Somewhere between sticky loose change and stale Cheetos under the seats of leased SUVs, ambition is initiated as promptly as doing one’s taxes.

Current literary trends seem as erratic and catastrophic as the shocking rate of surprise natural disasters that jack hammer over the airwaves and wire services through the news media every other second.

Questions need to be raised.

Is literature as cold and dead, yet finely preserved as Lenin’s stone-faced corpse? Are poets today too plagued by the tetanus they’ve caught prancing atop rusty barbwire fences for so many years to juggle flaming phrases into spectacular and fresh firework displays? And finally, does anyone really give a damn besides publishers, journalists and those wading through the oversaturated and landmine-laced field of writing?

There never have been any easy answers, and now that war once again has a suffocating grip on the media, and reality television makes leaving the sofa unnecessary, excluding a quick swing through a local drive-thru window, most Americans could seemingly not care less.

Long given up chasing the tail of the American dream, which is probably wedged somewhere between sticky loose change and stale Cheetos under the seats of leased SUVs, ambition is initiated as promptly as doing one’s taxes.

Does average American ambition have to tiptoe into the 21st century afraid to step on a crippling explosion of shrapnel or a steaming pile of dog feces on their landscaped lawn in order to fill some sort of acceptable status quo?

This string of agitated questions is as rhetorical and redundant as one lets it be. Relying on literature as a confidante or, at least, a distracting muse in order to deter present harsh realities from ruining life has always been a backdoor option. Escapism through literature is as old as scripture, and with its power in the hands of the reader it will never cease to exist.

Accessibility, which is being thwarted more and more by the mountains of junk and floods of senseless drool from talking heads, becomes a greater obstacle daily. This is the nut, which should be coveted and protected at all costs.

As literature becomes more watered down along with every other from of artistic expression, the reader, or appreciator, is forced to sift through more rocks and mud to find that gold nugget.

A dependence on proven classics is one way to read, but this addiction can also be condemning. Americana bled through the prophetically drunken pens of Hemmingway to Hunter S. Thompson, but after all, they both fled out the back of the sliding American landscape through a bullet-hole sized door in their heads. Jack Kerouac crawled all over the American highways, leading a dissociated generation to wander, drinking himself into an early grave, his heart seeping with contempt.

Another craftsman of American obscurity, the late Kurt Vonnegut, solidifies this pessimistic view with an array of essays in last year’s “A Man without a Country.” His smattering of relevant commentary on America’s own illnesses secretes bonds of hopelessness that feed off of the tragic trends of politics, art and dignity.

When the veteran storytellers of the American struggle start to turn their backs on the ugly truth, readers even remotely in tune with their songs will see that the future is bleak.

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