Word: kremen
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That, at least, is a mistake Bennett Kremen, a New York journalist who a couple of years ago had become, he says, "uncertain of what America had become," avoided. Kremen took off for a few months in search of the real America, having decided beforehand that "to pass through the country like a tourist with a tape recorder and a journalist's notebook would simply prove worthless." Instead, Kremen went hitchhiking around, spending a few weeks as a factory worker, a few in college towns, a stint in the South and a time living with blacks. His intentions were purely...
...Kremen is tremendously pleased with himself throughout Dateline: America for embarking on his journey, which he feels certain will yield forth all the profoundest truths about America. He is like a spy for The New York Times's reading world, whose job is to report back on what real people are like...
...everywhere he goes, every chance he gets, Kremen is asking people the Big Questions--and because the people he talks to are real, grassroots Americans, he presents everything they say as deeply momentous. Unfortunately, it doesn't always come out that way. Here is Kremen at Ohio State, the campus of America's heartland, talking to a student...
...over for you," Kremen muses...
...Kremen is, I guess, what the boys over in William James would call a participant-observer. He's fiercely determined to cram as much experience into a soujourn away from New York as possible, reveling in bars and dirt and cheap hotels and the like. Anything that smacks of either youth culture or the working class or, best of all, a combination of the two, sends him into ecstasy. Smoking marijuana, for instance, especially in a factory or a commune, is always tremendously meaningful: "The smoke striking into my lungs sends my blood leaping. And soon the flying sparks...