Dive Bars Will Save the West

On the wall of a dive bar in Washington, DC, hung a poster for Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger. The bar had the same name as the film. The movie (more boring to watch than metal melting) follows a disillusioned Anglo-American journalist roaming the African desert, indifferent to the landscape and the war he’s supposed to report on. He trades identities with a dead arms dealer and leaves behind his wife, job and old life, thinking that doing so will fix the emptiness. It doesn’t. He is incapable of caring. He has no convictions, not even when…