A Cry from the Far Middle Page 3

  What they were rebelling against was the Jamestown colony governor William Berkeley who was either too friendly with (dangerous!) Native Americans or not friendly enough with them to get other Jamestown colonists in on the fur trade (lucrative!) with Native Americans. The issue is—as issues could get to be even before the Internet—confused.

  One thing can be said in favor of the rebellion: it was inclusive. Indentured servants and slaves joined with plantation owners in rebelling. It’s heartening to see Americans working together toward a common goal. Although that can also be said of the 1622 Powhatan attack.

  Bacon had his rebels point their muskets at Governor Berkeley who (he may have been drinking brandy himself) bared his chest and told them to go ahead and shoot. So Bacon had his rebels point their muskets at the elected Burgesses who—every bit as courageous as today’s House and Senate members—promptly gave in. Although what they gave in to is not exactly clear. Anyway it wasn’t enough because Bacon’s rebels set fire to the House of Burgesses and the entire settlement burned.

  Nathaniel Bacon died of diarrhea. Governor Berkeley returned to power in 1677. In yet another first, predating the Salem witch trial mass executions by fifteen years, he hanged twenty-three of the men who had rebelled against . . . the deep state, or whatever.

  The Jamestown House of Burgesses was rebuilt but burned again, accidently. By 1699 Virginians had had enough of mosquito-infested, swampy, fractious, flammable Jamestown and moved their capital to Williamsburg. Or, as it is now known, “Colonial” Williamsburg.

  Jamestown’s last first would be to usher in the “living history” tourist trap at Williamsburg. This was America’s initial foray into making its history cute—Disneyfication while Walt was still doodling mice.

  Colonial Williamsburg was created in the 1920s by the kind of cross section of America that makes the rest of us Americans rather cross. Founders included the local Episcopal minister, the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Chamber of Commerce, and a group that went by (and still does) the marvelous name Colonial Dames. And the enterprise was paid for by John D. Rockefeller (whose own history of financial dealing was less than adorable).

  A visit to Colonial Williamsburg is at least as informative as a meet and greet with Pocahontas at Disney World. “Pocahontas will pose for photos with you and you can get her autograph. She appears daily at various times. Get the Animal Kingdom guide for exact times during your visit.”

  If John D. had read more American history (his higher education was a ten-week business course at Folsom’s Commercial College in Cleveland), he wouldn’t have picked this part of it for “living.”

  Or maybe—he was a man of foresight—he would have. Right now America seems determined to relive its early history in every detail of angry perplexity—from Verrazzano-like trade war confusion about the riches of the Orient, to calling Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas, to an endlessly woke Bacon-type rebellion against everything and nothing, to blog threats to hang antifas from alt-right wannabe Governor Berkeleys on 4chan.

  Thus, in explaining America, the “Ain’t it awful” explanation is always available, if we want it.

  Ravaged by climate change. Torn by internecine strife. Gross inequality in the distribution of wealth. Widespread poverty. Drug use. Oppression of women and minorities.

  And that was in 1491. Next year things got much worse.

  Can’t we choose some other moment in the American chronology to live our living history life in? Surely there was a time when America was in flower, at peace with itself and the world, growing in prosperity and hope, with shared values, respected institutions, and confident love of country. You know, the “Great” that’s the “Again” in the “Make America . . .” thing.

  Maybe that moment would be about 1910 when “America the Beautiful” became a popular patriotic song. It’s a stirring tune. Many are of the opinion that it should be our national anthem. It’s much easier to sing than “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Even Roseanne Barr couldn’t butcher it in front of 50,000 irked baseball fans in San Diego at the 1990 Padres–Cincinnati Reds game. (Padres owner Tom Werner was the producer of the Roseanne sitcom—in case you’ve been wondering WTF? for thirty years.) Some find “The Star-Spangled Banner” too bellicose. Others think it contains a coded message advocating open borders (“Jose can you see . . .”) Anyway, nobody ever takes a knee on “And crown thy good with brotherhood.”

  But “America the Beautiful” is not so anodyne or naïf as it seems. Its lyricist certainly wasn’t. Katharine Lee Bates (1859–1929) studied at Wellesley College and Oxford. She was the head of the English Department at Wellesley, neither then nor now a nest of conservative complacency. She was a formidable social activist supporting women’s suffrage, world peace, unionized labor, slum clearance, poor relief, and immigrant rights. She traveled the world and was a war correspondent for the New York Times during the Spanish-American War, which, as all politically correct people did at the time, she deplored. She was a friend of Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, and William Butler Yeats, as well as a widely published poet herself. Though not, truth to tell, a very good one. Sample this verse from her “In a Northern Wood”:

  FRAGRANT are the cedar-boughs stretching green and level,

  Feasting-halls where waxwings flit at their spicy revel,

  But O the pine, the questing pine, that flings its arms on high

  To search the secret of the sun and escalade the sky!

  Bates, however, was also a lifelong Republican and quit the GOP in 1924 only because of the party’s refusal to support the League of Nations. Furthermore she may have been gay, sharing a home for twenty-five years with fellow Wellesley professor Katharine Coman. If we are looking for a representative of a simpler time and place, Katharine Lee Bates is the wrong example.

  She wrote the words to “America the Beautiful” first as a poem in 1893. (The music it would be set to in 1910 was from an 1882 hymn by the organist and composer Samuel Ward.) Bate’s poem was inspired by a transcontinental train journey from Boston by way of Chicago and Denver to Pikes Peak. To begin with let us recall that trains, before they arrive at purple mountain majesties, don’t pass through the best parts of town.

  Now sing along with me. And let’s pay close attention to what Bates is saying.

  O beautiful for spacious skies,

  For amber waves of grain,

  For purple mountain majesties

  Only one out of three of which Americans can take any credit for.

  Above the fruited plain!

  KLB was perfectly aware of the deplorable working conditions of fruit pickers.

  America! America!

  God shed [Odd word choice. Like a dog sheds? America could use more God on its furniture?] His grace on thee

  And crown [sixth definition, Webster’s, “to hit on the head”] thy good with brotherhood

  From sea to shining sea!

  O beautiful for pilgrim [whose arrival on the Mayflower would nowadays be called Christian Right activism] feet,

  Whose stern impassioned stress

  Like other Puritan groups, the pilgrims would be the source of considerable stress in America.

  A thoroughfare for freedom beat

  Across the wilderness.

  KLB is putting things tactfully here. It was the germs from the pilgrim’s dirty feet that beat the thoroughfare.

  America! America!

  God mend thine every flaw,

  Implying a tailoring job for the ages.

  Confirm thy soul in self-control,

  KLB was a Congregationalist, and the Congregational Church was an important force in the temperance movement.

  Thy liberty in law.

  Which law KLB wanted to change in a variety of ways.

  O beautiful for heroes proved

  In liberating strife,

  When explaining Amer
ica, “liberating strife” is one way to put it.

  Who more than self their country loved

  KLB flatters us.

  And mercy more than life!

  But here she goes too far.

  America! America!

  May God thy gold refine,

  Advocacy for “hard money” gold standard? KLB was a Republican.

  Till all success be nobleness,

  But she was also offended by the excesses of the Gilded Age.

  And every gain divine!

  Still, as mentioned, she was a Republican.

  O beautiful for patriot dream

  That sees beyond the years

  The poem was written during the Panic of 1893, a severe economic depression that lasted until 1897.

  Thine alabaster cities gleam

  Undimmed by human tears!

  KLB knew full well what dimmed the cities of America. Her reference here is to Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which she presumably saw on her trip west. Temporary buildings representing an optimistic future were sheathed in fine-grained gypsum.

  America! America!

  God shed [There He goes again. This time a snakeskin comes to mind.] His grace on thee

  And crown [not to say clobber] thy good with brotherhood

  From sea to shining sea!

  What is America? Do other nations need this much explaining?

  Ask, “What is England?” and you’ll get an earful from the Bard by way of Richard II:

  This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

  This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

  This other Eden, demi-paradise,

  . . .

  This happy breed of men, this little world,

  This precious stone set in the silver sea . . .

  Aw, shut your hole.

  Ask, “What is China?” and invite a long, boring lecture from sinologists or, worse, from Xi Jinping.

  “What is France?” Prepare yourself for a load of brie, and in French at that.

  “What is Russia?” Churchill said it’s “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” and I’d add locked in a jail cell and dumped in a shithole.

  And let’s not ask “What is Germany?” for fear that they’ll show us again.

  Other nations are based on battle, blood, ethnicity, culture, language, and (unlike Jamestown) terra firma. Not America. We’re strangers turned loose in an opportunity. An opportunity to treat other strangers like shit very much included.

  Witness, in the Declaration of Independence, our unalienable right to Pursuit of Happiness. Whatever the hell happiness is supposed to mean. Pace Webster’s, “dominantly agreeable emotion ranging in value from mere contentment to deep and intense joy in living,” happiness has no definition. Whatever makes you happy. We are a pursuit without a purpose. Always on the go with no idea where.

  America is not a place. It was the middle of no place when people first got here and somebody else’s place we’re taking ever since. America is not an ideal, or lightning would have struck us dead long ago. America is not an idea either. Or if it is an idea, it’s a fuzzy one. And we’ve always been of two (or 327.2 million) minds about it.

  A friend of mine recently told me that America’s angry perplexity made him feel confused. (Admittedly he’s a cisgender hetronormative middle-aged white male from the Midwest and can’t be expected to truly have feelings.) “I don’t get it,” he said. “America emerged from the Cold War with a military that dominates the world and an economy that does the same and now business is booming. Why aren’t we taking a victory lap? Why aren’t we fat and happy?”

  Well, we’ve got the fat part . . .

  * * *

  Maybe we should just stick with the “Ain’t it awful” explanation of America. When things don’t turn out exactly the way we want, it’s sort of comforting to think that they never did. Or maybe we should go with the “foreigner” explanation of America—a capitalistic, imperialistic, hegemonistic, grossly materialistic place rife with social and economic injustice where they all want to live.

  Both true enough. Yet there’s an “exceptional” explanation of America that’s just as true and much more puzzling. Our country was founded by the delusional and the crazy, populated by the desperate and the unwilling, motivated by most of the Seven Deadly Sins, and is somehow . . . the richest and most powerful nation on earth, ever.

  Which leads us to the “drunk” explanation of America. We’ll let some drunk shout it from the back of the bar.

  “We had to fuck a lot of people to make this baby!”

  One Nation—Divided As Hell

  Coastals vs. Heartlanders

  They know all about organic, sustainable, non-GMO, pesticide-free, fair-traded, locavore, artisanal, gluten-free, hypoallergenic, and vegan. But they don’t know hay from straw.

  They are the Coastals—the enlightened, the progressive, the sensitive, the inclusive, the hip, the aware, the woke. They inhabit the metropolises of the Left Coast and the Eastern Seaboard from the Chesapeake Bay to Bar Harbor and they dwell in the trending atolls in between. You find them in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colorado; Taos, New Mexico, and all the other places where the smell of pot and $5 cups of coffee is stronger than the smell of factory smoke, crop fertilizer, heavy equipment diesel fumes, or the sweat of physical labor.

  The opposite of Coastal is Heartland. As far as the people of the Heartland are concerned, you can tell Coastals from Heartlanders the way you can tell

  Theories from practices

  Ideas from actions

  Words from deeds

  The Harvard football team from the Ohio State Buckeyes

  The defining feature of Coastals is that they know so much more than Heartlanders do. (Ignoring, of course, Coastals feeding straw to the horse and trying to sip a Starbucks Cascara Cold Foam through a blade of hay.)

  The Coastals know what’s good for the Heartlanders better than the Heartlanders do. They know what’s good for the whole world better than the whole world does. And the Coastals can prove it. It’s a bad old world. So the world must not know what the Coastals know or the world would be good. It’s not. Case closed.

  Another defining feature of Coastals is that they care so much more than Heartlanders do. They say to Oklahomans, “Oh, sure, you care about climate change. But you care only because of lawn-watering restrictions. We really care. We care so much we quit using the toilet. And because we care so much more than you do we’re better people than you are. The world should be run by better people. Therefore we’ll run Oklahoma from Washington.”

  Besides knowing and caring, a third defining feature of Coastals is that they are so much more successful than Heartlanders are. Materially, of course, but successful in their attainment of righteousness as well. Hearlanders try to be righteous, and almost always fail at it (just go to one of their cement-block churches and listen to one of their fire-and-brimstone preachers tell them so). Coastals try to be self-righteous and they succeed every time.

  As noted, being a Coastal or a Heartlander isn’t purely a matter of geography. Although it’s interesting to consider why Coastals dominate the coasts. Or some of the coasts. Coastals are scarce on the Gulf Coast, uncommon on the shores of the Great Lakes, and dominate the Atlantic Coast only as far south as Washington’s Virginia suburbs. Hawaii is both lower case c and capital C Coastal, while Alaska has lots of coast but is almost entirely Heartland.

  The Pacific Coast can be explained by a Midwestern saying: “Every now and then the country gets tilted and everything that’s loose rolls out to California.” As for New Yorkers, Bostonians, and their ilk, maybe while the rest of the nation was engaged in Manifest Destiny and the Great Western Migration the Northeast simply missed the bus.

  But there are lonely Heartlanders in B
erkeley and isolated Coastals frantically seeking their “safe space” in Tulsa.

  The Heartland/Costal divide does not fall along strict lines of political ideology either. Harry Truman was a Heartlander. Steve Bannon makes Heartlander tornado noises but is in fact a Coastal hurricane of know-it-all, cared-stiff self-regard. Donald Trump is a Coastal pretending to be a Heartlander, covering his oh-so-Coastal real estate scammer face with a mask of drunk-in-a-bowling-alley Heartlander bigotry. Elizabeth Warren is a Heartlander. You can tell by the middle-American banality of all her “to-do” lists. These may be posted with Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Emma Goldman refrigerator magnets. But you know that, inside the fridge, is Miracle Whip, Velveeta, Spam, yellow mustard, iceberg lettuce, Jello salad, tuna casserole, meat loaf surprise made with Hamburger Helper, and leftover SpaghettiOs. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, with an almost identical political platform, has spent fifty-two years in the Heartland of Vermont and you could still use his New York accent to grate cheddar.

  Nor are ethnic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, or religious “identities” determinative. Justice Scalia—Heartland. Sacco and Vanzetti—Coastal. Likewise: Colin Powell/Ta-Nehisi Coates, Peter Thiel/Rosie O’Donnell, Milton Friedman/Chuck Schumer.

  Caitlyn Jenner is a Heartland jock. Former Transparent star Jeffrey Tambor is a Coastal snowflake. And, speaking of sexual harassment, #MeToo also spans the Coastal-Heartland divide. Bill Clinton is a Heartlander and a Tit-and-Asslander. (While Hillary is a doughy Heartlander full of flakey Coastal pretensions.)

  Coastals are not all flakes. Among them there is an upper crust—crumbs that stick together.

  Some sit atop the pie of finance. Heartlanders may make money, but Coastals create money in their opaque central banks, their arcane derivative markets, and their mystifying high-tech IPO offerings.

  Some crumbs coat the bread loaf of politics. The political Coastals are devoted to social justice—a large pile of benefits to be distributed to the Heartland many, just as soon as the Coastal few have grabbed and hoarded a large pile of their own.