The important thing in America is to go.
It doesn’t matter where you go, but it is better if you go a long distance.
It is particularly good if you go but don’t know where you’re going. Guitar players will write songs about you, and there will be a general feeling in the country that you are a poet.
Young people should go at least three times in the summer and once during each of the other three seasons, preferably in Volkswagen buses with curtains on the windows, in airplanes or by hitchhiking.
Singles should go in sports cars. So should couples who are living together but not married, unless they wear jeans or overalls, in which case they should go in Volkswagen buses with curtains in the windows.
Married people with children should go in station wagons.
Businessmen and politicians should go in airplanes and never check their luggage.
Cowards should go in trains and ships.
People who like to feel cuddled deep in the center of a great cone of noise should go on motorcycles and wear sunglasses.
Rich people who start drinking before lunch and have skin that looks as if it might be on loan from an alligator suitcase should go in their private boats.
Presidents of the United States should go in personal four-engine jets, yachts, helicopters, limousines and golf carts. When they get there, they should issue a press release.
To go is not only an infinitive, but also the most American act it is possible to perform. Nothing is more American than a good go. Going is the one thing which, if subtracted from American life, would leave America stranger and more repugnant to Americans than the subtraction of any other one thing—be it democracy, salesmanship, consumption, violence, optimism, bribery, capitalism or hamburger.
Going is the only thing an American can do without making a lot of other Americans angry.
Columbus was a go-er.
So were Lewis and Clark.
Thomas Wolfe, hearing those train whistles in the night, made the whole South want to go, and Woody Guthrie would go out to Oregon and write a song about it faster than a pioneer would go to Louisiana with his banjo on his knee.
Jack Kerouac loved to go.
“Go west,” said Greeley. Go-getters with plenty of get-up and go got up and went for the pure love of going and getting, and because it was the one thing every American approved of, because every American, looking at go-getters getting up and going, felt wonderful about being part of a country that was on the go.
What explains the visceral appeal of those two savage guttural vowel noises, go-go? It is because the old-timers who did the first big go across the Atlantic were followed by the middle-timers who did the long go across the country who were followed by the good-timers nodding in ecstasies of sensuous surrender to Henry’s seductive Fords, and we still feel all those memories in our blood. Hit the drum, burp the electric guitar, start the hips jiggling, pectorals rippling, shout, “Go-go!” and, man…!
Get out the car. Down to the airport. Up on the motorbike. Untie the boat. Blood humming those go-go songs. By the time I get to Phoenix you’ll be leaving on a jet plane to get your kicks on Route 66 and fly me to the moon so we can shuffle off to Buffalo on the Chattanooga Choo-Choo.
Go-go, go-go. Don’t ask where. Buy the insurance. Collision, personal liability, life, mutilation, luggage theft, loss of a leg, loss of an arm, loss of a tire.
When you go-go, you go because you think there has to be something better up ahead, just has to be more fun in the next town, but all the same you wouldn’t dare bet against having a disaster on the way there.
The kind of insurance you need they don’t sell. This is insurance against the ultimate disaster, which is that (1) not only is there not going to be more fun in the next town, or any other town; nor (2) is there going to be anything better anywhere along the 75,000 go-go miles you intend to traverse in the next two weeks; but also (3) there is not even going to be any next town, not anything whatsoever up ahead.
The probabilities of these disasters are rising, as more and more of the places up ahead become identical to the place we thought we just left behind, as the next town turns out to be just another interchange on the interstate.
I do not think this will stop Americans from going for another generation or two. For that long, motion alone may satisfy the go-go need in the blood. And in the meantime, somebody might invent an economical, styrene, easy-to-install new place that can be taken out of the car trunk and erected at officially approved sites after every 500 miles of going.
The last important human activity not subject to taxation is sex. Why this curious exemption? When we are compelled to pay taxes for food, clothing and shelter, does it make any sense to leave sex tax-free like municipal bonds? —A Chaste Deduction
Elections are probably the most dangerous part of democracy. I say “probably,” because a very strong case can also be made for the jury system, which puts a person’s fate in the hands of twelve people anxious to be shed of a nuisance in time to get home before dinner.
—Yes No Other
The odd thing is not that we are in the business of overthrowing other peoples’ governments, but that we can still be surprised when somebody reminds us of it. In Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East we have been propping up and knocking down governments more or less openly for the past twenty-five years.
It is an established policy. Everybody knows it. It is supposed to be done covertly, which is only sensible if you hope to succeed since publicity in matters of this sort can only make the natives resentful and defeat the project. Imagine the chauvinistic rallying around President Nixon that would have occurred if Canada, say, had announced that her agents were going to destabilize United States society so that discontented Americans could heave the Nixon Administration out of office.
—Our Uncle Is Now Dorian Sam
Like American beers, presidential candidates these days are all pretty much the same—heavily watered for blandness, and too much gas.
—The Boys in the Ads