And Yet ... Read online

  • • •

  Was I supposed to be looking for patterns? If you look for them, you find them. But it wouldn’t be unfair to speculate, at this juncture, that if you consider yourself a Southerner you are more likely to come from a large family, more likely to have a family connection to the military or to the military-industrial complex, more likely to have some relationship—however twisted—with a personal savior, and more likely to take a “screw you” attitude to the federal government. To this one might add that you are more likely to live where your ancestors lived, and to feel the presence of American history. In Huntington, West Virginia, where the souvenirs at the airport tend to be made from coal, I was told quite simply, “You’ll like it here. Most people hereabouts are English.” Indeed, H. L. Mencken, that great Anglophobe, who originated the term “Bible Belt,” also alluded to “the hook-worm belt” of Anglo-Saxondom to put down Dixie. “The same people, living in the same place,” as T. S. Eliot rather more mildly put it in his famous lecture “After Strange Gods” at the University of Virginia. Many American cities and counties have some kind of “heritage” campaign, but one way of telling that you are in the South is the prevalence of roadside markers, battlefield memorials, equestrian statues, and plaques. This is by no means “the United States of Amnesia” that Gore Vidal scorns—it’s an area where the past is taken seriously.

  • • •

  This goes double for Texas, as Texans invariably think no matter what the subject is. It was actually in Marshall, Texas, that the last headquarters of the Confederacy was located: there were just that many secessionist dead-enders who held on for the few days between the burning of Richmond and the ceremony at Appomattox. Doomed last stands are a special subject in this territory, but the Alamo also symbolizes the fact that Texas had its own declaration of independence, its own revolution, and its own statehood, as well as a disastrous adventure in confederation, before rejoining the Union. You can still see where the French embassy to Texas used to be, in Austin, just as you can still see where the Texas embassy used to be on St. James’s Street in London. Schoolchildren in Texas have to recite the pledge to the Texas flag every morning, just after the Pledge of Allegiance.

  One always strives to avoid “land of contrast” clichés, but in Texas the more people live up to their reputation, the more they don’t. And the more it stays the same, the more it changes. You may be surprised to know that the famous bumper sticker “Don’t Mess with Texas,” now seen on the back of many a pickup that is also insured by Smith & Wesson, was originally a green slogan, for a statewide antilittering campaign. I went to call on Kinky Friedman, at his combination ranch and animal-rescue center in the fabulously beautiful Hill Country outside Austin. The Lone Star State’s most famous Jew and bohemian, now running for governor on a platform to be determined, was full of praise for the cowboy spirit. “ ‘Cowboy’ is a great word. Gandhi was a cowboy, Jesus was a cowboy, Mandela was a cowboy: stand-up guys.” The improbability of this formulation is underlined by the fact that less than 2 percent of Texans now work with ambulant cows in any capacity.

  Larry McMurtry, who has spent years trying to discredit the cowboy myth in his fiction (“I’ve called them fascists”), manages to run four large bookstores, each of them a warehouse, in Archer City (at last, a civilized Texas School Book Depository), a town of perhaps 1,500 souls many miles from anywhere on the flatland, one of those places where if the wind drops, all the chickens fall over. He told me that anyone who walks into the stores is almost certain to be from out of town. Despite this philistinism, as he points out, the Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas at Austin, has one of the finest collections of literature in the world. You could see Evelyn Waugh’s library, complete with its furniture, as well as the papers and manuscripts of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Robert Lowell, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Tom Stoppard, John Fowles, and all twenty thousand pounds of Norman Mailer’s archives. There are three first-class art museums in Fort Worth, where some say the South ends and the West begins, and the names Rothko and de Menil are almost synonymous with Houston.

  Texas’s other great living writer, John Graves—author of the wonderful Goodbye to a River—also lives way out the hell and gone, near Glen Rose. He has a respect for the grain and grit of the Texan character, and for the Calvinism that enabled those raw settlers to survive and grow in a harsh land, but now that Calvinism isn’t needed for that purpose, it can be a slight pain in the ass. “I wish I lived in a world,” he says softly, “where it was possible to be religious and think at the same time.” A few miles down the road from his place there stands the Creation Evidence Museum: a pathetic freak show featuring organisms allegedly so complex that they must have been invented and let loose by the divine hand all in one day. . . .

  Texas has a land border that is 1,254 miles in length, so appeals to the frontier spirit seldom fall on deaf ears, and by the year 2025 a majority of the state’s population may be Hispanic. But then, even the word “cowboy” originally comes from “vaquero” and is a Spanish imperial idea. You can see the reaction, though, in an emerging town like Plano, just outside Dallas. Here, rows and rows of new villa-style housing, punctuated by churches, schools, and the mandatory football fields, are creating a whole new white, observant, affluent constituency. This, and the feline redistricting plan that goes along with it, is one of the building blocks of the intended future Republican majority. (Ten years ago, the Texas Democrats had both houses and the governorship; now they can only whistle at how fast the state has metamorphosed from blue to red.)

  • • •

  I chose Atlanta for my last stop, intending to make a side trip to the town of Kennesaw, where local law makes gun ownership mandatory. (“An armed society is a polite society,” as some like to say.) But I ended up concentrating on Professor Eugene Genovese, the former Marxist from Brooklyn who with his scholar wife, Elizabeth, has moved south and become the preeminent historian of the area. I suppose I was looking for an encapsulating sentence: at all events they furnished me with one. Eugene had been praising some work on the South by the historian Eric Foner, who is a New Yorker to his fingertips, when his wife broke in to say, “It’s not that good. It lacks the tragic sense.”

  And that was it, in a phrase. Never quite able to get over a lost past, never quite at ease with the federal government (though very much at ease with the armed forces), and just not quite large enough to impose itself on the rest of the country, the South keeps on “reviving” and redefining itself, always pushing at its limits and limitations—and always finding them.

  (Vanity Fair, September 2005)

  The Turkey Has Landed

  CONCERNING THANKSGIVING, THAT most distinctive and unique of all American holidays, there need be no resentment and no recrimination. Likewise, there need be no wearisome present-giving, no order of divine service, and no obligation to the dead. This holiday is like a free gift, or even (profane though the concept may be to some readers) a free lunch—and a very big and handsome one at that. This is the festival on which one hears that distinct and generous American voice: the one that says “Why not?” Family values are certainly involved, but even those with no family will still be invited, or will invite. The doors are not exactly left open as for a Passover seder, yet who would not be ashamed to think of a neighbor who was excluded or forgotten on such a national day?

  Immigrants like me tend to mention it as their favorite. And this is paradoxical, perhaps, since it was tentative and yet ambitious immigrants who haltingly began the tradition. But these were immigrants to the Americas, not to the United States.

  You can have a decent quarrel about the poor return that Native Americans received for their kindness in leading Puritans to find corn and turkeys in the course of a harsh winter. You may find yourself embroiled, as on Columbus Day, with those who detest the conquistadores or who did not get here by way of Plymouth Rock or Ellis Island. (“Not for us it isn’t,” as the recepti
onist at Louis Farrakhan’s Final Call once glacially told me, after I had pointed out that her boss had desired me to telephone that very day.) Even Hallowe’en is fraught, with undertones of human sacrifice and Protestant ascendancy. But Thanksgiving really comes from the time when the USA had replaced the squabbling confessional colonists, and is fine, and all-American, too.

  As with so many fine things, it results from the granite jaw and the unhypocritical speech of Abraham Lincoln. It seemed to him, as it must have seemed in his composition of the Gettysburg Address, that there ought to be one day that belonged exclusively to all free citizens of a democratic republic. It need not trouble us that he spoke in April and named a regular calendar day at the end of November, any more than it need trouble us that he mentioned “God” but specified no particular religion. No nation can be without a day of its own, and who but a demagogue or a sentimentalist would have appointed a simulacrum of Easter or Passover? The Union had just been preserved from every kind of hazard and fanaticism: just be grateful. If there were to be any ceremonial or devotional moment at Thanksgiving, and I am sure that I wish that there were not, it still might not kill the spirit of the thing if Lincoln’s second inaugural were to be read aloud, or at least printed on a few place mats.

  Any attempt at further grandiosity would fail. To remember the terrible war that saved the Union, or the Winthropian fundamentalism about that “city on a hill,” would be too strenuous. And there are other days, in any case, on which one may celebrate or commemorate these things. I myself always concentrate on the dry wisdom of Benjamin Franklin, who once proposed that the turkey instead of the eagle should be the American national bird. After all, as he noted, the eagle is an inedible and arrogant predator whereas the turkey is harmless to others, nutritious, thrifty, industrious, and profuse. Pausing only to think of the variable slogans here (“Where Turkeys Dare”; “The Turkey Has Landed”; “On Wings of Turkeys” and, by a stretch, “Legal Turkeys”) I marvel to think that a nation so potentially strong could have had a Founding Father who was so irreverent. I also wish that I liked turkey. But there is always stuffing, cranberry sauce, and gravy—to be eked out by pumpkin pie, which I also wish I could pretend to relish.

  Indeed, it is the sheer modesty of the occasion that partly recommends it. Everybody knows what’s coming. Nobody acts as if caviar and venison are about to be served, rammed home by syllabub and fine Madeira. The whole point is that one forces down, at an odd hour of the afternoon, the sort of food that even the least discriminating diner in a restaurant would never order by choice. Perhaps false modesty is better than no modesty at all.

  Never mind all that. I am quite sure (indeed, I know) that many a Thanksgiving table is set with vegetarian delights for all the family. And never mind if you think that Norman Rockwell is a great cornball as well as a considerable painter. Many people all over the world, including many members of my own great profession of journalism, almost make their livings by describing the United States as a predatory and taloned bird, swooping down on the humble dinners of others. And of course, no country would really wish to represent itself on its own coinage and emblems as a feathered, flapping, gobbling, and flightless product of evolution. Still and all, I have become one of those to whom Thanksgiving is a festival to be welcomed, and not dreaded. I once grabbed a plate of what was quite possibly turkey, but which certainly involved processed cranberry and pumpkin, in a US Army position in the desert on the frontier of Iraq. It was the worst meal—by far the worst meal—I have ever eaten. But in all directions from the chow hall, I could see Americans of every conceivable stripe and confession, cheerfully asserting their connection, in awful heat, with a fall of long ago. And this in a holiday that in no way could divide them. May this always be so, and may one give some modest thanks for it.

  (Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2005)

  Bah, Humbug

  I USED TO HARBOR the quiet but fierce ambition to write just one definitive, annihilating anti-Christmas column and then find an editor sufficiently indulgent to run it every December. My model was the Thanksgiving pastiche knocked off by Art Buchwald several decades ago and recycled annually in a serious ongoing test of reader tolerance. But I have slowly come to appreciate that this hope was in vain. The thing must be done annually and afresh. Partly this is because the whole business becomes more vile and insufferable—and in new and worse ways—every twelve months. It also starts to kick in earlier each year: it was at Thanksgiving this year that, making my way through an airport, I was confronted by the leering and antlered visage of what to my disordered senses appeared to be a bloody great moose. Only as reason regained her throne did I realize that the reindeer—that plague species—were back.

  Not long after I’d swallowed this bitter pill, I was invited onto Scarborough Country on MSNBC to debate the proposition that reindeer were an ancient symbol of Christianity and thus deserving of First Amendment protection, if not indeed of mandatory display at every mall in the land. I am told that nobody watches that show anymore—certainly I heard from almost nobody who had seen it—so I must tell you that the view taken by the host was that coniferous trees were also a symbol of Christianity, and that the Founding Fathers had endorsed this proposition. From his cue cards, he even quoted a few vaguely deistic sentences from Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, neither of them remotely Christian in tone. When I pointed out the latter, and added that Christmas trees, yule logs, and all the rest were symbols of the winter solstice holidays before any birth had been registered in the greater Bethlehem area, I was greeted by a storm of abuse, as if I had broken into the studio instead of having been entreated to come by Scarborough’s increasingly desperate staff. And when I added that it wasn’t very Tiny Tim–like to invite a seasonal guest and then tell him to shut up, I was told that I was henceforth stricken from the Scarborough Rolodex. The ultimate threat: no room at the Bigmouth Inn.

  This was a useful demonstration of what I have always hated about the month of December: the atmosphere of a one-party state. On all media and in all newspapers, endless invocations of the same repetitive theme. In all public places, from train stations to department stores, an insistent din of identical propaganda and identical music. The collectivization of gaiety and the compulsory infliction of joy. Time wasted on foolishness at one’s children’s schools. Vapid ecumenical messages from the president, who has more pressing things to do and who is constitutionally required to avoid any religious endorsements.

  And yet none of this party-line unanimity is enough for the party’s true hard-liners. The slogans must be exactly right. No “Happy Holidays” or even “Cool Yule” or a cheery Dickensian “Compliments of the season.” No, all banners and chants must be specifically designated in honor of the birth of the Dear Leader and the authority of the Great Leader. By chance, the New York Times on December 19 ran a story about the difficulties encountered by Christian missionaries working among North Korean defectors, including a certain Mr. Park. One missionary was quoted as saying ruefully that “he knew he had not won over Mr. Park. He knew that Christianity reminded Mr. Park, as well as other defectors, of ‘North Korean ideology.’ ” An interesting admission, if a bit of a stretch. Let’s just say that the birth of the Dear Leader is indeed celebrated as a miraculous one—accompanied, among other things, by heavenly portents and by birds singing in Korean—and that compulsory worship and compulsory adoration can indeed become a touch wearying to the spirit.

  Our Christian enthusiasts are evidently too stupid, as well as too insecure, to appreciate this. A revealing mark of their insecurity is their rage when public places are not annually given over to religious symbolism, and now, their fresh rage when palaces of private consumption do not follow suit. The Fox News campaign against Walmart—and other outlets whose observance of the official feast day is otherwise fanatical and punctilious to a degree, but a degree that falls short of unswerving orthodoxy—is one of the most sinister as well as one of the most laughable campaigns on
record. If these dolts knew anything about the real Protestant tradition, they would know that it was exactly this paganism and corruption that led Oliver Cromwell—my own favorite Protestant fundamentalist—to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether.

  No believer in the First Amendment could go that far. But there are millions of well-appointed buildings all across the United States, most of them tax-exempt and some of them receiving state subventions, where anyone can go at any time and celebrate miraculous births and pregnant virgins all day and all night if they so desire. These places are known as “churches,” and they can also force passersby to look at the displays and billboards they erect and to give ear to the bells that they ring. In addition, they can count on numberless radio and TV stations to beam their stuff all through the ether. If this is not sufficient, then god damn them. God damn them everyone.