Sununu consulted his staff before taking the car to New York, sources say, but he didn’t check with President Bush or White House counsel Boyden Gray. White House officials described Sununu’s actions as “appropriate” because he did paperwork and made official phone calls en route. But administration insiders are privately “appalled,” as one said, that Sununu continues to exploit his position despite the recent controversy. Sununu has access to a portable secure phone he could use on any form of transportation.
The New York excursion wasn’t Sununu’s first personal out-of-town trip in a White House limo, sources say. Regulations permit some personal use of the cars, which Sununu must declare as income and on which he must pay taxes. Administration officials couldn’t explain why it was inappropriate, as Gray ruled, for Sununu to take a government plane to his Boston dentist but OK to use a taxpayer-funded car to go to a stamp show. “It’s just different,” said one official. Sununu refused to comment; other officials declined to defend him on the record.
title: “On The Road Again” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-11” author: “Ronald Hill”
But why lose sleep over a politician?
“Well, I wouldn’t have supported him a few months ago,” John Bruce said. “But then I saw this bus tour took out from the east, and I figured maybe they’ll learn something. This is where politics started off, people travelin’ the country from the back of a train. Maybe it’s where they should get back to. Anyway, I figure that anyone that would take the time to stop in the middle of the night and talk to us, instead of flying around to big cities in an airplane, can’t be all bad.”
Somewhere in the Iowa night-that night, the first of their second bus tour-Clinton and Gore had, once again, transcended the traditional rites and cliches of politics. There had been doubts all day: it would be impossible to replicate the magic of their first trip, the post-convention exhilaration, the crowds lining the highway, filling the town squares along the Ohio River valley. And it was true, the crowds this time wouldn’t be quite so large or enthusiastic, the candidates wouldn’t be quite so eloquent-but something was happening out there on Highway 61, an emotional connection that mocked and then demolished the industrial-strength cynicism of the 150 journalists tagging along. It had as much to do with the people who lined the roads as it did with the candidates-often, the farmers delivered Bill Clinton’s message of “change” more eloquently than he did. Once again this year-as they had in New Hampshire, and then during the Perot fever-people were registering their very serious concern about the state of the nation. And, once again, the depth of feeling was coming as a surprise to the politicians and the press.
The first bus tour had been Clinton campaign manager David Wilhelm’s idea. “I walked into David’s office one day a few weeks before the convention” says communications director George Stephanopoulos, “and he was running his finger along the map, out from New York toward St. Louis.” Wilhelm was thinking politics and imagery. The southern portions of Ohio and Illinois, especially, were pivotal territories if those crucial states were to be won. Putting Bill and Al and Tipper and Hillary on a bus to places where big-time politicians normally don’t go could be risky-what if they gave a bus tour and nobody came?-but it had a chance of resonating, too. For once, Democrats-tarred by their opponents as the party of perversion for a quarter century-would make their case in the midst of a rolling Norman Rockwell tableau, the placid, mythic beauty of small-town America in midsummer, rather than before their usual tired collection of interest groups, in union halls and depressing urban moonscapes.
“We also figured we’d be able to get more, especially local, media coverage,” Wilhelm says. The bus trip costs $100 per journalist per day, far less than plane fare. “More important,” Wilhelm adds, “at that point, Perot was still in the race and we were looking for a way to define ourselves. With Bush in the Rose Garden and Perot working the TV studios, why not go out and be with the people?”
The first bus trip seemed to tap into a primordial public yearning; it touched the same vein Ronald Reagan, steeped as he was in 1930s Hollywood fantasy visions of America, had always worked effortlessly (and which George Bush, uncomfortable with visions, has ignored at his peril). Indeed, since Vietnam and Watergate ended the national age of innocence, nostalgia has been the dominant American cultural theme. The commingling of technology and nostalgia-what is sometimes called postmodernism-has been especially powerful in politics. Reagan taught Republicans the value of scavenging the past for reassuring images that promised the restoration of innocence; Democrats were too obsessed with perceived injustice and personal liberation–enervating “modern” yearnings-to understand the narcotic powers of the postmodern past.
Until now: the bus trips allow Clinton to evoke a different, but equally valid, vision of the American heritage. The virtues expressed by the rural folks lining the highways-hope, desire for change, faith in the future-are, at once, old-fashioned and the very qualities Clinton and Gore are hoping to sell to a more cynical metropolitan electorate. Subtly, the tours have helped transform the Democrats into a party representing the most bedrock of American values: “[The Republicans] will try to scare you, to convince [you] that we’re two young guys with crazy ideas who don’t know what we’re doing, that we’ll make things worse,” Clinton would say at each rally. “Their whole idea is, it could be worse … Our whole idea is, it could be better.”
The second trip, three days on the road from St. Louis to Minneapolis along the Mississippi River, reinforced the images of the first-and raised the possibility new postmodern political form: bus tours seem to have their own biorhythms. They languish during the days, the candidates dragging themselves through standard, “modern” media events. At dusk, though, everything changes. People, done with their day’s work, appear on the roadsides-and they begin to dictate the nature of the campaign. Local radio stations announce possible gathering places: if enough folks show up at this crossroads, or that truck stop, the cavalcade may stop.
“If they build it, we will come,” said Al Gore, as he sat up front in his bus at dusk last Thursday, watching with glee as the nightly phenomenon began: a farmer sitting atop his combine with a homemade sign, GIVE ‘EM HELL, BILL: CLINTON-GORE IN ‘92 … three women sitting at a crossroads in lawn chairs, waving … an old fellow with a sign outside a country tavern: HEY CLINTON: STOP AND I’LL BUY … two kids waving as they somersaulted on a trampoline, their mom memorializing the moment with a camcorder. “Create your own television program,” said Gore, comparing the bus tour to other interactive information-age phenomena ranging from “America’s Funniest Home Videos” to the “massive parallelism” high-speed computing model. “Create your own rally … create your own presidency.”
The references to “Field of Dreams” were constant and inevitable as the caravan made its way through the Iowa cornfields. There was an apparitional quality to the long line of buses, suddenly materializing on a quiet country highway; but then, the apparitions were mutual-crowds appeared out of nowhere. If 500 or more gathered, Clinton’s bus would transform itself (like the magic truck in the Bud Lite commercials) into a rally site: staffers would produce a sound system and a stage from its belly. Candidates and wives would emerge; the Bill and Al show would commence.
The speeches last week weren’t very good. Gore would warm up the crowd with chanting and bluster; Clinton would retail campaign boilerplate–a quick tour through his jobs, education and health-care programs, an emotional plea asking them not to succumb to Republican attacks, not to chicken out. Nothing very moving or edifying; no acknowledgment that “change” will involve sacrifice; indeed, in Iowa, he added some smarmy agripandering about that anachronistic sacred cow, the family farm. The spontaneous, night-time rallies had more emotion than the daylight set pieces, but the real action wasn’t in the speechmaking at all. It was in the handshaking. Clinton was relentless, often stopping to chat and, especially, to listen-a woman, in tears at a country crossroads, over her husband losing his job after 27 years; a pro-life obstetrician in Hannibal, Mo., quietly persuasive on the evils of abortion. The candidate would nod sympathetically, ask questions-if Ross Perot was the ultimate talk-show guest, Clinton may be the great American talk-show host, interviewing the folks about their problems without ever providing answers.
This is a dangerous game, raising fierce expectations. In Wapello, John Bruce never got a chance to unload his gripe. “After a bunch of dry years,” he said, “we finally get some rain, a great crop-and the prices are just dropping. You watch the markets, and they fall every day.” It’s safe to surmise that Clinton wouldn’t have taken the time to explain the law of supply and demand-and, ultimately, his failure to repeal that law may prove disheartening, further proof that politicians are just a bunch of phonies. For the moment, though, it seemed enough that he was out there and listening.
There was another stop after Wapello that night, in Muscatine, where people holding candles lined the highway; and then it seemed to grow too late for crowds. The buses pushed on, candidates and staff and reporters drifting off, only to be awakened-past midnight, at the hotel in Bettendorf–by a monumental throng, thousands of people waiting in the soft Iowa night. Local volunteers led the way into the rally with Coleman lanterns; it was ghostly, ethereal. A young staffer yawned, rubbed her eyes and laughed softly. “Are we in heaven?” she asked. No, just Iowa.
title: “On The Road Again” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-25” author: “David Jackson”
Today it is otherwise. Work defines the ““real’’ world; we move in secular time and space. The sacred is experienced – if at all – as a private, usually weekend option. Science long ago desacralized the cosmos: the gods have fled their lofty pedestals and been domesticated in diverse houses of sectarian worship. Detached from the sacred, culture has become a human construct we labor to create.
But the yearning for a sacred dimension to life is far from extinct. In a secular culture where nothing is sacred, anything can be sacralized. What Americans seem to be searching for is some sense of harmony with a cosmic order and communion with its source – the experience other societies have celebrated as the presence of the sacred. A typical expression of this search is the eclectic Quest program at Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco. There, participants are encouraged to experiment with four spiritual paths to the sacred: artis-tic creativity, mystical experience, reclaiming the feminine as divine and the integration of Eastern and Western spiritual disciplines.
Searching for the sacred is scarcely new in the American experience. To the Pilgrim Fathers, the American continent itself was sacred soil – a new promised land uniquely blessed by God and reserved by him for a newly chosen people. By the middle of this century, however, all that remained of the Pilgrims’ foundation myth was the quintessential American belief in the sacredness of the individual person. Disguised in the secular language of psychotherapy, the search for the sacred turned sharply inward – a private quest. The goal, over the last 40 years, has been variously described as ““peace of mind,’’ ““higher consciousness,’’ ““personal transformation’’ or – in its most banal incarnation – ““self-esteem.’’
What distinguishes the current generation of self-help literature is the authors’ use of frankly religious language. Words like ““soul,’’ ““sacred,’’ ““spiritual’’ and ““sacramental’’ turn up regularly in today’s best-selling guidebooks. For example, shortly after psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s fabulously popular (576 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list) ““The Road Less Traveled’’ was published in 1985, the author embraced Christianity. His latest book, ““Further Along the Road Less Traveled’’ (45 weeks on the best-seller list), focuses on spiritual rather than psychological growth. Peck even encourages his readers to acknowledge the reality of another S word, ““sin.’’ In another best seller, ““Care of the Soul,’’ author Thomas Moore has almost singlehandedly revived references to the soul in public discourse. ““I locate soul-fullness somewhere between the spiritual, which hungers for transcendence, and the physical,’’ says Moore, a former Roman Catholic monk turned counselor. ““I’m not interested in self-esteem – we can esteem the self too much.’’ Instead, Moore sees caring for the soul as a way to uncover ““the sacredness that arises from things like cooking, music and the family.''
Forging another path to the sacred, the religious wing of American feminism seeks to ground women’s liberation in a God stripped of masculine traits. At major divinity schools like those at Harvard, Yale and Vanderbilt, women now outnumber men, and their presence is transforming both the curriculum and the culture of American seminaries. Inside the classroom, feminist theologians deconstruct the Bible and reinterpret it from a woman’s perspective. Since the Scriptures were written by men living in patriarchal societies, so the argument runs, the major religions of the West – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – worship an androcentric deity who ““privileges’’ male experience and justifies the oppression of women. As feminist theologian Mary Daly of Boston College puts it, ““where God is man, man is God.''
Once considered radical, the movement to re-imagine God as female has captured a wide audience within mainstream American Christianity – most of whose members are women. But its new paradigm retains the power to shock. Last year in Minneapolis, 2,000 Protestant and Catholic churchwomen from 27 nations gathered to sacralize female sexuality. During a communion service of milk and honey, they prayed to ““Sophia,’’ a feminine image used in the Bible to personify wisdom: ““Our maker Sophia, we are women in your image; with the hot blood of our wombs we give form to new life. With nectar between our thighs we invite a lover; with our warm bodily fluids we remind the world of its pleasures and sensations.’’ Jesus was never invoked. But his death in atonement for the sins of man – the meaning of the cross – was dismissed by one theologian as the grotesque product of the male imagination. ““I don’t think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff,’’ said the Rev. Dolores Williams, who teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Despite widespread criticism of the initial conference, the movement to celebrate God as female continues among groups of feminist Christians. What is at stake is a total redefinition of sacred time and space. No longer is God to be worshiped as a transcendent authority figure: that’s taboo masculine theology. Instead, she is to be experienced as the power that makes spiritual and physical communion possible. ““The feminization of Christianity,’’ says Willis Elliott, a theologian in the liberal United Church of Christ who is highly critical of the movement, ““represents the greatest upheaval in the church since the Reformation.''
For other searchers, the quest for the sacred is inspired by the simple need to connect their lives to something larger. To many Americans who find conventional religion alienating – and even some of those who don’t – that quest begins with a heightened concern for the environment. Nature, of course, has always prompted feelings of transcendence. But to many environmental enthusiasts, the evolution of the earth and its interlocking ecosystems provides a new context for encountering the sacred. Prompted by science, they envision ““Mother Earth’’ as a living organism, with human beings functioning as her central nervous system.
In this view, the evolution of the universe becomes the new sacred story. To Christian ecotheologians like Father Thomas Berry, director of the Riverdale Center for Religious Research in New York, evolution is both a ““sacred process’’ and ““the primary revelation of God to man.’’ And like all revelations, this one elicits a new set of commandments: to preserve and protect the life forms created by Mother Earth. ““The Epic of Evolution,’’ says religious philosopher Loyal D. Rue of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, ““tells us whence we have come, what our fundamental nature is and what possibilities are open to us in the future.''
In the figure of Czech President Vaclav Havel, the search for a sacred cosmos has found its most passionate international spokesman. Perhaps because he has seen his own country rent by factions – remember Czechoslovakia? – Havel has mounted a global pulpit to promote a pluralism that acknowledges kindred spiritual roots. Twice in the last six months, Havel has excited American audiences with the tantalizing prospect of a new democratic politics based on a ““global spirituality.’’ Democratic values, he told a recent audience at Stanford University, must be grounded in a ““spiritual dimension that connects all cultures and, in fact, all humanity.’’ Havel is particularly taken by the ancient notion – variously expressed in most world religions – that ““the whole history of the cosmos, and especially of life, is mysteriously recorded in the inner workings of all human beings.’’ This insight, he believes, provides one basis for establishing a ““planetary democracy.’’ But first, Havel insists, Western societies must recover ““that which modern man has lost: his transcendental anchor.''
No doubt much of this reconfiguring of the sacred is inspired by a new religious pluralism in America which makes any one spiritual path seem inherently parochial. In this environment, many searching Americans flit from one tradition to the next, tasting now the nectar of this traditional wisdom, now of that. But, like butterflies, they remain mostly up in the air.
Apart from spiritual tourists, the purpose of every journey is to arrive at a destination. Unlike the ancients, we now know that the sacred is no longer up there, out there or even in there. Rather, it is to be found wherever – and whenever – the pilgrim learns to recognize the mystery in each moment. That takes spiritual discipline, detachment and discernment. In the traditions of the West, every serious sojourner arrives at the still point of an abiding Presence, who sustains the seeker and justifies the search.
title: “On The Road Again” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-08” author: “Cynthia Osorio”
At this moment my resolve is firm. All I have to do is decide when to take the truck-driving course and come up with the 3,500 bucks. It will be tough to say goodbye to teaching, which I love. But it will be easy to chuck all the job letters and resumes, to let go of the fear of what happens if I should get an interview and, heaven forbid, an actual campus interview with job lecture. This Spring, I will be teaching my last classes at Harvard and learning how to be a trucker.
July 16, 2000 Chicopee, Mass. I am driving a 60-foot monster down a tiny little road that is crawling with tiny little cars threatening to disappear underneath the dinosaur, cutting me off, stopping much faster than I can possibly slow down in good form from 35 (let the tach go down to 1,200 rpms, clutch in, shift into neutral, clutch out, rev to 1,600, clutch in, shift down into sixth, clutch out…) to a stop. If only they knew, the little people in those tiny little cars. As my classmate Pete said: “It immediately gives you a whole new appreciation for truck drivers. Everyone should have to drive a big truck for half an hour before getting a driver’s license. “Did you know truck drivers are not supposed to shift gears in intersections?
July 23, 2000 Chicopee, Mass. The world still looks like a play world to me from my diesel-powered aerie, where the cars are dinky toys, utility poles are matchsticks, and I am on a level with full-grown maples. It’s also a world in which I have the power and responsibility of Gulliver. Fortunately, the transportation industry is hard up for drivers. Recruiters hold seminars, hoping to snare one or more of us. We discuss their merits: how much per mile, hometime, the guy’s hairdo, what kind of equipment does he offer to new drivers. The national carriers, like Werner (blue trucks), Schneider (orange trucks) and Swift (white trucks with a blue stripe), seem to compete most heavily on the quality and age of their trucks. We are offered 1998 or 1999 top of the line Freightliners and Peterbilts, with diesel engines that outrun hundreds of horses; 10-, 11-, or 12-speeds with air-ride suspension, cruise control, ergonomic seats and much, much more.
What beats it all as a carrot, however, is the 70-inch walk-in condo. When I go on the road, I will be living right behind the driver’s seat in a room 5 1/2 by 7 1/2 feet with bunk beds. My apartment will be fully dressed in a fancy stereo, space for a refrigerator and ready for cable TV. I will have a satellite hookup and e-mail. Most importantly, there will be a blanket on the passenger seat for my teammate, Mandy, 75-pounds of black lab mutt.
August 17, 2000 Deerfield, Mass. Time for the road test. Flawless. Merely almost getting on Interstate 84 while the instruction had been to get on I-90. Merely forgetting to mention the underpass (“Unmarked overpass, legal minimum 14 feet. This trailer is 13 feet, 6 inches. Safe to proceed”) until I am under it while crossing the highway to get off on the left, having just gotten on, and my seat all of a sudden loose, pushing my belly into the steering wheel. “Trooper Clay,” I hear a little wavering voice say, “there seems to be a problem with my seat. Do you mind if I pull over?”
August 30, 2000 Springfield, Ohio On the way to my training with Werner Enterprises I no longer have a clue what I might have been thinking when I so rashly decided to become a truck driver. The goodbye to man, dog, town and old life was tough, and the envelope with my bus ticket sports a picture of an adorable black lab balancing a milk bone on its nose, asking me to call. Good thing that behind me a baby starts to cry, so I don’t have to.
September 6, 2000 Houston, Texas I am lying in my bunk waiting for the sun to go down, parked in a drop yard in Houston until 4:30 a.m. tomorrow morning. We have not yet hooked up to the trailer we are to take out of here. Instead, we are hiding in the shade of another trailer. It’s 107 degrees outside. The walls of the tractor are hot to the touch. But I am comfortable in the top bunk, letting myself drift to the hum of engine and air-conditioning.
September 9, 2000 Taft, La. Midnight in southern Louisiana. The biggest chemical plant I ever saw. And the South Taft Gas Field, I later learn. The place is so lit up that I wonder whether it actually uses more energy than it produces. The guard is adamant. I have to change my shorts for long pants. I have to hand in my lighter for safekeeping. And I have to stay in the truck at all times.
September 17, 2000 St. Louis, Mo. I practice bits and pieces of the craft even as my trainer, Galan Martin, is asleep in his bunk. Hurtling down I 70 between Kansas City and St. Louis at night for instance: bad road, no lane markings, up one hill groaning, steeply down the other side, heart in my mouth. I am carrying a heavy load: 45,000 pounds of sugar. Along with the truck and ourselves, that’s 79,000 pounds. Get the picture?
September 27, 2000 Sparks, Nev. When I decided to drive a truck I knew that real, everyday food was to be scarce on the interstate. Not to worry, I assured family and friends, I have seen in magazines that truckers have all sorts of amenities: refrigerator/freezers, slow cooking pots and microwave ovens. This does not turn out to be true for the company driver, who doesn’t own her truck and whose amenities are limited to what can be plugged into the cigarette lighter. When I start to drive my own truck, I will have a small refrigerator, a thermos of sorts that boils a cup of water in about twenty minutes, and a small heating “lunch box” that will heat a can of soup in about forty.
October 2. 2000 North Brunswick, N.J. No empty trailers to be found in this dropyard. And we need one. Because we cannot pick up the next load without having a trailer to switch. A truck without a trailer–or bobtail, though it looks like a giant tadpole to me–is a sperm without an egg, unproductive and doomed to wither, money lost for the company; customers like to have a spare to load. This is a hard and fast rule. But there is more to it than that–making sure you have a trailer is a sport. Sometimes we spend a whole day chasing around to find one.
October 4, 2000 Allentown, Pa. Whenever we pass a rest area and I am in the bunk, Galan calls out, “Do you need to stop?” “I’m training for an hour-and-a-half and it’s been only and hour and fifteen,” I shout back through the closed vinyl curtain. “How many miles to the next one?” He can’t really imagine that I don’t care where I pee, within some loose limits of privacy, and tries his utmost to give me the restroom comfort his Texas heart feels is my due as a lady. After all, he probably knows more about my bodily functions than he did his wives’. I secretly think he is appalled at my quickly squatting underneath trailers when no one is looking. But the strong smell of urine wherever trucks park tells me I am not the only one. I call him on it and he confesses he doesn’t walk all the way to the restrooms at night when he is driving alone or with a guy. Ha.
October 14, 2000 Peosta, Iowa Trucks don’t just drive, they must also stop at regular intervals mandated by federal law. And places for trucks to sleep are few. Galan has hammered one thing into me: when you get to the East Coast, you’d better be done with your driving for the day by 3 p.m., lest there is no place for you to stop. “No room at the inn,” we took to calling it. And by colonizing an illegal space you risk being woken up by a cop who gives you a ticket and tells you to move on, hopefully not right into the arms of a Department of Transportation cop who yanks your license for driving beyond the 10 hour limit. This means you’d better start your driving at 3 a.m., when your internal clock is on sleep.
This is what I like about the trucking world. It’s messy. A lot of it takes place in spaces long since abandoned by the rest of us or spaces so purely functional no one cares what they look like. No one bothers to cut the grass or clean away the filth that collects around the edges. It’s a world so loosely organized that I, who have moved in carefully guarded space in recent years, have to learn a whole new way to be. I have to learn to do without the crutch of a familiar and supportive environment, learn to be outside by myself. I have to learn not to be so damned middle class. Sound my barbaric yawp without any wilderness to do it in.
