When a baboon, monkey, or ape of any age gets sick or injured, its group won’t stop and seek shelter where they can nurture him back to health. That’s a decidedly human behavior, and it may help explain the depth of feeling we often have for our homes, that place where we can be weak, cared for, and feel safe.
If there’s one thing we’ve all had enough of as we’ve sheltered-in-place over the past month, it’s our homes. Not surprisingly, an international tracking poll released last week found that the one behavior respondents most planned to change when this pandemic subsides is to be outside more.
But while many people are clearly feeling pent up, I think our attitude toward–and even definition of–home will be one of the more lasting cultural changes this pandemic will have on America.
The same tracking poll, conducted by international communication firm Kekst CNC, found that many Americans think they’ll likely not travel as much–internationally or domestically–after the pandemic is over. Even more say they’re likely to stop going to concerts and sporting events. What that suggests is that as sick as we are of sitting on our couches, we don’t envision straying far from them in the years to come.
Like for so many others, the shelter in place order in California forced me to stay at home more than I have at anytime since I was a child. I’m the opposite of a homebody. Left to my own devices, I’ll eat out every night. And over the past decade, I’ve spent up to 20 weeks a year away from the address where I’m registered to vote. You’d think that this downtime would have driven me crazy.
But what happened as I plunked myself down to read and listen to music each day over the past month is that I began to notice my surroundings more than I ever had. During breaks, I looked out the window, and began to recognize the patterns in the movements of the ground squirrels, quails, lizards, and cottontail bunnies that live around my house. I started to pay more attention to the plaintive calls of Road Runners, which at first I thought was the cry of a hurt dog. One early morning last week, I watched a tag team of coyotes chasing a hapless Jack Rabbit in the backyard. The upshot of all this is that I became more in tune with the sounds and the rhythms of the little world off the dirt road I live on in the desert. All the time I’ve spent looking around me has made me feel more at home here now than at any other place or time in my life.
I’ve also found comfort in being a Californian. While I’ve always been proud of my home state, this is the first time I’ve ever thought it could save my life. News from Washington is as nasty and nonsensical as it ever was. But there’s nothing like a pandemic to reveal how confusing America’s federalist system is, and how little journalists and the public at large seem to understand it. The question of who’s in charge has never seemed so critical. I could safely ignore the President’s disturbing daily press conferences knowing that at least when it came to this pandemic, his words didn’t influence my fate as much as those of Gavin Newsom, who, by the way, starting referring to California as a nation-state. I felt safer knowing that we were placed under a shelter-in-place order earlier than any other state in country.
***
One of America’s least acknowledged weaknesses it its size. Our connection to our country is generally more ideological than visceral, more a matter of faith than lived experience. (More than half of Americans have visited fewer than 10 states of the Union.) In 1857, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to a friend that it was the English who taught him what a “true and warm love of country is.” The United States, he wrote, were “too various and extended to form really one country. New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.” He wrote that when there were only 34 states. It’s still true that the vastness of our nation can sometimes leave us wondering what it is that keeps us all together. It explains why American national cohesion has been so heavily dependent on war and the creation of external and internal enemies.
Our federalist governing system was designed to allow for multiple political loyalties. Indeed, the first states would not have signed on to the Constitution had it not protected their political interests. Two years before the Constitutional Convention and almost a decade after he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson referred to Virginia as “his country.”
More than two centuries later, it’s hard to imagine Americans identifying primarily with their states. But the politics of this pandemic is likely to change that, at least in the states that, in the end, are seen as having done a better job protecting their residents than other states or the federal government.
Putting aside issues of shared history or ethnic affinity, people generally support and identify with the level of government that satisfies their fundamental needs. Protection from a potentially lethal virus would seem to fit that category. According to the late Czech political scientist Ivo Duchacek, “Gratitude for benefits received and expectation of more to come constitute the foundations of political loyalty.”
Not surprisingly, given its slow and chaotic response to the pandemic, the Kekst CNC poll found that 35% of Americans have decreased their confidence in the U.S. federal government. Conversely, 40% of Americans say their confidence in local government has grown. Similarly, the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index survey found that only 45% of respondents said they trusted the federal government “to look out for people’s best interests,” a figure twenty percent lower than that for state government.
Sure, you can assume that partisan affiliation predetermines at least some of these answers. But there’s something different going on here than in a routine political poll. During a pandemic, the question of whether you trust government becomes, “do you trust government with your life,” and that will likely have deeper and longer lasting consequences than mere partisanship.
While I was writing this, I received a text message from an old researcher of mine who now lives in rural Georgia. There was no salutation or preamble. I hadn’t heard from her since my birthday last July. Her message simply said, “I feel like we’re watching the buildup to another civil war.”
I don’t know about civil war, but the fact that blue and red states have not found common cause even while facing down a global pandemic does call into question the nation’s integrity. At the very least, the pandemic will likely leave us with stronger state and regional identities, which will change not only how we think about the federal government but about the country itself. Already, three groups of states have created alliances to plan how they will emerge from their pandemic stances. We shouldn’t expect this centrifugal trend to end with the coronavirus.
***
By mid-April, it had became clear that America’s slow and disorganized response to the pandemic would lead to more deaths in the U.S. than in any country that had previously been hit. This shameful fact made the usual bluster and blame seeking at the White House all the more pathetic. The wild-eyed Trump had become a dangerous Norma Desmond.
But blaming presidents for the country’s failures isn’t all that unlike Trump blaming anyone and everyone for the coronavirus. It’s a deflection from a bigger problem, which is that we’ve turned the idea of American Exceptionalism into mere triumphalism. The desperate attempt to restore some sort of national glory leads us to deny our national failings. And to deny one’s failings means that they’ll never be fixed, which leads to yet more failure.
Pulling away from the imperial center—the proverbial swamp—could encourage Americans to find a new sense of rootedness and love of country more powerful than the empty pride in being citizens of the strongest or richest nation in the world. A healthier balance between state and federal identities might also reorient the nation more toward satisfying our domestic needs than competing internationally.
Of the many things the coronavirus has already taught us is that our national arrogance is misplaced and unearned. We need a new sense of mission. We should start by remembering what a home—and homeland–is good for. If we don’t, we’re no better off than baboons.
It’s so hard for Americans not to grasp for a silver lining during a tragedy. So engrained in us are the narratives of happy endings and second chances that even a global pandemic can’t dampen our zeal.
If anything, the human and economic toll of the coronavirus has heightened our desire for redemption. Things are bad, but at least the air is clean and there’s no more traffic. And is it true that the city has finally housed the homeless?
When it’s all over, some have hoped, Americans will see how essential it is to have socialized medicine. With any luck, maybe this virus will kill globalization. Your ideological tilt generally predetermines the brave new world you desperately hope this pandemic will bring.
My personal hope is that the coronavirus will finally destroy the distorted vision of reality that Americans like to call optimism.
***
Three years after 9/11 shook the country, an independent commission concluded that the attacks had exploited four types of governmental failures, the most important of which was “one of imagination.” The strikes did not come out of nowhere. They were the result of a threat that could—and likely should—have been foreseen. America’s leaders underestimated the gravity of the threat.
In the end, the same will likely be said about America’s slow reaction to the coronavirus pandemic. It was not unforeseen. Last September, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, a group co-convened by the World Bank Group and the World Health Organization, warned that there “is a very real threat of a rapidly moving, highly lethal pandemic of a respiratory pathogen killing 50 to 80 million people and wiping out nearly 5% of the world’s economy.”
Presumably the report, which was funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, was sent to all sorts of officials at all levels of American government—federal, state, and local. I imagine that scores and scores of public servants in Washington, D.C., state capitals, as well as big cities across the nation glanced at it and said, “But what are the chances?”
***
In his 1913 essay, “Tragic Sense of Life,” Spanish existentialist philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote that “It is not enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for it.” What he meant was that it is just as important to learn emotionally from a tragedy than it is to overcome it.
He urged us to recall the mythical tragedy of Adam and Eve, who became subject to disease—and death—after tasting the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In the biblical story, progress—whose tools help humankind to overcome illness—springs from original sin. Unamuno wondered if progress itself isn’t also a sickness.
After all, science doesn’t so much expel harmful germs and viruses from the world as it teaches us to accommodate our bodies to them through vaccination. That means that the modern notion of healthiness is more an artificial than a natural reality.
To Unamuno, suffering–physically or spiritually–is a prerequisite to love. It is only through the knowledge of suffering that we attain wisdom and discover the meaning and value of life.
“A prayer for mercy sung by a multitude tormented by destiny,” he wrote, “is equal to any philosophy.”
***
San Francisco was the first big city in the U.S. to issue a shelter-in-place order to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. It preceded L.A.’s—and indeed California’s—by five days. It was 7 days earlier than New York’s.
I can’t help but think that Mayor London Breed’s quick action was informed by her knowledge of her city’s tragic history. Every April 18th at 5:12 a.m., city officials gather around Lotta’s Fountain at the corner of Market, Geary, and Kearny streets to remember the massive earthquake that struck the city in 1906 and left more than 3,000 dead.
Last’s year’s ceremony was Breed’s first as mayor. She arrived decked out in Victorian-era clothing. In her remarks, she spoke of how the earthquake and the fires it unleashed taught San Franciscans about resilience. They learned how to bounce back and rebuild. She could have also said that they also learned to remember. Tragedy is part of the city’s lore. And then, of course, there was another epidemic—HIV/AIDS–that killed more than 20,000 San Franciscans between 1981 and 2015.
***
Plenty of ink has been spilled on the advantages—particularly the material ones—of America’s forward-thinking orientation. But rarely do we explore the downside of our aspirational culture. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., once called optimism America’s “national attitude.” But doesn’t it stand to reason that the land of glorious rebirths is also home to just as many painful deaths?
In some instances, America is good at remembering the dead, particularly when it involves revenge and racism. Remember the Alamo, Pearl Harbor, September 11th. Never forget. Vengeance is another national attitude.
Yesterday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, predicted that the effects of the coronavirus pandemic “is going to be imprinted on the personality of our nation for a very long time.” Trauma will follow pain and loss.
How we choose to remember the dead this time could determine how prepared we are for the next pandemic. Remembering tragedy—absorbing it into our national story–could very well save lives in the future. But then again, I’m desperately searching for a silver lining.
If you were president, would it bother you if 2 million Americans died in the next few months from Covid-19? What about 1 million? What sort of financial hardships would you be willing to have the country endure to save many of those lives?
Because Austria reacted quickly and severely, the rate of new cases of Covid-19 has gone down in the past 24 hours. Italy seems to have reached its inflection point, when the rate of increase begins to slow. With any luck, Spain will reach its inflection point this week. To be clear, many more people will test positive and die as the curve flattens, but the point is that the rate of growth should continue to slow as long as the quarantine measures are still in place and working.
Today, President Trump said he’s thinking of rolling back social distancing measures before all the states have even enacted shelter-in-place orders. While public health measures are under state control, a shift of message from the White House could nonetheless encourage states to allow low-risk people back to the workplace. This suggests that Trump is comfortable with a certain number of deaths. Is he OK with .6 percent of the population dying? That would be roughly 2 million mostly elderly people, plus younger people who suffer from heart conditions, asthma, or autoimmune diseases. Do you think he’s fine with .3 percent dying?
If the nation’s low-risk (under 60) workers go back to the workplace, we’re likely to see a wartime draft situation. Millions would seek exemptions and the upper middle class would get their doctors to write notes to allow them to stay home. (Hell, their doctors help them get their dogs on planes!) Ironically, the uninsured, who don’t have access to doctors who can write them notes, would all be obliged to go back to the workplace. And despite the fact that the rate of death for the young who contract the coronavirus is low, some young people would inevitably die, and the blame would be placed squarely on the government. If you were president, how many deaths would you feel comfortable with?
The coils of razor-sharp concertina wire that drape the 18-foot-high border fence that runs like a scar through Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are low-tech weapons in a 21st century psy-op. Installed last year by the U.S. military ostensibly to add an extra deterrent to illegal crossings, it’s more likely intended to affect the hearts and minds of residents on the U.S. side than on anyone in Mexico.
For one, the wire is draped exclusively on the Arizona side of the fence, and two, crossings are relatively low within the city limits where much of the wire has been placed. Presumably, the Trump administration was trying to send a message to Americans that it was willing—and perhaps eager–to use lethal means to stop undocumented immigration. Walk up to the wire, as I did on a recent visit to the border, and you can imagine how its blades could easily slice into your flesh and even kill you.
I say psy-op because the sight of six coiled rows of concertina wire, which is mostly used by the military or in detention centers, is intended to provoke a reaction in those who see it in in person or in photos. It’s a clear display of aggression on the part of the U.S. Government. It also happens to be the physical embodiment of this president’s efforts to encourage Americans to distrust and fear countries and peoples outside our borders.
***
I’m keenly aware that America has often relied on the threat of enemies to give its diverse population both purpose and cohesion. Our rivalry with the Soviet Union justified the building of the federal highway system, hastened racial integration, and got us to the Moon faster. Likewise, in American politics, there’s nothing like stirring fear and disdain for the other side to get people to the polls. But what Trump has done over the past few years is less targeted, sloppier, and more about self-aggrandizing chest thumping than about forging unity or rallying Americans to step up their game.
U.C. Berkeley political scientist Wendy Brown argues that in an era in which so much labor and capital move across international lines, border walls are almost always more about political theater than actual deterrence. She thinks the demand for them comes from a desire to shore up people’s crumbling sense of national sovereignty. I suppose that the segments of society that think their nation is losing control of its destiny are the ones who feel they’ve lost control over their own. Whatever the case, walls and concertina wire are supposed to make those Americans feel better about being Americans simply because they are not them.
***
Most Americans’ understanding of international borders comes from the constant grandstanding over the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. Trump certainly didn’t invent the issue. We even refer to our Southern boundary as the border. As such, in the American imagination, borders aren’t merely about jurisdiction or even culture. They’re not even about national security. Instead, they are hugely symbolic boundaries separating little old us from a menacing world. If only we can hold the line on the border, we are told, we can rid our society of all rapists, drugs, terrorists, criminals, and now viruses.
Of course, all borders are places of contrast and differentiation. In my travels, I like to ask people who live near one—international or domestic–what they think of their neighbors. Whatever the boundary, most people on one side will readily give you their opinion of what and who resides on the other side. Nebraskans like to say that Iowa stands for Idiots Out Wandering Around. Even the humblest of Tennesseans might tell you that Mississippi is like the “third world.” Lithuanians can tell you that going to Belarus is like going back in time, a bad time. And you know what Oregonians and Arizonans say about Californians.
A decade ago, after giving a talk at a university in Matamoros, just south of the border from Brownsville, Texas, an earnest Mexican undergraduate in a sweater vest asked me a question that would change how I think about the United States. “Why,” he asked plaintively, “are you Americans so scared of us Mexicans? After all, you are so powerful, and we are not.”
I could have given the young man a variety of cheap, easy answers. Fear of strangers, demographic change, or the history of nativism in America. But I felt the way he posed the question obliged me to go deeper. The average American, I told him, is not a small-scale Uncle Sam who speaks softly but carries a big stick. Believe it or not, I explained, despite our nation’s global power, the life of a typical American is actually full of an inordinate amount of insecurity. We talk a big, loud game to compensate for our fears. The flipside of the forward-thinking culture of opportunity is constant instability, and living with so much instability is not so easy.
The sight of the most powerful nation in history portraying itself as the hapless victim of impoverished migrants is unseemly at best. Talk of building a 1,000-mile-long wall is a testament to our profound sense of insecurity. It sheds light on the way Americans behave in the world—both as individuals and as a nation. Despite our military might, our posturing or even our largesse, we have an awful tendency to cower in the face of both real and imagined foreign threats.
If the world is a big, bad place from which we need protection, then what does that make Americans? Small and good, I guess. And isn’t righteous what Americans want to be seen as most, both as individuals and citizens of a nation? Our obsession with being protected from the world, then, is infantilizing. While Uncle Sam fights the bullies, the public remains innocent. Our hands are clean.
***
For decades, social scientists have said Mexican migration to the U.S. served as a social safety valve that released pressure on a corrupt system that left too many Mexicans un- or underemployed. Were it not for mass migration northward, the logic went, Mexico would have exploded in revolution years ago.
In our own way, Americans have offshored too many of our problems and relieved ourselves of responsibility for facing them head on. It’s always someone else’s fault. If we can only hold the line on the border . . .
***
The coronavirus pandemic has shown us that the well-timed closing of borders, however temporarily, can help slow down an aggressive virus. But it doesn’t stop it, and it doesn’t mean we don’t have to take care of the sick, help protect the most vulnerable, and prepare the public once it reaches our towns and neighborhoods.
This morning, my German father-in-law called to check up on my wife and me. She had never heard him so worried. “Why isn’t the U.S. Government testing Americans or dealing with the crisis? Why is it so slow to respond to this outbreak?” My wife, who became a U.S. citizen 6 years ago, was speechless. I wanted to tell her that now that she’s an American, she’s free to tell her dad that it wasn’t our responsibility. After all, it’s a foreign virus.
David NeSmith, a 61-year-old self-described “Southern boy” and volunteer docent at the Jefferson Davis Memorial Historic Site in Irwinville, Georgia, told me that he doesn’t believe in hyphenated identities. “I don’t like it when people call themselves Irish-Americans or African-Americans,” he said. “We should all just be Americans.”
Without skipping a beat and with no hint of irony, NeSmith then began to wax poetic about his passion for “holding on to our Southern heritage.” He is particularly proud of a red baseball cap he owns that reads “American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God.” And then there’s the fact that he and his wife Janice are active volunteers at a county-funded historic site dedicated to the memory of the capture of the president of the Confederate States of America by federal troops.
Most Americans think the Civil War ended on April 9, 1865 at the courthouse in Appomattox, Virginia, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Army commander Ulysses S. Grant. But the real ending to the brutal sectional conflict came a month later on May 10, when two Union Army regiments tracked down an unrepentant and delusional Jefferson Davis, who was headed to Texas—with his family and a dwindling coterie in tow—in the hopes of retaking up arms.
Davis was captured in a pre-dawn raid near a creek by a hillside covered with tall yellow pine trees in Southern Georgia, roughly 85 miles from the Florida border. Two Union soldiers wound up dead from friendly fire, but once surrounded, Davis’ posse didn’t discharge a single shot. Perhaps the most salient and dramatic aspect of the capture, though, was the unfounded rumor that surfaced afterward: that Davis had been caught in women’s clothes. Northern cartoonists had a field day. A Harper’s Weekly illustration pictured Davis in a hoop skirt and bonnet, carrying a hatbox labeled “C. S.” for Confederate States.
For all the ink spilled about the American Civil War over the past six generations, too little has focused on the psychic toll of defeat, including the attendant fears of the loss of manhood that bedevil the losers of any armed conflict. After the war, Southern whites found themselves disconsolate and disoriented. Not only did they have to grieve the loss of loved ones; they were also forced to contend with the humiliating everyday realities brought on by profound economic, political, and social change. Post-war consolation came in the form of remembering the dead, making sense of defeat, and reconstituting their identities.
I came to Irwinville because I wanted to ponder the loss that lies at the core of Southern white identity. Defeat is a subject that Americans, who fancy themselves a nation of winners, don’t like to grapple with. But it’s impossible to understand the South without understanding both the pain of historic loss as well as the fear of more loss to come. To reach the Jefferson Davis Historic Memorial Site I drove 120 miles on a raw autumn morning along the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway from the Alabama border through peanut farms, cotton fields, and pecan orchards, before taking a left on Jeff Davis Park Drive 13 miles east of Interstate 75.
The story goes that after witnessing Davis’ arrest, the landowner vowed to place the grounds permanently in the “hands of the Southern people.” I was the sole guest on the Friday afternoon I visited. The ranger was taking care of some business upstate in Athens and had left David and Janice NeSmith in charge. A sign on the front door notified visitors that the site would close early that day in advance of a high school football state championship game between the Clinch County Panthers and the Irwin County Indians in nearby Ocilla.
The monument itself—a bronze bust of Davis atop an uninspired granite shaft placed on the exact spot of his capture—left me cold. But the NeSmiths welcomed me warmly and were happy to chat about high school football, their upcoming 43rd wedding anniversary, the hazards of driving on red dirt roads in the rain, and the curious mix of insecurity, grievance, and resistance that whites from here call Southern pride.
***
Confederate soldiers who marched off to war in 1861 weren’t moved to action by deep loyalty to a brand new nation. Rather, it was their attachment to their individual states and local communities that sent them into battle. As historian W.J. Cash wrote in The Mind of the Southin 1941, “the armies had brought men together from four quarters, molding them to a common purpose for four years, teaching them more and more to say and think the same things, giving them common memories—memories transcending all that had gone before and sealed with the great seal of pain and hunger and sweat—binding man more closely to man, class more closely to class.” It was only after the war that the concept of the South took hold and the idea of Southern pride blossomed, and nobody remembered that they had initially gone to fight for Alabama or Virginia or South Carolina.
Because Southern identity emerged from the Civil War, the memory of the Confederacy remained essential, particularly initially, to its survival. “The Lost Cause” was the name given to the interpretation of the war that sprung from writings and activities that perpetuated that memory. In hindsight, the war took on a nobility and aura of glory it never had in real life.
The Confederate memorial movement—first at gravesites and then later in public squares—was the most broad-based cultural expression of the Lost Cause. For a half-century throughout the South, communities erected monuments that not only helped them make sense of the past, but established a forward-thinking Southern mythology based on the belief that their honor would be vindicated.
On April 6, 1910, the town of Monticello in central Georgia unveiled a 32-foot stone obelisk flanked by two Confederate soldiers, one a fresh-faced young private, the other an officer with a Van Dyke beard. Today, the monument’s two plaques are virtually incomprehensible—if not a little crazy sounding. On the monument’s south side, the inscription reads: “Crowns of roses fade. Crowns of thorns endure. Cavalries of crucifixions take deepest hold of humanity. The triumphs of might are transient. They pass and are forgotten. The sufferings of right are graven deepest on the chronicle of nations.”
On the north side of the plaque is inscribed a more prosaic but no less illuminating message: “To the Confederate soldiers of Jasper County, the record of whose sublime self-sacrifice and undying devotion to duty, in the service of their country, is the proud heritage of a loyal posterity. ‘In legend and lay, our heroes in gray, will forever live over again for us.’” I’m sure I’m not the only unsuspecting visitor who immediately wondered what “country” the inscription was referring to. I was so befuddled that I took a photo of the plaque with my phone and immediately sent it to a historian friend. Not only was he not certain of the answer, but he told me to Google the name Enoch M. Banks, a search that revealed the story of a poor academic at the University of Florida who was fired from his job in 1911 for arguing that the South “was relatively in the wrong” in the secession crisis. I left Monticello more confused than when I had arrived.
Believe it or not, the answer to the question at hand goes a long way in explaining why proud Southerner David NeSmith doesn’t see the irony in his complaining about hyphenated Americans.
From the beginning of their rebellion, leaders of the Confederacy compared their struggle to the American fight against British tyranny. Jefferson Davis insisted that the South’s withdrawal from the Union wasn’t a rejection as much as a recommitment to the principles upon which the United States was founded. As historian Reid Mitchell has argued, the Confederates “regarded themselves as the true Americans.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, once the war was over, white Southerners found it relatively easy to reconcile their Confederate and American identities. It turns out that a nationalism put together on the fly can be relatively easily dismantled. Plenty of bitterness did remain, however. It was directed not at the United States, but against the North, which many Southerners believed had usurped the national government and wielded its power to humiliate them. Defeat had left white Southerners with something of a collective chip on their shoulders.
As such, subsequent generations were more than eager to prove their honor and valor to their condescending Yankee brethren. The Spanish-American War provided the first significant opportunity in 1898. With the nation caught up in a wave of patriotism, Southern soldiers thought it acceptable again to don the blue uniform. The Atlanta Constitution reported that former Confederate soldiers were “profoundly loyal to the Stars and Stripes and are eager to exhibit their fidelity upon the field of battle.” The many veterans who were too old to fight encouraged young men to enlist. By the end of the conflict, Southerners had proven their loyalty to the Union while celebrating the memory of the Confederacy. The war had helped confirm, wrote Louisiana State University historian Gaines M. Foster, that the Confederate tradition “blended readily and smoothly with American nationalism and mission.”
By the time the townsfolk of Monticello, Georgia filled their square in the spring of 1910 to proudly inaugurate their new Confederate memorial, Southern whites were fully back in the American fold while remaining unapologetic in their defense of their region’s right to secede. And while they didn’t bemoan the end of slavery, Southern whites remained intent on restoring white supremacy. By 1914, all Southern states had passed segregation laws, and nothing represented the triumph of white supremacy more than the formal, legal establishment of two separate and unequal societies. The post-Civil War white South had finally invented a new social system—and regional tradition—in response to abolishment of slavery. If that weren’t enough, in November 1912, Southern-born Woodrow Wilson was elected president of the United States. White Southerners viewed his election not only as a kind of vindication, but evidence that their region once again ruled the Union.
Segregation laws were, of course, designed to control and contain African Americans. But they had the simultaneous effect of reining in whites. The Civil War and subsequent Northern occupation had already left white Southerners defensive of any real or perceived intrusion from outsiders. Now, the emergence of Jim Crow further fueled the climate of strict social conformity. The South, W.J. Cash argued, adhered to what he called “the savage ideal,” “whereunder dissent and variety are completely suppressed, and men become, in all their attitudes, professions and actions, virtual replicas of each other.”
But presumably all this conformity paid some sort of psychic dividends. While Northern whites had to fight for jobs and jockey for social position in polyglot cities, Southern whites—no matter how poor—could comfort themselves with the illusion that the subjugation of blacks gave all whites equal standing.
In 1928, Southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips concluded that despite the South’s vast diversity, the shared essence of the region was a “persistent defensive self-containment” and a “common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man’s country.” That, he wrote, was “the cardinal test of a Southerner.”
But the Civil Rights Movement, which gained momentum in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, began to threaten the certainty of that rule. So deeply identified was the South with segregation that observers wondered whether the end of segregation would spell the end of the South as a distinctive region. Despite the long road toward civil rights still ahead, in his 1957 book, Epitaph for Dixie, Arkansas journalist Harry S. Ashmore was certain that nothing could “turn back the forces that are reshaping the Southern region in the nation’s image.” A year later, another Arkansan, historian C. Vann Woodward, warned, “The time is coming, if indeed it has not already arrived, when the Southerner will begin to ask himself whether there is any longer any point in calling himself a Southerner.” Now that such things as the poll tax, the white primary, and the Jim Crow railway car were beginning to vanish, white Southerners, he wrote, “were suddenly aware of the vacant place they have left in the landscape and of the habit of depending on them in final resort as landmarks of our regional identification.”
At the same time, the South was losing another mark of regional distinction. In 1938, on the occasion of the release of a federal economic study, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the South “the nation’s number one economic problem.” Over the next four decades, however, the regional poverty rate converged so considerably with the national norm that by the 1970s, the place that once seemed—in the words of Southern literary historian Fred Dobson—“poor, violent, pessimistic, tragic, and mysterious” had suddenly transformed into a place some were calling “successful, optimistic, prosperous, and bland.” In 1977, the personification of a kinder and gentler South, Jimmy Carter, became president of the United States.
A year later, Mississippi-born novelist Walker Percy gave a lecture at the University of Georgia in which he concluded that Carter’s election was part and parcel of a larger phenomenon: “The South had entered the mainstream of American life for the first time in perhaps 150 years.” Not only did he find this transformation plain “boring,” but he feared the South would become a “quaint corner” of a suburbanized coast to coast Sunbelt whose spiritual heartland would lie somewhere between Dallas and Los Angeles. Alas, he figured, progress has its costs.
So, once again, the white South feared it would lose whatever it was that made it unique. Indeed, as University of Richmond historian Edward Ayers has written, “From its very beginning, people have believed that the South, defined against an earlier South that was somehow more authentic, more real, more unified and distinct, was not only disappearing but also declining.”
One bulwark against that decline is a hugely popular business that gives Southerners the feeling that the region’s homespun past is still present: the Cracker Barrel chain. Founded in 1969 as a combined restaurant and gift shop styled as an old-fashioned country general store, Cracker Barrel first positioned itself next to Interstate highway exits in the Southeast before going national in the 1980s. Today the publicly traded corporate eatery serves traditional “down home” Southern comfort food in 42 states, and each restaurant features a front porch lined with wooden rocking chairs and a stone fireplace with a shotgun and a deer head above the mantel. Clearly, you don’t have to be Southern to soak up its nostalgia.
In 1966, the Birmingham, Alabama-based publisher of an 80-year-old agriculture journal launched a lifestyle magazine called Southern Living. Filled with recipes, interior design ideas, and regional travel tips, Southern Living became, according to National Public Radio commentator Diane Roberts, the “lifestyle Bible” of the white South’s “genuine and aspiring upper middle class.” By 1985, when it sold to Time, Inc. for $498 million, it had become the most successful regional magazine of its kind.
But clearly not everyone can afford to entertain that version of Southern culture. One of the biggest effects the end of segregation had on Southern whites was the highlighting of the inequality that had always existed among them. “The fiction that all whites are equal as long as blacks were suppressed was shot to hell,” historian James C. Cobb told me. Cobb, a distinguished University of Georgia professor emeritus who literally wrote the book on Southern identity, invited me to spend a warm late summer day with him in Athens, Georgia talking about Southern history.
During a drive through town, a walk on campus, and hours in his small office where he has a black velvet painting of Elvis Presley behind his desk, Cobb explained to me that the Confederate battle flag is often the last bastion for poor whites looking for a way to assert some status. “You’re not going to find too many middle-class white Southerners waving rebel flags these days,” he said. “You just don’t feel the need to assert your whiteness when you own a rambling McMansion.” On the other hand, if you’re poor, white, and feeling anxious about your place in the world, “waving the rebel flag is a statement about being white when you think being white is the only thing you’ve got.”
He talked at length about the persistence of white Southern identity in a globalized world. Here, he says, like in so many places around the globe, folks are trying to retain some local distinctiveness in the face of a homogenizing planet. Like so many latter-generation ethnic Americans who fear the prospect of full assimilation, large numbers of Southerners have refused to disappear into a homogenized, placeless, post-ethnic whiteness.
Nowadays they are doing so by repackaging Southernness and selling it in the marketplace. And the very act of commodifying culture, Cobb says, automatically makes it a little performative.
As if to prove a point, Cobb invited me to a brunch hosted by Lee Epting, this college town’s premier caterer, a man one local paper has called part set designer and part historian. The brunch was held in a circa-1800 plantation house Epting had transported from South Carolina and then furnished with antiques. The food that morning—which included grits, fried chicken, and biscuits and gravy—was fabulous. But as Epting likes to say, a good party is full of stories. As the token Yankee—the modern definition of which I learned that day means “not a Southerner”—I got an extra serving of stories. Epting walked me through the house explaining the provenance of this or that artifact and identifying the faces in the family photos he had on the walls. But my host saved the best for last. Just before I was about to leave for another meeting on campus, Epting took me outside to show me an old fashioned three-hole outhouse. He said he had gotten a call a few years ago from a man who wanted to sell him a house he swore William Tecumseh Sherman had slept in during his infamous march to the sea. While the house turned out to be built after the Civil War, Epting says he then stumbled across a nearby outhouse, which, he claims, was actually built in 1842. He snapped it up and quickly brought it back to Athens. Now he has the pleasure of telling his most gullible out-of-town guests that this is where General Sherman shat.
I’m tempted to say that as a little boy I found God in the swirly patterns on my bedroom ceiling. Some of my earliest memories are of me, a lifelong asthmatic, huffing and puffing on my twin bed looking upwards trying to make heads or tails of the stucco moonscape that was my window into another world for more days than I care to remember. A psychologist I went to in college once summed up the origins of my, well, let’s say complicated character, in one simple yet brutal sentence. “You spent too much time alone as a child,” she said just before my session was up. That was a fun walk back to class.
Gazing at the uneven texture of the stucco above me helped me escape from the prison to which my little lungs had me condemned. Was that a tree? No maybe it was a hand. And the more I stared at this or that blob, the more it didn’t matter what it was or represented. It was like looking at a desert landscape at dusk, when all the dangerous, jagged edges of daytime melt together into a mysterious, fluid, and ultimately comforting silhouette on the horizon.
So it wasn’t God that I found in my second floor bedroom as much as it was an escape hatch to a place where I could conjure up the meanings of patterns and shapes or just lie back and appreciate the wonderful blobbiness of it all.
I wasn’t raised in a religion. There was no talk of Jesus or the saints or angels when I was a boy. I came to my desire for transcendence on my own and clearly out of a need to escape my circumstances. Looking back, I figure that I had two choices when suffering a bad asthma attack. I could fantasize about having my dad rush me again to the emergency room at the hospital I was born at in Hollywood or I could fixate on the mysterious world just a few feet above my head.
As I grew older, I came to desire a more sophisticated understanding of my relationship with whatever it is that exists above this plane on which we live our natural lives. I read the tracts of medieval saints and books by contemporary theologians, but I never truly replaced my initial childhood instinct that that which is sacred is simply whatever it is that takes us above the constraints, the smallness, and the pain of our lives and let’s us take deeper, healthier, more robust breaths of air—both literally and figuratively–than our current conditions allow.
Sure, over time I came to understand the blob I looked to at 6 years old to be the source of life, the essence from which we came and would perhaps return. But I could never imagine that source to be some sort of image of perfection, let alone a perfect being. Consequently, I don’t have a particularly comforting image of a God or Gods. I don’t believe in an all-knowing supreme being who understands all my pains and doubts. If God is the source of all life, I certainly can’t believe that He is still planning all this craziness. At the very best, I can imagine that She is the source of life in the way that a hiker in the wilderness is the source of a campfire that got way out of her control. I guess you could say that in my mind, God is a bit of a hapless figure.
I realized this last year after stumbling onto The Wounded Angel, which is, as it turns out, the most beloved painting in Finland. I had taken refuge in Helsinki’s Ateneum, Finland’s National Gallery, on a gloomy 14°F degree January day and never expected to be so moved by its prized possession. The 1903 masterpiece by symbolist Hugo Simberg is disturbing, melancholy at best. Two sullen boys are carrying an injured angel on a stretcher, her forehead is bandaged and her wing bloodied. Her head is down as if dejected and she seems to be using all her strength to keep herself upright on the journey. Poor angel.
I walked away from the painting that day thinking about other pitiful depictions of supernatural beings. I recalled César Vallejo’s glorious 1918 poem, “Dios”, in which he speaks to, and of, the Almighty with such tenderness.
But I feel God. And it even seems that he sets aside some good color for me. He is kind and sad, like those that care for the sick; he whispers with sweet contempt like a lover’s: his heart must give him great pain.
The poem (translation here by Robert Bly) ends with a beautiful tribute to a deity Vallejo sees as something of an awkward, somewhat impotent, figure.
I consecrate you, God, because you love so much; because you never smile; because your heart must all the time give you great pain.
So, it seems, our image of God doesn’t have to be perfect or all knowing or all-powerful for us to be drawn to Him and new ways of understanding our lives and the world we live in.
Last night, I walked my friend Frank home through L.A.’s Koreatown while he tried to explain to me the theological rationale for why Jesus, the Son of God, expressed such sorrow before he died. There are few passages of the Gospels more moving than “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Frank explained that these words were a sign of Jesus’ humanity, and that Jesus had to suffer as a man—”had to let sin overcome him”–in order to save us from our own sin. I told him I couldn’t follow the logic, and he laughed.
Because to me, it’s enough that this God-Man figure is depicted as suffering like a human, that these images resonate with our own experiences on earth, and, ideally, help us learn to take pity on others, to empathize, to realize that it’s the pain, the imperfection, the desire to transcend it all, that makes us all human in the first place.
I’ve long been moved by the brief passage in Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 masterpiece “Brideshead Revisited” in which poor Sebastian, who is sliding into alcoholism, seeks common cause with his friend Charles against his family and the world that would seek to control him.
Sebastian: “Shall we get really drunk tonight?” Charles: “It’s the one time it could do no conceivable harm.” Sebastian: “Contra mundum?” Charles: “Contra mundum.”
In this bittersweet context, the phrase—“against the world” in Latin–is as much a call to friendship and brotherhood as it is a declaration of resistance to social forces, however well intentioned, that would have us submit to them.
It’s in that dual spirit that I launch this website on which I will share my thinking on a variety of things that spin inside my head. Inevitably, some of the items will be inspired by the thoughts I had the good sense never to share in a commercial publication. Ideally, however, most posts will be driven by my desire to figure things out, a practice I still find makes the ways of the world seem a little less arbitrary and ridiculous. Plus it’s fun.
