22
Popular Culture Review
world all its own. Moreover, it gives us something to hang on to, even as we
cling to each other. The more Steeves tells us how desolate he is, the more 1 find
him in august company, but not the sad company he keeps. Indeed, the more he
writes about Disneyland and Las Vegas, respectively, the more he reminds me
of Jack Kerouac in On the Road {\951), putting Cold War America to sleep with
anxious teddies, as the nuclear tide rolls in."^ Or Thoreau, determined to be free,
to free himself if not us from bureaucracy, technology, and conformity, not
necessarily in that order. Or how about Muck Finn, searching for his lost father
while ignoring the very savior beside him, rejecting the lures of civilization,
risking hell to face himself, yet always restless, on the go, lighting out for
territories as yet virgin, uncolonized, and therefore as innocent as he wishes he
were—and, underneath it all, still is. Or Whitman, affirming life against death,
long before Norman O. Brown or even Molly Bloom sang that song. (As Gore
Vidal aptly observes, “in time, the vulgarity of Whitman was seen for what it is,
the nation made flesh.”^
Or take the singular genius of Dr. DuBois, whose magisterial,
astonishingly powerful and haunting The Souls of Black Folk^ is still the best,
and perhaps the only precedent for T3 itself Genre-busting, unclassifiable
masterpiece: part lyric, part epic, part Jazz riff, part ode or elegy for lost souls,
the damned and the doomed, part political treatise, part sociological study, part
autobiographical confession, part sermon (or jeremiad—another American
genre), yet in its moral, emotional, and rational phases, all of a spiritual piece: as
befits a testament to the American genius for combining the One and the Many,
Du Bois creates and sustains a coherent, organic, satisfying e pliihbus unum, his
work a cracked, polished mirror of his hopes for an integrated, peaceful, and
united country (and world). As he prays to God, “thus in Thy good time may
infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf
be not indeed THE END.”^ Singular yet pluralistic, the unique experience of an
ecstatic nightmare we call the American Dream.
Such voices in the Puritan wilderness of the imagination (to echo
Spinoza, who out-Calvined latter-day predestination) are as noble as they are
rare. It has been over a century since we last had one. So we are overdue, and we
are fortunate that Steeves has both the breadth and the depth required to do such
an audacious thing. Like the poet of possibility coupled with the poet of outrage,
combining both halves of Muriel Rukeyser’s penetrating but false dichotomy,
Steeves’s inquisitive, wandering intellect crosses landscapes from canines to the
cosmos, with cities, circuses, science and Cezanne in-between. There’s no sense
of awkwardness or of forced transitions, either, no grab-bag of miscellaneous
insights. On the contrary, everything is related to a single, central theme, as old
as it is new (or in need of restatement): we are what we choose. And
philosophers have made some bad choices, which we need to reverse or undo
before it’s too late. In particular, we have worried far too much and too narrowly
about our alleged existence. “Rock philosophers would never have wasted time
wondering if they were alone” (141). Methodic doubt isn’t merely wrong, it’s