Pollyanna, Mr. Rogers, and the Trials of November

And so it began....

November so far has been a rough month, starting with the weather. Unusually early snow, unexpected in its quantity as well as its timing (calendar winter not yet arrived), was a trial to all of northern Michigan. Even the business provided to the guys who do the plowing was not an unalloyed cause for rejoicing on their part, because many of those same guys do lawn maintenance and hadn’t yet gotten up all the fall leaves. In fact, many of the leaves had not yet fallen and are even now coming down on top of the snow and making a real mess of things. 

Autumn storms also brought additional shorline erosion, not as gradual loss but overnight disappearance. 

Well, what would Pollyanna say, that character in the novel by Eleanor Porter (1868-1920)? Pollyanna was a little World War I-era orphan who pulled crutches as her gift from the Christmas barrel instead of the doll she wanted. Well, she got through the trials of her life by playing the “glad game,” finding something to be glad about in every situation. The good thing about the crutches was — she didn’t need them! So if we apply the glad game to a blizzard that kept people home from work and school on one November Monday, we see how lucky we were. Spared forest fire, hurricane, and tornado, most of us were able to take refuge in place rather than being forced to flee our homes. And while we may not have chosen to have it in early November, who doesn’t love a snow day?

And there's no denying it was beautiful.

Trial #2, the impeachment hearings, is more of a challenge to a player of the glad game. The president, of course, feels persecuted, but the whole country is suffering, and the suffering goes back to the campaign that led to the 2016 election, when partisan divisions became more than acrimonious and turned downright nasty. Also, unlike a snow day, we can’t turn the impeachment hearings into fun by baking muffins and making hot chocolate. 

Impeachment is always regrettable. Whatever anyone’s feelings and opinions about whatever president it involves, the impeachment process is an attempt to solve a worst-case scenario -- or what we have come to hope is the worst that can happen. And what if it isn’t? If things got worse? Much worse has happened in many countries around the world over the course of human history. And so even sleep provides no surefire escape: “Perchance to dream! Ay, there’s the rub!” To have the country’s leadership invade our hours of sleep seems a most egregious violation, does it not?

As a nation, though, we have suffered and survived periods of horrible political division before this. Without harking back as far as the Civil War, I think back to violent protests over desegregation in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s, and the rash of nightmare assassinations then, too. Surely, in those times as well as these, lies were spread, friendships destroyed, families torn apart. 

But it does seem that lies travel faster in these times — almost at the speed of light. “Misinformation,” as it’s called, has become an industry, prolific and profitable. So it’s hard to find anything to be glad about in our present whole situation, isn’t it? 

And yet — as I must remind myself almost hourly — we can be glad that the situation is being addressed by hearings in Congress rather than by military coup; that men and women of courage and principle are willing to put their devotion to country above political expediency; and that we still have reliable sources of news and can hear testimony for ourselves rather than having it filtered and presented in Newspeak.

Overwhelmed, we have to carry on.

Well, the blizzard was regional. The hearings are national, with international implications. But of course each of us has, besides, always, our personal trials. I will not go into mine, because it’s an old story — the behemoth in the room — and I would be either preaching to the (tiny) choir or beating my head pointlessly against the wall. 

What I can be and am glad of in the current global retail situation are those individuals, both the ones who saw the writing on the wall from the start and those only belatedly seeing where present trends would take us all, if continued — that small but perhaps expanding contingent — the people who value and support real bookstores. I’m glad of every visitor to my bookstore who doesn’t waste my time with idle questions about business but asks instead about books and takes the time to browse seriously. I'm glad of the many wonderful authors I've met over the years. And I am especially glad of and thankful for every single customer, neighbor or stranger, who leaves with a purchased book (or more than one), because that’s what it means to “love bookstores.”

Strange as it may seem, then, when I take the time to dig down under what I can’t help perceiving at times as the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” I’m still glad to have chosen this life in the slow, challenging, difficult lane strewn with trials and tribulations. Not giving thanks for the hardships, you understand, but grateful for the opportunity to scratch out a living without compromising my principles and extraordinarily grateful for having a coterie of loyal supporters in that endeavor. 

I’m so glad my goal is not now, never was, and never will be world domination and expansion into outer space! What could be better than our green planet? I’m glad to be able to say that I have invested instead in myself and my own small-town vision.

Now, as for that small-town angle, a couple paragraphs above I used the phrase “neighbor or stranger,” but I’ve been reading quite a bit lately (as have you, perhaps, the new Tom Hanks film getting quite a lot of press) about the late Fred Rogers, who so famously and unforgettably asked on his television show, "Won't you be my neighbor?" And reading about Mr. Rogers, I can't help looking into the way I live my life and asking myself some pretty hard questions. 

Mr. Rogers spoke directly to children, to all of their fears and confusions, and also to the confused and frightened children inside every adult. I wish I could say that I always do the same, but that wouldn't be true. More often than I want to admit, I respond too quickly (even when I attempt to hide that response) from a feeling that I have been attacked or insulted or dismissed as inconsequential when there was no such intention in the words that wounded me. 

And what if there really had been an intention to inflict pain? 

I think the possibility of intention to hurt is much rarer than our almost automatic response of self-defense, actually: my personal concerns are not the center of anyone else’s consciousness, and so what other people find important to say, whatever the context of our conversation, will seldom address my core concerns but simply express their own. But whether the words of another came from ignorance, thoughtlessness, or what looks like plain meanness do not matter at all if I think of them as the words of a child, which is how Mr. Rogers counseled us to respond to one another. 

Years ago I did substitute teaching and regular tutoring up at Northport School (one of many “side jobs” undertaken over time in order that my bookstore might survive). Teaching children wasn’t what I had been educated to do, and I quickly realized that subject matter (math or spelling or whatever) is only part of the job. Kids don’t leave their personal lives and feelings in their lockers when they come into the classroom, and sometimes they can say or even do hurtful to one another or even to their teachers. They can behave destructively. And if the behavior is not somehow checked they can be dangerous to themselves and others. 

My big take-away from those experiences was this: I never encountered a child I felt was really malicious. Bad behavior might result from frustration or hurt or embarrassment or fear or confusion, but it was always a reaction to something, never sui generis meanness. 

American society in our time has taken on a pretty mean look. Movies, “reality” television, business, politics — in all these realms, it seems that dirty tricks and name-calling are held up to us as behavior to emulate. Even “Pollyanna,” the name of the character in the old story, is generally used as a derogatory term, like Goody Two-Shoes. It’s like calling somebody “Stupid!” Kind of a dispiriting picture of twenty-first American culture, isn’t it?

A year or so ago I asked someone I don’t know all that well how she maintained her positive attitude. I really wanted to know. I needed her answer. Didn’t she sometimes feel overwhelmed by threats to free speech, truth, democracy, and the natural world (of which we’re all part, even when we forget the fact)? Didn’t she ever feel downright hopeless? I cannot quote her response exactly, but it was something like “Lead from your strength.” When speaking or writing, putting her words out in the world, she wanted those words to be encouraging and hopeful. 

We need those words.

Because we can all see the negative. What we need from each other are reminders that good things are true, too, maybe something we’ve overlooked or forgotten or just temporarily lost sight of, something good we can build on. I don’t know how many times I have sat down to write in a terrible mood but managed to find some small kernel of gratitude and hope, a kernel that grew as my sentences proliferated, and that's because I am aware of writing for a community and trying -- honestly! -- to draw and lead from my strength, although I may have to dig pretty deep some days to find it!

More than one good friend has told me in person or has written to me that they appreciate my ability to find joy in small, everyday sights and events. Whenever anyone says or writes something so complimentary, I feel compelled to tell them not to give me too much credit, because it can often be a huge effort for me to seek out those small joys, and that's true despite the fact that my life in general is really quite blessed. So if you're struggling, you're not alone. Many of us can slip all too easily into feeling overwhelmed and despondent, particularly in November. 

Even that lucky dog, Sarah, is not always wagging her tail.

But who wants or needs to hear the sob story of a fortunate person? The old Eric Berne book on transactional analysis, Games People Play, called that game “Ain’t It Awful?” Ick! Who wants to be invited to that party? Besides, commiseration even with real tragedy can be best in small doses, or it risks being counter-productive and exacerbating the misery.

And we all need the gift of light.

Pollyanna’s game was one she played to keep herself cheerful in trying situations and times. Fred Rogers went deeper, inviting everyone to be his neighbor. The two messages are different but compatible. Don’t we enjoy neighbors who bring cheer rather than gloom into our lives? And aren’t we better neighbors when we look for the good in others, wherever we meet them?

Neither path is always easy, and most of us will fall down over and over, but we can get up and try again each time. As little children must.

One word of caution to neighbors in northern Michigan: what looks like wet pavement these days can sometimes hide — yes, in plain sight! — a thin coating of ice, so step carefully! My own Wednesday morning fall on an icy sidewalk brought no terrible consequences, but not falling must be the standard for which we aim.

Namaste, as neighbor Paul says. Thanks, Paul! You are a good neighbor! And thank you, Maureen, for starting my bookstore Thursday off with your smiling face, and Karin, for the beautiful journal you made for me out of that old, falling-apart school book from Quebec, and all the rest of you who buy your books from me in Northport. And please, I urge you all, while I'm gone this winter, to take your custom down the road a piece to Leelanau Books in Leland and/or Bay Books in Suttons Bay. We will keep getting each other through, one day at a time.

Love to all,
Pamela

Spinning Off From Turner’s Frontier Theory of American History

Only four pages into Wilbur R. Jacobs’s foreword to a modern edition of Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History, I am struck by an implication of his frontier theory for our time in history. I'll have to see how my thinking and questions play out as I continue reading, but I thought going on record with some initial impressions and wonderings would be a place to start.

Turner saw history (I'm going now by what Jacobs writes) as the self-consciousness of society, the latter an evolving organism. The particular biological organism that constituted in Turner's view American society, he argued, evolved from the country’s frontier beginnings and a continually westward-moving frontier, the American frontier offering escape from old bondages -- first the bondages and habits of Europe, later those of the Eastern colonies-become-states. Moving ever-westward also, he believed, unified Americans as Americans, moderating sectional differences that had been so important in the East they left behind. 

One obvious fact (but I will state it anyway) is that Turner’s theory concerned the movement of white American pioneers of European origin. The fates of free or enslaved black peoples and of Native Americans “concentrated" by government policy onto smaller and smaller areas of marginal land were only tangential aspects in his story of the evolving America, rather than part and parcel of it. I state this obvious fact for two reasons. First, it is not only true but important when examining any history or historical theory about our country. Furthermore, however, I see it as the crucially overlooked seed to the implications of his theory that cry out at me as I prepare to read Turner in 2018. -- Implications of his theory, mind you, which I may accept, reject, or seek to modify after reading in in its entirety.

But let us accept for a moment, provisionally, Turner’s thesis about the frontier as that temporary boundary moves progressively west: 

(1) As each successive “frontier” became settled, would it not become a new “section,” with its own settled habits and prejudices and rivalries with other “sections”? 

(2) If Turner were right about sectionalism being left behind on the frontier, what did he imagine would happen when the frontier vanished, when pioneers reached the Pacific Ocean and could go no further to escape the bonds of habit? Is this where we are today?

(3) With the “safety valve” of “free land” [appropriated or conquered] no longer available, would social pressure build to the point of explosion?

After I read this book, I’ll turn to what other historians have said in response to the themes Turner hammered away on over 100 years ago.

From Whence This American Woodsman?

John James Audubon: Who was he, and where did he come from, this frontier birdman with the French name? In his new book, John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman, author Gregory Nobles begins by probing the ambiguity of Audubon’s origins and goes on to tell a story of dogged self-invention and relentless determination on the part of the artist to achieve material as well as artistic success in the New World.

With artists, it is often a question whether or not they are equipped to survive at all in the world of business. If they make the attempt, how they fare gives rise to new questions. The artist who fails in business is looked on as a hapless child, out of his element, while he who succeeds will often find himself branded a sellout.

Then there is the matter of being self-taught versus academy-trained. And has it ever been possible for an artist to survive without wealthy, influential patrons? In life stories from the art world, there are few whose uphill path was smooth and easy.

But how many, I wonder, flung themselves upstream as persistently as did John James Audubon? His challenges and setbacks would have broken most men, and as Nobles makes clear, there was more to those challenges than finding money to buy paints, more to the setbacks than losing a promised portrait commission. More than once, I found myself exclaiming out loud and tugging at my artist husband’s sleeve to read him a few pages.

For example, in an 1811 partnership with his brother-in-law that Audubon undertook for the support of his new wife and infant son, the decision was made to expand their operations from a simple store to a steam-powered mill that would turn logs into boards for the construction boom then underway in Kentucky. It seemed like a good idea and one their little Ohio River community could use. But it turned out that the community did not need a mill as big as the one they built. The mill also could have been better built—and  should have been built more quickly to take advantage of the need. Water proved more economical than steam for the operation of the mills that would survive when the discovery of good clay nearby prompted homebuilders to turn from lumber to bricks. In the face of the business failure, his brother-in-law departed the region and left Audubon holding the bag.

Investment in a steamboat, Audubon’s next partnership, was no more successful. The partner absconded with the boat! When Audubon encountered him again, an altercation in the street turned physical and nearly landed the artist in jail. Incarceration, however, was held at bay until the Panic of 1819, when the Audubon family lost all their business holdings, home and furnishings, and still could not clear their debts.

When Audubon went from Henderson to Louisville to try to clear up his financial situation, his creditors still hounded him, he was arrested for debt and put in jail, and he got out only by declaring bankruptcy. He left jail, he said, “keeping only the clothes I wore on that day, my original drawings, and my gun.” Those lat two possessions proved critical, soon becoming essential keys to his future.

On the other hand, it was shocking to me to learn that with Audubon’s early material success, before the bankruptcy, he became a slave-owner. My mental picture was jarred, as Nobles intends it should be. More familiar and more in line with our received impressions of the man are the stretches of hardship he endured. When he leaves his wife behind to support their children by teaching and goes downriver on a flatboat in 1820 with a young companion, paying his way by shooting game to feed the boat’s passengers, fretting in his diary about money all the way along but also finding time to glory in the birds he saw and shot and drew—this is closer to the frontiersman artist we recognize.

Of course, Audubon’s “Great Work,” as he referred to it long before its completion, necessitated a return to civilization, a search for patrons, lengthy negotiations with all kinds of businessmen and artisans, and careful business planning. The number and variety of skilled participants required by the work is staggering, and Audubon did not leave its supervision to anyone but himself. That this famous artist had high standards for the reproduction of his drawings will surprise no one. The production details are fascinating.

The main theme of Nobles’s John James Audubon, however, is that of self-invention, and that is where a new portrait of the artist appears. What elements of Audubon’s life does the artist himself stress? What is omitted? What embroidered? To what end? And, finally, how successful was the mythical self the artist projected?

We in Northport, Michigan, are in luck: Gregory Nobles and his wife have a vacation home in our midst, and the author will present a talk on his Audubon research findings this summer at Dog Ears Books. The date (sometime in July or August) has not yet been set, but I will happily take orders ahead of time for a book—and author—that our bird-loving and history-conscious community will not want to miss.

John James Audubon: The Nature of

       The American Frontiersman

by Gregory Nobles

Hardcover, 360pp, illustrated

$34.95

A Couple Things I Don’t Often Do

One thing I seldom do is to mark up the pages of a hardcover book, one in pretty good shape with a nice, sharp dust jacket. In this case, however, I am not the first to desecrate the pages, as a previous reader went at the text with blue highlighter, and I am making my own contributions lightly, in pencil.

Another activity from which I refrain as a general rule (though, obviously, not an ironclad law) is using this forum to discuss a book I recommend people not buy.

I could add a third item to the list. Rarely do I take the trouble to read fifty pages into a book before deciding it isn’t worth any more of my time.

Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism, by James B. Twitchell, published in 1999 by Columbia University Press with a retail price of $90 for hardcover (subsequently $30 for paperback), is the third in the author’s trilogy on American popular culture. Preceding volumes were Carnival Culture: TheTrashing of Taste in America and Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture. While Columbia publishes many titles I wish I could stock in my bookstore, they offer no wholesale discount through Ingram, my major national distributor, and paying full retail price plus shipping to put books on the shelf on spec doesn’t work for me. This time, exploring the opening chapter of this book, I was glad I hadn’t paid full price, and I would not want to ask a customer to do so, either.

Before the first chapter, as early as the introduction, I found the author’s style annoying. He was going to take a position and presenting a thesis, but he was taking his sweet time about it, inscribing slow circles around a vague center while taking potshots at all manner of easy targets, such as the selling of self-help books to wean people away from consumerism. When what sounded like the main thesis made an appearance -- “We live through things. We create ourselves through things.” -- it stepped in quietly, sideways, at the edge of a scene, rather than taking center stage. And far too much word count is given over to list-making. When the lists are clichés – sometimes presented in quotation marks and other times without – they are particularly irritating. For example:

On the bumpers of self we slap stickers: “Shop ‘til you drop,” “He who dies with the most toys wins,” “People who say money can’t buy happiness, don’t know where to shop,” When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping,” “But I can’t be overdrawn! I still have checks left!,” “I’m spending my grandchildren’s inheritance,” “Nouveau riche is better than no riche at all,” “A woman’s place is in the mall.”

Or

Soon the marketplace would capture this offloaded meaning and apply it to secular things. Buy this, you’ll be saved. You deserve a break today. You, you’re the one. We are the company that cares about you. You’re in good hands. We care. Trust in us. We are here for you.

My point is, he belabors his points. It’s insulting. Maybe it’s padding. Or both.

This author of nine books, as of the one next to me right now, teaches (or did in 1999) English and advertising at the University of Gainesville in Florida, but he clearly has contempt for academia in general and academic cultural criticisms in particular.

Nine times out of ten [clearly a rhetorical flourish rather than a statistical report], if you take a course in anything described as Cultural Studies, you will find that individuals are invariably seen as victims, while your instructor is the sage protector.

Your sage protector, I think he must mean to say. But note the academic author distancing himself from academia. Given his faculty position, one cannot help suspecting him of attacking straw men.

I made my first marginal notation on page 22, where the author lays out what he calls a “naive” four-part thesis. He begins the first of his four parts as follows:

(1) Humans are consumers by nature. We are tool users because we like to use what tool using can produce. In other words, tools are not the ends but the means.

He begins by claiming, in other words, that tools are tools. Forgive me for saying this, but – Duh! Next he claims that (2) consumers are “rational,” which he must do in order to oppose to what he presents as the widespread notion that consumers are helpless “victims” but which also, at the same time, ignores studies going back as far as 1979 (Tversky & Kahneman) that have tackled the classical economic model of rational decision-making. He wants to (3) cast doubt on the existence of “buyer’s remorse,” arguing that “consuming what looks to be overpriced kitsch may be preferable to consuming nothing.” He will go on later to say that we give our lives meaning by buying stuff, so buying nothing would yield a meaningless life, but then no one buys “nothing” in his view, and we’ll get back to that in a minute. Finally he would have us rethink the separation between production and consumption, which I would be perfectly willing to do if I were not already so put off by the paucity of claims (1) through (3).

Buying “stuff,” Twitchell wants us to believe, “is how we understand the world,” because if we’re not buying “overpriced kitsch,” we’re buying vacations or high culture experiences or the good feeling that comes from giving to charity. I’m not making this up.

One might well wonder if there is anything more to American life than shopping. After all, we are all consumers now, consumers of everything – consumers of health services, consumers of things and ideas, consumers of political representation, even consumers of what high culture there is left.

Note the clever move, blocking off the exit toward which you had turned. You may not be consuming kitsch, but aren’t you still consuming – say, opera or dental hygiene or philosophy. Every decision you make is a consumption decision.

For Freud, all dreams and all desires were basically about sex, and for Twitchell, everything you do is consuming. But if everything is consuming, all we can learn by investigating consumption will be more about consumption. Which is fine with Twitchell because while he concedes there are other important questions – happiness, justice, crime, divorce, drugs, pornography, etc., etc. – he declines to address them. Fair enough. Every writer gets to limit his domain of concern as he wishes. But saying that everything is just all this one “x”? Sorry, Charlie, not going there.

In an attempt to explode the consumer-victim straw man he has set up, the author asks readers to consider television viewing as an analogy. We are told, he says, that watching television is passive. He disagrees.

Most consumption, whether or entertainment or of what’s in the grocery store, is active. We are engaged. In fact, observe yourself watching and you will see that unlike reading, which really is passive, watching television is almost frantic with creative activity [italics mine].

Excuse me, but isn’t there a contradiction there? Oh, no, he qualified his statement with that “Most” at the beginning of the sentence, so reading can still be consumption, by his lights, but I’d sure like to hear a little more about how it “really is passive”! He could hardly think so were he to see the pages of my copy of his book, interaction demonstrated by the previous reader’s blue highlighting and my pencil underlining and marginal notes! The far more serious problem, however, with the claim that television is active and reading passive is that, once again, the author has completely ignored serious research studies in brain science. Channel-surfing to maximize images of sex and violence, the author’s self-avowed approach to viewing, is not evidence of creative brain activity or proof that screen input is more engaging than the printed page.

One thing I will say in the author’s defense, or at least to give him the benefit of doubt in the matter of political faddishness, is that he cannot easily be labeled either liberal or conservative and thus dismissed by half (assuming a 50/50 split) his audience. He derides consumer protection but quotes Marx and Weber approvingly, and then – surprise! He finds his intellectual soul-mates in French intellectuals. French academics, no less!

The French sociologists see consumer culture as multiple and interpenetrating discourses or fields, rather than as a singular dominant ideology that can be accepted or resisted. In the spirit of reader-response theory in literary criticism, they see meaning not rigidly super-applied to consumer goods by producers who hold the meaning stable, but rather supplied by the user who jumbles various interpretations simultaneously. Consumers are just [sic] another interpretive community. They are readers.

Readers? Wait, wasn’t reading “really ... passive”? And yet, the author concludes from his agreement with French sociology, that “the process of consumption, therefore, is creative and even emancipating.” We are creating “lifestyles,” today’s “secular religions, coherent patterns of valued things.”

I cannot say that I was completely bored by this book, that is, by the introduction and first chapter I read. Impatient, yes, annoyed, yes, but if I were still in the academic world myself I would probably have gone on to read it all, arguing with the author page by page. But life is short and calls me in too many other directions.

Why bother at all with this lengthy critique? Arguing is another thing I don’t do nearly as often as I used to – but sometimes it feels good to indulge myself!

Postscript: It was by the merest coincidence that David and I spent part of the evening watching a film we thought from the title was going to be a historical drama but that turned out to be a contemporary documentary of materialistic excess, "The Queen of Versailles." What a counterpoint to the book just that preceded it! Which was more "active," my reading or my viewing? What difference does it make? Yuck and ugh!

What Books Would You Take to a Brave New World?

When prospective colonists, preparing to embark for North America in the seventeenth century, came to pack their belongings for the long voyage in crowded little ships, the decision as to what to take and what to eliminate was a matter of such vital importance that it might mean success or failure, life or death. Since freight was high and even the most elementary essentials of life had to be transported, the wonder is that the emigrants found room for such luxuries as books. But the fact is that they did. 

 -       Louis B. Wright, The Cultural Life of the American Colonies, 1607-1763, Chapter 6, “Books, Libraries and Learning”

What books did the early American colonists bring to the New World? The Bible, of course, and works of theology considered important in their time; lots of history (“the sweetest recreation of the mind,” according to Richard Braithwaite, author of The English Gentleman, published in 1630), both ancient and contemporary; and practical books on farming and what passed in that day for medicine. For the “gentleman,” as well as the educated theologian, works by classical Greek or Latin authors were de rigueur, either in the original language (often) or in translation. The colonists also loved encyclopedic books of knowledge, a foundation in their time for adult, or continuing, education. For example, Pierre de La Primaudaye’s The French Academy (not to be confused with the Académie Française) is identified by Wright as “an outline of knowledge with a strong emphasis on the natural sciences, heavily moralized to take away any taint of damnation which meddling with God’s mysteries might have suggested.” They also held onto their grammar school books long after leaving the classroom and referred in later life to their old textbooks on rhetoric and logic.

Previous chapters of Wright’s book, on “Diversity of Religions” and “Zeal for Education,” give striking evidence of the forest of fear and suspicion with which members of various religious sects regarded one another in the colonial period (such sentiments and opinions in our own time are nothing new to the New World), and yet, despite these conflicts, the author insists that similarities between 17^th-century colonists’ private libraries are as striking as their differences and claims that “the intellectual differences between New Englanders and Virginians were not as great as some of their descendants would have us believe.” It is a sobering thought, to think that, for all the animosity and conflict between Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, everyone else and Quakers, perhaps Americans over 300 years ago shared more common values than Americans today.*

Anyway, here’s what I’ve been wondering -- about myself and my fellow Americans, but I’ll pose the question in the second person: If you were leaving home, ancestors and family history forever behind and heading into the Great Unknown, to start a new life in a New World, what books – if any – would you take with you? If no books, why not, and what else would you take in their place? Think of this question not only in terms of your own survival, well-being, recreation and interests but also in terms of what would benefit future generations in what would be their native land.

*Democracy is a difficult art of government, demanding of its citizens high ratios of courage and literacy, and at the moment we lack both the necessary habits of mind and a sphere of common reference. The marvel of postmodern communications—five hundred television channels, CD-ROMs, the Internet—invites each of us to construct a preferred reality, furnished ... with the objects of wish and dream. The commonwealth of shared meaning divides into remote worlds of our own invention, receding from one another literally at the speed of light.  

- Lewis Lapham, “Bomb-o’Gram,” July 1995, included in his collection entitled Waiting for the Barbarians, published by Verso in 1997
 

Are We the People to Blame for the Breakdown of the Legislative Process?

[This is a continuation of a recent post. Look here for the beginning of my discussion of this book.]

Congress no longer works. This is not a news flash. The question is, Why? Fishing through the tangled skeins clogging the federal legislative pipes requires careful, detailed and objective analysis of sociological data, looking at correlations between trends unlikely at first glance. It also takes a long look into American history. And so the explanation given in The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, by Bill Bishop, is not easily reducible to one short phrase. Bishop’s answer is NOT shameless gerrymandering or any kind of [conscious]“conspiracy.” Instead, he says, the Big Sort is the increasing ability of Americans to choose to associate primarily if not exclusively with people like themselves.

What's wrong with wanting to hang out with people like us? How can that account for the failure of Congress to do its job?

There have always been competing political parties in the U.S., and there have always been certain voter “blocks” and interests in competition. As Smith traces the history of partisanship, however, increasing divisions emerge in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, and gaps dividing Americans have been steadily increasing since that time. Okay, so why? The argument is complex, the data surveyed diverse and impressive, but I’ll try to compress the argument into a somewhat lumpy nutshell.

1)    Prosperity and economic security enabled more Americans to choose where they would live.

2)   Choice enabled people to congregate in communities with like-minded individuals, those with the same values and lifestyles.

3)   People in conversation primarily (or only) with like-minded individuals reinforced and strengthened each other’s commitments. When necessary, individuals adjusted their beliefs to conform to those of the group.

4)   Marketers, churches, and political parties increasingly began to target groups-- “tribes”--rather than appeal to a “mass market” or the country as a whole.

5)   To win the allegiance of “tribes,” political parties and churches (following market research) set out to attract groups rather than individuals, and to do this they could not challenge beliefs already strongly held.

6)   Consensus within groups became more extreme than prior individual beliefs had been.

7)   The middle view, those who could see both sides or agreed partially with one side and partially with the other, those who believed in compromise, etc. dropped out of the picture.

8)   Campaigns on both sides of the political divide demanded party purity, and moderate candidates were purged/

9)   “Without a sizable group of moderates, Congress has a harder time passing major legislation. The parties engage in the horseplay Americans see daily in Congress . . . while significant issues are sidelined.”

10)                 Legislative bodies “’either go lurching from one side to another, which means we have no continuity; or they are immobilized.’”

[Caveat: My ten steps could probably be reduced to five or enlarged to 20 and could certainly be formulated differently but are my quick and dirty synopsis of what the author took an entire book to explain.]

The political form of the “Question of the One and the Many” used to be, “How do the many – the diverse, those with different beliefs and backgrounds and values and interests – come together to live as one nation?” That question has been superseded in the last 30-4o years, as political marketers seek to ask instead how segments of voters can be isolated and converted. Demonizing the “other side” is part of the [marketing/identity] process.

“Us vs. Them” studies are a lot scarier than you might imagine.

People enhance their social identities by viewing their own groups positively and seeing other groups negatively. ... The price of identity is that despite what the human relations movement had hoped, differences aren’t diminished when groups come together. Instead, as social psychologists found out, differences are exacerbated.

And it’s even worse than that.

Researches found that there didn’t have to be any discernible dissimilarity [my emphasis added] between groups for “us” versus “them” conflict to arise. People adopted group identifications with only the flimsiest of pretexts.

In study after study, it turned out, incredibly --

The simple fact of assigning people groups led to discrimination....

The good news (were you hoping there would be some? I know I was) is that knowledge of different Others can reduce prejudice and increase tolerance, but it takes more than putting opposing groups in the same room. Psychologist Gordon Allport found that a number of necessary conditions besides proximity must also be met:

Ø    Groups must see themselves as equals.

Ø    Meetings between groups “should take place as a regular pursuit of an ordinary and shared goal.”

Ø    Meetings should “avoid artificiality.”

Without these conditions, disagreement between members of different groups will typically result in avoidance and silence rather than discussion.

Political scientist Diana Mutz, from the University of Pennsylvania, found that Americans are very reluctant to talk politics with those who might disagree with them.

In a comparison of citizens from twelve countries, Americans are the least likely to discuss politics with someone holding a different view. ... [T]hey avoid political confrontations personally – more so than people in any other country in this study.

Is it not paradoxical and horribly ironic that in the land of free expression, conformity and fear keep us from expressing ourselves except with those who already think the same way we do?

Do your friends share your political and religious beliefs and values? Are you able to talk to – and listen to -- those with different beliefs? How do you see the legislative future of American government? Divided by geography, by income, by education, by religion, and by political party, is there any hope that "one nation" will be able to move forward?

It would be so cool to get bipartisan groups together to read and discuss this book!

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This is a complete change of subject and has nothing to do with the rest of today's post, but I wanted to note that for some reason (I'm sure there is a reason, but for the life of me I cannot identify it) new titles I'm adding to my "Books Read 2013" list are now appearing at the bottom rather than the top of the list. It's messing me up, so if anyone has a solution, please clue me in. Thanks!

*  *  *  *  *

Coming back a day later to take another stab at this. Here's my synopsis in only four steps:

1) Since the early 1970s, Americans have chosen, increasingly, to live and associate as much as possible with those "like" themselves, in terms of income, education, lifestyle, and religious and political affiliation. 

2) Churches and political parties, following market research, have learned to target these belief and value groups to "sell" their "products."

3) Groups with different beliefs have moved further away from each other, become more extreme as they move apart, with the result that like-minded communities have become geographical, and so political districts have become increasingly polarized.

4) In polarized districts, moderate political candidates at the regional level cannot find party support, and so the middle drops out -- leaving in Congress two extremes with no ability or motivation to work together.

The author believes [on what grounds?] that only a younger generation can (and will?) reverse this trend, and yes, given enough time a pendulum does reverse direction, but where, in its swing from one extreme to the other, is the Early American ideal of a diverse citizenry overcoming differences to work together? Will our grandchildren achieve what we have lost?

COMPLETE COINCIDENCE??? The current New Yorker magazine opens with a piece by Steve Coll, called "Party Crashers," in which he follows one politician, through a brief number of years, adjusting his utterances and his votes in Congress again and again to satisfy the extreme of his party's line but ultimately failing to be "pure" enough.

Political purges have no logical end point; each newly drawn inner circle leaves a former respected acolyte suddenly on the outside.

Are we waking up yet?

Reading the Miles: U.S. by Highway by Books

Looking east Monday morning

Anyone who’s glanced at my Books Read list lately can see a lot of vicarious living going on -- compensation, no doubt, for the road time that is usually mine in September -- but I didn’t exactly plan a long, multiple travel book excursion. Like much of my reading, it just happened.

First came a new book by Phil Caputo, The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean.

Next I happened on an old Penguin paperback from 1979, Looking for America: A Writer’s Odyssey, by Richard Rhodes, pulled in by his descriptions of the Everglades in the first essay.

Then David and I both fell into Driving to Detroit: Memoirs of a Fast Woman, by Lesley Hazleton, so while he was having his turn...

... I picked up Bruce Stutz’s Chasing Spring: An American Journey Through a Changing Season.

That is, I read Caputo first, started Rhodes, put that aside to start Hazleton, began and raced through Stutz, and then went back to finish first Rhodes and then Hazleton. 

The book by Rhodes, oldest of the four, isn’t really a travel book at all but a collection of essays, many of which, however, involved trips to different regions of the United States, and since these places were often some of the same ones visited by the other writers – and some of the places each of them visited were visited also in by one or more of the others – I felt I was making multiple trips, stopping more than once in the same place, only to find it was not the “same” at all because of the writers' different perspectives. 

Finally, as you'll see if you stick with me through all this vicarious wandering, I came back to an old 30-year classic.

I have to begin by saying that the Rhodes, the not-really-a-travel book, was much more satisfying to me than Caputo’s road trip from Key West to Dead Horse, Alaska. Rhodes occasionally used the pronoun “we,” even mentioning his children a couple of times, but he didn’t bog down in mundane, trivial details of family travel but gave a wide-angle view with layers of historical depth of field. I could imagine myself there in the Everglades or wherever, which is what I most desire in reading of someone else’s travel. Any travel narrative, of course, is the story of the writer’s personal experiences, but too much I, I, I -- and especially too much trivial detail, as opposed to crucial detail of place and season and personal struggle or quest – comes between me and my vicarious, bookish experience, arousing my impatience. Escaping daily tedium is one of the joys of reading travel narrative, isn't it? 

While Caputo’s agenda was to drive from the southernmost point in the United States to the northernmost point, just because, Stutz set out to "chase spring" from south to north, his ultimate destination also Alaska. Hazleton’s more modest destination was the Detroit Auto Show, her route beginning in Seattle but circling widely and serendipitously south and east and north. The Rhodes essays explored first Florida and California and subsequently other regions and now-historical periods of the continental United States. Hazleton and Stutz paid more attention to American culture than Caputo and Stutz, but all four registered environmental awareness. His trip was singularly important to Stutz because it followed heart surgery. Hazleton was worried about her father's heart and made almost daily telephone calls to her parents in England (where she was born).

Early in his book, Caputo writes, “Without a design, a journey becomes aimless wandering.” Mentally I bookmarked that line with my skepticism as something to come back to later, and two questions were always hovering in the back of my mind: Does a journey need a design? Is aimless wandering pointless?

What do you look for in a travel book? Do you want a basically light-hearted road trip, complete with dogs? Go with Caputo. If it’s serious commentary on environmental, cultural, and historical issues you favor, let Rhodes be your guide. Amateur birders and geologists will probably want to hitch a ride with Stutz (and I learned a lot from him). 

In the end, after reading all four, I decided Hazleton was the guide for me, and anyone (this would not be me!) obsessed with the American automobile would be well advised to travel with her, too. Hers is a story to appeal to a much wider audience than “car guys,” but those guys will find plenty to love in the book. Hazleton wasn’t looking for the fastest, shortest way to get from Seattle to Detroit, and neither was she afraid to get out of her vehicle and hike trails or even to plunge into a cold mountain lake when one presented itself. There were arranged rendez-vous spots, a lot of serendipity, and one wrenching personal loss along the way, but the focus remained primarily on the road, on the countryside, and on the people she met.

One way Hazelton definitely has it all over Rhodes (whom in general I liked a whole lot) is that, with her imagination and her own experience, she can truly imagine the experiences of others, whereas Rhodes can only, as is true of far too many male writers, imagine male experience, writing therefore as if any human life experience, however far from a biological sex role or social norm, must come always in gendered form. This attitude is as tiresome as I, I, I, me, me, me. Here's how it goes: Men, men, men, women, women, women. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Guys, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how it is!  The experience of girls and women is not run through a filter reminding us at every moment of our existence that we are not men! That is, we do not see you men are the real experiencers and ourselves only spectators of you, you, you! So get a damn clue! Whenever as a young girl I saw a running horse or waved to a train engineer, there were no intervening daydreams in my head about boys coming between me and that beauty and power. (Rhodes imagines girls imagining the waving boys becoming the future engineers to whom they will wave. Seriously?) No, what I saw was my world. Experience is absolute, no matter whose it is.

Phew! Where was I? Oh, yes....

With four cross-country accounts newly added to my Books Read list, I felt it was time to re-read the American road classic of my lifetime, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, brought to mind by this passage from Lesley Hazleton:

...The moment I joined [inadvertently] that interstate, with its huge semis and high speeds, I seemed to have left Arizona behind and entered another world that existed only in long, straight two-hundred-foot-wide swathes. I was driving at an enforced remove from the landscape, as though someone had placed a clear, plastic tunnel over the road. The world of the interstate forced out the real world. All I could hear was traffic. All I could smell was burned gasoline. And with ears and nose assaulted, even my eyes felt dimmed. 

 The interstate, I realized, is an exercise in sensory deprivation. 

Lesley Hazleton, DRIVING TO DETROIT: MEMOIRS OF A FAST WOMAN (1999)

The passage goes on, but anyone who knows me can hear the Yes! This was the vicarious road experience I wanted, and to prolong it I pulled out a battered paperback copy of Blue Highways.

Least Heat-Moon starts out. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He avoids expressways. He meets people. Here is a scene in a little Tennessee holler:

...He cranked up an old Edison phonograph, the kind with the big morning-glory blossom for a speaker, and put on a wax cylinder. This will be ‘My Mother’s Prayer,’” he said. While I ate buttermilk pie, Watts served as disc jockey of Nameless Tennessee. “Here’s ‘Mountain Rose.’” It was one of those moments that you know at the time will stay with you to the grave: the sweet pie, the gaunt man playing the old music, the coals in the stove glowing orange, the scent of kerosene and hot bread. “Here’s ‘Evening Rhapsody.’” 

 - William Least Heat-Moon, BLUE HIGHWAYS: A JOURNEY INTO AMERICA (1983)

Okay, he’s wandering aimlessly, yes indeed he is, and I would not trade this aimless wandering for the most carefully designed road trip in the world. Serendipity comes along with risks, and this is my kind of travel and my kind of travel reading.

Reading my notes of the trip – images, bits of conversations, ideas – I hunted a structure in the events, but randomness was the rule. ... [L]ater that afternoon, a tactic returned to me from night maneuver training in the Navy: to see in deep darkness you don’t look directly at an object – you look to the left; you look at something else to see what you really want to see. Skewed vision.

Aimless wandering and serendipity remind me of what David and I remember as "the scary place," a tiny mountain hamlet perched high at the end of a narrow, climbing road, a place we never would have gone had we known ahead of time how frightening would be the ascent -- and, even worse, the turnaround to descend -- or if we had stayed on major expressways while driving from Avignon north. But we didn't stay on the main roads, and we had no reservations anywhere, so we have a vivid memory of fear and of the conversation I had with two astonished women living there and could hardly believe that a couple from près de Chicago (my usual geographic explanation of where we were from) had ventured such a trek.

Closer to home, there was last fall's walk out through bracken and old pine stumps when I stumbled upon the bearing tree. 

Aimless wandering? What can be better?

There is an element of memoir in both Blue Highways and Driving to Detroit, but the personal details given, whether of divorce, melancholy, anxiety, grief, or just plain discomfort and impatience, always have to do with what is an important personal journey, and this lifts them above daily diary minutiae. 

Looking west Monday morning

As for my own life, at present the road is still unrolling without me, except for my beloved back roads near home, and today under blue sky and sunshine I have no complaints whatsoever. (Is it only coincidence that the conversations all around me this morning in the coffee house have to do with long-distance travel? We kid ourselves if we think we are not a migratory species.) Actually, even under grey, cloudy skies on Sunday, it was worthwhile being out on the county roads, observing young, feathered families. Some of them will stay the winter, and some will fly south.