I’ve been searching for America and all variety of Americana for decades now. But this building has already climbed to the top of my charts. This is where the Commodores, who first met as freshmen at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute in 1968, recorded “Brick House” and other classics like “Easy” and–my favorite–“Zoom.” The early members bought the building and used it to rehearse and record for much of the 1970s and early 1980s. In 2015, one of the group’s former body guards turned it into a charming museum.
From an exhibit at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)
Atlanta, Georgia
One of the many flaws in American governance is that the president is expected to be both chief executive and head of state. There is no division of duties as in Britain between the monarch and the prime minister, or as in Germany, with its chancellor and president. The U.S. president is expected to fill both the executive role of making hard decisions and the ceremonial role of making the public feel they’re part of a cohesive nation. Except perhaps in times of war, it’s virtually impossible for a political figure whose job it is to win at the dirty game of politics to project those qualities of a nation that transcend mere politics. Jimmy Carter, who entered home hospice care this past weekend, was a far better symbol than he was an executive. It’s a shame that he wasn’t the symbol this gold medal obsessed nation wanted.
On July 15, 1979, in a televised address ostensibly about the energy crisis, Carter uttered words that a head of state needed to tell his people. But because they were too honest and challenging, they were also words no elected official could get away with saying.
That night, the peanut farmer from Georgia didn’t talk about unhappiness in the land or of a momentary spell of anxiety. He warned that too many Americans had traded a sense of purpose and community for “self indulgence” and a growing belief in “consumption.” Sounding like the Sunday school teacher he was, he said that Americans’ identities were becoming more defined by what they owned rather than by how they made a living. But he reminded us that “material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives” without purpose. Yes. An American president spoke to Americans from the Oval Office and told them that they needed to find meaning and purpose in their lives.
Perhaps even more striking is that he didn’t propose a governmental solution to this problem. In fact, he confessed, “that all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America.” Americans had to do it by and for themselves.
Carter feared that Americans would choose the path that led “to fragmentation and self-interest.” “Down that road,” he warned, “lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.”
Materialism, pessimism, a “growing disrespect” for government, churches, and other essential institutions, Carter saw the “symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.” And he was well aware that this message was not one of “happiness or reassurance.” But he knew it was true, and said it anyways. Though the speech did not use the word “malaise,” the press labeled it his “malaise speech.” That alone suggests that they didn’t understand the depth of Carter’s assessment of the state of the union.
Despite its brilliance, Carter’s infamous speech is most often remembered as another example of a “tone-deaf” one-term president. A year later, an aggressively optimistic former actor, who insisted that it was still “morning in America,” defeated him in a landslide.
Because we willfully misinterpreted and then ignored him, America has become the nation Carter feared it would. Humble, anti-elitist, the only Democratic former president in my memory who didn’t become filthy rich after leaving the White House, Carter was too straight an arrow to be an effective president. But he was also one of the very, very few national political figures who had the courage to tell the truth about the state of American culture.
179 East 93rd Street, New York, New York (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)
Upper East Side, Manhattan, New York
It was a beautiful—almost spring—morning in Manhattan, a perfect day for an excursion. So I hopped on the Lexington Avenue line to head uptown to see the apartment building where the Marx Brothers–Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo (who was born there)–called home between 1895 and 1910. Harpo called the apartment on the fourth floor of 179 East 93rd Street (between Lexington and Third) the “first real home” he could remember.
That’s because, according to Harpo, the Marxes were “poor, very poor,” and there were ten mouths to feed. In addition to the five brothers, there were Minnie and Frenchie, the boys’ parents, Minnie’s parents, Fanny and Lafe Schönberg, and cousin Polly, who the Marxes had adopted. Before finding the flat on 93rd Street, the family had moved around a lot, always keeping one step ahead of their debts. But they always preferred to live in and around the German-speaking neighborhoods of the Upper East Side. Minnie had been born in a small village in Lower Saxony, while Frenchie came from a French Alsatian town (hence his nickname) that had remained loyal to Germany. They both spoke the same German dialect and gravitated toward other immigrants who shared their mother tongue.
But while shared language and ethnicity was a source of comfort and community for many, the cliquishness of the Upper East Side was also a dangerous obstacle course for kids. One could read tomes of ethnic American history and sociology and find no more brilliant, poetic, and succinct description of the story of American diversity than Harpo’s recollections of his childhood neighborhood.
In his 1961 memoir Harpo Speaks!, the actor-comedian whose given name was Adolph, described the Upper East Side as being “subdivided” into German blocks, Irish blocks, a few Jewish blocks, and “a couple of Independent Italian states thrown in for good measure.” The north-and-south avenues meanwhile—First, Second, Third and Lexington—were “neutral zones” that “belonged more to the city than the neighborhood.” Four blocks to the west, Central Park was a “friendly foreign country,” where it was “safe territory for lone wolves.” But on the cross streets, it was “open season” on the kids whose ethnic group didn’t dominate any given block.
When a kid’s ethnicity was unclear–which was not uncommon–the toughs would ask him to identify what block he lived on. To save time and any more trouble than he was already in, Harpo decided early on to answer such questions honestly. So, when a group of Irish or German street kids asked him what street he was from, he’d say 93rd Street. And when they asked which block of 93rd Street—between Third and Lex, “that pinned me down,” he wrote, “I was a Jew.”
Even though Harpo was small, he wasn’t flat footed. He learned that the worst thing he could do was not have anything to “fork over for ransom.” To keep himself from being beaten to a pulp, he never left his block “without some kind of boodle in [his] pocket—a dead tennis ball, an empty thread spool, a penny, anything. It didn’t cost much to buy your freedom; the gesture was the important thing.”
Decades later Harpo waxed philosophical about this urban obstacle course. “Every Irish kid who made a Jewish kid knuckle under was made to say ‘Uncle!’ by an Italian, who got his lumps from a German kid, who got his insides kicked out by his old man for street fighting and then went out and beat up an Irish kid to heal his wounds. ‘I’ll teach you!’ was the threat they passed along, Irisher to Jew to Italian to German. Everybody was trying to teach everybody else, all down the line.”
In the end, he concluded, “It was all part of the endless fight for recognition of foreigners in the process of becoming America.”
While few would characterize that brand of multicultural education as ideal, Harpo’s honesty about inevitable interethnic tensions and competition is nonetheless refreshing.
Mosaic, melting pot, salad bowl. These are terms that have been used to describe America’s demographic diversity. But they’re all pretty inaccurate, as they make no reference to the competition and conflict among ethnic–as well as racial groups–that have always characterized American life.
Now that today’s post-civil rights social mandate requires us all to pretend to love one another (or else!), we no longer properly acknowledge the grittier side ofgroup behavior–and human nature–that cannot be banished by either slogans or legislation.
The marvelous Encyclopedia of New York City says the Marx Brothers’ brand of “anarchic comedy” came to be “strongly associated” with ethnic New York. It’s hard not to conclude that the neighborhood conflict they endured as children didn’t play a critical role in forging what the Encyclopedia calls the unique mix of verbal repartee, rapid timing, and physicality that defined their humor.
The Abbey of Gethsemani, Trappist, Kentucky (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)
Trappist, Kentucky
Someone had placed a chair next to Thomas Merton’s grave, but I would have felt way too presumptuous to sit on it. (No, no, I didn’t want to talk to him. I just wanted to quickly come by and say thanks.) Also, I felt guilty only acknowledging the celebrated writer in a graveyard full of Trappist monks. Merton himself felt conflicted and embarrassed by his fame. He longed to transcend any craving for it.
Not so long ago, when I had zero money to my name, I bought a used copy of A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from his Journals. The book became a talisman for me, a lifeline. I have begun many days reading snippets of his words to help me focus on the things that matter.
So, yes, I am grateful to Merton and to his spiritual genius, but for the reasons mentioned, I rushed through the cemetery as if through a duty free store at an airport. I did, however, manage to snap the above photo.
Most people come to Jackson Hole to ski, to enjoy nature, the snow, the elk, the bison, the occasional moose. (I saw three on my first two days!) But there’s a striking sociological phenomenon here that’s worth mentioning. Thanks to a combination of Wyoming’s natural beauty, its relaxed residency requirements and lack of income tax, Teton County, where Jackson is the county seat, is home to one of the most astonishing concentrations of ultra wealthy people in the world. Of all 3,144 counties in the U.S., Teton County has the highest per capita income, by far. Not surprisingly, it also has the highest income disparity in the country. The top 1 percent of residents here make about 233 times more money than the bottom 99 percent. Nearly 80% of that income is from investments. And although I knew all this before I landed, I was still shocked that the local Chamber of Commerce hands out free mimosas to all arriving airline passengers. (But yes, I gladly grabbed a cup.)
Evel Knievel’s Snake River Jump Monument (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)
Twin Falls, Idaho
I was looking forward to visiting daredevil Evel Knievel’s grave in Mountain View Cemetery in Butte, Montana. But about 155 miles south of our destination, and without any advance notice, orange traffic cones shepherded us off the interstate. State Troopers had shut down a one hundred mile stretch of the I-15 between DuBois, Idaho, and Dillon, Montana, due to some pretty nasty high winds. It’s probably just as well since it was minus 26 degrees in Butte last night. So we turned around and headed south to Twin Falls, Idaho, where, in 1974, Knievel made his ill-fated rocket jump over Snake River Canyon. Looking down into the gorge would persuade anyone that Knievel was nuts. But I’m glad his daring is memorialized in this monument at the edge of the canyon. It’s a reminder that risk, courage, and not a little bit of craziness were once a more robust part of America’s national ethos.
On a good day, I read, take notes, walk (now run), and hang out with my wife and talk to assorted strangers. If I’m lucky, I get to ask those strangers if they’ll allow me to take their photos with my phone. I love the connection we feel for that brief moment. I love capturing their coolness, their beauty, their confidence. These are some of my favorite photos I took this year in Madrid, London, Louisville, Istanbul, and beyond.
The other day, I stumbled across an interesting essay in Christianity Todayabout what the collapse of membership in evangelical churches might mean for politics in the American South. The upshot was that it might not mean as much you’d think. But what was most interesting in the analysis was how the author, Daniel K. Williams, an historian who studies the intersection of religion and politics, challenged the prevailing notion that secularization—or, more accurately, dechurching—transforms people into hyper-rational high modernists. Sure, there are a fair number of intellectual types who reject the religion they’d formerly practiced and become strict devotees of the Enlightenment, but most people who become alienated from their faiths generally don’t reinvent their world views from top to bottom.
I usually cringe when I read anything about religion in the non-religious American press. More often than not, journalists treat faith as if it were first and foremost a set of “beliefs,” not appreciating that the average church goer generally isn’t willing to throw down over the fine points of theology and dogma. When citizens of modern liberal democracies choose to worship in formal religious venues, it’s because it provides them with a source of solace and wisdom when confronting the trials and tribulations of life and helps orient them toward answers to the most difficult questions, particularly those surrounding death and the hell that is other people. Of course, the fine points of theology–and liturgy–are not insignificant. They’re what make someone feel part of one denomination as opposed to another. But sociologically and politically speaking, what’s most important in any religion is the Weltanschauung, the comprehensive conception of the world and the place of humans with in it, that it provides followers. Any given theology serves to undergird this overall understanding of the world, notions about the meaning of life and what attitudes and behaviors best help you survive it. This general “moral orientation,” as Williams calls it, can live on even after people leave their churches, “even if it survives only in a distorted form.”
This explains why the political views of lapsed Catholics in the Northeast are still generally liberal. They still retain the “theology of communal beliefs” of the Church they left behind. In the same way, Williams argues, lapsed Southern evangelicals are not likely to suddenly become political liberals but instead will retain the “individualistic moralism” that defines–and even predates–evangelicalism in the South.
At this point, then, we’re not talking about articulated beliefs in the supernatural but more implicit assumptions about the nature of reality. An unchurched American who was raised by Baptists from Oklahoma is likely to have different assumptions about what humans owe one another or how they should generally behave than does a child of lapsed Catholics–or even mainline Protestants–from Texas. The worldview that may have once been instilled by religion becomes a more secular lens through which an individual views his fellow humans.
After mining survey data to compare the political views of churched and unchurched evangelicals, Williams hits pay dirt. The biggest contrast between the two groups came in the “area of personal trust in other people.” When asked, “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance or would they try to be fair?” 54% of white Protestant Southerners who attended church no more than once a year said that most people would try to take advantage of them. The response to the same question by Southern Protestants who attend church every week was almost the opposite. Fully 62% percent said that most people would “try to be fair” and not take advantage of them.
Similarly, when asked “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?”, 58% of the once-a-year church goers chose the cynical answer. Again, the responses of weekly church goers were almost the opposite. 57% said that most of the time people “try to be helpful.” Stripped of any religiously inspired notions of divine or human grace, unchurched evangelicals were left with what Williams calls “a deeply suspicious individualism.”
This makes me wonder whether West Coast-variety secular progressivism—with its decidedly elevated focus on racial and gender discrimination—also elicits a similar kind of mistrust in people. Neo-Civil Rights social campaigns highlighting the need to take care when conducting cross-racial or cross-gender relationships can certainly make people properly conscientious about how they treat others who are unlike them. However, it’s conceivable that they can also instill mistrust. Particularly in an era in which minorities and women are encouraged to complain about any real or perceived mistreatment, I wonder if such a social climate could also make people more likely to assume—to paraphrase the aforementioned survey question—that most people unlike them would try to take advantage of them rather than be fair. It reminds me of the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen’s character calls a television executive an antisemite because, Allen insists, the exec asked him, “Jew eat lunch?” rather than “Did you eat lunch?” Allen’s character’s paranoia, of course, has clear historical origins. And the scene is poignant in addition to being funny, because even if this executive wasn’t an antisemite, it doesn’t mean that others might not be. And when do you trust people and when is it right to assume the worst? In any case, it’s fair to ask whether secular progressivism is spreading a “deeply suspicious communalism,” not entirely unlike the cynicism Williams found metastasizing in the South.
***
I’ve been reading a lot about the ideological mishmash that animated America’s founders, namely liberalism, republicanism, and the brand of Christianity and Deism that were clearly part of the mix. Despite historians’ best efforts to cast the American Revolution as some sort of intellectually-driven movement, there was not a single ideological through line that united the patriots or the framers. The Constitutional Convention itself was more a series of hard-won compromises over competing interests than it was some sort of intellectual debate about what constituted the best form of government.
I love that the delegates are called Framers. I realize it’s because they framed—or shaped—the Constitution, but what fascinates me is how much the Constitution itself was a frame to a nation that had not yet been born in any substantive sense. Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a member of the Continental Congress, called the Constitution a “new roof” that unified citizens of diverse and divided states. It’s significant that he saw it as a roof rather than a foundation. Nonetheless, that roof, according to the late Princeton historian John M. Murrin, “an ingenious contrivance” that gave a fragile, embryonic American national identity, a generation or two for interstate economic links to begin to tie together a real national community.
More than a half century later, Abraham Lincoln characterized the Constitution, which was a largely amoral set of procedural rules, as a picture frame designed to enhance the beauty of a work of art. Lincoln believed that the Declaration of Independence, which stated that all men are created equal, was the “primary cause of our great prosperity.” It was the “great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest.” As such, the Constitution could only be understood in tandem with the Declaration. Borrowing the biblical image of a “apple of a gold in a silver picture,” he compared the Constitution to “the picture of silver, subsequently framed around” the Declaration. “The picture,” he wrote, “was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—the apple not for the picture.”
Of course, the Declaration of Independence was a piece of war propaganda written to justify an act of secession and garner both domestic and international support. But that’s another story altogether. The point here is that the brilliant men who created the Constitution created a federal government but not a nation or a shared culture, which had to emerge through ongoing cooperation and conflict among the country’s inhabitants themselves.
I say inhabitants, because citizenship—along with its attendant rights—was defined legally and did not include all inhabitants. We all know the great trope of American civic life, that the Revolution is a work in progress, that the circle of citizenship widens through struggle over time. But citizenship is not the same as culture, and sharing a sense of national fate is not the same as sharing a worldview about the meaning and purpose of life.
That’s one of the many weaknesses of the current focus on social inclusion. Not only does it assume that there is a single culture into which everyone wants to be included, but that that single culture has already been pre-made by someone else before you were invited to participate. At the very least, you’d think that in the name of democracy, all Americans should be encouraged to inquire what exactly they’re being asked to include themselves in and whether there’s an escape hatch. Or at least an edit button.
More than 230 years after the Constitution was ratified, America still hasn’t congealed into a single culture. And while that fact can, at times, be a recipe for friction—political and otherwise—it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, if you really believe in diversity, as so many Americans claim to these days, you should really hope that the inhabitants of this enormous nation never allow themselves to be compelled to living in one single homogeneous culture. It seems to me that the only way to lower the unhealthy levels of social mistrust in contemporary America is not to try to shove everybody into one box, but in learning to accept that some people will never see the world like you do.
The George Rogers Clark Memorial Bridge, Louisville, Kentucky (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)
Athens, Georgia
We just got back from another road trip in search of America, the country where I was born but which I still find surprisingly foreign in so many ways. It’s the second such trip this year. Last spring, we drove around East Tennessee whose top historic sites included Davy Crockett’s birthplace along the Nolichucky River, Dolly Parton’s hometown of Sevierville, and Andrew Johnson’s gravesite in Greeneville.
This last trip was a six-day, five-state, 1,100-mile extravaganza that took us from Georgia, to western Tennessee, Kentucky, across the Ohio River into Indiana, then back south through North Carolina, and South Carolina. Among the key points of interest in Kentucky were Daniel and Rebecca Boone’s grave in Frankfort; Cane Ridge, the site of what was perhaps the most culturally significant religious gathering in U.S. history; a 170-year-old Trappist monastery near Bardstown where Thomas Merton lived, and Muhammad Ali’s gravesite in Louisville. Oh, and we saw Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace and ran a 5k along the way.
What most of these sites have in common is that they evoke both national mythology and popular culture. The more I study U.S. history, the more I am struck by how much and how often Americans wrap themselves in virtue and heroism in order to justify far less lofty, material goals. From the Revolutionary War to FTX cryptocurrency exchange, the nation and its citizens have had the unfortunate tendency to hide base desires and interests in high-minded idealism. (The CEO of FTX charmed investors by touting his belief in effective altruism, a social movement that encourages followers to make as much money as possible so they can give it away. And America’s Founders would not have looked so heroic had they simply expressed how angry they were that the British prohibited them from crossing the Appalachians and seizing land.). But then there are the genuinely heroic outliers like Ali and Merton, who puncture American myths but are themselves products of the nation’s remarkable cultural alchemy.
This little trip got me excited to return to the University of Georgia library, where I have a few more precious weeks to study this year before heading back to Madrid. Each day as I read–trying to understand the roots of evangelical Christianity, its link to America’s cult of individualism, and how they both relate—or not–to the country’s founding ideologies of liberalism and republicanism–I am reminded of what my late father used to say about Richard Nixon. In law school, poor Nixonspent so much time studying in the library that his classmates nicknamed him “Iron Butt.” So, yes, it’s nice to get off my butt and hit the road from time to time.
Yi-Fu Tuan’s 1977 masterpiece, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, is one of the handful of books I’ve read in my life that completely changed the way I see the world. I was saddened to hear that the great humanist geographer has died.
Tuan was one of those rare scholars who brought heart and spirit to his intellectual analysis. He sought to understand not only how humans interact with place, but how geography affects our emotions, and even taps into our deepest needs. His thinking was universal, but he never lost sight of the intimate. In fact, it was the human need for intimacy and meaning that he seemed to want to understand most.
Like other great thinkers, he was able to simply define those things most mortals take for granted and leave unexplained. His definition of place, for instance, is remarkable for its sensitivity to human behavior, needs, and emotions.
Place is whatever stable object catches our attention. As we look at a panoramic scene our eyes pause at points of interest. Each pause is time enough to create an image of place that looms large momentarily in our view. The pause may be of such short duration and the interest so fleeting that we may not be fully aware of having focused on any particular object; we believe we have simply been looking at the general scene. Nonetheless these pauses have occurred. It is not possible to look at a scene in general; our eyes keep searching for points of rest. We may be deliberately searching for a landmark, or a feature on the horizon may be so prominent that it compels attention. As we gaze and admire a famous mountain peak on the horizon, it looms so large in our consciousness that the picture we take of it with a camera is likely to disappoint us, revealing a midget where we would expect to find a giant.
The essential formula undergirding Space and Place is so simple, brilliant, and fundamental that the reader understands it instantly at an instinctive level. Tuan was a scholar blessed with the wisdom of a poet. His formula: “Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other.” Human lives, he writes, “are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom. In open space one can become intensely aware of place; and in the solitude of a sheltered place the vastness of space behind acquires a haunting presence.”
There’ve been times that I’ve loved or loathed places but was too inarticulate—and likely too insensitive—to pinpoint the source of my reactions. I once spent a total of two weeks at sea in the Roaring Forties of the South Atlantic Ocean. It was dreadful. I found it endlessly boring. Was it because there was nothing to rest my eyes on except perhaps an occasional distant, menacing weather front? And why do I think the barren Namib Desert is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen? Was it because the wind created shapes in the sand that my eyes—and soul—found comfort in? What does my disdain for one place and love for another say about me and what I need from life? Yi-Fu Tuan gave me the language that helps me grapple with my surroundings.
I never met Professor Tuan, but I wanted to. I sent him an email in January 2020, requesting an interview. He responded promptly and generously. We set a date to meet on Tuesday, March 31, of that same year. Then the pandemic happened. I never made that trip to Wisconsin, where I had hoped to meet him at the Starbucks on State Street in Madison where he was a regular. A Starbucks, of all places!
I like to imagine that we talked for hours in one of his favorite places.
