobile to Pensacola with a couple of Florida country boys. When they fiddled with the radio dial looking for good, down-home music, they passed over some of my favorite stations. I recommended that they might try listening to them, but they were adamant. “We don’t listen to that switchblade music,” one of them said. This surprised me. They saw my favorite music as dangerously urban, while for a city boy like me, country music had the potential to conjure up images of belligerent rednecks with shotguns and clubs.

Near Tallahassee, heading west, I was once picked up by an African-American college student. Everything was cool and relaxed until, at one point, he noticed a police car and said something nervously about what the cops might think about a white kid and a black kid riding together in the same car. That was a news flash for me. I had never imagined that just seeing a cop car when you were doing nothing wrong could be a source of anxiety.

An awful lot of my rides were with gay guys. Again cool, except for one very hefty dude who gave me a ride on highway 90 on the Florida panhandle. I had been politely propositioned a number of times, and it had never bothered me. In fact, one very likable guy in New Orleans actually engaged me in an interesting philosophical conversation based on the wisdom of Plato, etc.

But Mr. Meatball on Highway 90 was different - uncomfortably forward about his interests. Hmm. So that's what women must feel like when clumsy guys press them with crude advances.

It has been many years since I have hitchhiked, but for a while I made it a habit to pick up harmless looking hitchers during my cross-country travels. Most of these resulted in pleasant or uneventful encounters, though there was one particularly interesting hippie chick I picked up just outside Boulder, Colorado, who led me to what seemed like a permanent campsite in one of the local canyons. Living there was a small colony of some of the grooviest people you might want to know. One guy made decorative hashish pipes out of some kind of grayish material that he said was soft enough that he could carve it with his thumbnail.

I don’t quite know what has happened that hitchhiking seems so much more risky today than it did in the 1960s and 70s. We have changed, and the result of the change is either that we are more dangerous to each other than we used to be, or we simply have lost our ability to trust each other. Anyway, good on you, John Waters, for showing us that it is still possible to bum rides across America without being hacked to bits by some roving psycho killer.

(The reviews I read were in The New York Journal of Books by NormanPowers and in the New York Times Sunday Book Review by Dwight Garner.)

The Second Battle of Olustee

I didn’t know I was a Yankee until I was nine years old. This is because I was raised in the north. In New Jersey in 1he 1950s, the Civil War wasn’t on everyone’s mind. The situation was quite different in Florida.

My family moved to Cocoa Beach in 1956, and during recess on the first day of fourth grade there, I was excitedly asked by one of my classmates, “Are you a Yankee or a Rebel?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“Where are you from?”

“New Jersey.”

“Yer a Yankee! Git over there,” my classmate said, with a great deal of energy but with no apparent hostility, and he pointed to a pack of fourth grade boys that had formed up about 100 feet away.

So, I joined my fellow Yankees and we spent the next 30 minutes of recess re-enacting the Civil War as each group charged the other shouting with feigned ferocity. There seemed to be no real anger in this game, but it stoked up our spirits of tribal loyalty to blood-boiling intensity.

One year later, when our family had moved to Lakeland, the Civil War was once again re-enacted when my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Tolle, required that every morning after the pledge of allegiance to the flag, we remain standing to sing “Dixie.” By then I had learned to identify enough with my Yankee tribe that I would always insert the word “Jersey” in place of “Dixie” as I sang. In any case, it didn’t seem quite honest for me to sing, “In Dixieland where I was born in…” since it was Lafayette, Indiana, that I had actually been "born in," which is hundreds of miles away from Dixie.

Mrs. Tolle also introduced me to Southern manners when I answered “Yes” to a question she had posed, and she, with hot indignation, demanded that I answer her with “Yes, ma’am.”

Yes, ma’am.

My Yankee upbringing had never specified that ma’am and sir distinguished courtesy from rudeness, but Mrs. Tolle made it clear that this was part of the new code I had to learn, lest I invite myself to a real down-home whuppin’.

Years later, when I moved to California to attend graduate school, my fellow students there identified me as a Southerner. I didn’t object to this, since they seemed to think being Southern made me interestingly exotic. Also, by then I had learned to love grits and red beans and rice, so I felt I was Southern enough to pass in the greater Los Angeles area.

I see from Lizette Alvarez's article in today’s New York Times that the Civil War is still not over in Florida. The issue is the famous Battle of Olustee (well, famous in North Florida), where a detachment of 6,000 bluecoats got shellacked by a slightly smaller contingent of rebs and had to skedaddle back to Jacksonville in February of 1864. 

           Lithograph from 1894 depicting Florida's Battle of Olustee


What’s making Jefferson Davis tremble in his grave is the recent proposal by the Florida chapter of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War to place an obelisk in the Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park. Currently three monuments commemorating the Confederate soldiers already stand there, but there's nary a one for the Yankees.

The Confederate response? No go.

According to the Times story, John W. Adams, a former division commander in Florida for the Sons of Confederate Veterans declared, “Old grudges die hard. And feelings run deep.”

Well, I reckon they surely do.

The Times story continues:

“…the request has enraged many in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which views the state’s decision as a betrayal of the small park’s legacy. As word spread, an online call to arms was issued by the national Confederate group’s leader to oppose the ‘Darth Vader-esque obscene obsidian obelisk’ in what the group’s members see as the Second Battle of Olustee. Reinforcements were drafted, namely State Representative Dennis Baxley, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.”

I suppose that in the eyes of the Sons of the Confederacy, Darth Vader was a fairly typical Yankee.

The “Second Battle of Olustee” reminds me of the argument made by Joshua Greene in Moral Tribes, his study of the ways in which morality is often intimately linked to one’s sense of tribal loyalty. Greene’s book, by the way, is quite good, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the psychological roots of human moral systems. He offers a barrelful of evidence from psychological studies that show how a wide range of human motivators are apparently rooted in our genetic make-up and responsible for our capacity to survive as cooperative group members. These include “empathy, familial love, anger, social disgust, friendship, minimal decency, gratitude, vengefulness, romantic love, honor, shame, guilt, loyalty, humility, awe, judgmentalism, gossip, self-consciousness, embarrassment, tribalism, and righteous indignation.”

Despite his scientific credentials and good intentions, I’m afraid Professor Greene would never win the approval of Mrs. Tolle nor the Sons of the Confederacy. His main argument, ultimately, is that the best thing we can do when tribes collide is to hold our loyalties in check and seek a neutral basis on which to build a pan-tribal moral framework. And as far as the Confederate Sons of Olustee are concerned, a pan-tribal framework would be a desecration of the sacred site. “After all,” they seem to be saying, “the Yankees took a hard lickin’ here some 150 years ago, and that’s the one thing folks need to remember when they visit this park.”

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On a related topic, I have made the argument that my Great Great Grandfather Flynn may have actually won the Civil War. (Culture World, July 31, 2010)

Bookaholic

My librarian friend Jonathan, who likes to disrupt things, once suggested that books might be about to follow scrolls and parchment onto the ash heap of history.  Could well be true, but this leaves me with the question of what I should do with the 2,653 books that now line the shelves of my office.  Not to mention the approximately equal number we have at home.

For some of us, buying books is a kind of addiction.  I’m not sure how this affliction works with other people, but for me it reflects a lifetime delusion that when I own a book I have thereby mastered its contents.  Blalocks’ Social Statistics has been squatting fat, black and heavy on my corner shelf since graduate student days, therefore I must have absorbed something of its contents.  Or so some corner of my mind seems to believe.

At least with Blalock I can say I did once read a couple of its chapters.  But what about the books I haven’t got around to reading at all?  Occasionally a visitor to my office will look at my crowded shelves and ask incredulously, “Have you read all these?”  I sometimes answer by pointing to a specific item and say, “I haven’t read that yellow one yet.”  Which is true, if not entirely forthcoming.

The truth is that I haven’t read about a third of them at all.  But maybe I will someday, right?

This, Dear Reader, is the anguished cry of the bookaholic.

Certainly it would be more economical to rely on the library, since my collection and that of our trusty Olin Library broadly overlap.  In fact, I confess that I have more than once checked out a book from Olin that I already own, because I couldn’t quickly locate the needed volume on my shelf.  But what about that feeling that by owning a book I have mastered it?  Yes, I realize this is a delusion.  But it is not delusional to say that owning a book does allow me to write in the margins.  That is worth something I should think.

Another delusion under which I have long suffered is that every book is as interesting as its title.  Not true.  I recently bought a book called Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers.  This title is totally cool and so might have justified my purchase in itself.  Beyond this, the book was described as plumbing the depths of offbeat and marginalized speech communities, one of my favorite topics.  But the author, as it turned out, though certainly authoritative, wrote in a manner that lulled me to sleep, dwelling on trivia that couldn’t hold my interest and didn’t answer any of my questions about slang and badass language.   Sigh.  Twenty dollars and seventy-one cents, down the drain.

I really do appreciate good books and I remember when I learned that good authors can write bad books.  It was when I bought a paperback copy of D. H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious just before I boarded ship for my summer stint with the Navy Reserve.  I had planned to read it in my off duty hours, but once I started it, I quickly realized that it was dreadful.  I lay in my bunk one evening complaining about how god-awful it was, even though it was written by Lawrence, but none of my fellow midshipmen seemed to grasp the depths of my disgust.  So, to illustrate my sentiments with a vividness that they could understand, I began to tear the little volume into shreds.  Then, throwing the scraps onto the deck, I stood up and began stomping on them spewing out blasphemies as I did so.  “Wow,” one of them finally said, “you really don’t like that book, do you?”  Exactly.

These days I make it a point to assign books in my classes that I think will stay with undergraduates for much of their lives.  I didn’t always do this.  When I first began teaching I made the mistake of assigning “the latest thing” to my students.  This allowed me to keep up with the anthropological literature, but was an injustice to my freshmen and sophomores who weren’t really ready for a debate over the abstruse virtues of cognitive vs. symbolic anthropology.

So now I assign books that are more likely to matter to them, like Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World by Louis Fischer and Hiroshima by John Hersey.

I came to Hiroshima via a minor guilt trip.  Some 10 or 15 years ago, my friend and colleague Twila had her students ask their professors what books they thought everyone should read.  When I received an email from one of Twila’s students asking me this, I started to answer “Hiroshima.”  Then, I realized that I hadn’t actually read Hiroshima; I had only read about it.  But I wanted to stick to my choice, so I instructed the student to tell Twila that “Professor Moore recommends Hiroshima even though the big, fat hypocrite hasn’t read it himself.”  Well, now I have.

Anyway, it’s probably better that my shelves be stuffed with books like Hiroshima rather than some trendy academic tome designed to win a contemporary anthropological debate.  But, in addition to the great works, some books are worthwhile simply because they are just irresistibly fun.  For me this category includes almost all the work of P. G. Wodehouse.  I was tickled to read in today’s New York Times that Sting also treasures his collection of Wodehouse.  That’s one section of shelf that I can’t see myself culling.

But when I retire, some few years from now, how will I manage to empty the shelves of my office library?  I keep trying to minimize, and in fact I have given away a couple hundred books over the past year, but this has made barely a dent.  And we can’t clear our home shelves because there also stand ranks of volumes too precious to give up.  I think there may be only one solution: our little bungalow is going to have to be augmented with a new wing.  Call it the addict’s library wing.  This does a raise a pertinent consideration though; namely, what are my chances of getting my wife to go along with this idea?