More food for thought

I hadn't planned on taking a more serious look at Route 66, but that's the way the stories are arriving today.

This one's an excerpt from CBS' "The Late Late Show" host Craig Ferguson's book, "Between the Bridge and the River," via NPR:

White Americans have a very unusual sense of history. They make it up as they go along, constantly revising to suit their tastes in a manner that would make Stalin blush. Very few of them saw any irony in the fact that during a recent nasty Balkans conflict, when Uncle Sam intervened to stop the Serbs from ethnically cleansing the Bosnians, the military action was performed using Apache helicopter gunships. Helicopters named after a people that had been ethnically cleansed in the United States less than one hundred years previously. Sixteen-lane highways across the sacred burial grounds. Yee-hah.

I-40 runs all the way from Nashville, Tennessee, to Barstow in California, where it joins I-15, which can either take you north to Las Vegas and then on to Salt Lake City or south to Los Angeles and Mexico. For most of the way it follows old Route 66, a highway White America remembers fondly because for them it conjures up a time of innocence before cigarettes gave people cancer and gasoline fumes burned a hole in the sky. A time before homosexuality and drugs, a time when the only threats to the world were Soviet Russia, aggressive extraterrestrials, or perhaps the occasional mutant insect that had inadvertently fallen into a nuclear reactor and grown to five thousand times its original size and was intent on eating Chicago.

In short, Route 66 was a symbol of what White America is really nostalgic for: a time that never existed.

That's a mostly accurate take on nostalgia — the ability to embroider the good and forget the bad from an earlier era. However, I find Route 66 fascinating in the present day; it's different than what you encounter near the interstate. Sure, I'm nostalgic for a simpler time that may not have been all that great or all that simple. But I'm also keenly interested in Route 66 now, and its future.

The "race thing" is more problematic. The sad fact is that many older black people don't look at Route 66 as the Mother Road, but as the Road of Racism. The highway's history is littered with stories of black-only water fountains and restrooms, motels that wouldn't book blacks, and cafes that forced black people to use the back door to buy their food, if they were allowed all. Fortunately, awful behavior like this now is almost nonexistent.

But I still hear racially tinged cracks against Asian motel owners ("If it smells like curry, leave in a hurry" is a common one), despite the fact that folks like Jack Patel of the Desert Hills Motel in Tulsa and Manoj Patel of the Wigwam Motel in Rialto, Calif., are among those helping keep vintage motels alive. They deserve support, not derision.

Thoughts are welcome in the comments section.