Dive bars will save the West

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 doi…