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Road Trips! [1]

['Kelli Anne Busey', 'News Corpse']

Date: 2026-07-28  

Alex Pretti/Renee Good memorial, Minneapolis, 7/24/2026 Stewart King

I have been out of town on a variety of road trips and the diary has been on a hiatus for several weeks, so apologies to you, dear readers. But I did have a lot of time for thinking, listening to podcasts, and listening to the news as is my wont.

The first stop was California, where a relative of mine is dealing with a serious health crisis. He is getting his health care from Kaiser, which is a good analogue for what a public health system would look like if America had one. He is apparently quite well cared for. He has an MD who is his primary care person and principal contact, who calls him to check in – I was with him in the car on the way to one visit when he got a call from his main doctor. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a call from my doctor unless they were confirming an appointment or some such. My relative has a variety of specialists to deal with his condition, who can make appointments for him. He has a nearby health center with most levels of service available (including an emergency room, where I spent most of a day hanging around waiting for them to deal with a crisis he was having). He did have to trek all the way across the San Francisco bay area and halfway to Sacramento for one course of treatment, though. They have gotten him enrolled in experimental treatment programs at a non-Kaiser facility, so no “not invented here” prejudices apparent. Kaiser’s model is that they charge you a fixed rate and all your expenses are covered, at least in his case, so they have a financial interest in keeping you as healthy as possible. They lost their bet in his case, I’m sure, but this is what mutual aid looks like. I should say also that two other relatives of mine received their care from Kaiser during their final illnesses and both seemed well taken care of. To each according to his need, from each according to his ability. If only we all had socialized medicine.

I spent most of the trip listening to my daughter’s punk and metal music on Spotify, but I did get a chance to listen to these guys , Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell with their guest Matt Dinan discussing the work of philosopher of history and conservative icon Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Strauss was a refugee from fascist Europe in the 1930s who taught at the University of Chicago for many years. He loved America but was a critic of the Enlightenment ideas that underlie the American founding – or at least they do in the liberal arguments of people like Lincoln or Martin Luther King. In 1947 he delivered a series of lectures, later collected into a book, Natural Right and History (U of Chicago Press, 1953). In this work, he argued that modernism, which he sees as starting with Machiavelli, destroyed the humanist insights of the ancient world and that the concept of natural rights, central to the Enlightenment, was based on a misunderstanding of true human nature. His call to return to the, as he saw it, somewhat hidden and esoteric vision of the medieval and ancient philosophers, especially the Greeks but also Maimonides, puts him firmly in the camp of traditionalist conservatives. His willingness to explicitly condemn the modernist philosophers – he had harsh words for Locke and Hobbes and even Burke as well as Rousseau – puts him well beyond contemporary conservative philosophers who mostly rely on him for his critique of 20th century liberal political thought. Even though Strauss himself died in 1973, his thought is meaningful for us today because many of the chief thinkers of the new right call themselves Straussians. The Claremont Institute is a prominent west coast outpost of Straussian thought, focusing on his call to make religious values part of the architecture of American thought once again. They depart from Strauss by claiming that the American founders, while using Lockean Enlightenment language, were actually motivated by more classical and religious values and created a more Godly and truly natural regime, which subsequent deviations have harmed but not destroyed. This is the origin of the often-heard argument that America is a fundamentally Christian nation (though the Straussians would add Jewish and Greek antiquity to the specifically Christian roots). The east coast Straussians (actually headquartered in Chicago at the eponymous University), are more root and branch opponents of liberal ideas. Patrick Deneen, who holds forth at Notre Dame, is a very noteworthy opponent of the liberal vision and proponent of the idea of “common good conservatism”. In his vision, one shared by Catholic Integralist legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, the goal of government is not to promote liberty or human rights as such, but to advance the common good. Legal instruments like the US Constitution should be interpreted to advance the common good and not in light either of the goal of increased individual freedom or of the original intent of the provisions when enacted. Vermeule’s idea of what constitutes the common good comes from traditionalist Catholicism and includes a strong dose of regulation of personal behavior like reproductive care, sexual behavior, recreational consumption of intoxicants, and the like. Deneen is somewhat more libertarian but still argues that our common good includes a good bit of authoritarian control to prevent people from doing things that he sees as harming themselves. There are debates among the various clans, and there is no one Straussianism – indeed, the podcast guest, Dinan, who identifies as a leftist, sees himself as in some ways a Straussian, at least in his suspicion of 20th century post-modern ideas. But the fact that people with full professorships at Harvard, Notre Dame, and other top institutions, substantial grant funding, whole foundations, and plenty of public intellectuals who push these ideas should give us concern about the intellectual legitimacy of profoundly anti-liberal ideas. The Overton Window of political ideas has shifted; it is now acceptable to say that the American project isn’t about freedom or that America should have a more authoritarian government to enforce a rallying around an integral nationalism and traditional ideas about masculinity and hierarchy.

Arriving in Virginia, I found my copy of Eric Foner’s Our Fragile Freedoms (2025), a collection of essays and reviews he has written over the years, which I left here unfinished the last time I visited and am now reading. Foner is best known as a historian of 19th century America, and especially the crisis around the Civil War and Reconstruction. His best-known book, Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revolution, (1988) amplifies the vision of America’s purpose that Lincoln and the Republicans of that era held: we seek to strengthen a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Some people in American history oppose this idea, and sometimes those people win, as they did after the Civil War. Some of Foner’s most recent essays in Fragile Freedoms refer to efforts by opponents of that idea to change the way Americans learn about their history. While I was on the move, there were some developments in this area. An executive order on July 24th directed the Park Service to put up signage in front of the Smithsonian museums that “corrects inaccurate information” in the museums and warns the public that the Smithsonian is trying to undermine their faith in our country’s special virtues. Whatever they are. One of my earlier trips was to the AP grading, as discussed in an essay last month; I was happy to see the AP African American Studies graders there and hear that more and more schools are signing up for this class. There has been some pushback against this class and College Board cut back on the curriculum in response to complaints from, among other Governor Rhonda Santis of Florida. Looking at the current course design, though, I don’t know how much more you could fit into a year-long class at the high school level. History has been deemphasized in American secondary education over the past couple of decades thanks to No Child Left Behind, which placed an enormous value on ensuring students do well on standardized tests of math and English. As a result, Americans enter adulthood with little or no understanding of why or how our country works outside of their own immediate experience. In my years of classroom teaching, I saw this transition first-hand, as my students needed more and more basic information – especially in recent years, ,many students were unaware of or hazy on the details of America’s national independence, slavery and racism, the creation and evolution of the Constitution, industrialization, the women’s rights movement, etc. Often, the foreign students were better prepared than the native-born. Now that I’m tutoring AP students, they are generally pretty well-prepared, but again often lacking in basic knowledge about our nation’s history that I remember learning in my elementary school years. Of course, my education, beginning in segregated schools in the south in the mid-20th century, was strongly “patriotic” and left a whole bunch of nuance out. But I worry that, if the Park Service puts up “patriotic education” signs in front of the Smithsonian, people will not have enough background to understand that nuance and realize how they are being misled. I just looked online for an image of one of the signs, and didn’t find anything, so maybe it hasn’t happened yet. I’m going to go into DC next week probably, so I will be able to report further.

Wildfire smoke and Forest Service fire crew in eastern Oregon, 7/20/2026 Phillip Callicrate

My long road trip that I’ve just completed was an eight-day odyssey across the country, driving a new (to me) pickup from Oregon to Virginia. The first two days we passed through an apocalyptic scene of wildfire. We took off from Corvallis and crossed the Cascades to Sisters. Sisters is a nice little tourist town, we stopped at a coffee shop and set out across the middle of the state on US Highway 26. The whole way, we were in heavy smoke, enough to make my eyes water. We saw fire equipment and camps of fire crews the whole way. In the subsequent days, since I searched for information on those fires, my social media has been keeping me updated. Sisters is under evacuation orders, that nice coffee place and all those tchotchke shops and air b and b’s and so forth. The fire just to the north of the town is America’s top priority wildfire. A friend of mine who lives in Antelope, near where the Rajneesh devotees tried to establish their utopia as detailed in the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, is completely cut off as all roads leading to the town are closed. Meanwhile, a stretch of I-84 that we were on in the eastern part of the state, going down to the Idaho border, is closed, no detours available. This is a major highway that carries a huge amount of traffic to Portland and the west coast. My buddy’s sister’s place in northeastern Oregon is cut off from the rest of the state, with the road out leading through the aptly-named Hell’s Canyon to Idaho. A fire in Central Oregon closed US-26 for quite a while, although it looks like it is open again. The first time we saw the sun as more than an orange circle in a brown sky was when we got to Yellowstone. There have always been fires in summer, of course, fire is a part of the natural life cycle of the forest. But these megafires are a product of global climate change. We had a brutal series of fires in 2020, making the year of COVID even more apocalyptic, and it looks like we’re on course to exceed those fires as far as acreage burned in the state this year. So far, little fire activity on the west side of the Cascades, but there’s plenty of fuel and it has been pretty hot and dry these last few weeks.

Entrance booth, Yellowstone National Park, 7/22/2026 Stewart King

Yellowstone was amazingly beautiful. There were plenty of foreign visitors despite the increased tab charged at the gate (note the new bit at the bottom of the sign above). This makes a certain degree of sense, given that the Park Service is supported by taxes paid by American citizens and resident non-citizens. Still, it appears the government these days doesn’t want tourism. A Mexican man on a tourist visa died as a result of an encounter with ICE officers in Florida. A British woman on a tourist visa was arrested and held for five months, and a German tourist was held for over a month. Some countries are providing warnings to their citizens about risks when entering the United States. I should say that this is nothing new – the longest I ever spent at an international border was entering the United States from Canada on the eastern side of Glacier National Park. My friend and I were on a road trip across the country and had gone to Canada for a day to see the Waterton side of the international park. Coming back in, it was clear that the Customs Service (as CBP was in those days) lady at the border crossing saw two raggedy looking young guys in an old car crammed with junk and thought we had drugs in the car. She unloaded all my life’s possessions that we had crammed into the back seat and trunk, unshipped seats, opened up the gas tank and stuck something down there, jacked up the car and removed tires, really gave the car a going over. Of course, not being stupid despite still being in our 20s, we had carefully removed all illicit substances before crossing an international border. But these days, since we combined Customs, Border Patrol, Immigration and Naturalization, and Immigration Enforcement into CBP and ICE and put them in the Department of Homeland Security under the Patriot Act after 9/11, border enforcement has gotten even more stringent, and our current fearless leader has apparently determined to close the country off.

Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Center, North Dakota, 7/22/2026 Stewart King

We passed through Medora North Dakota and visited the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Center. It’s not a library; his papers are at Harvard, his alma mater, and most of his stuff is at his home in Oyster Bay, New York. It is run by a private foundation, not the National Archives. The Medora center is an educational facility with some artifacts, a lot of replica artifacts and reproductions of documents, and a very strong emphasis on virtual reality storytelling. The virtual reality stuff is interesting, especially for kids. The children I saw there were enjoying seeing themselves dressed as newsies in turn of the 20th century New York, or muckraking reporters, young Theodore, etc. There was purportedly an opportunity to have a conversation with a virtual avatar of the man himself, but I didn’t see it or I would have asked him what he thought of the Philippine conflict in retrospect. The general presentation was sympathetic to the man but not entirely hagiographic. They did mention colonialism, I think “we stole it fair and square” was cited with reference to the Panama Canal, they did talk about the poverty and suffering caused by industrialization, they did mention the fact that it was actually Black soldiers from the 25th Infantry who captured San Juan Hill in Cuba, not Roosevelt and his Rough Riders. I think a visitor who paid attention would come away from the place with a fairly complete picture of the man and his times. The architecture is impressive. The building, as you can see in the photo, is built out of natural materials from the site and designed to fit into the landscape. The roof has beds with local plants, and the surrounding area has trails and signage talking about wildlife, native people, and early colonial settlement.

We stopped in Minneapolis to pay our respects to the fallen in the glorious struggle against fascism last winter. As you can see in the photo at the top of this essay, Alex Pretti has a memorial at the site of his murder on Nicollet Avenue. The place where Renee Good was killed is a residential street and traffic is somewhat discouraged. While we were underway, ICE got back to its murderous ways and two more people were killed, one in Texas and one in Maine. In Oregon, the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, where I signed up as a volunteer many months ago, suddenly started sending me alerts. There was a situation in King City, right down the hill from my house – of course, I was thousands of kilometers away by that point and couldn’t respond within 15 minutes as the situation required. But apparently, while the performative “surges” carried out under Kristi Noem’s leadership have been abandoned, DHS has not given up on Stephen Miller’s goal of a million deportations a year. Those guys they hired last year are now available, no matter how incompetent, and so they can be active everywhere, they don’t need to send Greg Bovino. And their $118 billion budget for FY2026 goes a long way – DHS has a budget bigger than all but three global militaries, one of which is ours (the others are China at $251bn, and Russia at $186bn).

Obama Presidential Library from Jackson Park Stewart King

We passed through Chicago and got a look at the outside of the Obama library. There is a library here: a branch of the Chicago Public Library. The center is operated by the National Archives and has digital access to his presidential papers, while the physical papers are preserved at the Archives main facility in College Park Maryland. So this thing does have more right to call itself a library than the Teddy Roosevelt center does. Unfortunately, we didn’t get inside. There are tickets, and we got there on a Saturday and they were sold out. It’s a pretty impressive facility though, with several buildings on a large campus between Jackson Park, the city park of Chicago’s South Side where Obama made his bones as a politician, and the University of Chicago, haunt of those east coast Straussians and assorted conservative thinkers, the heirs of Milton Friedman and the “Chicago boys” of globalization and neoliberalism. So like Obama himself, it stands between African America and elite intellectual culture.

So we got here in the end, there’s the usual enormous amount of work to do around the place, and I’m tired, so this will have to do for the “what I did on my summer vacation” essay.

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