Numb Americans
CANTOR, DANIEL
Numb Americans BEYOND OUR CONTROL, by Tom Engelhardt. Photographs by Peter Whitney. Riverrun Press, 2636 Regent Street, Berkeley, CA 94704.189 pp. $4.95 paperback. DANIEL CANTOR We are, it is...
...In the summer of 1973, Tom Engle-hardt, a twenty-nine-year-old reporter, loaded up a Volkswagen van and, with photographer friend Peter Whitney, launched his journey to discover America and to find himself...
...he is never presumptuous or arrogant in his conversations, yet privately he keeps reflecting on the utter conformity of America today...
...There is nothing startling about this "gigantic centraliziation" of American culture...
...Tocqueville pointed it out, and warned of its dangers, almost 150 years ago...
...Most of the people Englehardt interviewed sensed that something was terribly wrong with their lives, but none could conceive of solutions...
...The pioneer, the hobo, the beatnik, the motorcyclist, the hippie: each has tried to escape a stifling past and forge an untrammeled future...
...Motion itself becomes a liberating force, and a change of location is substituted for a change of life...
...Beyond Our Control is more than a travelogue...
...combined with the sparse, carefully written text, they offer visual proof of Englehardt's vision of America, an America that is numbed, mired in a corporate maze, unable to find a way out...
...We met nobody of wealth and few really poor people," he notes...
...What is important and frightening about Beyond Our Control is that Englehardt reports how advanced the centralization process is...
...The political opinions people voiced to him sounded as if a ventriloquist were doing the talking...
...instead, he met minor bureaucrats, lower middle-class families, and many old people who had been swept aside by the corporate tide, "left high and dry in failing small businesses, small farms, shrinking towns, carnival sideshows, down-and-out hotels...
...It is a portrait of yet another America...
...Something in the American psyche and landscape, as writers from Tocqueville to Jack Kerouac have observed, has provoked people into leaving the lives to which they are accustomed...
...Daniel Cantor, an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, is a summer intern on The Progressive's staff...
...No one mentioned the potential in people and communities banding together, gathering strength from unity: it seems, from Englehardt's experience, that one legacy of American privatism and individualism is an inability to cooperate...
...And we are all part of that maze, Englehardt concludes, even though we may believe ourselves different...
...DANIEL CANTOR We are, it is commonly said, a nation of travelers...
...It is a fascinating journey...
...Englehardt is an unassuming radical...
...Englehardt does not presume that his personal report is a complete account of the current American scene...
...From Boston to Reno, where the trip ends abruptly and without flourish, we follow Engle-hardt as he looks, talks, and then writes about the places, the people, and himself...
...A trip across the United States is a relentless propaganda lesson," he writes, and he makes it clear that hitting the road is no longer an escape from corporate America...
...A word on Whitney's photographs: By themselves, they do not strike the viewer as original...
...At each new stop the same food, gimmicks, and ambiance awaited him...
Vol. 40 • September 1976 • No. 9
