Welcome

I

wrote the book, Rebel Without a Clue. See it up there? Over on the left. It is a gorgeous, pithy, insightful volume full of interesting anecdotes leading up to and including my objection to the Vietnam War. It recounts large parts of my life, plus a motorcycle journey I took in 1970 with a friend while waiting for the FBI and the Dept. of Justice to get off the dime.

I also spoke of the people Tom and I met on that journey, how the type of thinking we do and the natural movement of people changed our nation, and an assessment of our nation’s values.

My ideas went on from there, but the page count was well on its way to Jupiter, so I published the rest of my oh-so-pithy conclusions in the sequel: The Great American Dream Machine (up there on the right) as a series of monographs, along with a few other articles.

Below is a review of both books by a book editor in South Africa.

Jonathan Robertson 

Rebel_Clue@icloud.com

🔹 

Rebel Without a Clue: A stained-glass life, cast in amber

Rebel Without a Clue, a memoir by Jonathan Robertson, encapsulates that moment of awakening in American history—the 1970s—and brings it forward into the present. A young man’s stand against injustice, a motorcycle journey, and a friendship. Just a couple of guys riding the blue-gray ribbons of America’s existence, culminating in a few home truths.
The motorcycle journal itself is charmingly unassuming in its simplicity. It chronicles the day-to-days between boyhood and a fate sealed in either federal prison or taking over the family business—some mundane, a few rather funny, and some thoughtful. But the story is mostly a series of interludes dealing with new places and unfamiliar faces. The cold, wet, sunshiny moments of life on the road with not much more than a toothbrush, a fresh pair of socks, and a tank full of gas.  
Beyond the journals there are chapters of fierce introspection and defiance, ruminating and wrestling with existentialism and actualization as the first rumbles of American dystopia curdled the cream. At root cause, racism and magical thinking. Triggering everything was the immense lottery of Vietnam. Innocence lost.
Robertson recounts his early life, born to parents who had first-hand recollections of the dustbowl and the Great Depression, through to the hard-working and honest-to-God thriving of the ice cream generation of the 60s. There are early indications of an innate otherwise-ness. As a kid fed up with rote memorization and brought down by health issues, he artfully dodged pre-programed fare and read his way through three years of high school—at the public parks of his hometown—before going on to college. Philosophy, archeology, poetry, and prose; high adventure, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and classical literature. Plus a hefty dose of theology (taken twice, with attendant maps), and PB&J sandwiches for sustenance. 
An endeavor born from a desire to escape, this develops into a carefully curated education in intellectual rebellion. He lovingly name-drops a litany of writers as his framework of knowledge begins to take shape. Bertrand Russell, Thomas Wolfe, the Beat Generation’s Ginsberg and Kerouac, then Gertrude Stein’s lost writers Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and all the way back to Kit Marlowe, Kyd, and the Bard himself. He read “until his eyes bled, his hair fell out, and the leaves turned slowly into autumn.”
It is in the aptly named Music & Lyrics chapter that Robertson’s glittering prose and literary perception peaks. It is a lifetime’s culmination of learning how to think, rather than what to think. And it unfolds in an exquisite, pragmatic ode to those great voices of an era where art, the great thinkers, and those who read and listened to them swirl on a knife's edge of ecstatic epiphany. 
His own writing unfurls a fascinating notion—learning Shakespeare to understand Bob Dylan: “His songs were like stained glass windows shattered in a church of our own devising, and in their ruin became a more accurate reflection of a world we hadn’t understood before. He knew how to break and rebuild language such that we could see our own truth—like Plato’s Forms—clearly, and for the first time.” Simply brilliant.
But that isn’t the end of it. Using this same technique in a second book, The Great American Dream Machine, Robertson transposes the Middle Ages onto the present and compares Dr. King’s arc of justice to where we are today. He explains how magic and belief weigh against science and logic to skew our ability to reason, and indeed, even to survive. 
And that’s what makes these books so important. This is not just a voice from the generation that stopped a war, but a two-step thesis born of self-awareness, an understanding of history, and our present unsustainable predicament.
This is the voice of those who refused—then and now—to go quietly into that good night.

Nicolette Lategan
Johannesburg, South Africa