Almost a week late but I hope I didn't blow it.
After reading a few of my fellow students' postings I realized that both implicit and explicit meanings brought forth by Wyatt's prophetic claim. Yes, the fictionalized characters journey comes to a tragic end, and yes, their end can easily be understood as an allusion to the collapse of the optimism of the social rights movements of the 1960's.
While the film has received much recognition not just as great film, but as the archetype for the road film and been regarded in prophetic terms by Klinger as "[partaking in] apocalyptic,disaster-filled predictions of the future of the country" (193). At the same time the film's legacy, cultural resonance, and arguable legitimacy is constantly subverted by the its signifiers being used in an entirely different context from whence they were originally used. For all the counter cultural ideas the film attempts to espouse, they become diluted when one thinks of how many songs on the soundtrack are now used to sell automobiles, motorcycles, and other consumer products.
Furthermore motorcycle culture has gone from being a counter cultural movement, and based on very anticonsumerist principles becomes reincorporated (in the sense Guy Debor would use the term) into the commodity cultural. See: Harley Davidson, Orange County Choppers, et. al. Indeed Klinger's (not to mention many of my fellow student's) observation on the films' romanticized notions of nature, and fronteirism is another concept that has collapsed into a pastiche nostalgia for times that no one remembers.