Drifting. A song for the 4th, sorta

 

1.

Comes a time when you’re drifting, sang Mr. Neil Young in 1977. Or was it 78?

I thought about that line this 4^th.

The news about the slow downfall of secondary education at the state and private levels since January hasn’t really surprised me that much. When the jewel of American culture, the amazing college and university system that arose post-WWII, was at its peak, it seemed pretty obvious to the right that this was a very bad thing. The protests about the Vietnam war, the coddling of leftwingers among the teachers, and the idea that the children of the mob could study Shakespeare and write poetry instead of learning how to optimize their movements on the assembly line  – this simply and absolutely went counter to the tradition-based view of society. The solution, which started in Reagan’s California and became the norm, was to raise the price of education. But as the mob still wanted in, the compromise with the liberal-center was to keep raising the price while at the same time making it easy to get loans for that price. Thus, out of the jewel we extracted a mashup of the system of indentured servitude and the system of liberal education. But mashups are not syntheses. Eventually, they come apart.

Thus slowly, slowly, one of the great features of modernity – a feature that has roots as much in the medieval city and the culture of pilgrimage as in the breakup of the old patriarchal household, in which the extended family all lived together – the period of drift, fell prey to the new norms of debt and continuous labour.

Hard workin’, as Democratic candidates like to say. Hard working families. They work hard. Hard hard hard. It is hammered in with nails. Because the master always wants the serfs to work hard. And in that hard work, you fill in the space of drift. It is an offense and also leads to crime and drugs!

2.

I look at myself as a relic from that older era.

At that time Mr. Young was singing his line about drifting, I was a young sprout and I was drifting. Like many another young sprout, patched and peeled in the suburbs and spit out into the great America that I romanticized through numerous books and popular songs and movies.

I thought of it then, because I did recognize this was drift,  as a necessary phase, especially for a young buck who wanted to become a writer. To me, a writer was attached by every thread to experience, and experience was an adventure. The Wild West was not some historic fiction, it was right outside, you could walk into it any time.  Everything about the America of the sixties and seventies encouraged the thought that drifting and experience were all balled up together. Ishmael’s feeling was mine:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

The period of drift was made extraordinarily easy for me and my kind by the wondrous archipelago of colleges and universities across the Grand Old Country. You check in, you check out. And even while I was taking classes, I was working in all kinds of jobs.

I worked as a washer in a pizza place, a carpenter’s assistant, a parking lot attendant, a janitor in a Sears Warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana, a clerk in a hardware store, a furniture maker and deliverer, a landscape crew manager. I worked in a bookstore, I worked in a library, I worked in a diner. And I quit. Oh, quitting was one of the greatest pleasures in the world. To quit – who has ever sung the song of quitting? I remember, for instance, one summer when I was on a crew building a warehouse, and because I was too afraid to work on the roof, which required walking on crossbars yeah wide while carrying tools with the ground 30 foot under,  I was put under the thumb of a young thug, the pup of the owner of said warehouse, who would make me get in the cab of a lift that would take me up  those thirty feet. The thug would juggle me for a joke there, lowering and raising the cab. I took it for a week, being this idiot’s assistant. And then I quit. I think that day, the day I quit with no job in sight and no mowhney to pay the rent on the lousy little attic apartment I had at that time in Atlanta, was one of the happiest days in my life.

This could only have happened in a culture that preserved, reluctantly, a social space for the drift. Almost all my friends drifted, at one point or another. When I worked in the pizza joint – a place called Jaggers cattycornered from the entrance of Emory University, where I’d learned, for instance, all about Dilthey from a professor named Rudolf Makkreel, I fell into a crewe consisting of a lesbian cook who wanted to be a rabbi and goat breeder, a Gay Rights advocate waiter and Don Juan, a long haired, rather short punk who turned me on to Captain Beefheart, and the genial husband of another waitress who took me out to his favorite strip joint. I remember scrubbing the pizza pans, black iron pans, with steel wool, and how I’d get little splinters in my fingers. I remember throwing out the garbage, so much garbage, in the dumpster in the parking lot. I remember feeling this is it: the Wild West!

3.

And such was drift for one middle class white boy. But it would be a huge mistake to think that drift in America, a country founded by drifters, expanded by drifters and killers, and immigrated to, hugely, by drifters – it would be a mistake to think this was some privilege of my race, class, and gender. My aspirant rabbi friend, the Wiccan who I was afraid of who lived across the street from me there in Atlanta and sold drugs, the gay rights activist, the woman who I worked with at the hardware store who alternated between berating her husband, the fireman, and cheating on him with an obvy lowlife, the manager of that store who eventually went to prison for dipping in the till to pay for his gambling losses – this whole glorious collective that I can only call “my” life with a distorting simplification, so much was it ours – this was all within the drift.

And nobody hated the drift so much as those whose distant ancestors were all drifters. The whole of post 70s politics and social science was dedicated to eliminating, once and for all, drifting. And replacing it with debt and a policed underclass. Drifting moved to the Style section of the NYT, and was strictly for Nepo celebs. Who business planned and selfied their whole drift.

4.

When this is over, when the Chinese century has buried the brief time of the American hegemon, I think that drifting will reappear. It is structurally part of the revolution in social time that took place when the patriarchal house disintegrated, and though that house is being put back together, thirty year olds are now living with their parents and the age at which people marry is going up and up, I am certain this will fail. The stocks will fail. The tech companies will fail. The AI will fail. The climate will fail. The attempt to reinstitute racism, homophobia and misogyny will fail. The attempt to negotiate a centrist racism, homophobia and misogyny will fail. The housing market will fail, the police explosion will fail, the borders will fail.

And drift will remain. Thank God. Happy fourth!