Expedition. Sets out to accomplish, discover, claim, explore. Sets out with an agenda.

No revolution vanishes without effect.

To go to or stay in California had always meant to choose to be outside the mainstream, the orthodoxy, to choose other influences and a less Eurocentric point of view. This could mean cults, but it more often meant a little useful distance, literally and otherwise, from the status quo at the center of cultural power.

But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.

My definition of disaster became broader and broader, and I now see much of our everyday life—for its alienation and its destruction of souls and memory, as well as natural and social places—as a kind of disaster we escape temporarily in those golden moments of uprisings and carnivals. Or reclaiming the story.

That their desert camouflage only made them stand out and that the threats to the bridge were sketchy and remote, while the men with semiautomatic weapons were evident and unnerving, articulates something about war as a state of being.

I worry about the withdrawal from public space and public life. Democracy was always a bodily experience, claimed and fought for and celebrated in actual places. You must be present to win.

(Another view of Elvis, from Billboard magazine in 1958, stated, “In one aspect of America’s cultural life, integration has already taken place.”)

If, at the start of this story, the great divide was manifest in musical taste and distaste, that too has begun to close, as musical genres bleed into each other and no longer provide the airtight identities they once did.