Some might remember this year’s scene of President Bush futilely “touring” the country to drum up support for Social Security reform. As the country anxiously awaits the results of a prodigal journey which may have completely wasted tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of dollars and weeks of lost time on a political gamble, yet another trite political bus tour has been launched.

The “Bring Them Home Now” bus tour, a product of the tribulations of Camp Casey, Texas, has been touring the country for several weeks now, spreading the energy of a mass movement opposed to the War in Iraq. Cindy Sheehan, the mere figurehead of a nameless, numberless mass, seems almost to have been forced upon a bus by the winds of history. And so, for the next few months, the people have demanded that Mrs. Sheehan ride a bus through blue state and red state, zig-zagging across the political landscape. Eventually her travels climaxed on September 22, when, taking a microphone, she spoke to a crowd at Lafayette Park, begging Bush to allow the troops to go home so she could get off her bus.

But when did all this madness start? How did the Great American Bus Tour begin? One probably recollects reading about the splendid historical scene of thousands of carpet-baggers, the same ones captured my imagination as a kid, flooding the South to fight for civil rights. They, like some repetitive phenomena of history, would have surely ridden busses if they had lived exactly one hundred years later, but instead it was in this disorganized, idealistic environment that the roots of the first bus tour can be found. For on May 10, 1869, as the last golden spike was driven into the first trans-continental railroad at Promontory Summit in Utah, the dynamics of American society and politics completely changed. Trans-continental travel time was suddenly reduced from six months or more to merely a week. The whole country was finally open, and the era of boxcar campaigning began

Throughout the latter part of the 19th century and a good part of the early 20th century, the American imagination would be captured by presidents and political aspirers standing at the back of cabooses waving to their people. They would stop for 20 minutes in a town, give a speech, then continue onwards until the sun set. One can only imagine the effect this development must have had on the American mind, transforming the idea of politicians for people in the West from “those people back in Washington” to “the President who I saw on tour.”

But the advent and eventual popularization of the car in the early part of the 20th century would slowly replace this paradigm with a radically new, unrecognizably different one. The idea of the Great American Bus Tour might have begun as a trip in the mind of Ken Kesey-- famous author, and longtime advocate of LSD. Kesey and his group of Merry Pranksters, who single-handedly started the watershed counter-culture hallucinogen movement, were perhaps the first group to successfully exploit buses to spread their message. Their faithful bus Furthur (a synthesis of the words future and further) traveled across the country in the fateful of year of 1964, capturing the imagination of a youth disenfranchised by both parents and ideas born of a tired war generation. As Kesey himself put it, “What we hoped was that we could stop the coming end of the world.”

After the Pranksters had been thoroughly disenfranchised but their methods clearly proven, all that was left for the Bus Tour was its commercialization for mass consumption. Enter 1967, the Beatles and the Magical Mystery Tour. Specifically designed to imitate Kesey’s run for fame, the Beatles grouped together a slew of so-called ordinary people, put them on a charabanc bus, and, in a series of unscripted filmings, created the longest-running traffic jam in all recorded history.

An indubitable critical bomb, the Magical Mystery Tour nevertheless acquired an enormous cult following in the following years. They had touched a nerve in the American Spirit: combining a sense of freedom with a familiar landscape and the feeling of adventure. Throughout the next decade, hippies would follow the examples of Kesey and the Beatles, gathering bus after bus together in order to protest the Vietnam War and slake their sense of communal adventure. Soon after, American politicians and corporations saw this same device as a tool with which they could spread their own messages, and so for the following 40 years, political and commercial, rather than social, bus tours seemed to dominate the American landscape and imagination.

Cindy Sheehan’s entrance onto the American political scene might mark the first major event, since the hippy era, that a non-commercial, non-political personage has once again taken to the American scene and the American masses have taken to that personage. The product, however, has become so diluted and contorted that it hardly resembles its original. Just how far removed is Kesey from Sheehan? After all, they both represent, essentially, anti-violence, anti-war movements. And they both seem to be marginalized groups speaking for the underrepresented, against the political powers that be.

But when one looks at Sheehan’s bus, one gets the creeping feeling that they’re looking out a dead husk. Her movement is something sterilized, something mass-produced, and nothing particularly new. Unlike Kesey, or even Abraham Lincoln’s trans-continental railroad project (also in the ‘60s), Sheehan and her followers have hardly burst onto the American scene. Rather her entrance and her persona seem far too timely and far too uncannily mediocre.

But maybe the American people no longer expect much from their bus tours. Or maybe Sheehan is the last mediocrity in a tired era before something grandiosely new bursts onto the American political scene. Perhaps even the reincarnation of Ken Kesey (he died in 2001)? Particularly embodied by the latest bus tours, American Culture seems to have become desperately effete, dull, and tame. Can the American public renew its culture in yet another startling technicolor rendition?

That, perhaps, is a question only answerable by the bus tours of the next generation.