Introduction - Taken in by America

Taken in by America
Introduction
Taken in by America is a “by the way” telling of the story of how America came to be as it is, of
what makes the American tick. It’s a tale of two people, outsiders—an Australian couple who
spent a year in the land of the free from May 2006 to May 2007, a further two months in the
lead-up to the 2008 presidential election and from mid-September to mid-November of 2011—
and the story unfolds as they travel around the USA, taking rooms in motels, renting, subletting,
and being guests in American homes. And it’s a tale of two siblings, hostile twins who combine
to form the Union.
The colonial American’s seventeenth-century Puritan origins taught him to mask his real identity.
The nineteenth-century trader carried on the masquerade, selling confidence while giving nothing
away. Trade is in the American’s blood, its twin aspects of sweet commerce on the one hand and
the confidence trick on the other giving rise to the courteous ‘hail fellow, well met’ American for
whom you are fair game.
These elements of the story are laid out early on, as we travel across the terrain that gave rise to
the Connecticut Yankee—Phineas T. Barnum being the foremost exemplar. By the time we’re
nearing Hollywood in March 2007, the American is on the verge of realising his manifest destiny
and it’s clear that his nation is governed by Mercurius—the ancient Roman god of trade,
commerce and profit who emerged as the trickster spirit of modernity. Not until November
2011, though, do we fully appreciate the impact of Mercurius’ displacement of Coyote,
Kokopelli, and so on, the various guises of Trickster, who had been Indigenous America’s
governing spirit.
The American doesn’t think of himself as a product of pagan mythology but insofar as it’s rooted
in medieval religion his is an essentially mediaeval outlook. He takes it for granted that there’s a
transcendent overseer, a guiding hand that strives to shepherd him toward the Good and which
rewards his efforts at self-transformation with the promise of redemption. Yet he’s thoroughly
modern, too, this dual entity, and is just as much the product of the Scottish Enlightenment
which flowered in the lead up to the American Revolution in 1776.i
Taken in by America is no scholarly tome but a form of adult entertainment, a burlesque—for
America itself is a burlesque, an exaggerated copy of the classical republican ideal. And neither is
it a travel guide—though a mine of information on how travellers might make the most of any
time spent in the USA is contained herein—but an argument, developed around historical and
contemporary anecdotes, which leads to the conclusion that America is a stacked deck.
Why the American embraced Adam Smith yet rejected David Hume is beyond the scope of this book but
appreciating that he did so puts us in the box seat when trying to make head and tail of what he’s on about and it’s
what Taken in by America is all about.
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Chapter 1 Mercury V8
“If he’s the Democrat candidate for the 2008 presidential race,” Meryn served notice, “I’m
coming back.”
It was February 11th 2007 and we had just left Philadelphia, Mississippi. Ronald Reagan delivered
his first major campaign speech as the Republican Party’s 1980 presidential candidate in that
town. He had gone there to court good ’ol white supremacist Dixiecrats. Meryn was responding
to the news from Springfield, Illinois, that Barack Obama had just announced that he was
running to be elected president of the United States of America in 2008.
Like Governor Reagan before him, Senator Obama had blown the dog whistle. Unlike Reagan,
though, Obama was sending a message to educated Americans—by announcing his candidacy in
Abraham Lincoln’s hometown—that they should help save the Union.
Meryn had been sold on the junior Senator from Illinois by a colleague with whom she had
shared a room at a Chicago conference in the Spring of 2005 and we’d both witnessed Obama’s
impressive style during a visit to the Capitol in Washington D.C. in late 2006. There was no
doubt about his capacity for the top job, I suggested, but nothing would stand in the way of
Hillary Clinton’s being nominated as the Democrat candidate in the presidential election so I
wouldn’t be booking annual leave for late 2008.
We returned to Australia from the USA in May 2007 but Meryn reckoned we’d be back. We
were, touching down in Chicago, Illinois, sixteen months later, to drive through Kentucky,
Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, the Virginias, Indiana and Missouri in the weeks leading
up to the American presidential election then back to Illinois for the big event on Tuesday
November 4th 2008. That journey reaffirmed my belief that America merely masquerades as a
Christian nation, being governed all the while by the pagan deity, Trickster.
I boarded the Jumbo—Meryn was attending a conference in Glasgow and would meet me in
Chicago—alongside numerous gum-chewing passengers and settled in for the long haul across
the Pacific. The in-flight entertainment was portentous: Fawlty Towers’ conman, Lord Melbury;
Andrew Denton’s interview with Jerry Seinfeld; and the Oscar winning Civil War and
Reconstruction era epic ‘Gone With The Wind.’ Tocqueville stayed in my bag.
Los Angeles International Airport’s ranking immigration authority declared the whole planeload
of green forms null and void due to shoddy use of the guillotine so while my fellow travellers
went back to the drawing board the travel visa in my passport took me to the front of the queue.
The black officer who allowed me entry to the USA was enthusiastic about we non-Americans
wanting Obama to become the next president. He made it clear that he, too, wanted Barack to be
number 44 but asked “What is it about the rest of the world? Why is everyone so keen on an
Obama victory?”
Around at gate number whatever it was for the domestic leg to Chicago, a middle-aged American
introduced himself to the woman sitting behind me by remarking on the fact that she, like his
wife, was a knitter. He moved effortlessly from that tidbit of information to the news that his son
was on his third marriage despite the fact that he, the father, was doing good works in the
Church. The woman assured him that Jesus would heal the wound. I could almost certainly
guarantee that Meryn would not be within earshot of such intimate conversation between
strangers as she sat in the departure lounge at England’s Manchester Airport. The American has
childlike faith in the power of redemption.
At Chicago’s O’Hare a young Australian woman who had missed her connection to Denver
thought that American airport staff were “all dickheads.” Not so, I said, just disorganised; it’s the
flip side of the emphasis on freedom. “Dickheads,” she insisted, as she climbed in to share the
shuttle to the motel. Meryn arrived later that evening and next morning we took the ‘El’ to
Diversey, a short walk from our chosen car hire franchise, stopping off Downtown for a
delicious Mexican lunch and an hour or two examining Donghia fabrics in the otherworldly
Merchandise Mart.
Our eight-week tour was immediately threatened by my new Visa card having ‘DEBIT’
emblazoned beneath the logo. Meryn didn’t help any, either, by taking the side of the car rental
people when they pointed out that without a credit card there was no way I could complete the
pre-arranged deal to hire a small automobile for eight weeks. She followed the logic of their
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Taken in by America
argument whilst I stuck doggedly to the single-minded notion that, America being the
quintessential trading nation, I would not leave empty handed were I to stand my ground.
The car rental staff (one of them holding a well thumbed copy of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying) hung
in there but eventually relented, unprepared to squander the goodwill on which the business
prided itself. Phew. A financial crisis narrowly avoided. The only available vehicle was a
ridiculously outmoded (with petrol at $US4.20 per gallon) V8 Mercury and we used it to get back
to the Elk Grove Village motel. I would fight that battle on the morrow—which turned out to be
a gorgeous sunny day.
Meryn and I were looking out over Downtown Chicago from the Hancock skyscraper when the
car hire company called to say they’d swap the gas guzzler so we headed south in a Dodge
Avenger and came to rest in Lincoln, Illinois (founded in 1853 and the only location in America
named after Abraham Lincoln before he became president). Lincoln had helped survey the town
and been counsel for the company whose railroad was its raison d’être.
The courthouse, there, subsequently played host to the Circuit Judge and a group of lawyers
(Lincoln among them) on their regular two-month fall tour of the Illinois Eighth District.1 Meryn
was enamoured of the building, still standing, and took pains to measure the breadth-to-length
ratio of the window frames. Her house was being rebuilt while we took our two-month fall tour.
The sun had set, the camera was back at the motel, and we’d already lost a day to the V8 so she
completed a back of the envelope calculation and emailed the architect. Lost a day, that is to say,
on our way to Oxford, Mississippi, where Barack Obama and John McCain would engage in the
first of what are euphemistically referred to as televised ‘debates’.
Illinois was celebrating the sesquicentenary of the seven famous Senate race debates of 1858
between incumbent, Stephen Douglas, and challenger, Abraham Lincoln. Those stump speech
contests had taken Douglas’ opponent to national prominence as the make-or-break 1860
presidential election loomed on the horizon.
We could not take the advertised celebratory stroll around Charleston (where the fourth debate
had occurred) and spend a couple of days in Lincoln’s home town of Springfield, so chose the
latter. I went in to a motel, there, and ran through the checklist of basic requirements concerning
whether or not they had a non-smoking room with free wireless internet, MSNBC TV, fridge,
and a microwave. They did, so I fetched Meryn to sign the paperwork.
The Gujurati desk clerk was able to differentiate our accent from that of other non-American
English speakers so we followed up on that and learned that he’d been a university student in
Australia until expelled part way through his course by the Howard regime. Meryn mentioned the
Haneef case; he knew it well and was amused when she vent her spleen against Australia's selfappointed deputy sheriff representing George Bush’s interests in Southeast Asia, the (now
deposed) Prime Minister.
We turned on Andrea Mitchell’s lunchtime show. The deepening financial crisis had moved
apace since the subprime loan scandal had reared its head in our Boston motel in the winter of
2006-7.i Ms. Mitchell’s guests, political pundits, were coming around to the realisation that
Trickster pulls the strings of American capitalism.
Downtown, at the Illinois Capitol, we were entertained by a group of children whose grossly
overweight supervising teacher admonished the pupils to get some exercise and take the stairs;
she made her point forcefully, then entered the elevator and rode up to meet the excitable group
of grade schoolers as they were herded into the Senate Chamber by a young docent.
The school kids were to provide the audience for a meaningless ratta-tat-tat rote spiel that
nothing would prevent the docent delivering in its entirety in the allotted time. It reached us as an
uninterrupted staccato stream of consciousness, right down to the
“doesanyononehaveanyquestions” ending exactly four minutes on from the initial cannon burst.
It was an extraordinary feat, to be sure, but devoid of semantic content—the frequent mention
of ‘Barack Obama’ notwithstanding. Meryn had read both of the increasingly famous Illinois
Senator’s books and so filled me in on his time in that place as a State legislator.
I returned the favour with respect to Lincoln’s having represented Sangamon County in the Old
Capitol building on Sixth Street. It was there, at the State Capitol, in 1858, that Abraham Lincoln
announced he wanted to be the next Senator for Illinois, and there, while we were driving
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See below, Chapter 22 ‘Alias the Outlaw’
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through Mississippi in February 2007, that Obama had told an enthusiastic crowd that he wanted
to be the next President of the United States of America.
We visited the Lincoln home—nowadays another of those high standard National Parks Service
(NPS) sites—and pressed the buttons on the mechanical model of the slain president’s funeral
procession. Later, we paid the entrance fee at the much talked about Lincoln Museum opposite
the Old Capitol Building on Sixth Street and devoted an afternoon to its various digital exhibits
but, ever the old fogey, I preferred the NPS’s more prosaic approach to the subject.
Just after sunrise on the autumnal equinox, the Dodge pulled into the Oak Ridge Cemetery off
North Grande and slipped through an array of Stars and Stripes. Gliding past graves, it veered
left at a mausoleum and came to a dead end. There was nothing for it but to walk the final leg. A
sign posted on a makeshift chain wire fence informed visitors that Lincoln’s tomb was
undergoing renovation. So we got back in the car and drove to the town which had been the
region’s pre-eminent centre of commerce in antebellum America: St Louis, on the Mississippi
River.
I had expected to see the Eads Bridge but the semi-trailers on the spaghetti flyover carried us
miles into Missouri in their wake. This, even though it was early on a Sunday morning, reminded
me that tackling the Interstate is not for the faint-hearted. Having clocked up more than 25,000
rental car miles on our previous visit to the USA, you’d think it would all be second nature but it
took some time to turn around and head back to the Downtown exit. Disentangled from the
spaghetti, I pulled over on Main Street and stared out the window while Meryn scoured the Road
Atlas in search of the nineteenth-century landmark.
A middle-aged couple strolled along the sidewalk. The woman blew a huge bubble of gum that
burst all over her face but a protruding tongue cleaned up the mess and hauled it all back in
without her breaking stride. Meryn soon found the Eads Bridge I’d been looking for and we
made our way over. A sign near the entrance warned there was no access but approaching traffic
proved otherwise so we rode over the River on the steel structure that first spanned the
Mississippi in 1874.
St Louis steamboat interests had fought long and hard to protect what they regarded as their
water highway—America’s extensive navigable freshwater system—being superseded by rail
transportation. The surest way to halt the train had been to stand in the way of any bridge being
built across the Mississippi River. But, as Abraham Lincoln put it to the jury of the Effie Afton
case in the United States Circuit Court in Chicago in September 1857, were the boat owners to
succeed in this then instead of having the option of year round east-west railroad travel, the
American would be limited to carrying on trade during those months when the Mississippi, free
of ice, afforded relatively safe passage—would be prevented, that is to say, from realising his
destiny to go west.i
Bridges were built, the steamboat gave way to railroads, and Chicago stepped into the limelight to
challenge St Louis’ status as the pre-eminent city on the western frontier. The writing was on the
wall when St Louis lost the right to host the 1860 Republican Party National Convention to
Chicago and the whole thing subsequently spelled out when Mississippi River trade all but ceased
during the Civil War. By the mid-1860s, Chicago had taken over as the dominant centre of
regional commerce. St. Louis businessmen realised that they needed a bridge of their own.
The St. Louis Merchants Exchange called upon one of its own, J. B. Eads, to lay the groundwork
for building that bridge. His salvage company had hauled the Effie Afton up from the river
bottom after it had gone down following a collision with the pylons of the first railroad bridge to
span the Mississippi. And it was Eads who had designed and built the ironclad warships that
Ulysses Grant used to defeat the rebels on the Cumberland, Mississippi, Tennessee and Yazoo
Rivers.
Born in 1820 and named for his mother’s cousin (the future president) James Buchanan Eads
had arrived in St Louis on a steamboat that exploded and sank as it came in to dock. Thirteen
years old at the time, he spent the remainder of his life coming to terms with and striving to
conquer that river. Self-taught, like Lincoln, and no less ambitious, Eads established a salvage
business to capitalise on the fact that paddleboat boiler explosions were commonplace on
America’s arterial waterways. A successful businessman with ties to the White House—President
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See below, Chapter 6, ‘Twin Cities’
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James Buchanan was there from 1857 to 1861 and a Missouri colleague, Edward Bates, was
Lincoln’s attorney general—Eads submitted a plan for constructing ironclad gunboats when war
broke out between the North and South.
He’d no experience with design of warships before he started and none of building bridges either
but Eads had supreme confidence and proposed to construct the world’s first steel bridge,
incorporating unprecedentedly wide spans of more than 500 feet. Doubts about the integrity of
his engineering threatened to drive off potential investors but Eads secured funds from those
who, like Andrew Carnegie, were prepared to examine the track record and listen to his
explanation of how he intended to apply the principle of the lever. Work commenced, allegedly
at the spot where he had been pulled out of the freezing waters along with his mother and sisters
when the steamboat sank in 1833.2
When it was nearing completion, the Army Corps of Engineers demanded the St Louis Bridge be
torn down. Eads enlisted President Ulysses Grant’s help, the Corps of Engineers backed off, and
the Eads Bridge opened on July 4th 1874, paving the way for steel construction to become
commonplace. We drove back across the Mississippi on the landmark and were satisfied. Ideally,
we’d have capped off our St Louis visit by stopping off at the confluence of the Missouri and
Mississippi Rivers but it was upstream and inaccessible, Meryn reckoned, if the map was anything
to go on. So we headed south instead.
A Mexican restaurant made a fine late afternoon lunch and we crossed the Mississippi from
Missouri to Cairo, Illinois, where Mark Twain’s Huck and Jim had got lost in the fog and failed
to take the bend up the Ohio from the Mississippi.i There was no mistaking it when we were
there. A citizen of St Louis who’d come to Cairo to see the Ohio flow into the Mississippi for
himself was disturbed by the sorry state of the park. Broken branches lay across the path and
trash was scattered everywhere.
Hurricane Ike—more destructive, even, than Gustav, the hurricane that had enabled Bush and
Cheney to skip the Republican Party convention in the Twin Cities upstream—must shoulder
some of the blame, the citizen acknowledged, but the authorities in Springfield were failing in
their duty to adequately manage the important site, he maintained.
Two years had passed since we’d looked down over the source of the Ohio from high on a
hilltop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and stood, now, at its mouth as a massive grain barge came
down the Mississippi from St. Louis and turned left to head upstream, crossing the clearly visible
demarcation line where the Ohio River’s blue water from the east was sucked under by the Old
Man and went rolling on south down to New Orleans. Ulysses Grant had been at that spot in the
early 1860s as military commander of the District of Cairo, his authority extending all the way up
the Ohio to the mouth of the Cumberland River. James Eads met Grant at Cairo in January 1862
when the first of the ironclads, USS Carondelet, was commissioned.
Autumn had begun. The Dodge now carried us over the Ohio past leaves changing colour on the
trees to Mayfield, Kentucky, where we spent the night. Jerry Seinfeld had stayed in room
something or other and his key was on display, along with the newspaper article about how a
fellow entertainer had told him Mayfield Super 8 was a good place to stay. It was okay. The
splendid sight, next day, of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers which flow almost side by side
as they prepare to empty their contents into the Ohio upstream from Cairo was something to
write home about.
Ulysses Grant captured Fort Henry, Tennessee, on February 6th 1862. The success of that
mission meant that Union soldiers henceforth “had a navigable stream open to us up to Muscle
Shoals, Alabama.”3 The follow-up victory of Fort Donelson, ten days later, might have opened
the way for Federal forces to end the American Civil War swiftly, according to Grant,
“Providence ruled differently. [General Halleck failed to seize the initiative and] Time
was given the enemy to collect armies and fortify his new positions; and twice
afterwards he came near forcing his north-western front up to the Ohio River.”4
Whatever the case, Ulysses S. Grant was promoted to Major-General because of the Federal
victory and, as the excellent documentary we viewed in the National Parks’ Service theatre
explained, it’s where the great Civil War hero came to be known as “Unconditional Surrender
Grant” in another of those curious coincidences which characterise American history: in 1854
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See below, Chapter 7, ‘The Private Eye’
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Simon Buckner had loaned a destitute Grant money to return home from California; now, here
he was, a Confederate general at Fort Donelson left to surrender to Union General Grant’s
forces because his commanding officers had fled the scene.
In view of his having been a Good Samaritan to Grant eight years earlier, Buckner hoped to be
given some leeway. Grant sent word to Buckner that he could have credit but that “No terms
except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” The Confederate from
Kentucky understood. In 1885, he visited his old friend and former adversary a fortnight before
Grant’s death and was a pallbearer at the funeral.i
Simon Buckner went on to become Governor of Kentucky, in which capacity he played a role in the celebrated
Hatfield-McCoy feud.
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Chapter 2 Seeing Double
We arrived in Los Angeles in May 2006, Meryn and I, and hit our first snag at immigration. The
uniformed officer took fingerprints and informed us that our fresh new five-year visas did not
allow entry into the USA for a whole year. The sentence took on greater authority in being
pronounced with a Russian accent but was softened somewhat by the fact that this official was an
attractive blond in her mid-thirties whose own mother, she told us, was only ever permitted to
stay for six months at a time.
Our protests that we’d gone to considerable expense to obtain the visas—that the consulate
official in Melbourne had wished us well for our planned year of travel in the USA, that we had
return flights for then—made no impression so we stopped talking and listened, reading between
the lines that, come November, we could leave for some European destination and return from
there to the USA for another six months.
Bloody hell. We would have bought return tickets to London with stopovers in the USA had the
consulate put us in the picture about the unspoken rule. We were unaware, then, that America is
a pair of hostile twins, that since consulate and immigration officials work for different
departments what the one tells the individual traveller will invariably be at odds with whatever
the other says.
Still, we were in, and so collected our baggage and breezed through customs with confidence,
pinching ourselves at being back in the USA—for an extended stay. A couple of hours later,
aboard the connecting domestic flight to New York, we stared down at the snow on the Sierra
Mountains.
A night in Manhattan’s Sixty-third Street YMCA and a three-hour Greyhound ride the following
afternoon saw us at Union Station, New Haven, Connecticut. One of the first built outside of
New York, the nineteenth century New Haven train station stood at the junction of two
railroads, the one north to Hartford, the state capital, and the other east to New London. My
aversion to taking taxis is ever under challenge at these moments but there was nothing especially
difficult about finding a bus and making our way to the student apartment we’d sublet for the
summer.
A month before taking my year off from work I’d asked an under-thirty colleague at the office
whether he had a particular website to recommend concerning our obtaining accommodation in
the USA. “Craigslist dot com.” He tossed it off with that youthful air of owning the territory.
“Craigslist” was the right answer, of course, especially as regards summer accommodation in
New England. The supply, there, of apartments for a three-month stay from late May far
outweighs demand and our accommodation was a done deal prior to our arrival.
Rather than try to explain the route, our driver took us beyond the bus terminus to the corner of
Trumbull and Whitney so that it was a short walk to Orange Street where Mordecai, the law
student from whom we’d sublet, handed Meryn the key. It was immediately apparent that we had
taken over the lease on a bachelor pad. Declan, Mordecai’s roommate who spent most of his
waking hours at the hospital, welcomed us and insisted that we should feel free to use the tins
and condiments in the pantry since he, Declan, always ate at Subway and knew nothing at all
about that part of the house.
Mordecai’s was a ‘cooked in’ kitchen. And the larder was only half of it: there was a full range of
pots and pans, crockery, cutlery, coffee machines, and Tupperware type storage containers
together with enough rolls of aluminium foil to have the Bush Administration indict us on a
WMD charge.
Declan appeared at rare intervals. When he did flit through one morning I asked about the smell
of gas in the kitchen. He recalled that he and Mordecai had smelt gas, too, when they first moved
in but that the real estate agent had had it checked and no leak had been found. One gets used to
it, he said. Well one doesn’t but it would clearly be bad form to make a fuss so, as difficult as it
was for someone of squabbling Irish Catholic upbringing, I bit my tongue. We were subletting
and should take up issues only with Declan or Mordecai who’d then intercede with Honey
Pear—her downstairs—the prickly real estate agent whose ubiquitous For Rent signs blighted the
neighbourhood.
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That directive—that all communication be funnelled from sub-lessee to lessee to landlord—fell
at the first post because Ms. Pear lost no time in obtaining our (sub-lessee) cell phone number
for her office girls to dial daily.
The Pear assault drove me to distraction. First thing in the morning the phone would ring with
notification that the agency would be showing someone the apartment at 2 pm or tomorrow at
10 am or on “Saturday morning around eleven.” I thought that by paying the rent we’d have the
run of the place but Honey had us pegged as patsies, de-facto caretakers who’d clean up and
learn to come and go in accordance with her schedule of inspections for prospective post-August
tenants.
Ms. Pear and I came face to face when one of her minions phoned to say the painters would be
in the next day. “Oh no, no, no,” I protested, “This is too much.” The painters, it was agreed
after we had traded points of view about the payment of rent, could begin once we’d paid our
final day’s rent and moved out—three months hence. And could they please stop phoning to say
they’d be showing someone through? No, Mordecia advised by email; the lease entitled the agent
to usher any number of people through at a couple of hours’ notice.
Things weren’t turning out the way we had ’em planned.i Still, we enjoyed being in the Yale
University town. Comcast gave us the sixth series of The Sopranos—we’d not seen the fifth yet—
as well as Big Love. We crossed paths with Declan over News Hour with Jim Lehrer and I mentioned
the fact that the piles of books which lay about the apartment leaned to the left. His first loves
were history and philosophy, Declan explained, and went on to talk about the book on top of the
stack nearest the television set—Robert Fogel’s The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of
Egalitarianism. He was a trainee surgeon at Yale but spent the summer working for the
Democratic Party. He had worked as a volunteer to put JFK, John Forbes Kerry, in the White
House in 2004. Long faces all round.
We liked Declan. Warm, busy, easy-going, he was the ideal flatmate. So it came as a surprise,
when he told us that he would be leaving for California and thought we might like to meet Bob,
the poet who’d be subletting his bedroom. We should have seen it coming. I turned the Roaring
Twenties music off as Declan introduced us, assuring the new tenant that he wouldn’t be
subjected to my musical taste. He liked all kinds of music, Bob said, just so long as it wasn’t too
loud. That was a good sign, one which counterbalanced the Rastafarian visage.
It soon became clear—he relocated the internet router and hi-fi system from the living room to
his bedroom and piled dirty dishes in the kitchen sink—that Bob was 35-going-on-15. Born and
bred in New Haven, Connecticut, of Haitian parents, he was fond of playing with his
telephone—beeping from this to that option for twenty minutes at a time—in the kitchen. At 3
am. I asked if he wouldn’t mind playing with the device in his bedroom since our room adjoined
the kitchen and we preferred to sleep through the wee hours. The bewildered look he gave me
suggested that he judged me to be from Mars.
We had our moments, Bob and I, where we tried to find common ground. For his part, he
assured me that he was not a Rapper but a Hip-Hopper, the latter having a respect for women
which the former lack, apparently. And he took it upon himself to be my New Haven guide,
starting with the “three streets named after the guys who invented New Haven.”ii Try as we
might, though, we found none.
Patience is a virtue, I know, but I drew the line at the type of nonsense Bob passed off as
knowledge. He told me, for instance, that AIDS was created by the CIA in order to wipe out
black men. And he and his buddies had come to the conclusion that President George W. Bush
ordered that explosives be planted on the various floors of the Twin Towers in readiness for the
nine-eleven attacks, which explosives were timed to go off at regular intervals following the
impact of the aircraft.
According to Bob, then, the two aircraft did not so much cause the collapse of the World Trade
Center as provide convenient cover for the Bush Administration’s having done so. Apart from
violating Occam’s sound advice that explanations should not be multiplied beyond the necessary,
Bob’s conspiracy theory flew in the face of all that we knew about America in general and the
i
ii
The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)
See below, Chapter 9 ‘The Drifter’
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dysfunctional Bush Administration in particular. The various departments could not have cooperated in any such diabolical plot.
Connecticut third floor apartments are notoriously stuffy in summer, we now learned. Ninetyfive degree Fahrenheit temperatures and increasingly heated exchanges over the router interfered
with sleep and left me irritated and irascible. Deep-throated Harley Davidsons roared through the
streets after midnight drowning out the sound of distant gunfire.
It got worse. One night, a constable in an armchair sat at the doorway of a medieval building,
flanked by men in brilliantly coloured robes. A pair of trumpeters led a motley parade of men on
horseback, two by two. These were followed by a group of noblemen even more brightly attired
than those at the head of the parade, attended by servants and puffed up with their own selfimportance. There were horses, too, and trumpeters, but no pairs. And bringing up the rear was a
single horseman, attended by even more lackeys.
A noisy group of bystanders alternately cheered and jeered at the aristocrats in the passing
parade. Their waxing and waning communicated itself to the rest of the onlookers, who now
became noisy and partisan. I was somehow separate from the throng but held in thrall, and on
edge due to the din. A single voice detached itself from the madding crowd and was yelling
directly at me, just as if I was responsible for the division that had taken hold. I awoke, scared
and shaken. The hi-fi was on in the other bedroom and I could just make out the words ‘mother
fucking.’ I looked at the clock. A little after midnight. Bob must have been rehearsing his poem
in readiness for a performance at the Hip-Hop Club. Time to get away.
We’d gone to New Haven for our first three months in the USA because Meryn wanted to
conduct research in a Yale archive. She, too, had sleepless nights. Her tossing and turning was
occasioned by long days in the vault copying extracts of hand-written documents from the 1830s
that were too fragile to be photocopied. A fellow researcher suggested she photograph the
records with a digital camera. It was a great idea, and gave us time to see more of America.
We took a week-long tour of Massachusetts in a hire car, a Chevrolet Cobalt, during one of New
England’s wettest months on record. Their very competitive rental-car market virtually
guarantees that whatever you drive in the USA will be trouble-free but avoid the Cobalt if you’re
averse to backache.
Hurtling up Interstate 95 at 65 miles per hour (mph) in driving rain is a wake-up call. And you
daren’t slow down. ‘Keep up, or cause an accident’ is the code of the road. Aliens from a mirror
image road system where one keeps to the left, we had found ourselves in all kinds of
unanticipated trouble with our initial venture onto the highway outside Chicago’s O’Hare
International Airport in 2005. When Meryn said to make a right hand turn I went left, and viceversa. And when she said “Turn left” she sometimes meant “Turn right.” We eventually settled
on the terms ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. In America a ‘hard’ turn means to the left. North and south, on the
other hand, give rise to a more intractable problem having to do with the hemispheres either side
of the equator: instead of the sun traversing the Northern sky from right to left it does the
opposite in America—from left to right across the Southern sky.
Unbeknownst to me before I got out from Down Under, my good sense of direction is tied to
the position of the sun. And since it is second nature, I instinctively know where I am—in
Australia. The situation is reversed for me in the USA. While my sense of where A is in relation
to B remains intact, the cardinal points are rotated through 180°, the upshot being that I have to
think through where north, south, east, and west are. This necessity to consciously orientate
oneself is disconcerting—Meryn emigrated from England to Australia as a twelve-year-old and
instinctively associates April with springtime—but relatively inconsequential by comparison with
the switch from the left to the right hand side of the road.
The Interstate Highway system, integral to President Eisenhower’s defence strategy, was a mixed
blessing. It made railroads obsolete, laid the tracks on which global warming runs, and yet saved
small towns from being overrun with passing trade. Trade is to the American what fear of
authority is to the Australian. Passing trade leaves the Interstate at high speed to local roads,
slowing in stages from 55 mph on the outskirts of town to 25 mph on Main Street.
Crossing Narragansett Bay on the toll bridge from Conanicut Island, we checked in to a
Newport, Rhode Island, motel. It had never been our intention to pay homage to Alan Bond but
there we were, with the yachting fraternity at the Marina. It was as hot, there, on America’s Cup
Boulevard in June 2006, as it had been that September day in India, 1983, at the Taj Mahal, when
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informed that Australia had all but lost the famous boat race—again. It was Christmas when I
heard, months afterwards, that the property shark had ended America’s 132-year winning streak
and given convicts a good name.
The following morning we drove to Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was there, at the tip of
Cape Cod, that the Pilgrims disembarked from the Mayflower in 1620. I’d imagined being able to
see both the famous harbour and The Atlantic from the road along the narrow spit but saw
neither because of the vegetation that held the sand in place. It was something of a let down.
Whole crustacean was on offer at the café we called to for lunch but our selection was shoestring
chowder with fringe benefit. We chose, that is to say, the least expensive dish on the menu and
were spared, thereby, an introduction to the hostess. She chatted instead with the couple who had
ordered lobster and told them she’d met her husband, the proprietor, when she’d stopped in for
a beer. The rest was history.
Meryn and my eyes met. That’s why we were there—history. Cafés and bars are full of it. But it
wasn’t just the knowledge of how the forty-year-old had come to be living out on Cape Cod that
interested us. We learned, too, that it’s no better on the Florida Keys, that the road south-west
from Key Largo is all scrub and no ocean as well.
“Ah, Australia,” the clerk at the Hyannis motel beamed when Meryn handed over her passport at
check-in. Homesick, Mr Patel from Gujarat, welcomed us as citizens of a civilized, cricket-loving
country.
“Your Prime Minister played cricket in India.”
“Yes, we saw him bowling on TV,” I said promptly, to head Meryn off at the pass. She despised
John Howard. A nasty, mean-spirited, “lying rodent” (according to his colleagues), our then
Prime Minister was a national embarrassment, and I didn’t like him. But Meryn hated him with a
passion for exploiting the politics of fear, and didn’t mind saying so. We soon gained the
impression that Mr Patel’s American customers didn’t like him, either—presumably because he
gave short shrift to any guests from other than great cricketing nations.
A broken down old Buick couple struggled into the reception area and interrupted Patel’s
recollection of having padded up with Garfield Sobers at Adelaide Oval during his student days.
He quickly bustled them out in order to further develop his cricketing career but Meryn stumped
him with a mischievous question about his degree from the University of the Pineapple in
Parsippany, New Jersey, a framed copy of which hung on the wall.
He buttonholed us on the subject of Adelaide Oval when we returned the key to reception next
morning. We knew little about contemporary cricket, I said, and wanted only to snap the
graduation certificate and be on our way. Poor Patel—abandoned as always to baseball tourists.
As we departed, a lithe black couple from the West Indies asked for a room. I don’t like reggae; I
love it.
Black clouds piled up over Plymouth, the next port of call, and rolling thunder heralded our
arrival at the famous rock which commemorates the Pilgrims’ arrival in America. Having
concluded that Plymouth was more likely to provide safe harbour, they had moved there from
Provincetown after a few weeks. And, as luck would have it, were introduced to an Englishspeaking Patuxet Indian, Squanto, who happened to live there. They might have perished, this
vulnerable band of colonists, but for Squanto. He was a gift from God, according to the Pilgrims’
long serving Governor, William Bradford, and Americans have ever since regarded the
experience of redemption as of divine origin, and central.
There’s no denying the fact of the extraordinary coincidence which brought the Pilgrims to
Squanto’s shore: the Mayflower had set sail for the colony of Virginia but drifted 500 miles off
course to put down anchor at Cape Cod. There was next to no chance that there’d be an Englishspeaking Indian at journey’s end to guide them through the wilderness. It’s not surprising that the
seventeenth-century Calvinist colonists credited God for contriving the meeting with Squanto.
Nowadays, we’re inclined to regard it as just one of those things; extraordinary, yes, but not
divine. And if serendipity is divine, who’s to say that it’s the work of the Judeo-Christian God?
Happy coincidence is, after-all, the hallmark of Trickster, that pagan divinity whom we still
acknowledge on April Fools’ Day.
The colonists called their settlement New Plymouth. On April Fools’ Day, 1621, the Wampanoag
Chief, Massasoit, accompanied by Squanto, signed the first treaty between Native Americans and
colonists. New Plymouth survived until annexed by the Massachusetts Bay Company of Boston
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and Salem in 1691. A year later Trickster turned up in the village of Salem and assaulted the
senses of Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam.
It was raining cats and dogs when we were there, staring up at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of
Seven Gables and crouching down to examine seventeenth-century tombstones in the burial
ground. Meryn is especially fond of the Puritan death’s head design which reminds everyman that
all things must pass.
Puritan Judge Hathorne handed down his finding that Williams and Putnam had been visited by
Bridget Bishop the witch, that her spectre had hovered over them. The American set out on
a witch hunt, and got a taste for it. There’s some that say Judge Hathorne’s great-great
grandson—the celebrated nineteenth-century writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne—couldn’t stomach
what had been done in the family name and so changed it.
We headed for Concord but stopped to see Lexington’s handsome timber tavern where the
minutemen had rendezvoused in 1775. Meryn spoke to a docent who was huddled beneath an
umbrella. All done up in eighteenth-century breeches, knee-high boots, and three-cornered hat,
he thought the British had come and took up the case of Paul Revere’s horse. We should
have owned up about the accent but didn’t want to have to admit to knowing nothing about The
Crocodile Hunter.
Paul Revere rode through Lexington in April 1775 and warned the minutemen—Massachusetts
militia who were to be ready to fight at a minute’s notice—that the British had left their Boston
barracks and would be advancing on Concord to confiscate the revolutionaries’ gunpowder and
weapons cache.
Eighty-five years after the event, Henry Longfellow immortalised Paul Revere for riding from
Boston to Concord. Poetic licence enabled Longfellow to ignore the fact that the hero had had to
walk the last part of the 14 mile journey because the British took Revere’s borrowed horse out
from under him. His name didn’t lend itself to legend but Israel Bissel’s 345 mile ride from
Watertown, Connecticut, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to tell his countrymen that the American
Revolution had begun was a no less impressive feat.
So near Boston, and so remote, the village of Concord took us by surprise. Hawthorne had
moved there in the turbulent 1850s and lived near his friend and close contemporary, Emerson.
A wise old owl, Hawthorne did not adhere to Emerson’s philosophy yet stood by him when the
time came for a commemorative daguerreotype.
I’m not persuaded by the great Ralph Waldo either but posed for a photograph at the front door
of his house. The camera caught Meryn a stone’s throw from Walden Pond, at Gropius’ house.
Bauhaus modernism looked uncomfortable to me, nestled there in Thoreau’s backyard. I’ve since
come to think of that 1930s’ architectural statement being not so much ‘uncomfortable’ as ‘at
odds with itself’—American.
Framingham nestles in the shadow of a turnpike, a toll road, and would therefore be given a wide
berth other things being equal. Meryn’s research subject—born the same year as Hawthorne, and
possessed of as much visionary zeal as Emerson—had lived there, though, and that tipped the
balance. We didn’t find the house and never figured out how to determine whether or not a given
toll road was privately owned either. The Interstate Highways are impressive; the turnpikes, by
contrast, are by and large poorly designed, not properly maintained, and unsafe.
Torrential rain put an end to a planned stopover in Boston so we headed for the port town of
New Bedford. Timber, scarce in seventeenth-century England, was harvested by the boatload in
colonial America and shipped back to the mother country. Bakers, blacksmiths, carpenters,
coopers, wheelwrights, sailmakers, shoemakers, tailors and other craftsman took the raw
materials that came to market from the surrounding farms and lots and transformed them into
barrels, gloves, houses, jackets, ropes, ships, wharves, and so on. Port towns concentrated
colonial wealth along the coastal strip of the Atlantic seaboard. New Bedford had the added
advantage of being a nineteenth-century whaling port.
Whales oiled the wheels of international trade in the horse-and-buggy era and occasionally
rammed whaling ships. Herman Melville was a year-old infant when the Nantucket whaler, Essex,
was rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820. He read a survivor’s account of that ordeal after
leaving New Bedford on a whaling voyage aboard the Acushnet in 1841 and, taking literary
counsel from good friend and neighbour, Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote Moby Dick, the first
modernist novel.
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Hawthorne’s Puritan ancestry haunts the pages of Moby Dick but Melville’s own forebears are
there, too, no more convinced than Starbuck by Captain Ahab’s impotent boast from the
quarter-deck that he would penetrate the mask. Melville knew that the first move an American
makes is to don the mask.i His grandfather had dressed up as an Indian and thrown British East
India Company tea into Boston Harbor in December 1773.
I was in the USA but five minutes before realizing that I’d have to cover up the fact that I was all
at sea, that The Pequod I had charge of would be mashed to matchsticks if I did not open up my
mind as Ishmael had. For now though, on dry land, I walked with Meryn around the town made
wealthy from the trade in whale oil.
Wherever there has been wealth in America there’s a copy of Graeco-Roman architecture. New
Bedford is no exception. Trickster is there, too, as Mercurius, the Roman god of trade,
commerce and profit. The columns on the left of New Bedford’s Merchants and Mechanics Bank
building don’t match those on the right. The plaque outside tells us that the reason we’re “Seeing
Double,” there, is that when the Greek Revival building was constructed in the 1830s the
merchants and mechanics contracted separate firms to carry out the work. It gradually dawned
on me, over the following months, that it’s the story of the United States of America: the right
hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.
H. Melville, Moby-Dick (Penguin Books, 1851), Chapter 36: “If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the
prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.
Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough.”
i
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Taken in by America
Chapter 3 The Staircase Group
Shortly after taking up residence in New Haven, Meryn and I were out and about for the
Memorial Day celebrations. Memorial Day is akin to Anzac Day in Australia but without the rain
or the football. Memorial Day weekend is the beginning of the ‘driving season’ holiday period.
We figured that patriotism would be more on show that year, 2006, than when we had last
witnessed the goings-on for Memorial Day in the year 2000. Back then, wandering around
Downtown Chicago, we had been amazed to see a pathetic parade of ol’ sojers strung out along
State Street, I think it was.
We set off for the New Haven Vietnam Vet’s memorial service down at Long Wharf. The sight
of dozens of Harley-Davidsons with grizzled outcasts in the saddle was a good sign but that
celebration of fallen war heroes was over before we figured out how to cross the Interstate on
foot. So we toured a relatively recent reconstruction of the Amisted, the slave ship whose African
cargo broke free of its chains and sailed into New Haven Harbor, Connecticut, around the time
New Bedford’s Double Bank was being built.
From there we walked Downtown, to The Green, where the Mayor and various dignitaries
delivered orations prior to a wreath laying ceremony. Most of the thirty-two people in attendance
were family and friends of the fourteen officiating personnel, and so went through the motions.
Half a dozen, though, were down-at-heel Vietnam vets in wheelchairs or on crutches, each
wearing patriotism on his sleeve but abandoned nonetheless.
Two military men took up positions on the war-memorial fountain situated in the centre of The
Green—the old colonial Common where, upon hearing Israel Bissell’s news that the minutemen
and British had clashed in Lexington, Benedict Arnold had drilled his revolutionaries on April
21st 1775—and much saluting and straight-backed seriousness followed. The Mayor’s blue blazer
and fawn trousers stood out against the battle fatigues and the bugler stayed at his post
throughout ‘God Bless America’. The soprano didn’t cup a hand to her ear and it came out all
wrong. But that didn’t faze the dignitaries and they continued to sing along.
The Green filled to capacity when Dave Brubeck performed there a few weeks later so the poor
turnout in honour of those who have died fighting for the nation was a good indication of the
American’s priorities. But you’d have gained an altogether different impression had you stayed at
home and watched it all on TV: Memorial Day patriotism, there, was packaged and presented as
something of great substance.
The make-believe world of television commentary in which America’s soldiers were reportedly
the bravest and best in the world—each and every one of them a hero who loved his country—
ignored the fact that untold numbers of men and women who had served their nation in the
theatre of war suffered appalling treatment at the hands of their government. Military personnel
who displayed symptoms of mental illness caused by the trauma of seeing a four-year-old Iraqi’s
legs blown off by modern artillery, or an Afghani street vendor decapitated, were dishonourably
discharged by the Army. Seeing double.i
On our first visit to the USA, in April 2000—the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon—the
dominant TV commentary had been to the effect that America’s Armed Forces would never
again become trapped in a foreign land fighting an enemy who had nothing to lose in driving the
invader from his home. By April 2001, George W. Bush had entered the White House with a
mind to invade Iraq and no idea of what to do if the enemy fought back. His father had subdued
Iraq’s ruler, Saddam Hussein, and then been ignominiously defeated in the 1992 Presidential race.
i In
the week before Memorial Day, May 24th, the White House received yet another assessment from the intelligence
division of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff which confirmed what the numbers had been telling the president throughout
2006: the Iraqi insurgency was gaining strength. Two days before receiving this latest piece of bad news, President
Bush had told a Chicago audience that “… we have now reached a turning point in the struggle between freedom and
terror … [Iraqis] have demonstrated that democracy is the hope of the Middle East and the destiny of all mankind. …
Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the
story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began
their long retreat.” Two days after receiving the Pentagon’s classified intelligence report, on May 26th 2006, Donald
Rumsfeld’s Pentagon provided a report to Congress which was at odds with what Pentagon experts had concluded
concerning the resilience of the Iraqi insurgents.
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George W. was determined to right the wrong that had thereby been done to the family name
and appointed war hawks to key positions in his administration. Using al Qaeda’s September 11th
2001 attack on the USA as a pretext, he instructed Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to
update the USA’s war plan for Iraq. America made ready to repeat the mistake of Vietnam.
A couple of hours after leaving New Bedford, Massachusetts, Meryn and I made ready to cross
the swing bridge in Mystic, Connecticut. We were back in New Haven by nightfall and dined at
the pizza bar on the corner of Bradley and State. A nurse we met there picked up on the funny
accent and said “You guys hate us, don’t you?” The friendly, open American mourned the loss of
international goodwill squandered by the Bush Administration. We didn’t get around to the more
problematic conundrum of how such warm-hearted individuals have engendered a republic
which so readily meddles in the affairs of far flung sovereign nations.
Next morning, we went west along the coast from New Haven, through Bridgeport, and stopped
on the road to Fairfield when Meryn saw a brightly coloured parrot. A little further along, dozens
of the birds flitted in and out of massive stick nests atop timber telegraph poles. A woman came
out of her house and explained that it was an invasion of Monk Parakeets. We hadn’t asked, but,
as is typical of the American, she put herself in our place and concluded that we would like to
know about Myiopsitta monachus. She had guessed correctly.
The great eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, Adam Smith, regarded the
capacity to reflect upon one’s own emotional state to the point of seeing a given situation from
the other person’s point of view to be the hallmark of commercial society. In seeking to strike a
bargain with someone it helps to have an appreciation of what the proposed trade looks like
from his side of the fence. The French referred to this tendency of trade to enhance human
relations as sweet commerce whereas in England they used Lord Shaftesbury’s term for it—politeness.
Just as coins were polished (had their rough edges worn off) through passage from one pocket to
the next, so do individuals acquire polish and self-confidence through commerce.
They go hand in hand, then, the hail-fellow-well-met American and his quintessentially
commercial civilisation. The woman in the pizza bar, the local resident who came out of her
house just in case we might be wondering about the parakeet phenomenon, or any of the various
individuals on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with whom we talked in April 2000 about a
gruesome crime committed a couple of hours earlier in the stairwell of the building across the
street—they’re all born of that remarkable Enlightenment experiment in civilised commercial
society, the United States of America. And those Enlightenment intellects like Adam Smith and
David Hume, et al, regarded the person who is able to put himself in the other’s place as having
two thoughts at once—as being able to see things from the other point of view—seeing double.
There’s another side to the coin of sweet commerce, of course, whereby Trickster takes the mark
into his confidence in order to deceive. This is Herman Melville’s American—the confidence
man—a character who’s seeing double because he’s being double. Deeply spiritual and addicted
to consumerism, a patriot who distrusts government, the American is a paradox of opposites. He
founded a republic on the rule of law yet has the greatest admiration for the outlaw.
He hasn’t become double, the American, but was ever thus. In asserting his independence and
breaking free from the chains that had tied him to the British Crown, the American declared that
all men are created equal and then signed a Constitution which guaranteed his right to conduct
commerce in the slave trade. And the new government he made was structured so as to ensure
that one arm pulled against the other. This has ever since enabled the American to rail against his
government as ineffective when all the while he relishes the fact that it is deliberately hamstrung.
Herein lies his sense of humour and love of the paradoxical tall tale—such as the story of the
man who was so lofty he had to climb a ladder to shave.
In Fairfield, where we stopped for morning tea, a bronze Mark Twain read from Huckleberry Finn.
Twain was at home with paradox. Asked what he thought of the Vienna Opera, for instance, he
said that “Wagner’s music is not as bad as it sounds.” We entered a coffee shop that had a sign
on the window reflecting the mood of the moment: “There was music in the cafés at night and
revolution in the air.” Connecticut’s long serving Democratic Party senator, Joe Lieberman, was
under challenge from anti-war candidate, Ned Lamont, in the upcoming August Primary.
North-west of Fairfield, in Bethel, Connecticut, we photographed a mural of Jumbo, the famous
elephant purchased from London Zoo in 1881 for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Phineas T.
Barnum, America’s foremost nineteenth-century trickster, was born in Bethel on July 5th 1810.
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Tree-filled Barnum Square provided welcome shade and a pleasant perspective on Main Street.
North-east of there, in Hartford, we visited the Harriet Beecher Stowe residence—she the author
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin published the same year as Moby Dick, in 1851. Mark Twain’s mansion—
Meryn called it an ‘architectural folly’—is right next door.
On the road back to New Haven we chanced upon a trompe l’oeil (‘fool-the-eye’) sculpture, a pair
of panels whose wooden slats were arranged to give the impression of a flight of stairs. A
marvellous outdoor composition, this fool-the-eye artwork, alludes to Charles Willson Peale’s
‘The Staircase Group’ (1795), the trompe l’oeil painting which famously fooled George
Washington.
Starting out with impeccable credentials—he was the son of an embezzler—Peale might have
become America’s foremost nineteenth-century trickster figure. He hadn’t the heart for the art of
deception, however, and let his head get filled with the Enlightenment ideal of fostering the
development of evidence-based knowledge subject to scrutiny. To that end, Peale filled his
Philadelphia Museum with scientific exhibits designed to dispel myth and increase the public’s
understanding of the natural world. No-one gets rich doing that in America.
After dropping Meryn off at the Orange Street apartment and the Chevy at the New Haven
rental yard, I crossed Whalley Avenue and asked a young African American woman standing
there whether or not that was the place to catch a Downtown bus.
“If it ever comes,” she said. “I’ve been here since 8.45 for the 8.48 and the bus should have been
here. I’m supposed to start work at nine an’ I’m gonna get it.”
“Won’t your boss understand that the bus was late?”
“Oh yeah! She’s got additoode. And I had yesterday off so she’s gonna be pissed.”
“So she’s not very understanding of what it’s like for you to get to work if the bus doesn’t come,
huh?”
“She’ll say I should have walked down the hill and caught the 4B but I didn’t know the 8.48
wouldn’t come. What time do you have?”
“It’s 9.15. Does the bus often come late of a morning?”
“You know I can’t say that it does. But I normally work nights so I don’t know. My friend had to
work for me yesterday and I’m doin’ his 9 ’til 3 today but I gotta leave by 2 to pick up the kids
from the school bus. Oh man, she’s gonna be so pissed.”
“Is she difficult with everyone or does she single you out?”
“Hah. She’s got so much additoode you wouldn’t believe. Customers say to me she’s got too
much additoode and I have to tell ’em she’s the boss.”
“How old are your kids?”
“Five and eight.”
“How long have you worked at this place?”
“At the Dollar Store. I’ve been there five months.”
“What’s the work like? Do you get sick of it?”
“Yeah, sure. It sucks. What time is it now?”
“Nine-twenty. If you are sick do they pay you for the day off?”
She looks at me with incredulity. “Oh yeah, sure, I’d be sick every day if they’d pay me.”
“Would it help if you had a witness that the bus was late?”
“Sure.”
“Where’s the dollar store?”
“A little ways down Whalley. It’s not far from Downtown.”
“Well I’m here on holiday and don’t have to go to work so if you think it would make a
difference I’ll come in and tell your boss that we were both at the bus stop for a bus that didn’t
show.”
“I’d like that. Thanks.”
A slim oriental woman who had appeared near us a few minutes earlier now began pacing and
took out her mobile phone.
“Is it easy to get jobs here?”
“Look at her. And she’s only been here five minutes. Yeah, sometimes it is and sometimes not.
You’re always too scared to quit a job in case you can’t find another.”
“Would you like to get a different kind of job?”
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“Well my father works at Yale and me and my brother keep applying but we never get an
interview. Even though my Dad works there—and my cousin. Even my Mom used to work there
but we can’t even get an interview.”
“What sort of work would you do at Yale if you could work there?”
“An SCR.”
“What’s an SCR?”
“In the hospital. I used to do it in a private clinic but I was drawan’ blood and you don’ know
what’s in that blood. You might accidentally stick yourself, you know, so I quit.”
“Can you do a course to get into a job you’d like?”
“Yeah, I’m thinkin’ of becoming an EN or a SN. But I don’t know. It’s hard with the kids. What
time do you have?”
“Nine-forty-five. You’ve been here an hour.”
“Oh man. I knew I shoulda walked down the hill. She’s gonna say I shoulda walked down the
hill. What would she know about catchin’ the bus? She thinks everyone should have a car to get
to work.”
A young woman on ridiculously high pale blue-and-white stilletto boots with matching slacks and
top emerged from nowhere to cross the road.
“She’s gonna die in them shoes,” said my bus-stop companion as the woman strolled across the
pedestrian crossing, flagged down a car driven by a young man, and sped away.
“Hmm. Where’s that bus. If she says ‘You’re fired’ I’m gonna have such additoode. I’m gonna
have additoode today, I can tell ya. Oh! And here’s the bus at last.”
We boarded and I sat beside my companion. Opposite us, an imperial looking black woman in a
gopher commanded attention as she held forth on the subject of a recent visit from a neighbour.
“He came with a bunch of roses. ‘What you doin’ bringin’ them roses for?’ I says and he says
‘Long stem roses for your birthday.’ I was so surprised. ‘Them long stem roses for my birthday?’
and he says ‘Yes, Ma’am. Fifty long stem roses for your birthday.’ I’m fifty years old and he gives
me fifty long stem roses for my birthday! Fifty long stem roses.”
The bus stopped and about ten people got on. One of them was my height, half my age, and
sported a baseball cap atop shifty eyes. He looked at the rest of us as if we’d all conspired to
make the bus late. Someone said that there had been an accident and the news rippled through
the passengers and brought a measure of calm in its wake. After another stop I realised that there
were few seats vacant—the imperial woman having taken out four with her mobility scooter. I
stood up to let a young woman with a babe in arms sit down.
The imperial woman’s voice rose to the occasion as she cried “That’s why the sun is shining this
morning. Because there’s another gentleman on the bus. That makes three. There are three
gentlemen on the bus this morning.”
A couple of stops further on it became clear that the bus is for the poor, the sick, and the
crippled. There were three men my height, two of whom wore baseball hats. Was it my
hatlessness they looked upon with suspicion or the fact that I had been singled out for taking a
stand by the fifty-year-old who gave the running commentary?
The bus sailed past a stop and the gopher called out for the driver to halt.
“There’s no room,” somebody explained.
“Move to the back and make room, now,” the gopher demanded. “The sun is shinin’ this
mornin’ ’cos there are three gentlemen on the bus.”
The poor, the sick, and the lame moved toward the centre doors. The bus stopped and my
African American bus stop companion got off through the front door, lookin’ at me as she went.
I got off and she approached me. “Thanks for helpin’ me out. My boss is gonna be so pissed.”
We walked into the Dollar Store where I expected to see a big black sheila ten foot tall and scary as
hell but the boss was a dried up white woman about my own age. She accepted my witness
statement on behalf of the staff member who was now at her till but directed a definite air of
‘tskness’ toward her. I left the store by the wrong door and set off Downtown. A tiny man came
out from behind a tree and we recognized one another as having been fellow travellers on the
bus. His baseball cap was crooked. At the intersection with Broadway I recognised the three
pronged street formation which Bob had mentioned: Whalley Avenue, Goffe Street and Dixwell
Avenue all came to a point at Broadway.
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Taken in by America
Summer rolled on. We walked a wide radius of streets around New Haven—past houses with
Ionian columns, and others with Doric or Corinthian, to Fair Haven with its Grand Avenue
swing bridge across the Quinnipiac River and west, past the African American Leave it to Beaver
neighbourhood near Scantlebury Park and out onto Whalley where we shopped in the
supermarket and lugged the groceries home under a deceptively hot sun. Meryn studied the
flora—collected samples of tree leaves and subsequently identified them as Sycamore, Maple,
White Oak, Red Oak, Elm, Chestnut, Horse Chestnuts (for conkers), and so on—while I
speculated about selection pressure on the fauna.
The American housefly seemed to have adapted to an environment where there were almost no
fly swatters. Australian flies have eyes in the back of their heads and are fiendishly difficult to kill
with a rolled up newspaper. The American fly, though, was quite unprepared for the old
fashioned method of dispatch and succumbed in droves—a consequence, presumably, of
American television advertisements having drowned out Rachel Carson’s warning about a Silent
Spring with the message that householders should wage chemical warfare on the nation’s insect
fauna?
The American has his heart in the right place and we can rest assured that Ms. Carson’s
intellectual heirs will win back her constituents—people like Leo and Betty from North
Carolina—in the coming decade. Leo, an academic with a special interest in Florence
Nightingale’s influence on George McClellan and his organization of the Army of the Potomac,5
had sought out and read Meryn’s doctoral thesis during the dark ages of post-modern flim flam.i
Like Meryn, Leo had not been persuaded by the turn from rigorous evidence-based research
toward methodology so he was relieved and delighted to find a kindred spirit. They met face to
face on our 2005 US visit and became firm friends. Betty and Leo would be attending a family
reunion in Connecticut, and had taken a shore cottage—a demountable—near Old Saybrook for
the summer break; they’d invited Meryn and me to join them for a few days. The American is
generous; it’s in his being. Betty and Leo are generous to a fault.
Leo collected us from Orange Street and took us on a tour of the New Haven he’d known during
his years at Yale. Double-parked on the corner of Whitney and Trumbull, he strode into a Yale
administration office and introduced Meryn as the ‘world authority’ on one aspect of that
institution’s raison d’être. The personnel were polite but protective, as one might expect, and
poor Meryn didn’t know where to look.
Leo pressed on, working his way through this door and that in search of someone worthy of
being introduced to this world authority who’d turned up unannounced. Which is not to
diminish Meryn’s accomplishment in becoming, indeed, the foremost scholar in her field. But
we’re not used to this full frontal approach. It’s not just that we’re too tiny to bear down upon
those we stand before, bear down upon them as Leo does with his wide grin and barrel chest.
We’re Australians. We carry a convict past and shrink from authority. We assume that the doors
to an institution are there to keep us in our place.
The American sees things from the opposite side: it’s a free world, and he has as much right as
the next man to enter a given space. It took us a while to realise that we had misinterpreted the
intention behind the ubiquitous barrier, everywhere apparent in the USA, took time to appreciate
that it’s not there to prevent your passage but to stop a bomb from being carried across the
threshold. You do in fact have as much right as the next man to be there according to the
American; he puts a premium on freedom.
Most Americans, it’s true, would not have barged into the office with a cowering world authority
in tow. He might live down South in Carolina, but Leo is still a Connecticut Yankee, the epitome
of confidence. And we had no sooner returned to the car when he ducked back and badgered the
hapless staff to give up their sole copy of a commemorative booklet of pictures we’d seen, to
hand it over to Leo on behalf of the world authority; it sits on her bookshelf, a fond reminder of
the summer of 2006.
Michael Oren points out that when McClellan travelled in the Middle East in the 1870s he made the prescient
observation that the USA would continually come up with the wrong response to foreign policy with respect to the
Middle East just so long as its policy makers insist on seeing the Middle East as just like the USA; it’s not, he said, and
must be taken as it is.
i
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We now went east to Fair Haven, the backdrop to Leo’s childhood. He took us to what had been
his grandfather’s house, distinguished by the fact that it had had the New Haven to New London
railroad running through its backyard, and from there across the Quinnipiac, which we then
followed. Overlooking the river next to the mothballed Ferry Street Bridge he pulled into a
business premises and stopped the car. The office staff, there, too, were nonplussed at this
stranger’s sudden arrival. Meryn and I were anxious lest they take umbrage but Leo merely
smiled, reminding us that since the business probably employed illegal immigrants it was they
who’d be nervous.
This was the spot on the river where his great-grandfather’s body had been taken in 1892, after it
had been recovered from the swirling waters of Long Island Sound, here where the Irish
American community brought their oyster catch and traded in the nineteenth century, he
informed us, as we watched a fellow leave the office to approach the car. Leo timed his reverse
manoeuvre to perfection and pulled up alongside the business representative. “I’m showing these
Australians around,” he said, smiling broadly before driving across onto Fairmont Avenue and
continuing on down the road to East Shore Park where he gained free entry simply by singing the
“showing Australians around” refrain.
Once inside the Park, we walked to Lighthouse Point, at the mouth of the Quinnipiac, where
Patrick King had drowned on that awful day. Working aboard his yacht—42 feet long and 18 feet
wide with two masts but small draught—a sudden gust of wind saw the boom swing round and
knock the 56-year-old-oyster fisherman senseless into New Haven Harbor. King’s daughters,
Annie and Minnie, witnessed the tragedy.
That night, Meryn and I feared we’d be present at Leo’s death. A neighbour had rigged up what
to all intents and purposes was a searchlight and Leo walked over to ask that it be toned down. It
seemed to me to be a reasonable request but as far as the neighbour was concerned Leo had
stepped over the line; which is to say, he’d set foot on the neighbour’s property.
Leo, a bear of a man, smiled down benignly on the master of the adjoining patch of land, the
fellow who figured our man had done him wrong. But the more Leo tried to explain the innocent
nature of his trespass the more agitated the neighbour became, his good lady getting in on the act
with a suggestion that the heinous intrusion in question had carried with it an implicit threat to
ravage their daughter.
Betty, judging the neighbour to be possessed of a frontier fuse—and probably a gun to boot—
took the situation in hand, cutting Leo down with a crisp rebuke in order to buy off the madman
and his deranged spouse. Brilliantly done, Betty! The Wild West woman could call her man a
brave hero whose adversary had been forced to back down while Leo, safely out of the way, now,
in the living room of the demountable, recalled the debt civilisation owes to the blue stocking.
One might imagine that, given the paranoid behaviour exhibited by the searchlight neighbour,
the American barricades himself behind high security fences. But he doesn’t, by and large. The
residents of New Haven left their windows open wide all summer and members of Leo and
Betty’s shore cottage community roamed far and wide up and down the coast with nothing but a
flywire screen to keep out the would-be intruder from their respective demountables.
Whether or not it was one of those overnight conversions to which Americans are prone I can’t
be sure but next morning, over breakfast, Leo expressed the view that maybe America was ready
to embrace the Al Gore thesis concerning the energy-climate equation and take the ‘addicted to
oil’ argument seriously. This was the same Leo who had driven a god-knows-how-many-ton
pickup truck to Old Saybrook from North Carolina while his wife drove alongside in the family
sedan. That, to an American, was normal, standard energy consumption.
To be sure, Meryn and I clocked up over 25,000 rental car miles while in the USA for a year, so
I’m not claiming sainthood. Nevertheless, at that moment Australians had a far greater
appreciation than the American of how foolish and profligate we westerners are. I say “at that
moment” because the worm was turning while we were there—and Meryn said as much on
national television a few weeks later.
Budget conscious, and of the view that private enterprise regularly fails to deliver on promised
goods, Meryn and I get by on what America’s Federal National Park Service provides by way of
sites of historical significance. Leo, though, ever generous with time and money, took us to every
museum within cooee of the Connecticut River so we learned of the early farmers’ bitter harvest
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of rocks, stones and pebbles and experienced at first hand the New Englander’s unaverted
countenance in sundry maritime portraits.
Evening came, and with it a dense blue darkness, sirens sounding off in the distance. We
swapped stories and Betty was taken with the Dollar Store saga and those long stem roses but
underwhelmed by my observation that America is governed by a pagan trickster deity, the Roman
god of trade, profit, and commerce. The sirens had gained ground. Was the Sheriff closing in at
last on the backwoods neighbour? Would he be strapped down and separated from the wife?
No time to think—there was suddenly such a din that even the fingers in our ears could not
silence as fire engines and fire-fighters swarmed outside the flyscreen. We joined the instant
crowd of onlookers while Leo went in search of something to come back and say.
The sirens stopped screaming but all was still eerie as flashing yellow warning lights searched
through the thick night. “Carbon monoxide,” said Leo. The crowd slunk back, satisfied. That
would explain it. Meryn and I looked at one another. Carbon monoxide? Leo told us, later, that
American houses have carbon monoxide monitors. Bugger me. The firefighters had broken in
because the tenants had gone out.
Twenty minutes later the warning lights went out and the neighbourhood would have been in
darkness but for the lighthouse on the frontier. Leo closed the door on it and we went to bed.
Outside the window, the sky was heavy with lead.
Sometime after midnight a brilliant flash rent the firmament, the bolt so close that it crackled and
clapped above our heads. Nature’s violent streak caused us to question our safety under swaying
trees in a howling wind. The power was cut and dimmed the light of the frontier.
It was all over when I walked along the coast at dawn. A middle aged woman came out into the
street in her nightie to tell me that a great oak had fallen in the next street over, or maybe a
couple of streets down, and firefighters had had to come and cut it up to clear the road. Picking
up on the bizarre accent, she spoke in glowing terms about The Crocodile Hunter.
It’s not uncommon for a tree to fall across the road in Connecticut. There are, after-all,
staggering numbers of them from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River. We were held up for an
hour and a half while driving somewhere one Saturday morning and news came down the line
that a tree had fallen on a couple in a car. In Australia, such a tragic event would result in every
tree judged capable of falling being felled for our safety. Americans, despite being profligate with
fossil fuels and energy in general, are still attuned to nature and are at ease with it calling in
unannounced.
Drained of energy and not sleeping well, I struggled to keep up my end of the ‘let’s spend a year
together in the USA’ agreement I had entered into with Meryn. She was at her wits end with me
at times but spent much of her day in one or other of the Yale archives dotted around town so I
was able to wrestle with my demon alone for the most part.
I liked to sit in the kitchen—it must have been there that I read the label on the jam jar where,
under SERVING SUGGESTIONS, the householder was reminded that “Marmalade is a sweet
addition to cocktail sausages”—and might have whiled away whole mornings at the breakfast
table had it not been for the smell of gas.
Why do these Americans put up with this sort of treatment from the landlord, I wondered.
Mordecai’s a lawyer, for Christ’s sake, and Declan a medical practitioner. Providence, as the
American would have it, came to our aid, though, when Bob pushed Declan to speak to her
downstairs about getting the stove fixed so that one did not require a taper to light it. When, the
following morning, I opened the door expecting to find yet another would-be tenant come to
inspect the premises I was pleased to be told he was the gas man. He fixed the stove.
I mentioned the gas leak. “That’ll be the oven,” he said, and promptly relit the pilot light at the
back of the fixture. Bugger me, I thought. I told Honey Pear of this miraculous event and she
looked me straight in the eye and said “Oh I knew that’s what it was all along but I didn’t think
you’d understand if I tried to explain it to you.” Thanks, Honey.
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Chapter 4
Show Business
New Haven’s cafés and coffee shops do a roaring trade by comparison with those in comparable
locations in Australia because no-one, there, takes to the sidewalk except insofar as he has a large
throwaway coffee or soda in his hand. The American trades; it’s in his blood. The colonial farmer
did not weave his own cloth, nor did his wife sew their buckskins. They bartered or sold what
they had in exchange for pots, pans, clothes, etc. “Trade,” said a colonial American, “animates
the farmer, keeps him to his plough, brightens and enlivens all his rural themes, reconciles him to
all his hard labour, and makes him look fat and cheerful.”6
It was time for us to negotiate a trade of our own. By September we would need to be in
different quarters. The mid-term Congressional elections were to be held in early November and
we wanted to be in Washington, D.C., to see it all happen so we returned to that trading
exchange par excellence, www.craigslist.com, and settled on a room in Vera Sarkin’s house 26 mile
west of the Capitol, in Centreville, Virginia. We’d have preferred to have had an apartment to
ourselves but couldn’t afford one.
Vera was strange from the start but since we judged her to be strange-eccentric—she works from
home but could not afford the time to meet with us prior to our moving in with her—as against
strange-crazy, we took the plunge. Big mistake. To begin with, as I say, we had difficulty in
getting her to set aside a spare half-hour when we could meet in order to be sure about one
another. I managed to pin her down, this thirty-nine year-old who had advertised a room for
rent, and we hired a car to drive to Washington, D.C., for the appointment.
It would have been possible to make the round trip in a couple of days but we opted for the
more economical weekly rental on offer from the hire company’s website. The downside of
taking up these internet offers is that you’re stuck with whatever vehicle happens to be available
on the day. We collected the car—another Chevrolet Cobalt, the world’s most uncomfortable
motor sedan—on a Saturday morning in August and set off for upstate New York. I wanted to
be in Saratoga that evening but Meryn had no particular place to be, no particular time to arrive.
Smoke on the Connecticut-New York border signalled, soon enough, that my restless drive to
get to where I was going would come up against the brick wall of her determination to stay put.
Curling up into an otherwise clear blue sky from an industrial barbeque, the curtain of cloud
called Meryn to a fundraising fair below. The clock ticked while we wandered through the
grounds of a church, up this path and down that, stopping every now and then to rummage
around in piles of junk—antiques, she called them—looking for the lid of a broken down old
coffee pot, or the saucer belonging to an orphan cup. A known curmudgeon with respect to
belief in the potential for transformation via the ineffable bric-a-brac mysteries, I gritted my teeth
and walked the walk, following the footsteps of those before me on the path ahead and aware as
never before that there’d be no prospect of my ever seeing the light.
Deliverance came when a dozen Vietnam War vets fired a volley of cranked Harleys into the
crowd and broke the community up into separate units. I grabbed hold of Meryn and away we
ran. Stopped at an intersection in another small town, we noticed fresh yellow ribbons around
the stately old trees on The Green. The lights changed and I made to cross but a speeding hearse
flashed through the red trailing a funeral procession in its wake. Two green lights later, the
cortege was still passing. ‘When in Rome … ’ I knew, but at that rate we would not reach
Saratoga in Upstate New York.
We finally ran the green light and barged into the endless procession, racing along, now, with the
mourners up to the cemetery turn-off three or four mile down the road where we dodged past
startled military traffic wardens and parted company. One’s heart goes out to the family of that
soldier killed serving an irresponsible, power-mad president who had given no thought as to what
might happen after his army had decapitated the Iraqi state.
Going forward, the Chevrolet Cobalt crossed the magnificent Hudson River and lost its way in
torrential rain. It was obvious that Ticonderoga—if thou canst say ‘Ticonderoga’—was out of
reach so we settled on Saratoga. The Connecticut merchant trader and ship-owner who had
drilled his company of revolutionaries on the New Haven Green, Benedict Arnold, was en route
to fight the British in Boston when he learned of the need for cannons. Accordingly, on May
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Taken in by America
10th, 1775, he launched a surprise attack on Fort Ticonderoga, captured the British heavy artillery
there, and transported it to George Washington at Bunker Hill, Boston.
As luck would have it, Meryn and I fell 40 mile short of Saratoga and spent the night in Albany,
capital of New York State. Channel flicking turned up C-Span’s Book TV and that rare bird—an
American author who spoke (as against read) to the assembled multitudes. James Nelson held his
audience, entertained the listener, while holding forth. He was as good as Meryn is when she
stands and delivers on the subject about which she is expert. In 1776 the British were set to sail
their armada from Montreal, Canada, through New York State’s northern lakes and down the
Hudson River where they would cut New England off from the rest of the American colonies.
Benedict Arnold knew the revolutionaries could not defeat the British navy but believed they
might slow its advance and so went to meet the enemy before its fleet entered the Hudson River.
His ragtag navy had lost the ensuing October 10th battle of Lake Champlain, Nelson explained,
and won the American Revolution. The British subsequently whiled away the winter in Montreal
and were only 100 mile south of Lake Champlain when Benedict Arnold outfoxed British
General John Burgoyne to win two decisive battles at Saratoga. Burgoyne’s surrender in October
1777 was the turning point in the American War of Independence: the French took it as their cue
to side with the Americans and declare war on Britain.
General Horatio Gates, a key player in the bid by the New England cabal in the Continental
Congress to depose General Washington as Commander-in-Chief, took credit for Arnold’s
victory. Benedict Arnold wasn’t alone in being done over by Washington’s adversaries: Granny
Gates also took over command of the Continental Army’s Northern Department from Albany’s
Major General Philip Schuyler.
A slow start on the road south to New York City next morning, Sunday, was made slower still
when I took a wrong turn at the spaghetti, Downtown along the Hudson, in the poor part of
town where roads run out of room and double back on themselves. Seeking to rejoin the
freeway, I took what looked like it’d be a short cut but wasn’t and I became so hopelessly
disorientated that we had to pull over and take a walk. Just around the corner we came upon a
substantial old house set on a large block.
In stark contrast to the hovels and crash pads surrounding it, this property was clearly being
maintained as some sort of national monument. A stroll through the grounds revealed that this
diamond on the dung heap of dire poverty was the Schuyler mansion, designed and built in 1762
by Philip Schuyler, a prominent member of New York’s Dutch community and the Major
General whom the Continental Congress had deposed in favour of Horatio Gates. Serene in the
Sunday morning mist, the colonial compound took its place in the constellation of coincidence
that found us in the locale of significant historical events being discussed on television as we
happened to tune in.
Back on the road, we skirted the eastern edge of the Catskill Mountains, down main street,
Saugerties, through the Woodstock boutiques and then east, in search of a scenic route above the
Hudson. A few wrong turns saw us at a sentry box and the soldier, there, told us we were at West
Point and should go back to nearly from where we came, then be sure to “take the turn there,”
he pointed, “and head on up past those trees.” I heard him but wasn’t listening and we were soon
stuck on the wrong road without an exit, just like his Commander-in-Chief.
After a late lunch in a heat-hazed Haverstraw, we took the George Washington Bridge into
Manhattan then crossed back over the Hudson and south through Princeton to Trenton, New
Jersey—where Washington had crossed the Delaware River on Christmas Day 1776. The
Continental Army’s successful attack on the German garrison at Trenton put the American
patriot in a better frame of mind. And 230 years later, there we were.
We arrived in Centreville, Virginia, 26 miles west of Washington, D.C., on the Monday
afternoon, booked into a Manassas motel, and drove to Vera Sarkin’s house. As I say, she had
been extraordinarily reticent to commit on a time to meet but had finally agreed to see us at 8 pm
and suggested we stay the night and breakfast the following morning with her and her boyfriend,
Ajax, at some local doughnut chain. We declined the overnight invitation, nervous lest she fail to
show and leave us in the lurch.
Meryn had her doubts. She’d googled our prospective landlady and read the harrowing account
of a man whose daughter had died and who’d been given short shrift by Ms. Sarkin when he
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sought to obtain copies of photographs she’d taken of the child. I put it down to his anxiety,
since no-one could be as heartless as the woman he described.
The meeting was alright, though it was clear that Vera was one of America’s tougher nuts, and
seemed to have Ajax firmly by his. Ajax sought to meet us half way by introducing the topic of
The Crocodile Hunter but our ignorance showed, even if the disinterest didn’t. We signed the
lease—$650 per month plus $209.87 per month for utilities and another full $860 odd as
surety—for the tiny bedroom in her doll’s house.
That’s a lot of energy we’re paying for, we thought, but the overall amount was competitive, with
other locations boasting bus and train services to the Capitol. It was settled: we’d move in during
early September, and stay until late December, with a ‘one month notice to quit’ clause to protect
both parties. Businesslike but amicable. It suited us; wishy-washy nice is oftentimes more
troublesome in the final analysis.
The next day, Tuesday, was the hottest day of the summer. We drove from Manassas to
Gettysburg intending to walk around the battlefield where, between July 1st and 3rd 1863 more
than 6000 Americans had died and 34,000 were wounded fighting each other. Four score and
seven years after the Declaration of Independence, July 4th 1863 cast a new light on the nature of
the Union. Many among the living who surveyed the corpses littering the fields in the aftermath
of the previous three days’ carnage had been adults when President Jackson raised his glass at the
Jefferson Day dinner on April 13th 1830 and proposed that “Our Union—it must be preserved”
only to have Vice-president Calhoun ‘correct’ him with “The Union—next to our liberty—the
most dear.” Half those who were now dead on the ground had been fighting to preserve the
Union; the remainder had been defending the liberty of Southern planters to enslave African
Americans.
We’d inadvertently pulled up at Gettysburg’s private enterprise tourist hub and, unimpressed by
how tacky it was, returned to the air-conditioned car and set off north-east for New Brunswick,
New Jersey, where an old friend of Meryn—a New York architect—lived with his wife (an
academic scientist) and their two children. We stayed for dinner, contrived captions for cartoons
in The New Yorker, and headed home in the morning.
En route to New Haven we spent an afternoon in Phineas Taylor Barnum’s Bridgeport,
Connecticut, museum. It’s a fitting monument to the memory of the quintessential American—
the man who invented ‘the show business’. P. T. Barnum had recognized the entertainment value
inherent in the businessman’s confidence tricks, found fame and fortune selling the experience of
‘being had’.
It’s America itself that entertains Meryn and me. The first of the Democratic Party’s Primaries
for the upcoming Congressional elections was to occur on August 8th—in Connecticut. The
long-term incumbent, Joe Lieberman, was under challenge from gormless but popular
millionaire, Ned Lamont—popular because of his uncompromising anti-Iraq-war stance. Ned’s
campaign workers had been tirelessly drumming up support around New Haven and we were out
and about, taking it all in.
A weeks or so earlier, a black man with protruding white teeth had appeared on the streets of
New Haven. Our British heritage bade us to take no notice but Americans are quite openly
curious so we made ourselves at home and delighted in having come across this odd fellow. He
was strikingly arrayed in bright yellow, green, and red loose fitting garments that billowed in the
breeze to reveal the secret within. He wasn’t selling Rollexes. He wasn’t selling anything—which,
this being Connecticut, made him doubly strange. So there were no watches suspended there, in
the hidden recesses of his dress, but coffee coloured dolls. Cheap plastic voodoo.
I went to the Greyhound office at Union Station to ensure that our bus tickets were still valid and
to check the departure times and routine. The man behind the desk was having a bad day. He
told a woman to take her children out of the booking office because they were disturbing him
while he worked. She looked at me and shrugged. I continued to stand before this gentleman
awaiting my turn to put my well prepared questions but he was having difficulty with someone
on the other end of the phone. He assured the ‘phonee’ that since Indianapolis was not in
Minnesota he could not be of any assistance concerning fares to and from the non-existent
location.
Those of us on the customer side of the counter equation smiled at each other as the agent
struggled to be rid of the nuisance caller who seemed hell bent on getting that ticket. The
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Taken in by America
impasse was resolved when a big mama who had just joined the queue bellowed “Git him on the
bus to Minneapolis!” We all laughed but the man behind the desk seemed to regard it a quaint
suggestion. “Hurry up!” she scolded. The clerk eventually settled on Minneapolis as a workable
hypothesis and processed the call.
Next in line, I rehearsed my sequence of questions but the office man went about putting money
in envelopes and muttering to himself. He addressed the older of the two children, telling the
young boy to go away and stop making noise. Finally, he finished shuffling the envelopes and put
them on the desk. Then he looked up and did a double take. I assume it was because I was the
only white boy in the room. But perhaps it was because I was also the only other male in the
room, and a foot shorter than the smallest woman.
I placed two tickets on the counter and pointed at them. “Good afternoon, Sir. We have these
return tickets to New York and want to use them on Friday August 18 on the 6.20 am bus. Do
we need to book or just turn up?”
“You must arrive on May 26 for the bus.”
“No Sir. You misunderstand me. We were told these tickets are valid for a year from the date of
purchase. The May 26 return date was printed on them at the time of purchase but we were
assured that we can use them anytime within twelve months of purchase.”
“The tickets are for May 26, Sir. You may only use them on that date.”
“Not so. I phoned in May and it was made clear to me that we can use the return tickets on any
day within a year from the date of purchase.”
The ticket seller pointed at the date on the ticket and re-iterated that it was folly not to have used
them on May 26, four days after we had arrived. I protested that this was absurd, that I’d been
told otherwise in New York City. Tough Mama approached the counter and stood head and
shoulders above me glaring at him. He looked closely at the tickets and said “You can use these
tickets any time within the year of purchase.”
On the day of the Primary—the first Tuesday following the first Monday of the month—Meryn
and I went out to see Americans vote while millions of our fellow countrymen filled out their
census forms at home. New Haven was awash with promotional flags and badges for the various
contestants in numerous categories but mainly for the Lieberman-Lamont bout. Downtown,
nothing much was happening. We followed a Lieberman supporter but he got away in a Fed Ex
office. We returned to the Green.
Meryn took a picture of the Voodoo Man harassing two women. They needed no help. We
found neither voting booths nor serious indication of an election. It was only a Primary, but we
expected some action to back up all of the promotional material. There was a TV crew outside
NBC so I asked a Glen Robbins look-alike where people voted, what time the polls opened and
closed, and so on. “I’m not from round here,” he told me, “but usually at schools or community
centres. They close at 8 pm.”
We walked on round the block and immediately came to a polling booth at the rear of City Hall
(the Council Chambers). A woman handing out election material for the gubernatorial race filled
us in on some aspects of voting in the Primaries—how fraud is meant to be prevented through
the registration of voters as Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Libertarian, etc.—but she
wanted to know more about Australia than she had a mind to tell about America.
Around 7 pm, we went back Downtown. Someone asked if we’d voted yet. It is assumed that
everyone here is a registered Democrat. We were entertained by two women who clearly wanted
Lieberman out. Nothing much was happening and what action there was took place on the
pavement outside the NBC TV station from where there was a live telecast. It was all over pretty
quickly but we were invited to go back for the 1 am telecast. We did.
It was a TV programme for MSNBC called Hardball. Glen Robbins was doing the countdown to
go ‘live.’ We were welcomed like lost sailors returning from the deep and given ‘munchkins’—the
ball of dough that’s missing from the middle of the doughnut.
Mouths full and with sugar moustaches, we were manhandled onto the makeshift set on the
pavement. It had been very hot for a week so we had flimsy clothes on. After all, if it turned cold
we could walk back home and watch the show on TV. Not so lucky. Along with two others, we
made up the total audience.
Neither Meryn nor I knew what the political line for this show was—it might have been shockJock-fascist. As things turned out, it wasn’t. The presenter, Chris Matthews, was personable, very
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good at his job, and aimed for the truth. We could hear him as well as read the auto cue—he ad
libbed most of the time—but we’d no idea what his guests were saying.
By 1.15 am it was getting very chilly. We warmed up by jumping around when they stopped for
regular three-minute ad breaks but felt obliged to stay and make up the audience numbers. One
of the audience members slipped away, though, so it was up to an Italian who thought
proportional representation was one solution to America’s electoral problems and Meryn and me
to hold the fort. And I was beginning to shiver from cold. We had decided to stick it out, though.
In the middle of one of the interviews the Voodoo Man appeared from the Green, opposite, and
walked into the whole scene saying “Conspiracies, conspiracies, conspiracies.” Then he asked
Meryn if he could have a munchkin. What could she say but “Yes”? The TV people were
concerned but calm and let Meryn be both a third of the audience and in charge of preventing
mayhem. The Voodoo Man said the munchkins were very nice and thought he would take some
over to his friends—the homeless—in the park.
A woman pulled up in a car and started yelling for someone to tell her how to get to Union
Station. Meryn left her post and went over to help but then came back and said that she’d told
them I would be much better at giving them directions. So I left the set and went to tell them
how the one-way system worked—where not and where to turn. The producer was looking at me
with some concern so I resumed my place.
Then the Voodoo Man came back with the munchkins. The homeless were hungry but not
desperate, it seemed. We stayed the course, did not cut and run, and when it was all but over the
presenter said “And now for some audience reaction to the result of the Lieberman-Lamont
Primary … ” and turned directly to us. This was national TV. I had my usual T-shirt on and
Meryn had her version of a ‘no-one’s looking’ top on and Chris Matthews wanted our respective
opinons.
It was obvious from the accent that we were both Australians. Meryn reckoned that she thought
perhaps “The USA’s on the point of change” and I said “It’s a wonderful example of American
burlesque.” I have no idea what the Italian-American said because I was now a celebrity of the
stature of a Lionel Williams or Ernie Sigley. America happens on TV. We watched ourselves on
the Hardball website for a few minutes next morning, figuring we’d view the whole thing that
evening. But they’d edited it by then.
So, we had had our Andy Warhol moment while bearing witness to the first footfall on America’s
changing of the guard. Intrigued at our uncharacteristic night moves, Bob wanted to know where
we’d been and, having heard, was determined to track down the identity of the voodoo man. He
did. And was deflated. “Oh, that’s Terry, he told us. He’s a nice guy, a poet like me,” he told us a
couple of days later.
Nearing the end of our New Haven sojourn, we visited the gun-factory where Eli Whitney—best
known for his invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s—had pioneered the technique of mass
production in American industry and set Connecticut on the road to becoming ‘the arsenal of
America’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We also spent a day at the New Haven
Museum and Historical Society on Whitney Avenue, between Bradley and Trumbull, where another
crew of New England mariners stared back at me, their blank expressions safeguarding them
from the unnerving world of emotion.
The Puritan America of Massachusetts’ Governor Bradford had been long gone by the time
those salty sea dogs sat for the artists who had rendered their likeness on canvas but they were
still Yankees, still hid behind the mask. Herman Melville’s American creates a web of deception
from behind the mask of confidence. His progenitor, the Yankee trader, had started on the road
to what became the urban marketplace by peddling his wares to unsuspecting rural folk, luring
them with drawn out conversation before swapping his worthless items for their valuables.7 The
nineteenth century’s most celebrated Yankee, P. T. Barnum, bottled the experience of the game
of urban marketplace deception and sold it at 25 cents a pop. His American Museum in New
York shone the spotlight on the mask, drew attention to the deceit.
The American is whatever you want him to be. He uses his whole mouth to speak—Constance
Rourke detects Yankee rhythms of speech as if coming from old voices in the works of Robert
Frost8—and can talk at length without ever revealing himself because the language itself is a
masquerade, metaphor its mainstay.
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Taken in by America
The alarm went off at 4.30 am—about 40 minutes after Bob finally stopped fucking around in
the kitchen—on the Friday we were leaving New Haven in mid August 2006 and an hour later
we set off in the darkness with a suitcase, two laptops and three bags (Mommy, Woolworths, and
see-through Ann Taylor, this latter housing our cheese-and-tomato cut lunch) to walk a little over
a mile to Union Station. The sun was up by the time we had arrived.
A woman from Memphis, Tennessee, was seeking answers from the passengers who trickled in
and another, in African attire, shrugged histrionically when the bus driver announced the
expected time of arrival in New York City as being 8.55 am. “Eight-fifty-five?” she said
rhetorically, over and over.
“Everything has a purpose in God’s universe,” said the driver, apropos of nothing, as the
Greyhound Coach pulled onto the road and headed for Interstate 95 South. Fortunate enough to
have seats, we had a comfortable ride to the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan. We collected
our tickets for the Washington, D.C., leg on the upcoming Tuesday, purchased a couple of
$24.00 weekly New York City transit passes, took the subway to Columbus Circle, lugged the
bags up the stairs, and walked to the hotel we usually stay at in the Big Apple—the 63rd Street
West YMCA.
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Chapter 5 Buncombe
Trouble’t mill. The Colonial American merchant dammed a stream, employed a mason to lay the
stone foundation and a carpenter to construct a water wheel, then put raw nature through the
mill. After that he ferried the processed goods (lumber, flour, and, in due course, textiles) to
market at some seaport town.i Wealth accumulated to the point where production was carried
out on an industrial scale with capital and labour locked together, at odds with and yet dependent
upon one another—like Meryn and me.
We were in it together, committed for a year in the USA. Were one to pull the plug the other
would sink. We had to learn to live together—and did—but were no sooner settled in at the
apartment on Orange when I had the bizarre dream from which I awoke, terrified, about the
constable in the doorway of the medieval building. I was beginning to hear voices.
We had taken out travel insurance with ample medical cover but the standard ‘no liability
accepted for a pre-existing condition’ clause precluded my consulting a psychiatrist. So I had to
make it on my own, passing off my mental instability as moodiness. Meryn could not afford to
have it dawn on her that I was all at sea and in danger of drowning. A sceptic with respect to the
unfalsifiable claims of Freud, Jung and all the other depth psychologists, they were all I had to
lean on in seeking to cure myself.
The idea of how I might navigate safe passage through this dark night of the soul popped into
my head while staring down the canyons of New York City from high up on a ledge above the
Hudson, in Weehawken, New Jersey. Its genesis, though, lay in the lie I had told Meryn to
protect her from finding out that her co-dependent had gone crackers and was hearing voices.
And yet she could not help but notice my irascible outbursts. I had told her they were caused by
headaches from constipation.
Give Meryn a mission and she will accomplish it: a few days after my ‘admission’ the UPS man—
his route programmed such that he only ever turned soft (right)—had delivered a huge bag of
psyllium to our New Haven apartment. Meryn hoped for a regular all over improvement.
Medicine must not simply be taken but be seen to be. So I went through the motions, making
much of swallowing the stuff. The odd thing was that by the time we took the Greyhound for New
York I had begun to manage; the voices were somehow muffled by increasingly large doses of
fibre.
The room for our three-night stay at the YMCA wasn’t ready so we stored our luggage and
walked to the American Museum of Natural History. Taken for a ride by peddlers of medieval
religion, the American remains unconvinced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution via the
mechanism of natural selection so we felt duty bound to tour what the Museum had promised
would be an extravaganza celebrating the great man’s work. Entry was by appointment with the
confidence man: a fixed-price donation of $14.00 each to get into the museum and a further fee
to stroll through what turned out to be a pedestrian exhibition.
In the evening we dined at the Y—invariably good value—walked in Central Park, took a bus
(the ideal way to see New York) south along 7th Avenue, then walked some distance West along
39th Street until we reached the Hudson River at the Ferry Terminal. The sun on the horizon
behind us sent shafts of light down dark streets to a white flecked blue sky in the distance. New
York, New York.
We took a bus to the Lincoln Center, a stone’s throw from the YMCA, paid through the nose for
a beer, joined the audience for a blues and country music performance that would not pass
muster in an Australian pub, lost our shirt in an orange juice deal on Broadway, then went back
to the room and slept soundly into the Saturday.
‘Take the subway D,Q,N or F to the last stop, Stillwell Avenue, 45 minutes from midtown
Manhattan’ were the instructions for our Coney Island visit. There was some suggestion that
America’s greatness is less a function of the people’s superior organizational ability than a product of a land of
abundance. In the colonial era trees and major rivers afforded navigation on the one hand and mills (for sawing,
milling, etc.) on the other. Trade was immediately set up with the export of lumber to England where wood was so
scarce that noblemen in England had more difficulty obtaining it than the lowliest American.
i
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Taken in by America
there might be a problem with the D train so we doubled our chances by catching the A to 42nd
Street and boarded the Q more or less immediately.
An Indian woman asked me how far it was to somewhere or other so we worked through her
map. She was on the right track; I went back to reading the New York Times. Big layoffs were in
the offing at Ford and General Motors’ Detroit plants—the USA hoisted on its own petard—
because the two manufacturing giants had been tooled up to produce dinosaurs, SUVs and
Pickup Trucks. While they retool, restructure, re everything, fuel efficient Asian cars flood the
market.
The American doesn’t think of himself as part of the world and so hasn’t bothered to
benchmark. The nation’s founding fathers had planned to recreate the Roman Republic; New
York architects set that noble aim in stone. It’s a moot point as to whether the inexorable drift to
Empire will be followed by a fall but the American won’t be able to close his eyes to the rising
star in the Far East.
The woman from the subcontinent looked perplexed so I pinpointed her position on the
schematic diagram. She was pleased to see that it was working out and soon thereafter made
sense of the map. She was from Canada, she said, and members of her extended family had been
killed in a car crash the day before; she’d flown in that morning in order to help out around the
house. Some injured relatives were in the Brooklyn Hospital. The train had emerged into the
lower Brooklyn daylight from underground by the time she got off and the track turned west at
Brighton Beach to reveal the famous fairground on the southern seashore.
Rome wasn’t built in a day but those temples wherein the American is entertained are banged up
overnight—as they must be if entrepreneurs are to cash in on the latest fashion. Dr. Martin
Couney’s infant incubators had put Coney Island on the map as America’s quintessential
Amusement Park in the first half of the twentieth century but, hanging on, now, in the shadow of
its former glory, the fairground serves only to remind visitors that impermanence is an American
idol. Numerous sideshows off the boardwalk which runs along the beach about 150 metres from
the shoreline attracted a half-hearted, disengaged crowd. A sad preacher shot himself in the foot
with a sandwich board that proclaimed Jesus loves those who don’t know about Him. Apart
from people like us seeking to commit yet another instance of the American past-time of
religious nutterdom to digital memory, most were content to run with the message, to forego
whatever information this fellow had to pass on concerning the Lord and His blessings.
In the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution there had been a fashion for imitating
the ancient Romans but the Yankee did not warm to the practice, preferring instead the figure of
an uncouth but witty practical joker, a wise fool who revealed nothing of himself. The early
nineteenth-century theatre-goer paid to see stage performers dish up nonsense and buncombe,
not serious drama; his twenty-first century counterpart is no different: he, too, puts a premium
on entertainment, prefers a distorted view of reality, wants the world recreated as burlesque. The
American, that is to say, is an actor, one who looks out on the world from behind the mask.
Out on the pier we read the signs—no commercial touting, no amplified music, no this, no
that—denoting rules to be honoured in the breach. The American places freedom above
everything else. Regulation is a necessary evil which must know its place. In seeking to
differentiate for Leo and Betty between the behaviour of the American and Australians, I pointed
out that the Great Southern Land had started out as a convict colony.
This meant nothing to them so Meryn noted, for example, that drivers Down Under don’t cross
double yellow lines. “Don’t cross double yellow lines?” Betty said, incredulous. “No, they don’t,”
I persisted, “It’s against the law.” She looked at me, dumbfounded. “Well, yeah. It’s against the
law,” she said. In America the outlaw—John Wesley Hardin, Jesse James, and those other sons of
preachers—is a hero. The drifter on the other hand is despised.
We rode the bus back to Brighton Beach, to the Russian émigré stronghold, there, under the
elevated train track. Unable to find a café to make up the coffee deficit, we took another bus. On
board, a boy told his friend that an aunty from Russia who had been staying with the family over
the summer was weird. The bus moved north through a Russian Jewish into an Arab community
and terminated at Prospect Park.
A drunkard with a handicapped dog harassed the clientele at Connecticut Muffins corner café and
we whiled away an hour sitting on coffee and buns listening to the proprietor discuss the
intractable problem with nuisance regulars. The bus from Prospect Park dropped us in the
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middle of earthworks on the south side of the Manhattan Bridge and it took some time to find a
way up to the pedestrian path on the massive structure’s eastern side. Once up there, we looked
upon the metropolis from amid its fiery wheels and cogs, deafened by the subway trains and
downsized by tons of steel.
Cyclists swept past—one on a bike which, dedicated to the crossing, afforded the rider a
privileged perspective by elevating him way above the side rail—and Orthodox Jews cut fine
figures as they walked back to Brooklyn in dark suits, white shirts and black hats. The Twin
Towers gone, New York City’s Empire State Building penetrated the aerial sphere, streets ahead
of the Chrysler yet still no match.
A barge beneath the bridge worked its way up the East River as we came to the water’s edge and
walked down into Chinatown to stumble on the site of the New England Hotel at the corner of
the Bowery and Bayard. It was in a room, there, that America’s nineteenth-century songwriting
genius, Stephen Foster, sick and weak after having fallen on hard times, was found, face gashed,
in a pool of blood, in January 1864. The composer of ‘Campdown Races’, ‘Oh Susannah’, ‘Old
Folks at Home’, and numerous other classics, he was taken to Bellevue Hospital and died soon
thereafter. The casket was carried on a train to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the town where the
thirty-seven-year-old was born.i We walked back to the YMCA through the streets of Little Italy.
The following day, ferried across the water to Weehawken, New Jersey, under a blazing sun, we
climbed the cliffs above the Hudson River. A bride and groom bent and stretched for a
professional photographer in a Memorial Garden while the ogre’s assistant arranged the wedding
gown to suit the master’s artistic reach for the sky. A halfwit stared at the couple through
binoculars and called out that the bride would look good naked. His mother, sitting next to us,
told him to stop being silly. She commanded respect, treating her overgrown child with dignity
while calmly conveying convention concerning time and place. We were pleased to meet her.
Meryn walked on toward the inevitable Stars and Stripes fluttering from a pole. Left alone, I
mused upon the human propensity for assigning place, of social rank, and so on, and reflected
upon the dangers of being cast adrift in a sea of anonymous faces like any number of lost souls
over the water, there, on the upper West side of Manhattan. I was going to have to be to the
rowdy voices inside my head what that woman was to her son. ‘They’ would have to be ‘him’,
would have to become one. So I singled out a sole individual from the multitude—the constable
who stood in the doorway of the medieval building in the dream that had heralded the arrival of
my mental illness—and associated him with Detective Sergeant Hamilton of Boyd murder fame.
Hamilton had been a constable to begin with. Carl Jung claimed to have avoided a full blown
psychosis by engaging in just such a form of active imagination with the New Testament’s
Philemon. I had no reason to expect the feeble sounding technique to work but it was worth a
try, and Hamilton, not some Pauline Saint, was my type of guy.
Ghosts of the great—the gifted and the godawful, literary giants and social gadflies—haunt
Greenwich Village as much as anywhere else in Gotham so after having spent Monday morning
following the High Line we took a self-guided walking tour of Bleeker Street. Meryn’s interest in
The High Line project took off during our August 2003 Amtrak trek across the USA. Instead of
tearing down the disused elevated railroad which runs from 34th Street to warehouses in the
meatpacking district on Manhattan’s west side, concerned citizens convinced the City Council to
convert the three-story-high structure into a public space. It’s this type of vision that has made
New York City such an extraordinary urban environment.
Cheap rent once attracted artists to the road that ran through Bleeker Farm and we saw The Bitter
End music club, just across from where Lenny Bruce had been arrested for obscenity at the Café
Au Go Go in 1964. The church where the subject of Meryn’s research had preached to a
missionary society congregation in the 1830s was nearby and further along she recognised Louis
“form follows function” Sullivan’s style in the Bayard-Condict skyscraper just past the
intersection with Broadway. Sullivan, America’s pre-eminent late nineteenth-century architect,
was the father of modernism and the skyscraper.
Bleeker’s other, more tenuous, association with modernism—the site of Herman Melville’s
childhood home—took us closer to the T-junction with The Bowery and the subway to Wall
Street where, in the Spring of 2000 I witnessed the dotcom boom go bust from the New York
i
See below, Chapter 7 ‘The Private Eye’
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Taken in by America
Stock Exchange visitors’ gallery. No-one, it seemed, was taking financial fright that August day in
2006 but the sight of hundreds of white collar workers pouring out of the offices and onto the
street made me uneasy: the world economy was being run by a flock of sheep. At the end of the
road, in the grounds of Trinity Church, Hamilton, agitated, said that someone had just walked
over his grave.
Our Greyhound was scheduled to depart for Washington D.C. from Manhattan Port Authority
Terminal at 1.30 am on the Tuesday morning and we were there in plenty of time to get a seat.
Quentin Crisp’s observation that in Britain the system is benign and the people hostile, whereas
in the USA the people are benign and the system hostile is truth bearing. Research suggests that
thirty million Americans go hungry each day. Regular Greyhound bus rides will tell you all you need
to know about how the nation treats its many millions more who’re merely poor. Administrative
staff, bus drivers, patrons—all get a shabby deal.
We stood in line like hundreds of others, keeping an eye on this or that fellow traveller’s bags
while they went to the ‘bathroom’. The fear campaign made possible by the September 11th
attack is exposed as just that down on the ground. There’s no provision whatsoever for patrons
to adhere to the oft repeated ‘Do not leave bags unattended’ message. We finally boarded our
1.30 am bus at 3.15 am and listened to the official explanation for the delay. The usual lies.
There’s a shortage of bus drivers; those in the pool work dangerously long hours and there’s
precious little backup. So when a driver refuses to work around the clock management explains it
away as recalcitrance, the bad seed who’ll be disciplined. The system is hostile.
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Chapter 6 Twin Cities
The longer than expected walk from Washington D.C.’s Greyhound station to the Downtown car
rental franchise made driving the Dodge Caliber up out of the basement and south to
Constitution Avenue that much more pleasant and we took great pleasure in motoring through
modern Rome, across the Potomac, and West on Interstate 66 to Centreville, Virginia, where we
collected a house key from Vera Sarkin, since she would not be there on the moving-in day, a
fortnight hence.
The paucity of sleep would normally have seen me taking a nap early on but on that particular
Tuesday I had one of those rare lasting bursts of consciousness where I could drive safely for
hour after hour. I was never able to call up this wondrous state at will but became adept at falling
into a deep, brain de-fragmenting ten-minute sleep during roadside stops.
We tried a motel on Route-50 at Grafton, West Virginia, but it was for gamblers and smokers
and not the likes of us, the desk clerk made clear, and we pressed on. Demand had outstripped
supply because of a car race or football game, and we cut out losses by taking an expensive room
in the Morgantown Super 8. A dearth of sidewalks makes the pedestrian a sitting duck in such
places so we ate at the nearby Wendys, and hope never to have to do so again.
The sun was shining on the Dodge when it left town next morning and threaded through scenic
West Virginia. We stopped for petrol at Pleasant Valley and the people there took my story of
how a wage-earner was able to travel around the USA for a year to be a tall tale. A local mining
company employee reckoned that if there was such a thing as on long-service leave we
Australians’d better hang on to what we had.
Working conditions back home were one thing; holidaying with Hamilton was another. In
deference to Buddy Holly and the Coen Brothers, Meryn and I had earmarked Fargo, North
Dakota, as the outbound destination, the idea being to make our way there along the short sides
of a right-angled triangle, travelling west to Kansas then due north. Late starts forced us to
approach the problem from another angle and take the hypotenuse through the endless fields of
grain that make up a large part of the American bread basket. Hamilton demanded that we drive
straight for the Black Hills of Dakota, way out west near the border with Wyoming.
The Caliber pulled up outside the house where the poet Carl Sandburg (Robert Frost’s
contemporary) was born in 1878. A man came to greet us and said that he was just closing the
visitors’ centre but Meryn and I were welcome to walk through the memorial garden. We did,
reading the selections from Sandburg’s verse that had been laid out. It was quaint, pleasant, and
retained something of the old republic. Hamilton said that there, in the garden, he sensed the
presence of the American whom he sought.
That night, Thursday of the first week, we stayed at Rock Island, Illinois, on the Mississippi
River. Ideally, we’d have been there on May 6th for the sesquicentenary of the Effie Afton incident.
The Effie Afton was one of hundreds of steamboats that since 1811 had been slowly pushing back
the barrier of the American frontier, affording pioneers passage up and down the Mississippi, its
tributaries and the man-made canals connecting those vast watercourses.
King Cotton’s official carrier, the steamboat reigned for 40 years until the first steam locomotive
arrived at the banks of the Mississippi River on February 22nd 1854. The railroad company had
decided upon Rock Island as the departure point for its penetration of the frontier because it lay
due west of and relatively close to the Lake Michigan trading port of Chicago. Cashing in on
celebrations for the Washington birthday commemoration celebrations, the railroad men coupled
their “nuptial feast of the great Atlantic Ocean to the mighty Father of Waters”9 with the
anniversary of the birth of the father of the nation.
If European immigrants and native Americans could board a train in New York and alight in San
Francisco who would step onto the gangplank of a paddle-steamer or freight his produce to
market on treacherous rivers? Such a railroad would surely shift the axis east-west from northsouth and the focal point of trade from New Orleans—antebellum America’s wealthiest city—to
New York. Cotton planters and steamboat owners regarded any such east-west railroad corridor
as an axis of evil.
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Southern honour was as much at stake, here, as the profits from cargo. Meryn and I had not yet
come to understand Southern honour—that was months off—but it lay at the heart of the
North-South conflict which exploded in 1861.
The Chicago and Rock Island Railway Company contracted Henry Farnam’s Railroad Bridge
Company to build them a road over the Mississippi at Rock Island. Rock Island, a Federal
Government military site, was conveniently situated in the River so Farnam’s engineers were able
to span the Mississippi by building three discrete sections—Illinois shore, Rock Island, Iowa
shore—then join them together.
This was to be no run of the mill crossing, of course, but the first railroad bridge over the
Mississippi River. Moreover, since Rock Island was north of the Mason-Dixon line, not only
would the wealthy gentlemen of New Orleans and St. Louis lose out to the railroad men but
Northern capital and the employers of wage-labour, not cotton and the owners of slave-labour,
would dictate the terms of colonisation of the West beyond the Mississippi. The Southern
aristocracy understood they must nip this canker in the bud.
St. Louis steamboat interests lobbied President Franklin Pierce’s secretary of war, Jefferson
Davis, to ban the building of the bridge on the grounds that Rock Island was the site of a federal
arsenal. When Davis obliged they followed up by obtaining an injunction against the bridge
builders for having obstructed river navigation. This merely delayed construction of the Rock
Island Bridge because the court was bound to find in the railroad’s favour, as it did in July 1855.
Less than a year after that, in April 1856, a ‘railroad car’ first crossed the Mississippi.
A fortnight later, on May 6th 1856, the Effie Afton collided with the bridge, knocking out a section.
The steamboat’s owners then brought a damages suit against the Railroad Bridge Company on
the grounds that the bridge had caused the collision because it had changed the river’s current.
Henry Farnam went looking for 47-year-old Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln to defend the
Farnam Railroad Bridge Company in court.
Abraham Lincoln had read those same Enlightenment tracts which the founding fathers had
deemed a necessary grounding for public life. Self-taught, he studied law and subsequently
practised it with success in Illinois. As a youth on the Indiana frontier, he had put his experience
and knowledge of Ohio River currents to good use in rowing passengers out midstream to board
passing steamboats. It was via this employment that the future president first entered what was
for him “the wider and fairer” economy of monetary exchange. Not for Abe the barter economy;
he sought to smooth the way for capital.
As counsel for the defence in the Effie Afton case, Lincoln again drew upon his frontiersman’s
knowledge of river currents in designing experiments that showed the plaintiff’s claim to be false,
demonstrating his argument with a courtroom model of the bridge and boat. In addition to the
damning evidence about the circumstances of the crash, Lincoln repeatedly drove home the
point that the nation could not prosper were there to be an arbitrary injunction against east-west
transport. Rivers were to be crossed, he argued, and it was the manifest destiny of the people to
move westward and enjoy the benefits of modern civilisation.
Late on Friday afternoon of the first week of our tour of the upper Mid-West, we were in Mason
City, Iowa.i Meryn immediately warmed to the place, which was fortunate because I’d only
stopped when Hamilton forced my hand. A Frank Lloyd Wright creation in the town square had
taken Meryn by surprise. As it turned out, the great man had left his mark elsewhere in town so
we walked the streets for hours while Hamilton sniffed about in search of the American.
I’m writing the account of that tour in early January 2008, a couple of days after the Iowa Caucus in which Democrat
Barack Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee triumphed. State caucuses and primaries are the first of two stages
leading to the election of a new President of the United States. During this first stage delegates are elected to the
National Conventions of the Democratic and Republican parties. The delegates to the Convention then vote to
nominate their party’s presidential candidate. The Iowa Caucus is always the first step on the long road to the White
House so the Iowa elector has a disproportionate influence on the final outcome of the Presidential race. He or she is
indebted to the nation for the privilege and gives back by being among the most serious minded of voters. The Iowa
Caucus, that is to say, is the ‘qualitative’ core of the whole process; it harks back to the origins of American democracy.
Which is not to deny the fact that staggering sums of money swill around. But Mike Huckabee’s victory, like that of the
unknown Jimmy Carter in 1976, demonstrates that Iowa’s electors can’t be bought. If Iowa has a disproportionate
influence in the nation, Mason City has had a correspondingly disproportionate influence on Iowa with fewer eligible
voters turning out, there, than in other centres in the State.
i
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In the 1890s the celebrated Chicago architect, Louis Sullivan, had taught the young Frank Lloyd
Wright to look upon a proposed building as a functional structure that should be approached
somewhat as an artistic creation that belonged in its environment. Wright’s early twentieth
century prairie style architecture embodied this modernist principle and in 2000 we had toured
Oak Park, Chicago, and seen Wright-designed houses a stone’s throw from where he worked, in
the young Ernest Hemingway’s neighbourhood. And while still in Chicago, a guided tour the
Robie house on the south side had shown us the signs—so we know a Wright house when we
see one.
Wright had employed Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney in his Oak Park studio. Griffin
married Mahoney in 1911 and won the prize to design Australia’s Federal capital, Canberra, in
1912. In Mason City we discovered a series of Griffin designed houses that are forerunners to the
famous Castlecrag development in Sydney. Griffin’s houses stand like statues in settings of
craggy rock whereas Wright’s ‘flow’.
We stayed in Owatonna, Minnesota, and headed for the Twin Cities in the morning. Brunch in a
small town introduced us to rural America’s community diner—a socialist oasis in a desert of
cash nexus. Rejoining the highway, I instinctively followed the sun while Meryn studied the map.
The sun was in the south but I was meant to be heading north. Meryn woke up seven mile into
my mistake so we went east toward Red Wing and stopped at Northfield. Thank Providence for
wrong turns; Northfield has history.
J. L. Heywood, a Union veteran of the siege of Vicksburg in 1863, was at his job as a bookkeeper
in a Division Street bank on September 7th 1876 when Jesse James shot him dead.10 Cole
Younger and two of his brothers had come north from Missouri with Jesse and Frank James in
order to rob the Northfield bank. They were there because Jesse James wanted to make a pointed
political statement.
Still fighting for the lost Confederate cause a decade after the Civil War had ended, Jesse was at
the height of his infamy. Vehemently opposed to Reconstruction—the Federal government’s
series of measures designed to re-integrate the states that had seceded from the Union and to
protect the rights of freed slaves in those states—he had picked out Adelbert Ames as a target
for his wrath because Ames was a Radical Republican and had been elected a Mississippi senator
on the strength of the black vote.i
The son of Jesse Ames, a Massachusetts sea captain, Adelbert spent much of his youth aboard
ocean going vessels. He first stepped on a gangplank about the time that Herman Melville
abandoned the sailor’s life to become a Massachusetts farmer. Gifted, cultured, intellectual, and
imbued with New England ideals, Adelbert Ames graduated from West Point military academy
on the Hudson River in 1861 and went straight into battle at Bull Run. He fought many such
battles on the side of the Union throughout the Civil War, including Gettysburg, Petersburg and
Fort Fisher. During the period of Reconstruction he was a military administrator at Vicksburg,
Mississippi, shortly thereafter, the provisional military governor of that state and from 1870, its
Senator.11
General Ames, Yankee son-in-law of General Benjamin Butler—the man who had accepted
fugitive slaves as contraband—wanted to do something about the fact that African Americans in
much of the post-war South “had no rights whatever” and were subject to paramilitary rule by
former slaveholders. He was therefore a thorn in the side of Southern Democrats. They had long
wanted to be rid of this Mississippi senator who championed black’s civil rights and in 1876 they
succeeded.
Following that electoral defeat, Adelbert Ames went to work with his father and brother in their
Northfield flourmill. The Ames family had a thriving business and stored much of their wealth in
the local First National Bank. It’s not surprising, then, that Jesse James set his sights on that bank
as an ideal target of his rearguard actions in defence of Southern honour. The daring robbery was
foiled, the James-Younger gang having been thwarted inside the bank by the bookkeeper and
teller and outside by members of the local community, Adelbert and Jesse Ames among them.
Bandit Cole Younger, one of the many nineteenth-century songs collected for posterity by Carl
Sandburg, tells the tale of the Northfield bank robbery, of how Cole’s brother had warned him
that Jesse James would be their undoing and that they should not have allowed themselves to be
i
Radical Republicans were especially concerned to look after the interests of the former slaves.
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badgered into that particular hold-up.i The Younger brothers were captured as a consequence of
the Northfield bank robbery and, despite making their escape, Frank and Jesse James were
nothing but fugitives thereafter.
Unaware that he had been personally targeted as the archetypal Northern Yankee Unionist who
stood for everything Confederate terrorist James stood against, Ames nevertheless confided to
his wife that the cutthroats from Missouri who attacked the Northfield bank were eerily
reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klansmen who had murdered Republicans in Mississippi when he
had been there.12
Meryn determined from its tell tale stonework and location which riverside building must have
been the nineteenth-century Ames flour mill. When we walked from the Division Street bank
building across the bridge to take a closer look at her candidate mill there was a sign indicating
that that’s what it was. So, having walked the dividing line where Jesse James’ and Jesse Ames’
paths had crossed, we felt satisfied and struck out for Minneapolis and St. Paul, the Twin
Cities—the two North Country towns where, 130 years earlier in August 1876, members of the
James-Younger outlaw gang had masked their true identities and booked rooms in separate
hotels from one another in preparation for the Northfield attack.
The dispute between Jesse James and Cole Younger concerning the latter’s misgivings about the
Minnesota raid had taken place against the backdrop of nationwide preparations for the July 4th
celebration of the first centenary of the American Declaration of Independence. Across the
country, bandmasters had been conducting dress rehearsals for local renditions of Hail, Columbia
and Francis Scott Key’s patriotic poem, The Star Spangled Banner, sung to the tune of an early
nineteenth-century drinking song.
Francis Scott Key’s second cousin, thrice removed, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, was born in
Minnesota’s Twin Cities on September 24th 1896 and grew up to be “extraordinarily aware” of
his place on the social ladder.13 He had wanted to marry Zelda Sayre, daughter of a Supreme
Court Judge from Montgomery, Alabama, but not been wealthy enough. So he headed for New
York to become a stockbroker but only managed to secure a lowly advertising job.
Determined to realise the American Dream and ‘get the girl’, he returned to the Twin Cities,
pulled an early attempt at a novel out from the bottom drawer, reworked it, and became famous
when it was published in 1920 as This Side Of Paradise. He married Zelda and they had a daughter,
Frances, in 1921. The central character of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘jazz-age novel’, The Great Gatsby
(1925), is sacrificed on the altar of paradox—torn apart by striving for and realising the American
Dream.
On account of it being the time of year for the Minnesota State Fair, we weren’t the only people
in the Twin Cities on the last Saturday of August 2006. We followed the crowd through the
turnstiles and were drawn by the time-honoured antics of a man up on the podium who made his
knives miraculous. Meryn was sold on him; I was reticent. Not as resistant to the message of
carefree cutting, though, as a man who remonstrated with his wife and tried (unsuccessfully) to
drag her away. Refusing to be drawn into the knife man’s confidence, he turned his back and
hunched his shoulders, hoping, no doubt, to block out the effects of sales magic. Only $20—and
if you buy now you’ll get another knife thrown in and a free lemon juicer. We paid our money
and took our chances.
Departing early on Sunday morning from a Rest Area on Interstate 35, we set out for Brainerd,
Minnesota, en route to Fargo, North Dakota. Meryn, ill at ease about being awake so early—we
had slept in the car—stared straight ahead and didn’t bother with the road atlas. Hamilton carped
about just missing his man in St Paul and insisted that I chase after him. The upshot was that we
went nowhere near the Coen brothers’ Blue Ox motel, missed Brainerd altogether in fact, and
turned up instead at America’s biggest open-cut iron mine on the outskirts of Hibbing.
When, in 1901, John D. Rockefeller sold his holdings in Hibbing’s Mesabi Range to J. P. Morgan,
the U. S. Steel Corporation secured a steady supply of iron ore for its steel manufacture. Mesabi
Iron Range ore was transported 60 miles to the Lake Superior port of Duluth and shipped from
there to steel mills on other Great Lakes’ shores.
Bandit Cole Younger was recorded in 1930 and is available, nowadays, on the reissued ‘Anthology of American Folk
Music’ collection.
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Hibbing businessmen grew fat on the profits from European immigrant labour in the first half of
the twentieth century. The Greyhound bus company was one such business that started in that
northern Minnesota mining town. We found a thriving community in Hibbing, a place that had
obviously once been well-heeled.
The diner we went to for breakfast was up there with all the other rural diners. While we waited
on bar stools at the counter for the bacon and eggs with hash-browns Meryn commented on an
article in the local rag to the effect that Hibbing folk would soon be shooting bears. Our waitress
was in earshot and when she came to top up the coffee she put us in the picture about hunting
bear: one bear per hunter per season, from September 1st; these creatures are so wily that only
dedicated hunters stand a chance of bagging one; bear-baiting is a painstaking art and succeeds
only after much grooming of the sought-after beast.
Bear meat was not to our waitress’s husband’s taste but she cans it anyway. We enjoyed listening
to her, the scrumptious hash browns a treat until the cook took a break and lit up a Marlborough
on the next stool. We moved away and it became obvious that Hibbing smokers are from Mars
and regard those of us who don’t mix tobacco with breakfast as girls from Venus.
North Dakota was beyond us, we realised, and turned for home. A massive ship tied up in the
port made clear how vital a cog a Duluth, on the western shore of Lake Superior, had been in
facilitating trade on a grand scale.
Ore carriers weren’t the only ships to dock there, though: a hundred years ago James Gatz, an
insignificant young man from the Midwest, was walking along a Superior beach when he noticed
a boat out on the lake. The boy had always known that he was meant to be somebody and had
simply to seize the moment when it came. It did, and like Abraham Lincoln rowing out into the
Ohio River to his epiphany James Gatz became Jay Gatsby when he rowed out to warn Dan
Cody that the ship would be split to splinters were the wind to lift. Staring up at Cody’s yacht, the
youth yearned to belong in that glamorous world. Cody bought him a blue coat, white duck
trousers and a yachting cap in Duluth and they left for the Barbary Coast—where scores of 18th
century white American sailors had been sold into slavery.
Fitzgerald reveals Gatsby’s genesis in Chapter Six of his classic novel. Gatsby, wandering along
the shore of the Great Lakes while dreaming of the fame and fortune which would come of
creating a new identity, is the American. As such, Fitzgerald’s hero adheres to that peculiarly
American tradition of regarding time as cyclical. Should he doubt it, one need only read on to the
end of the chapter where Gatsby says “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” The
American is born of a nation whose people celebrate excellence, whose vitality comes from being
at odds with itself, and whose artists create magic from behind the mask.
We followed Route 13 along the southern edge of Lake Superior, Wisconsin, the Apostle Islands
in view, and checked in to a clean, independently run low-priced Ashland motel as a majestic sun
set on the shimmering lake. The motel’s night supervisor was a fan of The Crocodile Hunter.
The next day we travelled 450 miles along the northern coast of Lake Michigan on Route 2,
across the magnificent toll bridge spanning the fresh water of Lakes Michigan and Huron and ate
at a café in Indian River, Michigan. Good fare, a far cry from what’s served up at chain stores like
Arbys and the like. The waitresses played cards while waiting to serve customers; they were easygoing and steered clear of the usual mechanical niceness. We slept in the car at a nearby Rest
Area and woke to a public radio documentary about Michigan’s famous motor vehicle
manufacturer, Henry Ford.
Ford was born in July 1863, the month of Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. In his
mid-forties, he organised production of the Model T automobile in Detroit along the same lines
as Ely Whitney had his New Haven gun factory. During the Great Depression, the Ford
assembly line symbolised the dehumanising aspect of industrial capitalism in the Chaplin film
Modern Times (1936).
We left the Rest Area before sunrise and made it to Detroit just by lunchtime. Conspicuous
wealth embedded in the Downtown architecture was offset by African American poverty five or
ten minutes walk from the city centre. A major traffic jam quashed a planned visit to the Ford
Museum and after crawling less than a mile in an hour, we pulled across to a motel opposite and
enquired about a room.
The desk clerk was cagey, checking us out. It was mid afternoon and the suite he had would not
be ready for another half hour. We didn’t catch on at first but when he escorted us to a room
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Taken in by America
which would be much like the one put aside for us we realised that it was a trucker’s brothel so
we thanked him and moved on, accommodated, eventually, in an establishment boasting the
world’s longest corridor and housing the world’s rustiest automobile (which belonged to the
couple in the adjoining room). Spike Lee’s film about Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke,
kept us up late; the Dick Cheney press conference in Gulfport, Mississippi, was priceless.
Michigan peninsular separates Lakes Huron and Eerie in the east from its namesake lake in the
west. Come Wednesday, the Caliber had the sun at its back and Ann Arbor in its sights. Meryn
had located a Whole Foods Store at which we stocked up with good quality produce before taking
coffee in the university precinct along with hundreds of other people our age who were there
from all over the country to see sons and daughters settle in to a new life.
The American—ever conscious of the need to properly pass on the culture to succeeding
generations—places a high value on tertiary education. Ann Arbor is another of that nation’s
high calibre university towns.
South of there, we took Route 20 east along Lake Eerie, reaching Cleveland, Ohio, late in the
afternoon. We’d been there before, in 2003, having ‘detrained’ at 3 am on the false assumption
that Amtrak would have a service that skirted Lake Eerie to Buffalo, New York, not far from
Niagara Falls. We’d made our bed, and must lay on it—the waiting room floor.
The station master explained that the railroad had become a laughing stock ever since Detroit
had gained the ear of government, that if we wanted to see what might have been we should go
Downtown to the grand old Cleveland Union Terminal. We did, and went to other places he had
suggested, such as the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Completed in 1930, Union Terminal never lived up to its promise as Cleveland’s answer to New
York’s Grand Central Station but became a shopping mall instead; it was renamed Tower City
Center in 1991. The hundreds of Cleveland youths who hung out in the Tower the day we were
there were so obese that Meryn and I saw little else. There must be at least ten freight for every
passenger train on the U.S. rail network, and a relatively high percentage of those is transporting
corn syrup—a major cause of the American obesity scandal.
I told an Australian academic who was about to spend six months in Cleveland what we saw—
extraordinarily overweight citizens by day and trainloads of syrup by night—and she immediately
zeroed in on the point at issue. “You’re fattist,” she said. Post-modernism has done nothing if
not name things.
It was our good luck to be in the mall for the arrival of a wedding party in which the
photographer was servant, not master. He had to manage a dozen or more gigantic dramatis
personae who took their positions standing on steps leading down from a running water feature.
From the flower girl at the base up through the maids to the bride at the top and all down the
other side of best men to a pageboy stationed at the same elevation as the flower girl, the proud
and happy African Americans, all wearing white, were massively overweight. The fantastic
spectacle could never have escaped our attention, even without the groom, but with him it was
U. S. burlesque at its best: there, next to the gargantuan Queen, his new wife, was a tiny man so
thin that he could have been blown through a flute.
Railroads crisscrossed the nation and carried the American to his manifest destiny from the
1850s. In the first half of the nineteenth century, though, the economy had been carried by water
transport across the Great Lakes along man made canals to the mighty rivers. The Ohio Canal
joined Cleveland to the Mississippi system via the Ohio River in the late 1820s, at the beginning
of the era of Jacksonian Democracy. Then, when the railroad took over and the Civil War created
the need for sudden industrial expansion, Cleveland came into its own, transforming vast
supplies of iron and coal into ships and steel and making billionaires of John D. Rockefeller, et al.
White weddings peppered the surrounds of the Cleveland Museum of Art on what had continued
to be a bright blue day. We’d caught the bus there and, impressed, toured the art galleries. Meryn
normally gains more than me from meandering through miles of canvas but when I chanced
upon a trompe l’oeil—Jack of Hearts, painted by John F Peto in 1895—the day was complete. The
American, a confidence man, is really and truly himself when at work practising the art of
deception. And he frequently makes his mark by fooling us into perceiving the two dimensional
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copy as the three dimensional real thing.i Peto’s specialty was the ‘rack picture’ masquerade and
his depiction of the letter rack which I stood staring at in Cleveland that day is a fine example of
American counterfeit.
Anticipating a second look at Peto’s Jack of Hearts as Cleveland’s Tower came nearer the Caliber, I
recalled that day we’d spent at the Museum. Meryn came out with the name of the street—
Euclid—down which we’d caught the bus three years earlier. Hamilton heralded our arrival as a
new dawn because he believed the quarry was in Downtown Cleveland, had gone there from
Duluth.
Running parallel with Euclid, we located the Museum and I reverse parked with geometric
precision. Renovations were being carried out there so we could not view the canvases but on the
way back to the car we chanced upon Frank Gehry’s Peter B. Lewis Building, a work of art with
extraordinary metallic curves climbing all over bricks laid to confound the commonsense notion
that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
The great nineteenth-century essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson ((1803-1882), believed that there’s not an original
thought out there, that the real thing is invariably a copy.
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Taken in by America
Chapter 7 The Private Eye
Ours was one of many cars that stayed in the Rest Area out on Interstate 90 that night. It took
Route 528 for Pittsburgh as soon as the sun rose on the last day of August. Hamilton had wanted
to head on up to Ashtabula. I subsequently learned that President-elect Abraham Lincoln (en
route from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C.) entertained the crowd that had gathered on
the train platform, there, in February 1861, with a few remarks about his wife’s headstrong
nature.14
We stopped at Windsor, Ohio, for breakfast. The café turned out to be a pub. A man at the bar
had set up a smoke screen and sat inside it with his beer and a bourbon chaser. I wasn’t sure I
could stomach someone else’s cigarette for breakfast but we gave it a shot and ordered the
special. It came with coffee that alone was worth the $US2.50 we paid for the meal. Eggs with
biscuit and gravy, which is to say, eggs with bread soaked in white sauce and a piece of toast on
the side.i It was edible but not my cup of tea.
Two men drank coffee on either side of the beer and bourbon man as he whinged about his wife.
He talked of a local teenager who had allowed some fellow for whom there was an outstanding
warrant to drive her car while she sat in the passenger seat. The police pulled them over, searched
the car, and found four loaded guns. So both were arrested and arraigned on various charges
including intent to commit a crime. The young woman couldn’t understand, he said, why she’d
been charged.
A stocky African American in a stylish white hat with the brim turned down all round appeared
in the doorway. He shaded his eyes, sizing up the situation before sidling over and speaking softly
to one of the beer man’s coffee drinking companions. The fellow offered the excuse that his
truck was overloaded and he couldn’t drive at 80 miles per hour like those others who leave late
and arrive early at 8 am. Then he gathered up his belongings and made a move for the door
through which the overseer, if that’s what the black man was, had entered. The other fellow
who’d had coffee went with him, as did another who had turned up shortly beforehand and sat at
the bar.
The barmaid filled the beer man’s whisky glass and topped up his ale. Continuing to chainsmoke, he tried to tell the overseer about the woeful wife but the black man, disinterested, was
merely polite. We were almost ready to leave when the beer man finished off another couple of
cigarettes, downed a full beer and then the whisky, bade goodbye to the barmaid and left.
Moments later, a semi trailer pulled up at the crossroads outside the pub and Meryn and I looked
at one another with one thought in mind: who was driving that rig?
We paid the check and continued east along Route 322 through Orwell and across the border
into Pennsylvania. Soon thereafter, we saw a couple of other-worldly children playing in their
front yard near the road. I slowed and asked Meryn to grab the camera—the type of request
guaranteed to cause anxiety because we’re completely at odds in this regard. She’s inclined to
shoot a roll of film containing a limited number of well composed high quality photographs
whereas I hold that in the era of storing energy in digital format one can click at will, constrained
only by the capacity of the card and the amount of charge left in the batteries. When we passed
an exotic family travelling by horse and buggy Meryn reached for the camera. This was Amish
country.
Meryn phoned family friends who lived in Elwood City, north of Pittsburgh. We’d like to call by
and say hello. Did an American ever give a cold shoulder to anyone? We must stay for a few
days.
A sulphur-crested-cockatoo swooped down from somewhere and landed on the fridge as we
crossed the threshold into Martin and Karin’s kitchen. Two cockatiels (Tricksy and Dixie)
conversed in high-pitched parrot and an extraordinary feline (some sort of lynx, perhaps, or was
it an ocicat?) sat at the window, weighing the pro’s and con’s of whether or not to heed the call
of the wild. Meryn spoke of her cockatiel back home, Magda, and we all laughed out loud when
she told us about the friend, Trish, who was caring for the precious pet.
The American 'biscuit' is a moveable feast. While above the Mason-Dixon Line it’s a piece of bread, in the South it’s a
scone.
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Trish kept budgerigars but had recently been given a male cockatiel, Dobro, and was as devoted
to him as Meryn was to Magda. If Magda was going to fit into the family she was going to have
to get along with Dobro, of course, and so Meryn regularly took Magda to visit Trish and her
cockatiel well in advance of our departure for the USA. Once, when she phoned to say she would
take her bird over, Trish told her that she was lying on the bed with Dobro, that they both
needed a break and be together, just the two of them. Dobro had been spending too much time
with the other birds, she said, “And I don’t want him speaking budgie!”
The humble Elwood City house was no glass menagerie; redemption came from being there: Meryn
settled into the sofa; the cougar crouched near the cocky’s cage; and though he ruffled my
feathers to begin with, Hamilton came around.
Martin and Karin drove us to an old buckwheat mill where we took comfort in their political
point of view. Martin wasn’t the first American to say that he opposed George W. Bush but was
unique in describing the president as a ‘moron’. Perhaps he’s not—Dubya may merely have been
speaking budgie—but forty-three was surely the most incompetent White House incumbent
since James Buchanan left office, with America on the brink of civil war, in 1861. The next day,
Friday, September 1st, our hosts drove us the 40 odd miles to Pittsburgh, where Martin had been
Meryn’s stepfather’s student and, subsequently, academic colleague.
When George Washington had surveyed the Ohio valley in 1754 he noted the strategic
significance of the Point—the place where the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela
forms the beginning of the Ohio River: whomever controlled the Point, he concluded, would
gain dominion over the interior. Four years later the British captured the Point’s Fort Duquesne
from the French and renamed the area after William Pitt. Four years after that Pittsbourgh—
Pittsburgh—had its first coal mine and became part of Pennsylvania when the Mason-Dixon line
was extended in 1778.
A transport hub during the steamboat era in the first half of the nineteenth century, Pittsburgh
developed as a major trading and manufacturing city, one of relatively few urban centres
harbouring the burgeoning proletariat of American capitalism. It was on a Pittsburgh stage, in
1830, that Thomas Dartmouth Rice donned the blackface mask and introduced his fictional
character, Jim Crow (the naïve Southern slave who wheeled and turned about in dance while
dispensing homespun political commentary), to theatre audiences. It seemed to newspaper
editors of the day that a sudden insanity had swept urban America with otherwise sober city
dwellers now wheeling and turning about to jump Jim Crow.
White performers in blackface mask took their place in the entertainment industry alongside the
circus performers, stage magicians and museum exhibits and by the early 1840s the blackface
minstrel show had become an integral part of the Northern phenomenon of artful deception.15
Stephen Foster, who wrote numerous classic minstrel show songs and campaigned on behalf of
James Buchanan in 1856, was born in Pittsburgh on July 4th 1826.i He grew up listening to the
African Americans who sang at work on the Ohio River—part of the dividing line, the MasonDixon, which separates the North from the South—and in the black church congregations.
In 1828 a flatboat loaded with tobacco, sugar, grain and meat had carried nineteen-year-old
Abraham Lincoln downstream along the Ohio River to the Mississippi to tie up alongside seven
thousand similar vessels in the port of New Orleans, Louisiana. On a second Mississippi River
flatboat voyage Lincoln took in May 1831, this time from St. Louis, Missouri, the sight of
Negroes being whipped and scourged in the Crescent City left a lasting impression on the
twenty-two-year-old.16
A decade later, Lincoln the politician employed his backwoods facility with the language when
addressing the Springfield Temperance Society at its Washington birthday celebration on
February 22nd1842 on the subject of alcohol abuse:
“There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant, and the warm-blooded, to
fall into this vice. The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking
the blood of genius and of generosity.ii
Having been born on that auspicious day, Foster was surely destined to become an archetypal American.
The Temperance Society’s greatest achievement in American culture was to inadvertently promote the development
of jazz and blues music in Chicago during the prohibition era of the Roaring Twenties.
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Taken in by America
Huck Finn, Mark Twain’s boy from the backwoods, took a trip down the Mississippi River in
antebellum America with the fugitive slave, Jim. Huck had been feeling put upon by women who
wanted to clothe and house the unruly boy as well as instruct him in the rudiments of reading,
writing and Christian values. Up in his bedroom after a day among those women, he felt tired
and lonesome, Huck says, as he sat in a chair and looked out the window.
“The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods … and the wind was trying
to whisper something to me and I couldn’t make out what it was. … I hadn’t no
confidence.”17
Feeling hemmed-in, Huckleberry Finn was poised to break free. In creating his boy-hero, Twain
drew on the image of the backwoodsman fleeing before encroaching civilisation, the nineteenthcentury American who lived on the frontier (another dividing line) and didn’t want to grow up to
become a European.
Huck rode to freedom floating down the Mississippi on a raft. He and his fugitive-slave
companion, Jim, were desperately trying to recognise Cairo, the town which sits at the junction of
Big Muddy and the Ohio River. It was imperative that Huck and Jim head away from the
Mississippi, up the Ohio to the other side of the Mason-Dixon line because that way lay the only
hope of liberation for escaped slaves. Jim had escaped from slavery in Missouri when he believed
that he was about to be sold down the River in New Orleans by a slave trader.
Now, there they were—at the crossroads. Insofar as he made the transition from the Mississippi
to the Ohio, freedom was just around the corner for Jim. Huck, on the other hand, would
thenceforth become the fugitive because Jim was the lawful property, so far as Huck knew, of
Miss Watson, Huck’s long-suffering moral guardian. Once Jim crossed that river Huck would be
throwing his civilised Christian upbringing in the face of the women who had taught him to read
and write using the biblical story of Moses.
The atmosphere of the river spoke to Huck’s dark night of the soul, especially when a dense fog
obscured the lights of Cairo and caused Jim and him to lose their bearings and be carried south
on the current beyond the point of no return. Living by the light of nature (or superstition), each
had upset the powers of darkness in his own way, Huck believed, and further retribution came,
now, when a steamboat reared up out of that darkness, swamped their raft, and sent them to the
bottom of the river.
Scrambling ashore after nearly being drowned, Huck found a house with lights on but was bailed
up by fierce dogs. Wary, the wily backwoods boy knew better than to identify himself by his real
name and so adopted the pseudonym of ‘George Jackson.’ He obeyed orders, fearful of having
his head blown off by being mistaken as a member of the Shepherdson family (with whom his
hosts were feuding). He concocted a potted biography to explain his presence: he was originally
from Arkansas, he told them, but “my sister … run off and got married and never was heard of
no more … ” that his brother went off on the hunt for her and never came back and that after
his father died he took deck passage, north, on a steamer.
In the clear morning light Huck could see that fate had tossed him up on a remarkable shore,
that the well-furnished dwelling with antiques and finery was no ordinary house in the country.
He learned about the pendulum clock on the mantelpiece, that it had attracted the knavery of
passing Yankee peddlers who had invariably sought to ‘con them out of it’. According to Huck, it
“was beautiful to hear the clock tick” and see the books and paintings it seemed they—the hosts,
Mr Grangerford and his family—had brought with them to Kentucky from Philadelphia,
paintings of Washington and Lafayette.18
The Grangerfords kept more than a hundred slaves. On the face of it they were the epitome of
the wealthy slave-owning aristocracy imbued with the tradition of Southern honour, people who
cherished the belief that God had provided them with an inferior servile race to do the dirtywork while they themselves pursued the dream of the founding fathers of the American
republic—the quest for intellectual eminence.i But things are never so straightforward in
America. The Grangerfords read Henry Clay—Kentucky slaveholder and Whig politician who
sought to preserve the Union through the introduction of measures to effect the gradual,
The fact that few intellectual works ever came out of the antebellum South was ignored or embellished. Stephen
Foster songs such as My Old Kentucky Home, Old Black Joe and Hard Times were cited as evidence of the “beauty and
pathos of the Old South” but he, like Mr Grangerford, was a native of Pennsylvania. S.E. Morison, The Oxford History
Of The American People, vol. 2 (New York: Mentor, Oxford University Press, 1965), 263-7
i
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compensated emancipation of slaves. Twain identified Huck’s hosts, then, as among that group
of Southern slave owners who did not support secession but remained loyal to the Union and
supported Clay’s younger protégé, Abraham Lincoln. They were from Kentucky, one of the slave
States that did not secede.i
Lincoln and Huck Finn weren’t the only Americans to follow the Mighty Mississippi downstream
from St. Louis. At sunrise on April Fools’ Day, Melville’s confidence man boards a steamboat for
New Orleans.19 He carries no baggage. The stranger has recently plied his craft in Missouri but
can be found all over the United States. Melville’s America is a place where the counterfeitdetector is operated by a man who is himself counterfeit, where a “purple-faced” slave trader is
fooled by the masquerade of a white man in blackface disguise, and where reality invariably takes a
back seat to the copy.ii The Confidence Man was published in 1857; in 1867 the Atlantic Monthly
carried an article that recast Melville’s fictional account of the scene on the St. Louis wharf20
as a true account of how T. D. Rice had conceived of the figure of Jim Crow on the
Monongahela docks in Pittsburgh.iii
Martin took us to the top of a hill that afforded a panoramic view of Pittsburgh spread out
behind the Point where the Monongahela and Allegheny lose themselves in the Ohio. Thus
elevated, Hamilton had visions of grandeur—convinced that, like the river, the American could
run but not hide, that there’d be blood on the tracks.
We came down from the mountain to Griffin Chiles’ bronze bust of Stephen Foster at the
university and Henry Bessemer’s converter at Station Square. Though others had made
significant contributions to knowledge of how to inexpensively mass-produce steel from pig iron,
Henry Bessemer patented the process in 1855 and Graff, Bennett and Company employed it to
manufacture trainloads of steel in their Clinton furnace at Pittsburgh from 1859 to 1927.
Lunch, in the sportsman’s bar, afforded the unedifying spectacle of a bouncer unjustly accusing
the couple at the adjoining table of not paying for their meal. He’d got it all wrong but official
paranoia had been the order of the day in America for a week short of five years by then. The
Station Square bar wasn’t Guantanamo but had adopted the Cheney-Rumsfeld line of reasoning:
there’s no evidence but …
The Pittsburgh and Lake Eerie railroad had hauled freight in and out of Pittsburgh’s steel mills,
through Station Square, to Ashtabula, Ohio. In 1953 young men carrying military kit boarded
trains all over the United States. Martin did so at Station Square. They were bound for Korea.
The American is ignorant of the world at large but the tentacles of U.S. imperialism encircle the
globe.
After a day in the ‘big smoke’—Pittsburgh is no longer the filthy hell hole that capital created in
the century following the Civil War—we settled down to the documentary about the parrots of
Telegraph Hill. Karin cried when the old soldier died. Her cockatiels, like Meryn’s Magda, were
snug and safe, but for how long? The two women went next door to the Beauty Salon and
drowned their tears in mousse.
On the Saturday we went to stay with Meryn’s colleague, Nita, her medical practitioner husband,
Harry, and their wonderful three-year-old twins (Ewen and Allison) in an impressive
architecturally designed house on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. I had set off on the wrong foot:
Hamilton hated me and Nita didn’t care for my angle on America. I talked to the kids while she
discussed a conference paper with Meryn.
Ewen was shy and kept his distance but Allison spoke at length on what were matters of import
to her. Shy, but attentive: we learned, weeks later, that Ewen had taken to describing all things
ever after his encounter with my curious accent and idiom as “Brilliant!”
Harry’s parents, sister, brother-in-law and twin nieces came around on the Sunday morning. The
adult world revolved around the children, naturally, but they’re tertiary educated professionals in
their day jobs. The sister and her husband are civil engineers; she designs highway signs and he
the roads themselves. Meryn told them of our admiration for the road system. It’s true, we think
When the Civil War broke out, Lincoln is supposed to have quipped that whilst it would be a bonus to have God on
side, he must have Kentucky.
ii According to Eric Lott, Melville regards the blackface mask as just another confidence trick. Stiles, Jesse James. Last
Rebel of the Civil War, 61-62; E. Lott, Love And Theft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 61-62
iii Ironically, in seeking to unmask nineteenth century minstrelsy Lott himself was taken in by the confidence trick of
(unfalsifiable) psychoanalytic theory.
i
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Taken in by America
it brilliant. Rail was probably the more sustainable option, of course, but that’s another story.
They left soon after lunch and took Ewen and Allison with them because Harry and Nita were
staging a party that night.
I spent the afternoon at a local museum exhibition about the history of the greater Pittsburgh
region steel industry. An audio-visual display prosecuted an argument to the effect that the U. S.
became great because of steel from Pittsburgh, that it would not be the wonderful nation that it
now is had the heroic captains of industry not screwed the workers. According to the story, the
American’s anti-Trades-Union stance was the upshot of the steelworker’s strike of July 1892 at
Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead steel works.
Artisans had passed down their knowledge as puddlers, and so on, within a tight-knit community
but the Eli Whitney method of mechanisation had begun to encroach on that tradition and pose
a threat to skilled workers’ job security. When the workers’ existing agreement with the steel
company expired, management had seized the opportunity to alter what it considered were
anachronistic terms and conditions of employment. The steelworkers went on strike. Carnegie,
overseas, left his business partner, Henry Frick, to conduct the negotiations.
Frick, anti-Union, locked out the workers and called in Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency to
break the strike. On July 6th three-hundred inexperienced Pinkerton paramilitary guards went up
the Monongahela River on barges toward the Homestead Mill where they were confronted by a
ten-thousand strong crowd of jeering workers and their families determined to preserve
traditional livelihoods. Pinkerton’s guards, no match for the mob, were forced to yield.
National sentiment was with the workers. But the strikers’ mothers and wives, some with babes
in arms, had their gander up and went from jostling the hapless paramilitary innocents to severely
beating them. Twelve people were killed in the fracas and more than twenty seriously injured.
From that moment, the voice-over claimed, the American turned anti-Trades-Union and has
been readily persuaded ever after that labour unionism is evil.
Frick called upon the governor of Pennsylvania to put down ‘mob rule’ and on July 8th the state
militia took over from Pinkerton’s private army. It took until the November but Henry Frick
finally frustrated the Union’s demands by exploiting the structural division between the skilled
and unskilled workforce. Organised labour in America did not find its feet again for another forty
years—not until unfettered capital was brought to its knees by its own bootstraps.
Carnegie had previously defended the workers’ right to organise and was thought to be a friend
of labour. Frick’s conduct of the Homestead strike, however, changed that perception and
Carnegie was lumped in with all the other barons.
Twelve-year-old Andrew Carnegie had arrived in the United States from Scotland with his
emigrant parents in 1848. His father was an artisan, a handloom weaver, and young Andrew
started out as a bobbin boy in a Pittsburgh cotton mill. Literate, he moved into the office as a
clerk and then became a telegraph operator and telegrapher to a superintendent of the
Pennsylvania Railroad Company. While there, he initiated more efficient work practices and
played a crucial role as a strike breaker.
In 1856 Carnegie took out a loan and invested in the railroad business, building up substantial
capital from the profit. He plunged that back into Pennsylvania oil, the telegraph, and a company
which would build bridges from iron instead of wood. The construction of the Eads Bridge in St.
Louis alerted Carnegie to the fact that steel would be in demand so he put a Bessemer converter
to work and opened a steel plant in 1875. The Carnegie Steel Company made its owner rich by
churning out rails for the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1899 he consolidated his various steel making
operations as Carnegie Steel and provided such stiff competition for J. P. Morgan that the latter
bought him out in 1901. Morgan created U. S. Steel from the deal and Carnegie became the
richest man in the world.
Allan Pinkerton was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1819. He emigrated to the USA in 1842 and
went into business as a cooper near Chicago, Illinois. An abolitionist, Pinkerton provided
sanctuary to escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad, but was otherwise a stickler for the
rule of law. So when he got wind of the fact that there was a gang of counterfeiters in the county
he saw to it that they were arrested.
Appointed deputy sheriff, he went on to become a Chicago Police detective and subsequently
founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The Pinkerton Agency specialised in tracking
down urban America’s professional thieves—pickpockets, confidence men, safecrackers—by
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infiltrating their networks. The expansion of the railroad saw the agency branch out into the
‘apprehension of train robbers and members of outlaw gangs’ business. His own network of
contacts, mug shots of known criminals, and so on, led Pinkerton to promote his agency as the
‘all-seeing eye’—which is how the generic detective became a ‘private eye.’
Pinkerton was instrumental in the instigation of the United States Secret Service, the organisation
charged with “detecting persons perpetrating frauds against the government”—a labour in the
domain of Trickster, for an agency engendered by Mercurius. It all began with the drawn out
transition between the November 6th 1860 election of President Abraham Lincoln and his March
14th 1861 inauguration.
From the moment the rail-splitter set off for the White House from Springfield, Illinois, on
February 11th 1861, Trickster contrived circumstances to present the president-elect as a figure of
fun. The hostile twins who constituted the Republic were on the verge of realising their destiny
as warring opposites: seven states had seceded, arsenals and mints had been seized by the rebels,
the Mighty Mississippi was blockaded, and the Union in turmoil. On the train trip to
Washington, D.C., through twenty speeches in five states over twelve days, then, it was
incumbent upon Lincoln that he not frighten the horses, that he say nothing of consequence; so
he told dignitaries jokes, talked of lifting the weight of injustice, of giving all an equal chance to
be free—waxed paradoxical and ambiguous, that is to say.
Among the crowds that gathered, many who heard the president-elect speak thus thought him a
fool—an impression subsequently compounded by the fact that the railroad sleuth, Allan
Pinkerton, reported that his detectives had infiltrated a Baltimore gang, the ‘Blood Tubs,’ whose
members planned to assassinate Honest Abe before he took the oath of office. Given no choice
but to slip through Baltimore—a stronghold of slavery—masquerading as an invalid, Lincoln
arrived in the capital ridiculed and lampooned as a gangly goose.21 He subsequently contracted
Pinkerton to set up a ‘secret service’ to gather military intelligence in the Confederacy.
As George McClellan’s intelligence chief, Allan Pinkerton fed the Union General’s notorious
over-estimation of the size of the Confederate forces arrayed against him. The epitome of the
paranoid American, Pinkerton sought to defend the nation, to protect its commerce, trade, and
industry from the criminal element, should it take the form of secessionist rebels, the JamesYounger gang in Missouri, or organised labour in Pennsylvania. The private army which the
Pinkerton Detective Agency flung together to break the Homestead strike in Pittsburgh was no
better equipped to tackle the job than had been the agents sent to capture Jesse James at his
mother’s farm near Kearney, Missouri, in March 1874 and January 1875.
Late in the afternoon of March 10th 1874, Joseph Whicher (a naïve private eye masquerading as a
farm hand) knocked on the front door of Jesse James’ mother’s farmhouse. Whicher was
executed within 24 hours. A week later, two of Cole Younger’s brothers saw through the weak
disguise of a pair of Pinkerton operatives and ambushed them.
Pinkerton appointed Robert Linden to take charge of a major operation to bring the leaders of
the James-Younger gang to book. Linden went to the U. S. Government’s arsenal at Rock Island,
Illinois, in January 1875 with a letter of introduction from General Sheridan and came away with
an explosive-powered device—the ‘gunpowder candle’—that would illuminate the inside of a
building when thrown inside.
A private train packed with weapons and equipment waited at a siding on the Hannibal & St.
Joseph railroad for agents to board and then carried them to rendezvous with an advance party in
the woods near Jesse James’ mother’s farm. In the early hours of January 26th the agents moved
in on the farmhouse and set it ablaze before throwing the gunpowder candle through the
window.
All heat and no light, that no-holds-barred attempt to arrest Jesse James was a spectacular failure.
Jesse and Frank James had fled the farmhouse hours before the raid. Their mother, Zerelda
Samuel, lost an arm, their half-brother was killed and the ‘servant’ (slave) was struck on the head
by flying fragments when the ‘high-tech’ candle exploded.
Reporters went in search of the special train and exposed the fact that the raid had been carried
out by Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency. Jesse became more famous than ever. John
Edwards of the St. Louis Dispatch painted the whole affair as something of a Republican Party
conspiracy and set about turning it into a Confederate cause celebre. Edwards continued to fan
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Taken in by America
the fire of resentment in Confederate Democrat bellies and succeeded in transforming Jesse
James from the terrorist that he was into the hero that he became.
Pinkerton had come up against the American’s respect for and defence of the outlaw. A mythical
hero, the outlaw runs and hides in the knowledge that the common man identifies with his bid for
freedom. Moreover, while Pinkerton represented the interests of Northern capital, Jesse James
had won the hearts of Southerners who still sympathised with the Confederate cause. Jesse was
still picking that same old Confederate sore when, twenty months later, his gang of outlaws
followed the Mississippi River to Minnesota and attacked the Northfield Bank.i
I left the museum and stepped back into the contemporary world, mingling with the party of
academics at Nita and Harry’s house. A senior staffer who went out of her way to be sociable
told me all about her Scottish ancestry and lent encouragement on the question of the American
and his masquerade. Her husband asked for more detail concerning some story I told about
Australian banks. Someone else had lost a bikini on Bondi beach.
Detective Sergeant Hamilton from New South Wales might have gone unnoticed but for the
shiraz. My inner Pinkerton, he slipped in through a side door some way down the slope of
sobriety and guided me to disgrace by hand and mouth. I held court, Meryn reminded me the
next day, on Melville, Twain, Foster, Faulkner, and God knows what-all. It wouldn’t have been
so bad had the desire to touch that silken Scottish thigh not been given free rein.
The twins were home by the time we left on the Monday morning and Allison, unaware of the
type of man I was, held me tight and hugged, sad to see me go. A debilitating hangover promised
a long haul ahead to return the Caliber to Downtown D.C. within the allotted fortnight.
Harry had provided directions to the turn-off that took us on the scenic route to Fallingwater, the
Frank Lloyd Wright designed cantilever house which juts out over a waterfall on Bear Run,
Pennsylvania. Extraordinary architecture, wonderful woods, Meryn in fine form—it all looked
good. But Hamilton wanted none of it, he said, for it was his manifest destiny to go west.
i
See above, Chapter 6 ‘Twin Cities’.
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Chapter 8 The Buzzard
At the entrance pavilion to another Wright house near Bear Run we were informed that further
progress entailed boarding a touring bus with everyone else. It suited me that Meryn wasn’t
having any of that—I take after my father who, when he retired, avoided any organised social
gathering where a game of ‘throw the ball in the bucket’ was in the offing—so we pressed on
south-east through Cumberland, Maryland, the hangover receding, to Winchester, Virginia,
where we lost our way on a narrow back-road at dusk and arrived home late for our first night in
the Centreville doll’s house.
“We’re sorry to hear of your loss,” said the rental company desk clerk when we returned the car
on the Tuesday. It drew a blank. There had been a radio in the Caliber but we’d turned it off
because of the wall to wall advertisements on one band and biblical nonsense on the other. So we
had not heard about the death of Steve Irwin, Australia’s Crocodile Hunter.
Centreville, Virginia, not only has British spelling but all of the streets have English names and
the layout is as per England’s Midlands. The $350,000.00 house we now shared with Vera and
Ajax might have been picked up from Stafford and set down in Virginia; it was tiny, like the
other houses in the neighbourhood.
Vera took Meryn and me to dinner, two miles away, on the Lee Highway a couple of days after
we moved in. She told us all about her childhood, how she didn’t get along with her mother, her
father’s work as an economist, their Jewish roots, her preference to remain childless, and all
manner of personal detail. She was making an effort and put us at ease—though it was obvious
we had absolutely nothing in common. We should shop at the Food Barn opposite the restaurant,
she said, and stared uncomprehendingly when we explained that since we had no car that option
would be impractical.
Despite being a gifted photographer (which was clear from the pictures she had framed and hung
in the doll’s house) Vera preferred to work “in sales.” She worked from home, selling computer
systems to oil producers, and had to all intents and purposes abandoned her professional career.
She was suited for sales, that much was clear, and possessed of the heart of stone that the
bereaved parent said he’d come up against. When she told us that photographing celebrities had
been the main game the dots began to join up: born from the head of Fellini’s Paparazzo, our
Vera had thus far failed to fully realise the American Dream, but, not yet forty, she had the
trappings—a Mercedes and a Porsche.
He doesn’t know it yet, but what’s good for General Motors is a mixed blessing for the American
because Ike’s feted highway system is all road and no sidewalk. Meryn and I had chosen
Centreville because we could afford to live there and it was within commuting distance of
Washington, D.C.—our real goal. In our craigslist email exchanges Vera had told us that we’d be
a hop, step, and jump from the bus stop. That suited us well because we were time-rich, as they
say, and would enjoy taking the bus to the subway terminus at Vienna to catch the train into
town.
We enjoyed it very much, rubbing shoulders with the American on his way to and from work. In
taking us into his confidence, though, Trickster had neglected to say that the bus ran peak hours
only: sold a pup, we were stranded in the doll’s house all evenings and weekends, restricted to the
crescents, courts and circuits that accommodated pedestrians. Vera never used public transport
and had imagined that the local bus stop came with a bus service. The fact that this was a false
assumption did not alter the fact that we’d signed a lease.
On the first outing to Downtown D.C. we each obtained a Library of Congress card and ate our
cut-lunch sandwiches in the sixth floor cafeteria with its magnificent outlook on the Potomac
River, south-west of the Library. The Capitol is just over the road and on the fifth anniversary of
the terrorist attacks we sat in the visitors’ gallery of both the House and Senate.
First thing that day, September 11th 2006, we had taken the Metro to the Pentagon and sought
entry with all the other dignitaries. An absurd idea, you may think, for the likes of us to turn up at
the front door of the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense asking to be let in. And
yet for all his paranoia about Muslim extremists and despite the exaggerated security provisions
found at the entrance to a public building, the American enjoys a level of access to his country’s
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institutions far beyond that of Australians and Britons to theirs. The American expects to be able
to walk in whenever he wants—and is given every courtesy.
We were invited to make an appointment to return to the Pentagon on a day when it had not
been ‘booked out’, so to speak. So we went to the Capitol instead and spent nine-eleven watching
Congress at work. On another visit a month or so later, we walked from the House around the
corridors of power to the Senate and witnessed a curious snapshot of the future when Hillary
Clinton came into the chamber a lone wolf. Ill at ease, she contrived a handshake with the
senator closest to hand but her would-be social intercourse was stiff and wooden. Admittedly,
Ms. Clinton’s fellow females in that chamber faired no better.
One of the chaps—a middle-aged man with a balding head and compensatory ponytail—was the
centre of attention on both sides of the political divide. The mid-term Congressional elections
were a month away so the Republicans still called the shots. Senator Ponytail seemed to be back
from sick leave, or perhaps he’d spent time in Afghanistan, or Iraq? Whatever the reason, he was
greeted like a long lost comrade who’d turned up unexpectedly, and was warmly received.
Then a door flew open and a lithe and confident Barak Obama burst upon the scene, slapping
backs and showing anyone who cared to look just how to make an entrance. The contrast with
Hillary couldn’t have been clearer. If ever there was to be another JFK in the White House this
was he. I’m writing this a day or so after Edward Kennedy endorsed the black Chicago senator as
the man to whom the torch should be passed in November, 2008.
Those of us attuned to American burlesque have never had it so good. Better than 1952, it’s even
bigger than 1960 when Chicago played such a pivotal role in the making of a President—thank
you Mayor Daley, for cooking the books—and possibly on a par with Chicago 1860 when dark
horse Abraham Lincoln took the Republican Party nomination.
Living under the same roof as Vera was going to be a trial—there was no space set aside for us in
the refrigerator, for example—but we’d make do until our first six months in the USA was up in
late November, 2006. No room in the refrigerator? Well I made space, of course, but began a war
of attrition in doing so.
To be fair, Vera said Meryn could feel at home, that should we need to use the washing machine,
say, and there were clothes in the way, we should simply move them. Despite this, Meryn kept
well away, encountering Vera less often, even, than she had Connecticut’s foremost hip-hop
poet. Our tiny room in the house made out of ticky-tacky became Meryn’s prison.
Hamilton and I tried to make ourselves at home but Vera, whether deliberately setting out to
stake a claim or simply doing as she’d always done, surrounded us with black garbage bags of
house contents. These appeared on the stairs, in doorways, down in the basement, up on the
landing—all over.
Then there were the rules: because Vera ran the air-conditioner all-day every-day in order to
drown out the noise of the aircraft flying in and out of Dulles Airport, the windows must be kept
closed, no matter how perfect the weather; rubbish, mountains of it, mostly cardboard from the
packaging in which the previous week’s acquisitions had been delivered, was to be put out on the
sidewalk for collection every Friday morning; an emphatic “I don’t do recycling … ” remark was
delivered with the implicit admonition that ‘you won’t either’; and no dish washing except in the
dishwasher.
Ajax taught me another important rule when up early to drive the 60 miles to his office in
Baltimore, Maryland: first person up must pull back the curtains that face the street. Not too
much to ask, I thought, well aware that it would invariably be me. Predictably, the curtain rods
(sourced from the same consumer catalogue as all the other doll’s house chintz) were engineered
in the same fashion as the poorly designed shower curtain rail—telescoped sections linked by a
junction that dammed the curtain rings so that they did not slide but bunched up on one side of
the divide. A taller man might steady the rod while pulling the curtain. I could only hope that the
fabric would not catch in the join—and everyone knows what happened when hope passed wind.
So I soon stepped down from curtain duty. Ajax simply suffered in silence and behaved as if he
were still the early bird. But he was only home on weekends and it was left to Vera to do the
honours from Monday to Friday. At first she sought to subtly convey her displeasure, breaking
her arrival in the kitchen with a histrionic snatch at the offending fabric. When that failed to
move me she came straight out and read the riot act.
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Reminded of what I’d told the grade five Primary School teacher concerning homework, I said
I’d try and remember to do what must be done. The sadistic Mr. Georgeson beat me because I
never did his homework so a mere tongue lashing from Ms. Sarkin was never going to do the
trick in the house of tat.
Vera kept her Porsche under a cloth cover in the one-car driveway while her recent model
Mercedes sat out in the weather. Meryn was intrigued that the Centreville developers had been
permitted to sell acres of housing with little available off-road parking space. The idea of having
residents make do without an automobile would be commendable were there an alternative but,
as we’d found to our dismay, that dormitory suburb—the American calls such subdivisions
characterized by a lack of amenities an ‘exurb’—had no public transport to speak of. Trickster
was afoot.
And so were we, carting groceries in a cardboard box strapped to a luggage trolley on a nearenough to three-mile round trip to and from the only shopping centre to which we could safely
walk. That took care of the weekend exercise routine and our perambulations all over the District
of Columbia did the rest.
Weekends were set aside for chintz installation in Vera’s world. Ajax would get back from
Baltimore late on Friday nights and be up early on Saturdays to pull back the blinds. After
breakfast he’d go downstairs and move from the basement to the garden whatever new gnome or
concrete frog had turned up from the catalogue. He’d have been carrying out his chores for a
good hour when Vera would go out and tell him her intentions with respect to this or that aspect
of the landscaping. Then she’d come inside and have breakfast before going off in the Mercedes.
Early on, I made the mistake of engaging our mistress in conversation while she rummaged
through the fridge. She stopped what she was doing, took her head out of the crisper, and turned
to say “I’m very sorry but I have projects.” That was the first weekend and I had been told.
When she drove away I started vacuuming the living room but Ajax appeared, rescheduling
outdoor jobs in order to attend to the more traditional domestic duties.
Northern Virginia’s climate creates conditions in which the mushroom thrives so Meryn and I
collected them from the undergrowth on the side of the road when we walked to the
supermarket. On once such expedition, the weather was hot (nearly ninety degrees) and a vulture
took off just ahead of us as we neared a clump of trees. A second vulture took to the air, and
then another—each with a wing-span like that of an eagle—and then we came upon the object of
the birds’ attention: a recently dead squirrel, its carcase surrounded by flies. Freshly killed, it smelt
awful. A little further on, four vultures imitating Bernard Wooley stared down at us with horrible
drooping shoulders from the roof of the shopping centre.
The groceries loaded in the cupboard box, we left the shopping complex wishing someone in
Centreville sold other than sugar-sweet bread. Nature called for us to get a good view of a vulture
head down in the body of the dead animal but the bird had flown—like the spirits of the soldiers
who had died at Bull Run.
Near enough to nine-hundred human carcases had littered the fields and woods adjoining Bull
Run in the aftermath of the first main battle of the American Civil War. Bull Run, a Centreville
creek, gave its name to that day of carnage. If one dead squirrel could smell so bad in the summer
of 2006 what must the atmosphere have been like in Centreville on that longest day of blood and
guts, July 21st 1861?
Back at the doll’s house, you could have cut the air with a knife: we were in the way of the
projects. The expectation that we would pay the rent and exorbitant energy bills but not be there
had been thwarted by the fact that the occupants of the dormitory suburb had no need for public
transport except to commute to the office in Washington.
We had no desire to hang out with Ajax and Vera but once the walk with the vultures was done
there was no place else to go without the risk of being run down. So we read, conducted research
(learning, for instance, that the birds were Turkey Vultures, otherwise known as buzzards), wrote,
prepared meals, and watched TV. The American has no equivalent of Australia’s Radio National
but the Australian has nothing to compare with American television presentations such as The
McLaughlin Report, News Hour, Washington Week, The Chris Matthews Show, Meet the Press, Book TV,
and so on.
Weekends, then, were something of a desert but come Monday we could take the bus with the
regular commuters to Vienna Metro station, last stop west on the Orange train line, purchase a
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Taken in by America
ticket from the machine, and ride the last 15 of the 26 miles to town. If New York City has the
best public transport system, greater Washington (extending to Northern Virginia and Maryland)
has the worst. Expensive, unresponsive, unavailable except in peak hour, we made do with the
small window—9.30 am to 3.30 pm—available for movement, missing out on the numerous
talks and seminars we had expected to be able to attend. There were options to set off earlier from
Centreville and leave downtown D.C. later by purchasing higher-priced train tickets but we still
had to be back at Vienna by 7 pm to catch the last bus.
Some seminars were within reach: Meryn got wind of the fact that Chicago University Nobel Prize
winner and octogenarian, Robert Fogel (author of the book we’d seen in New Haven about
America’s four ‘Great Awakenings’ of religious fervour) and Dora Costa from Massachusetts
Institute of Technology would be speaking at the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda) in
Maryland one weekday afternoon so we made our way over. Security, there, was tighter than that
at the entrance to the Capitol. Which is reassuring since research into germ warfare is carried out
at Bethesda.
We were interviewed and issued with security passes. Once again, the emphasis was on security
and had nothing to do with keeping one out. When the American says “You’re welcome” he
means it. I went directly to the cafeteria (good but not a patch on that at the Library of Congress)
while Meryn located the seminar room. After lunch we listened as Fogel and Costa presented
their research into a century of change in the aging process of the American, findings made
possible because of the Union Army’s having kept good medical records—a legacy of General
George McClellan’s thoroughgoing reorganization of the Army of the Potomac at the start of the
Civil War.i The discussion surrounding Fogel and Costa’s counterintuitive findings about various
aspects of received wisdom concerning American history was first rate.
A couple of days later we took a rental car to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland,
and sat in on a seminar. Meryn enjoyed listening to the various viewpoints but it was all too
vague and wishy-washy—postmodern—for me, coming after the clarity at Bethesda.
The Centreville bus regulars were wonderful: courteous drivers; joyful Latinas; a friendly fellow
who struck up conversation with whomever he shared a seat, taking them into his confidence
before producing a bible and reading from Scripture; the attractive blonde who invariably turned
up and climbed aboard as the bus pulled out. En route to Vienna, the blonde applied her
makeup; once there, she stood far back in the station as the clock ticked toward the nine-thirty
price-barrier then came from the shadows with seconds to go, flashing through the turnstile and
racing down the escalator to the carriage before you could say “Jack Robinson.” Most days she
dressed well but every now and then it was to kill. I imagined her to be a lawyer without the
slightest evidence.
Hamilton had to be humoured, hemmed in, held back from tracking down Dempster, whom he
believed to have murderered Mark Boyd after taking the victim’s wife into his confidence.
Meanwhile, I came across another reference to Detective Pinkerton. A taxi-driver arrived at the
bus terminus and offered us a free ride to Rosslyn, on the border of Virginia and the District of
Columbia. He needed to get there in a hurry and our going along for the ride would enable him
to use the HOV (high-occupancy-vehicle) lane. He had migrated to the USA from Afghanistan in
the 1980s—when the American military was training Osama bin Laden and numerous other
Muslim fanatics to launch terrorist attacks against the USSR.
From Rosslyn, Virginia, we walked across the bridge to Georgetown, D.C. on the other bank of
the Potomac.
Prior to the battle of Bull Run, the Army of the Potomac had been of modest size but following
the Union’s disastrous showing under General Irvin McDowell at that battle General McClellan
transformed it into the main fighting force in the eastern theatre of war. George McClellan, a
West Point graduate, was president of the eastern division of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad
when civil war broke out on April 12th1861.ii Ready to defend the Union, on April 23rd he took
up a commission in the western theatre of war as a major general in the Ohio volunteers.
Leo had already put us in the picture about how McClellan, the son of a Philadelphia surgeon, had been influenced by
Florence Nightingale. See above, page 18.
ii On April 11th 1861 in Montgomery, Alabama, the president of the Confederate States of America sent a telegram to
Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard in South Carolina giving the rebel General authority to shell Fort Sumter.
i
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Between May and July McClellan lived up to his promise as ‘Young Napoleon’—achieving
military success in West Virginia “by manoeuvring rather than by fighting.”22 Coming as it did a
couple of weeks before the debacle at Bull Run, McClellan’s victory over the Confederates was in
such stark contrast with McDowell’s defeat at their hands that it could not go unnoticed. On the
day after the battle of Bull Run President Lincoln telegrammed the Napoleonic thirty-four-yearold to ‘come hither’ and bend the Army of the Potomac into shape.
A Calvinist, McClellan believed that God had inspired Lincoln’s call, that he, Little Mac, was
predestined to save the Union. He called upon his trusted railroad detective, Allan Pinkerton, to
meet him in Washington so that while McClellan transfigured the 50,000 lost souls who had been
“cowering on the banks of the Potomac” into a fighting force of 168,000 well-trained and
properly equipped soldiers between August and November 1861 Pinkerton’s agents sent
intelligence from behind Confederate lines. One-hundred-thousand rebels had crowded into
Virginia’s rail junction at Manassas, near Centreville, Pinkerton reported in August.
McClellan was quite capable of deluding himself about the strength and size of the enemy force
confronting his Army but having the private detective confirm his worst fears helped raise the
Union General’s paranoia to fever pitch. The rebels were being regularly reinforced, according to
Pinkerton, so that there were at least 150,000 enemy combatants ready and waiting to descend on
the U.S. capital from the Potomac River by early October 1861.
Pushed by Lincoln to act, McClellan finally moved against the Confederates at Manassas in
March 1862 only to discover that their massive show of force had been a masquerade: the rebel
cannons were nothing but painted tree logs, ‘Quaker guns’.
The last thing anyone needed was a detective pissing in his pocket, especially at Centreville. Being
confined to barracks could only make matters worse. Vera was on edge. ‘One more weekend,’ I
could hear her thinking, ‘one more weekend with you and there’ll be blood.’ With Meryn
melancholy and Hamilton driving me up the wall, life in the doll’s house was no picnic. So
mention of our packing lunch and walking west along the old Warrenton Turnpike to the
battlefield at Bull Run brought Vera round and she offered to give us a lift. Meryn made sure I
sat up front with the wicked witch but the Mercedes wasn’t built for backseat passengers and she
twisted her spine when climbing out.
Starting at the famous stone bridge, we walked in the footsteps of those poor bastards like
Adelbert Ames who had fought to put down the rebellion. We spied a sly fox through field
glasses. He was camouflaged as grass but we pointed him out to a Scout master who had taken a
spell from his cubs. The American’s community spirit takes many forms; passing on the culture
to pre-pubescents on The Civil War Trail is one of them. The museums take up where the
masters leave off by taking kids into consideration in the design of their exhibits. Proud of his
nation, the American reverently hands over its history to succeeding generations.
We sat outside the battlefield bookstore and ate our sandwiches while visitors took photos of the
prominent monument to Confederate Brigadier General Thomas Jackson seated on his horse.
Jackson, ever a law unto himself, withheld his Virginians from the fury on the field and had them
form on the reverse slope of a ridge. When his fellow Brigadier General Barnard Bee saw Jackson
and his men up on that ridge above the fray he cried out “There is Jackson standing like a stone
wall!”
Bee was shot and fell as the Union soldiers came across the stone bridge, up the hill and over the
ridge into the teeth of a storm of bullets from Jackson’s Virginians. Jackson’s men slaughtered a
subsequent wave of Union soldiers with the bayonet and then advanced to attack the enemy
while shrieking like furies.
Barnard Bee had probably been disparaging in the remark made about Thomas Jackson during
the heat of battle. But Bee is long forgotten while the Confederate victory at the first battle of
Bull Run has ever after been associated with the emergence of Stonewall Jackson and his soldiers’
rebel yell. Not afraid to challenge his superiors—General Robert E. Lee included—Thomas
Jackson stonewalled whenever it suited him, not co-operating in man-made plans if they
conflicted with his reading of the divine will.
A religious fanatic, Stonewall Jackson saw the hand of God at work in the twists and turns of
war. And when Meryn saw the stone house at the intersection of the Warrenton Turnpike and
the Manassas-Sudley Road she took more than academic interest in the fact that it had been used
as a hospital in both the Bull Run battles—July 1861 and August 1862. A museum nowadays, it
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Taken in by America
displayed a nineteenth-century carpetbag, the artefact so much associated in the Southern mind
with those confidence men and scalawags from the industrial North who had crossed the MasonDixon at the end of the war. Carpetbaggers all, in the eyes of the southerner, those aliens had
come from the North to pillage Thomas Jefferson’s feudal agrarian paradise and kill its king—
Cotton.
Whereas the North names Civil War battles for the water course that had to be forded, down
South they are called after the location for which control had been sought. The Bull Run battle of
July 1861, then, is known in Dixie as ‘First Manassas’.i Manassas, Virginia, was strategically
located at the crossroads between railroads which headed east to the Federal capital in
Washington, D.C., southwest through the Shenandoah Valley, and south to the Confederate
capital in Richmond, Virginia. If President Jefferson Davis’ Confederate States of America was to
survive beyond the summer of 1861 it had to be able to defend Manassas railroad junction.
Union military chief, General Winfield Scott, had devised an ‘Anaconda Plan’ in response to
suggestions made by George McClellan in late April 1861 and dismissed General Irvin
McDowell’s proposal to seize Manassas. President Lincoln convinced the war cabinet to overrule
Scott and McDowell had 30,000 well-equipped soldiers sent their marching orders. Since the U.
S. Army was as poorly organised then as it is now, it took from the Tuesday until the Saturday for
the men to get from Washington to battle-ready bivouac in Centreville—after which the yelling
rebels sent them packing on the Sunday.
Centreville was at the outer edge of Confederate cannon range from Manassas. On the Friday
prior to the battle civilian spectators (including Congressmen and government officials) arrived
from Washington by horse and carriage. Under no military restraint, they brought picnic hampers
with them, hoping to join in the fun as the rebels were brought to heel. There was a convivial and
joyous atmosphere, and an air of confidence. Only War Secretary Cameron was apprehensive.
It was a different matter when the battle was lost late on the Sunday. The more or less orderly
retreat of the soldiers turned to a panic-stricken rush of every man for himself when rebel fire
reached the spectators at Centreville. A wagonload of sightseers was tipped out on the
Warrenton Turnpike bridge over Cub Run and blocked the passage of military vehicles. Picnic
carriages became entangled with gun carriages and ammunition wagons. All was mayhem. Army
discipline had been weak at best on the march from Washington to Centreville but there was
none at all—“most of them were sovereigns in uniforms, not soldiers”23—from Centreville to
Washington once panic had set in.
Late on that Sunday, the last in September, 2006, we had no choice but to walk the two miles or
more from Bull Run to Centreville. The distance would normally pose no difficulty but Meryn
was in pain from Mercedes back and there was no sidewalk. But this was America; at that point
in the journey where the old Warrenton Turnpike bridged Cub Run an SUV that had passed us
came back, and stopped. The stranger at the wheel told her children to move over and bade us
“Get in.”
Had Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills & Nash fame been born in New York instead of Texas, for instance, he might have
called his 1972 album Bull Run instead of Manassas.
i
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Chapter 9 The Drifter
Bedridden, but inspired by the kindness of strangers, Meryn had emailed a Craigslist woman
about the possibility of our renting a place near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in December. We had
always intended staying at Centreville until the beginning of the New Year but ‘bus-less-ness’ and
eggshells in the doll’s house had made life miserable so we decided to leave Vera and Ajax behind
us when we flew out of Dulles Airport for Manchester, England, in mid-November. In the
meantime, we’d hire a car and tour Virginia and neighbouring states over the six or so weeks we
had left.
Meryn needed caring for so we were both housebound while the anti-inflammatories went to
work. Their side-effects and my Hamilton caused no end of grief but we coped by reading more
of the Washington Post than usual.
New York Republican district attorney Jeanine Pirro, who was running for state attorney general
and who suspected her spouse of having an affair, had been caught out asking former New York
police commissioner Bernard Kerik to plant a listening device on the Pirro family yacht.
According to the newspaper article, an NBC affiliate had obtained a tape of Ms. Pirro saying
“What am I supposed to do, Bernie—watch him [vulgar verb for intimate activity] her every
night?”
Americans are so squeamish about references to the discharge of the human appetite for sexual
pleasure that sub-editors bracket them off whilst placing violence front and centre. It’s
understandable: the American dwells inside twin myths—Christianity and the frontier outlook. It
explains why CNBC’s Erin Burnett was so coy when she said “Come you know what or high
water … ” when talking about the credit crunch on September 24th 2008.
On September 27th 2006 a “drifter”i walked into a school 40 miles from Columbine, Colorado,
took a girl hostage, and then shot her dead. Two days later a 15 year old shot his School Principal
in Wisconsin and on October 2nd a milk tank truck driver walked into a one-room Amish school
in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania—not far from where we were negotiating to rent a converted
Post Office—carrying a semiautomatic handgun, a rifle, shotgun, stun gun, two knives, and 600
rounds of ammunition. The 32-year-old then lined up eleven young girls at the blackboard and
shot a number of them at close range in the back of the head, killing three before taking his own
life.
Meryn had found an exceptional rental car deal but the vehicle had to be collected from the
airport. Since we were going to have to figure out how to get to Dulles International for the
November flight from Centreville, this was an ideal opportunity to test our scheme: bus to
Vienna Metro; Metro to Rosslyn; airport bus from Rosslyn. We didn’t appreciate it at the time
but the bus was for airport staff to commute. The experience of riding with these workers—a
number of superb storytellers and comics among them—was a highlight of our time in D.C. The
American works ridiculously long hours for low pay so those who entertain their fellow
employees by shooting off at the mouth about employment conditions do the nation a great
service.
Meryn and I had taken a day trip to Richmond, Virginia, from Washington, D.C., on Amtrak rail
pass in 2003 but the train was delayed and finally departed from Washington so late that we had
to board the returning train immediately upon arrival in RRichmond. Now we could drive the
130 miles to the old Confederate capital in a few hours. We didn’t know that it was Columbus
Day weekend, during which everyone takes to the Highways and byways.
We regarded the backroads as our own so Meryn and I were miffed at having to share with those
who think nothing of crossing a double yellow line. But we managed, heading down Centreville
Road on through the intersection with Yorkshire Lane where Wilmer McLean was living in July
1861 when Trickster visited.
Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard moved in to the McLean family home on the
eighteenth and set up his headquarters there just before First Manassas. His house overrun and
damaged by enemy fire, McLean moved his family to safer ground at Fauquier, then Lunenburg,
and finally much further south to Appomattox Court House.24
i
The drifter is an altogether different kettle of fish from the outlaw, the latter being an anti-government hero.
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Taken in by America
The rain was increasingly heavy as we drove south that Friday morning. Unaware that we were
tracking into the teeth of a nor’easter, we pressed on down the peninsula between the York and
James rivers through Yorktown to Hampton Roads and Fort Monroe—where escaped slaves
became Union General Benjamin Butler’s non-returnable ‘contraband’ from May 23rd 1861, six
weeks into the Civil War.i
Aiming for the backest of roads, we stopped someplace to figure out what strange crop it was we
saw. Meryn went into the field and came back with a cotton boll. Brilliant. Like Ulysses Grant in
June 1864, we had intended to move on Richmond from Cold Harbor in the north-east. Grant
sent thousands to their death in what he afterwards referred to as an inglorious futile assault at
that place. And though he won the battle, Cold Harbor ultimately cost Robert E. Lee the war.
Meryn and I didn’t even make it to the battlefield, not until the next day at least. Trees were
falling like cannon fodder in the howling wind and driving rain so the authorities had closed the
Rest Area at which we’d hoped to spend the night. We eventually found a motel but had to go to
bed without any supper.
Had British General Charles Cornwallis known (as George Washington did) that the French
would sail a fleet of warships into Chesapeake Bay in August 1781 he would not have stationed
his force at Yorktown and been trapped. Cornwallis was forced to surrender to Washington and
the American won his War of Independence.
According to the weather channel, that 2006 nor’easter was mild by comparison with those that
had gone before. The success of General Washington’s surprise attack on the German garrison at
Trenton, New Jersey, in 1776 is attributed to a nor’easter.25 The ‘Perfect Storm’ of October 1991
was a nor’easter.ii Nor’easters over the Atlantic Ocean have sent the American to Davy Jones’
locker a hundred times over.
The storm continued to strengthen overnight and into Saturday. Breakfast in a diner was all I
cared about as we drove north to Cold Harbor in absurd rain. Having found neither café nor
diner, we walked hungry across the battlefield in the rain but were forced back, umbrellas torn to
pieces, and sat in the car. Momentous events had occurred a little way beyond the windscreen, in
1864.
We prepared to take Richmond but it was flooded and so followed Grant across the James River
to Petersburg, south of the Confederate capital. Grant went there because the four railroads that
supplied Richmond in the 1860s converged at Petersburg. We wanted to go there because Grant
had.
Robert E. Lee was anxious to avoid being caught in Grant’s trap and so went west with his
infantry. Starving hungry, we abandoned the assault on Petersburg and went west with Lee.
Surely the storm would blow itself out that far inland? The rain pelted down all the way to
Amelia Court House.
Meryn reckoned Amelia was our best chance of a decent breakfast. She was right. The waitress at
the diner we discovered there greeted us just as if we’d been expected on Thursday and here it
was Saturday so she was worried lest we’d fallen by the wayside. They served breakfast until 11
am. We were a couple of minutes into the lunch menu but in view of our having lost the
Crocodile Hunter they squeezed us into bacon and eggs over easy with home fries (as against
unpatriotic French) and jelly on toast—no grits; they’re for the birds, we had decided, after trying
them at the previous day’s diner—and confirmed Meryn’s belief in Amelia Court House being
our best bet. She had arrived at the decision via the homonym, Amelia being the name of an inlaw. There’s nothing like food to allay debilitating hunger pangs so we lingered longer in that
diner than any other. The imposing Amelia Court House water tank is now a fond memory.
A couple of hours later we were at Appomatox Court House. The trick is not to assume:
Appomatox Court House is no more about Court Houses than is Amelia Court House. It’s a
town. Appomatox Court House is no longer where it used to be so once we’d sorted that out and
arrived at the nineteenth-century location we were almost home and hosed. A fellow was due to
give a talk at 2.20 pm and we must appreciate that he knows of nothing that’s happened since
General Butler’s daughter, Blanche, subsequently married Adelbert Ames in 1870, on the ninth anniversary of Bull
Run.
ii The Wolfgang Petersen movie The Perfect Storm (2000) starring George Clooney was spawned by the Sebastian Junger
book of the same name published in 1997.
i
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1865 so please don’t ask other than period questions and don’t take flash photographs or have a
mobile phone turned on. Got it?
Got it. It sounded kind of corny but we went along with the idea. When in Rome, you know. It
was worth every bit of the suspension of belief because we were treated to a one act play by a
consummate performer who was completely in character and superb at doing what he does.
We were quite absorbed, especially when he explained that as one of General Lee’s soldiers he
had marched for three days as the Confederates fled west from Petersburg to avoid being
hemmed in by Grant. The soldiers were exhausted and very hungry, having not eaten for those
three days since leaving Petersburg. However, all would be well, Lee had told them, because a
train loaded with supplies had left from deep in the South and would be waiting at Amelia Court
House for them. That kept the soldiers going in the Spring of 1865. It had been raining cats and
dogs, their boots were sticking in the mud and they were wet through, famished, and ready to
desert. They would be replenished at Amelia Court House if they could just hang on.
They made it and, as promised, the train was there at Amelia. A Lieutenant ordered that the
doors be flung open and they were. All the guns and ammunition you could want, but no food or
clothing. Confederate management had sent the wrong train! The 60,000 desperate soldiers were
ordered to march 55 minutes in every hour for another 18 hours to Appomattox. Only 30,000
bivouacked at Appomattox Court House; the rest had deserted or gone raving mad.
Lee realised that Grant had him cornered, that his men were not up to a fight, and so he
surrendered on April 9th 1865 in the house just down the lane from where we heard the soldier
tell his tale. He was brilliant, that actor, and I would gladly have shot both the fool whose camera
flashed during the one act play and the fuckwit who carried on a mobile phone conversation
during it.
That house down the lane was the one Trickster had found for the McLean family following the
Battle of Manassas in July 1861. According to the Manassas (Va) Journal in 1895, McLean was
wont to tell folks that the American Civil War had started with the Army of the Potomac
confronting the Army of Northern Virginia on his front lawn and ended with their coming face
to face in his front parlour.
While we had been looking at Robert E. Lee’s quarters inside the superb Fort Monroe—he’d
been stationed there in the 1830s—as the nor’easter lashed Virginia Peninsula late on the
previous Friday afternoon, the Bush Administration released its policy that the United States
would “deny access to space to anyone ‘hostile to U. S. interests’.” Which is to say that just as the
patriot act gives absolute power to the U. S. President to imprison anyone he declares is a bad
person, so too will the president choose who can and can’t launch a payload into outer space.
According to U. S. Counterspace Operations Doctrine, the American should feel free to engage
in “deception, disruption, denial, degradation and destruction” in order to protect its spacecraft.
“Too right,” our Prime Minister at the time would have said, had he known about it, but a policy
released late Friday afternoon of the Columbus Day long weekend is not intended to be read, as
the Washington Post reporter explained. If, for argument sake, we suppose that someone in
Canberra did read it and our Foreign Affairs people had contacted Washington, it’s doubtful that
anyone in the USA would have noticed because ours is an insignificant satrapy.
Australia was never mentioned in the USA except insofar as The Crocodile Hunter was
Australian. His September 2006 demise received blanket coverage on American television. Vera
Sarkin watched TV in her bedroom so Meryn and I had access to the one in the living room or
the other in the basement, depending upon Ajax’ movements.
The mid-term Congressional elections were five weeks off and the Republicans were expected to
just hang on in the Senate, and possibly the House. Virginian Republican senator, George Felix
Allen, hadn’t cottoned on to the fact that right wing dominance had worn out its welcome with
the electorate and so still wore his racism on his sleeve while displaying (so they said) a noose—
fond memories of the good old days of nigger lynchings—in his office.
Allen entertained the idea of a tilt at the presidency, apparently, and didn’t realize that his
Democrat opponent, Scotch-Irish Jim Webb, had closed in—not, at any rate, until the news got
out that a Republican colleague, Florida Congressman Mark Foley, had been sending explicit
material to one of the Congressional Pages. Meryn and I had seen these Pages during visits to the
Capitol, youths who mooch about in the House and Senate—they’ve been there since 1820—
awaiting the summons to run errands or help out in one way or the other.
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Taken in by America
In light of the Foley sex scandal, the Saturday evening news carried an investigative reporter’s
interview with a former Page. They’re school students from the various Federal electorates, he
explained, and in years gone by had been billeted in the homes of their respective Congressmen.
That practice had ceased in the 1980s due to the number of Pages who had been sexually
harassed by their member. They nowadays live in segregated (male and female, not black and
white) dormitories and all was going well, it had been imagined, until the introduction of email.
Congressman Foley fell foul on that account. The Page had little to offer when asked by the
reporter to detail the best thing that had happened to him during his tenure. Lots of good things
had happened, he said. The interviewer pressed him for some gem. What was the funniest thing
that had happened? “Ah, the funniest thing,” the young man said gleefully, “was when the
Australian Prime Minister was here a couple of years ago to address both Houses and there were
hardly any Congressmen present. They got us to sit in the seats and pretend we were members of
Congress.”
Borat turned up in Washington and told Americans that their president was entertaining a
pretender at the White House whereas he, Borat, was the rightful representative of Kazakhstan.
A day or so later, we noticed strange people riding the Metro, all talking about 1 pm. at the White
House. We were going there ourselves, to Lafayette Square, where we wanted to see pew number
54 in St John’s Episcopal Church. Every American president since James Madison has
worshipped at St. John’s so we went and knelt on the various presidential cushions. One was too
soft, another too hard, but Bill Clinton’s was just right.
We also wanted to see a house that had been built on the corner of the square over the road
from the White House in 1860. It’s the same as collecting bracelet charms, or spoons, only
different. Come one o’clock, we strolled through the square and saw the people who’d been on
the Metro walking up and down, carrying placards, agitated. They didn’t appear to be upset about
the invasion of Iraq, or anything like that so I asked an angry middle-aged woman what they were
protesting about. “The Mexicans have imprisoned the bounty hunter,” she said, “and our
president must get him freed.”
The White House Press Secretary specialised in snow jobs, spinning and dressing up whatever
‘information’ a cynical Administration released for public consumption. After savaging a member
of the press corp in front of his peers he encountered the fellow in a corridor. The Press
Secretary turned on the charm and extended his hand as if the public dressing down hadn’t
happened. It was all a show but which was the real Tony Snow? Masquerade is second nature to
the American.
Brought before the LDS patriarchs, a Mormon historian was branded an apostate for honest
research into her Church’s past. Having just made her a pariah, the men who’d cut her off from
her community talked to her of their admiration for her impressive defence of her work. She
summed up the experience of this aspect of corporate culture with the observation that “There’s
something vicious about niceness.” Blank expression, poker face, niceness—it’s a masquerade.
Half way through October, black netting began to appear on front porches. Intrigued, we said
nothing and waited, having learned from experience that things are never what they seem in the
USA. Then, driving somewhere in the car one day we saw a sign on someone’s fence declaring
that in view of all the trouble caused by the previous year’s display that householder would not
be making an effort for Halloween 2006. The black netting depicted spider web.
My Catholic upbringing had taught me that the last day of October is ‘All Souls Day’ whereas the
first of November is ‘All Saints Day’. The American doesn’t go in for souls and saints, though.
Come October, he drops the Christian façade and reverts to his true nature as a child of pagan
Mercurius. We didn’t notice until the following April, but Halloween trumps Good Friday.
Trickster triumphs over Christ.
On Friday October 13th 2006 we took the Metro south along the Potomac past Ronald Reagan
Airport to an eighteenth-century section of Alexandria, Virginia, the town where on July 18th
1774 George Washington chaired the Court House meeting which resulted in Virginia siding with
Massachusetts in adopting the rally cry of no taxation without representation. The Virginians
who attended proposed that a colonial congress convene for the purpose of preserving the
American’s rights.
Prior to that gathering, Virginia had regarded Massachusetts as its main rival, a hostile twin; after
it, the twins sought to play up their identity, to view any assault by Mother England on the one as
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a threat to the other. They hadn’t expected that this would lead to a union of the opposites and
the formation of a newly independent nation. Thomas Paine the pamphleteer had, though.
With the help of Benjamin Franklin, Paine had migrated from England to Philadelphia in 1774
and became a leading light in the republican movement. Paine’s powerful, straightforward prose
and disarming logic laid out the core issues of independence so cogently in Common Sense that the
Continental Congress was inspired to declare the former colonies to be free and independent
states.
Alexandria was reminiscent of Middleburg but without the hounds and horses. Middleburg, so
named for being mid-way between Alexandria and Winchester, was a way station for eighteenthcentury travellers and known for its inns. It added the other strings to its bow—foxhunting and
steeplechase—from the beginning of the twentieth century.i More substantial but just as British,
Alexandria grew from being a tobacco export port in the late seventeenth century to a major
trading town by the middle of the eighteenth.
Named for the merchant, John Alexander, Alexandria became a hub of shipping for Scottish
merchants to move cargo between Glasgow and Virginia, a critical leg in international trade.
Today, Alexandria and Middleburg are chintzy tourist towns whose traders tout tat for the likes
of Vera Sarkin.
I gave the month’s notice specified in our lease to Vera on the Sunday but she took umbrage and
seemed to suggest that we were liable for payment of rent and utilities right up until the end of
the year. Eggshells everywhere, I eventually managed to speak with Ajax about the terms of the
written agreement. He told me that Vera had realised she didn’t properly word the document and
accepted the fact that we were operating under the letter of the law. I explained that we had not
imagined we were escaping through any loophole, that were that the case we would have done so
immediately upon moving in only to discover that Vera’s claim concerning public transport had
been a furphy. I relaxed. I told Ajax we would co-operate and move out just as soon as Vera
found another tenant.
Meryn removed a load of washing that our landlady had left in the machine for a day, removed it
and put it through the dryer, taking care with fabrics that could be damaged if not properly
handled. When she told Vera what had been done the ogre bit her head off, screaming “How
dare you!” at Meryn’s audacity, “How would you feel if someone touched your things?”
Hysterical.
We packed our bags, arranging to store items not needed for the mid-November United
Kingdom trip in Meryn’s New Jersey friend’s basement. We sent a parcel of books to Australia in
an M bag from the Post Office at Washington’s Union Station, transacted secure electronic
banking at the Library of Congress, purchased two recent books—‘State of Denial’ and ‘The
Architect’—about Trickster in American politics, and rented a car for our autumn leaves tour of
Connecticut.
The car company came up with a Chrysler PT Cruiser as conforming to the criteria in the rental
contract. It was marginally better than the Chevrolet Cobalt. It was dark when we left the doll’s
house at 5.30 am and there was a thick fog so instead of our usual backroads I took Interstate 66
west intending to turn right at Route 15 to connect with Interstate 70 and then Interstate 81. We
missed the turn and completely squandered any advantage our early start might have afforded
when caught up in a major traffic jam near Middleburg on Route 50.
Hamilton had reckoned on catching up with Dempster and was incensed by the two-hour delay.
We were, all three, nervous wrecks by the time the Chrysler merged with Interstate 81 at
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and crossed the magnificent Susquehanna River. We left Interstate 81
for roast beef with gravy and mashed potatoes at a diner on Route 443 near Friedensburg.
In differentiating the real Virginia Gentleman from the ubiquitous copy, Richard Crouch notes that “If he is a riding
gentleman and gets invited to the hunts, he enjoys in his slightly embarrassed way the attention he gets as an authentic
in a gathering that includes so many of the nouveau-this and the pseudo-that. But the very presence of so many
parvenus as dominate many hunts these days is enough to make at least the native gentleman wonder uncomfortably if
he is in the wrong place. He probably doesn’t mind suiting up, for the appeal of anachronistic costume is strong
enough to make time-transvestism one of his most notorious secret vices. But the unnecessary overlay of recentlyimported English tradition, and the unavoidable hint of snobbery and strangeness among the newcomers, are enough
to make him wonder seriously if he really wants to get his neck broken withg a bunch of people like this.” Richard E
Crouch, The Virginia Gentleman: A Field Guide, an Owner's Manual, a History, and a Way of Life (Arlington, Va: Elden
Editions, 1999), 18-19
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Taken in by America
Another two hour traffic jam on Route 61 frustrated me to buggery and it was dark by the time
we were on Interstate 17 in New York State. Meryn found a Rest Area and we slept in the
Cruiser, heavy rain beating down all night. No better stationary than mobile, it’s a very
uncomfortable vehicle and I’d steer clear of one if I were you.
Fog and un-signposted back roads in the Catskill Mountains made for an eerie start to the day as
deer crossed the road before us willy-nilly, backwoods folk appeared from nowhere and a down
at heel trailer park loomed up out of the mist. Better wake to that than Vera Sarkin.
The wandering deer reminded Meryn of a business enterprise that we’d come across which
specialised in breeding lions for wealthy Wall Street financiers to kill. Once the lion was ‘treed’,
the customer would get a phone call so he could fly in, shoot it, and fly out. And how did a deer
on the road remind her of that? Well, having told some acquaintance about the Wall Street way
of hunting big game, Meryn’s interlocutor said that he knew of a New Zealand deer farmer who
provides a similar service for American tourists. Once a buck is corralled in a suitable setting—
one where neither the fencing nor any other marker of civilisation is visible—he phones the deer
‘hunter’ who flies in to be photographed in the act of shooting the beast. The head and antlers
are mounted and he gets to take home the trophy and accompanying pic. It’s a costly business
with little room for error and to more or less guarantee success a crackshot farmhand stands
nearby and takes up the slack of any near misses. The beast gets a bullet through the heart every
time. On one occasion, the deer was inadvertently despatched before the customer had arrived so
the farmhands had to string the animal up with fishing line to the branch of a tree and let go as
the punter fired the gun. For the American, the copy is the thing.
Eggs, bacon, and sausage in a Shandanken diner on Route 28 left us dissatisfied. Subtle autumn
colours seen through mist and drizzle were greyed out by a lead curtain of rain so heavy that the
town of Ashoken appeared to be underwater and so loud that it drowned out the Ken Burns
Civil War soundtrack to which we’d been listening. The inner ear must have picked out some
tune, though, because I drifted back to Amelia Court House, musing upon the plight of those
poor bastards awash with guns when they desperately needed butter.
A number of friends had said the tale about our experience of the Columbus Day weekend
nor’easter reminded them of Robbie Robertson’s 1969 song The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
where a Confederate veteran casts his mind back to those days leading up to Robert E. Lee’s
surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia in April 1865. We were near Woodstock, New York,
and the house (dubbed ‘Big Pink’) where Robbie Robertson and his fellow members of ‘The
Hawks’ rehearsed songs which they subsequently recorded for ‘Music From Big Pink.’ They
released that album under their new name, ‘The Band’.
Meryn was happy enough to wander around downtown Saugerties. Hamilton was ecstatic: The
Band was not alone in going under a different name; the American adopts an alias at the drop of
a hat and, according to Hamilton, Dempster sometimes travelled under the ‘Henry Carter’ alias.
The Detective Sergeant believed that Henry Carter hung out near there.
A couple of young shop assistants in a milk bar stared at me, uncomprehending, when I asked if
they could tell me where to find Big Pink. Their boss managed to hear beyond the accent and
came out and suggested I ask the bookshop proprietor next door “ ... because he knows
everything about Saugerties.”
I don’t know how I had missed seeing the bookshop. It was typically American, as was the
proprietor. One of his customers and I discussed the music made in the basement of Big Pink
while he dug out and marked a map which guided us to Ponderosa Lane. Standing next to that
icon was a highlight for me. Meryn was taken with the setting in the woods and Hamilton wanted
to stay until Carter came home. He could not be accommodated, I knew, so I was expecting
trouble but he acquiesced, calmed by the colours, perhaps, or the texture of the hardback I had
purchased from the bookshop?
Hartford’s freeways threatened to crunch the Chrysler. Motels were near capacity because of a
basketball game but we found room at the inn and southeast to North Westchester in the
morning, down Route 149, across the Connecticut River at East Haddam, and southwest through
North Branford and other nineteenth-century mill towns to New Haven’s East Rock overlook
(lookout) at the end of Orange Street, wondering whether we’d run into Bob. From up there it
was evident that Connecticut’s famed fall colours would not reach their peak for another week.
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Downtown, we checked out the old haunts, had black bean and sour cream soup at Atticus, and
took a last look at Harkness Tower. And while we didn’t come across Bob, his guide to New
Haven came to mind as we looked down on the town from West Rock. For it was in a cave up
there at West Rock that Edward Whalley and William Goffe hid from King Charles II’s men in
the 1660s.
Charles II’s father, King Charles I, had been tried and executed in 1649 at the height of the
English Civil War between the parliamentary roundheads (republicans) and the royalist cavaliers
(monarchists). Edward Whalley, his son-in-law, William Goffe, and John Dixwell had all played a
part in that trial and execution. Whalley, moreover, was the lieutenant general in the roundhead
cavalry to whom the royal garrison had surrendered after the battle of Worcester in September
1651. With the defeat of the royalists at Worcester, the parliamentarians had won the war and
Charles II fled England. Oliver Cromwell, Whalley’s cousin, became Lord Protector of England,
Scotland and Ireland.
Cromwell died on the anniversary of the battle of Worcester in 1658 and was buried in
Westminster Abbey. He had left a political vacuum which was not resolved until Charles I’s son
was restored to the throne in 1660. Charles II set about avenging his father’s death. Oliver
Cromwell’s body was dug up from Westminster Abbey and the Lord Protector was
posthumously beheaded. Royal agents were sent to arrest the ‘regicides,’ the republican judges
who’d presided at Charless I’s trial. Three of them—Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell—became
fugitives and escaped to Massachusetts.
Colonial Americans from Massachusetts had tended to identify with the roundheads because they
were of the same ilk—Puritans who wanted to break free from Anglican royalty. Virginia, more
cavalier, had remained loyal to the throne and opposed to Massachusetts right up until that
Alexandria Court House meeting in 1774. Massachusetts hid and protected the three regicides,
and assisted in getting them get across the Connecticut River to New Haven and the woodlands
of West Rock.
The roads which spread out in three directions from Broadway in the town in which Yale
University was founded 40 years after the restoration of the English monarchy, then, are named
for the men who represented the republican cause in English society.
New York State’s autumn leaves had been impressive so we drove back to the Hudson where,
high up on the eastern bank overlooking Bear Mountain Bridge we looked down upon nature’s
spectacular mantle. The day was getting dark and, having already discovered that the Cruiser
didn’t double as a bed, we took the scenic route above the western bank of that magnificent river
past the crowded lookout to end up at a Super 8 on Interstate 84, paying double—$US91.00—for
the last remaining room.
Come Sunday morning, October 23rd, we learned that demand for the rooms had exceeded
supply because of a hotrod race nearby. The chaplain’s white Chrysler PT Cruiser track car was
parked next to our rented PT. Back on the scenic route south, we slotted into a space at the
overlook and got out to marvel at the magnificent spectacle. Another parking space at Bear
Mountain Bridge afforded us the opportunity to walk out over the water and see the splendid
autumn leaves up and down the banks. Meryn stitched her first tapestry from a snap taken on the
bridge walkway.
Hamilton told me he couldn’t be too sure how reliable they were but reports indicated that
Dempster had drowned while on a picnic. In so far as such stories kept him quiet they were
efficacious so I joined the crowd in allowing silly nonsense a seat at the table of what sustains me.
And, as if this type of irrational behaviour pleased the Lord, exquisite fall colours raised the
experience of the drive along Seven Lakes Parkway to the level of the numinous—after which we
rejoined Route 17 and relished the bacon, eggs, and hash browns served up at a Tuxedo diner.
From there, we went to unload our excess baggage in Meryn’s friend’s New Brunswick, New
Jersey basement. He and his family welcomed us with coffee and cake and his wife told us of a
scientific breakthrough she had been part of in a research laboratoryi: mammals pass a hormone
to their suckling infants from the breast but do not carry that hormone in their blood. Counterintuitive outcomes associated with this system give rise to the fact that infants suckled in
environments where there’s dire scarcity suck nutrition out of anything and everything.
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The American pronounces ‘laboratory’ from the original meaning of ‘to elaborate.’
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Taken in by America
This remains a life long facility—even if the person in question migrates to a region of plenty
such as the United States. The American obesity epidemic, then, may have an organic as against a
psychological cause. There’s a lot of water to go under the bridge before any such ‘lactocrine’
conclusion can be reached, of course, and I’m still rooting for corn syrup as the likely culprit. It’s
food for thought but.
Pressing on, we made slow progress on Route 1 so detoured to Interstate 95 and were caught in
an hour-long traffic jam caused by roadworks that closed 2 lanes between Exits 1 and 3. Where
we come from the notion of driving bumper to bumper on a freeway after dark on a Sunday
doesn’t compute. Once through, we resumed the standard 70 mph and kept up until a very
welcome Maryland Rest Area presented itself. All Rest Areas boast clean toilets so that was no
surprise but the high quality brewed coffee dispensed by a slot machine was a godsend. A week
to the day we pulled in to that Rest Area again.
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Chapter 10 A Pair of Knaves
Northern Virginia’s fall was spectacular. We went west, to the Blue Ridge, reading the signs
concerning George McClellan’s drawn out dismissal as commander of the Army of the Potomac
and his finally boarding the train at Warrenton on November 11th 1862 to go home to his wife in
New Jersey.
We were back in Centreville in time to watch Hardball and out of there early on the Tuesday for a
final assault on Richmond. Wrong turns, roadworks, and rain resulted in our not reaching
Fredericksburg until 10.30 am. It’s another of those well preserved eighteenth-century towns—
chock full of shopkeepers like Alexandria and Middleburg but without the gaudy chintz.
We toured the Civil War sites associated with the battles of Chancellorsville and the Wilderness.
Exquisite autumn leaves paved the way as we followed the 27-mile route that the ambulance
bearing an injured Stonewall Jackson took to Guiney Station on May 2nd 1863. Jackson had
ridden out to scout around under cover of darkness and was shot by friendly fire. He contracted
pneumonia after his left arm was amputated and when he died a week later General Robert E.
Lee said he’d lost his right arm.
The Confederate victory at the Battle of Chancellorsville paved the way for Lee’s invasion of the
north and his subsequent defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Union General
Ulysses Grant’s victory at Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 4th 1863, the day after Meade’s less than
spectacular success at Gettysburg, turned the tide of the war and put the spotlight on Grant as
the military leader for whom Lincoln had prayed.
Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant first encountered one another as field commanders at the
Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864. An extraordinarily bloody three days of fighting, there,
where, a year after it had hit the Stonewall, friendly fire wounded Confederate Lieutenant
General James Longstreet to signal the beginning of the end for Lee’s rebels: the wily old fox
would be slowly but surely hemmed in and hunted down by a relentless foe who had the
industrial might of the nation supplying him and an indomitable spirit that would neither retreat
nor back down, no matter how many men had to die.
Pre-Grant, the Army of Northern Virginia had been able to rely upon the Union Army to allow
it to go off, lick its wounds and gird its loins after a fierce battle then come back to fight better
and stronger another day. Those days were gone; Union Major General Philip Sheridan was
already nipping at Lee’s heel in Richmond as Ulysses Grant moved south.
Amtrak had let us down on the outskirts of Richmond in 2003 but we had a vivid image of
having been hauled past once proud mansions just north of the Confederate capital. With little to
go on, we went looking for that place, at our best on such a hunt. Meryn reckoned the scene I
described had been in the vicinity of Harper’s Ferry but noted that Route 1 intersected a railroad
track 20 miles north of Richmond.
The Cruiser crossed the North Anna River at the point where Lee had sought to force the Union
Army to split into three in order to check Grant’s advance. Who knows what might have
happened had Lee not taken sick leave and missed the opportunity to strike Grant the heavy
blow so painstakingly contrived? The Union forces moved closer yet to Richmond.
So did we, and located those dilapidated mansions five miles from the crossing. One’s first visit
to Disneyland cannot be as sweet a sensation as finding a mile of railroad that was otherwise a
faint memory. We walked along it, over it, took photographs of freight trains on it, looked
askance at the weak coffees served up in a café adjacent to it, and I bowed to America’s pagan
god when the Amtrak passenger train passed over it. What why we are here, as my Russian
colleague would say.
God knows what history has trod that stretch of railroad in Ashland, Virginia. We drove up and
down the road along which the train passes, lost our way when I made a false move, and
eventually approached Richmond from Route 33 South. It was difficult to get a handle on
Richmond in the early afternoon so we went south across the James River to Petersburg where a
car came at me head-on down the ‘wrong’ side of Washington before I realised I was the culprit,
running against the tide of a one-way street. A three-point manoeuvre (not helped by the PT
Cruiser’s limited turning circle) got us out of the fix and we found our way to a motel.
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Taken in by America
Did it have MSNBC? Yes. That was enough for us because Chris Matthews was hosting a day
long politics special on the imminent Congressional election. The women at the visitors’ centre
helped out with a local map and directions to the battlefield site. We walked around the old city
of Petersburg and found it to be cold and deserted despite the obvious signs of an effort to
rejuvenate it as a Civil War tourism centre. Poverty seemed to be the order of the day and we felt
like sitting ducks for a mugging as we made our way to the various ‘attractions’, such as the
trapezoid shaped (for keeping evil spirits out) house.
We returned to the car and toured the excellent battlefield site. Robert E. Lee knew the jig was
up but had dug in at Petersburg in a last ditch attempt to save Richmond. Grant laid siege and
Lee’s men held out for nine months. The Confederates starved in the trenches while the Union’s
Army of the Potomac was amply clothed and fed by its supply trains. The first frames of the
Nicole Kidman movie ‘Cold Mountain’ depict the scene, there, on July 30th 1864, when Union
Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants’ well laid plans to blow the Confederates from their trenches
resulted in an own goal of 4000 Union casualties at the battle of the Crater.
Pleasants, a Pennsylvania mining engineer who had overseen the digging of Allegheny Mountain
tunnels for the Pennsylvania Railroad, had his men—experienced coal miners—dig beneath a
Confederate trench and pack the tunnel with explosives. The resulting explosion killed or
maimed 278 Confederates and breached their defences but Union General Meade, solicitous,
ordered a change of plan so that instead of the specially trained African American division going
in to complete the job untrained white troops were sent instead. Ulysses Grant had supported
Meade and now they both looked on as Union soldiers charged into the crater made by Pleasants’
explosion.
The American is nothing if not disorganised. His nation’s government is deliberately structured
to ensure that the one arm of government is prevented from acting by the other. The American
is a pair of hostile twins, his world a conflict of opposites—Jesus-Satan, Adams-Jefferson, liberty
versus freedom, white mastering black, outlaw-drifter, state’s rights as against Union, NorthSouth, Baptist-Southern Baptist Convention, and so on—that had its origins in Virginia’s distrust
of Massachusetts.
We left the battlefield near dark and went in search of something to eat. Petersburg poverty came
to the fore: none of the eating establishments was open, not even a ‘take-out’. We drove to a
Domino’s Pizza joint on the outskirsts of town and discovered that in that part of America
entrances are designed to keep people out, that its security system is a retail outlet’s top priority.
The small, unappetising pizza cost $US17.00 and they didn’t do coffee. We’d have to get that at
the gas station. I filled the tank while Meryn went inside to get the precious fluid. They suggested
she try the place next door. It had a security door and security grill but no coffee.
After pizza with MSNBC we went to bed, ready to take Richmond on the morrow. Scarborough
Country featured a fellow from Las Vegas who sought to draw attention to the fact that the
American needs be properly entertained, that “if the escape isn’t there then [he’s] not free” and
the whole money making enterprise will collapse. Out the window, what had appeared to be the
very peculiar arc of a jet airliner’s vapour trail revealed itself in time as a thin and wispy sickle
moon. I’d never before seen the arc of the new moon leave such a trace; the radius which gave
rise to that perimeter was beyond my experience.
All through the night the constant passage of trains—the whole basis of Petersburg’s strategic
importance and why Grant had laid siege to it—disturbed Hamilton and set me in a sublunary
orbit of half-sleep. Come morning, the room was all round the wrong way and the light on the
opposite side of where it should have been.
Breakfast television carried a report that the significant increase in fuel economy of the modern
car over that of its 1960s’ precursors had been more than offset by the percentage increase in the
weight of the American and average fuel-consumption had therefore risen. Channel flicking
revealed that the Bush Administration and Rush Limbaugh strategy for winning elections was to
create a straw man, a two-dimensional world of fantasy and spin that copied only that aspect of
the real world of substance which inspired confidence. Karl Rove, George Bush’s confidence
man, kept a card up his sleeve to trick a gullible electorate with a false picture of reality. Would he
fall for it again, the American, or read the signs?
We parked and walked to the Richmond Capitol, first constructed in 1788 as a copy of an ancient
Roman temple. A fellow approached us as we tried to identify lesser lights among the founding
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fathers on a massive stone monument that gave prominence to George Washington. Hamilton
was creating a terrific din, bitching about the masons. The helpful guide wanted to tell the story
of Virginia’s Capitol and assumed, reasonably, that we were admiring it and the surrounds from a
tourist’s perspective but he warmed to the broader issue of the nation’s presentation of its heroes
and listened politely to the suggestion that the American casts Washington in much the same
light as Chinese communists had Mao Zedong.
Pressed for time, he let that go but confirmed that it was Patrick “give me liberty or give me
death” Henry being portrayed on the second level of greatness. Patrick Henry, Virginia’s first
governor, is the personification of American liberty operating as freedom’s hostile twin.
Virginia had put aside its opposition to Massachusetts and, fired by the type of republican spirit
which Patrick Henry’s call had expressed, took up arms against authority to fight for
independence from the Crown. The War of Independence won, the delegates representing the
people of the newly independent states set about ratifying the American Constitution. Virginia’s
“Yea” or “Nay” vote would be critical.
The members of the Virginia convention charged with making the decision debated the pros and
cons of the matter for three weeks. At the climax on June 24th 1788, Patrick Henry addressed the
convention and called upon the delegates not to ratify the Constitution of the United States of
America because to do so would mean handing over to the Federation the God-given right of a
Virginian to own slaves. “ … they’ll free your niggers,” he had warned.
The Virginians ratified it anyway—because James Madison was able to convince his fellow
Convention delegates that Massachusetts would not free the slaves, had no evil intent with
respect to the peculiar institution and wouldn’t dream of depriving white men of their liberty to
own black men.
Virginia had exacted its price—the preservation of the institution of slavery—and joined the
Union. Massachusetts looked upon that union as having given rise to a New World nation, the
United States. Virginia, though, regarded itself as a sovereign member of the United States and
pushed for each state’s right to govern as it saw fit, free from federal interference. Instead of
throwing its weight behind and helping to consolidate the fledgling republic, Virginia reverted to
the colonial habit of differentiating itself from Massachusetts.
That the Union had paid too high a price for Virginia’s vote was brought home when Richmond
fell seventy-seven years later. The architect of Richmond’s Capitol, Thomas Jefferson, became
Virginia’s foremost representative in the Federal government. He shared his fellow founding
fathers’ Enlightenment ideals but not their vision of the ideal republic. Not that put forward by
Northerners like John Adams of Massachusetts at any rate.
The Constitution of the United States which Virginia ratified in 1788 had been born of
competing notions as to what would constitute the ideal republic. Massachusetts had found
nothing in eighteenth-century Europe to inspire confidence (because monarchy was the norm
there) so had turned instead to the Enlightenment version of Greek democracy and the Roman
republic as guiding models. Adams believed that mixed government was what had made Rome a
great republic.
Virginia disagreed. According to Jefferson, it was the fact that Roman society had been
underpinned by the noble agrarian ideal whereby the “cultivators of the earth are [regarded as]
the most valuable citizens.”26 Jefferson’s vision for Virginia, as for the United States of America,
was at one with his architecture: a copy of his picture of ancient Rome.
Massachusetts, too keenly aware of the realities of international trade and the stirring giant of
manufacture and industry, was not persuaded by Virginia’s notion of an agrarian arcadia. The
twins settled upon a typically American compromise: The North succeeded in having the
Constitution of the United States of America underwrite a structure in which government
becomes a balancing act between one president, few senators, and many representativesi while
the South secured the right of its citizens to own slaves. So it was that the New World republic
developed into a nation at odds with itself.
The history of the USA is the story of Trickster fooling the American time out of mind.
Massachusetts gained the upper hand in federal government and held onto it until 1800. Virginia
The founding fathers who championed this model operated on the belief that the Roman republic had incarnated
Plato’s 4th century BC theory of mixed government.
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might have folded but for the good fortune of having turned up a pair of jacks: Eli Whitney’s
invention of the cotton gin and ’dat old time religion.
The introduction of the cotton gin from 1792 made it possible for the short-staple cotton
cultivated in the American South to compete with imported long-staple cotton. Planters suddenly
had money growing on trees and would become very wealthy just so long as there was plenty of
slave-labour on hand to pick it. With this lifeline thrown to the South’s agrarian economy,
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison succeeded in turning the tide of Federation away from an
emphasis on Union toward its contrary, states’ rights.
Time and tide wait for no man, though, the planters knew, so they set about nipping the
development of progressive ideas in the bud. Well-educated federal politicians were unreliable
because they might one day adhere to their professed Enlightenment ideals and emancipate the
slaves. Rather than cross that bridge when they came to it, the plantation owners began the
process of supplanting such ‘old-school’ types with unsophisticated, self-serving legislators whom
they could put in their pocket.
Jeffersonian democracy inadvertently created a steady supply of such self-serving politicians via
the attempt to establish an agrarian republic of myriad small landowners. Since these commonfolk landowners met the property requirement as electors, all that was needed was to get them to
vote for ill-educated bigots willing to take provincial politics into the federal arena.
Mercurius had stacked the deck, of course, so up jumped the other half of the pair, America’s
perennial jack-in-the-box—evangelical Christianity. Religious zealots made ‘nigger haters’ of the
South’s common folk while opportunist politicians, in their turn, moved heaven and earth to
remove the property requirement altogether. That resulted in all the men among the preachers’
congregations being entitled to vote. Our generic Virginia called the political shots in federal
government right up until Abraham Lincoln called the South’s bluff in the 1860 presidential
election. Massachusetts (the North) paid to look and Virginia raised hell—acting upon the oftrepeated threat to secede. The secessionists left the Union to form the Confederate States of
America.
Meryn and I walked from Jefferson’s Capitol to the Confederate White House from which
Confederate President Jefferson Davis had fled on April 2nd 1865 when Abraham Lincoln’s
fighting General, Ulysses Grant, was at the gate. Grant was about to bring Virginia to heel and
end the war of rebellion. It had taken the American nigh on eighty years to put a leader in the
Oval Office who was prepared to face up to the fact that the Union was a house of cards
incapable of supporting both liberty and freedom.
Back at Centreville, we watched the state’s incumbent Republican senator, good ’ol boy George
Allen, entertain the crowd at what might have been a garden party. The racist slur had always
played well in Virginia and the senator was among friends. He dished it up to the WASP
audience. But it was all on Youtube, and TV. The Confederate flag, noose, and being ill at ease
with questions concerning a Jewish lineage combined with the garden party performance to
frame the senator as representative of a bygone era.
The common man had no place in the vast exurb of Washington that Northern Virginia had
become. We watched with interest as successive polls showed Allen’s Democrat challenger
creeping up on the senator.
Vera Sarkin, meanwhile, instructed us on how we were to greet the children—with a mask of
niceness, and candy—who would come to the door and ask whether it would be trick or treat.
Nita, Meryn’s academic colleague, took the opposing view. As a child, she more than anything
else had preferred the trick, especially a scary one.
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Chapter 11 Donning the Mask
Nita and Harry had invited us to a Halloween Party in Pittsburgh. We booked a car at $US66.00
all up for three days from 4 pm on the Friday of the last weekend in October 2006, took the
Orange Line to L’Enfant Metro station, walked to the Library of Congress for internet banking,
then returned to catch the commuter bus to Dulles Airport where the rental car awaited us.
The bus exchange ticket did not work because it was more than 2 hours since we’d alighted from
the previous bus but we admitted under benign interrogation to possessing Metro rail tickets and
the driver found an 80-cent reduction in each of them. We collected a cobalt-blue Suzuki 4-door
sedan and left Centreville early on the Saturday morning. Route 40 West’s scenic section’s
Appalachian vistas and brilliantly coloured autumnal back roads were awe inspiring.
A massive black cloud unleashed heavy rain and hail as we descended what a road sign labelled “a
dangerous mountain” path and ticked off another ‘first’—driving through sleet.
In Pittsburgh, we took up where we’d left off with Nita and Harry, the latter saying he thought
Halloween America’s best secular celebration all year. Nita was unimpressed with my description
of Halloween as “wonderfully pagan.” It had started out as a Christian festival, she put me
straight “so your theory is wrong there.” Nita was not the first person to tell me that my theory
about this or that was wrong.
A work colleague once told me that shopping is invigorating. My gene for that is expressed as
taking pleasure in the heat of argument. Surely the most significant element of the Roman
Catholic ‘All Souls Day’ is the Roman part? The fall, death, decay, Pluto, and so on were integral
to pagan religions long before the Christians started worshipping Jesus the carpenter, weren’t
they? Nita said that where she comes from and where her mother still teaches, in Oklahoma,
there’s a ban against the non-Christian elements—the scary stuff which she had enjoyed most as
a child—associated with Halloween. Whatever else might be the case, it’s obvious that Halloween
is all about the American’s need to don the mask.
To the untrained eye, Harry and Nita (he ghostly-pale in modified tuxedo and cummerbund and
she similarly pale except for a bloodstain running down from the corner of her mouth) might
have been a generic Dracula and heroine. In fact, they had transformed themselves into faithful
copies of a particular pair—the famous 1930s Hollywood couple, Bela Lugosi and Helen
Chandler. They were in costume as the American.
Meryn’s solution to our dressing up dilemma was inspired for being both practical and
appropriate: we cut slits in black paper bags, put them over our heads, and dressed as the pair of
Ned Kellys from Sidney Nolan’s ‘Glenrowan’ (1945). Such primitive disguise unsettled the other
guests to the point where Meryn felt compelled to drop it and resume her life as the real thing. I
maintained the charade, enthralled by the strange effect that a paper bag mask had on those
around me.
A 1930s socialite in long gloves and swirling hat sat next to me but I didn’t realise she was there
(the slit limited visual perception) until she stood up to move away and asked “Who or what is
that?” Not Hollywood. Harry and Nita’s masquerade was the most sophisticated but they didn’t
win the prize. That went to the couple who looked for all the world to be Neptune and Diana.
No, no, someone said, John is dressed as Poseidon and Rene as Artemis. Wrong movie.
If allowed back in to the USA upon returning from the United Kingdom at the end of
November we’d be living on the other side of Pennsylvania from Pittsburgh, in Lancaster
County. Meryn had negotiated the rental arrangement with a pleasant, civilised woman with
whom we felt relieved to be dealing. We left Harry and Nita’s at noon, intending to drive by the
apartment that would be our new home. A terrifying wind-blown ride east along the turnpike
trying to keep from being run down by tractor-trailers bearing down on us at 80 mph and plastic
turkey sandwiched between two lumps of half-frozen counterfeit foccacia served up at the lunch
stop half way between Greensburgh and Lancaster reiterated the working rule of thumb:
‘Interstate yes, turnpike no’.
Lancaster looked like the ideal antidote to an exurb when we drove through town with the sun
low down. Fifteen or so miles further on we reached the rural outpost that would be home for
the last month of 2006. In the half hour of light left in the day we drove around to try and figure
out how we’d be able to lay in provisions without a motor vehicle. It would be feasible, we
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decided, not easy but worth the effort. And if necessary we’d hire a car. Rustic, with Amish horse
drawn carriages clip clopping down Main Street, past what would be our window. And no Vera
Sarkin.
It had been a week to the day since we’d been caught in the Sunday night gridlock on Interstate
95 so we set out for Route-1 but missed a turn and drove through Amish communities for an
hour before finding our way. The oncoming headlights on Route 1 convinced us that Interstate
95 South was the safe bet and we were once again in the Sunday night snarl. It only lasted fifteen
minutes but we were buggered from the long drive and still 24 miles northeast of Baltimore,
Maryland.
Getting through the spaghetti immediately after emerging from the Baltimore tunnel at night is
no mean feat, especially since you’re pushed to drive at break neck speed, but it’s an adrenalin
inducing ride and we figured we could make it to the excellent Maryland Rest Area half way to
Washington, D.C., for another fine cup of brewed coffee from the superb slot machine. We
made it but came upon a bad sign: “Out of Order.” Very bad.
Interstate 495, the Beltway, felt close to home when we finally reached it, and Interstate 66
seemed to be just around the corner. Hamilton had no hope of keeping me awake that night.
Vera had started to signal that she would not return our deposit for rent and utilities. What could
possibly stop her from inspecting the room which we had rented on the morning we were leaving
and settling the account straight away? “That’s not how it’s done,” she said. So I was keyed up
and angry with the ogre and the idea of a month in Amish country took on the aura of light at
the end of the funnel web spider’s tunnel.
The flight from Dulles to Manchester, England, was a fortnight off. The excellent Suzuki wasn’t
due back until late afternoon so we went in search of the Confederate shop in the Shenandoah
Valley that we’d stumbled upon on our first car rental trip in 2005. While in that store we had
first heard a recording of the 2nd South Carolina String Band and a member of the band now
informed me that the shop in question was on the outskirts of Harrisonburg. He went on to say
that the proprietor continued to hold Abraham Lincoln in contempt and suggested we conduct
an experiment to verify the fact. The deal went down as he had predicted: we purchased an item
worth one dollar and paid with a five-dollar note; the employee placed Abraham Lincoln’s visage
on the $US5 note face down in the till and gave us two $US2 notes in return.
The Thomas Jefferson $US2 note is quite uncommon. This was not just Jefferson’s Virginia but
the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, scene of Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson’s rapid marching military
triumphs in May and June of 1862. The proprietor of that Confederate trading post makes a
living selling the Stars and Bars and other anachronistic Southern memorabilia to the Yankee
Civil War tourist. Virginia’s inverted copy of the Yankee trader’s masquerade reflects the dual
nature of the American.
On another deja vu trip Meryn and went looking for the ‘Bed and Breakfast’ we’d stayed at on
our first visit to D.C. in 2003. We rode the Red Line from Metro Central to Adams Morgan and
then walked where we’d gone before. The inn was still open for business and everything looked
much the same but it was much closer to Downtown D.C. than we’d realised when staying there.
It’s walking distance from the White House out along Connecticut Avenue. Familiarity shrinks
the scale: an intersection that had required the full sensory repertoire in 2003 was now just
another step along the way. After clocking up thousands of miles in rental cars and walking a
good many through D.C., NYC, New Haven, etc., the left-hand–right-hand polarity had become
second nature, not a puzzle to be thought through. Now we are tall and Christmas trees are small
…
Aside from the exquisite display of the decline and decay of the autumn leaves, the Northern
Virginia fall was much like what we were used to back home: beautiful sunny days where the
temperature was just right. It was the first week of November; sun poured through the window
of the doll’s house past the clocks that had been put back to where they should have been all
along; the silk long johns called up by the creeping cold of the previous week had gone back in
their box because the weather had reverted to ‘benign’ mode.
The ‘Washington Post’ carried a story about re-training the people whose job it was to see that
the polling stations ran smoothly come the following Tuesday, November 7th. The average age of
these workers was 67 (because retired folks didn’t have to take a day off work to perform that
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civic duty) and they were expected to become au fait with electronic voting machines. One 76year-old was quite frustrated when he was told the machines were similar to
“Blackberries and other PDA’s.”
“What’s a PDA? He asked.
“Personal Digital Assistant, Sir.”
The fellow was nonplussed.
An MSNBC presenter questioned someone from the advisory body set up after the ‘hanging
chad’ debacle in Florida during the 2000 presidential election. The advisor wanted to re-assure
Americans that the system had been fixed, that more changes had been made in the six years to
2006 than in the previous two-hundred. On behalf of any elector still not convinced, the womn
from MSNBC pressed him further and he made the serious point that whilst it was true that
there’d be all kinds of electronic voting machines in use on the Tuesday and that many of them
would be difficult to use, he felt certain that only the few who did not bother to find out in
advance what sort of machine was being used in their electoral precinct and ensure that they
practised and learned how to use that machine would have any difficulty on the day.
The woman conducting the interview accepted his remarks at face value and did not question
him further. Rather, she took him as having now put any unwarranted concerns to rest on the
question of electronic voting. President Andrew Jackson’s mythical advisor wasn’t too far off the
mark when he said that “In America the people is used for voting.”
I had advised Vera that the shower set aside for our use had been lukewarm at best since she’d
had a new boiler installed. She called in a plumber who promised to be there but hadn’t showed
as yet. So when the knock came she bolted to the door and escorted the handsome fellow
downstairs. I had half expected her to direct him to enter via the back gate but then remembered
that for all her nastiness, she’s still a citizen of the republic; the American does not demean
himself with a tradesman’s entrance mentality.
When he had finished the job I heard the plumber tell Vera that the old tap had so deteriorated
that he’d had to break it to pieces, that there was nothing for it but to install a new one, and that
she must be careful to reset the thermostat if we were not to be scalded as a consequence of his
having fixed the problem. I waited for an hour before checking whether Vera had adjusted the
setting. She hadn’t so I was careful to have a handle on the cold tap as I showered. There was no
need. Still lukewarm at best. The thermostat remained on the highest setting right up until our
last day in the doll’s house and the water was never more than tepid. The plumber was a
confidence man. Vera didn’t want to know. She had paid so by definition the shower had been
fixed.
The American’s constant refrain that “this is the greatest country on earth” is true only by
definition, too, because he doesn’t bother to compare his living conditions with conditions
enjoyed by citizens of other nations: driving to the ‘park and ride’ or ‘kiss and ride’ as the first
stage in a ridiculously long ‘commute’; appalling public transport; low hourly rates of pay because
of excessive hours of work; as a customer he pays business the going price and must then top up
the workers’ low wages with a tip; the gun lobby arms local lunatics in his community to the teeth
on the one hand while executive government whips up paranoia against harmless outsiders on
the other.
He buys the story that everyone wants to live in America, that they’ll do anything to get there at
the same time as he believes that evil Satanic types hate the American’s freedom, hate the fact
that he has fashioned a paradise on earth for himself. It’s all buncombe, as Andrew Jackson’s
advisor used to say. The American is the mark in the confidence game.
I’d always thought that the presidential race was run on Melbourne Cup Day but the American
votes on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November. So Nixon may not have passed
the post the same day as ‘Rain Lover’ afterall. Two main schools of thought had emerged on
what would determine the outcome of the Congressional mid term elections to be held on
Tuesday, November 7th. The longstanding traditional (macro) view was that the American would
use what the founding fathers bequeathed to him in the way of checks and balances and vote
Democrat in consequence. Old style conservative Republicans, Independents, and Democrats
would vote Democrat in order to restrain an increasingly worrisome executive branch of
government.
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Conservatives pointed out that the Bush Administration’s excesses were the result of a White
House presided over by a man who had lost his grip on reality. The job of Congress was to check
the president but since the existing (Republican Party dominated) Congress had merely rubber
stamped whatever the president decreed the USA was in danger of becoming another of those
one-party states the American finds anathema. So the Republicans deserved to be thrown out of
the House and Senate, and would be, according to the ‘old school’ macro analysis.
The alternative view was that Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s long-time puppeteer and jester, had
micromanaged the electoral process to the point of consolidating the Republicans as a one-party
state, and that, corruption and sex scandals notwithstanding, the jester’s minions having been
following their instructions and sticking doggedly to making personal contact with each of the
many millions of eligible (and ineligible) voters in the Rove database, would once again turn out
the vote in favour of corruption and a Republican Party stranglehold on power.
This micro view rested on the success of the model Republicans had used to oust the unpopular
Democrats in the 1994 Congressional election and in every subsequent federal election. That
model in turn was a modern version of the strategy Republicans had used to get McKinley into
the White House in 1897 and to populate the Hill for years afterwards.
There was much greater discontent in 2006 than there had been in 1994 it was generally agreed,
and so the traditionalists concluded that the Democrats were a ‘shoo-in’ for the House, if not
both the House and Senate. But the micro school held fast to the belief that Rove’s ‘get out the
vote’ strategy was far superior to anything the Democrats had ever had, even when compared
with the industrial era Democrat method of ensuring everyone stuck to the Party line. Back then,
the mechanical voting machines were given a coat of coal dust by the local officials, and anyone
who voted other than according to the prescribed formula would be betrayed as having done so
by the black stain on his lever-pulling hand.
The American is comfortable with the fact that party officials run elections. Nor was he overly
concerned to learn that a significant proportion of the upcoming 2006 vote would be registered
and counted by privately supplied and programmed electronic digital black box voting machines
that had no paper trail; the voter could never know that what came out as being his vote was what
he had put in. Tests had shown, however, that inserting ‘Democrat’ resulted in a 60% likelihood
that ‘Democrat’ came out the other side—so the elector could have confidence. Traditionally, it
had been Democrats who’d benefited from cooking the election books so Republicans might
regard tipping the balance their way as nothing more than a recalibration.
Rove was leaving as little to chance as possible. He’d divided the American into absolutist and
non-absolutist types. There were many more non-absolutists—Catholics who believed it’s a
woman’s right to choose whether or not to have an abortion; Protestants who were squeamish
about homosexuality but who thought that what goes on (and who is) in the bedroom is a matter
for consenting adults. Non-absolutists were not regular church-goers, by and large, and only
attended once a week if they were regular.
The absolutist, on the other hand, was likely to go more than once a week to church—especially
on Wednesdays and Sundays—and he or she was much less concerned with the war in Iraq, or
the ineptitude of the president, or the level of corruption, than about gay men being allowed to
marry. Gay marriage really made him see red and he’d turn out to vote in a blizzard, just in order
to put a stop to the Gomorrah of gay men tying the knot. He was easy to find, that voter,
because he was at church two days before the election. And Karl Rove had been watching him
for years.
The absolutist was guaranteed to get a personal visit from a roving Karlite, and a series of followup phone calls to remind him that he simply must vote Republican if the president was to have
any hope of holding back the tide of homosexuality poised to swamp all good men and force that
great nation to its knees. As a matter of fact, the absolutist fundamentalist Christian was so afraid
of the legion of homosexuals wandering abroad that he no longer went down on his knees for
fear that evil Satan would slip something into his mouth and tempt him to suck it and see.
So that’s the way they lined up on Guy Fawke’s Day, three sleeps out from America’s world
famous biennial horse race. Would the American vote to use the Constitution to rein in an
increasingly manic Administration or would Karl’s foot soldiers work the absolutist Christians
into enough of a lather to vote against having to swallow what comes at Thanksgiving? Gobble,
gobble. Would the late-breaking news that the Evangelical advisor to the White House had been
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using the money from the Wednesday and Sunday collection plates to purchase methamphetamine and gay sex from a male prostitute-cum-drug dealer for the past three years be
enough to make the fundamentalist choke on his porridge?
We couldn’t vote, of course, but Meryn and I went to the local school to check the lay of the
land. A woman told us that Jim Webb was looking like a winner. She was on the money:
Northern Virginia put James Webb in the U. S. Senate.
A Republican who had been President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, James Webb is
the antithesis of George Allen. A successful author of novels and screenplays, Webb wants the
world to know of the vital role the Scotch-Irish have played in the development of the United
States. The Scotch-Irish were Scottish Protestants who went to Ulster in the early seventeenth
century and then migrated to America in the eighteenth century, taking a preparedness for
hardscrabble with them into the mountains of Virginia. Individualists who put a premium on
self-reliance, they were transformed into Thomas Jefferson’s common man who demanded the
right to bear arms and to worship God by copying the movements of wild animals—writhing,
crawling, and howling—at primitive religious camp meetings conducted by ill-educated circuitriders.
The common man bought the circuit-rider story that the bible sanctioned slavery and was
persuaded to defend states’ rights and identify with the planters’ interests. This was the American
whom Jefferson imagined to be the salt of the earth who would build the agrarian republic, and
whom self-serving legislators of the early nineteenth century put in their pocket. He went on to
be the common man of Jacksonian Democracy and continued to vote Democrat right up until
Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Thereafter, the common man became the
backbone of the Republican Party’s hold on the South.
Whether or not Senator Webb’s having gone over to the Democrats and toppled George Allen
signalled a seismic shift in the Red States remained to be seen but we had that same sensation of
‘being there when the worm turned’ in Virginia as we had had when Senator Joe Lieberman lost
the Connecticut Primary. Was it merely a change in the weather or was the American about to
change horses? We wouldn’t know until the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November
2008 but a black JFK elected on the strength of the youth vote would surely tell the world that
the American can do change better than anyone. Some things change and some stay the same:
would all eyes be on Chicago again?
Australia’s Remembrance Day is America’s Veteran’s Day; we visited Arlington cemetery on
Friday November 10th and were caught up in the sombre ceremonies taking place. Up until the
Civil War in the 1860s, Arlington had been Robert E. Lee’s Virginia estate, the inheritance of his
wife (who was a descendant of George Washington). It overlooks the Potomac River across from
the Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King told the nation about his version of the
American dream—on August 28th 1963.
On that day a quarter of a million Americans marched on Washington in the name of racial
equality. President John F. Kennedy had stared out from a window of the White House,
apprehensive about what the demand for African American civil rights might portend. Three
months later Kennedy was assassinated and his body interred at an exquisitely understated burial
site below Robert E. Lee’s house on the hill.
Robert Kennedy’s minimalist grave with its lone white cross is nearby. The burying ground of the
famous Irish Catholic brothers is worlds away from the changing of the guard ceremony at the
tomb of the unknown soldier. There, the American, patriotism on his sleeve, crowded round to
witness a precision display of what blind obedience can achieve: highly disciplined Marines
saluted empty stands upon which they were about to place a bouquet of flowers, clicked toes and
heels of very shiny shoes and moved like marionettes to their allotted place. And one staff officer
jumped right over the other staff officer’s back.
We walked across the Arlington Bridge to the District of Columbia, the river spread out
majestically below and beyond, and approached George Washington University from the West
rather than from the Vietnam War Memorial. Maya Lin’s black granite memorial is a continuum
of the Kennedy gravesites drawing our attention, as it does, to the fact of the matter as against
the sweet lie of mythical heroism. We’d paid homage to that sublime work of art on many
occasions so there was no sacrifice involved in our taking the alternative route through a part of
town with which we were unfamiliar.
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Taken in by America
Trickster rewarded us for the decision: we stumbled upon the Watergate Hotel just in time for
lunch. I wondered as I munched away on the excellent Greek chicken wrap and sipped the
quality coffee what might have happened had Chicago’s Mayor Daley not been there for JFK in
1960. Would Richard Nixon have been a better president, then, than he became a decade later?
Might as well ask the man on the moon, I guess? A few steps on from Watergate we walked
through the university to K Street—home of lobbyists paid to advance the agenda of wealthy
special interests ahead of the national interest—and down M through the eighteenth-century
charm of Georgetown.
During our final week in Centreville, Virginia, we made the most of fine weather, walking along
the National Mall from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol, zooming up for a privileged view of
the District of Columbia from the summit of the Washington Monument. And as we walked
away I recalled that night on the New Haven sidewalk and the Voodoo Man’s refrain:
“Conspiracies, conspiracies, conspiracies.” For internet cranks, the Monument (an Egyptian
obelisk) is a blatant sign that the freemasons run the world, their power and influence filling
every nook and cranny of Downtown D.C. Hamilton had already been initiated in the science of
signs, he told me, and insisted on my leaving one in Washington before we flew away.
We didn’t know until we turned up on the doorstep that the Portrait Gallery doesn’t open to the
public until about the time exurb commuters need to be heading home. Faced with such petty
frustrations, the American is apt to cash a cheque from his bank of clichés and be reminded, say,
that defeat is merely opportunity in disguise. He doesn’t cry over spilt milk, I figured, and neither
should I, so, despite the fact that the situation had nothing to do with self-reliance, we went in
search of bootstraps.
My shoe laces would not stay tied. According to Meryn, it’s common knowledge that shoes must
always and everywhere be tied twice whereas I’m of the flat-lace-single-knot school. I believed
that my shoes had kept coming undone because they had round laces. A department store
assistant suggested a CVS Pharmacy opposite a building that had a bizarre façade so we went in
and were told there might be shoelaces in aisle eleven. Alas, the staff packing shelves at aisle
eleven were in no mind to let us muscle in on their territory and take something off the shelf so
we returned to the gallery and saw an exhibition by an American artist who documented
experiences of being black in the South during the Kennedy-Johnson era. We’d heard him on
Australia’s Radio National earlier in the year and his work encouraged us to be sure to go to the
Deep South for more than a cursory glance. Upstairs, the striking nineteenth-century portrait of
John C. Calhoun looked me straight in the eye.
South Carolina’s favourite son, Scotch-Irish Calhoun had started out as a Union man but came
around to be the foremost states’ rights advocate—as we know from his infamous snub to
President Andrew Jackson at the 1830 dinner to honour the memory of Thomas Jefferson.i
The liberty to which Calhoun had referred was that which Jefferson and Madison had spoken
of—a state’s right to remain free from federal government interference. Like Jefferson and
Madison, Calhoun and South Carolina insisted on a state’s right to nullify federal laws. Moreover,
a given state might even go so far as to secede from the Union in order to nullify a piece of
federal legislation. South Carolina was on the brink of secession in 1832 and President Jackson
had threatened to keep Carolinians in the Union by military force if necessary when Henry Clay
proposed another of his compromises to save the marriage between North and South. For all the
trumpeting they continue to receive, Clay’s famous compromises were never able to heal the rift
between Massachusetts and Virginia but merely postponed the inevitable.
When the separation came, nearly thirty years later, President Abraham Lincoln made good on
President Andrew Jackson’s promise to return the wife to the marital bed; secession was
tantamount to rebellion, he argued, and it was incumbent upon the president to put it down with
military force if needs be. Lincoln’s second inauguration ball took place in the government patent
office, nowadays part of the Portrait Gallery, and just down the hall from Lincoln’s so-called
‘death’ mask.
A comparison of the before (Volk, April 1860) and after (Mills, February 1865) facial masks
suggests that being the President who had had to wage war on his own people made an old man
of the boy from Kentucky; an alternative explanation—that 56 year-old Lincoln suffered from a
i
See above, Chapter 4, ‘The Show Business’.
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rare genetic cancer syndrome—was put forward by John Sotos in a Washington Post article in
November 2007.
Our next port of call was the Barnes & Noble E Street café for coffee to wash down our
homemade sandwiches. What we didn’t spend on services such as having someone else cut our
lunch made it feasible to be in the USA for a year. Accommodation costs were about to
significantly increase, of course, because ‘twice bitten four times shy’ had taught us to steer clear
of share households or we, too, would age beyond recognition.
Déjà vu stalked us. We had been to the café before and had sat at the one available table; it was
our only option this time, as well. Meryn went to the bathroom. I noticed that no-one in the
café—they were all black guys—was eating or drinking, and most were on the nod. I
remembered that on a previous visit I had gone to the men’s bathroom in that bookshop and
encountered a fellow who had made only a cursory attempt to disguise the fact that he was
shooting up.
Sitting there waiting for Meryn on this final Barnes & Noble E Street foray, I realised I’d stumbled
into a scene where bookshop patrons were moving about and selling dope. It wasn’t just a case
of the homeless seeking shelter; there was a definite undercurrent of surreptitious but none-toosubtle drug-deals. Meryn returned and agreed with my assessment of the situation.
Next to where we sat, a big black man with a stack of books on one café table and the book he
was reading on another was counselling one of the fellows who seemed to be part of the trading
ring. There was much talk about religion and having respect for another’s personal religious
belief. The counsellor, if that’s what he was, advised the other man that he had rights and could
not be thrown out on the street during the day. He asked where else this fellow went for succour
and Meryn heard him answer “the Library of Congress.”
The penny dropped for us, then, because we, too, frequented the Library as a social refuge. On
the way home we added up and subtracted the evidence of our senses and came to the
conclusion that we had indeed wandered into the parallel universe of the dispossessed. While
we’d be sitting in the library doing electronic banking or securing a rental car deal on the internet
there’d be men like those in Barnes & Noble, and women, too, huddled, sometimes talking so
loudly that the librarian would ask them to keep their voices down. It would make sense that
they’re people with psychiatric illnesses who’ve been “returned to the community”—which is to
say, abandoned to their fate—on the street. America deals a cruel hand to the poor.
A couple of days prior to our departure for Britain, we caught the bus from Centreville Park &
Ride at the usual time and went to the bank to change the account address from Virginia to
Pennsylvania. The two most regular commuters weren’t on board the bus that arrives in Vienna
for the first of the reduced fare departures at 9.30 am.
Plenty of regulars passed through the turnstiles as the clock struck the half hour but there would
invariably be someone to attract attention for one reason or another—passing ‘Go’ prior to the
cut-off time for the cheaper fare, for instance, or coming to grief with the ticket dispensing
machine—someone more innocent and ignorant than us. That morning it was a fellow in the
early stages of Parkinson’s; I wondered about him, where he fitted into the great commuter
scheme of things.
Changing trains at Metro Central, we happened to be in the same carriage as one of those missing
bus regulars. Meryn needed to snail mail a couple of disks so we went downstairs to the North
Farrugut Post Office on the corner of Connecticut and L. While she transacted business with the
postal clerk, the man who suffered from Parkinson’s disease in Vienna walked in. Later, at lunch
in the Library of Congress cafeteria, a man with Parkinson’s sat next to us. A couple of months
earlier, in New Haven, it had been women with huge breasts; they came at us from every which
way, never to appear in quantum packets ever again; on a previous visit to that bank branch we
saw blind men everywhere. Your number’s up if it’s a man with guns, I guess?
On the Tuesday prior to our Friday morning departure Vera conducted her “I’m the powerful
landlady holding your deposit” tour of inspection of the tenant’s shower recess. We had kept it
clean throughout our stay but gave it extra sparkle to guarantee Ms. Sarkin had no claim on our
deposit. Once she was satisfied she announced that our rent ran out at midnight on the transition
from Thursday to Friday. What?! I was furious. Where could we go at that hour in this
godforsaken exurb, and when did one’s rent on a room ever expire at midnight except in a
brothel?
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So she wanted an extra night’s rent, did she? Bloody hell. We didn’t argue because she held our
deposit. We might as well have, though, because she was not seeking a bonus unearned rental
payment. That wasn’t it, no: we would not be permitted to stay beyond midnight under any
circumstances. The American is not given to gratuitous nastiness as a rule but Vera was unique.
We’ve never come across anyone as unspeakably awful, though we’d both worked with office
bitches.
We just made the last bus to get Downtown to find accommodation for the next night, our last
in the USA until we returned to Dulles International in a fortnight. America was on the verge of
Thanksgiving weekend. Rental car rates were up by two and three hundred percent and hotel
rates were similarly inflated. Double effort in the Library of Congress yielded a motel out near
the Greyhound Bus station at $US100.00 for the night.
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Chapter 12 Sweet Commerce
Dulles Airport is nothing to write home about to begin with but add in a large dose of paranoia
concerning the perceived terrorist threat and you have American lunacy. Prior to the attacks on
the toppling of New York’s Twin Towers by religious maniacs, terrorism had been a form of
criminal behaviour. After them it was recast as a Satan signifier. Once Satan had crossed the
Nine-eleven line, neo-conservative opportunists immediately sent up a smoke screen of postmodernist flim flam and religious rhetoric behind which to advance a ready-made rightwing
agenda. Waving flags, re-badging the staple fast food, and suspending disbelief, the American
walked headlong into the hell of sacrificing cherished freedom.
We Australians have no star to guide us when trying to appreciate what freedom means to a
citizen of the United States. It is all—after God and country. Airport security personnel (some of
whom probably supported the IRA in the 1980s) took Meryn’s computer case apart before she
could enter the departure lounge. It was theirs to Humpty Dumpy and ours to put back together
again. The American has no star to guide him when trying to understand what it is to be
buggered.
A change of planes meant hanging about Chicago’s O’Hare. Miles ahead of Dulles in design, and
superb to fly in and out of, one could do worse. The woman opposite was a study in
distractedness so when she dropped her bottle of Pepsi we waited, then watched with interest as
the contents went everywhere when she unscrewed the top. If there had been a cockroach in it
we would have told her but.
The flight to Manchester (pleasant and enjoyable, in a near new Airbus) was not up and over
Iceland as had been the London to Chicago flight we took in 2000 but in a beeline due Northeast. Manchester Airport is a better bet than London’s Heathrow. Meryn’s cousin collected us
and had a couple over for dinner. The husband was a successful scriptwriter who had worked on
Coronation Street and was credited with having rescued a more recent television soap opera. I asked
what his greatest achievement as a writer had been and whether he thought his best work was yet
to come. Writing was merely a nine-to-five job so far as he was concerned. Meryn’s heel pressing
down on my toe prevented my going on to say “Well, as satisfying as it must be to be to have
saved a TV series from oblivion do you have any ambition to write something of the calibre of a
Dennis Potter drama series?”
She sat up with her cousin and watched a reality TV show set in the Daintree and on the Monday
we walked around St. Peter’s Square then toured the superb Science Museum to see a ‘boll to
woven cloth’ demonstration of cotton textile manufacture. Primed to deliver the lesson to school
children, the instructor adapted the presentation for a class made up of middle-aged couples and
deserved the effort we took to sing his praises on the feedback form. Manchester was full of
civilised folk going about their business amid glorious autumn leaves.
Come Tuesday, Meryn took the train south to Stafford, Oxford and London, and I boarded a
bus in search of Hamilton’s Scottish forebears. It departed at 9 am and arrived at an awful roadstop two hours later. The uninviting smell of greasy food accompanied by the high cost of a
small filtered coffee and scone did not augur well. ‘No Smoking’ signs, prominent and plentiful,
meant nothing to a large group of men who were milling around in a menacing manner.
They had been bovver boys not so long ago, surely, and the lead lad lit up ostentatiously, as if
daring the authorities to confront him. No-one did. No intelligent being would, either, because
he was that type of thuggish oaf not to be reasoned with. So many smokers; busloads of geezers,
gits and skinheads. Too few Americans. The Detective Sergeant in me wanted to wallop the
lumpen proles.
Back on the road, apprehensive about having to find affordable accommodation upon arrival in
Glasgow, I was acutely aware of being alone. Meryn and I were going in opposite directions,
Hamilton all I had. No man is an island. Refusal to sacrifice autonomy for the sake of the union
might see me stranded like a shag on a rock. Love thy psychosis. Hamilton had become the other
half, my mind a mirror of America with its twin colonies.
Sir Walter Raleigh had named Virginia in honour of his Virgin Queen, Elizabeth 1 of England,
and when she died that remote trading post came under the dominion of James I. Already King
James VI of Scotland, from 1603 he wore two crowns. In 1607 Virginia became England’s first
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North American colony when a settlement was established at Jamestown. The second,
Massachusetts, had its origins in the arrival of the Mayflower at Cape Cod. Economic and social
rivals, Massachusetts in the north and Virginia in the south kept their distance from one another
for a hundred years or more, the former accumulating vast riches in seaport towns from
shipping, whaling, forestry, and the cod fishery while the latter exported home-grown tobacco
across the Atlantic.
Massachusetts and Virginia never got on but when the time came for the one to leave home and
strike out on his own the other saw it as in her interest to do likewise so they joined forces to
declare their independence from the Crown in the late eighteenth century. The King sought to
bring each of the siblings to heel by separating them but they stuck by one another (after a
fashion) and finally succeeded in pushing the ogre away when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to
George Washington not far from Jamestown in 1781.
The union of Massachusetts and Virginia as a single sovereign nation had pedigree. England and
Scotland, too, were siblings that had grown up together on the outskirts of Europe after the fall
of the Roman Empire.
Soon after James VI of Scotland became James I of England, two Scottish aristocrats—Hugh
Montgomery and James Hamilton—obtained substantial property in Northern Ireland and
settled tenant farmers from Scotland there. The arrival of those fundamentalist Presbyterians in
Ulster suited King James down to the ground because they pushed out the Gaelic Catholics
who’d led the Irish resistance to the Crown.
The success of the Montgomery-Hamilton settlement inclined James to look favourably upon the
Virginia Company’s proposal for settlement of North America. That new colony held out the
prospect of being a land of opportunity for the Ulster settlers and they migrated to Virginia in
large numbers. Here was the origin of the Scotch-Irish in America, the people of Appalachia who
gave birth to the common man of Jeffersonian democracy.
Though they shared the same monarch from 1603, England and Scotland remained separate
states until 1707. Trade drew them together while politics and religion pushed them apart.
Mercurius, Roman god of trade, commerce, and profit, saw to it that Lord Shaftesbury’s politeness
prevailed, that the self-confidence Scottish merchants had acquired through sweet commerce rubbed
off on their countrymen.i
The Scottish Parliament enacted the necessary legislation which put into effect the Treaty of
Union to join the two kingdoms as one—the United Kingdom—in 1707. Passage of the Act of
Union through the Scottish parliament, though, was not as smooth an operation as passing coins
from hand to hand. For that, it took the skill and finesse of polished politicians like the Earl of
Stair and statesmen of the calibre of William Carstares.
The Earl of Stair, John Dalrymple, was right-hand man to the London power brokers’ Scottish
agent, the Marquis of Queensbury. Stair scared the hell out of his countrymen. They thought him
the son of a witch who had cursed his sister, Janet, for marrying the wrong man, that Janet had
paid with her life for crossing the wicked witch when the groom went insane and murdered his
bride on their wedding night. The ‘Dalrymple curse’ made its way into a Sir Walter Scott novel
and turned up in the Mad Scene of Lucia di Lammermoor, the Donizetti opera which Joan
Sutherland made her own.
As a matter of historical fact, Janet Dalrymple died of natural causes; neither is there any truth to
the rumour that Stair’s other sister, Sarah, could levitate. But that’s not what early eighteenthcentury Scots had heard; Stair struck fear into their hearts. And not just because of the curse. He
had cynically engineered the infamous Glen Coe massacre of the MacDonalds by the Campbells
in a treacherous Trojan horse campaign at the end of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which
deposed Catholic James II (James VII of Scotland) and put Protestant William of Orange on the
English throne.
The MacDonalds had been Jacobites—loyal to James—whereas the Campbells (Meryn’s
maternal ancestors) were Orange. Stair’s underhand tactics marked him out as exceedingly
dangerous.
London paid Stair’s boss, Queensbury, a king’s ransom to ensure that Scotland’s Parliament
voted for the proposed Act of Union even in the face of the popular resistance led by the Duke
i
See above, Chapter 3 ‘The Staircase Group’.
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of Hamilton. Hamilton had reminded his fellow Scots that they were being asked to give up their
autonomy straight away in return for the promise of economic prosperity later, to sell their
precious independence.
The procession for the opening of the Scottish Parliament which would be asked to vote itself
out of existence in favour of sending a handful of vastly outnumbered representatives to the
British House of Commons did not augur well for union: the crowd cheered for Hamilton and
jeered Queensbury.
The Earl of Stair reminded Queensbury that Edinburgh had long since forfeited its political
power to London. Besides, the Scottish Parliament had never been more than a royal plaything,
had never represented the Scottish people nor championed their freedom. Hamilton’s clarion
call, therefore, was mere rhetoric, Stair pointed out. He counselled his boss to put trade in the
spotlight, to emphasise that that was where real change would take place. The strategy worked.
Hamilton had another card up his sleeve: the Kirk. The Presbyterian Church had never ceded
power to the Anglicans—not even when Charles II went out of his way to force Anglicanism
down Scottish throats during the Restorationi—and remained an independent Scottish
institution.
The Moderator of the Kirk’s General Assembly, William Carstares, had been imprisoned for his
Presbyterian faith by Charles II and tortured during the reign of Charles’ Catholic brother and
successor, James II. So the Duke of Hamilton had good reason to believe that the Presbyterian
clergy would regard the proposed union as yet another threat to the Kirk and rally the religious
leaders to his nationalist cause.
He had miscalculated. Rather than taking away a desire for revenge from the painful experience
of religious intolerance, Carstares had learned the value of real politik—to keep what’s most
important by sacrificing something of lesser importance. The Kirk Moderator persuaded
the Presbyterian clergy to give their blessing to the union in expectation of maintaining control
over Scottish religious expression.
Queensbury ruled. The Scottish Parliament ratified the Treaty of Union and Scotland became
part of the United Kingdom on May 1st 1707. British taxes bought Scots a stake in a society that
boasted a highly organised navy which protected international trading lanes, effective transport
and communications, an efficient bureaucracy, and political stability. Being part of the United
Kingdom transformed Scotland over the next twenty years from a backwater to a modern nation.
Not everyone benefited. Among those left behind were Scots who had been pro-union.
Discontent bred rebellion. Jacobite rebellion bubbled up and gave rise to a formidable army of
Scots prepared to die for the Stuart cause. James the Pretender (son of James II) arrived at
Peterhead in 1715 anticipating that he’d soon be James VIII of Scotland. He returned to France a
month later with his tail between his legs.
Aside from having to keep a weather eye out for the pesky Jacobites, London largely ignored its
new northern province and the result was that the Scots made the most of their integration into a
well-ordered state—reaping the benefits of free trade on the one hand and free thought on the
other.
And so it was that the eighteenth century brought forth the Scottish Enlightenment. Sacrifice of
something held dear now in exchange for greater reward later was the code of the road for
Frances Hutcheson, Archibald Campbell, Lord Kames, Adam Smith, David Hume, James Watt
and other Scottish intellects; they transformed the world.
Old habits die hard, though, and in 1745 disgruntled Scots who preferred the quick political fix
made another attempt to turn back the clock when they fell in with the latest quest to reinstate
the Stuarts to the throne. Charles Edward Stuart, son of James the Pretender, sailed from Belle
Isle for Scotland in July 1745 and went ashore to solicit the support of Highland Clans in
crowning a Stuart king.
The only thing the romantic plan had going for it was that Charles would be made a fool of by
the French if he returned to the continent empty handed, as had his father after the failed
Jacobite revolt of 1715.
i.e., at the same time as he was hunting down Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell in Massachusetts. See above, Chapter 9
‘The Drifter’.
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The Camerons, Gordons, MacDonalds, Mackinnnons, MacPhersons, McDonnells, and Murrays
were honour bound to rally behind Charles, son of James—Bonnie Prince Charlie—on the crazy
quest. No-one had expected it, especially not London, with its military defences deployed
elsewhere. So Bonnie Prince Charlie’s forces faced little resistance as they marched south into
England and captured Carlisle.
Charles felt poised to make England Stuart again but the Highland chiefs had nothing to gain
from an English king, wanting only to make the Stuarts monarchs of Scotland. So the Prince was
forced to retreat. He and his ragtag band of rebels would have been annihilated by the British
army had they pressed on. As it was, they were slaughtered at Culloden field in April 1746, the
Jacobite MacDonalds once again cut down by the loyalist Campbells.
Just south of Carlisle, a man in Middle Eastern garb and about 25 years old boarded the Glasgow
bound bus carrying an infant. The child had a heavy cold and whimpered throughout the journey
but the patient father remained calm. I looked out the window as if at a movie about Thatcher’s
England. Every third or fourth house in Carlisle’s High Street was for sale. A man pushed a pram
through the rain. The pervasive smell of burning coal took me back to my first visit to England
in the seventies, and I reminisced about the three years spent in London in the eighties.
The woman I lived with back then had used a cassette tape of Lucia di Lammermoor to help me
appreciate opera and we sometimes attended performances at Convent Garden and the English
National Opera. On one occasion the diva in the Donizetti drama Maria Stuarda was ill and noone seemed to notice that while Queen Elizabeth I of England assailed her adversary in English
the Queen of Scots (Mary Stuart) replied in Italian.i
Queen Mary had entered England in mid-May 1568 and Elizabeth had ordered that she be
incarcerated at Carlisle Castle. Meryn and I had spent a couple of hours there when changing
trains in 2000.ii
The bus crossed the border into Scotland and took on more passengers at Hamilton, the town
southeast of Glasgow that had been the original home of the Hamilton clan and where James
Hamilton had provided sanctuary to Mary Queen of Scots in early-May 1568, a fortnight before
she was imprisoned in Carlisle.iii The Detective Sergeant wanted me to alight then and there but I
stayed put until mid-afternoon when the bus arrived at Buchanan Street station. From there, I
lugged my bag up the hill to the Tourist Info office in Glasgow’s main square and cursed my lack
of foresight in having left the trolley in Manchester.
Ill at ease because the sun was low in the sky and the temperature falling, I joined a line of
travellers making enquiries. High season had long since passed so what could they all be doing
here, I wondered. A man approached me and said, “You were on the bus, weren’t you?” I had
been. “There’s no hotel rooms in town. Everything’s booked out for the football. We’ve finally
found a place 20 miles out for £50.00 per night. Good luck.”
Ten minutes later, the woman behind the desk confirmed that there was no room at the inn and
showed me the crossed out accommodation guide, crosses indicating places already full. My heart
sank. The aggressive bunch of unsavoury characters at the service centre stop on the M6 earlier
in the day loomed into consciousness, one and the same as with the pre-Hamilton voices of the
New Haven nightmare.iv Their visage drowned out the helpful tourist office employee but her
sympathetic expression spoke volumes as I thanked her and turned toward the door.
“Of course, if you were prepared to take a room in a hostel,” I heard her change tack out of the
corner of my ear, “there’s one at the Youth Hostel.”
Meryn and I prefer hostels—when the choice is between that and a big city hotel.
“I would greatly appreciate a bunk in a hostel,” I beamed so she phoned for me and booked the
bed.
One night we sat next to a dying man in Convent Garden for a performance of Bizet’s Carmen. His friend had taken
him on the final outing—for that was surely what it was—and though he must have known that the overpowering
odour of death kept at bay by powerful chemicals would draw attention from all those around them, the friend braved
the slings and arrows to do so. An heroic act of kindness, and excruciating for those of us who happened to buy tickets
in adjoining seats.
ii The dismantling of British Rail had resulted in it being cheaper to purchase a series of isolated tickets rather than one
return trip for a journey. One need look no further for the counter-argument to the privatisation mantra.
iii This James Hamilton was the 2nd Earl of Arran, an altogether different Hamilton from the James Hamilton who was
a founding father of the Ulster Scots.
iv See above, Chapter Two ‘Seeing Double.’
i
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“I won’t charge you the £3.00 booking fee.”
I have no idea why the charge was waived but if ever you’re in the United Kingdom be sure to
stay in Glasgow. The walk to the Youth Hostel, made easier by the knowledge that it would not
be in vain, was a relief and a pleasure.
Some of the drunks spilling out onto Sauchiehall Street from the pubs and bars gave the cold
twilight an air of menace but I stayed calm, in control, confident the wild beasts would not get
the scent of fear, and passed by unobtrusively.
I went out star gazing on the Indian subcontinent at 4 am one morning and was confronted by a
pack of snarling dogs, the top dog baring his teeth. ‘Rabies,’ I thought, ‘I’m in serious trouble.’ I
recalled a remark made to me by a friend who was a mine of tidbits. Dogs are a pack animal, he
had said, and can be managed through control of their leader. So I started up a terrific din, yelling
and screaming right in the face of the leader of the pack and sure enough the dogs skedaddled,
like James the Pretender.
Next morning, Wednesday, November 22nd, the 43rd anniversary of the JFK assassination, I
mused on the fact that the Massachusetts senator had been 43 years old when elected President
of the USA. Forty-three-ness has not been kind to the American.
I took the Glasgow underground to town. Platform, train, and length of track are of toylike
proportions. The Detective Sergeant wanted to pay his respects to the ancestors so I took a bus
to North Ayrshire, the district where James Hamilton was born in 1559. Prior to becoming a
founding father of the Scotch-Irish in Ulster he had been in charge of a Dublin school at which
James Ussher was a student.
The pupil had gone on to make a name for himself as the clergyman who, working backwards
through the begettings of the biblical ‘record’, arrived at the conclusion that God had made the
world on Sunday, October 23rd 4004 BC. Staggering numbers of twenty-first century Scotch-Irish
Americans still believe Archbishop Ussher to have spoken the gospel truth.
The X36 to Ardrossan was my best bet according to a helpful local so I climbed aboard and went
in search of Hamiltons, some twenty-five miles south-west of Glasgow, and just across the bay
from the Island of Arran. A return ticket cost £6.20 whereas the one-way fare was £3.00 but I
wasn’t looking after the pennies and so lashed out for the sake of convenience.
Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers wear Arran knit pullovers on 1960s American folk
music films; I’d purchased one while hitchhiking around Ireland in the seventies and so hoped to
get a peek at the place from where that prized hairshirt had come. James Hamilton’s Ulster is a
hop, step and jump across the bay from Ardrossan so I had high hopes of coming across
someone who’d heard of him.
Three-quarters-of-an-hour into the trip, numerous retired folk boarded the bus at a series of
stops and greeted one another with pleasure at seeing the laddie or lassie again after not having
seen him or her in a wee while. I enjoyed hearing various garbled breakneck deliveries followed,
invariably, by a short interval and the word “Aye” coming from the passive interlocutors. The
men near me spoke about Celtic having beaten Manchester United one-nil in a most unexpected
victory the night before. It was music to my ears.
The further we went the more it rained. One hamlet was as good as another so I asked the driver
to drop me off at the next town. Bugger me if he didn’t ask where, precisely, in Stevenston, I
wanted to go! No other town along the way, all of them signposted, was more than a High Street
with the occasional intersection, but the driver said I should not get off for another couple of
stops if I wanted Stevenston’s High Street. I took his advice and alighted when he gave me the
nod at the next stop, the other having presumably been skipped due to lack of passenger interest.
The Public Library would be a good place to start, obviously. It was raining steadily as I walked
into the vestibule. The sign on the window read “Closed on Wednesdays.” I went into the local
supermarket opposite the Pharmacy and asked about an umbrella. “You’ll get one at the Shoe
Shop, love,” the helpful woman informed me. “You’ll need the one in the next street, about half
way down.”
“Ooh, noo. We do not stock gentleman’s umbrellas. You’ll need to go to the Pharmacy.”
“On the High Street?”
“Ooh, noo. Two doors along.”
I went there and an attractive young woman sold me an umbrella for £1.50. Super. Not the
umbrella, so much as the fact that I had something to get through the rain with and which, when
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torn apart by the howling winds of Glasgow, would not have been such a waste. I asked if she’d
any idea where I might find a trace or relic of James Hamilton’s family. Stupid, yes, but there was
nothing to lose in humouring my Hamilton while wandering about in a quaint seaside town.
The Pharmacy assistant—or Pharmacist, perhaps?—was surprised that I should ask her of all
people. Few people in town would know about it, she said, but she used to live near Kerelaw
ruins up over the Kirk on the hill and along the burn. Kerelaw Castle had belonged to the
Hamiltons centuries ago, she said, and came out into the wind and rain to point the way.
It would be a long and winding road, by the sound of it, but I set off through the Kirk gate and
over the bridge to a muddy track along the burn where I surprised a couple taking their dogs for
a walk. They were unused to encountering anyone else on that path, they informed me. The rain
had eased off to a slight drizzle but the burn was a fast running creek which veered off to the left
as the path emerged onto a road with a nearby intersection. There were no signposts, though
there had been one pointing the way to the Cambuskieth Castle on the road bridge.
I followed the road that ran nearest where I’d seen the creek’s upstream course and soon came to
a sign—Campbell Road—high up on a house. The Pharmacy guide had mentioned Campbell
Road. Further along, I approached a postman as he delivered mail on a narrow footpath between
two rows of houses and just as I put my question a castle peeked out from some scrub so I asked
if it be the Kerelaw or Cambuskieth or some other ruins. Kerelaw Castle, home of the
Cambuskieth Hamiltons, he told me.
The Detective Sergeant and I stayed up there surveying the ruins and the stone bridge for an
hour or more, and then went back to the Kirk and its adjoining graveyard to look out on the
Firth of Clyde in the distance. The Isle of Arran was lost in the mist. Then the rain returned in
torrents so I went back down town to the Pharmacy and thanked the umbrella guide who’d been
so helpful. She posed for a photo and I told her that she’d be a celebrity soon enough. The
Detective Sergeant wanted me to leave a sign but the bus came. He acquiesced, strangely quiet.
The Buchanan Street Bus Station schedule indicated a more or less regular service between
Glasgow and Edinburgh, twin cities of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment.
I made some calls concerning accommodation, wanting to wander around David Hume’s
Edinburgh. The great philosopher put us straight about the folly of conceiving of ourselves as
made in the image of God. Much flows from the fact that we’re not. Modern America would be
an altogether different nation had the descendants of James Hamilton’s Scotch-Irish cottoned on
to Hume’s Enquiry rather than Smith’s.
Adam Smith’s famous work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, was
published in 1776—the year that Smith’s friend David Hume died and the great champion of his
economic theory, the United States of America, was born. Unable to book a room, I decided to
cut my losses and stay in Adam Smith’s Glasgow.
Glasgow had resisted Union in 1707 but was no friend to Bonnie Prince Charles in the Forty-five
Jacobite rebellion. Things had changed: being inside the British tent had brought economic
progress. Union had freed Scottish merchants from the chains of England’s Navigation Acts and
Glasgow had reaped a harvest of international trade.
Perched on the River Clyde, it’s ocean-going vessels sailed downstream to the firth, out into the
Atlantic, and over the sea. Scottish ships supplied Virginia’s planters with sought after goods and
brought back the products of slave labour, sheltering from the Atlantic in the Firth of Clyde
before delivering their cargo to the Tobacco Lords’ Glasgow warehouses. Glasgow dominated its
American trading partner by the time Virginia joined hands with Massachusetts at the 1774
Alexandria Court House meeting.i
There being no Friday night room available at the Hostel, I booked into a Guest House and went
out in the rain after dark to locate it and get my bearings. Leaving the toy train at Cowcaddens, I
walked some distance—up this hill, down that, and all around Robin Hood’s barn—to the
correct address. Lugging my stuff there would require an effort but it passed muster since there’d
be no need for a cab.
I was the only person in the four-bed room at the Hostel when I went to sleep that Wednesday
night but a youth who entered later turned the light on and stared at me with utter contempt,
i
See above, Chapter 9 ‘The Drifter’.
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perhaps because I was so old, maybe because he thought it was an old woman in the bed—my
ballooning grey hair giving that impression, unfortunately. He made me nervous.
Thursday was Tobacco Lords day, a walking tour around the old warehouses and baroque
buildings to which the fabulous wealth accumulated by those merchant traders gave rise. Once
across the M8, I gave in to the impulse to continue on up whatever street it was instead of
making for Sauchiehall with its shops and pedestrians. Wet and pinched I walked with other such
Glaswegians east along this featureless nondescript thoroughfare. It was strangely familiar. I’d
been in Glasgow in the seventies but that didn’t seem to account for the sensation I was
experiencing. It was so familiar, now, that the penny dropped: this was Renfrew Street and I was
very near the Guest House I’d come to see—from the opposite direction—the night before.
Recognition, in the strangest places.
The chance discovery set off a great wave of satisfaction, just as if I had been guided there by the
Detective Sergeant’s ancestors so that I might be initiated into the Hamilton clan. As if. It would
take ten minutes at most for me to walk, fully laden, to my new abode the following day.
Down in the town, I came upon a statue of Mercurius inscribed in Latin—Mercvrivs, like I
Clavdivs. The Roman god of trade, commerce, and profit had moved back and forth between the
firth and Alexandria, Virginia. Strong and persistent rain drove me into a café where I flicked
through a magazine that was lying around. An enthralling essay about how presidential primaries
in New Hampshire and Iowa distorted and undermined the whole political process in the USA
bade me pay closer attention to the modern glossy and it turned out to be the Virginia Quarterly
Review.
Virginia had played host to the sons of eighteenth-century Glasgow merchants who served
apprenticeships and learned the trade in tobacco warehouses up and down the Chesapeake Bay.
Adam Smith learned all about the snake and ladder reality of the tobacco business—its peaks and
troughs, and so on—from the horse’s mouth, the Lords themselves, while an academic at
Glasgow University in the mid-eighteenth century. His Wealth of Nations crystallised the
importance of the Scottish Enlightenment ideal of the individual’s pursuit of excellence being the
basis of a refined civil society and became the capitalists’ bible, setting out, as it does, the
intellectual argument for free trade.
The British Government had erred, according to Smith, in seeking to command the economies
of Massachusetts and Virginia from London. Far better, he said, to allow the merchants to
pursue their business interests unfettered by short-sighted dictates from on high.
The role of government was to maintain infrastructure, make just laws, guard individual rights,
protect the nation and look after its interests, educate the citizenry, and so on. Government
lacked the wherewithal to run the economy effectively and invariably favoured the interests of a
powerful minority of producers at the expense of the majority of consumers. Only the market
could impartially negotiate between the competing interests of buyers and sellers.
The more London succeeded in dominating the American colonies the greater the likelihood of
killing the goose that laid the golden eggs traded back and forth across the Atlantic. Moreover,
said Adam Smith, America’s Continental Congress of shopkeepers, millers, merchants and other
small business proprietors resulting from the Massachusetts-Virginia pact was most likely to
fashion a form of government best suited to the development of that type of economic empire
which London had imagined it alone could create. These shopkeepers and millers had once been
English, Irish, Scots, and Ulster-Scots (Scotch-Irish).
Someone turned on the light and woke me that final night at the Youth Hostel. It was an older
man and he pointed to where my wallet had fallen on the floor from off my bunk. Thanks, I
croaked, and went straight back to sleep. I found out next morning that the old man was from
Bilbao, Spain, and a couple of years my senior.
I took to him straight away. He’d lived and worked in Madrid. We agreed with one another that
the immigrants from South America soften the USA, make it more pleasant. He said they’d had
the same effect on Spain. Adam Smith would have agreed, noting that most of us would rather
live on the bottom rung of a sophisticated society than struggle to make ends meet as a well
respected member of a backward one.
The Spaniard told me that he had resigned from his job in order to move about while still able to.
“I’m not a tourist so much as a traveller,” he said, and had recently visited Australia. We discussed
the nastiness of Prime Minister John Howard and the narrow, small-minded outlook his
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government had bred. The immigration authorities had treated the Spaniard’s non-English
speaking arrival in Sydney with contempt, apparently.
The EEC has seen to it that people from all over Europe now live and work in Glasgow,
including a Polish couple who ran a café on Great Western Road where I had a coffee and lemon
cake.
I checked in at the Renfrew Street Guest House and was soon absorbed in an Australian movie
with which I was unfamiliar. There was every chance that I would be unfamiliar, of course, since
I rarely get around to seeing contemporary films. After a while I realised that it must be The Dish.
I enjoyed it so much that I settled in.
The Polonium 210 poisoning of a Putin critic in London was big news and during a break from
that non-stop story I saw Simon Schama’s documentary about how we put the cart before the
horse in viewing Vincent Van Gogh as an artist who went insane; rather, said Schama, the
famous Dutch painter kept insanity at bay by giving expression to his creative muse. Too true, I
say; just ask the Detective Sergeant.
Howling winds and heavy rain gave way to a beautiful, mild Saturday morning. On the way back
from a long walk along the Clyde embankment I came across a group of people gathering for a
political demonstration. It was the annual Scottish Trades Union Congress’ St. Andrews Day
march and was being supported by the Glasgow Anti-Racist Alliance around the theme of racial
tolerance in the twin cities: recently, a Sikh youth in Edinburgh had been kicked and punched
and had his hair hacked off by a group who taunted him with racial jibes; and three Asian gang
members had been gaoled for the 2004 murder of a white teenager.
Glasgow had become a thriving centre of international trade by the 1770s. Benjamin Franklin
supervised the erection of the first lightning conductor in High Street in 1772, strolling Tobacco
Lords in their finery among the onlookers. High Street meets Gallowgate and Saltmarket at the
Tollbooth Steeple in the centre of the Cross. South down Saltmarket from the Cross is the
Green.
Musing upon the problem of Englishman Thomas Newcommen’s steam engine while walking on
the Green in 1765, James Watt conceived of the revolutionary breakthrough that created the
workhorse of the Industrial Age. The 500 horse-power Newcommen engine had been in use
since 1712 but had limited application because of high fuel consumption. Glasgow University’s
Watt realised that the machine could be made much more efficient with the addition of a
separate condenser. His steam engine, developed in partnership with Mathew Boulton in
Birmingham, England, used a quarter of the fuel required by the Newcommen engine and paved
the way for large scale industrial manufacture.
Hamilton was more interested in Gallowgate (the way to the gallows) where harsh justice had
been dispensed to petty criminals and murderers alike in pre-Enlightenment Scotland. Those
who were not hanged might be chained to the wall, or have an ear nailed to the Tollbooth
door—their suffering and humiliation a source of entertainment.
A crowd of 100,000 had turned out to witness Glasgow’s last public hanging in 1865, the
execution of a man found guilty of murdering his wife and mother-in-law; but it had been
another of those underdetermined instances where the evidence is as consistent with a “Not
Guilty” verdict as “Guilty.”
Many an accused that had died on the scaffold hadn’t done the crime; wrongly convicted
moderns might only do the time but their life is taken from them nonetheless. Hamilton was
disturbed by the conviction that he was responsible for an innocent life being lost doing time.
Pawing over the entrails of Boyd’s dead body, he had divined that the woman found guilty on his
evidence had not done the deed.
Sunday morning sun made the walk to Buchanan Street for the return to Manchester a joy. The
Coronation Street scriptwriter and his wife would be putting on a party for friends and colleagues in
the late afternoon. Once back in Manchester, I was to meet Meryn’s cousin there and ride home
with her.
Anxious moments locating the departure point in the dark and keeping watch to be sure to get
off at the correct bus stop were soon behind me and I mingled with the party people. Their
friendships were long established and Meryn’s cousin lit up in the warm and affectionate
company. Back home, she invited me to watch the show about celebrities in the Daintree. Reality
TV. I wondered if the scriptwriters worked nine-to-five.
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Chapter 13 Burlesque
The return flight from Manchester to Chicago was as relaxed as the outbound leg. A young
woman used her cell phone—something passengers had been warned against—during the
descent into O’Hare. The fellow opposite me shook his head; Meryn and I wondered how
serious a risk it was. We’d missed the first few seasons of The West Wing and so didn’t know that
the electronic device rule might only apply to a bygone era.
Still, when a member of the cabin crew told the girl to cut the call we all felt more comfortable,
I’m sure, and made no connection between use of the recalcitrant mobile and the fact that the
aircraft skidded to a halt on the runway without reversing engines and had to be towed to the
arrival gate. The incident made us an hour late in what the American refers to as ‘deplaning.’
An airport employee carried us on a motorised baggage buggy to immigration. Meryn was to do
the talking since she had so much at stake with respect to re-entry. The line moved relatively
quickly as I scanned the countenance of each entry booth official; there was only one to avoid
and he, a grim faced middle-aged Latino, seemed least likely to take anyone from our queue.
Then a woman approached us and directed that we follow her to form a new section. She called
for Meryn and me to “go stand on the red line right there,” where she pointed. It was the man.
We’d walked right into the Chicago Immigration chapter of Paul Simon’s ‘Paranoia Blues.’
Meryn went first. I took off my hat. He asked how long we intended staying. Meryn said “Six
months.” Oh no, no, no. Whatever gave us the idea we could stay six months? Meryn went
through the explanation about having a paper to deliver at a university. He turned to me.
“What do you do in Australia?”
“I’m a computer programmer.”
“Why are you in the USA?
“I’m on holiday. I’m on authorised leave from work. I have the papers from my employer right
here in my bag.”
“Put your left index finger on the red light.”
My left index finger was doing as it was told.
“Press harder.”
Pressing, pressing.
“Right index finger, now, Sir, please. Look into the camera. Madam,” he raised his eyebrows, and
Meryn’s finger was on the red light. I handed over the leave authorisation signed by my
employer. He ignored it. “Right index finger, again, please. Look into the camera.”
Meryn pressed her case.
“Please take your passports and stand over there by the glass panel,” the man said. We stood
aside, many ducks dependent upon this one slotting into its allotted place. A very big man, armed
to the teeth, came and escorted us to the little room. We sat down upon a wooden bench with
what looked like the cast from Alice’s Restaurant.
The hour delay on the tarmac had concerned us but immigration delay virtually guaranteed we’d
miss the connecting flight to Dulles even if they let us back into the USA. We were a long way
down the list of sleuthers and n’er’do’wells striving to be let in to the land of the free, the world’s
greatest democracy.
I was calm, philosophical. I wanted to spend the next few months in America but it would not be
the end of the world to have to return home to live out the remaining six months of my longservice leave. But would we be able to use our existing return ticket? And what of our rental car
and motel reservations, not to mention the pre-paid rent for the apartment in Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania? Would we be deported and have the ridiculous expense associated with travelling
on the next available flight?
“What if they strip search us?” Meryn was alarmed.
“They don’t think we’re smugglers. This isn’t Customs. It’ll be okay. We’ll be right. I think the
Anglo looking woman has our passports. The Latino who stopped us will be cancelled out by
this Anglo woman who’ll see that we’ve been here numerous times and never over-stayed.”
A minute or so later a woman in an air hostess uniform entered the room and asked after us of
the Anglo official.
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Taken in by America
“These nice people,” said the official, looking straight at us as if we were well acquainted, “will be
right with you. Please come up to the podium.”
We went. I thanked the air hostess for taking the trouble to ensure that we would be able to
make our connecting flight. She was concerned that we’d not collected our luggage.
The Anglo immigration official smiled at us.
“And what is it that you do research in, Maam?” she asked, and Meryn told her.
“Here are your passports. I hope you will enjoy your stay.”
We collected our bags, walked straight through Customs, checked the luggage to Dulles, D.C.,
and lined up at Security. There were people who’d been on our International flight not very far
ahead of us in the queue. Off with the jacket, off with the shoes, take out the laptop, no more
hard-travelling blues.
The attendant at the departure gate lounge allocated both of us window seats, one in front of the
other on the international flight to Kuwait—via Dulles. I sat next to a businesswoman who ran a
consultancy about raising venture capital for starting up a business. She’d recently been to
Canberra to train some would-be entrepreneurs—and was jolted by a bolt of culture shock.
Australians aren’t in the same world as the American.
After picking up a rental car at the airport, we drove to our Manassas motel, and set off in the
fog on Interstate 66 and Route 222 for Lancaster, Pennsylvania, first thing on the last Wednesday
of November 2006. Our new landlady, Laura, was hosting locals but gave us the key to the
apartment and an orientation tour before we left to collect our belongings from the New Jersey
basement.
Though we had a map of Pennsylvania there was none of New Jersey so it was an achievement
to arrive around the time we said we would, in the late afternoon. We were invariably treated as
welcome guests in the New Jersey household though the busy family schedule made me anxious
lest our being there interrupted the flow of their routine.
Meryn’s friend since way back when encouraged us to join in the nightly ritual with his wife and
daughters so we stayed ’til bedtime and then bedded down at a Rest Area on Interstate 95 and
slept—under pain of being towed for the violation—until driven away by the cold around 4 am.
Pennsylvania is turnpike country and we had no cash for the toll. So we stayed on Interstate 95
because finding a suitable exit in the dark wasn’t easy, and avoiding the pike meant getting south
of Philadelphia. Semi-trailers raised the hair on the back of our necks as they sped even faster
under cover of darkness. There’s a lot of darkness up there on the last day of November. Still, we
would pull into a petrol station and figure out the best route west to Lancaster over coffee.
‘Would’ and ‘could’, those troublesome twins who trip up philosophers of freewill, were clearly
differentiated in our minds around about 4.30 am on Thursday November 30th 2006. We would
have stopped for gas—but couldn’t.
Fog that had been rolling over the road now stood still and survival was our sole intent. Acid had
nothing on the sensation of standing in the Australian desert and seeing Luna devour Sol
somewhere off the beaten track from Glendambo on December 4th 2002 but racing through a
fallen cloud and seeing Vulcan suddenly loom up from Philadelphia’s pitch black forge came
close. Terrified, awed, aware that we might have lived longer had we been deported, we went on
through the night, hoping for salvation while marvelling at the extraordinary spectacle of gold
and yellow lit industrial sites belching plumes of smoke amidst the increasingly dense fog.
The benign and gentle Philly of the 2000 Amtrak train arrival on the one hand and the 2005
Greyhound transit on the other was now a gigantic metropolis way beyond human scale with its
spaghetti looming out of the darkness of Interstate 95 and leading God knows where. It was a
feat to stay in lane, and almost impossible to find a departure point. A Chrysler PT Cruiser that
had dangerously tailgated us until I could get out into the middle lane almost came to grief as an
exit loomed up unexpectedly.
Meryn had calculated that we should have to find a way out sometime soon. We couldn’t see
where we were and while taking the wrong turnoff was liable to land us hopelessly far from our
intended destination it was a better bet than barrelling down the deadly Interstate 95 so we got
off at the next ramp.
There was no-one else around in the darkness, no-one to crash into. High beam headlights were
no better than low, as we drove through a green light into the void, and then another favourable
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traffic light, and so on until we landed at a Safeway shopping centre and ground to a halt. Once we
found Route 41 West we’d be heading for home.
Easier said than done, with poor signposting forcing a dangerous U-turn, mad pickup trucks in
the backseat, and no diner in sight. It was after 6 am but there was not a glimmer of light apart
from that of the oncoming traffic and the occasional red of a receding pickup that managed to
cross the double yellow lines and escape the tyranny of a driver sticking to the speed limit in the
pea soup.
Half an hour onwards we came to The Chuck Stop, a truckers’ café. We like eating at the counter
but the men on the bar stools there were surrounded by a Camel pall so I asked for the nonsmoking section. It was over in the corner where they kept the empty boxes. We sat down,
pariahs. The waitress took our order for eggs, bacon, and hash browns amidst the melancholy
twang of a lonesome man singing about his no-good-long-gone-still-loved woman.
It was the real thing: an American diner. A glimmer of light in the window told us we would soon
be through The Gap, on to Strasburg, and in our new home in rural Pennsylvania. Laura told us
that there’d been a spike in reservations for the rental apartments since the senseless murders at
the Amish school.
Scotland had got under my skin. It wasn’t just that I now had porridge and Andy Stewart’s
‘Green Hills of Tyrol’ for breakfast. Glasgow’s Renfrew Street Guest House kept coming back,
and Kerelaw Castle.
Amish carriages rumbled past our parlour kitchen from around milking time at 5 am until late at
night. The horse-drawn plough, carriage, and what have you, was a common sight. From the
local point of view we were the more exotic with our strange accents and walking down the road
to the Amish grocery store wheeling a cardboard box strapped to a luggage trolley. A woman
who was packing her shopping cart with a year’s supply of cracker dip was astounded to hear that
we had neither automobile nor horse.
From our perspective, the hybrid world of a modern supermarket with stables in the parking lot
was a wonderland. On our first or second visit there, Meryn stood staring as an Amish gentleman
bearing a taper moved along the bread and jam aisle. He smiled as he reached up and answered
“Gaslight” to her unasked question.
The rental car was due back in D.C. on the Tuesday so on the Friday we drove the dozen or so
miles to the local auto hire firm and booked their $16.98 per day weekend deal for the following
weekend. Over soup at a café which Laura had recommended, we engaged with the proprietor of
a Lancaster county museum who read aloud from the newspaper about how visitors to the
United States were to be allocated a ‘terrorist rating.’
The laconic delivery, its tenor and tone, conveyed an equal measure of disgust and despair at the
cynicism of Dubya’s button-pushing presidency. The woman who ran the café was similarly
downcast. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg had pointed out that smoking posed a greater risk to
the American than did terrorism.
The Glasgow Guest House continued to haunt me until it suddenly clicked that our Pennsylvania
kitchen was a tribute to Van Gogh. Lancaster living was a complete contrast with the Centreville
Doll’s House. We wrote in peace, listened to public radio, walked to the creek, and read State of
Denial—Bob Woodward’s precision piece detailing Donald Rumsfeld’s struggle to wrest power
from Colin Powell and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in early 2001.
Any one of the numerous events (radio, creek, etc.) might have caused my satisfied state of mind.
Even Trickster had played a part: Laura’s daughter, Ellie, the D.C. Law student who had placed
the craigslist ad and with whom we’d negotiated the lease, had told us that there was a television.
There was a TV set but no television reception. The American is so inured to this type of trick
that he doesn’t seem to think of it as deception.
Lancaster boasts the oldest farmers’ market in the USA—continuous since 1730—and we
stocked up on prodoose, including ‘rutabaga’ (swede) and the other ingredients for pea soup. The
Philadelphia fog was just another memory. Good reception on the car radio gave us that old
favourite, The Tappet Brothers,i and Wait For It, a Chicago programme that was new to us.
i
To be taken only in small doses, and never on TV.
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Taken in by America
A panel discussed the $US500 million Bush Presidential Library with much hilarity. He’d
probably never been into a library, they surmised, and so George Dubya must have concluded
that if he was going to go into one, then it would have to be a good one.
Another story concerned an African American woman who took umbrage at her female
employer’s racial insensitivity in calling her employee ‘Mammee’; the black woman took her
employer to task whereupon the accused white woman was horrified to think anyone might
consider her racially prejudiced. “I’m not racist at all,” she insisted, “I’m very fond of Aunt
Jemima.”
Aunt Jemima is an anachronistic food manufacturer’s trademark still popular in the USA. The
Wait For It commentator thought she might have gone the whole hog and included lawn jockeys.
December 3rd was Joseph Conrad’s birthday as well as the 59th anniversary of the Broadway
opening of Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar. Early morning radio was given over to a report about an
itinerant musician who appeared at a Memphis Church service in the 1930s, another of those
‘journey of redemption’ tales of which the American is so enamoured. After breakfast Meryn and
I walked many miles. Herons, a cardinal finch, a mad dog and buzzards, and fine horses pulling
elegant open Amish carriages along the blacktop told us this was not an exurb. When he’s not
calling it ‘blacktop’, the American refers to bitumen as ‘buy-toomin.’
Lunch (ham and Gorgonzola cheese on Meryn’s homemade flatbread, orange juice, all finished
off with Danish pastry and coffee) put the finishing touches to the Van Gogh as home, sweet
home. And bugger me if Laura and Greg, the landpersons, didn’t take us for a Sunday drive in
the afternoon.
A framed scarf emblazoned with the visage of the 1880 Democratic Party presidential and vicepresidential candidates hung on a wall of an antique showroom we stopped at. Women had worn
such scarves to show their true colours, perhaps? At another antiquery (reached via a covered
bridge—covered to protect the timbers from the ravages of the weather) a well-heeled couple got
out of a car and walked two big black French Poodles into a barn from which could be heard the
sounds of amateur (i.e., folk) musicians straining for harmony over Christmas carols.
Following our guides to a purple shed (the same shade as the adopted colour of that fruitcake
feminist who used pop up without warning on ABC TV throughout the 80s 90s) we were greeted
by a garish display of local tat made from bees’ wax and twigs for the most part. A bakers’ dozen
Mary Magdalene hardbacks sat on a lone bookshelf waiting for punters that never came. A
purebred Collie pup whose owner had seemingly taken her out for a walk and been unable to
resist a bit of shopping at the purple room stood in the way of Greg’s getting to the oatmeal
Christmas-star-cookie jar.
The proprietor, a stylised woman of some importance (judging by the way she looked down over
her spectacles at us), was bickering with another like her who had suggested that this or that item
for sale must have come from … , or been made by … , and so on. Whatever suggestion the
mutton-dressed-as-lamb customer made, the woman on the podium (for that was what her way
of sitting at the little desk she had for a sales counter had conveyed) would promptly pooh-hooh
the idea. Greg purchased the cookies and we followed him to the barn.
Entering necessitated interrupting whatever Christmas carol was being churned through by the
ragtag group. “Oh Christmas tree, Oh Christmas tree … ” “we’ll leave the red flag flying here”
Meryn and I mouthed to one another. The guitarist neither sang nor played; the banjo player sang
but didn’t strum; and a couple of zitherers looked askance at a bevy of antique hunters huddled
together and talking over the karaoke carol being belted out.
There were more antiques upstairs—cradles and cribs of European inspiration, most likely from
boat building folk—but before too long we were all four heading for the exit. I was being
particularly careful not to tread on one of the poodles’ feet, nor get within coo-ee of those
monsters, when the woman with the Collie put her head in and the Poodles drowned out the
vocalist with their ferocious barking and serious efforts to bite the little mutt in half. I was almost
through the door but tripped over the fleeing puppy’s leash. That little doggie had as much
interest in being introduced to the pair of bitches as I did and we both made a beeline for the
carpark.
Our hosts then took us to that same café in Strasburg where Meryn and I had supped in the
company of the museum man. Greg passed round star cookies and he and Laura raved about the
Australian movie, The Castle. Greg, a real estate lawyer, dressed much like the man of the house in
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that movie and both he and Laura delighted in yelling in their best Strine “That’s going straight to
the pool room!” I recommended that they follow up with The Dish.
On the way back, Greg loomed up menacingly behind a horse and carriage but, that being
standard practice in those parts, the black-capped figure holding the reins gave us the
characteristic Amish wave and we sped past.
A good time was had by all, as they say, and later that night we climbed into bed, for that is what
it required to get to our aerie. After a while, as we lay in the dark, Meryn drew my attention to the
low rumble in the distance and reckoned it must be caused by the passage of carriages returning
from the Amish frolic. Surely not, I said; there must be an airforce base somewhere nearby?
Meryn stuck to her guns.
Sure enough, that far-off sound had been caused by the iron wheels of carriages and shoes of the
horses hauling them past our parlour. They scarified the black top as they clip clopped through
the night carting youths home from their Sunday romp in search of a spouse with whom to raise
another eight miniature adults over the next decade. The last B52 hit the runway around 3 am.
A little after 5.30 am on the Tuesday I set off on Route 222 South to return the rental car to
Dulles. The moon, just past full, was low in the west and sweat sprayed off the Amish horses
coming toward me, gleaming in the headlights, while a subtle orange-red lit up a corner of the
south-east.
School buses continually broke up the growing line of single occupancy commuter cars but it
regularly reformed and snaked along Interstate 95 into the Baltimore tunnel. The wheels fell off
on the Beltway and my detour via Downtown only exacerbated the problem. I squandered the
three-hour buffer on the last twenty miles to the airport and was a nervous wreck by the time I
climbed aboard the Greyhound for the return trip.
A woman in her 70s, but perhaps only 50, was yabbering at a fellow who sat in the front seat
opposite and one row behind the driver (above the entrance).
“Yes Maam,” he would say to her nonsense, “No, Maam, I don’t believe it is,” as she would go
on about the perils of travel that people like her encounter, and, she assumed, people like him.
“You get all flustered and make mistakes that you don’t choose to make. It’s so scary, isn’t it,
travel?”
“Yes, Maam.”
He was a gentleman, but lost in his own thoughts by my estimation.
“Do you think we’ll leave early?”
“No Maam, I don’t believe so.”
“Well, we’re all ready. Why can’t we go now?”
The driver boarded and sat in his seat, closing the door. “Are we going now?” she wanted to
know.
“If I do that I’ll lose my job,” said the benign black driver. The gentleman smiled.
The bus pulled out at 1.15 pm and headed back up New York Avenue from where I’d just come.
Recognition. Paul Kelly’s song says it all: I’d gone there from the Beltway snarl and been caught
in a jam right outside the Motel Meryn and I had moved to after the Doll House bitch had done
us over.
Traffic delays could be cut right back but for the fact that the American is not only disorganised
but exaggerates everything. The hold up, there, was caused by a small number of people working
with a front-end loader near the shoulder of the bitumen.
The gentleman asked the driver what was under the hood.
“A V-six.”
“V-six? Is that diesel?”
“Yes Sir, a diesel V-six.”
“Where do they make those?”
“Don’t know.”
“Detroit, driver,” came a voice from the middle of the bus.
Loud music and fumbling from behind the gentleman caused the woman to speak loudly into her
cell phone. “Yes, I’m here. We just left Washington. I had a cup of coffee.”
“V-six, wow.” He pulled his baseball cap lower and glanced out the window.
“We had trouble with exhaust on the other bus. So they give me this one,” the driver said,
struggling with the lack of synchromesh.
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The other bus?
“When we get to Harrisburg I’ll let you take a peek.”
The gentleman and driver seemed to be carrying on a conversation that had begun prior to my
having joined the troop. “My daddy grew up around here. There was a bicycle shop. It’s still
there. You have probably been to a few games there,” he said, referring to the sports stadium to
our right.
“No, not there or that one in front,” the driver corrected, explaining that he followed some team
no longer based in Baltimore.
The bus pulled into the Greyhound Station at the base of the Baltimore spaghetti.
“Do I have time to use the Rest Room?” the gentleman wanted to know.
“You have ten minutes. Be back at two-twenty,” our driver spoke up to no-one in particular.
Aiming for relief, I was proud and horrified when the urinal overflowed. Outside, I peered up at
the unsightly mess of spaghetti. I’d only ever seen that tangled web from a distance or while
racing round it in a rental car. A crazy construct, it was nevertheless awe inspiring in its late
industrial age utility.
“Why is there smoke coming out of that pipe?” the woman asked the gentleman.
“That’s what it’s for, Ma’am.”
“But won’t it pollute the air?”
“It’s been there a long time, Ma’am.”
“Why does it have lights?”
“When you go up so many feet you have to have lights, Ma’am. For the aircraft.”
“How many feet?”
“Don’t rightly know, Ma’am.”
The driver backed out.
“Stop driver, stop. There’s people waving,” said the woman.
“Never interrupt the driver. People wave to wish us a pleasant ride,” he said, opening the door to
a couple of non-English speaking Hispanics, who’d have missed the bus but for the woman.
A second stop in Baltimore was followed by a difficult climb up the steep outer edge of the
spaghetti to Interstate 95 South. We had to join Interstate 95 to take the tunnel but would stay on
it only so far as necessary, the driver told the gentleman, because the bus would be run over the
top of on that major highway. We crunched into a lower gear, did a ninety-degree turn at the top
of the ramp, entered the tunnel and took Interstate 83 for York, Pennsylvania.
On becoming aware of the shoddy treatment meted out to long haul bus drivers and their
passengers, the outsider penetrates the American’s mask and his myth of living in the greatest
country on earth. Whether it be a Barnum exhibit, stage performance, politician’s stump speech,
preacher’s sermon, trompe l’oeil artwork, blockbuster Hollywood production, or some other
attempt to woo an audience, burlesque—exaggerated imitation of the original—does the trick
because the American prefers the copy to the real thing.
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Chapter 14 Hostile Twins
An Australian friend who had wanted to experience the American on his home turf and whose
wife worked around the clock was on the verge of booking a flight to join Meryn and me. He,
Bernie, and his wife had done a lot for me while I wandered in the wilderness of the 1970s and
this would be a practical way to acknowledge that I’d not forgotten. We’d gone our separate ways
since but still shared similar values and interests. Bernie knew nothing of Hamilton, of course,
but the fog had lifted on that front anyway, the Detective Sergeant having caused me no grief
since Glasgow.
Pennsylvania kept coming up trumps. The young woman from the local car-hire firm phoned to
say she’d pick us up in half-an-hour, and did, returning on backroads to the office. We signed the
paperwork and she handed over the keys to a Dodge Neon, one of the better rental vehicles, and
we drove to a specialist shop where Meryn took a crash course in tapestry and purchased the
requisites. She’d already downloaded a matrix—wireless broadband was provided in the Van
Gogh—and was now prepared to transform a Bear Mountain Autumn pic into coloured cloth.
Cool.
Freezing, in fact. Meryn hadn’t warned me that she’d be picking through thread for an hour and
the car was an ice box. Once initiated—Meryn into those of Ariadne and me made an order of
the brass monkey—we searched for a diner. One looks for evidence of where the Sheriff,
Highway Patrol, and sundry other poe-lease officials meet to eat. The best fare will be there. We
found it. But a big sign on the door made clear that there was no Non-smoking area.
We got the message and went off to check out ‘Intercourse’ and ‘Bird in Hand’, tourist villages
trading on the Amish brand. They were both awful. So we went home and tucked into more of
that Gorgonzola and smoked pork chop, this time with plain and blueberry bagels. Delicious.
After lunch we used the local library’s secure internet connection to transfer funds from Australia
to our American bank account and then reconstructed the backroads route which the car hire
clerk had used between the Van Gogh and her office. After driving around the district, we
stocked up at the main supermarket and went to photograph the stalls in the carpark. It was a
normal day. An Amish woman emerged from the supermarket, stowed her groceries in the back
of the enclosed carriage. While she attended to her horse, a carriage backed out from an
adjoining stall and drove off, the man with the reins giving us the Amish wave. There was no
doubt about it: we Australians were the exotics.
Low humidity cold dries and destroys the skin and Meryn reckoned the moisturiser sold at the
needlework shop was good value so we went back and bought the product marketed as ‘Gloves
in a Bottle.’ She swears by it but it was all buncombe, in my view, and the seller had merely spun
a good yarn. Meryn’s online order of our silk underwear had been delivered by the UPS man in
his brown van by the time we returned. Trickster played no part in that purchase; they’re a best
value item. We had dinner just as soon as it got dark: my pearl barley soup and her exquisite
homemade bread and cranberry pie. No TV, but no Sarkin either.
Next morning, we slipped into the silk thermals and wound through backroads to Valley Forge
National Park, 30 miles north-west of Downtown Philadelphia, stopping en route for bad buns
and great coffee at a converted railway carriage diner, the type where locals socialise over
Saturday breakfast.
The sun shone brightly but the 35°F—lower with the wind chill—made us appreciate how
difficult it must have been for the members of the revolutionary army who were there with
George Washington in December 1777. The Park’s eighteen-minute documentary film about
Valley Forge went to the heart of what makes the American tick: no battle was fought, and only
half of the 12,000 soldiers who entered the winter encampment were still there when they moved
out months later. Valley Forge is seared into the American psyche, though, because those 12,000
rag tag ill-disciplined and poorly equipped soldiers had been transformed into a 6,000 strong
well-drilled and highly motivated military force capable of defeating the British by the time they
emerged from the crucible in June 1778.
That’s the story—an exaggerated copy—one which, had the French not joined the war on
England, would probably never have been told. Still, the French had intervened only after
Washington’s soldiers had endured their dark night of the soul in Valley Forge. The American is
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imbued with the religious myth of redemption whereby what was gross and deformed is
transformed into something pure and perfect, what was worn out is rejuvenated.
Religious belief forged the American Revolution. Massachusetts and Virginia had put aside their
differences and the thirteen colonies had sent delegations to the newly formed Continental
Congress and then united as one nation around John Adams and Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration
of Independence. The delegates calculated that the War of Independence would be won with the
British overwhelmed in a single decisive battle. It wasn’t. Reality ultimately undermined the
confidence that came of gross exaggeration. But not for long: as soon as the war was over the
American returned to the land of Nod and the art of storytelling. “In the beginning … ,” he read
in the bible, blind to the fact that his religious conviction might carry him off to where Cain
dwelt, east of Eden.
Two-hundred-and-thirty years after the heroic Revolution, the American still prefers the
exaggerated copy to the real thing, is still a sucker for the fantasy of religious fervour. George W.
Bush’s tortured syntax made a mockery of any sense there might have been for the invasion of
Iraq in 2003. The 43rd President couldn’t string a sentence together but blew such a clear note on
the dog whistle that the patriot rolled over as soon as the band struck up the tune of that old
song about Christianity’s crusade to recover the Holy Land from the infidel.
The American backed his Commander-in-Chief, confident that Uncle Sam would whip the
enemy lickety-split, and have the troops home for Christmas. He came down to earth with a thud
when the war dragged on beyond the shock and awe of the first attack and body bags started
flying in from Babylon. But, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, he turned a
blind eye and put his trust in God. Karl Rove had assured Republicans that the American’s faith
in old time religion virtually guaranteed the success of the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2004 and the
Democrats didn’t raise the stake, never called that bluff.
In the beginning … .
According to an eighteenth-century Hessian officer loyal to Britain’s Hanoverian King, George
III, the American War of Independence was a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian rebellion. The Hessian
put it down to the American’s penchant for religion, to Puritanism. Virginia had begun life as an
Anglican, it’s true; the law prescribed that colonists had to worship in the Church of England.
But Scotch-Irish Presbyterians resented this dictate and moved west into the Appalachian
Mountains. Virginia, then, while still Anglican (Episcopalian) on the surface, became increasingly
Puritan under the skin from the early eighteenth century.
In Massachusetts, John Winthrope’s Puritans had persecuted those who did not share their strict
religious beliefs, pushed non-Puritan dissenters down the coast and out onto Nantuckett Island
where they might meet biblical Jonah’s fate. William Penn, though, had made religious freedom
sacrosanct when he founded his American colony in 1681. The Quakers felt at home in Penn’s
Sylvania, squeezed as they were between two Puritan majorities. So when Pennsylvania’s Quakers
heard in April 1775 that the Massachusetts minutemen had gone up against the British on
Lexington Green they looked to the Crown to protect them from the Puritans whom they
regarded as hell bent on turning America into a radical Calvinist theocratic state. Should the
American Revolution succeed, the Quakers would lose their cherished religious freedom and be
crushed under the jackboot of religious fanatics. Or so many of them thought.
When it dawned on the Continental Congress that victory in the war to establish their New
World republic was still a long way off, religion came to the fore: the difference in outlook
between Puritans and Episcopalians determined in large part the opposite ways in which
Massachusetts and Virginia approached the question of leadership. Virginia’s George Washington
liked to attend the theatre, and try his luck at cards; the Adams clique in Congress flew the
Calvinist flag of pious indignation about such sins.
The Massachusetts Calvinists launched a purification campaign to rein in the Army, put an end to
what they perceived as waste and profligate purchases, and correct lax morality—such as
indulgence in worldly pleasures like card games. If Massachusetts had its way, Washington would
have his wings clipped, his power spread thin. Massachusetts’ radical republican prescription for
running a war was pure and simple—and would simply have failed, according to Virginia. It was
necessary, She said, to hand over military authority to a Commander-in-Chief in order to
prosecute the war; the trick was to appoint a General who would act in the interest of all, and
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cede power when called upon by Congress to do so. That man, in Virginia’s estimation, was
George Washington—and Congress agreed.
Massachusetts pushed its purification plan when and where it could, never giving up on the
ultimate goal of supplanting Washington as Commander-in-Chief. In June 1776 Congressman
Sam Adams had Horatio Gates installed as commander in Canada but by the time Gates reached
Albany in Upstate New York there was no American army in Canada. Undaunted, Gates
attempted to usurp Major General Philip Schuyler’s role as commander of the northern
department. The Major General stood his ground, and Washington confirmed Schuyler’s
authority. Gates backed down and did his bit in combining with Generals Schuyler and Benedict
Arnold to hold the fort in northern New York, but urged his Massachusetts minders to redouble
their efforts to have him made top dog.
Washington, meanwhile, could not hold on in southern New York. His army was driven into
New Jersey and beyond, to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. So the Commander-inChief called for reinforcements from General Gates and he arrived with his regiments at the
beginning of winter. The American Generals held a council of war where Gates argued that the
British forces were too strong and the American army should retreat west beyond Lancaster to
the other side of the Susquehanna River.
Congress fled Philadelphia for Baltimore, Maryland, in anticipation of being overrun by the
British. The war council decided to attack the Hessian held Trenton, New Jersey. Pressing on
with the plan in the teeth of a ferocious Nor’easter, the Commander-in-Chief lead his men back
over the Delaware to take the town, Trickster playing an all-important role in the ensuing battle.
The American at large regarded Trenton as a work of Providence, the unfolding of divine
purpose, a sign of redemption. He continued to do so in the nineteenth century, and still does,
idolising Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 painting, Washington’s Crossing, which depicts an heroic leader
being poled through an icy Delaware River on Christmas Day 1776.27 General Gates wasn’t in
the picture; he played no part in the battle, having followed the Continental Congress to
Baltimore.
Washington had saved the day so Virginia might have expected Massachusetts to desist from the
attempt to white ant the Commander-in-Chief, the more so for Gates’ failure to contribute in
such a decisive battle as had been fought at Trenton. But Massachusetts continued to gnaw away
at Washington’s authority. In August 1777 Congress dropped Schuyler as commander of the
northern department and installed Horatio Gates.
General William Howe (Commander of the British forces) defeated Washington at the battle of
Brandywine on September 11th 1777 then moved on and occupied Philadelphia. The Continental
Congress fled west from Baltimore to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and thence to York. The
Commander-in-Chief of the revolutionaries was at a low ebb. The British were poised to cut
Massachusetts off from Virginia in Upstate New York after which Howe would be able to move
against Washington whenever he chose.
Benedict Arnold, though, forced British General Burgoyne to surrender at Saratoga in October
and the Revolution lived on, the French now emboldened to throw their weight behind the
Americans. Still, Saratoga was a mixed blessing because Horatio Gates took credit for the victory
and strengthened Massachusetts’ hand. Washington was now more vulnerable than ever. In
December he and his army encamped at Valley Forge and prepared for a winter of discontent.
The worm had begun to turn on the Puritans. The Valley turned white and it seemed the
revolution might not survive the winter. Pennsylvania’s Quakers took heart, believing that the
conflict would surely soon be over and the Calvinist who had had his hour upon the stage would
be heard no more. But life wasn’t meant to be easy. The Quaker community was a microcosm of
the broader society and reflected the same religious tension as that which divided ‘live-and-letlive’ Episcopalians from dour Calvinists.
In characteristically American fashion it was the world of the copy, the theatre, that drove a
wedge between the two types of Quaker. The Philadelphia community had gone about its
business as usual despite the British occupation. Happy-go-lucky Quakers (‘wets’) laughed along
with the rest of the audience at burlesque portrayals of ill-educated Methodist circuit riders. The
more God-fearing (‘dries’) refused to condone representatives of religion being subjected to
ridicule for the purpose of entertainment.
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Torn in two over which was the greater evil in British occupied Philadelphia—the militant
Presbyterian or the strolling player who mocked them that preached the word of God?—the
Quaker community split into ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ factions. The (loyalist) wets continued to rub
shoulders with the British but the dries left the theatre and went over to the cause of the
revolution.i
In the Valley, the revolutionary army was being transformed into a disciplined military fighting
force. While General Washington’s aides inspired the troops by reading them extracts from
Thomas Paine’s essays, Baron Steuben trained them in the art of war. Washington’s military
campaigns had been nothing to write home about but the Commander-in-Chief was a first rate
leader—and consummate political player. All through the winter the Virginian went about
winning what Thomas Fleming calls Washington’s ‘secret war,’28 out-manoeuvring his
Massachusetts enemies then systematically destroying their untenable positions.
In the Spring of 1778, the Commander-in-Chief lead his rejuvenated army out of Valley Forge.
Had it come up against General Henry Clinton’s army, Washington’s meagre military force would
probably have been overwhelmed by the superior strength of the British war machine. But
Providence intervened: with a French fleet sailing for America, London had ordered Clinton to
abandon Philadelphia and retreat to New York; the revolution’s butterfly army opened its wings
and pursued the enemy, striking a heavy blow at the battle of Monmouth Court House in June
1778 and sweeping George Washington up into the American pantheon.
The myth of Valley Forge, then, the exaggerated copy, is not as fantastic as the reality: the twins,
Massachusetts and Virginia, had put aside their colonial differences to form the Union; but the
inherent contradiction of religious belief brought old hostilities to the surface so that the United
States prosecuted its war of independence from Britain with one arm tied behind its back.
Massachusetts regarded Virginia as insufficiently pure, morally suspect, and lacking an
appreciation of how mighty a force is God’s wrath; Virginia thought Massachusetts a hypocrite,
waging a holy war and preaching piety while pocketing profit from sharp business practice in
general and being duplicitous with respect to the Commander-in-Chief in particular. And the
bickering didn’t stop once the war was over: Thomas Jefferson of Virginia portrayed the French
as having acted out of a high regard for liberty when it came to the aid of the American
revolutionaries in the wake of Saratoga. Only a fool could believe that, said Jefferson’s
Massachusetts’ opponents, pointing out that the despotic French court had sought only to break
up the British Empire.
Massachusetts and Virginia went on to establish the New World republic of the United States of
America but theirs was an unsteady Union, held together by a series of unsustainable
compromises.
As Meryn and I were preparing to leave Valley Forge and go west to where the Continental
Congress had set up shop across the Susquehanna River in York, Hamilton said he’d been
touched by some Cambuskieth ghost and wanted to leave a sign. So I did, on a bookshop shelf.
The Detective Sergeant’s spirits had lifted. He was back in the saddle, determined to get back out
there and track down Dempster. Would that he’d remained the brooding Scot laid low by
remorse at having backed the wrong horse in the murder trial.
On the Sunday, we came upon an old nickel mine while touring the local area. Meryn
remembered that it was near there that the milkman had murdered the children of a one-room
Amish school some months before. The Amish community had returned the site of the tragedy
to farmland, had removed all trace of what had been.
I drew Meryn’s attention to the showroom for new carriages coming up on the road ahead. She
doubted my conclusion, reminded me that in America things are often not what they seem. But
when shortly thereafter we came across a used carriage advertisement outside a farm house right
next door to one advertising a ‘Tools and Mules’ auction to take place in January she accepted,
more or less, that it must have been a showroom after-all.
More is less, though, in such situations, and when we came upon yet another at a property that
had not been a showroom a few days earlier and, not far from the Van Gogh, saw young men in
Today’s Pennsylvania patriot still places the greatest store on religion, and votes accordingly. Or did, until it started to
dawn on him in the lead up to the November 2006 Congressional election that he’d been duped by the radical right of
the Republican Party, his Pavlov vote bought with the ringing of the ‘gay marriage’ or ‘abortion’ bell. Ding dong.
i
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their Sunday best carrying pews into a barn the scales fell from my eyes: each one had been an
Amish household at which Sunday religious services were being conducted. When the Amish
split off from the Mennonite Church in order to be more disciplined in living according to
biblical injunctions, they ceased congregating in churches. We resisted the temptation to capture
a graven image.
Schaefferstown, where we went after that, was not at all tourist orientated but a roadside pretzel
bar a few miles south of it was—and set up to hook suckers. We dined instead at a beer joint
where a friendly young woman whipped up an excellent roast beef and salad roll with two coffees
for $US6.00. Meryn wanted a new skirt so we called into the Outlet—a bleak shopping centre
where the consumer buys direct from the manufacturer and gets a whole new experience in
alienation—on the edge of Lancaster. Nothing there compared with what Meryn invariably finds
on offer at Ann Taylor so we went to Willow Street K-Mart for soap. The woman in front of us
on the checkout queue was a jaded Christmas shopper who had the stress of the festive season
written all over the lines on her face.
I took the Dodge Neon back the next morning and made the mistake of trying to explain the
Australian worker’s long-service leave entitlement to the car rental clerk who drove me home.
The very notion of having three months’ paid leave on top of the four weeks’ annual entitlement
is inconceivable to the American but I made matters worse by laying it on thick about how I’d
managed the move from garden variety work into IT. The rental car woman readily understood
my claim that it’s best to work in IT if you have to work in an office and grasped the point about
business managers never knowing what computer programmers do and being too afraid to
question them for fear of appearing to be stupid. Had I left it at that all would have been well.
Alas, I went on to tell the tale of how I’d got the IT job despite being unqualified. I thought that
since she could see I was neither rich nor handsome she would appreciate the irony of my having
slept my way in. It was foolhardy of me to try and entertain the American in this way. I made
matters worse by referring to the liaison as ‘an affair’ so the story came across as an instance of
my having cheated on my wife to get a job.
We were back at the Van Gogh by then so there wasn’t time to explain that I’d found work in
that office in order to get away from a woman I was mad about and who had dumped me; that
the object of my affection, too, had left the old job and obtained employment in the office I’d
just moved to; that I’d been ‘rescued’ by a nymphomaniac manager who slotted me into her IT
team and gave me bonus self-esteem. We would be renting from the car hire firm again soon so I
said nothing to Meryn. She already knew how I’d learned to programme on the job but would
not have been amused to hear about the mess I’d made of the ride home.
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Taken in by America
Chapter 15 Backwoodsman
Winter hadn’t yet set in—some days had upper-fifties Fahrenheit temperatures—so we walked
many miles. Meryn noted how curious the farm animals were. This, by way of contrast with
George W. Bush, who is not curious at all, according to those in the know. Midway through
December, Laura and Greg invited us to spend Christmas with them at a cabin in the mountains.
The invitation merely reiterated what we already knew—that the American is generous.
That night, I dreamt about the woman who’d given me my lawnmower start in IT. I woke late
with a head full of cotton wool and walked to the fast flowing creek. An Amish carriage crossed
the bridge, a small child inside peering out at me; the woman holding the reins waved and the
horse broke out of a trot and into a gallop as they rounded the bend.
Meryn and I sat working at our laptops, rain drumming on the window pane. Another beat broke
in. Laura’s sons, Clint and Lester, yelled imprecations in the adjoining room, screaming excitedly
and exclaiming “Oh my word!”, “Gosh!” and “Golly!” Oh my goodness. I listened more closely
to the music coming from deep inside Laura’s house. It was a Wednesday. She seemed to be
conducting some sort of counselling session. An occasional song lyric crept further away from
the hi-fi, right into the Van Gogh. “Christian Rock,” I announced to a disinterested Meryn.
Around 4.00 pm we went for a walk, the sun low in the west, a golden ball devoid of heat.
There’d been a car crash just down the road from our apartment and the neighbour’s boy said
that a horse had broken a leg. An Amish woman came over and said, “I guess you want to know
what happened? Well, the grey SUV was passing the … ” and she explained the genesis of the
accident to Meryn. An Amish man engaged me in conversation about whether or not it was okay
to have parked his horse and buggy where he did. I told him it was okay. It wasn’t my property
and I’d already seen what had happened when Leo stepped over the line at that shore cottage
with the light on in the New England summer. But they’re Puritans up there, and we were in
Pennsylvania, not far from where the Continental Congress had met before crossing the
Susquehanna. And it was winter.
The neighbour boy stood with Meryn and listened to the story of how the auto-wreck had
occurred. “It’s kinda sad,” he said. Meryn was at a loss: the horse hadn’t broken a leg, no-one was
injured, another SUV was off the road. ‘What’s to be sad about?’ she wondered. So it was a
curious coincidence, we thought, when we walked on for another half hour only to come across a
dead horse. Despite the run of warm weather, it hadn’t yet started to smell.
Like so many of her fellow citizens, Laura does voluntary community work—two hours at the
local library in her case. So she gave us a lift to the supermarket, 3 or 4 mile away and we walked
home, taking our life in our hands to run through a long one-way tunnel that had no footpath.
The community spirited American is at home in a world dominated by low-tax-paying private
enterprise. His government cannot afford to do what higher business taxes would make possible
and he wants to keep it that way. My ideal—a social democracy wherein corporations pay for
community necessities through higher taxes—is anathema to his way of thinking but there’s no
doubting the American’s community spirit. In Meryn and my experience, the United States hosts
a thousand Lauras for every Vera Sarkin, and twenty million automobiles for every pedestrian.
Morning radio ran a story about a remote Ozark religious community in Grand Valley, Missouri,
where a 65-year-old pastor had been charged with child sexual abuse. The situation came to light
when a member of that community broke the rule against women reading the bible. Dipping into
the Good Book, she found the stuff about the lion being expected to lay down with the lamb but
there was nothing in there about young girls having to lie down with the pastor. She felt she’d
been had, and told the other women what she’d discovered. That of the 65-year-old was the first
of several child-sexual-abuse cases involving Independent Baptist Church leaders that would be
coming to trial in southwest Missouri. Most of the accusers and the accused were related by
blood or marriage.
Having heard of our interest in the horse and mule sale, Laura had phoned the New Holland
Sales Yard and found out there’d be a livestock auction that day. “Take my car,” she insisted. I
was wary of doing so but she didn’t take “No thanks” for an answer. We arrived at the premises,
an array of old sheds near a railway siding, while the auctioneer was wrapping up bids of 70 cents
and other trifling sums on barnyard paraphernalia, saddles, and so on. He had a black straw hat
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atop black hair and the standard Amish male whiskers—the face clean-shaven down to the jaw
line where the beard begins. His auctioneer’s sing-song ran like a river round the railings and out
back in the stalls where mules brayed and mares neighed.
At 10.10 am the auctioneer announced that this here gathering was for selling horses and so the
main business of the day would begin. He took his cue, no doubt, from the rapidly filling
bleachers and the flurry of baseball hats and nineteenth-century bonnets lining the perimeter of
the tenth of a furlong sand and sawdust race. A numbered yellow sticker slapped on its flank
made clear to bidders which piece of horseflesh was up for sale. The riders—most of them in
cowboy shirts and genes from the same part of the pool—geed them up or walked their mounts
backwards down the pitch to demonstrate that a given nag was sound. The auctioneer’s radio
microphone and his old greybeard clerk’s computer keyboard were the only concessions to
modernism.
We might have been in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County with Flem Snopes and those
Texas ‘ponies.’ These weren’t all from Texas, it’s true—some were from Oklahoma, and South
Dakota, and one of the mules had only ever been ridden by an old lady in Colorado. I’m no judge
of Equidae, nor of any other beasts of creation which go about on all fours, but I was surprised
nonetheless when the prettiest fillies went for $US200 odd while mules fetched over $US700. It
was ploughing time again, I guess?
We found a non-smoking diner for lunch. The clientele’s tell-tale basin hairdos and uncanny
resemblance to one another made clear that this eating establishment was not part of any
commercial chain. The coffee was good. Meryn had the oyster soup but I went instead for the
hot roast beef sandwich with gravy. After that we drove to a dairy and lined up on the ice-cream
line for a pound of rich cream butter. That this was no backwoods operation was made apparent
when the woman behind the sales counter held onto her bonnet with one hand while opening a
side window with the other to serve an SUV customer.
The drive-in movie business might have been first cab off the rank—or was it the ubiquitous
hamburger joint?—but today’s American does banking and buys donuts from behind the wheel
so the Amish dairy owner had sewn a strip of blacktop right next to the till. The variety of such
trade is one thing but what makes the drive-in business so unmistakably American is that there
are no drive-in bottle shops, no easy-access alcohol available. We rubbed noses with some calves
then returned to study the goats and cattle at auction.
We’d leave for the cabin on Saturday the 23rd, Laura said, so prepare a couple of meals and be
ready to leave first thing. She and Greg were our kind of people: they liked creature comforts but
weren’t consumerist; their sense of humour meshed with ours, they appreciated good food, and
one could take a book from the shelf in the common room between their house and the Van
Gogh and expect to enjoy it. And, as I say, Laura’s car was at our disposal.
They were wonderful folk. Come the Friday before Christmas, they asked us to join them and
their friends for a Christmas party at their house, a tastefully restored nineteenth-century General
Store. Motorists used to fill their automobiles with gasoline from petrol pumps outside the front
door.
The Van Gogh had been the Post Office (but only during periods when the Republicans held
sway in Congress) and the railroad station was nearby. Be there at 7 pm, Laura told us, and we
were—along with all the other guests. Odd, we thought, that everyone arrived at the official
starting time. We were on the wagon, there being no purveyor of fine wines within 20 mile of
there, and no drive-in bottle shops. And a good thing, too, because a number of guests were
sipping water, and the rest were sitting on a half-glass of chocolate milk.
Introduced to various wholesome looking women and their daughters, Meryn and I chatted
about our experience of the USA, the return from Manchester, and what not, and then split up to
begin the fact finding pincer movement. I was telling Gary the auctioneer that it’s a mistake to
imagine that Australians and Americans are alike. “How so?” he wanted to know. Steve had
joined us just as I was explaining that Australians still have a convict mentality, that we might
thumb our collective nose at authority but yield to it nevertheless whereas the American presents
his credentials as ‘ant-eye government’ and mentions freedom or liberty more or less immediately
upon being introduced.
We discoursed on American foreign policy but they’d lost confidence by the time I got to the
overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile on September 11th 1973. So I
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expressed the wish that U S governments were as ‘Hail fellow, well met’ as the individual
American but lost them for good over the archivist.
There is a chink in the national armour of good grace and a striving for excellence, I suggested,
and that’s the archivist. The American archivist lets the side down, I told them, and cited a few
examples of Meryn’s dealings with these dungeon dwellers, summing up with “… and of course
it’s my job to be the arsehole, you see. It invariably falls to me to phone the person in question
and give them what for … ” Steve and Gary’s expressions told me that the word was not in their
lexicon. Steve took his leave more or less straight away and left poor Gary to find a diplomatic
departure tunnel shortly thereafter.
Summoned one and all to the common room, we gathered round Steve as directed. He
welcomed everybody, the two Australians and one Swiss in particular, and broke into song. I
didn’t quite catch the words because he sang only the first line but it had a hymnlike quality.
Meryn caught my eye. Steve went on to say that we’d all sit down together and eat, then play
games and meet one another. Then they all prayed and Steve said he hoped we’d all have a joyous
time together and that the party would go pretty much along the path that Jesus had mapped out
for it. Meryn and I had hoped to run into a fundamentalist at some stage so this was seventh
heaven. Cool, clear water.
We talked to Joseph and his wife, Mandy. He was a carpenter and she was shopping for genuine
eighteenth-century furniture on the internet, having already bought an eighteenth-century house.
The house was exactly what they wanted, but not where so Mandy’d had it dismantled and shipped
to their Pennsylvania property. She suggested we visit the Vanderbilt mansion as well as the
preserved buildings of Ephrata Cloister, an eighteenth-century religious community that had
stored up spiritual as against earthly rewards.
Earl, a shy man who ran a local dairy with an extravert wife and two lovely daughters, was most
impressed with the Vanderbilt mansion but had to break off the conversation because Steve was
calling upon everyone to gather in the common room for games. Cornball. Earl’s wife and maids
sang Christmas carols and one or two real songs. Their three-part harmony and singing in rounds
was first rate and finally brought the party to life around 9.30 pm. Earl told us about how he had
been raised among the Amish but been excommunicated and banished when his dad got rubber
tyres on the family tractor.
We hit it off with Earl and the girls and were invited to the dairy. He told us, too, that the
prevalence of Presbyterian Churches along the Mason-Dixon line came about as a consequence
of William Penn’s having granted allotments for settlement of Pennsylvania in accord with the
principle that the pacifist inclined Quakers and Germans should move inland and leave the
Presbyterian Scotch-Irish to the border region—the idea being that Maryland’s Irish Catholics
would be kept at bay by their fiercest enemies.
At 10 pm Steve announced that the party was over and everyone went home. I’d learned a lot, I
thought, but Meryn’s a better listener and came away with prized gems. Most of the people
gathered, there, in Jesus’ name, she explained, belonged to a group, Steve’s group. Steve had been
praying to the Lord and was getting a pretty clear message that Jesus wanted him to build a
Church upon the rock of this group’s community spirit. He’d been joined by Joseph and the two
men had been praying together in the hope that Greg would go with them.
En route to the Endless Mountains next morning, Laura spilled the beans that they were
Christians and went on to confirm what Meryn had told me after the party. She and Greg had
been churchgoers for 40 years, Laura explained, but, having grown disenchanted with the
institution, had left to meet informally with like-minded religious folk who felt, like them, that
reading the bible and listening to what Jesus wanted was all that mattered.
The fuss over getting a pastor and building a church is not what it’s all about, they said, and not
what the Apostles had set up with Jesus’ guidance. But that new group had gone down the old
road and placed much emphasis on the building where they worshipped and on the authority of
the pastor. When that group brought in a pastor from Delaware Greg decided it was time to
leave and since then he and his family had been meeting with others who’d gown disenchanted
with what had come of the Delaware decision. They sought to find Jesus outside of the Church, to
discover—in Scripture—the path to an intimate and personal relationship with Him. Now they
were praying for guidance as to whether or not He wanted them to throw in their lot with Steve
and the carpenter in building yet another new Church.
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Greg followed the Susquehanna for many miles north before taking the road to the ‘cabin,’ an
architecturally designed 1940s house with en-suite bathrooms in each bedroom. A long weekend
in that late art deco treasure was going to be Christmas.
Buck and Lily rolled up. Lily is Greg’s sister. We warmed to them straight away. Greg and Laura
took us to look at their new land—120 acres adjoining the game park. Buck liked that because
he’s a deer-stalker, a Pennsylvania flint-lock-rifleman, the archetypal tall-tale-telling
backwoodsman. When we got back to the cabin he entertained everyone with hunting stories
until Laura called us to the evening meal which began with them all joining hands while Greg
prayed to Jesus—thanking Him for the drive and the walk on the new land as well as asking His
guidance on how to do what He had in mind for them until bedtime, and to give them a
comfortable night’s sleep.
Laura had bought The Dish from Amazon and we watched it that night. I’m still unsure about the
cause—perhaps the lack of a real estate angle, or maybe man’s landing on the moon was a form
of trespass, a final sundering of the immutable crystal spheres—but it crashed.
On Saturday everyone except Meryn and me joined hands while Greg prayed that we’d enjoy
breakfast and have a good day walking around the new property. Then we all tucked in to the egg
and bacon pies Meryn had baked. Buck didn’t seem too keen on being seen eating quiche but
enjoyed them with grace while he regaled us with tales of his favourite turkey shoots in scent free
socks. Buck gave us the eye when we mentioned the Dick Cheney quail hunt and lamented the
sorry pass to which the nation had come. “You shoot one man,” he noted, “and you never hear
the end of it.”
Breakfast done, I started rooting around washing rutabaga, parsnip, turnip and other vegetables
for the next day’s soup. Buck looked over his coffee at me when I picked up the potato peeler.
We got onto the topic of immigration and he was horrified to hear that I work with a highly
cultivated Russian. “Who let him in?” he wanted to know.
Meryn changed the subject to the difference between Australia and America, saying that it’d be
less likely for someone to walk into a school in Australia and shoot half a dozen children at point
blank range. How so, Lily enquired. Well, because we’re not allowed to own automatic pistols.
Lily was horrified. “Well how do you defend yourselves?” she demanded, looking up over her
spectacles from her needlework.
After Buck and Lily left we heard how Greg and Laura had asked Jesus to guide them in the
purchase of the land. They had missed so many good properties and were really concerned about
what He had in mind when yet another deal fell through. So a friend of theirs sold some shares
and loaned the money to Greg who used it to buy out another bidder. Jesus had really come
through for them, they said, without the slightest intimation of irony concerning the nature of the
god they pray to. Ellie arrived that night and we watched Little Miss Sunshine. ‘So they’re not so
squeamish about sex,’ I thought, as to have it impair a great sense of humour.
Ellie, sharp as a tack—she has an extensive knowledge of human anatomy, a degree from
England’s Oxford University, and thinks analytically—was our best bet for finding out how this
family of fundamentalists made the connection with modernity.
During our first week at the Van Gogh Greg had been forthcoming about what he liked to read
but made no specific mention of Jesus or the bible. Meryn and I wanted to know how such a
well-educated family reconciled a knowledge of science with a belief that scripture is to be taken
literally. Meryn didn’t grow up with bible stories and almost fell off the chair when Ellie and
Laura made clear that they believe Adam and Eve were real people and that it all started with
them.
It was just the three of us, Ellie, Meryn and me, around the fire on Christmas morning so we
could cut to the chase. We started off with establishing just how much she accepts of scientific
knowledge. She accepts it all, she said. So what about the theory of evolution? As if by
supernatural means, Laura came in and yarned about tapestry and quilting to the point where we
lost the thread of the biblical account of the little devil with the apple in the Garden of Eden and
how it might be embroidered by the story of evolution by natural selection. I knit my brow but
took comfort in the flurry of snow that played outside the picture window. Not exactly a White
Christmas but our first hint of snow since arriving in the USA.
After breakfast, we set off up the mountain but Meryn had Cedar sinus trouble and turned back.
Greg, Laura and Ellie sat down on a tuft of grass when we reached the top and I went to take a
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photo from some bushes. Greg casually noted that I was close to the edge. The edge? I had no
idea that I’d been at the very edge of an overhang with a sheer drop of hundreds of feet. I
couldn’t believe that they failed to warn me at all until I was standing there, and still shudder to
think of it. But the American’s primary concern is freedom. My hiking companions allowed me
to move about at will before warning me, ever so gently and without prescribing any action, that
I was perilously close to death.
That night we tempted Ellie with a bottle of Shiraz, sat at the kitchen table with her and her
parents and got down to tin tacks about the Christian thing. The man is the head of the family.
Ellie, then, deferred to her dad. He claimed his Christianity was primarily mystical, that he wanted
no part of the materialism he saw around him. Laura backed him up, and spoke of how her bible
class had recently discussed Daniel and how America today is like Babylon of old. This was at
odds with their talk of how they hope Jesus will continue to help them get what they want.
Babylonian materialism is bad whereas owning a string of investment properties is good,
presumably?
From where I stood, the only difference between Greg and Laura’s material world of plenty and
the consumer society around them was that they have taste—and blind faith that bountiful Jesus
is behind it all. An individual must accept Him as personal Saviour and Lord, acknowledge that
He’s running everything and then get as much of the material good life as he or she can grab.
Greg told us that he’d had a personal relationship with Jesus for some time, now, and that once
one understands that the truth is a person—Jesus—then it all falls into place. Epistemology
seemed to be an inappropriate discipline to introduce but somewhere along the line we were
going to have to set some ground rules about what constitutes knowing something as distinct
from believing it. Merely stating that Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the light”29 doesn’t
cut it for me. For Greg, though, that’s the beginning and end of the matter; Jesus is the alpha and
omega. Greg told us, too, that Satan loves hierarchies, that they’re a work of the Devil.
Laura said that when her first husband had been killed in an auto wreck she simply had to know
what had happened to him after death and had prayed and learned that he was in heaven so from
that time on she had studied the bible to know what God wanted of her. Meryn and I looked to
Ellie for something a little more compelling and she told us that though she had gone to Oxford
to study the works of Charles Dickens she had instead learned to read the New Testament in
Greek and found it to be so poorly written by a man of limited learning that it must be the word
of God. Jesus wept!
Surely any detached reading of the Old Testament reveals the figure of Yahweh as one of the
nastiest bastards that human imagination has ever dreamed up, I wanted to say. How can you
otherwise rational, savvy folk who know which way is up, believe such a stupid story? One can’t
say, of course, because it’s rude. It’s rude even to try and get a handle on such faith; you can’t be
too sure what the fundamentalist believes and how he thinks it all fits together because he
doesn’t volunteer the ingredients of an even vaguely coherent picture.
Lester, the youngest, came into the kitchen from the bunkhouse where he’d been holed up with
his brother, Clint, and good friend, Eric. He wanted his Mom to come over and pray with them.
I’d had enough Looney Tunes for now. We’d be heading back to the Van Gogh on the morrow,
thank God, because Meryn had forbidden my bringing the laptop and I’d read the one book
allowed me.
Breakfast prayers brought bad news: we were staying an extra couple of days and would drive
down off the mountain to go shopping. So it wasn’t all bad: I’d be able to buy a book at least.
The whole day was a nightmare of shopping, most of it at a ‘mall’—a collection of giant
warehouses full of consumer stuff, spread over a vast area—with nary a bookshop in sight.
Meryn purchased some fine cotton sheets that Laura had put her on to and we were entertained
by a walk around an outdoor emporium with everything for the hunter, including scent free
socks. Wild animals can smell the difference between naturally occurring and industrial man.
Good things come to those who wait. When Greg eventually drove away from the great eyesore I
spied a Borders but we were running late to collect Ellie (who’d apparently been searching
downtown Williamsport for our evening’s entertainment). Generous, as I say. So I felt especially
ungrateful for not taking any viewing pleasure at all from that night’s movie, A Christmas Story
(1983).
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The Bunkhouse boys went home on the Wednesday and took me with them. We had hoped it
would provide Meryn with the opportunity to finish that conversation with Ellie concerning the
cognitive dissonance between the creationist and scientific accounts of how those little Amish
babies are born with six fingers and toes when they’re not even Melungeons. It didn’t.
But Meryn did tell Ellie and her Mom about The Architect, James Moore and Wayne Slater’s
excellent book about the machinations of Karl Rove in cynically exploiting hot-button
fundamentalist Christian issues (such as holding back the iniquitous tide of gay marriage on the
one hand and Devil driven abortionists on the other) to get out the vote for the Bush-Cheney
Republican Party agenda. Our generous hosts were moderate in most respects but Rove had used
them as far-right voting fodder. Karl Rove comes of that long line of confidence men who have
played the American for a sucker.
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Chapter 16 Joseph the Carpenter
We had booked a car for the last weekend of 2006 but there’d been a changing of the guard at
the rental agency and the two new blokes failed to deliver until late morning. This delayed our
Friday departure for Gettysburg so we went instead to the National Civil War Medicine Museum
at Frederick, Maryland. The exhibits were good and the staff in attendance were typically
American—wonderful—but the obvious lack of funding for this less sexy aspect of the war
between Virginia and Massachusetts showed, especially by contrast with what we found at
Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park, West Virginia, when we went there on the Saturday.
En route to the superb Harper’s Ferry, we heard some radio discussion about how legislators in
some state of the Union had agreed in principle with the proposition that the partners in a gay
relationship be able to obtain the financial benefits of superannuation, and so on, in the event
that their other half died, or retired. The pair would have to establish, of course, that their union
was an ongoing sexual relationship. No problem there, since everyone knows homosexuals root
like rabbits. Not so for the rest of us, though, they feared: too many couples in an orthodox
heterosexual marriage would fail the test. Christian fanatics decried the debate as belonging to the
province of Satan.
America is the home of the Christian fanatic. In the early nineteenth century, Virginia’s Christian
fanatics had pushed the biblical case for maintaining the institution of slavery; Massachusetts
Christians argued as vehemently for its abolition. Matters came to a head when, in 1859, the
Christian fanatic, John Brown, tried to start a Virginia slave uprising at Harper’s Ferry.
A century earlier, the American seeking to go west down the Shenandoah Valley in order to pass
through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains to the bluegrass prairies beyond was
impeded by the raging waters of the Potomac River that separates the states of Maryland and
Virginia. Then, in 1761, Robert Harper established a service to carry pioneers across the Potomac
at the point of its confluence with the Shenandoah River.
Robert Harper’s Ferry was an important element of westward expansion and white settlement
beyond the Appalachians. We stood at the spot where, in 1783, the Virginia statesman, Thomas
Jefferson, had watched the Shenandoah River flow into the Potomac and concurred with him
that it’s “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature.”
President George Washington was instrumental in siting a federal armoury and arsenal at
Harper’s Ferry in the 1790s and it was there, in 1834, that the railroad (associated with the North)
first triumphed over water transport (the South)—a battle not finally won until Abraham Lincoln
represented the railroad men in court after the Effie Afton ploughed into the Railroad Bridge at
the Rock Island federal arsenal in 1856.
John Brown had been praying to the Lord and was sent a pretty clear message that Jesus wanted
true believers to smite the peculiar institution (slavery), by armed insurrection if necessary. That’s
why Brown led an attack on pro-slavery settlers in Kansas in 1856 and headed the group that had
attempted to seize the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry on October 16th 1859. The first casualty of
Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was a free black porter on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B
O). Colonel Robert E. Lee put down the uprising and John Brown was found guilty of treason
against Virginia later that same year.
The Christian fanatic, Major Thomas Jackson, and his military cadets provided security at the trial
of John Brown and ensured that only pro-slavery sentiment was expressed at the subsequent
execution on December 2nd 1859. Brown left a note saying that the American was guilty of a
grievous crime—condoning and practising slavery—and would pay for it with his blood.
Hostility between the twins, Massachusetts and Virginia, escalated in the following months and
culminated in the election of Abraham-the Union-“cannot endure, permanently half-slave and
half-free”-Lincoln as President.30 Twelve months after John Brown was hanged, South Carolina
seceded from the Union and soon thereafter Virginia went to war with Massachusetts.
A hundred years after its establishment, Harper’s Ferry remained the focal point of the corridor
that connected east and west. So it was strategically important in waging war and became the vital
link between the two theatres of the Civil War—the one centred in the region between
Washington and Richmond in the east and the other accessed by the Mississippi River system in
the west. In addition to being at the entrance to the east-west corridor, Harper’s Ferry was the
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most vulnerable link in the critical B O Railroad supply line—because that’s where the railroad
crossed the Potomac River.
Confederate Colonel Thomas Jackson seized Harper’s Ferry at the outbreak of war in April 1861
and the Federals took it back more or less immediately. The town changed hands from the
Union North to Confederate South and vice-versa eight times between 1861 and 1865. Jackson’s
famous exploits in the east-west corridor, the Shenandoah Valley, became the stuff of legend.
The Federal garrison stationed at Harper’s Ferry delayed Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s
invasion of Maryland in mid September 1862 and thereby saved the North from disaster by
allowing Union General McClellan’s Army of the Potomac time to advance on the Confederate
position.
We’d no sooner turned on the light upon our return to the Van Gogh that night when Laura and
Ellie called to take us to hear Earl’s girls rehearse material for their New Year’s Eve performance
at a local retirement home. After they’d exhausted their extensive hymn repertoire, I asked
whether they knew songs such as ‘Oh Susannah’ and ‘The Lone Pilgrim’ from their nation’s
musical heritage. They knew the first verse and chorus of ‘Blue Moon’ so they did that, and a
fine rendition of the ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’. For their pièce de résistance they launched into
‘How Much is That Doggie in The Window?’ It was a shame such talent had already gone to
seed.
The party retired to the kitchen for sweetmeats and the wonderful Earl told Meryn and me the
history of the dairy farm, of the narrow gauge railroad that had serviced it, and about the
destruction of the barn by a hurricane. Widely read, and not given to too much devotion to
anything but his women, Earl told a story about an importer of Swiss chocolates who was really a
currency trader. That’s how George Soros, bête noire of the right wing of the Republican Party,
had made his fortune, I said, by shifting paper around. Earl was amused; not so, Laura and Greg
who headed for the door. The girls serenaded us with that one verse and chorus of ‘Blue Moon.’
At Antietam (Sharpsburg) the following morning, we watched another of the excellent National
Parks’ films, toured the locations of the three phases of the gruesome Civil War battle, then saw a
documentary about President Lincoln’s post battle meeting with McClellan.
Detective Pinkerton had grossly overestimated the Confederate force McClellan would have had
to confront just north of Sharpsburg had he attacked while the enemy was held up at Harper’s
Ferry. So McClellan waited, and gave Lee a fighting chance. The more than 20,000 casualties
from the fighting at Antietam on September 17th 1862 made it the bloodiest day of the war.
McClellan had the wherewithal to break through Lee’s lines on the Sharpsburg ridge but
Pinkerton and paranoia convinced him that somewhere back behind that line Lee had thousands
of troops ready to spring up and destroy the Federals.
McClellan regarded Antietam as a victory and wrote his wife that he’d once more saved the
nation. Lincoln, less sanguine, rode up from Harper’s Ferry on October 1st, inspected the Army
of the Potomac and had a photo-op with the General and Detective Allan Pinkerton. The
president appreciated the fact that the troops were fiercely loyal to their General but he needed
them to show more fight and knew they wouldn’t while McClellan lead them.
Lincoln had already risked mutiny when he demoted McClellan in August 1862 for refusing to
attack Richmond. In that instance, the General had believed he was outnumbered nearly three to
one. His army had been handed over to General Pope but McClellan undermined Pope to the
point where the new commander lost the confidence of his men and faltered, turning victory to
defeat at Second Bull Run. So Lincoln had reinstated McClellan out of necessity.
The Battle of Antietam and its aftermath left the president no choice but to settle the question
once and for all. The Federals had gained the upper hand in the terrible military encounter but
McClellan did not pursue the enemy south to Harper’s Ferry and beyond because he was
convinced that the Confederates would turn around and destroy the Army of the Potomac with
an extra force General Lee had hidden in his back pocket. Face to face with McClellan, Lincoln
had urged him to go after Lee but Little Mac put his foot down. The president sat on a hill
overlooking the encampment with an old friend and asked him what it was they saw below them.
The Army of the Potomac, obviously, said his companion. No, said Lincoln, it’s General
McClellan’s bodyguard.31
For the want of something more promising, we stopped at a franchise food hall just east of the
centre of New Oxford on Route-30. The ultimate experience in consumer dining, it was a study
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in alienation; the waitress assaulted us with the full gamut of ‘customer service’ training course
techniques; she tried so hard that we were ready to scream. It rained steadily all the way home
and we experienced our first nerve-wracking instance of a below par rental car: the windscreen
wipers needed new blades and the tyres didn’t hold a wet road. It was New Year’s Eve so I
suggested we open the bottle of wine we had but Meryn wasn’t interested. Hamilton was getting
restless.
On New Year’s Day we went to the New Holland horse and mule auction again and then to
Ephrata Cloister. It was closed for the day but we toured the timber buildings and looked in the
windows. Set up in 1732 by German settlers, the Brothers and Sisters took a vow of celibacy to
worship there. Back at the Van Gogh, we decided to buy some cheese from the shop attached to
Earl’s dairy and were heading off to get it when Laura called to take us to Joseph and Mandy’s
eighteenth-century house in the woods. It’s a marvel of dovetail joints and extraordinarily well
preserved timbers—the outcome of chinking on the one hand and exterior and interior cladding
on the other.
Joseph, a great bloke and skilled carpenter, hunts wild deer with a bow and arrow. Mandy had
prepared sauerkraut and pork, a Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch) tradition on the first day of the
year. Joseph said grace before meals (a variation on Greg’s prayer to the effect that the Lord
watch over the conversation and guide the evening in accord with His divine plan, that we all
sleep well, and so on, though Joseph added thanks to His Almightiness for the safe arrival of the
Australians).
Sapphire, their daughter, was there with her boyfriend, Mathew, the Swiss whom we’d met at the
Christmas party. Mathew’s parents had made a small fortune investing in Zurich real estate and
marketing mobile phone software. Sapphire and Mathew became an item on the Mercy Ship which
ministers to people worldwide, bringing succour and medicine to the needy while providing the
crew members with their first opportunity to develop an adult personal relationship with God—
and others of like mind and opposite sex.
Asked where we’d been and what we’d done since Christmas Eve, we were pleased to be able to
report having come more or less straight from the Cloister Mandy’d suggested we visit. Joseph
told us that Mandy had cajoled him into going there too, the previous Friday, and wanted to
know what we thought. Meryn warned me with her foot to be circumspect but Joseph was at
ease, making fun of the religious community and their backward ideas. I would have joined in but
for Meryn’s shoe. As she said when we got home, it was always going to be better coming from
him. Joseph went on with his story of the religious community and their well-meaning devotion
to Jesus, laughing himself silly at their expense. How did they ever expect a Cloister of Christian
celibates to survive, he chortled, when it’s not mentioned in Scripture?
Mandy followed up with the observation that the individual cannot be expected to simply sit
down with the Good Book and expect to know what God is saying. Each of us has to be taught
to read the bible. So, despite what Laura and Ellie had said about Adam and Eve, they were not
so much fundamentalist as Althusserian Christians.
I told Buck’s Dick Cheney You shoot one man … joke but it was one anti-Republican Party jibe too
many and broke the proverbial back: Laura said she’d rather go hunting with Dick Cheney than
driving with Edward Kennedy. Meryn’s shoe either missed the mark or she had loosened up
because she didn’t prevent me telling about Just a Minute’s review of the year just gone where
someone told the story of how the vice-president shot trial lawyer Whittington and a Jewish
shrew cried out “Enough already. What is it with you people and Dick Cheney’s hunting exploits.
I mean, it happened, okay. But the victim has apologised. What more do you want?”
Laura could do without my politics but, generous as ever, took us to the dairy where Earl showed
us the process of preparing milk for sale from arrival by tanker through separation,
pasteurisation, and homogenisation to bottling for retail. Earl’s eldest, Sally, conducted us
through the farm that her father had leased to a young Amish family. We toured the comfort
stalls where the contented cows have their tails tied to strings so that when they plop the dung
falls freely into the manure trough where it can be collected to fertilise the fields.
We met the farmer and his four-year-old who, like all Amish children, was dressed as a miniature
adult. The Amish have preserved many of the ways of colonial life in America, and that’s one of
them. The farmer and his wife were both 25-years-old and had three children. The eldest was six;
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by the time he’s eight, he will be husbanding cows and ploughing fields for days on end with a
team of mules.
Earl had arranged a buggy ride for Meryn and me but the farmer had a sudden emergency with a
day old calf we’d seen him hand feed earlier. We were sorry for the baby cow but relieved at not
having to learn how to behave as tourists. I slipped Sally a flash-drive as we parted and suggested
she download the songs—The Yearlings’ arrangement of Stephen Foster’s ‘Oh Susannah’ among
them—to build the trio’s repertoire and then we headed off to the ‘Mules and Tools’ auction
near the old nickel mine. Laura picked Emily up on the way.
Meryn and I were as pleased as punch to find that the Amish auctioneer from New Holland was
the master of ceremonies. And so was his sidekick with the distinctive hat, a member of the Dick
Tracy Mennonite sect. We checked out the mules—horse and dolly both—before going down to
the basement of the farm house for ‘eats.’ Very salty. There were lots of miniature adults with
cute smiles. It was a fundraiser for the family whose farm it had been; they were selling up—
mules, tools and everything else—then leaving. And not because of tractor tyres: their daughter
was one of the victims of the milk tanker gunman who had laid waste to the local community’s
one room school. Americans are benign but their system’s hostile.
Our Greyhound tickets and bank statement had been delivered to the General Store and Laura
brought them to us with the keys to her car. It was winter, 70ºF, and couldn’t last, she said, so we
should go see the bald eagles at their sanctuary on the Susquehanna. It had last been that hot in
January way back in 1870.
There were many people in the park and those we spoke to said they’d never been there without
seeing at least two or three eagles. A friendly woman—which goes without saying, since we were
in the USA—told Meryn that bald eagles do not get their white head and tail feathers until they’re
three-years-old. They’d obviously followed the adults down south, just in case winter starts. We
saw one Osprey, a long way off. Still, the Susquehanna’s a mighty river to look out over,
notwithstanding the fact that one of America’s largest nuclear power plants dominates the bank
opposite where the eagles nest.
There was still more to do, Laura said, so we should hang on to those keys because she had
arranged for us to go to dinner at an Amish household that night. It turned out to be a home
restaurant where you fell in with whomever else made a booking. When in Rome, sure, but it was
strange nonetheless to be dining with an Italian American family from Philadelphia at the
waitress’ house while her husband did the dishes. The youngest of the guests, daughter-in-law of
Papa, was a journalist and had arranged for the whole family to drive over for the buggy ride and all
things Amish weekend.
Amish tourism is big in Lancaster. Meryn was at her wits end with the somewhat overbearing
woman but I enjoyed being around the live wire; she put some sparkle in the night. Who knows
but there might have been a miracle had they served alcohol? I was more than ready for some
drunkenness and sin but extraverted conversation was going to have to be enough.
There were fireworks all the way home—ignited in the cornfield out back of the Van Gogh. A
local entrepreneur in the pyrotechnics business tested his latest batch of products there, and put
on a spectacular display. July 4th in Connecticut had been a fizzer but that, in the dead of winter,
more than compensated. All I needed was alcohol and sin in the fortnight before we hopped on
the bus and headed for North Carolina.
A fortnight after we had first met Buck and Lily, Laura took us to their house. Buck came
straight over and shook my hand with a warm greeting. The feeling was mutual. I was very happy
to see him again. Lily, a dead ringer for Pie in the Sky’s Maggie, invited us upstairs to show what
they’d done with the house while Buck swept up from the haircut his wife had given him. I gave
Lily the river stones she’d collected when we’d gone walking at Christmas.
Buck and Lily lived in a tiny dwelling, smaller than the Virginia doll’s house. But it was a home and
Meryn and I were delighted to be invited. Someone showed me a replica gun, the sort I’d seen
Wyatt Earp use on TV. It was apparent to all except me that I should not carry a gun.
We went back downstairs and I realised that the country music that I had heard was coming from
a DVD, the movie about the life of Johnny Cash. Buck came over and shook my hand again and
offered me a beer or iced tea or … “I’d love a beer, thanks,” I said, aware, now, that he’d already
had a few. He told a pathetic dirty joke about heat and getting a woman’s pants down which he
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believed to be hilarious. Greg shrugged. I knew rightaway that this would not be an ordinary
evening.
Greg, Buck, and I sat at the kitchen table and the women—Laura, Lily, Meryn and Ellie—
adorned the couch. Buck asked Ellie if she was still doing “that lawyering.” She was. Giving me a
confidential eyebrow, he made some derogatory remark about the government and finished off
with words to the effect that the government didn’t know something that he did and he had no
intention of them ever finding out.
Meryn dobbed on me for having waved the gun around upstairs and Buck said that it was only a
replica, and seemed kinda proud of my bad behaviour. He paid scant attention to the Wyatt Earp
citation and told me that Colt revolvers of that type were carried in holsters on either side of the
saddle.
Greg asked Buck about two pistols mounted on the wall and recoiled in horror when his brotherin-law let slip that they’d been stolen from a museum. Fantastic. Another chink in the Christian
wall. Greg took them down and Buck, slurring his words, showed how they were simply cap
guns. Then he produced a flat pistol and removed the magazine. Greg was nervous. For good
reason, it turned out, because Buck held a real pistol, and it was loaded.
“No point having it if it’s empty,” he said, then turned to let me in on a secret. “I got a licence to
carry a concealed weapon.”
The tiny open plan kitchen-cum-dining-and-lounge-room did not allow for such confidences, of
course, and Meryn asked me, later, why he had this licence—from the government, presumably?
I hadn’t found that out, unfortunately, hadn’t even tried. One pot screamer.
Buck went on to talk about how the Colt revolver had never been up to the job, that only when
the German, Browning, had figured out the design for the flat pistol had the handgun been up to
much. I mentioned that Meryn and I had witnessed the process for making a rifle—lock, stock,
and barrel—at Harper’s Ferry the previous week and asked why the barrels had been so long
back then.
“Akkarrassee,” Buck said, “Akkarussee.”
“What about pistols, does that mean they’re not so accurate?”
“Yup,” he pointed to the window, smiling, “about that far.”
“Is the bullet rifled in a handgun?”
“A little.”
I pointed at the window. “So those Wild West gunfighters would have had to be standing that
close to one another to have done much damage?”
“Mostly they missed,” said Buck. “I’ve had a coupla weeks huntin’.”
“With the bow and arrow or the flintlock?”
“Flintlock. Jus’ me and the dogs.”
Johnny Cash caught our attention at this point because he was pulling a sink off the wall. I was
going to say something about rock stars and cocaine but thought better of it.
“The demon drink,” Buck noted.
“How’s the flooring work going?” Greg changed the subject.
“The boss has checked himself in for rehab. Cocaine abuse. Checked hisself in. We didn’t notice
nothin’.”
“Where does that leave you?” Greg wanted to know, concerned no doubt for his sister Lily’s
welfare. Laura told Meryn, later, that when Buck’s previous employer had gone belly up, he and
Lily were looking down the barrel of the gun for a while, unsure of where their next meal was
coming from.
“In charge,” Buck laughed, opening another beer. “We didn’ notice. He’s jus’ like nothin’ was
wrong.”
“That’s the second time this has happened, isn’t it?” Greg elaborated for my benefit. “Didn’t you
end up fighting with your old boss?”
“Yup. Fistfight. Right out there,” he pointed to the driveway. Greg went on to tell the story of
the two men rolling around in the yard.
“Yeah. Made a lot of money and loss focus. Chasin’ after women he weren’t married to,” Buck
explained. “Loss focus. His wife though. She didn’ lose focus. Took the lot,” he said, still
amused. “Yeah. Checked hisself in to rehab. And it’s one of those expensive places, too. Cost a
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lot of money. Cocaine. So I’m the boss, now. Told my brother and he said ‘That hardwood
flooring game sure must be stressful.’ ”
“What will happen?” Greg, persevered, very focussed, “Will you get paid?”
“They pay him a lot of money for those hardwood floors. We gotta get paid. We’re the only ones
doin’ the work now. We never noticed. He weren’t no diffrnt.”
“If you can do it without him maybe you should become an entrepreneur. Is there a lot of work
around?”
“Hardwood floors. People pay big money for hardwood floors.”
Johnny Cash was singing. “Yeah, The Four Horsemen. Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and uh,
uh, Kris Kristofferson. That’s the best in country music there in that one group. The Four
Horseman.”
“What other music do you like, Buck?” I asked.
“Country music. Johnny Cash. He’s my favourite, and The Four Horsemen,” and turning to
Greg said, “They’re runnin’ episodes of Hee Haw on the TV. I saw it the other day.”
“Yeah, Buck Owens,” Greg said, from somewhere back behind the kitchen cabinet.
“Is that the old 1960s or 70s show with Roy Clarke?” I wanted to know.
“He used to play down here about three or four mile. Can play anything. George Jones used to
play there but he was drunk most of the time and never came on. ‘No show’ Jones, they call him.
Loretta Lynn played there too, the coalminer’s daughter. We thought it was alcohol he was on
but it was probably drugs. Like Elvis. We thought they was drunk but they wuz probably on
drugs. Why would they sing those tunes and do drugs. It doan make sense.”
“Well, imagine what it’d be like to be just out of school and suddenly you’re famous and people
are treating you as if you’re divine?” I put in my two penneth worth, “You’d have to keep up
appearances, and perform on stage when you’re exhausted from gruelling schedules organised by
a manager who’s in it for the money. So as soon as someone offered you a wonder drug … ”
“Elvis.”
Greg grew restless and looked around as if the evening wasn’t going where Jesus had planned.
‘Thank Christ for that,’ I thought, and asked Buck if he ever listened to the Stanley Brothers but
he’d never heard of them.
“What about Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Did you ever see it?”
“Oh yeah,” said Greg, “that’s a great movie,” and the whole gathering chimed in. I hadn’t
realised the girls were listening but all agreed, Buck as well, that it is a fine film.
“Remember the scene in the recording studio near the crossroads? When they sang that song
with the line “… the place where he was born and raised…?” They were miming to the Stanley
Brothers recording of ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’. ”
“Cain’t say I know them. My son likes all those old songs. He’s interested in history. Started out
gettin’ interested in World War II and listens to music from the 1930s and 40s. Knows a lot of
that. He found out we wuz all from Austria. Came ’ere in 1670. Carpenters—and distillers,” he
said proudly. “Yeah my son found it all out. He likes history. Carpenters and distillers, 1600s.
’Bout no mor’n’five mile from here they came.”
“And you’re laying floors. You say it’s hardwood. What timber do you use mainly?”
“Oak. White oak. There’s all kinds of oak. Black oak, red oak, all kinds of red and black oak. But
only a few types of white oak. That’s white oak right there,” he said, pointing, “and that there’s
chestnut,” still looking at the floor while pointing to the sky. He was talking about the heavy
timber used in constructing the wall of the house. “Got a bug from Asia, chestnuts, and were
wiped out.”
I called Meryn over, told her about the white oak, and had Buck repeat what he said about the
chestnut tree. She engaged him in conversation about chinking, having learned about the
technique over pork and sauerkraut from Joseph. The walls meet in interlocking dovetail joints
and leave gaps, chinks, between the massive beams. These gaps are then filled with a mortar
made early-on of mud, sticks, stones, and broken bones (no, not really, not bones) and later on of
more concrete substance over which chicken wire is placed.
Joseph used steel mesh and caulked with a very modern flexible mortar which expands and
contracts without cracking. He finished off with an insulating material that he coloured to give it
the timeworn appearance of yesteryear. Buck’s looks less ancient because he has stuck with the
more traditional compound. Chinking creates the effect of a layered chocolate and cream cake.
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“Folks who didn’t want to seem poor used to cover these walls with thin strips of pine wood
and plaster over the top of it.”
“Lathe and plaster,” Meryn said.
“That’s it—lathe and plaster,” Buck nodded, and talked further about the original structure.
There’d been four rooms downstairs, he told us, shaking his head at how small those rooms must
have been.
Ellie had been over near the back door for some time. Laura and Greg had joined her. “Well, did
you ask them?” Lily said to Buck, who looked bewildered. “Did he ask you about how you can
protect yourselves without guns?” she said to Meryn and me, “Is it true you had to give back all
your guns?”
“Well, ten years ago a fellow went on a rampage and shot thirty odd people,” I explained, “There
was a great outcry, as there should be when someone gets to walk about shooting at will. Our
leader saw an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the electorate and buy a swag of votes so he
outlawed unnecessary gun ownership. Most Australians agreed with him so yeah, the government
took people’s guns from them. But guns aren’t part of our culture. We don’t think of it as our
right to carry a firearm. But we understand it is part of your culture. You guys have insisted on
carrying guns since you arrived from Europe. The Puritans of Massachusetts marched to Sunday
church service with loaded guns and rested them on their lap. That’s not how our culture
developed. It strikes us as a recipe for trouble.”
“Like the melting pot,” Buck said. “Yeah I know it’s gotta come but I don’t want my daughter
marryin’ into no melting pot. We’ll all be speakin’ Spanish. I hear it all day long at work. Don’t
need to hear it from anyone in my family.”
He came over and told Meryn and me that Pennsylvania’s extensive natural woodlands had been
preserved by the efforts of the hunting fraternity. All that land had been saved for posterity
because they had lobbied the government.
“Bicyclists, trail hikers—they all get to use it now,” he said, “but it was hunters that got it
protected.”
“In game parks?” Meryn wanted to be sure she’d understood.
“Yup.”
“So it’s regulated.”
“Yup. But Pennsylvania’s got a huge area. And Maryland’s only got a few hundred acres. Yet they
get reciprocal rights.”
“They have a lot of woodlands,” I pointed out, “Are you saying they’re not game parks?”
“All tied up by private ownership,” Buck explained. “New York State’s the same. They get
reciprocal rights and can come and hunt in our woods but we cain’t go to theirs ’cos they’re all
private.”
“What about Virginia?”
“Virginia!? Huh. Ain’t nothin’ there. They’re Southerners. Still fightin’ the war. We wupped ’em
but they still fightin’.” He turned and spoke sotto voce to both of us. “I’m a Yankee.”
We laughed and agreed with him that the South did seem to be still fighting the Civil War.
“We wupped ’em,” he said again, pleased with himself.
Laura and Ellie were waiting in the car. Greg had the engine running. Buck took us into the barn
to introduce us to his two-year-old basset hounds. They looked at him with great affection and
he kissed the one nearest him.
“She always wets in her box and not where she should,” he told us, kissing her, “But she’s a real
good hunting dog and I don’t like to make her feel bad.”
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Chapter 17 Trickster
Meryn was to attend a conference in San Francisco in March 2007 and another in Boston a week
later. The maximum period for a given car rental was 28 days and the vehicle had to be returned
to the franchise from which it had been collected. So I was studying the map, lining up the ducks;
I’d no experience driving on ice and snow, but eventually decided that Des Moine, Iowa, should
be our base. We normally booked online but I phoned our favourite hire company, there, to go
over a few details.
Guided or not by some divinity—Trickster, Providence, Jesus?—I happened to speak to a young
man who was helpful in the first degree; his tone of voice conveyed that I was close to the edge
of stepping into a financial abyss and would benefit from a closer reading of the webpage fine
print. Thank God he didn’t allow me the freedom to walk into the trap of signing an ‘unlimited
mileage’ car hire contract only to find, when I returned the vehicle, that I’d breached the
conditions by travelling to a non-contiguous state. We were, after-all, intending to drive across
the country to San Francisco and back on one contract and then to Boston and back on another,
preceded by a three-week tour of the Deep South. Chicago (Illinois) and Memphis (Tennessee)
were the two cities with branches where unlimited mileage meant what it said. We chose Memphis.
And, as it turned out, the woman who ran the car hire firm, there, was an angel as sweet as
Tupelo honey.
We made the three back-to-back bookings then took delivery of the keys to Laura’s car for our
trip, next day, to the Pennsylvania State Agricultural Fair—which she said we simply must attend.
But there was a commotion first thing and I saw through the window of the Van Gogh that a big
yellow taxi truck took away the car and a van. The sedan was flooding, Ellie told us, so we must
take the station wagon instead. It behaved badly within minutes and made me nervous but we
made it to the Fair.
Marvellously understated, devoid of glitz and nonsense, and more or less like an Australian
Agricultural Show from the 1950s, the Harrisburg Agricultural Fair was no place for the urban
sophisticate: shearing a sheep (in one case a goat), carding the fleece, spinning the yarn (mainly
on spinning wheels but in one case involving the use of a drop spindle), and weaving a shawl on
a loom was the first major event on our calendar for the day.
It was a good start. The food was awful and expensive, while the coffee vied for first place as
America’s worst but the complimentary ‘dandy’, a spoonful or two of ice cream in a cardboard
bucket, and the butter sculpture of Benjamin Franklin, made it all worthwhile. A complete
absence of cynicism was the order of the day. Home-town naïveté was the norm but the artless
Polka Dancing demonstration in the equestrian arena was an hilarious burlesque.
The main arena, an oval of sandy dirt with around 5000 seats, hosted the carriage racing event
where two people (just as many women as men) and a pair of horses raced against the clock at
breakneck speed around a very tight slalom obstacle course. Despite it being a very exciting event
where the competitors displayed extraordinary skill, we had to get to the auctioneering challenge
where thirty-five Elmer Fudds pitted themselves against one another in selling items to the
audience. The soup served there was good quality.
Once again, though, we had to leave them to it because the six shawls we’d seen woven earlier at
the sheep shearing contest were going up for auction and we simply had to go full circle. They
went for between $US300 and $US870. On the way back to the car we took a final tour of the
main hall and watched while a fellow from Penn State College showed an enthralled group the
types of animals to be found in Pennsylvania backyards: a turtle, black rat snake (boa constrictor),
ground hog (we’d seen one in a Centreville backyard in October), and a juvenile red-tailed Hawk.
We braced ourselves for the frigid night but it wasn’t as cold at 7.30 pm as it had been when we
arrived at lunchtime.
An accident on Interstate 83 slowed the traffic to a crawl and the station wagon ran rough. Once
past the crash, we made good time to Lancaster but as soon as we left the freeway for the unlit
backroads the dashboard flashed a meaningless warning sign: ‘Service’ ‘1’. It would not be a good
place to break down because we had no torch, no tools, and the cell phone didn’t work that far
from town.
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With nothing but the experience gained from years of driving FJ and EJ Holdens, we pulled off
to the side of the road without going into a ditch each time the engine failed. The hazard lights
helped but it was not possible to get right out of the way of any horse and cart or innocent
automobile that chanced to come by as we waited while the machine regained its strength and
could manage another mile before a relapse. We nursed it home with a hop, step, and jump and
pinned a note on Laura’s back door.
A radio report put it all in perspective next morning: an American soldier whose goods and
chattels were in storage while he went on a tour of duty in Iraq didn’t get paid on time so the
company auctioned off his stuff. He had advised the storage company that the Army would
eventually get its act together and pay his salary but they went ahead and auctioned the
belongings. He was compensated for the loss by a payment amounting to not quite half the value
of the items. Pot luck—it’s the American way.
We went to a Lancaster diner on Route 222 with Laura the day we vacated the Van Gogh and, as
if to underline the theme of our seven weeks in her world, she made it a Last Supper and prayed
out loud in the small and very public establishment. We didn’t know where to look; it was all I
could do not to laugh. Still, it was an experience, and that’s what we were in America for. The
sacredness of the moment was lost on the waitress, though, because she came up in the middle
of the prayer and asked whether we wanted more coffee. To have motioned her away would
mean not being asked again so I lifted my cup up toward her pot saying “Yes, please.”
Laura, offended, waited for the crude commercial transaction to pass before going on to thank
the Lord for having brought Meryn and me into her family’s life, and asking Him to get us safely
to North Carolina. She talked about her children, of how Lester asked his Mom to pray for him
and of Ellie’s excitement concerning an upcoming gathering with fellow members of their
Christian group.
Greg had joined us and I asked if their kids would feel they’d be banished by the rest of the
family and community should they declare that they were not believers. Not at all, Greg said, but
there’s no way his children could doubt that they were having a personal relationship with Jesus.
I said that religion is more a sociological than a personal belief system for Australians, that I did
not share their faith, and thought Darwin’s account was the hands down winner when it came to
the question of Creation versus evolution as an explanation of how we came to be here. I left
Meryn to play good cop stuff while I went to the Restroom but she made no progress, she told
me on the bus, because Greg would go no further than to admit that Evolution had some
interesting narrative elements.
Laura drove us to the intercity bus terminal at Lancaster Train Station. We’d purchased the
tickets from Greyhound but Trailways did the Lancaster to Baltimore leg of the interstate route.
Trailways got us to York 45 minutes before the connecting bus from Harrisburg was due. It was
cold and Meryn sat in the waiting room while I joined the line to check that all was well with our
tickets.
The man ahead of me said “I just got outa gaol” just so I’d know. No threat was implied; rather,
it was a variation on the standard “Howdy stranger” introduction whereby the American puts
you in the picture concerning his place on the ladder of freedom. He was friendly, pleasant—and
black. He knew his place. The African American sits naturally on the bottom rung; it’s where he
belongs in that God-fearing society of white Christians. He’s as likely as not to have been
incarcerated at some stage.
Maybe my fellow traveller on that queue was a violent rapist or murderer but the odds are that he
was not. The black guy driving the desk—a wizard with the computer terminal, he was not such a
good cleaner, the job he had to do when closing up for the day—gave the ex-convict every
courtesy, as he did the rest of us. It was after 6 pm. so he was closing up for the day and had no
choice but to put us out in the cold. I felt for those whose bus was scheduled for after 7 pm
because they were going to be blocks of ice, in that there town where the Continental Congress
had met in 1777.
Our bus didn’t show. We phoned Trailways in Harrisburg and they said it was on the way. An
hour later, a bus pulled in and picked up those heading for Harrisburg. More phone calls. More
lies. Bus travel is for the poor. The drivers get a raw deal and are sometimes sick; their shifts are
covered by whomever it is that turns up from wherever. We were cold and angry when the bus
for Baltimore turned up more than three hours late. We’d been through it before, with Greyhound
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in New York, but that was no excuse. Everyone waiting with us, there, in York, had paid and
been taken for a ride. I overheard the driver talking to his wife on the phone. He’d already done a
long shift but wanted to keep the job and did what was expected.
Poorly maintained equipment, appalling working conditions, complete cynicism on the part of
the business owners with respect to passengers and staff—that’s how the free market for bus
travel works in the USA. It’s how things were in January 1959 and Charles Hardin Holley from
Texas couldn’t take being treated as one of America’s poor any more. Conditions on the Trailways
bus that Holley travelled on were so bleak that he chartered a plane.
He, Jiles P. Richardson, and Richie Valenzuela had donned professional masks to perform for
audiences on a north country winter tour. Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens had
played the Duluth Armory on the last day of January and would be leaving for Fargo, North
Dakota, after the Clear Lake, Iowa, show on February 2nd. Waylon Jennings, Holly’s Texas
buddy, gave up his seat on the plane to the Big Bopper as an act of kindness. The plane crashed
moments after take off early on February 3rd and all on board perished.
Hamilton was ready to fly off the handle and we had a whole night of bus travel ahead so I had a
torrid time: Lucia di Lammermoor, Glen Coe, the ‘Dalrymple curse’, the Kirk, a prize fight,
Presbyterians being tortured—all things Scottish—played on my mind.
The bus was in a blanket of fog. Half awake, I heard ‘Durham’ and looked across at Meryn who
was in a deep sleep. She would phone Leo and Betty when we got off the bus and they’d drive to
Durham to get us. Hamilton was still in something of a state and I wondered whether I could get
him back in the box before we reached Chapel Hill. I dozed off but kept one eye half open since
Durham was the next stop and it was difficult to tell where we were.
Durham? I remembered that Meryn and I had seen a documentary, on SBS perhaps, about a
Durham murder trial. A Durham novelist’s wife had died at the foot of a staircase in December
2001 and he’d been charged with the murder. The writer swore black and blue that he had
nothing to do with it. Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung’s belief in the existence of a ‘collective
unconscious’ had been bolstered by a strange coincidence that had befallen a patient: the fellow
suffered from a fear of stairs that had proved resistant to analysis, the phobia having persisted
through countless consultations. When the analysand stopped attending Jung assumed that he’d
effected the classic psychoanalytic cure—which is to say, as Freud had, that the patient was cured
when the money ran out. Later on, Jung learned that the patient in question had instead been
caught in the crossfire of a shootout between rival gangs. Ducking would do no good, so he ran;
but there was nowhere to go except up a flight of stairs. He died on the steps.
Meryn phoned Betty and we sat in Durham’s warm, clean, waiting room and watched a young
black man come to terms with a frustrating predicament. The friendly, deftly competent middleaged African American woman behind the counter was taking him through the steps required to
get to his intended destination. It was still dark out and the waiting room lights were dimmed for
those passengers who wanted to rest until they made their connection. But the tall young black
man wore heavy sunglasses. They were part of the pattern, and went with crutch-to-knee pants
that he held up with nothing but attitude, shoes without laces, and a proud chip on the shoulder.
The desk clerk saw straight past his aggressive insecurity and affectionately mothered him,
explaining that the only solution would be for him to go back to from where he caught the
wrong bus and get on the right bus. He maintained a dogged sense of being the victim of a cruel
schedule but was gradually being brought round to see the sense in what the woman had been
saying. Someone else might have made a mess of his journey but only he could clean it up; he
could see that.
Leo entered the waiting room, his broad beaming smile a tonic. He understands what it is we
love about America and took us on a tour of Chapel Hill; it’s where we first met him and his
wife, Betty, in April 2005. Back then, he guided us through the University of North Carolina’s
Collection and I was struck by the watercolour painting of Eng and Chang, the Siamese twins
who had settled down to married life in North Carolina after having been a P T Barnum circus
act in the 1830s. Leo drove around places with which he knew we’d be familiar—including the
house where Betty and he used to live—then headed home to the gated community on the
outskirts of Chapel Hill and served breakfast.
He’s a big man but seemed unsuited to the vast brand new house. As I say, the American goes in
for burlesque, and the gated community is nothing if not that. But it didn’t sit well on Leo. Meryn
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and I wallowed in the luxury of being able to watch Hardball, Countdown, Colbert and all the other
favourites on both the big screen in the living room as well as the 21 inch in the bedroom.
Adam Smith and those other enlightened eighteenth-century Scots recognised that civilisation
comes of an expanding middle class. Experience has demonstrated, though, that free-booting
unregulated capitalism ultimately concentrates wealth, shrinks the middle class, and creates
hostile opposites. The American puts up with it as a necessary price to be paid and imagines that
a Franklin Roosevelt will always follow a Herbert Hoover.
Leo’s maternal great-great-grandmother had migrated to the USA in 1860 with her five sons, all
of whom fought in and survived the Civil War. His great-grandfather, Patrick McMahon, enlisted
in the Connecticut 6th and was mentioned in despatches from the historic July 18th 1863 Federal
attack on Fort Wagner. Patrick’s regiment fought alongside the predominantly African American
Massachusetts 54th which had been formed when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation came
into force on January 1st 1863.
Abolitionists had taken charge of recruitment of soldiers for the Massachusetts 54th. Despite
failing to win the day at South Carolina’s Fort Wagner, the black soldiers came to everyone’s
attention for their disciplined valour. They weren’t alone in being noticed: an officer reported
that Patrick McMahon had escorted a captured Confederate Officer to the command post.
Patrick went on to fight at Fort Fisher, the Confederate South’s last line of defence of their deep
sea Atlantic port in North Carolina, in Brigadier General Adelbert Ames’ successful infantry
attack on the stronghold in January 1865.
Leo’s great-grandfather, then, had fought in the same Civil War battle as the man whom Jesse
James had targeted when the James boys held up the Northfield Bank with Col Younger and his
gang. Col’s uncle, Sim Younger, a former Negro slave who had enlisted as a Union soldier, also
took part in the successful Federal assault on the Confederate Fort.i So Leo’s merely a few
degrees of separation away from another of those curious coincidences of American history
which entwined the fate of abolitionist Adelbert Ames with that of Jesse James’ gang of whitesupremacist terrorists.
Leo took us to a marvellous bookshop at a retirement-village-cum-cattle raising-venture and,
after browsing and grazing, to a shanty town to see critters hacked from tree trunks by a man
who had been injured while working at the local textile mill. The dilapidated mill was abandoned
long ago but the man had stayed in his timber shotgun shack after the workplace accident and
was still living in the tumble-down structure when we were there. On the way home we stopped
at one of those supermarkets designed to draw you in and Meryn was as surprised as me to be
walking up and down the aisles nursing a Starbucks’ cardboard cup of coffee. Leo thought we
needed to not just see but be the American. It was all counterfeit.
Betty had various couples to dinner on separate occasions during the week we stayed. It was
surely a tall order for her to do it all in the middle of launching a new business but that’s what the
American does.
We met a former businessman from a large publishing house (who told us that if we had to
choose between one or the other then we should go to Las Vegas rather than Salt Lake City
“because Las Vegas is insane!” he said); a woman who had researched the Bronk’s family farm,
now the Bronx of New York City; a laconic hospital architect; a pair of literary theorists; and the
woman who told us that when she and her husband had once taken their kids on a round trip to
the west coast her spouse was so solicitous of his family’s safety that he slept with a knife in
clenched teeth for fear of a break-in. When he eventually gave in to fatigue and went to bed early
one night she went for a walk and discovered that their motel was an integral part of a Wyoming
brothel strip. She told us, too, about ‘greeters’, men and women who travel on the train for free
but who walk up and down the carriages saying “Hello” and ensuring that all the passengers are
doin’ okay.
After listening to the story about the terminal operator at the Durham bus station, the literary
theorists pointed out that the black guy’s fashion statement had its origins in the politics of race:
walking around in as dignified a manner as possible with one’s pants falling down and shoes
Sim Younger’s white father had sired him by a slave woman the old man had owned. Col Younger was one of the
slave-owner’s ‘legitimate’ grandchildren.
i
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falling off is an act of solidarity with those black brothers in gaol who have their belts and
shoelaces taken from them by the prison authorities. It made good sense.
There’s a thousand and one varieties across the USA but only a single type: the American; a real
prisoner had spoken to me when we were setting off from the Trailways terminal in York,
Pennsylvania, and had been transformed into a burlesque copy by journey’s end.
When Meryn sat down to a birthday breakfast on our last day in Chapel Hill, I pressed ‘play’ on
the mp3 and the band struck up an appropriate song. We were booked on the bus to Memphis
that night. Leo put us in the picture about the struggle between America’s nineteenth-century
Allopaths with their humoral medicine (blood-letting, purging, calomel, and so on) and the ‘do
no harm’ physicians led by Oliver Wendel Holmes who had argued that allopathy was worse than
ineffective and positively harmful, in fact.
Holmes had given a paper on the subject at the outbreak of the Civil War. Meryn and I had
examined an exhibit about that pre-scientific medical practice at the National Civil War Medicine
Museum a fortnight earlier. Betty’s eyes were smiling and when Leo stopped to refuel she held up
an article from that morning’s New York Times about the birthday song we'd just heard. Trickster
contrives coincidence—and rides Greyhound.
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Taken in by America
Chapter 18 Massachusetts and Virginia
North Carolina is contiguous with Tennessee. So when Betty and Leo saw us off from the
Durham bus depot at 7 pm we might have made a beeline for the Mississippi River and arrived in
Memphis early the next morning. Since, however, the bus companies go around rather than
across the Appalachian Mountains we were somewhere between Atlanta, Georgia, and
Birmingham, Alabama, having gone round Robin Hood’s barn in North Carolina.
Charles Cornwallis had been in that neck o’ the woods in the summer of 1780. Outnumbered as
he was, the British General outmanoeuvred America’s Horatio Gates at the battle of Camden,
South Carolina, and then moved up into North Carolina and pursued the American Continental
Army toward the border with the state of Virginia. Cornwallis won the horrific battle of Guilford
Court House in Hillsborough (North Carolina) but, having gained no strategic advantage,
retreated southeast to the Atlantic seaport town of Wilmington in April 1781.
He’d had enough of cat and mouse warfare and decided instead to sail up the coast to Virginia
where he might tackle the American Commander-in-Chief head-on. On the verge of success in
August, his superior, Sir Henry Clinton, ordered Cornwallis to establish a base on the Atlantic
coast from which the British Navy could be supplied. Trickster convinced the latter to choose
Yorktown, which he did—just as the French sailed into the Chesapeake and sealed his fate.
We changed buses at Hillsborough and again at Charlotte for Atlanta. I sat next to a very tall,
well-built African American who had been pensioned out of the American Navy with a
permanent disability. He had been all over Europe during his time, and once took off for Rome
in a jet from the deck of an aircraft carrier. He’d fought in both Afghanistan and Iraq and left me
in no doubt that he thought Bush’s military adventurism a disaster. His wife and child were
asleep in the seat behind us and he vowed and declared he’d never put them through another
night on an American bus. He’d imagined that it would be like travelling in Europe. He’d
obviously been softened up by European civilisation, like all those other Southern blacks who’d
sailed across the Atlantic in 1917, and ever since.
A pert young black woman who had stood out from the crowd in Atlanta’s Greyhound terminal
happened to sit in the front seat opposite us on the 5.30 am ride to Birmingham. The driver
pulled into a gas station two blocks down the road and asked her to go in and buy him a soda.
She had style, and stilettos. The lights were on but the store wasn’t yet open for business so the
errand girl walked back and forth across the service station forecourt looking for a way in,
attracting attention.
The driver motioned to her to knock on the window. She did, and eventually the proprietor
opened up for the first sale of the day. The woman climbed back on the bus and handed over the
soft drink and change. The driver offered her a tip but she politely declined and he introduced
himself to the rest of us and made a speech about the on-board rules, where he’d get us to, and
so on, ostensibly for the collective benefit. The young woman in the white woollen waist jacket
and fishnet stockings lapped it up. Her conversation and speech rhythm was priceless—white
man’s English pales by comparison—and I lamented having no way of keeping it for posterity.
She was an expert flirt and the man at the wheel lost all control, driven to distraction with the
prospect of her sugar. He asked her how she was.
“Fine,” she said.
“I can see that but I wanna know how you is.”
She parlayed back and forth with him getting increasingly personal. He went around the point of
wanting to say ‘How come you’re on the Greyhound when you’re so well dressed and stylish. You
are not the sort of person to ride the Greyhound, so what’s with you being here?’ He suggested
that she was like a red SL parked in a back alley. She replied that she was unfamiliar with which
car was which so he went on to elaborate on the image of a two door, soft-top, Mercedes
convertible sports car which stands out among the broken down models he’s used to seeing in
this environment.
She clearly enjoyed the attention but maintained decorum, playing our driver like a fish she had
every intention of throwing back as soon as he was reeled in. He elicited the information that she
was going to Birmingham to catch an aeroplane, and that it wasn’t on work time. He knew that
the game would be over were he to let her take him down that track so he asked her name.
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“Shira.”
“What do they call you for short.”
They didn’t call her anything for short, only ‘Shira.’ He had her spell it and then asked her other
personal stuff. She answered with questions of her own such as “And how long have you been
driving Greyhound buses Mr William?” After a while he started to get the sense that he might be
pushing it too far so he stuck to driving. She let it go until the tension was quite palpable and
then said “Where do you come from Mr Willie?” He was from some suburb in outer Atlanta. He
asked where she got such a soft voiced accent and she owned up to being from Tennessee.
“Which part of Tennessee?”
“The west.”
“Are you from Heloise?”
“No.”
“Golddust.”
She played him along and then told him it was Tigrett.
Birmingham was as we remembered it from the 2005 trip when Meryn attended an academic
conference in a Downtown hotel. We had stayed in a motel just off an exceedingly dangerous
stretch of road at the end of a drive down Highway 61. We’d hugged the Mississippi River from
Mark Twain’s childhood town of Hannibal (Missouri) through Memphis, Clarksdale, Oxford and
Tupelo then, and now looked forward to seeing those towns again: Clarksdale’s famous
crossroads where blues musicians sold their soul to the Devil; William Faulkner’s Oxford;
Tupelo’s Assemblies of God church where Elvis Presley sang Gospel, a couple of streets over from
the shotgun shack in which he was raised.
When the bus pulled out from Tupelo the journey was almost done. ‘Next stop, Memphis,
Tennessee!’ I almost spoke aloud, grateful for the comfortable leg we’d had on the long road
from Atlanta. Had I done so I would have been politely corrected with the equivalent of
“Detroit, driver” from somewhere in back of the bus, because it was New Albany, where we lost
one and gained two passengers. I had the name of the town going round in my head all the way
to Memphis. I looked it up: New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner’s birthplace.
We’d been in Memphis twice before, in 2003 and 2005, and it looked as good as ever. It’s one of
our favourite cities, and Hamilton’s too, judging by his mood. We booked into our hotel and felt
at home in what would be our base for the three long trips to be taken over the next ten weeks.
On our first visit to Memphis in late July 2003, I paid homage at Sun Studios, 706 Union Avenue,
more or less immediately upon arrival on the overnight train from Chicago. A very confident
young woman conducted a tour, there. She was something of a feminist and so made sure to
explain that it wasn’t Sam Phillips who’d discovered Elvis but Marion Keisker.
Meryn hadn’t gone along for the ride but commented on my uncharacteristic enthusiasm for the
tour. I’m usually jaded by commerce of that nature, regarding it as amounting to nothing more
than a cashing in on celebrity, but the docent’s approach and attitude was a breath of fresh air.
News that Sam Phillips had just died in a local hospital was the first in a string of odd things that
occurred during the three of four days we were in that city.
Sam Phillips left high school before graduating because his father had died and the youth needed
a job to support his mother and aunt. He was taken in by a funeral parlour. From 1945, he
worked as a disc jockey spinning jazz and blues at Radio WREC and in 1950 opened the
Memphis Recording Service. Memphis, racially segregated, was thriving from its long-established
status as an agricultural trading nexus and the more recent development of manufacturing
industry (which had begun there in World War II).
African Americans in Memphis, many of whom were immigrants from the Deep South, had
gravitated to Beale Street—not far from the cotton warehouses lining the Illinois Central railroad
on the banks of the Mississippi River—and Beale Street blues and jazz held much of Memphis’
attraction for Sam Phillips. Black artists cut records in his studios because Phillips had made it
clear that they were as welcome as anybody else. B. B. King, a black Memphis disc jockey,
recorded there; so did Chicago’s Chess label artists Howlin’ Wolf and Jackie Brenston. Brenston’s
‘Rocket 88’, featuring Ike Turner on piano, made accidental history with a strange new sound—
rock’n’roll—and it topped the Rhythm and Blues (RB) charts in June 1951. That revolutionary
breakthrough in modern music, rock’n’roll, was the outcome of the strange sound that emanated
from an amplifier that had been packed with newspaper after being dropped en route from
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Clarksdale, Mississippi, to the studio. On the back of that success, Sam Phillips expanded his
business, setting up the ‘Sun Records’ label.
Three years after ‘Rocket 88’ went to number one, Sam Phillips struck gold when the nineteenyear-old Elvis Presley recorded Arthur Crudup’s ‘That’s All Right’ and Bill Monroe’s ‘Blue Moon
of Kentucky’ for Sun Records.i Elvis was the conduit whereby rock’n’roll gained currency as the
sound that the newly minted American teenager called his own. He had fashioned the sought
after union of opposites—a magical combination of black and white America, Negro blues and
Appalachian hillbilly music.
Trickster’s first foray into this type of union between black and white America—a white copy of
black reality for the purpose of white entertainment—had been via the nineteenth-century
Minstrel Show. Moreover, the folk-lyric form which gave American song its unique pedigree had
emerged from minstrelsy, in the 1850s. Elvis Presley’s rock’n’roll stardom, then, is one link in a
causal chain that runs all the way back to the suffering occasioned by the white American’s belief
that he was superior to the black man.
When the peculiar institution was outlawed in the 1860s, freed slaves had believed they would
each get forty acres and a mule just as soon as the Civil War was won. They got instead a fierce
backlash from their humiliated white superiors—the Cavalierii and cracker—who gradually reintroduced human bondage during the ‘White Redemption’ era that began in the 1870s.
Southern state legislatures re-instated the old order through passage of a series of Jim Crow laws
that cemented slavery’s copy—peonage—in place. The poor white cracker suffered under the yolk
of peonage too but his pain was self-inflicted, the outcome of identifying with the Cavalier
planter, the wealthy aristocrat, as white supremacist rather than with the poor black as oppressed
worker. The American’s proud, long-standing aversion to class consciousness has set him up as
the confidence man’s mark.
Blues music, the strongest link in the causal chain which connects rock’n’roll with the treatment
handed out to the African American by his white American overseer, was born of the black
man’s dashed hope and renewed suffering occasioned by White Redemption. It’s more than
ironic, therefore, that the American’s great gift to the world—popular song—is rooted in and
makes a mockery of his foolish fantasy of white supremacy.
Meryn and my upcoming journey through the Deep South held out the promise that the Blues,
Civil War, and Civil Rights Movement would all show up in relief against the backdrop of Old
Man River.
British General Cornwallis had hardly set foot on the beach at Charleston, South Carolina, in
May 1780 before realising that there’s a discontinuity between Massachusetts and Virginia,
between America’s North and South. So many Southerners loyal to Britain came out of the
woodwork that Cornwallis imagined it would be a cakewalk for his troops to progress from the
capture of South Carolina up through North Carolina to meet up with (British Commander)
General Clinton’s forces and crush the American Revolution.
Cornwallis had been mistaken in his belief that the Carolinians had come out in support of the
British because they were loyalists. Rather, the Carolinian was loyalist only insofar as it would
help preserve his way of life. A Carolinian was just as likely to be a patriot as a royalist because,
more than anything, he was a Southerner, a heartfelt conservative, and didn’t think and act like
his Northern brother.iii
Massachusetts was settled by Puritans who had sought to escape from England’s master-andservant society to one where the individual might be rewarded for his industry. Virginia imagined
Phillips sold the Presley contract to RCA in 1955 and they marketed Presley nationwide. Elvis became the toast of the
town, The King, and fans swooned over even the most banal songs—‘Tweedle Dee’ and ‘Poor Boy’ for instance—
because he sang them.
ii See above, Chapter 9 ‘The Drifter’.
iii “The inhabitants of warmer climates are more dissolute in their manners, and less industrious, than in colder
countries. A degree of severity is, therefore, necessary with one which would cramp the spirit of the other,” wrote John
Winthrop in The Massachusetts Gazette of December 3rd 1787 “Federal v. Consolidated Government: Agrippa, no. 4,”
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch8s21.html;
“We see plainly that men who come from New England are different from us,” Joseph Taylor told the North Carolina
Federal Constitution Ratifying Convention on July 24th 1788. “Preamble: Debate in North Carolina Ratifying
Convention,” http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/preambles15.html; The Federalist Papers
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 58
i
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Herself to be the complete opposite—a feudal Paradise where aristocrats might live in luxury off
of the back-breaking labour of their inferiors. And, after shaky beginnings where She came face
to face with death through starvation and sickness, Virginia succeeded in setting up an American
copy of English social privilege. She encouraged aristocrats whose world had been turned upside
down by the English Civil War between Cromwell’s Puritan Roundheads and King Charles’
Cavaliers in the 1640s to bring the sense of superiority that they’d had in the old world and apply
it in the new colony.i Those that heeded her call soon found that the copy went one up on the
real thing: not only did they get free land but could replace their indentured servants with African
slaves.
Virginia’s Cavalier—Percy, Spencer, Wyatt, or Carter—got rich using slave labour to grow
tobacco on plantations. In time, he became an American and so stopped calling himself an
aristocrat but allowed the myth of his high-born nobility and breeding to influence the way the
common man perceived him.32 He was a planter. The planter curried favour with the common
man, slapped his back, condescended to listen to his opinion, and admired his religious faith.
Planters fostered the common man’s fantasy of being superior to the Negro, and sold him
confidence in the status of the white man. His black slaves must address the planter as “Massa”
but impoverished white folk were his equal, and could call him ‘Uncle.’
The common man was fooled into equating his freedom to scratch a living from the rocky
outcrop on the margin with the planter’s liberty to own black slaves. Ronald Reagan played the
race card in much the same way as had the planter: to distract poor whites from class awareness.
Class difference is everywhere apparent in his nation but the American can’t see it; like the pea
under the shell, or the game of three card monte, he falls for the confidence trick every time.33
Evangelical Christianity had taught Jefferson’s common man,ii the Southern cracker, to vote in
the planter’s economic interest rather than his own. The cracker, primarily Scotch-Irish in origin,
bought the story that God had fashioned the Negro to serve the white man, that the black man
was better off as an American slave than an African tribesman because he was incapable of
looking after himself. The cracker believed this because Christian religion told him it was true.
God said so Himself, it was right there in the bible—once he’d been shown how it should be
read.
The American, much given to religion, has had a series of ‘Great Awakenings’ to renew his
Christian faith. The first of these took hold in the 1730s and culminated in Massachusetts and
Virginia uniting to stage the American Revolution; the second engendered a major expansion in
the institution of slavery in Virginia and the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts.
Both of these religious awakenings admonished the individual to throw off the shackles of
authority and find God in his everyday surroundings. The traditional faiths lost much of their
flock to the so-called ‘New Light’ churches. New Light ministers were predominantly from poor
backgrounds, and ill-educated.
Down South they rode about on horseback and preached a fire and brimstone message to
gatherings of common folk who gave themselves over to emotional abandon. The Southerner
wanted a religion as uncomplicated and emotional as himself.34 He wanted to be part of the
show, to be conducted down to hell, forced to look upon the awful fire, threatened with eternal
torment therein, then raised back up, brought screaming to the Light of Christ, and saved by the
Blood of the Lamb.
The American liked religion as theatre as much then as now. He found a path to redemption by
howling, jerking, going about on all fours, crawling—whatever gyrations might be necessary to
free him from Satan’s evil spirit. His religion, like his politics, takes the form of entertainment, is
a burlesque. Which is not to say that religion and politics are insignificant. Jefferson’s
Republicans eventually split over the political role of the common man. Those who chanced their
hand on gaining the support of the common man went with President Andrew Jackson’s
Democrats; those who decried this as a decent into the politics of lowest common denominator
populism joined the Whigs.
Davy Crockett went to Washington as a Democrat but became a Whig when he saw how deals
were done. Jacksonian Democracy saw the advent of the professional politician, the fellow who
i
ii
See above Chapter 9 ‘The Drifter’
See above, Chapter 11 ‘Donning the Mask’.
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made a career of being a Party man. Jacksonian Democracy did much for the common man but
did so by putting the agrarian slave-owning Southern planter in the driving seat of government.
The planter got his way for the first sixty years of nineteenth-century Federal politics by pushing
the Southern politician to extreme gambit positions in Washington and then allowing him to fall
back and accept the compromise that invariably advanced his cause.
The first major compromise came about over the ‘Louisiana Purchase’. President Jefferson
bought the territory between the Mississippi River and The Rocky Mountains from France in
1803 and sent Lewis and Clark to explore it by travelling west along the Missouri River in 1804.
Their return in 1806 had conjured up such extraordinary visions of economic growth in the
American’s imagination that within two generations he had transformed the organic process of
westward migration into the myth of divinely ordained territorial expansion. But which of the
twins, North or South, would determine the status of those who crossed that river? Would the
trans-Mississippi American live in a free-state or slave-state?
Matters first came to a head in 1819 when Congress dealt with the proposal to admit Missouri to
the Union. The House of Representatives voted that Missouri be free whereas the Senate insisted
that she be a slave-state. The pre-eminent champion of states’ rights, Thomas Jefferson, an old
man by then, endured sleepless nights at the prospect that the Union might dissolve as a
consequence of his Louisiana Purchase. The impasse was resolved when Kentucky Whig Senator,
Henry Clay, formulated the Missouri Compromise of 1820: Maine was admitted with Missouri,
the former as a free-state and the latter as a slave-state; and Missouri’s southern border, latitude
36º30’, would henceforth be the dividing line between (Southern) slave and (Northern) free states
west of the Mississippi River.
Trickster had reduced the serious business of America’s national development to the level of a
farcical card game where the South trumped the North by gaining Missouri as a slave state
despite the fact that Missouri was north of the Mason-Dixon line; then the North trumped the
South by establishing demarcation midway between the 36th and 37th parallels. Henry Clay came
up with another compromise when South Carolina threatened to secede over the question of
tariffs in 1832 and the day of reckoning was once again postponed.
President Andrew Jackson commented at the time that it was tariffs today but would be slavery
tomorrow. Either way, the ongoing struggle between North and South came down to the
overweening pride of a handful of planters asserting their ‘rights.’ They had convinced the
common man that their cause was his, that it was the Southerner’s duty to defend the honour of
the white man and his liberty. Missouri was just another step on the way, of course. Michigan and
Arkansas were admitted in the late 1830s and it was then that the South realised that the 1820
Missouri Compromise added up all wrong. By then, thirteen new states had joined the original
thirteen and this had resulted in a precarious balance of thirteen free and thirteen slave states. Of
the four territories that might yet become states, three (Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) were
north of the 36th parallel and one (Florida) was south. Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and so on
were still predominantly Indian territories.35
In 1836 South Carolina’s John Calhoun proposed that Texas be annexed from Mexico but
nothing came of it until he was appointed Secretary of State on April Fools’ Day, 1844. Calhoun
worked tirelessly for President John Tyler to annex Texas but the fact that it was a Presidential
election year stayed Tyler’s hand because both the Democratic frontrunner, Martin Van Buren,
and his Whig opponent in the presidential race, Henry Clay, were against annexation.
Trickster, though, granted the planters’ wish and Calhoun’s dream came true: the Democrats
dumped Van Buren in favour of James Polk and the latter went on to win the 1844 presidential
election on a territorial expansion platform. President Tyler promptly annexed Texas and paved
the way for his successor to contrive a war with Mexico and seize a vast amount of her land as
newly acquired territory of the United States of America.
Texas, below the 36thparallel, was slave but California and Utah straddled it. Virginia wanted to
retrieve what she figured she’d lost in agreeing to the 1820 Compromise. The spoils of war with
Mexico would be the means to that end. Massachusetts had no intention of giving in and so the
two old warhorses, Henry Clay and John Calhoun, battled it out in Congress as to which of the
states to be formed from the newly acquired territories would be slave and which free.
The wily Democrat Senator, Stephen Douglas of Illinois, put Clay’s inevitable compromise
proposal into effect by buying a vote here and a vote there to steer a series of legislative bills
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through Congress. California would be free; a section of Texas would be split off to form New
Mexico; the moribund 1793 Slave Act would be made robust to the point where anyone aiding an
escaped slave would be fined and imprisoned; and the people residing in the territories of Utah
and New Mexico could choose whether or not to be admitted as a free or slave state. Known as
the 1850 Compromise, the stitched up package pleased no-one but bought time for both sides,
North and South, as they prepared for a fight.
Stephen Douglas was Chairman of the Senate committee on Territories; Southern senators
readied themselves for him to come buying votes for a Nebraska Territory bill. It was inevitable
that there’d be an east-west railroad once steam locomotives crossed the Mississippi River. That
railroad would traverse the Territory beyond Missouri—Nebraska.
David Atchison of Missouri spearheaded the delegation of Southern senators with whom
Chairman Douglas would have to bargain. The Missouri senator promised to deliver the
Southern vote in return for repeal of the 1820 Compromise. The Chicago and Rock Island
Railway tracks neared the banks of the Mississippi in 1854 as Stephen Douglas tried to
accommodate Atchison.
Douglas aimed to divide the Nebraska Territory into the states of Nebraska and Kansas and
allow the question of their status—slave or free—to be decided by ‘popular sovereignty;’ i.e., the
people residing in the respective territories would choose whether or not theirs was to be a free
or slave state. Senator Atchison liked the proposal but had Douglas insert a clause into the
legislation for explicit repeal of the limitation of slavery above latitude 36° 30’ and the die was
cast: the North could not abide it.
Northern Democrats were at odds with Southern Democrats; Northern Whigs were so much at
odds with Southern Whigs that their party disintegrated. A newly constituted Republican Party
attracted Northerners who wanted to resolve the slavery question once and for all.
Kansas was clearly on the free side of the 1820 slave-free dividing line but Atchison was adamant
that Kansas be admitted as a slave state and so organised hoards of pro-slavery Missourians to
cross the river and vote ‘pro-slavery’ in the Kansas election; William Seward (the New York
senator who was to become Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State) responded by sending antislavery Northerners to vote in Kansas. The resulting polarisation escalated until violence erupted
in 1855.
On May 21st 1856, two weeks after the Effie Afton had crashed into the Rock Island Bridge,
Senator Atchison rode into the Kansas anti-slavery town of Lawrence with 800 armed militia and
laid waste to the place. That same day, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks entered the
Senate chamber in Washington D.C. and beat Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner about the
head with a cane until the victim lay senseless on the floor. The Northern abolitionist, John
Brown, then avenged the Lawrence and Sumner attacks by savagely murdering and mutilating
five proslavery Kansans in Pottawatomie Creek. The violence over Kansas’ admission to the
Union divided Missouri into Northern and Southern factions and was the prelude to civil war.
[insert 2011 visit]
Abraham Lincoln, meanwhile, was preparing his brief as defence counsel in the Rock Island
Bridge case that would commence on September 8th 1857 in the courtroom of the Saloon
Building at Clark and Lake Streets, Chicago. The Chicago press commented favourably on
Lincoln’s breadth of knowledge and depth of understanding and Northern capitalists took note.
The Kansas-Nebraska debacle had made it all too clear to them that the next President must be a
man of such ability.
Lincoln obtained the Republican Party nomination as senator for Illinois in the mid-term
elections of 1858 and took on Democrat Stephen Douglas in a series of debates across the state.
He lost the battle for the senate but won the war of words for the hearts and minds of those who
would decide Republican Party strategy for the 1860 Presidential race by calling upon the
American to acknowledge that he could not have both liberty and freedom and must choose
between the two. The Democrats sought to protect the American’s liberty as a slaveholder, said
Lincoln, whereas the Republicans wanted to secure his stake in a republic of free citizens:
‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure,
permanently half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the
house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the
other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the
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public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates
will push forward, ’til it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new—north as well
as south.36
The Democrats split their vote between Southern (John Breckinridge) and Northern (Stephen
Douglas) candidates in the 1860 presidential election, and thereby left the door open for Lincoln
to walk into the White House. Presented with the fait accompli of Southern secession, President
Lincoln set about nipping the rebellion in the bud but ended up with a blooming war.
At the outbreak of that war, the Federal military forces adopted an ‘anaconda strategy’ whereby
the North would secure control of the Atlantic coast, the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi
River then gradually tighten its grip on the South’s supply lines. The purpose of the war, as
Lincoln saw it, was to save the Union; if freeing the slaves would do it then he’d free them; if not
freeing the slaves would save the Union then he’d not free them. He had to maintain the
confidence of the North, including the members of his own party, while he subdued the South.
Once the Confederates had been driven out of the border state of Maryland at Antietam, Lincoln
issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring the freedom of all slaves in the Confederacy as
from January 1st 1863. It had the desired effect on the Confederate states in that slaveholders
were under direct threat on the one hand and the Confederacy itself was unlikely ever to get
recognition from Britain and Europe on the other. It was a different matter in the North, though,
because for every Republican that saluted emancipation, there were ten Irish labourers who
feared that a freed Negro would take his job. Only military victories would compensate for that
unrest.
Independence Day 1863 must have been bitter sweet for the President: Federal forces had held
the line against the Confederate invasion of the North when the battle of Gettysburg ended the
day before, on July 3rd, but Union General Meade, like Generals McClellan and Hooker before
him, had failed to press home the attack and Confederate General Robert E. Lee made yet
another of his trademark escapes.
Then, on July 7th, came news that on July 4th Union General Ulysses Grant had captured
Vicksburg after a long and difficult siege. Lincoln, greatly relieved, remarked that “The Father of
Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” Vicksburg was vital for the success of the Federals’
anaconda strategy. The inexorable progress of Grant’s army as it slowly but surely wrenched
control from the rebels of the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee River valleys in the western
theatre of war squeezed the life out of the South, though She did not surrender until suffering a
direct blow to the heart nearly two years after the loss of Vicksburg.
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Chapter 19 The Poker Night
On the Friday, Australia Day 2007, Meryn and I set off from Memphis for our tour of what Paul
Simon calls the cradle of the Civil War. We drove west down Union Avenue and then south
along Highway 51, past Graceland, and across the border into Mississippi. Meryn commented on
the air of decay that was immediately apparent. I wanted to spend some time at The Ebony Club, a
jook joint in Indianola so went west toward Clarksdale then south on Highway 49W to the small
town.
In 1943, eighteen-year-old Riley King had busked for dimes on the Indianola street corner where
we now stood. He went on to become a household name as the famous blues musician B B
King—and we went into a shop whose storefront window advertised soup. At first glance, there
was nothing but Christian chintz for sale but we followed our noses to the secret ‘eatery’ out
back.
The woman in charge was tall, and up herself. She looked like the dentist’s wife from the English
sitcom As Time Goes By and gave us a welcoming spiel about having not seen us around Indianola
before. I gained the impression that she had set out to create an oasis of cleanliness in a town
that was otherwise (to her way of thinking) a desert of Negro blues backwardness. The eatery was
generally spotless but the ‘Restrooms’ took the cake with their rolled up white flannel hand
towels. The waitress friendly, efficient, and full of recommendations about what we might like to
try, told me where I’d find the jook joint. Meryn’s bowl of chilli and my pumpernickel sandwich
were expensive but of good quality.
The jook joint would not be open until the Sunday so we pressed on and came to an expansive
prison. The penny dropped: we were on Highway 49 and this was the infamous Parchman Farm
which inspired much Negro blues music as well as featuring in Faulkner’s work, and in movies
too.
Yazoo City was Indianola writ large. In 1862, Federal forces sought control of the Yazoo River
as an important element in their campaign to capture the vital Confederate stronghold of
Vicksburg. Ironclad gunboats designed by America’s most extraordinary self-made man, James
Eads, were readied for action in anticipation of the vital role they would be expected to play in
wresting control of the Mississippi River highway from the rebels.i One of those gunboats, USS
Cairo, took part in Federal military victories at Nashville and Memphis, and was patrolling the
Yazoo just north of Vicksburg when it was sunk by a naval mine—the first ship ever to succumb
to such ordnance—on December 12th 1862.
Hamilton was the more easygoing the further west the Calibre went and was positively pleasant
when it cut across to Highway 61 and rolled into Vicksburg for a few days’ stay. We purchased a
pass to the Vicksburg National Military Park and visited the site on numerous occasions.
The Mississippi River was awash with old paddle steamers that had been converted to gambling
casinos so, after photographing the high-water mark of the infamous 1927 flood, we checked
some of them out. Meryn lingered on the periphery of a card game but Hamilton was only
interested in what sort of perspective the steamboat gave on the River.
In the tourist information office we talked of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi to a guide who
knew Big Muddy like the back of her hand. She recommended John Barry’s Rising Tide and
Meryn snapped up a copy from the internet. A superb book, the Cavalier Percys and their
descendant—the archetypal Southern Gentleman—haunt its pages. Mark Twain had convinced
Ulysses S Grant to record his war experience and we purchased the foremost Union General’s
Personal Memoirs and used it to follow the movements of the Federal Army in the lead up to the
1863 siege of Vicksburg.
The tourist office guide had recommended a catfish restaurant but I couldn’t remember the name
so we were never sure if it was indeed Gregory’s Kitchen but that’s where we went to try the
Southern delicacy. Give me garfish any day, I say, but our accents made us more than welcome.
While there, we heard all about how the casino moguls were knocked back when they put up
their first dozen or so proposals to moor a gambling steamboat at the Vicksburg wharf but they
i
See above, Chapter 1 ‘Mercury V8’.
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won in the end by wearing down the opposition of the townsfolk. They’re a blight on many a
Dixie town’s Mississippi River frontage.
Making ends meet isn’t easy in the Deep South; the husband and wife team who ran the
restaurant worked in other jobs apart from their business. The man was a modern day circuit
rider who spread the Christian Word across the world. He’d given witness in China and Australia
and was very pleased we were there because while Down Under he had let slip that he hailed
from the banks of the Mississippi River and Australians had told him that it was surely nothing
compared to the Hawkesbury. He wanted us to tell him all about that mighty Australian river
because he’d not had an opportunity to see for himself.
We completed the Vicksburg siege tour on a sunny, cold, dry Sunday and moved to a more upmarket but cheaper—$US40.70 per night—motel using a coupon Meryn found in a brochure in
the tourist office. We’d not been tuned in to that particular type of discount but made use of it
from then on, booking in for an additional night.
The coupon was one thing we became aware of in Vicksburg; the American’s paradoxical attitude
to government was another. He’s for freedom and against government. Privatised, corporate,
profit-maximising business is revered despite the fact that whilst the profits are indeed privatised
the costs are all too often socialised with the wage-earner paying the bills of the wealthy risktaker. This is just another of those confidence tricks characteristic of the nation and therfore
hardly worth mentioning.
It’s the American’s attitude to what he holds really sacred that makes one sit up and take notice.
Religion can be burlesque (because he takes God for granted) and political theatre absurdist but
national parks, particularly those involving the Revolution or Civil War, are held dear.
Extraordinarily well managed, and respectful of the citizen who avails himself of its facilities,
America’s National Parks Service is a shining light. There’s no tat, no crass stalls and gimmicks,
highly-educated and well-trained staff, superb organization, and a clear understanding that
commercialisation is out of bounds in the sacred space under its jurisdiction.
It’s true, too, that Interstate Highway Rest Areas have something in common with national parks,
perhaps because it’s the individual’s manifest destiny to traverse the continent? The American
celebrates limited government, free trade, private-enterprise-knows-best-ism, and other such
fairytales but will not tolerate the private sector getting its grubby hands on what’s really
important: his nation’s mythology about itself.
We drove across to the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River to examine the site where the
Federal Army had sought to re-route the river and leave the Confederate guns high and dry
above Vicksburg. Hamilton was in his element. Some earthworks from the Federal Army’s effort
to bypass the town are still apparent, there, on the south side of the bridge. A trailer park shanty
town on the north side bespoke poverty and decay.
Back on Route-20, we asked a Louisiana tourist guide about General Grant’s Civil War exploits at
Hard Times. There was no such place, she said, and directed us to the canal earthworks from
where we’d just come. We hadn’t fully divined just how much an ogre Ulysses Grant still is down
there in Dixie. I had photographed a Civil War signpost and Meryn used it to navigate along a
series of corrugated back roads, first to Milliken’s Bend, northwest of Vicksburg and then to
Hard Times, southwest of it.
In March 1863, President Lincoln had written to the Military Governor of Tennessee saying that
he hoped emancipated slaves would join the Federal Army, that the “bare sight of 50,000 armed,
and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once.”
On June 7th 1863, five weeks before the former slaves in the Massachusetts 54th attacked Fort
Wagner, freed slaves in Grant’s army fought in hand to hand combat against Texas Confederates
engaged in a futile attempt to cut the Federal supply line at Milliken’s Bend—futile because,
whilst Grant’s major supply depot as his troops massed for the all-important assault on
Vicksburg had been at Milliken’s Bend, the Federal army had cut loose and marched south to
Hard Times plantation in April. General Grant spent the night of April 29th 1863 in the Winter
Quarters, the planter’s house at Hard Times, and we spent an hour or more looking through it
that last Sunday of January 2007.
A freed slave told Grant that Federal troops could cross the Mississippi River from Hard Times
and land safely at Bruinsburg on the eastern bank. They did, on April 30th, and marched the 130
miles from there to Jackson, arriving a fortnight later, to sever the connection between Vicksburg
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and Confederate General Johnston’s army. Then they turned west toward Vicksburg and
besieged the riverfront town from May 18th until the legendary cuckoo hollered at the
Independence Day 1863 victory.
We left Hard Times, took a circuitous route to Highway 605, and stopped at a diner where a
vivacious African American in a striking green top and red pants served coffee before taking our
order. The meals were good and the entertainment better than ever, incidental as it was. For
example, my hamburger was delivered on a plate so small that it seemed to be a spoof. Beautiful,
warm, and exceedingly pleasant, the waitress pronounced the ‘o’ in cotton as ‘ar,’ cart’n. The
women who worked there were that type of American who makes the world a better place.
The very next day, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews reviewed the evidence in the Scooter Libby trial
and zeroed in on Dick Cheney’s bald-faced deceit: the vice-president invented the story that the
Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, had been importing aluminium rods from Africa for the purpose
of enriching uranium; then he pressured the CIA to report the lie as fact; and after it did he
complained that the CIA claim mislead him into pushing for the invasion of Iraq. Cheney’s
duplicity, also typically American, is chilling.
The riverfront town went up in our estimation after a visit to Mississippi’s capital, Jackson, due
east of Vicksburg, on the Monday. Jackson never had a chance, I recognise, because the capital
had long been associated in my mind with racial intolerance. Crackers had never accepted the
emancipation of the Negro so when African Americans stopped putting up with institutionalised
white supremacy in the 1950s there was bound to a violent neo-white-redemptionist backlash.
The black man was going to have to fight all over again for the freedom he thought he’d won at
Appomattox Court House.i
The cracker went about the usual business of consolidating his own white Christian superiority
from behind the mask, meting out undercover violence to the African American from beneath
the white hood of the Ku Klux Klan. As I say, Jackson had nothing going for it as far as we
could see, except that it was one of many Deep South Civil Rights sites. The Klan murdered 37year-old Negro civil rights activist, Medgar Evers, there, on June 12th 1963.
Meryn and I followed Grant to Vicksburg, stopping at Clinton and detouring along Faulkner’s
Natchez Trace for some thirty miles or so. Back at the National Military Park we were waved
through, again, by the woman at the entrance, familiar faces, by then, in that neck’o’th’woods,
and visited the USS Cairo which had been salvaged from the Yazoo in 1964. At that stage we’d
not been across Eads’ steel bridge, upstream, in St Louis so to have walked among the timbers of
one of his ironclads was the next best thing.
Tuesday saw us on Highway 61, working toward Natchez via Grand Gulf and Port Gibson. I’d
left one of Hamilton’s signs in Vicksburg; the closer we were to the River the happier he was.
Meryn had been reading aloud from Grant’s memoirs so we left Rodney Road (along which the
Union army had trod in order to overcome Confederate resistance at Port Gibson) and doubled
back to the remains of Grand Gulf, the Mississippi riverfront town opposite Hard Times.
The African American woman who managed the museum there was a treasure. Meryn asked her
about the settlement and the woman told us that the town had been along the edge of the river
bank.
“It was seventy-six blocks. Fifty-five of those seventy-six fell into the river before the Civil War.
Now when you lookit that tree lyin out they-err through that win-doe. That is actually the old
Mississippi River bay-yed. That’s how cloze-in the river cayem. It went back out and done gave
us six acres of length butt-choo-kayent do anything with’t becoz like it is now it’s half way to that
road there and it’ll give it to you but then it’ll come right back and take it. So actually you cane
do anything with it, no Maam. No Maam. But that is the old river bed.”
“So how far is it back from here, now?”
“It’s a half a mile.”
“Half a mile?”
“Yes Maam. It’s a nice little walk. Down to it because it’s straight down to it. And it’s a nice little
walk when the water ain’t out and you can git right there to the edge of that, uh-huh. We just
advise people when they go down there, coz we don’t have levees or anything, not to get too,”
she paused, “cloze. Because you got about a forty foot drarp right there on the eyre-j. And once
i
See above, Chapter 9 ‘The Drifter’.
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Taken in by America
you get in they gotta get choo out at Natchz, Noo Orlanz, anywhere down that road, you know.
You know.”
During the year spent in the USA, we never saw the archetypal American bird that warbles as it
flies, never heard it holler ‘Coo Coo.’ But there, outside the Grand Gulf museum, was the
unmistakable sound of a woodpecker. Then we saw some but never caught ’em in the act. After
examining the Civil War embattlements which Union Rear Admiral David Porter’s ironclads had
attacked while Grant was at Hard Times, we looked out over the Mississippi River from a 75foot high tower then checked into a motel on Highway 61 on the outskirts of Natchez.
Downtown, we took a walking tour of the splendid city with its tall white mansions and little
shacks. Elsewhere in America, fabulous wealth does not live side by side with extreme poverty
and though Natchez was devoid of people and long past its prime it retained some of the old
charm.
A prison gang, its members wearing arrow suits from 1950s TV shows, worked out on Highway
61. Longwood Mansion—which had been owned by the Hard Times planter—was open to the
public so we drove on up there but it had all the hallmarks of being a private enterprise tourist
trap so we turned back at the entrance. Sarah Dorsey, the nineteenth-century novelist and
Southern patriot, was from Natchez and so, too, was James Butler, the twentieth-century
Southern financier, but we knew nothing of them until we’d left town.
We’d taken to TV dinners; at a cost of $US1.00, they were at least as good as the best in-flight
airline fare and of better quality than any of the convenience junk food we might have
contemplated. The featureless lowlands had sapped our driving energy so we picked up a couple
of those frozen meals and an extra pack of frozen vegetables and went back to the motel to zap
them in the microwave and watch Hardball.
Back on Highway 61 after breakfast on February 1st, we left Natchez for Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
with a detour to all that remains—a cemetery—of Locust Grove plantation. In 1835 Jefferson
Davis had visited Locust Grove with his 21-year-old bride of three months, Sallie. While there,
they contracted malaria and Sallie Davis (the daughter of Colonel Zachary Taylor) died from the
disease.
Jefferson Davis was born in June 1808, in a log cabin on the same Kentucky frontier as Abraham
Lincoln, who was born eight months later, in February 1809. The Lincolns subsequently moved
further north into Indiana, and then Illinois; the Davis family on the other hand moved south, to
Mississippi. Aged twenty, Davis graduated from West Point and joined the First Infantry just as
the Jackson Administration was stepping up the U S effort to push Native American tribes from
the vicinity of the Mississippi River into the western territories.
Federal government forces had driven the Sauk west across the Mississippi River from their tribal
lands near Rock Island but then the Sioux had forced them back east. Threatened with
starvation, the Sauk planted a crop of corn on their traditional tribal lands but the white settlers
took this to be an act of war and the governor of Illinois called out the volunteer militia, Captain
Abraham Lincoln commanding one of the companies. Some of the volunteers massacred Indian
women and children in “a disgraceful frontier frolic.”
When the Sauk war-chief, Black Hawk, was captured by the United States First Infantry in 1832,
Colonel Zachary Taylor gave Jefferson Davis responsibility for escorting the distinguished
prisoner of war to Fort Jefferson, Missouri, near St Louis. Lieutenant Davis, so the story goes,
offered the Indian Chief every courtesy and behaved as a Southern gentleman throughout.
His honourable behaviour in dealing with the captive Black Hawk notwithstanding, Jefferson
Davis came to epitomise the Southern politician representing the narrow aristocratic interests of
the American Cavalier planter. Ten years after the death of his first wife, Sallie, he married Varina
Howell from Natchez. He fought with Lee and Grant in the dubious Mexican War, opposed the
1850 Compromise, and was appointed Federal Secretary of War by President Pierce in 1853—in
which capacity he sought to refuse Farnam’s Railroad Bridge Company permission to build at
Rock Island.
Southern planters demanded small government, low taxes, and states’ rights but had no
hesitation in arguing for the opposite when it was expedient: rather than allow the North to span
the Mississippi with a railroad bridge at Rock Island, Secretary of War Davis proposed that the
federal government use taxpayer funds to purchase part of Arizona and build a transcontinental
railway north-west from New Orleans to San Diego. Trickster rewards guile, not naïveté. Truth
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telling is folly—as Congressman Davy Crockett had learned when criticising President Jackson’s
treatment of the Native American in the early 1830s.
After leaving Locust Grove we drove to Port Hudson, Louisiana, the other Confederate
stronghold which had vexed Abraham Lincoln in mid 1863. But it was raining when we arrived
and the rebel garrison had surrendered, anyway, less than a week after Grant took Vicksburg, so
we, too, abandoned it for the Baton Rouge spaghetti. Heavy rain made the drive down Interstate
10 difficult but all’s well that ends well: the $US56.00 per night suite we checked into using a
Meryn coupon was not only spacious but included cooking facilities. Rather than try and get
accommodation and parking in the Crescent City, we booked another two nights in that Baton
Rouge ‘extended stay’ facility and planned a day trip for Ground Hog Day.
The sun came up and the rodent cast no shadow—so there’d be an early Spring. When it set, an
industrial barge collided with a bridge upstream, set the Old Man on fire, and lit up the night sky
over Vicksburg. We spent the time between down in New Orleans, cruising through the French
Quarter, past the bed and breakfast on Dauphine at which we had stayed during our first visit to
the USA in 2000.
Back then, I’d tagged along with Meryn to America on condition that we went to England. There
would be nothing for me in America, I felt sure, but if I was going there at all then I figured that
New Orleans and Chicago should be on the itinerary, because of their significance with respect to
the blues. The extraordinary Richard ‘Rabbit’ Brown grew up amid the violence of New Orleans’
‘battlefield’ neighbourhood and had lived on the same street—Jane Alley—as Louis Armstrong.
Many a poor girl who took up with New Orleans gangsters and gamblers had gone to ruin in Mrs
Levant’s House Of The Rising Sun. For us it was love at first sight. During that week in March 2000,
we became familiar with the mule, an extraordinary beast of burden and an indelible mark of the
South, and Jackson Square with its equestrian bronze of America’s mythical hero of the 1812 war
against Britain. We rode the celebrated New Orleans tram that gave its name to Tennessee
Williams’ 1948 Pulitzer Prize winning play, A Streetcar Named Desire (originally entitled The Poker
Night) and Elia Kazan’s Hollywood movie of the drama starring Vivien Leigh as Blanche Dubois
and Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski.
Blanche and Stella Dubois had been raised as Southern belles on the ancestral Dubois plantation,
Belle Reve. But the demise of the South had caught up with the Dubois family and they lost their
ancestral home. Stella had accepted the fact and started a new life in a rough part of New
Orleans. Blanche, though, held on to the old values, persisted with the Southern masquerade of a
genteel life of white manners, and went down with the ship. Raped and brutalised by the real
world of Stanley Kowalski, she remained steadfastly fixed in that of the copy. And by staying true
to that counterfeit reality with its rosy picture of Southern delicacy she was doomed. Carted off
to an asylum as Stanley and his companions insensitively played cards, Blanche delivered her final
Hollywood words: “Don’t get up gentlemen. I’m only passing through.”
Thomas—alias Tennessee—Williams was born in Mississippi, the son of a travelling salesman,
but moved to New Orleans in his late twenties. He felt compelled to write as a means of escape
from uncomfortable reality: “My back is to the wall,” he told a journalist in 1959, “and has been
to the wall so long that … the wall has started to crumble … ”37
Virginia crumbled after defending Her honour against what She perceived to have been the
unprovoked assault of an estranged spouse in the four years to April 1865. Aggressor or not,
Massachusetts, went on to realise the potential of being a product of capital while Virginia
languished in the deluded belief that She remained a ravished belle whose menfolk must do
everything they could to prevent Her suffering any further falls at the hands of the brutish
Yankee. The marriage was a sham and She had been justified, Southerners maintained, in trying
to break away from the Union:
Oh I’m a good old rebel
Now that’s just what I am
For this fair land of freedom
I do not care a damn
I’m glad I fought against it
I only wish we’d won
And I don’t want no pardon
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For anything I’ve done.i
Like the cracker subject of James Randolph’s (ironic?) song, Good Old Rebel, here, Virginia lost
contact with reality in the post-war years; the copy of the real thing, always more exaggerated
down South, became so absurdly burlesque that representation and fact eventually parted
company altogether. The Southern planter now wrapped himself in a garment of aristocratic
pretension so caricatured that Tennessee Williams had no need to invent Big Daddy but simply
modelled his fictional character on a Southern Gentleman he had known in Clarksdale,
Mississippi.
The Yankee had set out to reconstruct the Southerner, to confront him with reality, but succeeded
only in setting the caricature in concrete for one hundred years. The fantasy of medieval honour,
of a world where God had assigned a place for everyone and put each individual in his place,
increased in direct proportion to the number of burials of those who had actually lived in the Old
South.38 And, according to that fantasy, the African American, needless to say, belonged on the
bottom rung, and must learn all over again to respect his white superiors, must learn all over
again to don the mask.
Behind the masquerade of the black man’s smiling deference to the master race was the cruel
reality of his desperate circumstance. The Negro transformed his experience of the exaggerated
cruelty which Virginia visited upon him into song, the blues, and laid the foundations of
American popular song—one of the nation’s greatest gifts to the world—in so doing. The white
cracker did not trust the black mask of deference and fantasised that the African American was
primed ready instead to rape any vulnerable pure white Southern Belle he might chance to meet.
So the cracker entertained himself with right wing Christian Ku Klux Klan ceremony and donned
that secret society’s absurdly burlesque costume as the mask of White Redemption. Which suited
Virginian aristocracy down to the ground.
For their part, the aristocrats gathered in New Orleans boardrooms to govern finance and rule
over their Cotton Kingdom as of old. They took the pre-war celebration of Mardi Gras and
exaggerated it as their special mask. The common man paraded in the streets below, but the
Southern Gentleman pulled the strings. And blew a hole in the Mississippi River levee if he
deemed it appropriate, as he did during the great 1927 flood. He, in this instance, was a
committee driven by Natchez financier, James Pierce Butler.
The same men who ran the Mardi Gras ran the CrescentCity and Butler was chief among them.
He had most of the duly elected representatives in his pocket and was able to manipulate the
chairman of the flood relief committee, President Calvin Coolidge’s Commerce Secretary,
Herbert Hoover. For all his power, though, Butler could not control Isaac Cline, head of the U S
Weather Bureau in New Orleans and a man who knew more about the situation than anyone on
the Mardi Gras committee.
Cline had made clear that he considered the decision to blow the levee below the business district
to be dangerous and unnecessary. Butler’s group of financiers put pressure on Cline to back their
decision but the Weather Bureau chief said to do so would diminish the integrity of the office
and he would continue to rely upon the evidence. Butler would not countenance even the
slightest flood risk to the New Orleans’ upmarket business district so went ahead with the plan
and had the levee dynamited on Friday April 29th 1927. The memory of that cynical act provided
the backdrop to the rumour which spread during the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that
the powers-that-be had dynamited the levee to protect the business district. American
confidence.
We parked the Caliber in Barracks Street between Bourbon and Decatur and went on foot
through the old haunts. The place was different, of course, not least because of Katrina. A truck
sprayed detergent all over town and the Bourbon Street bars had signs on them declaring
“Minimum 2 drinks upon entry. Strictly enforced.” I needed a restroom and no drink so I went
to the Court House. There was top security but, as I had learned to expect, no barred entry. What
a relief.
The Caliber took us through the lower ninth ward, an area devastated by water that had poured
in when the levee was breached after Katrina hit. One of the three most powerful hurricanes to
make landfall in the United States, Katrina slammed into the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts in
i
Good Old Rebel written by Confederate Major James Randolph, a member of Jeb Stuart’s staff.
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August 2005. New Orleans was spared a direct hit but suffered the greatest damage courtesy of
more than one hundred years of power-politics in the management of flood mitigation in the
Mississippi River system.
The 2005 flooding of New Orleans and the subsequent confusion as the victims tried to flee the
disaster is a study in American disorganisation. After Cyclone Tracy destroyed Darwin in
December 1974, the Australian government went to work and the city was rebuilt within eighteen
months. Touring the lower ninth eighteen months after the flood brought home the fact that the
famed American know-how is hamstrung by its system of government. New Orleans was a
bomb site. Here and there, a householder had rebuilt (they don’t mention ‘reconstruction’ in the
Deep South) but he might as well have done so at the rubbish tip because all around him was as
it had been when the waters had receded in 2005. Nothing doing. That’s New Orleans.
The lower ninth ward was a complete mess but no worse than the area north of the city. There,
where the walls of canals which connect Lake Pontchatrain to the Mississippi River gave way, we
witnessed acre upon acre of destroyed housing. The scene before us said it all: poverty and decay;
the Deep South writ large.
America’s vice-president conducted a press conference on location, as it were, in the aftermath of
Katrina. No riff raff allowed. But two locals who realised what was happening blended in with
the press corp that had gathered to faithfully put out government propaganda concerning the
marvellous miracles being wrought by the Bush Administration in the wake of the Hurricane.
The vice president was hosing down disquiet when one of the infiltrators called out from among
the throng of reporters and camera crews: “Go fuck yourself Cheney.” The press conference
continued but that eyebrow, the one which invariably gives the old fraud away, registered a flicker
of recognition. “Go fuck yourself Cheney,” the fellow repeated. The vice president was intrigued
and amused. He would squash the insect that had interrupted the sound bite, of course, but
seemed to be impressed with the fact that the tables had been turned for a brief moment, that
Trickster had stalked him.
Disorganisation is one thing; that’s just how it is and has been. But when the authorities got wind
of the fact that a number of the trailer homes they’d shipped in to house the dispossessed
citizens had formaldehyde levels 75 times greater than workplace safety limits would permit they
quickly stopped measuring. Groundhog Day. The government was so disorganised that it knew
itself to be a danger to the public, and fell back on deception. Which is not to be confused with
the secretiveness of British and Australian governments.
The English, like Australians, would call us ‘stickybeaks’ for touring the disaster area; the
American provides a map so that you can see for yourself. It’s invariably assumed, there, in the
USA, that one is curious—that you will want to know the details of disasters, and so forth.
George Bush’s lack of curiosity is aberrant. Sometimes the rodent does cast a shadow.
On the Saturday afternoon Meryn shopped at her favourite clothes chain and I read a biography
of H. L. Mencken (the Baltimore journalist and raconteur who made sense of America in the first
half of the twentieth century) over coffee at the Wholefoods Supermarket. We went Downtown
afterwards, checked out Spanish Street near the Capitol and walked along the Mississippi River
levee; the riverboat casino, there, was as alienating and horrible as those at Vicksburg.
Afterwards, we stood on the street in the cold and joined in the Jupiter Krewe’s Mardi Gras
parade—a display of American burlesque and gaudiness—and caught beads thrown from the
floats. We wore them just as everyone else did. Non commercial, by and large, the parade had
that counterintuitive homely atmosphere we’ve so often witnessed of the American celebrating
life in some local community ritual. The boys in the school marching band competed with one
another to see who could pull his cap furthest down over his eyes and this girl outdid that with
sassy dancing manoeuvres. Drive-by shootings and prostitution rings seemed a million miles
away.
Gulfport (“Go fuck yourself Cheney”) and Biloxi, on the Mississippi Sound, had suffered direct
hits from Katrina, and been laid waste by the hurricane. At first glance, it looked like little had
been done to resurrect the coastal strip. Biloxi’s casinos, though, were back in business and that
says something, I guess. Jefferson Davis lived in Natchez novelist Sarah Dorsey’s plantation
house on the beachfront at Biloxi from 1877 until he died in 1889. Confederate patriots opened
the Jefferson Davis Presidential library there in 1998 and though the building was badly damaged
by Katrina, most of Davis’ papers had survived, apparently.
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It was a little over a week since the Caliber had left Memphis and we were stuck out on Highway
65 near Mobile, Alabama, in a motel that belonged in New Orleans’ ninth ward. A drive,
Downtown, past stately homes of yesteryear on the Monday morning turned tricky when we
stopped for gasoline at a small street-corner outlet. A couple of beggars asked for cash as I went
to pay for the petrol, and Meryn, too, was besieged by a desperate looking old woman. American
poverty is never pretty but Mobile made us both blue (Hamilton, too) and glad to get out of
town.
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Chapter 20 Crackers
Jefferson Davis was at his Vicksburg plantation home in February 1861 hoping that the
Convention of Seceding States meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, would nominate him as their
military commander. When news came, it was not good: they’d chosen him instead as president
of the Confederate States of America. He left Vicksburg for his inauguration in Montgomery—
the first capital of the Confederate States—on the same day, February 11th 1861, as Abraham
Lincoln left Springfield, Illinois, for Washington, D.C.
We walked up Dexter to Alabama’s Capitol and toured the interior with its trompe l’oeil decor
and paintings of an heroic looking Governor George Wallace. Back down Dexter we passed the
Baptist Church (site of an eighteenth-century slave market) where Martin Luther King Jr. had
been pastor from 1954 to 1960. Dexter is home, too, to the state judicial building wherein
Alabama’s Chief Justice had placed a granite monument of the Ten Commandments in 2001. He
reckoned that the biblical injunction not to covet this white man’s wife nor to lynch him was the
supreme law of the land. American burlesque, Southern style.
Dexter Avenue doglegs into Commerce at Court Square (site of Montgomery’s nineteenthcentury slave market) and it was from the building at number 2 Dexter Avenue that the
Confederate Secretary of War, L P Walker, sent the fateful telegram authorising General
Beauregard to fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. That was the moment, on April
11th 1861, that Confederate President Jefferson Davis declared the beginning of civil war in
America. Spotless Virginia, then, had cast the first stone.
Commerce Street houses the Hank Williams Museum. Fourteen-year-old Hiram Williams arrived
in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1937 and sang a haunting combination of cracker hillbilly and
Negro blues music outside the local radio station. His hillbilly folk repertoire came from within
the white community and the blues from Rufus (Teetot) Payne, a Negro, who taught him to play
the guitar. Hiram wanted to be a professional entertainer so he naturally adopted an alias—
Hank—and a star was born.
Hank Williams was a song-writing genius who more or less single-handedly invented modern
country music. The narrator of his songs fears Yahweh, allows the camp meeting preacher to ride
roughshod over any religious doubts a man might have, struggles to stay on the path of puritan
righteousness, imagines he’s communing directly with Jesus, is at home with violence, and
laments taking to the bottle. He is the South’s common man as he was in the hundred years
between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement—the product of White Redemption.
Massachusetts had agreed at the outset of the marriage with Virginia to condone slavery and had
behaved dishonourably, according to the latter, by spending the next seventy odd years striving
to corral and disown the peculiar institution. So when Massachusetts elected the candidate who
had expressly stated that the nation must face up to the slavery issue as president Virginia was
honour bound to leave the Union. Massachusetts had ruined and defiled Her and then set about
refashioning Southern society by appointing Radical Republicans such as Adelbert Ames to
govern the former Confederate States. And if that wasn’t bad enough, swarms of carpetbaggers
and scalawags were permitted to cross the Mason-Dixon and infest Dixie. The Northern Yankee
was a work of Satan, according to the Southern evangelical preacher, and God would redeem the
South if only Southern man would obey His commands.
Reconstruction, the North’s attempt to shift the South from neo-feudalism to capitalism,
produced the fierce backlash of White Redemption whereby the South became more backward,
repressive, and violent than it had been before the war. As an American, the Southerner was
susceptible to religion; as a descendant of the Scotch-Irish, he was a puritan with a frontier
mentality. He accepted what the preacher passed off as the word of God and followed him in the
door of the Ku Klux Klan, the organization set up to protect pure white Christian society from
the evil influence of Catholics, Jews, and Negroes.
When the preacher put it to the politician that alcohol be outlawed, the Southern cracker voted
for its prohibition. He got drunk on bootleg liquor, like Hank Williams. Got drunk because he
was a frontiersman at heart and could be against earthly pleasure on puritan principle whilst for it
in practice. Tomorrow, he could repent, seek divine forgiveness, and be forgiven by his Creator.
As for the procreative urge, that must not be indulged except in the marriage bed or at the
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revivalist tent meeting where release of pent up orgiastic emotion was encouraged. Sexual
restraint required eternal vigilance and the strength of character which came of being a white
man.
Black men, devoid of a sense of honour with respect to the fair sex, were hell bent on having
their way. They could do what they liked with their women but must be kept from any kind of
congress with pure white maidens. The slightest hint of any sexual exchange—a glance, a word
that might be interpreted—between a Negro or Jew or any other outsider and a Southern Belle
brought instant retribution. The American had always been a gun toting individual and the war
hade made firearms available by the trainload so any perceived sexual transgression might trigger
an instant response. Such lawlessness posed a threat to good order, though, and must be
tempered with the sanction of the group—whose members would then lynch the outsider.
The cracker’s tough Scotch-Irish forebears had fled westward from Virginia’s Atlantic coast
Anglican authority into the Appalachian Mountains and beyond to the bluegrass of Kentucky,
Tennessee and the black soil of the Mississippi Delta. Southern man did not go in for abstract
law with its time consuming notion of justice being seen to be done. A rugged individualist
frontiersman (even after the frontier had long gone), he was quick to anger and swift in righting
any perceived wrong with an outburst of violence and vigilante action. The satisfaction of sorting
out today’s dispute today by lynching the suspect was part and parcel of antebellum Southern
society. In the post-war era, since the Negro had no master to put him in his place, it fell to the
white mob to show the African American who was boss. Lynching, then, was second nature to
the cracker: before the war, it had been used to bring swift justice to some hapless white man
whereas after it the time-honoured practice was used primarily to despatch niggers.
White Redemption had successfully pushed back against Reconstruction by the mid 1870s and by
the turn of the century Southern state governments had re-instituted the God-given social order
guaranteeing the Negro’s inferior status as little more than a beast of burden. Jim Crow laws
outlawed African-American participation in society on the one hand and effectively bonded the
black man to hard labour in the service of a white master on the other.
The Federal Emancipation Proclamation had outlawed slavery in the 1860s so the planter for
whom the Negro now picked cotton had to pay the black man a wage. And, being a Southern
Gentleman, the white employer obeyed the law. He simply charged more for the food and
clothing that he sold his employees than he paid them in wages. So the African-American (and
the poor white cracker in many instances) was not so much a wage-earner as a peon who had to
work like a Trojan to pay off the ever increasing debt he owed the company store.
Commerce comes to a dead end at the Alabama River adjacent to Union Station in Water Street.
Trains no longer stopped but the grand old building was put to good use as a visitors’ centre. The
women who worked there—many of whom would have been in their late teens or twenties in the
early 1960s—were very helpful, and made a point of distancing themselves from the white
supremacist terrorist attacks that had been perpetrated on civil rights activists in the Kennedy era
by local townsfolk.
Bandanas was a good diner, one of the guides suggested, and she was right. After lunch we
boarded the trolley on the green route. It had been a long day; I was tired and slumped down in
my seat. But the driver said I had no right to sit there. “Old boilers move back,” he barked, and
demanded that I get to the rear of the bus. I did not move. It had all taken place in my
imagination, of course, because no such thing could happen in the land of the free. Not now,
anyway.
On December 3rd 1955—three years after Hank Williams had succumbed to fame, alcohol,
painkillers, and identifying as a drifter—the new white singing sensation with a black sound, Elvis
Presley, played the Coliseum in Hank Williams’ home town. A week before that concert, fortytwo-year-old seamstress Rosa Parks had attended a meeting of people concerned at the recent
violent Klan style murder of the fourteen-year-old African-American, Emmett Till, in Mississippi.
Then, while on board a commuter bus on her way home from work on December 1st the driver
ordered Ms Parks to get out of her seat, move to the back of the bus, and make way for white
folks to sit down. She refused, and was arrested. Taken to the jailhouse and charged for violating
Jim Crow segregation law, Rosa Parks was gaoled.
White maidens cried for more. Elvis gave it to them; his gyrations had the audience howling and
writhing as if that black music performance was visited upon them by a New Light preacher
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conducting a Camp Meeting. And while the white youths screamed and jerked, a representative
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) conferred with a
college professor about organising a boycott of Montgomery’s commuter bus service.
Rosa Parks went on trial a couple of days later and the NAACP representative met with
Reverends Martin Luther King and David Abernathy along with fifteen or so others in the
basement of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to plan a more systematic boycott of the bus
company. Within the year, on November 13th 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on
buses was unconstitutional. The boycott ended on December 21st, the day after the Supreme
Court order reached Montgomery, Alabama. In response to what they regarded as federal
interference in the genteel Southern way of life, crackers threw bombs at civil right activists’
homes and churches and took pistol shots at buses.
The green route bus we’d boarded made its first stop on the spot where Rosa Parks had taken a
stand on December 1st 1955.
The Supreme Court had ruled against American apartheid since 1946 but the South regarded any
such adjudication as an attack on each state’s right to legislate for segregation and could not abide
such blatant attacks on its liberty. County officials simply ignored federal rulings and applied the
unconstitutional Jim Crow laws. So the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organised freedom
rides through the South. Freedom and liberty—still opposites after all those years. Adding insult
to injury, the North’s Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy from Massachusetts won the presidential
election in November 1960, two days after the hundredth anniversary of the election of Abraham
Lincoln in 1860. The youthful 43-year-old owed his narrow victory to the youngest voters,
Americans who were hungry for change.
On May 4th 1961, six white and seven black freedom riders split into two groups and boarded
two interstate buses to travel south from Washington, D.C. One group took a Greyhound and the
other a Trailways. Though people in the states of Virginia and North Carolina had flouted federal
anti-segregation law on CORE’s 1947 freedom ride, they presented no obstacle this time around.
Two of the black freedom riders were beaten by white supremacists in South Carolina but police
intervened when a white woman freedom rider was pushed to the ground.
There were no further incidents until the buses crossed into Alabama. There, angry crackers
exploded, first setting fire to the Greyhound and then beating the freedom riders as they escaped
the flames. The Trailways was all they had left and when it stopped in Birmingham two members
of the group walked through the bus station where Shira had parted company with Mr Willie to
the adjoining diner where Meryn and I had had breakfast while watching Shira slide into the
backseat of a cab.i The tough black Mama who had taken our order that morning was formidable
but civil. The members of the Ku Klux Klan who had dragged the two freedom riders out of
there and beaten them with lead pipes and metal chains in May 1961 were barbarians, as was the
Police Commissioner who aided and abetted the assault.
President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy put pressure on Alabama’s state
authorities to act responsibly and enforce federal law. But when the bus arrived at the
Greyhound Station in Montgomery more than 1000 crackers were there to attack the passengers
as they stepped out into the street. A Justice Department official phoned Attorney-General
Kennedy and described the violent brutality of the lynch mob, pointing out that the local
authorities had provided no police protection for the law-abiding freedom riders.
As I say, Trailways travel’s not for the faint-hearted. Meryn and I stood where the events of May
20th 1961 had occurred. Sweet home Alabama. Banjos played through the broken glass.
Montgomery is a great place to walk around. We’d been at the first Confederate White House not
far from the Capitol and were wandering down Washington when we chanced upon a superb
black granite sculpture—an instant reminder of D.C.’s Vietnam War Memorial—near the corner
with Decatur. Unmistakably the work of Maya Lin, it was Montgomery’s Civil Rights Memorial.ii
Ms. Lin’s memorials deal in facts and the clear symbols associated with them; the hero worship
fantasy evident in most American iconography has no place in her sculpture.
See above, Chapter 18 ‘Massachusetts and Virginia’.
This notwithstanding, we had failed to notice her Yale University Women’s Table (1993) during our three months’ stay
in North Haven, Connecticut.
i
ii
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We drove 55 mile west on Route-80 on the Thursday, February 8th, and crossed the Alabama
River on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the Travellers’ Information office at Selma. Someone had
left a note saying the office was closed due to illness and to return Downtown to the Chamber of
Commerce. So we did, and picked up a Civil Rights walking tour pamphlet from there.
On Martin Luther King Street we came to a police road block and outside the Brown Chapel half
way down the road listened to a tiny but forceful black woman get schoolkids in line. Further
along, a young African American from the National Parks Service told us it was Black History
month and the younger generation was being taught about the struggle for civil rights. Aside
from a lone white policewoman who leaned against her squad car, deeply unimpressed, the State
troopers co-operated in trying to get the message across to the bemused happy-go-lucky students
of ancient history.
The walking tour was good but we completed that section of Jeff Davis Street south of Broad in
the Dodge due to feeling vulnerable and ripe for a mugging. We parked in the faded mansions
part of town and happened to do so right out front of the house where Elodie Dawson had lived.
Elodie had met Colonel Dawson while visiting her sister, Mrs Martha White, in Selma. It’s not
surprising that Elodie and Martha Todd married men from Alabama. The Kentucky Todds were
of solid Southern stock and backed the Confederacy during the Civil War. What is surprising—or
rather, American—was that Elodie and Martha were close kin to the First Lady of the United
States.
Their sister, Elizabeth, had crossed the Mason-Dixon and become Mrs Edwards of Springfield,
Illinois. Then another sister, Mary, had left the family home in Lexington, and gone North to live
with Elizabeth. Mary had been courted by none other than the erstwhile Democrat politician,
Stephen Douglas, but shrewedly chose to marry frontier lawyer Abraham Lincoln instead. During
his time at the White House, President Lincoln had more than once pointed out to loyal Union
patriots that blood is thicker than water.i
The White, Helm and Dawson Todds remained steadfast in their support of Virginia in Her
bloody battle with Massachusetts during the 1860s. In the decades that followed, Virginia
climbed out of the grave, an exaggerated caricature of Her old self, and set about putting
everyone back in his proper place. And She might have succeeded had the Supreme Court not
interpreted the Constitution of the United States as conferring on the African American as much
right to participate in the affairs of the nation as any other citizen of the republic.
In asserting that right, black leaders had organised for a large gathering of people to set off from
Selma on the last day of the first week of the third month of 1965 and march on Alabama’s state
capital in protest at police violence against Negroes seeking equality before the law. The nation
watched on TV as Southern cops bashed the defenceless protesters with clubs and burned their
eyes with tear gas.
The protesters tried again on the 9th. Virginia, enraged to find that Her blacks were supported by
Massachusetts’ sympathisers, murdered a white clergyman who’d come down from the North.
President Johnson sent in the National Guard and 25,000 people walked over the Edmund
Pettus Bridge en route to Montgomery where Martin Luther King Jr addressed the crowd at the
Dexter Avenue Capitol. Governor George Wallace denied King the right to mount the steps and
enter the building.
Humiliated by the presence of black men marching proudly through the streets of the capital and
infuriated at what they believed to be federal interference in a states’ rights issue, the Ku Klux
Klan murdered a white woman from Detroit, shot her dead at the wheel as she drove a black
man back to Selma from Montgomery in her car. It was all still a matter of honour—one
hundred years, almost to the day, since the fall of the Confederate States of America.
The woman who had told us in Selma that it was black history month had also mentioned the
Selma-to-Montgomery historic trail midway between the two towns so we called there. It lived up
to the high standard of the National Parks historical sites. The film studio was modern,
innovative and designed for that generation of people which prefers to have voices coming at
them from all directions and more than one screen to view at a time. I think it was there that I
Union General Dan Sickles challenged Lincoln for allowing Emilie Helm (nee Todd) access to the White House and
Northern newspaper editors frequently took Lincoln to task over the fact that Martha White travelled back and forth
between Alabama and Washington, DC.
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saw an exhibit about the ‘Trickum Store,’ Virginia’s burlesque expression of the national
penchant for chicanery and trade in confidence.
We left Montgomery on the Friday and took Route 14 through Autaugaville, followed the
railroad track to Selma, then travelled along Route 22 past decayed dwellings in the process of
being reclaimed by nature. It had been raining all day and was increasingly wet as we drove along
Route 28 West through Linden where we stopped at a café for coffee. They’d run out. So we
drove to a run down dump of a place and Meryn poured two good coffees from their machine
and we drank them with our cut lunch on the side of Route 28 before joining up with Route 80
West not far past Cuba.
Wet weather made the journey less interesting than it might have been, but was well timed, the
rain’s having stayed away for our four-day walk around Montgomery and Selma. We pulled up in
Meridian, Mississippi—the horrendous smell of chemicals heavy on the air—and checked into a
motel which honoured the advertised coupon price: it was a good room with fridge, microwave
and hard-wired internet—which allowed us to do banking and pay bills online.
Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, another of America’s great songwriters, was a native of
Meridian, Mississippi, and a hundred-and-nine-years-old when we were there—or would have
been had he not died in 1933. He started working on the railroad as a water-boy when he was
thirteen and was a brakeman when he contracted tuberculosis in 1924. Railroad men and hoboes
had taught Rodgers how to holler the blues and hold a hillbilly tune by then so he became a
travelling entertainer. But a hurricane tore his tent to shreds.
He had trouble holding down another couple of railroad jobs, his illness having got the better of
him, but ended up recording ‘T for Texas’ in New York in 1927. It made him a star on the eve of
the Depression. His songs—‘Gambling Bar Room Blues’ chief among them—captured that same
cracker essence which Hank Williams distilled and bottled. The traditional Dixie lyric about
buying a pistol with a big, long, shiny barrel and using it to avenge some perceived transgression,
some challenge to the honour of a proud individual, found its way into one of his ‘somebody
done me wrong’ songs as naturally as violence found a home in Southern society.
Indicative of just how natural violence was in the region where Jimmie Rodgers was born is the
1964 case of a Mississippi businessman who appeared before a grand jury for murdering a drunk
Native American and was not indicted. Asked why, given the evidence that the businessman had
indeed shot the victim the jury had set the accused free, a juror explained that it was wrong to
drink liquor. Three civil rights activists had just been murdered in that same area, Neshoba
County, Mississippi, so there was not much likelihood of their killers facing justice. They had,
afterall, been agitating for African Americans to be able to exercise their civil rights—a deep
affront to the honour of white Christian society.
Everyone knew the Klan had got rid of the activists but the KKK was simply preserving the
purity of Virginia; no white man would betray a fellow cracker to the federal agents President
Lyndon Johnson had running around all over the place. Lawlessness posed a threat to good order
so, generally speaking, the cracker was as law abiding as anyone else. If someone had to be
murdered it must be done with the sanction of the group—whose members would then lynch
the outsider.
Waylaid Downtown by confusing street signs, we aborted a planned visit to Jimmie Rodgers’
grave and took Route 19 North to Philadelphia and parked opposite the Court House on that
beautiful, sunny, dry, cold Saturday. I followed Meryn in to a bookshop whose proprietor was an
enthusiast for life, a scaled down version of Leo from North Carolina, who told us that the
artillery shell on display had come from Vicksburg. His friend had uncovered it in the basement
of a house being renovated in that Mississippi River town and had tracked its course back
through the building to the point of entry. The shell was an impressive reminder of how difficult
life must have been—living under constant bombardment from Union General Grant’s forces
and having to eat rats for sustenance—for the inhabitants during the six week siege of the
strategic Confederate stronghold.
Philadelphia was no longer a cotton centre but made its money from pine plantations, the
proprietor said, and from the casinos on the Choctaw Reservation. He recommended an
eyewitness account of white Philadelphia’s backlash against the struggle to extend civil rights to
the Negro that I was thumbing through. He had known the author, dead only a week or two; she
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had stood up to the Ku Klux Klan and suffered for it. Since we’d already mailed boxes of books
back home, I left the expensive publication on the shelf.
After a stroll around the town we drove to the dwellings beyond the railroad. It was clear, even in
2007, that that was the black part of town, the other side of the tracks. I photographed the
funeral parlour which had been operated by Charles Evers, brother of Medgar who’d been
murdered in Jackson. An African American about 10 years of age asked why I was taking a photo
of the building and when I told him that it was famous he and the group of half a dozen or so
boys and girls, mostly about 7 or 8 years old, that he was part of laughed and walked on. We
drove ten miles to the other side of town to see the Mt Zion Methodist Church.
On the longest day of 1964 three civil rights activists—two New York Jews and a Mississippi
Negro—had driven to that same spot from Meridian. They’d been talking to the black
community of Mt Zion about setting up a ‘freedom school’ but the Ku Klux Klan had got wind
of the fact and taken direct action against what it perceived as an affront to cracker honour, an
assault on Southern liberty. Klan members beat the aged black churchgoers as the congregants
left a meeting at Mt Zion Methodist and burned the church to the ground.
After inspecting the ruins, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman talked to
members of the Mt Zion congregation then headed back to Meridian. They never made it. A
Christian preacher (Edgar Killen) had conspired with the Deputy Sheriff (Cecil Price) and other
local Klan folk to have the three young civil rights activists silenced. Their bodies were found and
Killen went on trial in a federal court in 1967. A woman on the all-white jury said it was against
her principles to find fault with a preacher so Killen was not convicted.
Meryn and I walked around the grounds of the rebuilt Mt Zion church site but were driven off
by mangy dogs. We returned to the bookshop and I bought that paperback after-all. There’d
been a changing of the guard and the woman in charge asked where in Australia we were from
and engaged us in conversation while making coffee and laying out chocolate chip cookies. She
recognised the accent because she’d been in Sydney with her husband in November 1997 when
he was a witness in a wrongful death lawsuit against the makers of a metal heart valve. The
complainant was a widow whose husband had been fitted with one of the valves.
The American gave evidence in Sydney that the heart valve company did running repairs on
valves that had been reported as faulty and then resold them to be put into the chest cavity of
some other unsuspecting victim. The whole trial procedure struck the bookshop proprietor as
extraordinary because the seriousness really came home to her and everyone else in the
courtroom, she said, due to the judicial regalia of wig and gown, and so on. I told her of how
having been on jury service had had a similar effect on me and my fellow jurors. She and her
husband had stayed in an apartment near the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and been mesmerised by the
media circus that sprang up following the discovery of Michael Hutchence’ body hanging from a
door in what was reportedly a case of erotic asphyxiation gone wrong.
She’d been reminded of the Ritz-Carlton experience when visiting her sister in Philadelphia a
couple of years earlier: the media circus had been all over the Court House for the re-trial of
Preacher Edgar Killen. Killen was found guilty, on Thursday June 23rd 2005, of manslaughter in
the 1964 Ku Klux Klan murder of the three civil rights workers.
Taken with the South, the visitor sold her house in California and moved to Philadelphia. Upon
hearing that we intended going to Oxford, Mississippi, she spoke highly of the town and noted
that the bookshop there had given her ideas for the one we were in. I wondered what it was
about Dixie that had induced her to suddenly leave one life behind for another. The American
does that, I know, but why the South?
The paperback was Florence Mars’ Witness in Philadelphia. An extraordinary story, it provides an
insight into the cracker’s deep-seated anxiety concerning the black man’s proper place. The Old
South had gone down but instead of facing reality and accepting modernity, the whites,
Gentleman and cracker both, had constructed an exaggerated copy of the vanquished feudal
order and hid behind it for a hundred years. William Faulkner chronicled the life of just such a
disturbed community in his Yoknapatawpha County saga and Ronald Reagan began his 1980
presidential campaign with a speech on states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, precisely
because he wanted to be heard by a disturbed community.i It was dog whistle politics, an appeal
i
See above, Chapter 1 ‘Mercury V8’.
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to white supremacists to shift their vote from the (LBJ) Democrats to the Republicans, the party
now most likely to represent the interests of Dixie, Virginia, the South. Meryn and I were
wondering if that cycle, too, the one which involved manipulating Southern anxiety about the
proper place of the black man in order to take the White House and prosecute the cause of
capital, was not in its death throes?
The drive along Route 19 North (on the day we learned that Barack Obama had just announced
that he was running for president of the United States of America) took us through Kosciusko to
Route 35 and on past Vaiden to Greenwood where we stopped for the night. Meryn opened her
email to find a message concerning the fact that Greenwood Press of Connecticut was seeking
authors for a publication that was right up her alley.
Poverty and decay had been our overwhelming impression of the Deep South and Greenwood
had that combination in spades. North of town we saw evidence of a Greenwood middle class.
In August 1938 the locals had an opportunity to see the legendary bluesman, Robert Johnson, in
a jook joint there. Johnson roamed all over the Mississippi Delta entertaining black cotton
pickers, share croppers, and so on, and had women in most of the towns in which he worked.
Greenwood was the last place he played, though, because he took sick and perished three days
after that performance. According to one account, he died of complications from syphilis but the
more common view is that a cuckolded husband put strychnine in the twenty-seven-year-old
musician’s bourbon. Johnson’s mother told folklorist Alan Lomax that ‘Little Robert’ kept the
Grim Reaper at bay until she arrived at the death bed, whereupon he handed her his guitar
(saying he no longer had any need for the devil’s instrument) then passed on. No-one knows for
sure where he’s buried but the good money’s on the graveyard next to the Little Zion Church
where we stopped, a few miles north of Greenwood.
A little further on, where the Tallahatchie River winds back toward Route 430, we came to
Money, the railway siding where in August 1955 Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Negro from
Chicago, had been among a group of teenagers who went to Bryant’s Grocery Store for some
refreshment after a day picking cotton. He talked about his white girlfriend back home,
something totally beyond the pale in the Deep South, and someone dared him to whistle at
Carolyn Bryant, the white woman who owned the store, so he did.
From the cracker point of view that was tantamount to young Emmett Till having defiled a
precious Southern Belle so Carolyn’s husband, Roy, and three accomplices took Till from his bed
in the dead of night and tortured him to death. Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader, disguised
himself as a cotton picker and went looking for the boy, making enquiries about the events
leading up to the kidnapping, and following the trail.
Emmett Till’s mutilated corpse was fished out of the Tallahatchie three days after he’d been
murdered. Bryant and his half-brother went on trial for the lynching and their defence attorney
put it to the jury that he felt sure “that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free
these men” in the face of pressure from the North. The all-white jury acquitted the defendants
on the grounds that the body taken from the Tallahatchie might not have been that of Emmett
Till. Bryant and his brother immediately sold their story, admitting they’d committed the crime.
They had intended only to scare the boy and force him to repent but had no choice but to kill the
youth because he refused to believe he’d done anything wrong. Emmett Till, that is to say, did
not appreciate that he had stepped back into an essentially medieval world of honour where one
must know one’s place.
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Chapter 21 Two Tricks
Money, Mississippi, was a picture of decay and we moved on to Route-49 North, for Clarksdale.
Clarksdale had been a transport hub—Illinois Central Railroad and the Greyhound Bus Company had
depots there—with a thriving economy in the 1920s-and-30s, a hive of activity where itinerant
blues musicians entertained cashed-up audiences. We entered Clarksdale at the intersection with
Route-161, the dot on the map where Tommy Johnson made a pact with the Devil, according to
his God-fearing brother, a preacher. Back then, it was where Highway 49 met Highway 61, the
blues crossroads depicted in the Coen film, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Preacher Johnson
reckoned Tommy had made the trade for fiendish musical talent but the Vocalion record
company fostered the myth that it had been Robert Johnson who sold his soul in exchange for
the gift of the Devil’s music.
Meryn and I had driven down Highway 61 from Memphis to Clarksdale in 2005 listening to radio
reports of tornadoes swirling menacingly around the area. We weren’t swept up in one of those
twisters but thunder boomed from leaden storm clouds and torrential rain put us on our way. So
it was good to be back in town and able to complete unfinished business. The desk clerk at the
upmarket motel could not honour our voucher, she said, so I turned to leave, “but there’s a
special offer … ”—the same deal under another name. That done, the Caliber took us out to
Friar’s Point where the Riverside Railroad had provided 1930s blues musicians with another
source of entertainment income. Robert Johnson tells us he had a ‘good gal’ out there. Judging by
appearances, the modern Friar’s Point woman is a victim of poverty and decay.
The motel room was luxurious by our standards and we’d be there for a couple of nights so I
went to buy a bottle of wine but it was Sunday so the liquor store was closed. Yet despite our
evening of sobriety Meryn and I felt hung over when we went for the cooked breakfast on the
Monday morning. That cloud soon passed, however, when a big black woman easily able to
break me in half came out from behind the woodwork to preside over the conduct of the meal. I
had spooned out a cereal bowl of porridge and was looking around for milk and honey. She told
me I had to warm the biscuit first. I’d been south of the Mason-Disxon often enough to know
that she was referring to the scones. By inference, then, it wasn’t porridge but ‘gravy.’ What I had
taken to be cooked oatmeal, despite the fact that it looked like grits, was gravy. It looked nothing
like the meal that had been served up at Windsor, Ohio, in the summer.i There’s nothing like it.
I had no stomach for the fare but the party of African American women who had gathered at the
motel for a business seminar on hair products purged Meryn and my collective liver with their
uplifting shenanigans. Had we been able to film the breakfast scene with clear audio the resulting
episode of whatever sitcom it was passed off as would be a billion dollar classic. The antics and
conversation of the high-spirited, excited, optimistic (business?) women—the high point of
which was their bawling laughter at the expense of some pathetic male whom one of their
number mercilessly ridiculed—was a million dollar experience which Meryn and I still talk about
with fondness. And who knows, perhaps one of those fabulous females had driven up from
Friar’s Point?
A walk around that part of Clarksdale in the environs of the parsonage where Tennessee
Williams grew up in the care of his clergyman grandfather added to our enjoyable start to the
week. As we were walking away from the stately mansion that the town’s founder, John Clark,
had built in 1859, a man appeared, asked where we were from, took our photo in front of the
building, and introduced us to Lois—the woman in charge of the redevelopment of the mansion
as a facility for students of the Coahoma County Higher Education Center. Clark’s daughter,
Blanche, had had the house rolled on logs to its present site next to the Cutrer mansion where
her husband, J W Cutrer, kept his mistress. Tennessee Williams based his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
character, Big Daddy, on that local identity and Cutrer’s wife had served as the model for
Blanche Dubois.
Lois, originally from Atlanta, Georgia, invited us to look around, which we did, and then
entertained us with wonderful stories such as that passed down through her family to the effect
that her great-great-grandfather had freed all of his slaves; that she had had a black student who
i
See above, Chapter 7 ‘The Private Eye’.
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shared her surname, and that he had told her of a story passed down through his family that his
forebears were slaves who had been freed by their master on the principle that slavery was
wrong. Snap! It reminded me of all those people who can remember their past lives, none of
whose was ever less than world famous. During the days when I believed in the realm of the
unfalsifiable, I met Baron von Richthofen’s latest incarnation (a nonentity living in the western
suburbs of an Australian capital city) and a former long dead Japanese Emperor reincarnated in
Milton Keynes on the outskirts of London. Lois’ story, at least, is falsifiable in principle and is
therefore more likely to be true on that account.
Forgetting where we were, I strayed into forbidden territory in mentioning Grant’s Memoirs;
Lois blanched, then regained her composure: it wasn’t so much Grant, she admitted upon
reflection, as Sherman, she said, and made as if to spit on the ground. “We hope and expect he’s
burning forever in hell fires,” she said pouring out the bile of three or four generations of
bitterness felt by descendants of those good slave masters lumped in with the bad to be ground
down by the boot heel of the blue-uniformed Union soldiers who marched across Georgia. Lois’
father had worked in the Navy and been based in Italy but neither his wife nor child knew until it
was all over that he was an operative for the forerunner of the CIA. That’s why he had been a
friend of Adolf Eichmann when they lived in Argentina; it had been her dad’s job to keep an eye
on the old Nazi, she now understood.
Lunch at actor Morgan Freeman’s Ground Zero Blues Club wasn’t up to much but the atmosphere
and music were great. From there we set off on Oakhurst Road for Moon Lake, a Mississippi
River billabong out where Route-1 meets Route-49W. Navigating from the Mississippi to the
Tallahatchie and Yazoo Rivers by blasting his way into Moon Lake, General Grant had tried
to gain access to Vicksburg’s back door in February 1863 but the plan had come to nothing.
Blanche Dubois’ teenage husband had suicided at the exclusive Moon Lake Club for wealthy
white folks. Moon Lake is nowadays immortalised in a tapestry that hangs in the kitchen of
Meryn’s new house.
We went on across the muddy Mississippi to Helena, Arkansas, another old blues hangout of
yesteryear where poverty and decay is now the order of the day, and stopped at the site of Stovall
plantation on our way back to Clarksdale. McKinley Morganfield had grown up in a
sharecropper’s Cypress log cabin there; he wanted to be a famous bluesman and performed for
an Alan Lomax field recording at Stovall in 1941 then left to seek his fortune in 1943. Donning
the mask of Muddy Waters, he made a name for himself playing electric blues in Chicago on the
way to becoming an international star. I saw him perform in many good theatres and once in a
bad basketball stadium. He was ready to bring his band back to our student house for an allnighter in the 1970s but we declined the offer, anticipating the reaction of those housemates who
worked for a living. Regrets, I’ve had a few.
It had been a long day and Meryn climbed into bed as soon as we got back but I needed a drink
and drove to the wine and liquor store, a trailer out on Route 161. A tall Anglo-Saxon went in
ahead of me; he had the demeanour of a punter stepping over the threshold at a brothel. I
followed him in the door and stood before a reinforced grill punctuated by two windows. An
underfed crone behind the glass talked through a highly amplified microphone to the trick who’d
got inside ahead of me. I looked up at the merchandise on display in the distance while her
fingers scraped loudly across the notes she’d been passed through a cash hole in the counter. It
was hard to make out what was on sale and at what price but my eyes soon passed from the
bourbon to the wine over near the second window. A loud voice startled me and I looked
around, aware, then, that I’d been asked what I wanted to purchase.
“Shiraz, please,” I said, to an old stick insect on the inside of this pawn-shop-cum-under-thecounter store that seemed to operate in a perpetual state of Prohibition readiness. The old man
reached up and snatched a bottle of Chardonnay down from a shelf.
“No, no, no, Sir. I want She-raz, please.”
“Shraz? There’s only Awestrayleanne.”
“Hmm. That’ll do, I guess.”
He climbed up and pulled down a bottle of Yellowtail. It was over-priced but I wanted wine.
“Credit card,” said the metallic voice. I put my plastic in the receptacle and the old boy slid it to
his side of what was probably bullet-proof glass. “Photo-ID, please.” I handed over my driver’s
licence.
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“Awestrayleah.”
A brown paper bag appeared at my waist from a shute. It was only then that I noticed that the
trick was still at the other window. He’d not made eye contact. The stick insect appeared from
behind a locked door and handed him a slab of beer; the fellow grabbed it and went. I remained
at my station; the insect stayed where he was, looking at me to co-operate in getting the job done
as quickly and discretely as possible. He proffered a slip of paper.
“Sign here.”
Bottle in hand, I went over and signed the authorisation. The mantis scuttled back inside and
slipped my receipt under the glass, saying “We thank you for you business. Yawl come back
now.”
That night on TV we watched the story of New Orleans and how the politics of race had been
played out in the various symbolic messages conveyed by Mardi Gras Krewes—African
Americans of the Zulu Krewe donning minstrel blackface to make fun of Jim Crow whites.
When Louis Armstrong was King Zulu in 1949 the world spotlight was thrown on
thoroughgoing segregation in the Deep South. During the Civil Rights era, there was dissent
from those African Americans who saw the Zulu Krewe as aiding and abetting the ridicule of the
Negro. Nowadays, Zulu is just another participant in the generation of New Orleans tourist
income.
Early in the morning of September 26th 1937, legendary jazz and blues diva, Bessie Smith, was
travelling in a car that smashed into a parked truck on an unlit Highway 61 near Clarksdale.
There are conflicting stories about what happened next—variations on the Jim Crow
segregationist theme to which King Zulu Satchmo drew attention—but she was taken to
Clarksdale’s G T Thomas Hospital for African Americans and died there. In 1944, the hospital
was converted to a hotel for itinerant black entertainers, still subject to Jim Crow segregation
laws. Had we been aware that the hotel was still open for business, Meryn and I would have
taken a room there instead of at the upmarket motel. And since Clarksdale might be back on the
itinerary just prior to our leaving for home, we went to enquire about booking an overnight stay,
there, in Frank ‘Rat’ Ratliff’s Riverside Hotel.
Very welcoming, Rat ushered us in but said that our plan to take a room from April 11th for three
nights might be difficult because it would be Jook Joint Festival time on the weekend of Friday
13th 2007. Once he’d learned that we were from Australia he said that we would have a better
chance of obtaining a room because he gave preference to people from overseas. Americans only
started patronising the hotel with the premature death of JFK Junior in the 1990s, he explained,
and it was foreigners who had kept him afloat before then so they still got preference. We
weren’t even sure we’d be back so took a raincheck, as they say.
Rat took us through the rooms in the hotel, starting with that in which Bessie Smith had died. It
felt weird being in there, but not bad. He took us into Ike Turner’s room, and Sam Cooke’s, and
the Swedish fellow who was currently in John Lee Hooker’s old room took us in there as well.
Whether or not Rat showed us where the President’s son had stayed, I can’t remember. He
seemed to think of white Americans as being crackers one and all. Guests who stay there
regularly leave their stuff in the drawers.
The hotelier was settling in for an all day rave but we took our leave and drove the 60 miles to
Oxford and checked out various possible ‘accommodations’ before checking into another
upmarket chain motel on the voucher system. That Tuesday, February 13th, was cold and wet so
we spent the afternoon reading before tuning in to MSNBC’s Hardball. The host, Chris
Matthews, no rightwing apologist but an independent thinker who’s not afraid to tell it how he
thinks it is, spoke of his admiration for Scooter Libby, of the aide’s loyalty to the vice-president.
Matthews, that is to say, condoned deliberate thwarting of the law, praising Libby for helping
Cheney cover up the fact that the Bush Administration manufactured false evidence in order to
prosecute an unjust war.
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough comes from that side of the ideological divide which fosters a small
government agenda: according to those who promote the notion, the extent to which
government shrinks over time is an important measure of the success of the republic. On TV
that night Mr Scarborough was full of righteous indignation over the government’s failure to
curtail and regulate the dodgy business practices of those enterprises that serve food to the public
from filthy premises. The American is at home with paradox.
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Trickster governs Virginia just as surely as He does Massachusetts but He’s more exaggerated
down there in Dixie, where they’re possessed of the horse-trader mentality William Faulkner
depicted in his 1940 novel, The Hamlet. According to the fanciful image of the copy, the
aristocratic planter, Southern bred to chivalry, had a deep concern for the welfare of the common
man and behaved with honour in commerce. Not for him the grubby profit gained from sleight
of hand trade. And the slaves he owned loved him, too, of course.
In reality, maintaining one’s status as top dog required of the Southern Gentleman that he be a
past master at duplicitous, underhand behaviour. To begin with, he had to pull off the confidence
trick of convincing long lost cracker kin that had the cards fallen differently God would have
smiled on one of them instead, that it was nothing but the luck of the draw which made him
wealthy and them as poor as church mice.
Post-war era Southerners could believe in a remote antebellum Golden Age of noblesse oblige
and contrast it with the ignoble world of cynical wretches unleashed by Reconstruction and
White Redemption. Faulkner’s Flem Snopes is one such wretch and the famous author’s tall tale
about a Texas horse trader come to Mississippi presents us with different degrees of deception.
The Texan is an old style confidence man who parts the people from their money fair and
square, as it were, simply by knowing how to play the game; the narrator, Ratliff, an itinerant
sewing machine salesman, is a student of the confidence trick, an admirer of the art of pulling a
swifty. Snopes on the other hand is a viper, a man devoid of human warmth and empathy who
has but one aim in life: to gather unto himself the wealth which used reside in the community.
Like Trickster, he brings disorder, is akin to a force of nature. Flem Snopes is beyond
redemption, and so, too, by implication, was the post Civil War South insofar as it wallowed in
ignorance.
When William Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature he donated most of the prizemoney to a memorial fund which provides scholarships and books for the students of Oxford,
the town where he lived and worked. He died in July 1962, only weeks before James Meredith
became the first Negro to enrol at Oxford’s University of Mississippi. Meredith had been assisted
in his struggle for justice by the NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers. White crackers—good ol’
boys, and their wives and girlfriends—were adamant that no black man would be educated at
their university and staged a riot against the Meredith enrolment; two people were killed and 75
injured.
President Kennedy, preoccupied with the Cuban Missile Crisis, had to send federal troops to
Oxford to protect James Meredith because the state’s police would not. The Governor—
explicitly harking back to the Civil War as a case of Northern aggression toward the South—
spoke of Mississippi as having been “invaded by federal forces” when Kennedy’s men arrived. It
had been one hundred years since President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation
Proclamation, in September 1862.
The students at Ol’ Miss were calm and collected when Meryn and I walked around the campus
on Valentine’s Day 2007. We took a walking tour of Faulkner’s Oxford, starting in the Court
House Square with a log book record bearing the signature of William Falkner, the man who
masqueraded (in name only) as Faulkner; we’d been inside his house in 2005 (a couple of days
after Tim Winton had been there, apparently) and walked through the grounds this time.
Over coffee at The Square, the superb bookshop in the centre of town that had influenced the
Philadelphia proprietor, I came under the spell of the South, Faulkner’s phrase ‘time out of mind’
beckoning. Dixie had not been there for-ever-and-ever, I knew, but it felt that way. I would not
end my days dipping further into the cruel history of Mississippi and Alabama while wandering
around modern day Yoknapatawpha County, heading over to Clarksdale this day and down to
Philadelphia the next, but musing on the idea of it was efficacious.
The rental car was due back in Memphis so we left Oxford on the Thursday morning, taking
Route 7 to Interstate 78. An isolated pocket of snow filled the sky with cotton flecks at the
Tennessee border but the Caliber flew through the flakes without the windscreen getting wet.
Whether or not this was an odd phenomenon we had no idea, but it was counter to our
expectation; the snow behaved like a band of white air, not mist or rain. Memphis felt like home
as we took the elevator to our hotel room overlooking Union Avenue.
After lunch I returned the car to Mt. Moriah, walked to Poplar Road in 50 minutes and waited
another thirty-five for a bus. The dry cold that crept under my clothes and seeped into my bones
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made the half hour seem longer and the bus journey even better than normal. A Memphis metro
bus ride rates highly on Meryn and my register of what makes America marvellous. There’s
nothing wrong with Chicago or New York buses, they’re great, but Memphis drivers, especially
the women, approach the job as involving pastoral care and engage the passenger in something
of an intimate relationship, one carried on in the public domain for the benefit of all and the
entertainment of those with a seat in the auditorium. There’s an assumption that God is in the
house, that He is speaking through the driver, and will see you safely to your destination.
Meryn and I moved to a larger room on the Friday then spent an hour or two on the Memphis
Metro website figuring out how I’d get to the airport by bus. Bernie would be arriving from San
Francisco that night to travel across the country with us before flying back home to Australia.i I
took the 56 along Union Avenue to the terminus downtown and changed buses. The 4 was way
ahead of schedule but the driver corrected for this when he stopped for a hamburger. Memphis
airport was almost as barren and alien as Dulles so I whiled away an hour with H L Mencken
whom I’d picked up at Burke’s bookshop and collected Bernie who’d come via Phoenix.
America’s air-transport hubs do strange things with time and distance.
Bernie was up and ready to go first thing Saturday morning so we walked the three miles to
downtown Memphis in search of Mike’s, Meryn and my favourite diner from the 2003 train trip.
We found an abandoned premises; there was no business as usual, and more’s the pity. Who
knows, perhaps inspectors had found a filthy kitchen and government regulation had closed
them down? We went around the corner and sat down to a dreadful meal then pressed on down
Main Street in biting cold to the train station featured in the Jim Jarmusch film, ‘Mystery Train’;
the toilet seats, there, had electrical warmers. Meryn and I had passed that way in 2003 and
caught something vaguely familiar out of the corner of our eye—the balcony where Dr King had
stood next to Jesse Jackson and been assassinated on April 4th 1968. It didn’t reach out and grab
Bernie so we approached it from the south. A banner protested against the ‘gentrification’ of the
site.
The Lord’s day had been set aside for music business. The $US10.00 Sun Studios tour was alright
but not up to the standard set by the post-modern woman who had had the gig the day that Sam
Phillips died. Beale Street, a short stroll past the old cotton warehouses along the banks of the
Mississippi River in the freezing cold, and a bus ride back to the hotel for lunch was meant to
prepare Bernie for the ultimate experience: a tour of Graceland. Meryn and my eyes had been
opened inside the home of the King in 2003 and I wondered what Bernie would make of it. For
me, Graceland is a concrete expression of what a mid-twentieth-century poor white cracker might
dream of doing were he suddenly to become wealthy beyond imagination.
American kings are destined to be burlesque copies. The American, not cut from the royal cloth
of Sol and Luna, is a child of Mercurius, an incarnation of Trickster; he’s Merlin, not Arthur. The
tiny recording studio on Union Avenue where Elvis Presley performed magic is worlds away
from the Southern mansion out on Highway 51. Whether from fatigue or disinterest, Bernie
decided not to take a tour of Graceland but sipped Shiraz instead, and said he was happy to talk
about his religious faith. I might not be able to reason with the American concerning such
matters but figured I surely could with a friend from way back when.
Up before 5 am Monday, Bernie came with me on the bus ride and walk to Mt Moriah Road
where we rented another Caliber, this one with 60 miles on the odometer, and returned to pack
the luggage and check out of the hotel. It would have been better to have had three drivers, or
even two, but the additional expense was prohibitive so I was at the wheel for the month long
round trip—Bernie leaving for Australia on day 21. I had hoped to make Paris, Texas, by
nightfall, but it was almost noon by the time we finished stocking the larder at the Memphis
Market Fresh located in the opposite direction from where we were headed; superb food stores
are few and far between in the land of the free so it’s a case of shop ’til you drop when you find
one.
There was a further detour when Bernie decided to take some pics of Graceland after-all so we
saw Little Rock, Arkansas, from the freeway and drove through Hot Springs (where Bill Clinton
grew up) to a National Park for a late afternoon lunch. Meryn conjured up a feast—olive bread,
cottage cheese, tomato and lettuce—from the morning’s fresh food run. Route 70 West delivered
i
See above, Chapter 14 ‘Hostile Twins’.
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us to a motel in De Queen, near the Oklahoma border, and a friendly waiter at the adjacent
Mexican Restaurant made our day. Unfortunately, though, I ruined Bernie’s by rushing him out
of the room in the morning so that he went without some electronic devices. The one he’d left in
the Caliber meant we could still play mp3 selections through the sound system so we listened to
the blues.
“Howdy neighbour,” a man said as I entered the breakfast diner to join Meryn and Bernie. Pretty
soon, we were in the square at Paris, Texas. There was nothing special about the town when we
passed through, its poor-cousin copy of the Eiffel Tower notwithstanding. Paris, though, had
been the starting point for the Chisum Traili in the cowboy era following the Civil War and lent
its name to the atmospheric 1984 movie with the Sam Shepard screenplay. And Bonham, just
west of Paris, had been the starting point for John Wesley Hardin, another of those son-of-apreacher outlaws the American romanticises.
Detective Sergeant Hamilton reckoned that he’d followed Dempster all the way from New
Orleans through Mobile, Money, and Clarksdale across the river to Helena, Arkansas, and would
have gone on after him except that I had backtracked. But Dempster was in the vicinity,
Hamilton felt sure, and would no doubt regard the Caliber as a hellhound on his trail.
The said hellhound headed south on Route 19, the Davy Crockett National Forest on its left.
John Wesley Hardin grew up on the edge of that forest, in Sumpter. Like his older contemporary
from Missouri, Jesse James, Hardin hated Yankees and loved violence. As a twelve-year-old, he
killed an African American (who worked on the Hardin family plantation) and fled. That was in
1865. A crack shot with a Colt .44 pistol, he put bullets in three members of a Union patrol that
went to arrest him. Adept at poker and euchre, he took to the life of a gambling cowboy and
killed two more Union troops in a gunfight. A public enemy by then, Hardin hid for a while on
his uncle’s plantation then travelled through east Texas en route to Shreveport, Louisiana,
shooting another two men along the way.
The fugitive never made it to Shreveport, though, because he was arrested at the state border.
Before the authorities could extradite him to Waco, the outlaw shot the prison guard, and
escaped, only to be re-arrested by Union troops. Free again after killing them, Hardin took a herd
of cattle to Abilene, Kansas, and stayed there for a few months, gambling in the saloons and
then, heading back to Texas, shot three members of a posse sent to capture him.
Soon after that he got into a fight over a gambling dispute and was wounded by a shotgun blast
to the stomach. The ubiquitous posse arrived while a doctor was patching him up in a hotel and
he was on the road again. Sheriff Charles Webb went to arrest Hardin as the young killer
celebrated his twenty-first birthday in a Comanche saloon. He shot the sheriff, saw his
companions lynched by a mob and moved to Alabama with his wife and three children to run a
saloon of his own. Not long after that, he was arrested by the Texas Rangers, served 19 years of a
25-year sentence and was released in 1894 to practice law. His first wife having died two years
earlier, he remarried. When his second wife left him, John Wesley Hardin took to gambling and
hanging around in bars. On August 19th 1895 Sheriff John Selman shot him dead in El Paso for
casting aspersions on the sheriff’s son. Such is life.
We stayed overnight in Huntsville—where Hardin had served nineteen years in prison—and
took the freeway to Houston during peak hour the next morning. Hamilton demanded to go
straight to Corpus Christi but Meryn and I had long since decided that Galveston, on the Gulf of
Mexico coast, was a ‘must.’ The thriving town had competed with Houston to become the
dominant regional centre and might have succeeded had it not been destroyed by a hurricane on
September 8th 1900. Eight-thousand Texans died in that storm; it transformed Isaac Cline,
Galveston’s U S Weather Bureau Chief, into the nation’s first scientific practitioner in the art of
predicting which way the wind would blow, and why it was significant. Cline, we already know,
went on to play a critical role as the New Orleans weatherman in the 1927 Mississippi River
flood.
Lunch in a below par diner on the blue water shore followed by a prolonged examination of
historic east end and Downtown architecture might have slowed our progress but for Hamilton.
The bee in his bonnet stung me into action and the Caliber moved on through the arid coastal
Not to be confused with the Chisolm Trail, named for Jesse Chisolm (son of a Scottish immigrant father and
Cherokee mother) who had trading posts on the route between the Red River and Kansas City, Missouri.
i
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flatlands past massive refineries. Fading light and driver fatigue sent us off in search of a Port
Lavaca motel but our arrival coincided with the three-monthly change of shift at the refineries
and the incoming workforce had occupied all available accommodation. So we settled on a hole
in the wall at Rockport and set off early for Corpus Christi.
Second-lieutenant Ulysses Grant sailed from New Orleans to Corpus Christi with General
Zachary Taylor’s Army in September 1845. They’d been sent there to provoke an attack—Texas
being Mexican territory that had been annexed by the USA—so President Polk could declare war
on Mexico.i In his memoirs, Grant describes how an outbreak of yellow fever had emptied out
the streets of New Orleans for most of the three months the troops were stationed there but that
on one occasion a crowd had gathered—to witness a duel over some point of honour. Grant, like
Taylor, considered the U S Government’s annexation of Texas and subsequent invasion to have
been dishonourable—as had Congressman Abraham Lincoln. Jefferson Davis, by contrast, had
welcomed America’s aggressive stance and resigned from Congress specifically in order to raise a
volunteer regiment to fight in the Mexican War.ii
A thick fog had rolled in off the sea and it was almost noon before visibility extended beyond a
50-yard radius. Stomachs rumbling, we crossed the railroad track to a diner. Whereas to Bernie’s
untrained eye it was a rough looking dump in a run down part of town, for Meryn and me it had
the tell-tale signs of a good quality diner: not much investment in infrastructure, in a poor part of
town, but with many motor vehicles out front, those of the local Sheriff, State Trooper, and
Federal Border Patrol in particular.
We took our seats and placed an order with one of two extraordinarily beautiful waitresses. A
dozen or so men in army fatigues came in and sat next to us. Bernie, much less reticent than
Meryn and me, ascertained that they were hunters and then went up and asked the assembled
police personnel whether they’d mind if he took a photograph of them enjoying the repast. They
had no objection. The food, décor, staff, most of the clientele, and the experience in general was
Mexican; it was probably the best diner we’ve been to anywhere and the weight of responsibility
for initiating Bernie into Meryn and my America lifted from my shoulders. The meal was of very
high quality yet at a reasonable price, and the toilets had upholstered seats.
Back on Route 77, we continued to follow the railroad; a wild boar ran across the road in front of
us and another of those Christian billboards signed ‘God’ suggested to blasphemers that if they
must curse then they should use their own name. A little further down the road the railway track
had been cleared of the tangled wreckage from what must have been a recently derailed train so
we stopped to take photographs and examine the damage. The flashing lights on a pickup truck
warned any would be looter to stay away from the precious cargo inside the upturned freight
cars.
Brownsville loomed into view mid-afternoon and the Dodge Caliber came to rest in a crowded
carpark on the borderline. Phalanxes of yellow school buses lined up and disgorged costumed
kids and brass bands amid streams of people pouring onto a street adjacent to the massive
migration checkpoint. An old cowpoke surprised Bernie with the news that the people were
gathering for a street parade that would feature the usual bands and marching groups from local
schools; it was the culmination of the week long festival of the cowboy. Surprised him because he
had imagined that these Mexican Americans would be predominantly Catholic and yet here they
were holding the Charro Days Fiesta during Lent. Hamilton, on the other hand, was convinced
that here, at last, we’d catch the cowboy he’d been combing the country for. I had no idea why
the Detective Sergeant thought Dempster would be there or what part we were supposed to play.
The school students did what they do in street parades all over America, but Brownsville’s
marching girls were especially sassy, one in particular making the most of her moment in the
spotlight. Hamilton was going to have a hard time differentiating one cowboy from the next, it
seemed to me. Unless, of course, he had in mind the copy, the Hollywood Western gunfighter.
There were none of them around here, only pre-school-age boys kitted out in prototype Cisco
Kid costume—Mexican caballeros from their high-heeled boots to broad-brimmed sombreros.
General Zachary Taylor received orders from Washington to advance further into Mexican
territory in March 1846 and Ulysses Grant was enthralled to see an immense herd of mustangs
i
ii
See Chapter 18 ‘Massachusetts and Virginia’.
See Chapter 19 ‘The Poker Night’.
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that ranged as far as the eye could see over the uninhabited flatland between Corpus Christi and
Brownsville. His own mount, he tells us, had recently been one among those thousands of wild
horses; the spotted ponies Faulkner’s Flem Snopes arranged to be auctioned off in Mississippi
were probably their direct descendants.
There was no Brownsville in 1846, but upon reaching the bank of the Rio Grande opposite the
town of Matamoras General Taylor had his engineers draw up plans for a fort which, once built,
housed the 7th infantry garrison commanded by Major Jacob Brown.39 Fort Brown, then, gave its
Anglo Saxon name to the town on what became the Mexican border following the American
invasion.
President Polk and his Southern Democrats had prosecuted the Mexican War in order to tilt the
balance back toward the slave-states within the terms of the Missouri Compromise. The
American supported that war because he believed it was the white man’s destiny to take Western
civilisation to the rest of the continent—to conquer it. As William Gilpin put it in 1846,
The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent—to rush over this
vast field to the Pacific Ocean … to teach old nations a new civilisation—to confirm the destiny
of the human race—to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point—to cause a stagnant
people to be reborn … to shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind ...40
It was manifest that God had ordained that man should make proper use of all the land between
the Atlantic and Pacific and only the white man knew how to do so. Opposing the invasion of
Mexico was tantamount to denying America’s manifest destiny and Abraham Lincoln almost lost
his political scalp in so doing. He learned the lesson, though, and said what the American wanted
to hear—“that it was the manifest destiny of the people to move westward”—when he spoke on
behalf of the railroad men in the Effie Afton court case ten years after the Mexican War.41 Gilpin,
too, regarded the railroad as the vehicle of manifest destiny; he was one of thirteen men who
accompanied president-elect Lincoln from Springfield to Washington in February 1861 and a
member of the one-hundred strong presidential bodyguard which protected the president as he
consulted his cabinet on what was to be done about Jefferson Davis’ Confederacy.
Zachary Taylor, Jefferson Davis’ father-in-law, was dead by then. Affectionately known as ‘Old
Rough and Ready’, General Taylor was elected President of the United States in 1848 and invited
settlers in the newly acquired territory of New Mexico and California to draft constitutions for
admittance to statehood. Calculated to upset the Southern applecart, had the proposal gone
ahead it would most likely have resulted in those new states being free rather than slave. But, like
Robert Johnson, Zachary Taylor was given something to sip and died within days of drinking his
health during a July 4th celebration at the Washington Monument. President Taylor’s demise put
Virginia back on top so She stayed with her spouse—but was more determined than ever that the
marriage be conducted on Her terms.
A coupon got us a comfortable motel. Bernie wanted to buy some lighter clothing for south
Texas’ balmy weather and, imagining we could walk to the shopping complex he could see from
the motel balcony, had trouble believing that it was too dangerous to attempt a walk between any
two points intersected by a freeway. He was amazed, too, to find the staggering number of retail
warehouses servicing such a modestly sized city.
The next morning, Friday, our travelling companion resumed his train of thought concerning
Mexican Catholicism as we followed the Rio Grande north-west past the irrigated flatlands
toward the streets of Laredo. Burl Ives’ saccharine cowboy song recording ran through my head
as we passed small cemeteries full of brightly coloured artificial flowers. We stopped at one of
them and Bernie confessed that the walk amongst tombstones bearing mainly Mexican names
had a Lenten appeal. Some of the deceased had died early last century so they would have been
Mexicans at birth, born before President Tyler annexed Texas.
Mexicans at birth who’d recently crossed the Rio Grande were being rounded up by law
enforcement folk in the many Border Patrol cars that bobbed up regularly along that stretch of
road. A patrol car pulled us over at one point but the officials lost interest before we’d found our
passports. No-one from south of the border could have managed to affect such an accent yet we
three had it down pat so they waved us on.
I took a 20-minute nap in Crystal City, a small town that lays claim to being spinach capital of the
world. Bernie agreed that it was no city but pointed out that it had “a very impressive Catholic
Church.” Three crosses out front apparently had handles on the horizontal beams which could
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be used for re-enactments of the Blessed Saviour’s crucifixion at Easter. I yawned, having had my
fill of Christian pathology. A little further on, signs for Christian campgrounds in amongst
taxidermist store-fronts gave Bernie pause for thought. Australian Christians are squeamish about
gun ownership and think of animals as a source of meat; the juxtaposition of God-fearing with
deer hunting doesn’t come naturally to people from Down Under so that leg of the journey in
the mountains above the Nueces River presented religion in a different light from the familiar
scene of the spinach capital’s Christian crucifix. Still, the sight of the burning cross at a Ku Klux
Klan camp meeting never put a Christian off so there was no reason to worry about anyone
losing faith. The deer today won’t be gone tomorrow because there’s a measure of regulation.
Herds of bison outnumbering ten to one the number of wild horses Ulysses Grant saw in Texas
once roamed across the American prairie but had been hunted almost to extinction by 1875
when Texas cowboy Pat Garrett took up the profession of hunting the magnificent beast. Garrett
soon realised that there was no future in that game and went further west to try his hand in a
New Mexico saloon.
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Chapter 22 Alias the Outlaw
We slept overnight at Sonoro, Texas, pressed against a high head wind and flying debris on
Interstate 10 in the morning, then followed Route 285 from Stockton north toward the Rio
Pecos and drove all afternoon to reach Roswell, New Mexico, late in the day. Reason dictated
that we take a room there but Hamilton drove me west on Route 380, convinced that Dempster
was in Lincoln. He wasn’t—and neither was anyone else. There was seasonal accommodation
only and it wasn’t available mid-winter so we had to go on despite the fact that it had got too
dark to see. We found a place not far away, at Capitan.
A couple of years after the Civil War, John Chisum drove 600 head of cattle from Paris, Texas, to
Fort Sumner, New Mexico. They’d been three days without water when the precious necessity
was found at the site where Roswell now stands. Chisum succeeded in the cattle business and set
up a ranch a few miles from Roswell in the early 1870s. He grazed his herds on public land in
Lincoln County and others like John Tunstall soon did the same.
A pair of local merchants who wanted a piece of the action demanded a cut on all beef sales so
Chisum and Tunstall teamed up to resist the threat. When the merchants had a sheriff’s posse
gun down Tunstall in cold blood, a gang of ranch-hands set out to right the wrong. In March
1878 they murdered two members of the posse that had ambushed Tunstall then, on April 1st,
shot Lincoln County’s sheriff and his deputy.
Henry McCarty, alias William Bonney, was a member of the ranch-hand gang that had taken the
law into its own hands. McCarty, a victim of circumstance, had a history of lawlessness. Having
had to fend for himself after being orphaned at fourteen, he was arrested and gaoled for theft a
year or so later. When he climbed up the chimney and escaped from the Silver City, New Mexico,
lockup it was to a life of fugitive wandering in America’s Wild West. A couple of years later, the
seventeen-year-old killed a man who had attacked him at Camp Bowie, Arizona. He returned to
New Mexico, donned the mask of William Bonney, and eventually found employment as a
Tunstall ranch-hand in Lincoln County.
On the run following the April Fools’ Day lawmen murders, Bonney—now known affectionately
as ‘Billy the Kid’—made ends meet as a cattle rustler, cardsharp, and killer. During a game of
poker in a Fort Sumner saloon, Billy’s opponent bragged that if he ever saw the ‘Kid’ he’d kill
him. The hapless gunslinger learned too late that America is governed by the pagan god whose
calling card is strange coincidence, and that he therefore had only moments to live.
Billy got on well with the bartender in Beaver Smith’s saloon at Fort Sumner. The bartender—
Pat Garrett—tells us that they had known each other at Camp Bowie and describes a character
much like those found in William Faulkner’s fiction. Billy arrived, Garrett said,
… with a companion, both mounted on one sore-backed pony, equipped with a
packsaddle and rope bridle, without a quarter of a dollar between them … Billy’s
partner doubtless had a name which was his legal property, but he was so given to
changing it that it is impossible to fix on the right one. Billy always called him ‘Alias.’42
‘Faulkner’ was an alias not yet conceived when Ash Upson penned this portrait for Garrett’s
book about the outlaw but both authors were influenced by the southwest style of tall tale
storytelling. William Faulkner’s ‘Spotted Ponies’ came out of that tradition, as did the following
record of a conversation between a Yankee and a cracker:
“What mout your name be?”…
“It might be anything,” answered the traveller. …
“Well, what is it then?”
“It is ‘Porter’, but it might as well have been anything else.”
“Pretty digging!” said the cracker; and when he was asked to give his own name, “To be sure I
will,” he replied. “Take it, take it, and welcome. Anything else you’d like to have?”
“No,” said the traveller, “there’s nothing else about you worth having.”43
Whether he be a Yankee, cracker, African American, or Wild West cowboy, the American dons
the mask, puts reality aside, and is entertained by the image, by whatever is presented; he prefers
the copy.
Pat Garrett presented himself as ‘friend’ to Billy the Kid despite having applied for the vacant
position of Lincoln County Sheriff. He captured the Kid in December 1880 and Billy went on
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trial in Mesilla, New Mexico, and sentenced (on April 13th) to be executed a month later on May
13th 1881. He was incarcerated at the County Courthouse in Lincoln but escaped on April 28th
when the Sheriff was out of town. Garrett could nothing for the two deputies who’d bitten the
dust in the breakout but track down their killer. He must uphold the law—and had a reputation
to restore. So the Lincoln County Sheriff rode up and down the Rio Pecos Valley for nigh on
three months and finally cornered his adversary in a farmhouse near Fort Sumner on July 14th.
That’s where Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid and catapulted the 21-year-old to heroic outlaw
status.
His paternity being clouded in mystery, we’re unable to conclude that Henry McCarty’s brief
hour upon the stage as Billy the Kid of the Wild West proves the rule that the American outlaw is
a son of a preacher. But it’s a safe bet that his executioner, Pat Garrett, would have been better
off had he not fostered the development of the caricatured copy of the Wild West outlaw with
his William Bonney biography. On the one hand, he lived off his association with the Billy the
Kid myth whilst on the other he came to represent the dead weight of government authority that
restricted the American’s freedom. Hungry land grubbers hitched their wagon to this latter image
of the negative lawman in order to steal his land and get away with murder: they shot Pat Garrett
on February 28th 1908.
Wintery light from the pre-dawn east played on snow-capped peaks as the Caliber went west
toward Trinity, site of the first atomic bomb explosion. The mystery of nuclear physics makes for
serious conversation against the backdrop of fabulous topography. Bernie had read out the
instructions for cruise control back on Interstate 10 and, undoubtedly, setting the accelerator on
‘automatic’ reduced driver fatigue—but increased fuel consumption into the bargain, I later
discovered.
Bernie would like to have visited Truth and Consequences but couldn’t because it was too far off.
Brunch, at Carolyn and Shirley’s somewhere southwest of Albuquerque, didn’t live up to its
promise. We surmised that the diner was a ‘retirement project’ for the women who ran it; they
were in that early adrenalin phase by the look of it but appearances weren’t going to be enough;
there was definite room for improvement on the scrambled eggs with chorizo sausage and hash
browns according to Bernie. Truth and Consequences.
Meryn and I had laughed at his account of being engaged by faith and the mystery of the Trinity.
Surely one can appreciate Bach’s music without jumping to the conclusion that its beauty and
form is a sign from God, we argued. Bernie said he hadn’t really intended to cite Bach as
evidence for the existence of a Creator so much as zero in on what it was about His nature. He
had had enough of my saying it all sounded pretty silly and regarded that approach as ad
hominem.
Faith doesn’t have a feather to fly with concerning matters of fact—the existence of God being
either fact or fiction—but the Christian chooses to believe. Whatever way you cut it, it is silly to
simply believe without evidence. Bernie seemed to want to have it both ways, though,
acknowledging that it’s silly to believe that the tooth fairy exists yet adamant that the tall tale
about The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is of an altogether different order of belief. He thought
it reasonable to rope off this fantasy as of a special order; Meryn and I were amused, and are still.
A flight in Shepherd-1 might make us less sceptical, perhaps?
Route 371 carried us north to Farmington and a baseball game being played there made it
necessary to take an upmarket motel before heading northwest onto the Navajo Indian
Reservation—Trickster’s home ground. The Indian divinity had long since worked his way into
the national psyche, the white settlers having absorbed Him in the process of pushing the
indigenous inhabitants westward during the “mad scramble … to grab the best locations and
defend them against all comers.”44
Lewis and Clark’s 1804-1806 exploration of the Missouri River had been the cue for young men
to go west across the Mississippi River along three main overland trails: those engaged in
commerce with the Spaniards took the Santa Fe trail; fur traders used the Oregon trail; and men
in search of gold went in wagon trains on the California trail. By the 1840s “the greedy
overreaching, the fraud and bloody violence that everywhere marked the frontier as it moved
westward”45 had been transformed into the myth of manifest destiny.
The American who did his duty and obeyed the dictate that the whole continent must come
under the dominion of the Empire reserved the right to slaughter whosoever stood in the way of
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Christian civilisation. The United States Cavalry and iron horse put the finishing touches to the
genocide in the post Civil War era. The Indian had been deluded in the effort to defend his
territory and way of life, according to the American, because manifest destiny had been ordained
by the Trinity. He might have been violent but he had a heart, this American, and so set aside
Indian reservations like the one we drove through up there in north-western New Mexico, across
into north-eastern Arizona, and southeast Utah.
Snow on the ground, layered deposits in rocky contours, and pink cliffs in the distance created
exquisite sensations as we gazed upon God’s country around ‘Four Corners.’ Meryn spotted a
neon ‘Open’ sign when we stopped for gas at Montezuma Creek. It was the Mussi Café and
turned out to be one of America’s finer diners. We sat on barstools in the small transportable and
took most of Meryn’s meal—Navaho Tacos (home-made dinner plate sized taco topped with
ground beef, red beans, lettuce and orange cheese)—with us when we left, finishing it off at
sunset on the porch outside our hacienda overlooking the fast flowing San Juan River at Mexican
Hat, Utah.
En route to Mexican Hat, the Caliber had climbed a very steep dirt road up a cliff-face. After
criss-crossing our way to the top I took a nap while Meryn and Bernie went off into the woods,
their advance checked by observation of what seemed to be a fresh set of cougar paw-prints in
the snow. They returned to the car and we went back down the mountain through the Valley of
the Gods, late afternoon light glinting off rocks and throwing spectacular shadows.
The fabulous beauty of the region was so far beyond words that it and a film we saw at the
Natural Bridges National Monuments Park triggered debate concerning the creationist versus
scientific account of how everything came to be as it is. A Catholic, Bernie accepted the latter
(causal) explanation yet switched arbitrarily between the two, injecting God into the overall
picture wherever the science was in its infancy, as, for instance, as was the case with respect to
human ethics.
I put it to him that for all their faults the various secular humanist explanations of how values are
arrived at are more plausible than any of the religious accounts. Bernie wasn’t buying that at all.
And he wasn’t having a bar of the line of reasoning which holds that that since no-one knows
whether or not there is a God then we should not use faith to arrive at our value system; religion
should be, as Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico had argued, a personal matter, not an
active determinant in the political arena. This went too far for Bernie; he was worried on behalf
of all those unborn babies.
Crossing back into Arizona after leaving the wonderful Mexican Hat motel we’d had to
ourselves, the Caliber meandered through the Hollywood Western Monument Valley terrain to
Tuba City where Bernie picked out Cates Café as likely to be a suitable diner. Very busy, always a
good sign, it lived up to expectations. The desert wind saw us bite the dust for dessert while we
‘gassed up.’ The locals were still predominantly Indian-Mexican, refreshingly non-Anglo. We had
decided to go south to Flagstaff then north to the Grand Canyon but the Detective Sergeant was
on my case to branch off into the Painted Desert. So we slotted it in with what was to be a quick
run there and back the following morning.
Up at cock crow, the Caliber made a series of false moves before taking Interstate 40 in search of
a way in to the Painted Desert. It had to head much further east, helpful folks said. Low on gas,
we left the freeway at Winslow. Bernie remembered that was where, once upon a time, the girl in
a flat bed Ford had flirted with Jackson Browne. She had slowed down; we stopped. Jackson
Browne had been in his prime; I was grappling with my inner policeman, a superego to be sure.
And sure of the line of reason which lead me to doubt the existence of Bernie or anyone else’s
God. One could understand how it all got started, though, the conviction that a superior being
created the world and then made a creature smart enough to appreciate the achievement. No
doubt about it, whoever painted the striking array of soft rainbow sandstone stripes laid out
across the horizon is awesome, assuming that they were painted.
Hamilton had been in his element all the while and bade me leave a sign in that freezing dry dirt
wilderness. I did, but worried that there’d be repercussions when the Detective Sergeant realised
that it would be torn apart and scattered in the wild wind. Instead, he seemed to relish the
prospect, declaring that his work was almost done. The day was done.
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It’s an ill wind that blows no-one no good; the vast rushing air mass that had chilled us to the
bone in the petrified forest had also made a Grand Canyon cabin available for hire at short notice
and we booked online for the first two nights of March 2007 in Maswick Lodge.
Snow had fallen overnight in Flagstaff. Babes in the woods with respect to the phenomenon, we
gazed in wonder when Bernie grabbed the squeegee to wipe the window. The water in the gas
station bucket was frozen so he grabbed a bottle from inside the car and doused the windscreen
with the contents—a translucent layer of ice. We fell about laughing. Who’d have thought of
that? And who’d’ve thought the Grand Canyon could be a let down? It staged a first rate
performance but the support acts had stolen the show in the week long build up. I was shocked
to find I’d had enough of awe. I went off on my own, just Hamilton and me, walking madly
along the south rim.
A young bundle of energy Park Ranger was conducting a couple on a tour and stopped to give
them a talk, presumably one of many. She was tiny but asked them in a booming voice what
humans have in common with trees. They were nonplussed but a passer-by stopped and
answered, “Carbon.”“Correct,” she said and launched into a tale of how the trees have their
needs just as much as we have ours, different though they might be. A crowd gathered and took
in her spiel. She was talking about the tiny bit of muddy water—the Colorado River—down
below and I wanted to say to move to where I was because there you saw a little more than a
muddy pool, albeit a long way off and not especially more prominent than a pool.
She talked about the dry conditions at this time of year, how the temperature had recently dipped
to minus fourteen Fahrenheit and that down below it was a desert, that the Grand Canyon had
every climatic condition apart from tropical and arctic, the canyon floor being a desert with very
low “precit.” The precipitation up at rim level was far greater and in the summer months there’s
much lightning. Arizona, she informed them and the considerable gathering, now, had more
lightning than any other state and that much of it was over the Grand Canyon. Not so long ago,
she went on, a Park employee’s house had burned to the ground following a lightning strike.
Despite flying past throngs of Japanese and Chinese tourists, I saw the same faces further along
the path. It hadn’t occurred to me that there was a road around the rim: I was keeping pace with
sightseers who were driving from one scenic lookout to the next. At one of these I saw a huge
black vulture sunning itself on a rock; it had markings on its wings reminiscent of American
Indian motifs and was as big as a wedge-tail eagle. Meryn told me later that it was probably a
condor then showed me a brooch in the shape of the Hopi trickster god, Kokopelli.
I went out before dawn on the Friday, walked west along the rim and saw the Canyon walls bathe
in the first light of day. Naked beauty trumps religion every time. After breakfast we drove east
along the rim to the Watchtower designed by architect Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter and Meryn
and I took a bus to Hermit’s Rest, another Colter construction, in the late afternoon.
Come Saturday, we went back to Interstate 40 and kept going west, getting the low down from a
local on which Kingman diner was best before filling up with petrol. Bernie went to pay the
cashier and couldn’t believe it when a beat up guy walked in with a sixgun in a cowboy holster
strapped to his waist. The gunman pre-paid for his gas and went back out to the pump. Bernie
asked the cashier if the fellow was the law, or some sort of authority. “No, this is Arizona,
honey,” she replied, “and he’s just some desert rat.”
Las Vegas, Nevada, is northwest of Kingman on Route 93. Impressive new roadworks for
construction of a massive bridge were in progress as we approached the border and around a
corner the Hoover Dam loomed up without warning. A huge crowd had gathered; whoever had
told them didn’t tell us. Commissioned by President Warren Harding’s Commerce Secretary,
Herbert Hoover, in 1922, the engineering feat of holding back the waters of the Colorado River
downstream from the Grand Canyon on the Nevada-Arizona border was achieved in 1935. The
experience of being up close to the Hoover Dam wasn’t sublime, exactly, but Las Vegas, right
next door, is ridiculous—insane, as Leo and Betty’s friend had said.
The American, born of a culture polished by sweet commerce, is courteous and polite. He might
be strolling down the sidewalk with a coffee in hand when you ask him how to get to wherever
and nine times out of ten you’ll get clear, specific directions: take Route whatever for three sets
of traffic lights then take a right and it’ll be five blocks down. Or you may be walking yourself
when he’ll stop in the street, wind the window down and ask you for directions. He doesn’t go in
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for public drunkenness such as is on show in, say, Sydney or Glasgow. So it’s not surprising he
thinks of Vegas as sin city.
The people strolling down Flamingo, or The Strip, carry yard glass Margaritas and send you off
on a wild goose chase. Meryn wanted to know where she could purchase some device that she
thought would come in handy at the San Francisco conference and was sent thither and yon in
search of it. We followed a series of instructions and drove all over Las Vegas that Saturday night
until we gave up looking and found, by chance, a fabulous Vietnamese Restaurant. Luck of the
draw.
I thought I might find America, there, on Las Vegas Boulevard late at night while walking with
Bernie under a full moon through a glittering world of copies—Paris, Rome, Luxor, Monte
Carlo, and New York City—but it was more false than counterfeit, brash rather than burlesque, a
locus of manufactured destiny.
Las Vegas (Nevada) to Fresno (California) on the Sunday was a tiring, high speed run, and
uneventful except for a weird parting of the ways with Hamilton. I’d downed a large dose of
psyllium and had to use a Restroom just before the Los Angeles fork. We were on the road early,
the moon still high, when the Detective Sergeant said he must be leaving, that though Dempster
had been to a party in San Francisco, there was nowhere else the American could be now but
Hollywood. He had not come all the way across the country only to abandon the chase when he
had the quarry pinned down. There when I went into the cubicle, Hamilton was gone when I came
back. I stepped on the gas, fearful that the evacuation would herald the return of the voices.
The voucher system saw us in a good quality San Francisco motel opposite a Church on the
corner of Broadway and Van Ness by lunchtime Monday. We walked up hill and down dale to
Chinatown, along the wharf, and back, a six mile trek according to Meryn’s pedometer. San
Francisco residents seemed to be more law abiding than other Americans we’d encountered;
pedestrians, for instance, waited at traffic lights until the walk sign or green light was showing. It
may have been a case of self-preservation but the cars were no more out of control, there, than
elsewhere so perhaps, having come to the edge of the continent, the American could finally
appreciate the value of regulation?
Urban America had brought me back to life. Woody Allen’s my kind of guy: for all its beauty and
the awe it inspires, the geologic magnificence of painted desert wilderness wouldn’t move me out
of the metropolis any more than it has the parrots of Telegraph Hill. The cycle of life and death
in that colony of half wild creatures documented by Mark Bittner had brought Karin to tears in
Elwood City, Pennsylvania, and moved Bernie’s daughter’s boyfriend back home. So we were
pleased to see the brilliant birds in the trees below the tower up there on that Hill.
I went to a Van Ness Beauty Salon where a Chinese American woman cut my hair using a comb
and electric razor to sever each individual strand; the pleasure was all mine; I wondered how she
could afford to pay the rent. The local beggar who asked Bernie for forty dollars took a more
direct route to the ongoing problem and was not put off when the mark said he didn’t carry cash:
the neatly attired upmarket panhandler set about escorting Bernie to the ATM machine. Attuned,
then, to this form of urban enterprise, Bernie paid closer attention to street conversation over in
Haight-Ashbury: “Do you want to hear a joke for a quarter?” one panhandler asked a passer-by
while another portrayed himself as a sinner in need of a financial leg-up to redemption saying
“I’m gay—can you help me get resurrected?” Whether or not the comic got his twenty-five cents,
I can’t be certain, but the beggar who took the religious route reaped a spiritual harvest of shrewd
honesty, being informed that “You’ve hit me at a bad time.”
The hairdresser and panhandlers each had different approaches to making ends meet but in a
coffee shop the conversation concerned a get-rich-quick scenario. Apart from the woman behind
the counter, there were only old men, lost souls for the most part, and a fellow in his mid-60s
held court on how to win the lottery.
A Chinese American listened intently as the self-styled expert talked about how the recent winner
of $US36 million, a 52-year-old with three children and quite inexperienced in these matters, had
made the cardinal error of admitting to the win on national television. This being a federal
lottery, it was not necessary, said the expert, to straight away declare that one has the winning
numbers; the winner could wait for up to a year before coming forward. A winner of the
California state lottery, by way of contrast, had to declare his hand within six months.
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After waxing at length about the numerous pitfalls for the uninitiated, the expert took the
Chinese American into his confidence and explained that he had studied the patterns of winning
numbers for a whole day prior to submitting his pick; had he jumped this way instead of that he
might be that lucky fellow now, he confided, and hoped that if it had been him that he would not
have betrayed his excitement, would have stayed calm and said nothing, behaved just as if he
were not now fabulously wealthy. As it was, he had won ten dollars.
Were he to win the lottery, the Chinese American confessed, he would get married. “Oh no!” said
the expert, calling out to the waitress to come and clean up the mess he’d made of the table,
“that’s a common fatal error ventured into by unmarried lottery winners.” Women one might
have proposed to even thirty years ago could turn up and say they’d thought it over and would
marry him. Not on your life!
Bernie and Meryn went to a Vivienne Westwood exhibition at the De Young Museum while I
wandered through Golden Gate Park, anxious, wondering whether the voices would be back.
Afterwards, we drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and arrived unannounced at what turned
out to be the entrance to San Quentin prison.
Meryn and I attended the opening address at the academic conference, a paper delivered by a
woman to whom everyone else had deferred in the wishy-washy post-modern seminar at JohnHopkins University we’d attended months earlier, during the Centreville doll’s house phase. I was
surprised at how much more sense she made there, in San Francisco, when telling the story of
the Jesuits in China from the sixteenth century. That opening address augured well for a good
conference, as did the celebratory meal for scholars and their partners at a Chinese Restaurant a
mile or so from the University Institute.
A young woman at our table was an American who taught at a Sydney university. Like the
businesswoman I had sat next to on the flight from Chicago to D.C., she was in no doubt about
the fact that our two cultures are worlds apart.i The whole event brought home to me the
extraordinary effort the American woman takes to juggle home, family, and academic career.
These people, Nita from Pennsylvania among them, are what the world needs—and Meryn
needs, too, for they, like, Leo, recognise the significance of her published research.
Meryn was at the symposium when Bernie left for Australia on the Friday. He gave me a ‘Jesus is
Coming … so look busy’ T-shirt which came in handy for padding in one of the many packages
of books Meryn and I M-bagged the following month. We left San Francisco the next morning,
Saturday March 10th, to return the Caliber to Memphis, Tennessee, within the maximum 28-day
rental period and collect another to be in Boston, Massachusetts, for Meryn’s follow-up
conference on March 22nd. So it would be necessary to stay on Interstate 40 from Barstow.
That was the plan but it didn’t work out: we left the highway in Arizona to take a long and
winding section of Historic Route-66 then left it again with a storm on the horizon to travel
south along Route 84 and stay a while at Billy the Kid’s gravesite near Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
I thought about Pat Garrett’s pursuit of Billy. Well over forty movies had been made about the
famous outlaw. I had seen Dirty Little Billy instead of attending a university tutorial on the
microeconomic theory of marginal utility, and Pekinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid at a drive-in
the night Malcolm Fraser defeated Gough Whitlam in the election Australia should never have
had. I thought about Hollywood, and of Geoffrey Hamilton on Dempter’s trail.
Heavy rain on Route 60 reduced visibility to the point where we had to pull over. Cattle—
descendants, no doubt, of those which had featured in the lives of Chisum, Bonney, Garrett, et
al—had been mustered at some rail junction. We’d grown accustomed to lying in a motel at night
and listening to the haunting sound of locomotives hauling railroad freight across the country. I
can’t remember whether we heard any trains that night in Amarillo, Texas, but can be sure that
the straight-talking Bill Maher discussed the suicide of a 49-year-old fellow comedian with
CNN’s decrepit host of Larry King Live.
Maher pointed out that the American is a sucker for the confidence game, that he’s sold on the
story that show business success is the inevitable result of following a dream when in fact the
odds are stacked against him. Nine times out of ten he loses on the deal but buys into the fantasy
because it’s in his blood to trade. He sold trinkets in the taverns of the town, slaves down the
river, bolts of fabric from the factory floor, and had jokers up his sleeve on the steamboat. He is
i
See above Chapter 13 ‘Burlesque’.
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an actor who hides behind a mask of confidence. Having gone as far west as he could, he came
to rest after the long journey of carving out an empire.
We can imagine him wanting to take off his hat and coat, unbuckle his belt, then sit down and
relax. But that would be to misunderstand this extraordinary individual—and his destination. It is
his manifest destiny to enter the two-dimensional mirror world and live out the American
Dream. There he is in Hollywood. And he takes his hat off—takes it off to all those Americans
who have died to their old selves and been reborn as a fictitious creation. Men like Marion
Morrison who no-one’s ever heard of being transformed into John Wayne, counterfeit Wild West
cowboy. He takes his hat off, dons the mask, and is free.
Appearance is everything, the world of the copy sacrosanct. He had entered that counterfeit
reality more or less immediately upon stepping off the boat on the eastern seaboard in the
seventeenth century so H L Mencken might as well have been talking to a fence post when trying
to explain that a Broadway or Hollywood production “is not life in miniature, but life
enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated. Its emotions are ten times as idiotic as those of
real men … its people are grotesque burlesques.”46 The American’s manifest destiny, then, was to
carve out a burlesque empire.
A heavy blanket of fog on the Texas panhandle transformed into a series of crystal curtains by
the rising sun gave us enough of a glimpse of Interstate 40 to encourage us to keep going, the
Caliber’s flashing orange hazard lights increasing the safety margin by causing the maniacs who
drove as if visibility was normal to give it a wide berth. A massive crucifix floating in the thick
mist reminded one that he might yet save his mortal soul and the toll road from Oklahoma City
to Tulsa—Meryn had heard about that city’s architecture—suggested that the end might be nigh:
its dangerous left exits for gasoline, rest stops without restrooms, and unattended toll booths
which required correct change in coins all added up to a cost cutting design which paid little heed
to anything but the profit motive.
Tulsa’s art deco buildings told a different story of what things are like when money and power
does good. Oil revenues from the 1920s and 1930s made Tulsa the marvel that it is and I guess
that another strain of American Puritanism was responsible for ensuring that in Oklahoma even
the urinals are private cubicles.
Back on Interstate 40, we spent the night at Fort Smith, Arkansas, arrived in Memphis on the
Wednesday and collected our jackets from the La Quinta motel just off the Beltway at exit 15A.
We’d left them behind at the Huntsville, Texas, La Quinta weeks earlier and they’d been
forwarded. Bernie hadn’t been so fortunate with the electronics left at De Queen, Arkansas, and
we weren’t counting on such first rate service—though we might have, since it’s typically
American. The Econolodge at Exit 22, on Interstate 65, Pulaski, Tennessee, too, came up trumps
when I left my laptop power pack there, three weeks later.
Meryn mapped out the relevant Memphis bus route (#69 with a collection of Edmund Wilson
essays) for returning the car and collecting the next rental vehicle—another Caliber—and we left
town for Kentucky on St Patrick’s Day, a Saturday. I had wanted to visit Nashville’s Grand Ol’
Opry where Uncle Dave Macon had played in the 1920s and Hank Williams in the 1950s but had
to be content with seeing the skyline as we passed on by and crossed into Kentucky. After
visiting the site near Hodgenville (from Hodge’s Mill) where Abraham Lincoln was born among
the corn husks and bear skins of a log cabin on February 12th 1809, we drove on through the
valley and stayed the night in Bardstown. Stephen Foster wrote ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ there
while visiting Southern kin at Federal Hill plantation in 1852. Or so they say.
There was something about Bardstown that we liked but the Caliber had to make tracks in case
the weather turned and pressed on northeast, therefore, past Kentucky’s bluegrass properties
sporting horse fence facades to be parked out front of Elk Lodge, a hunter’s shack in Sutton,
West Virgini, by dusk on the Sunday. According to a TV programme we saw up there in the
mountains, Christian preachers had been among the first to present their wares when the small
screen reached Appalachia in the early 1950s. The simple format—local folk praying that so-andso, having started again, would stop drinking—had made it all very neighbourly and appealing.
We drove through snow all day Monday to Frackville, Pennsylvania, where the streets were piled
high with the stuff from a recent storm. The evening news carried the story that a Pennsylvania
mine had been ‘idled.’ In the morning, a severe weather report warned of more snow on the way,
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and freezing rain, but we were in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, that night and booked into a motel
at Danvers, north of Boston on the equinox, a Wednesday.
Day had caught up with night and Trickster had caught up with us, there, in the home of the
confidence game. We had taken management’s claim that their motel was twelve miles from
downtown Boston at face value and booked the room for four nights. It was twice that distance,
and the daily commute to and from Boston was more dangerous than death row in Birmingham,
Alabama—freeway exits located immediately after the entry points forcing vehicles to cross paths
at breakneck speed in a frenzied zipper motion. Highway signs added insult to injury by flashing
an electronic message that it’s a sin to drive aggressively, to show respect for fellow road users.
Our online bank statement revealed that we’d been charged twice for the Frackville motel. Meryn
and I could do something about the situation, at least, but the American isn’t bothered, safe in
the knowledge that Christian civilisation has bestowed the world’s highest standard of living
upon him. He’s the plaything of medieval Mercurius and indigenous Trickster.
The adjustable rate mortgage chickens had just started coming home to roost and on March 22nd
CNN’s Paula Zahn was citing an instance from Georgia of the type of jiggery pokery which is
nowadays infamous as the sub-prime scandal that exposed the fact that capitalism had reverted to
type once the Berlin Wall was down. Zahn revealed that low-income-earning black women in
their sixties had been sold a loan pup and went on to talk about the record number of foreclosed
homes on the American market. That record was subsequently regularly broken to the point
where even President George W Bush had paid attention to the fact that it might have had
implications for the wider economy. He scolded the victims, the marks, for purchasing wooden
nutmeg from white-collar New York financiers, Connecticut Yankees, and real estate Honeys.
Mercurius the trickster thrives in Puritan society and Massachusetts is more straight-laced than
most. Henry L Mencken, editor of Alfred A Knopf’s monthly, The American Mercury, defined
Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. Always on the look out
for an opportunity to draw religious fundamentalists into the open for ridicule, he knew he was
onto something when publishing Herbert Asbury’s essay about ‘Hatrack’ in the April 1926 issue
of the Mercury. Hatrack was a prostitute who took her Protestant tricks to the Catholic cemetery
and Catholics to the Masonic burial ground. Mencken wanted to flush out the movers and
shakers of Massachusetts Puritanism and was therefore delighted when Boston banned that
edition of the magazine.
Nine months earlier, he had exposed hillbilly ignorance concerning Creationism and the scientific
theory of evolution in his dispatches from the Scopes Monkey trial in rural Tennessee. The
yokels had been stupid but sincere. The Harvard professors who presided over New England
religious bigotry, though, were powerful and dangerous according to Mencken so he went to
Massachusetts and sold a banned copy of the Mercury on Boston Common. He won the battle in
court but lost the war to win over the educated public when big city newspaper editors up North
sided with the Puritans in denouncing Mencken as a vulgar peddler of smut for the cynical
purpose of increasing the circulation of the Mercury.
Downtown, in Cambridge, Meryn made enquiries about access to research documents while I
combed the second hand section of the book store across the street. Boston’s beggars were more
overtly political than San Francisco’s had been a fortnight earlier. A black woman was yelling at
people that they needed to cough up their coins to her cup NOW! A well-dressed man explained
to anyone who’d listen that he had all of the various political bases covered so they could not use
them to avoid handing over the money owed him. The tall, handsome black man accosting
people outside the Au Pain in Massachusetts Avenue worked hard for whatever money he made:
“Oh, young man, I see you’re … ” Ignored, he turned on his heel and addressed another “Oh
Good morning kind Sir … .” The gentleman purchased the homeless newspaper. “Ah, here’s a
young lady who … ”
Meryn met me at the car and contrasted the attitude of the co-operative librarians at Yale with
the diffident, snotty nosed Harvard University Library guardians she’d just encountered. One
needs an inflatable Leo to blow up at those types. They probably mistook her accent as British.
Up near the Charles River, a man with no legs was propped up in prime panhandle real estate
that was his, presumably, by dint of major disability? What price disfiguration? Ronald Reagan
went all the way to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to rid America of the New Deal and those who
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might need its economic security provisions most gave him two terms to tilt the balance back in
favour of the very tiny minority who live it up at everyone else’s expense.
Meryn’s conference finished at the Huntington Street hotel by noon Sunday so we went in search
of her subject’s Framingham house again—and found it. We stayed the night at Groton,
Connecticut, where Gerald, from Louisiana, struck up a conversation; a student of the American
Presidency, Lincoln was his favourite because of the deft way the rail splitter had managed a
most difficult crisis.
From Galloway, New Jersey, we drove to the foreshore at Atlantic City and took in the
boardwalk nostalgia and casino blight. Staff at the Post Office a hundred yards from our motel as
the crow flies but inaccessible except via a three mile car trip knew nothing about sending books
in an ‘M bag’ so we spent the day motoring back and forth doing their work for them. It’s
entirely pot luck as to whether the person who ‘serves’ on the counter at an American Post
Office knows anything at all about the job and so it comes as no surprise that the American uses
UPS or Fed-Ex for freight. Perhaps the Harpers Ferry management team responsible for the first
rate National Parks Service could be seconded to straighten out the United States Postal Service?
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Chapter 23 Confidence Game
Union General Joseph Hooker crossed the Rappahannock and Rapidan Rivers in late April 1863
in order to straighten out Robert E. Lee. Hooker’s Army of the Potomac which assembled near
Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, was twice the size of Lee’s but the Confederate General—
consummate master of long odds and on home ground—won the ensuing Battle of
Chancellorsville on May 6th—the battle in which Stonewall Jackson was wounded by friendly fire
and taken by ambulance to Guiney Station.i Jackson told those with him on that last ride that the
Confederates had been victorious because Union General Hooker had ruined a sound battle plan
by sending away his cavalry. But for that stroke of luck, said Jackson, he could not have
succeeded in the critical attack on the Union flank.47
Trickster had convinced Lee that his grasp of the confidence game was complete, that were the
rebels to cross the Potomac a second time they would succeed and put the failure of Sharpsburg
(Antietam) behind them. An editorial in Chicago’s Tribune concurred, suggesting that the Army of
the Potomac was “less confident of itself … and less an honour to the country … ” Hooker
complained to President Lincoln that he had “not enjoyed the confidence” of the general-inchief, Halleck. He was being managed, forced to move his forces in such strict accordance with
directives from above, that those movements were easily anticipated by Robert E Lee.
Hooker had been correct in his assessment. The duplicitous Halleck had him replaced with
George Meade. Hooker bade his men support Meade as one “who has nobly earned the
confidence and esteem of this army.”48 Lee had planned to launch an all out attack as the Union
forces came up through Frederick, Maryland, into Pennsylvania, and was caught on the hop
when General Meade immediately struck out for York in order to hold the line at the
Susquehanna River. The confidence needle flipped 180° for any battle to be fought in the North:
the blue clad men of Meade’s army entertained no thought of defeat on their home ground.
Heading west from New Jersey we made a surprise courtesy call on Laura in Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania, but there was no-one home so we crossed the Susquehanna River and carried on
through York along Route 30 toward Gettysburg, the hub on which a dozen roads converge like
spokes in a wagon wheel. When we’d been there the previous August all we saw was crass
commercialism under a blazing sun but this time around we knew what to look for and were
privileged to be taught about that most unnerving American Civil War confrontation, the Battle
of Gettysburg, by instructors who used the wonderful ‘Electric Map’ at the soon to be
superseded National Parks Military Centre to make sense of the mayhem that occurred around
town on the first three days of July 1863. Following the electric demonstration, we toured the
battlefield in the car.
At first, Robert E Lee had been nervous, less sure of himself at the prospect of encountering the
enemy on the northern side of the Mason-Dixon. Moreover, he was blind and deaf, as it were,
because Confederate General Jeb Stuarthad gone off somewhere with the cavalry and not made
contact. Lee’s supply lines were paper thin and Richmond (the Confederate capital) was
vulnerable. And though he had no need to worry on that score—because Union General
Hooker’s proposal to attack Richmond had been over-ruled from on high—the Confederate
military commander remained in the dark. He did not know that Hooker was north of the
Potomac, that the Union Army stood between him and his cavalry.
For lack of news from any other source, Lee turned to a ‘scout’ from Mississippi whom
Confederate General Longstreet had sent to Washington to hang around in bars and pick up
what he could. “I have no confidence in any scout,” Lee had said but that’s all there was. In the
light of what he heard—that the Federals were on the same side of the Potomac as his own and
under the command, now, of Meade—the Confederate military leader concentrated his forces to
move east and strike at Baltimore and Washington. Meade, meanwhile, anxious to spare his men
energy sapping marches in the summer sun, prepared to take up a defensive position at Pipe
Creek and stand in the way of the advancing rebels. Before he could do so, though, and before
Lee had all his men to hand the two armies ran into one another at Gettysburg on July 1st 1863.
i
See above, Chapter 10 ‘A Pair of Knaves’.
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Lee was reluctant to engage the enemy in the first instance but the scenes unfolding in his field
glasses took on the aspect of a microcosmic Second Manassas and created a sense of déjà vu. His
confidence restored, he decided that this was the battle he’d come to Pennsylvania to fight. When
Confederate General Peter Longstreet arrived and looked upon the same terrain he, too,
concluded that it was their lucky break for the battle to have been joined at that place: the rebels
could take up defensive positions and wait for the Federal force to attack; the enemy would have
to come at the Confederates in order to save Washington, Longstreet reasoned, and the rebels
would be in the better position to destroy them. Gettysburg, by sheer good luck, was the ideal
location for Lee to achieve his goal in invading the North. Lee, though, full of confidence,
imagined it had all been down to good management and decided instead to attack while he had
the Union on the run. He’d better do so straight away if at all, Longstreet argued, because the
Federal bluecoats were massing in number. Lee, unaware that Trickster had switched sides since
Chancellorsville, waited for reinforcements.
Longstreet had spoken truly. Union General Hancock had arrived and had the bluecoats take up
commanding positions on the high ground around Gettysburg. Hancock inspired confidence in
his men and seized the initiative which Longstreet had suggested Lee take. Lee’s lack of match
practice exposed a rashness in his nature to the commanders upon whose leadership he would be
relying when the sun came up on July 2nd. They lacked confidence in his judgement. To make
matters worse, Lee directed Captain Johnston to guide Longstreet’s First Corps into position. But
Johnston did not know the terrain and so a three-mile march extended to six miles only to have
the troops arrive back at their starting point two hours after they’d set off. Johnston said later
that he was distraught that Lee should have put his confidence in a man who had no idea what
the job of guide had entailed.
When darkness fell at the end of the second day of fighting, Lee concluded that the battle plan
had been sound but the commanders too uncoordinated; he had complete confidence that his
men would do what was needed to win if only they were well lead. Meanwhile, Lee himself failed
to inform his commanders, the Confederate Generals, of what he had in mind for the morrow.
Peter Longstreet could not believe it when Lee revealed that he would continue to attack the
Federals at their strongest point, and said as much. But Lee, taken in by Trickster, was stubbornly
confident of his daring. At the critical moment when Longstreet was called upon by Pickett to
give the order for his men to charge into the valley of death Longstreet “could not speak, for fear
of betraying my want of confidence.”49 Lee was off his game, Longstreet knew, but there was
nothing for it but to await the inevitable disaster.
Robert E Lee accepted full responsibility for the debacle but Lieutenant Colonel Fremantle of
Her British Majesty’s Coldstream Guards, visiting, heard a Confederate cannoneer say of their
commander “We’ve lost no confidence in the old man. … Uncle Robert will get us into
Washington yet.”50 The infantrymen who’d obeyed orders to charge into hell fire and managed to
come back in one piece were less sanguine and stampeded from Seminary Ridge. In his official
report to President Jefferson Davis, General Lee admitted that he’d expected too much of the
soldiers “but my admiration of their noble qualities and confidence in their ability to cope
successfully with the enemy has suffered no abatement … .”51
Meade had been in command for six days, the last three of them in that most momentous
battle—there had been 50,000 casualties—of the war; he had taken a defensive stance and won.
Those around him urged Meade to go on the offensive and win the war but he refused, with
good reason according to others, on the grounds that it would have been rash. The Confederates
had escaped from McClellan after Antietam and Lincoln was adamant that Meade follow-up the
victory at Gettysburg and destroy the rebel army before it reached the Potomac. So the President
was beside himself when Lee forded that river and slipped into the Shenandoah Valley safe and
out of reach.
Meryn and I went after him on the last day of March 2007, a Saturday. Subtle colours showed up
those spots where swelling buds were springing up on what had been stark winter sticks as we
sped toward the southwest corner of the state of Virginia and into neighbouring Kentucky. The
Confederates controlled that Valley, the corridor between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny
Mountains, in the early 1860s. A hundred years before that a long line of hunter-cum-land
speculators had crossed the Potomac on Robert Harper’s ferry and beat a path down that
Shenandoah thruway to the Cumberland Gap.
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Named after the Duke of Cumberland in 1750 by a 35-year-old Virginia land speculator, Thomas
Walker, the gap was an indigenous American pathway through the Alleghenies to the vast acreage
beyond. Walker and his business partner, Peter Jefferson, had teamed up to obtain land grants;
following in their wake, hoards of white men flowed through the gap and laid claim to tracts of
Indian hardwood forest and blue grass prairies.i Colonial America’s frontier was creeping
inexorably west, regardless of any agreements and treaties the British Government might have
made with the Shawnee and other Indian nations.
Thomas Walker became Thomas Jefferson’s legal guardian after the death of Peter Jefferson, Thomas’ father, in 1757;
Walker was related to Meriwether Lewis by marriage. President Thomas Jefferson, anxious to expand white settlement
in the newly purchased territory of the Louisiana Purchase (1803) had Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out on
the expedition to traverse the continent to the Pacific Ocean from 1804; upon their return in 1806, Lewis and Clark
entered Virginia from Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap.
i
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Chapter 24 Real Copy
Thousands of young men in the newly formed United States of America voted with their feet and
crossed the Appalachians to the Promised Land. Those from the South left behind an ailing
plantation economy. Tobacco yields had fallen because the land was over-cultivated and planters
had sold their slaves for lack of available work. Virginia was in such a parlous state that Thomas
Jefferson thought the institution of slavery would simply wither on the vine. But two
inventions—Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (1794) and Jean Étienne Boré’s process for granulating
sugar (1795)—changed everything and within the decade cotton was being planted wherever it
would grow and sugar cane stretched across the lowlands.
The South stretched too, extending, now, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River.
There was a sharp increase in demand for slave-labour and for suitable transport to get the
abundant harvests to market. Had it not been for the opening up of the Cumberland Gap, then,
American slavery may never have shifted from being a dying to the peculiar institution responsible
for dividing the nation to the point of civil war.
A perceived economic benefit triggered the American’s fantasy genius so that by the midnineteenth century grubby land grabbing had become manifest destiny and refashioned the real
Daniel Boone—a failed land speculator whose gang of workmen cut a rudimentary trail
(Wilderness Road) through the Cumberland Gap in 1775—into its mythical hero as the
exaggerated copy, the legendary backwoodsman. The frontier represents the American’s escape
to freedom and redemption; it transforms him into something new, presents him with
opportunity, the chance to overcome his limitations. The individual will overcome whatever
adversity befalls him just so long as he is prepared to slough off the old skin. To ‘go West’ was to
do what Daniel Boone had done, to leave the old world behind and cross over. (Never mind the
fact that the real man who had grabbed all the land he from the Indians soon lost it to the
ubiquitous swindlers.)
The Daniel Boone legend set the terms of the mythology that would for Americans describe and
explain the process of westward expansion for the next century. The process always involves a
kind of exile from civilisation, a kind of regression to the world of the savage but from that
regression comes a kind of purification, a new contact with nature, a regeneration of the spirit, a
regeneration of earthly fortunes as well and ultimately the man who has gone to the wilderness
becomes an agent for the further advance of civilisation against the wilderness.52
Trickster enjoyed himself at our expense on April 1st by guiding us to a horrible diner on Route
58 Alternate that doubled as a sewing machine repair outlet. Pins and needles. I know that was
the date because the well-laid scheme to trick Meryn while it was still morning—before she was
fully awake—went awry when the Public Radio presenter greeted the Sunday Puzzle audience
with “Happy April Fools’ Day.” How would he like it if someone posted online pre-programme
solutions to the problems he poses on air?
The Caliber traversed the Gap—a tunnel nowadays—late that afternoon and we spent the night
in Middlesboro. There wasn’t much on TV so we watched a Sixty Minutes expose on how the
pharmaceutical dirty tricks lobby had engineered the legislation that Republicans Billy Tozan and
Tony Scully pushed through the pre-November 2006 Congress. According to the report, Tozan
was on a $US2million retainer from the drug companies and fifteen staffers who had worked on
the bill subsequently went to work for drug companies. Happy April Fools’ Day.
Back in Tennessee first thing Monday, we paid for three nights in a cheap (because of the
voucher) but well-appointed motel in Asbury Drive, Cleveland. Tennessee had been the last state
to secede from the Union and side with the Confederates. That was in June 1861. Eastern
Tennessee had remained pro-Union and President Lincoln, wanting the Appalachian Mountain
folk’s continuing support, was solicitous of their welfare. And, as Ulysses Grant’s memoirs make
clear, federal control of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers was essential if the Union was to
succeed. Accordingly, Tennessee became the site of more Civil War battles than any other state
except Virginia. Grant’s victory over Confederate General Bragg at Chattanooga prepared the
way for Union General Sherman’s advance on Atlanta and the march through Georgia in 1864.
We drove to wonderful Chattanooga on the first Tuesday of April 2007 and examined the scene
of Grant’s November 1863 victory.
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On May 4th 1925 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) placed an advertisement in a
Chattanooga newspaper seeking a Tennessee teacher to break the law of that state by explaining
the theory of evolution to school students. It had been illegal to do so for six weeks. The leading
lights of Dayton thought they saw a sound business opportunity so one of their number
approached John Scopes, the local science teacher, and persuaded him to heed the ACLU’s call.
They expected the publicity surrounding any resulting trial to put the Appalachian Tennessee
town on the map. Scopes was indicted.
When Henry Louis Mencken got wind of the fact he convinced the famous attorney, Clarence
Darrow, to defend Scopes and further the cause of reasoned enlightenment—the raison d’être of
the Mercury—in America.i William Jennings Bryan, fundamentalist Christian, three-time Democrat
presidential candidate and champion of the common man, was to prosecute the case. Mencken
fully expected that Scopes would be found guilty and it would lead inexorably to religious
fundamentalist lunacy being exposed across the nation. He failed to appreciate just how wedded
the American is to the pre-scientific medieval worldview.
On April 4th 2007 Meryn and I drove to Dayton, the town Mencken had called ‘monkeytown’
after arriving on the train from Baltimore in July 1925. He found, as we did in 2007, a pleasant
tree-lined rural centre with the Court House Square in the centre of town, the typical Dixie
pattern. We visited the drug store location where those in the know had hung out in 1925 and we
ate pot roast with butter beans and deep fried squash (zucchini) at the quality diner where today’s
townsfolk meet up with one another. Mencken thought the locals he spoke to were easy-going
and courteous; we had the same experience.
On the day we were there, the people gathered in the upstairs courtroom where Scopes was tried
were waiting for the judge to hand out justice to men and women accused of being intoxicated in
public, driving without a licence, or some such misdemeanour. Down in the basement, the
museum exhibited a comprehensive array of monkey trial paraphernalia. Dayton, for Meryn and
me, was the ant’s pants of being back down South. For Mencken, it had provided an opportunity
to strike a blow for modernity. And just in case he might have begun to imagine that the friendly,
benign smiles suggested an openness to well presented evidence and clarity of thought he went
along to an evangelical camp meeting in the mountains and saw for himself how primitive is the
practice of orgiastic religion. There was nothing new, there; burlesque had been part and parcel
of American religion since the First Great Awakening of the 1730s.
Clarence Darrow was not permitted to call scientists to the stand but he made a goose of Bryan
by calling the old fraudster to testify as an expert on the bible. Scopes was found guilty (as
everyone knew he must be with the man on the bench subject to the will of the majority who
would cast their ballots at the next election) but the trial served a purpose in highlighting just
how much in thrall the American is to religion. Mercurius the trickster must have known he was
on a good thing when he had left seventeenth-century Europe and its scientific revolution for the
virgin New World.
Rather than open up debate on the merits of the scientific method and the backwardness of the
medieval outlook, the Scopes Trial exacerbated the American’s tendency to substitute the real
thing with burlesque. Publishers subsequently steered clear of any involvement in expensive
courtroom dramas by editing out explanations of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural
selection from their textbooks. The result was that two generations of school children were
deprived of that fundamental grounding in scientific thought. Not until after Russia’s Sputnik
broadcast the famous “Wake up!” call did evolution creep back into the American classroom in
the 1960s.
Christian evangelists then demanded equal time to teach medieval superstition and the whole
thing came to a head when the Supreme Court ruled that teaching the Book of Genesis in public
school science lessons contravened the Constitutional guarantee of a separation between church
and state. The would-be-if-they-could-be-honest Christians turned to medieval Mercurius, pagan
Trickster, in order to dodge the Supreme Court decision: they had creationism masquerade as the
newly discovered scientific theory of ‘intelligent design’ and stacked small town school boards in
order to be able to proselytise.
i
See above, Chapter 22 ‘Alias the Outlaw’.
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President George W Bush supported the teaching of the re-labelled medieval account as if it were
a scientific theory. Pennsylvania’s rightwing senator, Rick Santorum, praised the Dover school
board for their 2004 directive that teachers give equal weight to the so-called new scientific
theory.
There was no love lost between the creationists and concerned parents in Dover, Pennsylvania.
Tammy Kitzmiller took the troglodytes on and the case of Kitzmiller versus Dover Area School
District opened in the Pennsylvania capital federal court in September 2005. Meryn and I had
been in the capital for the Harrisburg Agricultural Fair the day that Laura’s car broke down on
the backroads of Lancaster and would have made a pilgrimage to the court had we been aware
that it was a modern monkey trial landmark.
Laura’s law student daughter, Ellie, had told us in December 2006 (six weeks after Senator
Santorum lost his seat in the mid-term elections) that her father, Greg, had played a bit part in
arguing the case for the Dover defence—the creationists. The creationists had been quietly
confident of the outcome because Rick Santorum had recommended the judge who would try
the case to George Bush and the President had appointed the straight-laced jurist, John Jones III,
to the position.
Jones let the team down, though, by deviating from the Scopes model and allowing scientific
evidence to be put before the court. Game over. The prosecution produced a modern fossil—
irrefutable evidence that intelligent design is creationism in fancy dress. The philosopher Barbara
Forrest had tirelessly tracked the developmental stages of the intelligent design textbook and
discovered where clumsy global substitution had produced early versions of the theory with
names like cintelligent designism. Creationism might readily fool the American by donning the mask
of ‘intelligent design’ but the eyes of the world were on Judge Jones’ courtroom and the monkey
theory came up trumps. The battle was over but the war goes on. Evangelical Christians are still
infiltrating school boards in the American county seat system of government.
We headed out on the Thursday and had bacon, eggs, and hash browns at Bill’s Café on Route 64.
Hardly anyone was smoking when we walked in but next to no-one wasn’t once we’d put in our
order. We were in the America we love. All the customers were male, one of them black, most
over 50, and some played cards out back of the store. The cooks and counter staff were all
women, one about 20, and the others (into their 40s and 50s) had long since given up on beauty
parlour gloss.
The women called a spade a ‘spade’ and mixed it with the rough, gruff clientele. The meal they
served was delicious, the coffee just right, and the road to Memphis took us to Pulaski—home of
the turkey shoot according to the signs—where we stayed in the Econolodge. A good choice
because, as I say, I left my laptop power-pack in the room and the manager parcelled it up and
posted it to me in North Carolina.i Having already figured out that one can go most anywhere in
the United States of America just so long as he’s not carrying a bomb, we turned up in the town
square for the Pulaski Court General Session due to commence at 1 pm and learned yet again
that not much is as it seems in that extraordinary nation.
A troupe of school girls—on Spring break, obviously—was waiting outside the courtroom with
their teacher. We went in to sit down and the girls followed. Four men and a woman, each in
orange (hunter’s blaze) jumpsuits and shackled with heavy chains around their waists and hands,
shuffled in on leg irons. The judge—a dead ringer for Western Australia’s Geoff Gallop—
entered right on cue and everyone except Meryn and me took the pledge of allegiance with hands
on hearts. All very solemn and religious. But only for the moment because there was an
altogether relaxed down-home atmosphere in every other respect. Even the chains and leg irons
were more for show than substance. An afternoon of theatre.
The judge said he’d give the defence attorneys half an hour to meet with their prospective
clients—for the first time in all but one or two cases. The parade of lawyers was a performance in
itself: they all wore suits but had little else in common. The tallest among them leaned on the sill
and stared out the window; the shortest, buttoned braces and hands where his fob pocket should
be, walked with splayed feet, a copy of Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp. The smooth-haired
prosecutor left by this door and returned by that in a seemingly endless round; his colleague
looked like she’d just got back from a party with her long black dress and high boots.
i
See above, Chapter 22 ‘Alias the Outlaw’.
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All of the courtroom officials chewed gum. The policeman who leaned in the doorway had an
exotic moustache and a little black book. He was forever driving out an invisible insect which
had somehow infiltrated the side of his face through the left nostril, then another which had got
in through the right, and then both at once; he talked to the woman who sat next to me. She was
shocked, and repeated, presumably, what she’d heard: “Three years.” The black man in the
jumpsuit looked straight at her and she said it again—“Three years?”—as if doing so would make
it all make sense.
Then Geoff Gallop came back and the various accused people took their turn before him. Not
only were the well dressed men and women in court not there in support of the jumpsuit felons,
but neither were the apparent mother-father-and-son combinations any such thing, nor the
spouses husband-and-wife pairs. All bar a few were having their day in court after having been
charged with fighting and scratching, public intoxication, driving without a licence, driving
without a seat belt ($US10.00 fine), and, in the case of the shackled woman, driving without a
seatbelt and not restraining children with a seatbelt. No-one was on a school excursion.
A young girl sitting two doors down from me told Meryn that if the judge let her off this time
then she would be enrolling in a college because education was a good way to get your life back
on course. Each one spoke in polite terms saying “Yes Judge” and “No Judge.” The only
disrespect toward the judge came when he enquired of the administrative staff seated up the back
what had become of some paperwork. A woman explained that the computer had gone down
but Mr Gallop made it known that he wasn’t satisfied. Her office colleague, a tall woman who sat
immediately behind the one getting it in the neck, mimicked the judge’s outrage by way of
parodying him.
The high calibre entertainment continued all afternoon. In one instance the only other observer
(apart from we two Australians) cried out to the judge that so and so’s claim that he’d been
before the court once before was incorrect: this was his third appearance, she pointed out. Noone challenged her right to throw in that two-penneth worth. Meryn dropped her mp3 recorder
and the policeman with the tick came toward us. But he was on some other errand so no-one
paid Meryn any mind. William Faulkner walked abroad.
Those criminals in orange blaze had committed crimes no more heinous than the rest of the
people assembled there in that courtroom. The only difference was that they’d done so before
and then again during the parole period. They’d all gone and the courtroom emptied of everyone
but Meryn, me, and one other woman who had materialised. It turned out she was the mother of
the innocent looking boy in the jumpsuit. We got down to an imitation of the real TV courtroom
drama when she was called to the witness box and asked “Do you swear to tell the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
The lawyers went at it hammer and claw while the judge determined whether there was “probable
cause,” a prima facie case against the young man accused of rape. His graceful attorney put
forward something of a “grassy knoll” defence arguing that no-one in the court had been present
other than the defendant, who denied the charge. This was the wrong way round, surely?
Shouldn’t he be saying that no evidence had been led which gave the court any reason to try the
accused? But what would I know? I couldn’t tell the difference between a drunk driver and a
school girl. The defendant had been known to the arresting police officer because he’d been
picked up a couple of years earlier inside a stolen car. The judge found probable cause just before
5.20 pm. and we all went home and Meryn and I left for Memphis the next morning, Good
Friday.
Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, on Route 64 West trades on its Davy Crockett connection but we
were too early and it wasn’t up yet so we drove through the David Crockett State Park where for
five years that particular incarnation of the legendary backwoods hero—Trickster’s first attempt
at an Abraham Lincoln—had operated a mill with his wife and kids before it was destroyed by
floodwaters in 1822.
We crossed Snake Creek, unaware that 145 years earlier to the day, the first of the truly
devastating military clashes of the American Civil War, Shiloh, had begun near there on April 6th
1862 and that by the time the battle was over two days later a quarter of the 100,000 men who
had fought were either taken prisoner, wounded, or killed. It was the turning point for Ulysses
Grant:
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Up to the battle of Shiloh I … believed that the rebellion against the Government would collapse
suddenly and soon, if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies. Donelson and
Henry were such victories … The Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, from their mouths to the
head of navigation, were secured. But when Confederate armies were collected which not only
attempted to hold a line farther south, from Memphis to Chattanooga … but assumed the
offensive and made such a gallant effort to regain what had been lost … I gave up all idea of
saving the Union except by complete conquest.53
Therein lay the seed of William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea across Georgia from
November to December 1864 and my faux pas in having mentioned Ulysses Grant to Lois in
Clarksdale.i
We went looking for a Good Friday church service but America surprised us yet again when
instead of religion we found a host of trading tables. Jesus took a back seat to the Roman god of
trade, commerce, and profit on what we thought would be a solemn day of wailing and gnashing
of teeth. The diner on Route 64 in Whiteville kept up the American standard and the Easter
Sunday bus ride from Memphis, Tennessee, to Durham, North Carolina, convinced us that from
there on in we’d take the train. A beggar outside the bus station in Memphis picked up on our
accents and said he was sorry to hear of our loss. The Crocodile Hunter is almost up there with
Davy Crockett in the eyes of the American.
Inside, a young woman with a babe in arms made a beeline for Meryn. She had been dropped off
at the bus station by a male who promptly left. ‘Was that her brother?’ I wondered. The infant,
well cared for by her young mother from what we saw, was a very alert gem. They were on a 24hour ride to Wilmington, Delaware, and the mother was preparing for the journey by soliciting
help to get her luggage on board well in advance of the inevitable rush.
When it came, she moved to the back of the bus and we heard nothing more from her until we
pulled out from Nashville and the new driver asked for everyone’s attention before proceeding to
lay out a set of rules. He was on a hiding to nothing, though, because a group of young women
had crowned the Wilmington bound mother ‘Queen’ and now sat at her feet, all ears, as she
talked over the top of him.
So instead of the usual fresh-driver story about how Jesus is King we all heard the proud mother
detail each stage in the development of her extraordinarily gifted child, from the birth process all
the way to the ins-and-outs of how she’d come to tell the father that she was leaving due to his
inability to appreciate that she was not one of those women who sit at home and twirl their hair
and do whatever the man says. She was not his Mom, she explained, and he wasn’t used to
women who talked back. So what else was she to do at the tender age of 21?
At 5.15 am on Easter Monday we arrived at an impressive looking transport hub with covered
shelter for a large number of local, regional, and interstate buses in Winston-Salem, North
Carolina. The cold crept through the waiting room doors and worked its way past our silk long
johns to chill our bones. A deaf woman sat working through a bible puzzle booklet; her friend
scraped across the terrazzo floor in an excruciatingly slow and painful manner using a walking
frame that had long ago lost its rubber feet. Scrape, scrape, scrape.
People came and went, some to this bus and others to that. A dwarf complemented the
collection of those with disabilities; he no sooner vanished than the group was topped up by an
enormous half-wit fat man. When the Durham connection finally arrived, late, it was a case of
the last shall come first such that we were lucky to get on board at all, the seats having been
snapped up by those—such as a tall, white, shaven-headed youth in a Navy top—who had just
arrived. The driver said it was nothing new, that it happens every day, that Greyhound management
prefers its bus schedule to be oversubscribed wherever possible.
A community of supporters gathered round the young woman who sat on her bag next to me in
the aisle next to the coach restroom. “Ain’t nobody better think they gonna use the bathroom;
they gonna just have to hold on,” she announced. She wore a black stocking over her head in the
manner of young black guys and explained that she had some problems and had come to North
Carolina to make a new start. I cannot do justice to the woman’s superb command of the
language, the rhythm and poetry of her speech up there with anything delivered from the stage.
i
See above, Chapter 21 ‘Two Tricks’.
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The women around her were full of encouragement and a man introduced himself with “I’m 52
years old and I … .” He’d had a tough time when he was young fellow, he testified, and so felt
qualified to counsel her to control the anger she was driven by the Devil to express.
Asked why she took the Greyhound, an old wise woman replied “I don’t ride no train and I don’t
ride no airplane. I likes to be down real low.” Someone told her she should trust in the Lord and
have faith. She had as much faith as anybody, she said, “But I got common sense, too!” She went
on to say that she had seven grandsons and prayed to the Lord “so’s they won’t go in the Army
and go to Iraq.” And not one of them had so God had heard her prayer and blessed her. “And
one great-grandchild.”
The Navy queue-jumper read the Book of Joshua from his bible, and a pair of women took New
Testament lessons from one another. The 52-year-old said that Jesus loves us whoever we are but
that we should all call upon Him to keep us from behaving in accord with the wishes of the
Devil. He had more advice for the young woman whom the Lord had moved him to counsel.
She should count to ten whenever she feels she’s getting angry. “I counts to ten,” said the
woman, “and then I counts to twenty, and goes backwards but it don’t make no diff’rence, that
old Devil still gets a hold of me and makes me hit somebody.”
She had no family in Durham where she was headin’ because she was “not from these parts.”
Already on probation for her aggressive behaviour, she had had to leave her boyfriend because
he was arrested again, on drugs charges. She had come down to North Carolina and now had a
job. And so she had to get on the bus, whether or not there was a seat, because she needed to
hold on to that job. It was her lifeline to the future.
Her family had bought land but found it was infested with snakes. So they had brought in pigs
(she said ‘pigs’ not hogs) because someone told her father that animal loves to catch and eat
snakes. And the pigs cleaned up the snakes. Then they couldn’t get the pigs back to from where
they came from so the family killed them and ate them. “But I weren’t gonna eat no pig what’s
ate no snake,” she made clear.
The 52 year old told her she should take up boxing. When he was a young man he, too, had had
the Devil in him making him lash out in anger. So the Lord had him take up the pugilist art. The
young woman said that she’d tried Karate but gave up, and how she might appear to them to be
a nice young lady but they didn’t know how bad she could get when angry.
Life’s full of sorrows and troubles, the 52 year old said, and went on to cite their current
circumstances by way of illustration. We’re all in this boat together, and we’re not happy to have
been treated this way by the bus company, he explained, but that’s life and we’re all looking at the
humour in the situation; we’re all tied together in this community of people who’ve been
wronged but there’s no point getting all upset when there’s nothing to be done about it for the
moment, he waxed philosophical.
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Chapter 25 Confidence Trickster
Meryn had organised another stay at Betty and Leo’s. The thought of a whole week in the lap of
luxury was a great pleasure, of course, but surely our being there would be too much of an
imposition? Betty met us at Durham’s relocated Greyhound depot and before we knew it we were
back with Oliver Wendell Holmes and the nature of evidence-based medicine. MSNBC’s
morning host, the iconoclastic Don Imus, had referred to “Nappy headed ho’s” (whores) and
thereby brought the nation’s deep-seated anxiety about race to the fore.
It seemed to me that there’d been a total over-reaction to Imus’ impolitic remark, that instead of
availing himself of the opportunity presented by the furore to engage in dialogue about race the
American had donned the mask. Far from covering up his deep discomfort at having to face the
history of what’s been done to the African American, though, the shrill sentiment and insincere
outrage served instead to highlight the fact.
Our Amtrak tickets for the return to Connecticut arrived, the experience a reminder of how
disorganised American business can be: we had to pay the express delivery rate of $US12.00 for
the tickets because there needs be 11 days between purchase and departure. Could we not collect
them from the station or an agency? No. They would be delivered to the home address and we
must be there to sign for them. Hmm, okay, so when will that be? They couldn’t say. So just sit
around and don’t go anywhere until they arrive. We awaited the approach of a tornado all Sunday
afternoon and into the evening but it spent its force on a deadly dance through some part of
South Carolina.
Neither Meryn nor I was awake when our carriage glided past Ashland’s ham and something or
other bagel caféi near the once proud mansions of Virginia but I entered a dreamlike state of
medieval melancholy—the mood that is nowadays only ever conjured up by the wizardry of a
Leonard Cohen—during the last hundred miles to Union Station in Washington, D.C., where we
sat around between trains. Still no voices. Was Hamilton in Hollywood? Did he capture the
American?
Meryn took Nyquill and slept soundly on the Massachusetts bound train. She looked peaceful.
The great snake pulled into Penn Station at 2 hours past midnight and was still there at 3.15 am.
We got off in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, and went up to Vermont, then left from New Haven
on the commuter service to Grand Central Station, in 42nd Street, New York City, when we came
back down.
Redeeming accumulated free-day vouchers with the rental car firm, we set off in the pouring rain
from 85th Street in peak hour Friday afternoon traffic for the final few days before the flight out.
There were no small cars available, only an oversized Ford Mercury—“take it or leave it.” The
Mercury V8 took off south down FDR Drive toward The Battery and turned off at Exit 15 for
the Holland Tunnel. It might have been counted on by Simon and Garfunkel as it sped down the
New Jersey turnpike, through Tony Soprano’s industrial backyard to Interstate 284 and our
(accumulated rent-free) Hillsborough motel.
The family from New Brunswick invited us to attend the Rutger’s University open day outing. It
was there that British troops under General Charles Cornwallis had sought to take a bridge over
the Raritan River on December 1st 1776 and George Washington had called upon one of his
young artillery captains to halt the British advance. The captain succeeded, engaging the British in
a fierce artillery duel, and winning the admiration of senior officers in making it possible for the
Americans to escape and cross the freezing Delaware River into Pennsylvania.
Meryn’s friend’s wife, the lactocrine hypothesis scientist, took us on a tour of her laboratory—
and discovered that the air-conditioning had failed in the room where temperature sensitive
experiments were housed.ii While she attended to that crisis we heard from her daughters that
their architect father had had a recent brush with death at his work site when the boiler in the
basement blew. Metres away, he had somehow managed to escape what might have been an
anachronistic end with a few cuts and bruises. Boiler explosions were an occupational hazard in
the 1830s, a major factor in making paddlewheel travel on the Mississippi River more dangerous
i
ii
See above, Chapter 10 ‘A Pair of Knaves’.
See above, Chapter 9 ‘The Drifter’.
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than any ocean going voyage. The annual destruction of life and property on America’s Rivers at
the height of the steamboat era surpassed anything anywhere in the previous history of man,
according to a contemporary authority on the subject.
We spent much of the last day of April, a Monday, wandering through the middle of a dispute
between organised labour and capital scabs and out onto the boardwalk at Asbury Park.
Springsteen’s Madame Marie wasn’t there to be busted but I photographed her kiosk, and mused
upon the singer’s chagrin concerning the realisation that his girlfriend would no longer set herself
on fire. And it took me back to those curious coincidences associated with July 4th 1826, the
fiftieth anniversary of the signing of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams’ document The
Declaration of Independence: that was the day that both men, 83-year-old Thomas Jefferson of
Virginia and his bitter rival, 90-year-old John Adams of Massachusetts, died; it hadn’t all been
bad, though, because throughout it all, in Pittsburgh, Stephen Foster was being born.
Trickster was at home in America and nineteenth-century New York City was his playground.
We’d taken a room at a motel on the Jersey side of Washington Bridge and walked high above
the Hudson in high wind and diesel fumes, the Manhattan skyline stretched out before us to the
south. The modern middle-class American was unaware, then, that first day of May 2007, that
Mercurius still worked tirelessly at some scheme to trip them up. They’d learn about the credit
crisis caused by sub-prime soon enough but I was interested in the early days, back when urban
existence was a new experience, a complex game in which one could not tell the difference
between a colleague and a criminal.
We came up from the subway to the streets where, according to a nineteenth-century guidebook,
unscrupulous men led “double lives.” The confidence game was rife; the press carried frequent
reports of sleuthers passing counterfeit dollar bills, dud cheques, and forged documents, of card
sharps, pickpockets, and so on. Such crimes were so commonplace in mid-nineteenth-century
urban America that when the charming New York swindler, William Thomson, was described as
a ‘confidence man’ in the 1840s the term immediately caught on; it succinctly summed up the
wider phenomenon of that type of urban deception which had once been the preserve of the
Yankee peddler with his blank expression.
Deceptive talk, a face like a mask—the same old story but transferred to the more anonymous
urban landscape. Rather than wipe out the conman, middle-class America condoned and
encouraged the phenomenon of daylight robbery, became party to the confidence game, to the
extent that there was no appreciable difference between the self-made man and his twin—the
white-collar criminal.
On the day the Mercury was due back at the rental firm we drove down 42nd Street, across the
Brooklyn Bridge, and all over New York City until our time was up. Meryn had drawn the line at
taking the subway to the airport so we took a cab, and flew out of JFK in early May 2007. Back
in Australia, she set about writing up the results of her research and I went back to work at my
office job.
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Chapter 26 Ole Miss
The Roman god of trade, commerce and profit must have smiled to himself when, sixteen
months on from that day in Manhattan, I was driving around America’s alternative metropolis,
Chicago, at the wheel of another Mercury. It made the Dodge Avenger we had swapped it for
seem reasonable. And the Dodge was—when the sun was shining and the roads dry. We
followed the Tennessee south through Kentucky on another endless day, the autumnal River lent
a magical air by the burnished trees lining its banks.
Meryn read a message received in response to an email she’d sent the architect. She’d mailed him
a request for an American fixture in the new bathroom. The wholesaler he’d relied upon for
more than forty years could meet the requirement, said the architect, but there was probably no
need to go to such expense because they “have Australian mixers that work quite well.” The
American has a penchant for gadgets and there’d been a new fangled faucet in every room we’d
rented. Meryn, mesmerised by dozens of motel stays, had allowed their taps to set the plumbing
standard.
We laughed all the way to Waverley, Tennessee, where we were lucky to get gasoline. Supplies
were so low that the petrol trickling out of the pump took more than half an hour to fill the tank.
America’s Deep South has long been a third world country but to bear firsthand witness that
poverty and decay had crept so close to the bluegrass was disconcerting. The powers that be
proffered a plausible explanation that it was the outcome of Hurricane Ike, but its coinciding
with the credit crunch made me doubt. That it fanned out as far as Chapel Hill in North Carolina
and set us on a regular hunt for fuel that went on into October was consistent with both
hypotheses, though it lent more weight to the Ike account, admittedly.
Whatever the cause, we stayed at the Days Inn, opposite Knight’s, in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee,
and drove to Oxford, Mississippi, the next day. Motels, there, were at a premium because the
circus was in town. We checked in for a five-night stay in Holly Springs and drove the 60 mile
round trip to Ole Miss where it was politics from dawn to dusk in the lead up to the first
presidential debate on Friday September 26th. Familiar with the town from having been there
twice before, we parked midway between the courthouse square and Overby and walked back
and forth to wherever there was something of interest.
We roamed among the TV networks’ tractor trailers outside the Gertrude Ford Theatre where
the debate was set to occur. There was not much of interest but the various tents, trucks,
equipment, staff, and overall layout, were all part of the carnival and so went on the photographic
record. It was unwise, though, to have lingered over the shot of a body of security personnel who
stayed out of the hot sun under a shady canopy. Summonsed into their midst, each uniformed
individual, including a man with a mullet, had an opinion on the subject of our being there and
which secret entrance had been used to gain access. How did we get in there? Who did we know
that let us in? Why were we there? Did we know that the whole area had been cordoned off
because the next president of the United States was due on campus? Had we taken any other
photos?
“Yes,” I said, not wanting to be the third Australian tortured at Gitmo. Meryn voided the photos
while the guards looked on. There was much consternation when we reiterated that we had
walked in off the main road and had intended leaving the same way. Oh no no no, the captain
made clear. We would not be allowed further access to such a high security area but would have
to walk out down that road there, where he pointed. But we were hoping to attend a seminar a
few minutes walk away, across the overpass, I explained. No way, not today, and not ever while
he was in charge. The guard with the mullet offered to escort us out the way we’d come in. Not
on your life, not on his watch, said the man in charge. We got in the easy way but were gonna
have to go the hard. We did, and broadened our knowledge of Ole Miss’s environs.
The Overby Centre for Southern Journalism and Politics has a mission to promote
understanding of the First Amendment—the extension of the American’s freedom of speech and
assembly adopted in 1791—and had organised a series of seminars. When not eavesdropping on
conversations in the university cafeteria or observing an uninspired batch of five or six protestors
chant platitudes while walking, head down and single file, past the shops in the centre of town,
we attended the Overby sessions. The first was the best: a panel of International Journalists
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representing Australia, India, Japan and the Netherlands told the audience what it was they
thought their readers hoped for from the upcoming election.
A group of students from Oxford Middle School was dragged along to the first seminar on the
Wednesday—a panel discussion about what it was like to be black in Mississippi in the 1950s and
60s—and the grade 8 girl who sat next to me spoke about the history they’d learned of the Civil
Rights movement. Her favourite period of American history, though, she said, was the
Revolutionary War. I asked what in particular she liked about that period but there was nothing,
though Thomas Jefferson was her favourite character and William Morris her favourite writer
because he came from Yazoo City, where her grandparents live.
I told her that William Faulkner was one of my favourite writers and she said that she and her
friends loved playing in William Faulkner’s house at Halloween and that the presidential debate
made living in Oxford great, that it was “really cool ... but they’ve been working on the
Courthouse for so long that you couldn’t go for a drive in the convertible with it open because of
the dust in the air the whole time, for weeks on end.”
The panel discussion was hijacked by one or two Moses Generation African Americans who
seized the opportunity to be heard. Understandable as it was, their grandstanding destroyed what
might otherwise have been a forum for the broadening of consciousness. Politics is the art of the
possible, they say, and the Joshua Generation has advanced the cause by assuming that the old
sore will heal the quicker for being left alone. It’s not fair but it’s smart—as President Obama has
demonstrated.
Downtown, in the square, a handful of local women with whom we chatted were enjoying the
world’s attention yet seemed to have no idea that Barack Obama was the cause of it all; they were
aware, though, that the ground was shifting under their feet. Faded belles of yesteryear, they were
very polite and pleased that we’all had come to Oxford. One of the ladies asked what we’d been
doing. Meryn mentioned the forum of international journalists and another in the group said
she’d read about it in the newspaper and that the reports of America had been very negative.
‘Balanced,’ we’d have said, but it’s all to do with point of view, of course. Southern ‘politeness’
had long since lost any connection with Adam Smith’s elaboration of Shaftesbury’s concept.i
Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin levened the bread of political pundits and gave heart to
all who hoped the people would resist the temptation to put the backwoods bimbo a stone’s
throw from the Oval Office.ii Fey-Palin was all of that, and more, for me and my Rourkian thesis
that the American prefers the copy to the real thing. When, masquerading as Palin, Fey quoted
the would-be vice-president almost verbatim, one right wing commentator thought that a bridge
too far and railed at those liberals who condoned such “savage” satire. Another, The New
Republic’s Rich Lowry, made a complete fool of himself and lost all credibility by describing his
erotic response to Palin’s charms. Too much time spent hunched over homework as adolescents
and not enough in playground rough and tumble makes for dull boys. A further manifestation of
that same pajero syndrome presented itself in the form of a Republican Congressman claiming
on MSNBC that the deepening financial crisis was caused by government intervention in the
market.
McCain, meanwhile, lurched from one extreme to the other in an attempt to deal himself back
into an election game where Obama held all the cards. In the face of overwhelming evidence to
the contrary, the self-styled maverick assured the voting public that “the fundamentals of the
economy are sound,” then turned around and said he was suspending his presidential campaign,
opting out of the Ole Miss debate, in order to rush back to Washington to sort out the economic
mess. McCain’s brinksmanship exacerbated the fallout from the financial crisis to the point of a
major collapse of world credit. The self-confessed high-stakes gambler was prepared to risk it all
on a single throw of the dice.iii
Would the American be fooled again; would McCain’s Oval Office strategy succeed? Probably
not, because it was not a strategy at all but merely a series of tricksy tactics. Early morning media
on the day of the debate carried the news that the ‘Washington Mutual’ bank had collapsed.
See above, Chapter 3 ‘The Staircase Group’.
Meryn saw straight away that Sarah Palin was America’s Pauline Hanson.
iii McCain had told President Clinton’s former Ambassador to the U N, Richard Holbrooke, of his penchant for high
stakes gambling.
i
ii
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Meryn and I were in the USA to witness the most significant presidential election since JFK had
gone up against Nixon in 1960 and might be there, it seemed, for the collapse of capitalism.
Had the Democrat presidential candidate committed any one of the numerous faux pas which his
Republican opponent notched up in the course of the campaign, the pundits would have
dismissed him as a dubious pretender. The Vietnam POW stayed in the race because of race; any
old white Anglo would do but the African American had to be near-perfect, run a flawless
campaign, and have arrived on the scene at exactly the right moment.
Oxford became increasingly crowded toward the end of the week but the Avenger knew the lay
of the land and continued to find all-day free-parking. The local McCain-Palin folk showed their
true colours early on the balmy Autumn day of the debate. Three excited young women asked us
to take their photo. They were ‘freshmen’ they said, as Meryn froze the moment they stood there
together under an oak on Friday September 26th 2008, and loved the accent and hoped we-awl
enjoyed being at Ole Miss for the historic occasion.
We did—though the sea of McCainanites that covered the campus was disconcertingly deep.
This was Mississippi, afterall, so the place was bound to be awash with Republicans. Yet I had
hoped the students would not be so sure this time, that they might be swept up by the wave of
transformation that I felt sure had been rolling over the land since the night Joe Lieberman was
defeated in the Primary and we were two thirds of Chris Matthews’ studio audience on the
sidewalk opposite New Haven Green.i
We drank coffee in a corner of the Ole Miss cafeteria, a welcome respite from the ‘Rock the
Vote’ band that had rent the air and put paid to engaging conversation. One of the three
freshmen saw us and came to say hello. We were disarmed by the young woman’s charm—had I
been in her shoes I’d have ducked out of sight—as she told us that she was for McCain. We said
we were for Obama and explained why.
She listened politely then told us that being brought up a Southern Baptist left her no option but
to back the Republican. The band volume went down like the coffee and, leaving Meryn at the
bookshop, I followed the sound of hillbilly fiddle and manic mandolin to where a country dance
was getting underway. An hour or so of moving to the rhythm put me in a good frame of mind,
one made better still by the sight of a couple in canvas chairs bearing ‘Colbert for president’
placards.
MSNBC’s bright lights made Andrea Mitchell shine but all sight and no sound dimmed the
picture for those of us there in person. I went in search of a route around the security zone and
was stopped by two youths whom I hoped would not mug me. They wanted to know how to get
to the cafeteria and where I’d picked up the strange accent but were none the wiser for my telling
them, I guess, because they asked who I would be voting for.ii One of the young men was from
Oxford and the other from Tennessee, or Arkansas, perhaps, I forget which, but they reckoned
some skinheads were planning to shoot Obama. Would be assassins wouldn’t stand a chance, I
said, “because the security is so tight.”
Evening came, and so did a huge contingent of Democrats in Steelworkers for Obama T-shirts.
They’d been bussed in from Tennessee. They weren’t alone. A group of ACORNiii activists
arrived and joined the Unionists outside Chris Matthews’ live MSNBC broadcast—now with
audio to accompany the flesh and blood presenter. Matthews is not intimidated by the noisy
crowds which invariably gather around his outdoor telecast tent to get their message across. The
McCainanites, though, had been intimidated and slunk off, no longer confident that they’d
continue to call the shots. The Joshua generation of African Americans was on the rise and it
showed, there, that evening. The sun had gone down on white supremacy even to the point of
there being a better than even chance of a black family living in the White House.
The Chancellor of the university made an appearance on TV and, having had a nodding
acquaintance at the seminars, I wanted to tell him myself that his organization had turned on a
first rate series of events. But a security guard blocked my path—until he saw who it was. Then
he greeted me warmly, his mullet and friendly face familiar from the shady canopy on the edge of
the security zone. He made way for me and I shook hands with the man whose university
See above, Chapter 4 ‘Show Business’.
Australians don’t vote in American elections.
iii Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
i
ii
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invested more than $US5 million to stage the first debate between the endorsed Democrat and
Republican candidates for the 2008 presidential election. We ran into the Dutch reporter (or was
he Flemish?) from the international journalists’ panel and he treated us like long lost friends.
Two of the three Ole Miss freshers—best friends—came by and we were their long lost buddies
too. They'd just emerged from the MSNBC scrum holding posters. The Southern Baptist had
waved her lonely ‘Vote McCain’ sign against the tide of Obama sentiment. She was from Fort
Worth, Texas, and her companion hailed from Illinois.
Many students had fled Ole Miss, they said, fearing racial violence, but the Texan's father had
encouraged his daughter to remain on campus and take part in the once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity
to get up close and personal with that aspect of the nation’s political process. The Illinois parents
had concurred and so the two young women who had formed a firm friendship in their first year
at university attended the week’s campus activities and then worked on each other’s political
posters—Illinois for the Democrat and Texas for the Republican—and carried them into the
fray. It’s the stuff that the republic’s made on.
Texan and Illinois parents were not alone in wanting their daughters to participate fully in the
process of electing the next Commander-in-chief. Chris Matthews’ daughter was among a group
of activist students outside the MSNBC tent for the Nashville presidential debate a fortnight later
and he picked her out from the crowd to express her view on national TV. Taking a meal in the
Ole Miss cafeteria, Matthews, the host of Hardball , graciously accepted my offer to send him the
story about the night the voodoo man came for the munchkins.i
A McCain supporter was not at all gracious when Obama entered the debate. Sick at the sight of
the African American, the good ol’ boy screamed abuse. Impotent rage, and a dying rebel yell. He
at least could see the image on the screen. An obstructed line of sight marred the occasion for
Meryn and me so we drove back Downtown then headed home to Holly Springs and watched it
on TV.
A strong, no-nonsense woman I worked with in the 90s used to entertain the whole office with
renditions of classic Monty Python sketches. When Princess Diana was killed in a car crash she
did not countenance banter concerning the phenomenon of a grieving British nation. About two
years after the tragedy, she told her first Diana death joke. Five years after nine-eleven, the
American remained steadfast in his religious avoidance of any light-heartedness with respect to
the audacious attack on the Twin Towers. It had been seven years since the event when we jetted
into Chicago and while it was still a touchy subject, the fact that an American Express card ad
conveyed its message by playing around with terrorism struck me as a sign. Hamilton, too, was a
thing of the past but his memory lived on so I left a sign in the bookshop that had inspired the
proprietor in Philadelphia who had given us coffee and cookies.ii
Betty and Leo were as busy as buggery but we were in the neighbourhood so there was nothing
for it but to drive to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and stay a couple of days. We stopped for
lunch at an isolated diner on the outskirts of Corinth. The meal was awful to the point of being
inedible but with it came the privilege of sitting in on a ‘real life in Mississippi’ scene: A pickup
truck pulled up outside and disgorged a grossly overweight man and two boys, the elder of the
lads a copy of his dad, but red-faced from physical activity. The father ordered a round of
hamburger-and-fries then they each set about sipping on gargantuan colas. The boys’ mother
phoned and her husband said their son had played well.
The hamburgers and fries arrived, were doused in ketchup, and devoured. The fellow, no more
than 35 years of age, was the worst possible role model for any child insofar as he poisoned them
with such an appalling junk food habit. All three were a picture of pitiable obesity. The boys
seemed to regard their dad as some sort of divinity and looked up to him, listening devotedly to
every word he uttered. He spoke in a soft voice, warmly, and with great affection, gently
counselling the elder boy that when playing football the idea was to “take the opponent down”
and to “run like hell” when you had the ball. If love can conquer all then those kids are set for
life.
Gasoline was hard to get, but we had a lucky break in Muscle Shoals, on the Tennessee River,
and continued east. Huntsville was marked as a small town on the 1998 Road Atlas Leo had
i
ii
See above, Chapter 4 ‘Show Business’.
See above, Chapter 20 ‘Crackers’.
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given us after we’d driven from Oxford to our first meeting with him at his house in Chapel Hill
in 2005. By late September 2008 Huntsville had undergone major development. Earmarks,
perhaps? The noticeably poor signage all around stood out so much against the American
standard of excellence with respect to road design that I wondered aloud about who the hell was
in charge of roads around there. The penny dropped: we were in Alabama; the state with the
death strip that the Dodge Neon had traversed each day of Meryn’s academic conference in
Birmingham, 2005.i
That night’s motel, in Scottsboro, had no MSNBC but Jerry Seinfeld’s distinctive voice came up
on channel flick so we settled in to his animated bee movie featuring Sting and Larry King.ii Later
on, after we’d returned from the supermarket and microwaved the frozen dinners, Larry King
hosted a special about his and Heather Mills’ (of Paul McCartney fame) interviews with Paul
Newman, who had just died. The last time I’d seen a Larry King show was in Amarillo, March
2007, and death had been the topic of conversation, then, too.
On ABC’s ‘This Week’ with George Stephanopolous, Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post
pointed out that the American had been living beyond his means. Robert Reich (Clinton’s
Secretary of Labor) argued that the economy had been strangled, that purchasing power had been
constrained because the nation’s wealth was tied up by the top 1% of the population. If he lacked
purchasing power, Pearlstein pressed the point about the increase in consumption being at the
expense of investment, then the American should cease purchasing. Government spending on
infrastructure, not private ‘investment’ in housing was what was required, he said. Newt Gingrich
stopped them all in their tracks when he cited over-regulation as the cause of the credit crunch.
The panel’s body language dubbed Gingrich an ideologue.
There’s something in a Sunday that makes a late breakfast with hash browns that much more
satisfying—assuming you find a suitable diner. That at Ocoee, Tennessee, had the right signs so
the Dodge pulled in to the parking lot. Full house, almost, but the waitress found a booth. I
might never have noticed but my white T-shirt was be-speckled with navy nylon fluff from the
cheap tracksuit top I’d purchased for the trip. Might not have noticed, that is, had the clientele of
the so-called ‘Italian Restaurant’ been the usual weekend Harley riders. But most everyone wore
his Sunday best. And if it hadn’t been obvious right away that we’d wandered in to where
wholesome families gathered after the church service, the fact that the head of the table next to
us was reading from Scripture and inviting discussion from those still eating lettuce—the
American takes salad as an entrée—made it clear.
Too polite to say she hadn’t a clue what we’d ordered, the waitress brought sweet tea. We
swapped it for coffee and, hopelessly mono-accented, pointed at ‘bacon and eggs’ on the menu.
The patrons were not only well dressed but unmistakably middle class. No more than a couple in
a hundred was overweight, and only one or two all up were hamburger-and-fries obese. A 50
year-old and his momma stripped off their leathers and sat down. Then the Sheriff came in. So
there was nowhere else we might have been. When a couple bowed their heads and prayed
Meryn reckoned Laura from Lancaster hadn’t been so unusual, afterall. This pair had put on a
very public display of the ‘grace before meals’ ritual, I acknowledged, but Laura had professed
her love of Jesus from the rooftops.
A benign sun poured honey on the leather guided hogs that roamed in packs along the
Appalachian Highway as it shadowed the Ocoee River. Canoes, kayaks, and their helmeted crews
fell headlong down to Georgia, white-water rafts on rugged rock, while we worked our way
upstream and across the border to Franklin, North Carolina, home of the Scottish Tartans
Museum. A rural mountain gem, Franklin stands aside from the alienating mess of chain stores
and garish advertising signs kept at bay out on the Highway. It had seen better days but we
checked into a Downtown motel and, out on the front porch overlooking the swimming pool, I
had a beer with Cody, the bloke next door.
Cody wanted to know where the accent came from then told me that from what he’d seen on
television I was too short to be an Australian. And what did I think about the election? I gave
him the standard ‘American renewal’ line, saying that we non-Americans were hanging out for
See above, Chapter 22 ‘Alias the Outlaw’.
In the absence of a post-scientific breakthrough concerning the concept of causality, the repetition of the strange
juxtaposition of Seinfeld and Muscle Shoals is nothing but another of those weird coincidences that characterise the
American experience. See above, Chapter 1 ‘Mercury V8’, for the first instance of the Seinfeld-Shoals connection.
i
ii
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the USA to become a responsible leader. He nodded his head so I added that while McCain
might be a salty sea dog he was no captain yet here he was sailing into the teeth of a brewing
perfect storm. Cody concurred. Did he think the American would be fooled again? He wasn’t
sure about that. And was non-committal concerning Obama. Wade, though, he assured me, was
a real Democrat, one who knew all there was to know about politics.
Cody had recently lost his girlfriend of 10 years—an heiress worth more than $30 million at the
time of her death—and was now living on next to nothing. She had taken ill and was prescribed
pharmaceuticals that killed her, he said. A chap I had worked with went to the USA as a tourist
and came back as cargo a few years ago; some over the counter medicine for bronchitis had killed
him. Cody’s tale of woe may have been true. His internet conspiracy talk about a secret trade
corridor being shoved up through the Midwest from Mexico on the one hand and Chinese
container ships on the Pacific shelf waiting to offload who knows what on the other warned me
it was time to fly.
But he had hit his groove and went on with a tall tale to the effect that the bad blood between
Donald Rumsfeld and the French had been the end game in something that started during the
hostage crisis in the lead up to the 1980 presidential election: the French would not let the
Americans fly over French air space and a number of helicopter Special Services personnel had
been killed in consequence. When President Reagan subsequently attacked Libya, so the story
goes, one man’s bitter memory of lost mates from the Special Services rescue mission in the
dying days of the Carter Administration caused him to target the French Embassy with a laser
beam bomb.
Wade came out and Cody called him over but it wasn’t politics he had on his mind. Bible in
hand, he spoke of how he was introducing the woman in the end motel room to Jesus, having
her welcome Him into her heart. He heard my accent, mistook it for British, and talked about his
frequent trips to Manchester, England, preaching the word of God, then realised I was Australian
and talked about a friend of his who goes to Australia to weld pipes and talk about Jesus. Cody
wanted us all to breakfast together in the morning but Wade said he couldn’t make it because he
had to be at work.
Did I believe in Jesus, Cody wondered. I gave him the usual line about Australians being
primarily secular in outlook but that didn’t do it for him. So I told him I’d been raised a Catholic
but had learned to doubt as an adult. Belief in God failed the knowledge test, so it’s all a matter
of faith, I argued. Cody could appreciate that that was a reasonable point of view but Jesus had
healed his knee so he knew there was a God. I said that I would take his word for it that his knee
had healed but would not go so far as to put it down to Jesus. I would no more believe that it
was Jesus in America than I would believe that the same thing happening in Pakistan was the
work of Allah.
Cody said that he could understand that but that I could not say such a thing in front of Wade.
He went on with more Jesus stuff for a while and I asked what would have happened had I said
to Wade what I said to him. You wouldn’t say that to Wade, he said, because he would lose it. I
asked him what Wade would say was happening to a Pakistani whose knee was healed
supernaturally, as his had by Jesus. “Satan. The evil one.” I said I’d like to attend a church service
out of curiosity and Cody explained that Baptists take the pews on the right and Pentecostals on
the left of the pulpit. “But don’t go up the back because that’s where people who don’t feel good
about themselves sit.”
Breakfast, at the Normandie across the street from the motel, was just what the doctor ordered.
Full of men, on their way to work, perhaps, or retired, who meet there for breakfast (escaping the
house, Meryn thought, like the Australian in his shed or going to the pub) the diner’s convivial
atmosphere highlighted what’s best about our travels in the USA. Everyone was friendly, the
people talked to one another, and the two women who dished up the meals, though businesslike,
were joyous and lively. It’s America’s answer to socialism. A good start to the day.
MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle noted that the American beeps his horn when he’s three cars back on
the line at McDonald’s and reckoned that “this instant gratification society is going to have to
change.” We checked out—neighbour Cody’s beat up pickup cold and lifeless—and went in
search of wireless internet up on Main Street. The builders were laying the slab for her new house
and Meryn was awaiting a message from the architect. That done, she stocked up on tapestry
thread and we were on the road again, hunting for gasoline.
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Eighty mile into the journey, a stone’s throw from Carl Sandburg’s 1960s goat farm,i I phoned
Leo to say that though we had enough gas to make it to his house it’d be necessary to fill up,
there, or be stranded. Perhaps, it being unwise to turn up on their doorstep and not be able to
leave, we should head north into Virginia and catch up with them next time? No, said Leo,
Chapel Hill’s ‘gassed up’ so we should still come on over Tuesday afternoon. Hmm. Rather than
continue to amble along Route 64 we would have to barrel down an interstate, ironically, to
conserve fuel (because the Avenger was a guzzler at anything under 60 mph) so we moved on up.
Time on our hands due to the change, we stopped at a ‘Rest Area’ and made lunch.
Five minutes into the picnic, a rest stop attendant marched up and said “Did you hear they killed
the bill?” I guess we looked like the ‘tuned in to politics’ type? No, we hadn’t heard. Wow! “We
don’t much listen to the radio because it’s all religion and rock music,” I explained. “You need
Public Radio … ,” he said, and gave us the number on the dial. The bill to which he referred
concerned the Congressional vote on Treasury Secretary Paulson’s request for a $US700 billion
Wall Street bailout. The sky was about to fall, we felt sure, because Hank Paulson had left us all
in no doubt that only immediate unquestioning action could save the international financial
system from a devastating and unthinkable collapse.
Congressmen had been listening to their constituents, men like our attendant, whose great-greatgreat grandfather had been born when Washington was president and lived to see Teddy
Roosevelt in the White House, who were agin it. Poor folks had been suffering for years under
Bush, our man said, so now it was those with Lamborghinis’ turn. He’d been forced back into
the workforce after retiring and now, in his mid 70s, had to go to work every day just to keep his
head above water. The American puts a premium on freedom as against fairness and sees
nothing wrong with the excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of the top one or two
percent. Only after the rich man has torn down the whole tent will the American sit up and take
notice of rapacious greed’s effect.
Meryn flipped through the travel brochure and found a great deal for Days Inn twenty mile away,
just out of Asheville at Biltmore East. Luxury living for $US50.00 per night, with all the
requisites, and the necessary MSNBC. We stared at the screen all afternoon and into the night,
channel flicking from Fox through CNN and finishing off with John Stewart and Stephen
Colbert on Comedy Central. Morning came and George W Bush made an appearance on TV.
Congressmen in the Capitol gym jeered him. They’d all had to take a cold shower.
Commentators and pundits on the right were outraged at Paulson’s proposed bail out; it was
tantamount to introducing socialism, they said. No-one wanted to see the collapse of society but
that would be preferable to having the government intervene at the level that it was. The
Democratic Congress had failed to apply the rules these commentators argued. Like the
archetypal American himself, they were seeing double, of course, because these ideologues came
out of the same box as those who for the past thirty years had chanted the Reaganomic mantra
that government should get out of the way and allow the invisible hand of the free market to
determine behaviour.
i
See above, Chapter 6 ‘Twin Cities’.
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Chapter 27 Mercurius at Monticello
Leo and Betty welcomed us into their home and we caught up on news that had fallen by the
wayside in email exchanges. Their daughter arrived, a forthright woman making the transition
from academia to business management. She’d been called up for jury service but not yet been in
court—maybe because she’d stood out when the members of the group were asked if they had
any moral difficulty with sitting in judgment on a fellow human being and she had declared
“none at all …”?
We told them about our security breach at Ole Miss and Leo recalled having wandered around
backstage, as it were, during the Carter-Reagan debate. He can’t resist putting authority to the test
and delighted in telling us about his latest ruse—parking in a restricted area without a permit;
were the traffic warden to bother climbing under the overhanging shrubbery in order to check
the vehicle’s windscreen then Leo would pay the fine.
When Sarah Palin’s name came up Meryn told them about Pauline Hanson—the sex appeal,
political naïveté, and so on. Betty ran through her elevator speech—the 30 second spiel she
delivers to prospective clients. She manages individual health care needs of an ever expanding
circle of patients. A typical example might be that of a Massachusetts woman who, unable to be
there herself, pays a nurse to take responsibility for her parents’ wellbeing. When the woman’s
93-year-old father protested, pointing out that he’d put away the funds for his old age, Betty
didn't beat around the bush. “Let me tell you: the day has arrived,” she informed him.
Meryn had arranged to have coffee with Joan, a friend from her school days, nowadays a
successful Chapel Hill novelist. I’d met her when she was back in Australia in 2007 and got off
on the wrong foot with my ‘it's as if America is governed by Trickster’ thesis so thought better of
spoiling the reunion. According to Meryn, though, Joan had specifically included me in the
planned get together. Not wanting to cause offence, I went along for the ride. Joan introduced
herself and said she was pleased to meet me. Should I have reminded her that we’d already met? I
went with the sleeping dogs option and kept a low profile. Joan had just mailed the final draft of
her latest book and was ready to party.
She offered to have her literary agent examine the work Meryn had compiled concerning the
subject of her research. Somehow the topic of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski came up. As far
as Joan was concerned, it was their own affair, no-one else’s business. I was about to agree but
she hadn't finished. Hillary Clinton had aided and abetted Bill’s philandering, she went on, and it
was unforgivable for the president to have engaged in extra-marital sex at the White House. I held
my tongue. She said I looked vaguely familiar. I cited something I’d heard on TV. She explained
that MSNBC is on the far left of the political spectrum and that the arrival of Fox had been
important in balancing up the overall left wing bias of the media. I desperately wanted to tell her
about Lee Atwater but shut up.
Meryn mentioned my 100,000 word text that no-one had read on what it is that makes the
American tick. Joan sprang into action. She knew a professional who would do that. Could we
wait while she obtained the reader’s phone number and called? We could. She phoned around
and made an appointment for later that day. We could print a hard copy at her house. Easier said
than done because my .pdf file was incompatible with her software but we managed to package it
up in presentable form and then called on Miss Penelope.
Miss Penelope, from Cleveland, Ohio, had come down over the Mason-Dixon, donned the mask
of a Southern Belle, and established a literary service in Durham County. She asked what ‘Taken
in by America’ was all about and I delivered my elevator speech. She liked the title, understood
the philosophical base, made the connection with Analytical Psychology, zeroed in on the value
of running an Ariadne thread about the contemporary American genius through the whole fabric,
and was prepared to start straight away. Even Joan seemed to think there was something in this
trickster thing.
We were all getting on like a house on fire but when it came down to brass tacks I baulked at the
more than $US2000 fee she charged for 200 pages. The Australian dollar had recently fallen
against the American greenback and I reckoned some Australian would evaluate my work
without my having to hand over more than $A3000. Joan had gone out of her way to help and I
had pulled the rug out from under her. Worse, I kept my calculation that I’d be better off
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purchasing an HP TX2525 tablet to myself and said I’d get back to Miss Penelope. So we left the
manuscript on her desk when we drove away.
A fortnight later I emailed the one to say I could not afford to pay her fee and the other to ask
that she retrieve the typescript and shred it. It’s funny how you can’t help but do your worst by
some folks. Meryn’s duplicity hadn’t helped either. When I questioned the claim that her friend
had specifically asked for me to be there she admitted that she had gilded the lily, that Joan had in
fact asked Meryn to bring along her partner so that she might meet him. Rather than remind Joan
that the fellow she had met at the pub—the one who called George Bush a fool and suggested
that Mercurius the trickster, not Jesus the saviour, governed the heart of the American—was the
man in question, Meryn had left it in the lap of the gods and let fate take its course.
On the last night with Leo and Betty we dined at a local restaurant and left in time to catch the
vice-presidential debate on TV. Leo was at the wheel and took us down some dark hollow to the
local rubbish dump. He thought we’d like to see it. We did, but Betty scolded him and demanded
we get back to where the son-in-law would be waiting at the house with the grand-dog.
Unperturbed, Leo took a further detour past a service station. “Gas up there in the morning
before you head off,” he advised, then raced home along the blacktop.
Joe Biden was streets ahead of his rival but the Pat Buchanans of this world seized upon Ms
Palin’s ability to dodge the bullets as evidence that she was the best candidate who’d ever taken
to the debating stage since the first TV face off between Kennedy and Nixon. Tina Fey exposed
the masquerade and the Peggy Noonans couldn’t help but notice. Palin might wink but wouldn’t
get the nod.
First thing next morning, the Avenger pulled into the petrol stop that Leo had recommended.
The pumps lay idle; they were out of gas. Almost as adept, by then, at locating petrol supplies as
at finding the ideal diner, we filled up across town and drove due north to Virginia. We’d visited
Thomas Jefferson’s estate after leaving Chapel Hill in 2005 but had not taken the tour of his
home. And had not gone there despite it being close at hand during a long day’s journey at the
Doll’s House in 2006. So it was a must. As was Danville, to where Confederate President
Jefferson Davis and his cabinet had decamped on the Richmond and Danville Railroad (RD) in
early April 1865. It was the Danville train that had dashed the Army of Northern Virginia’s hopes
when it arrived at Amelia Courthouse carrying guns instead of butter.i
Rooms in Lynchburg were at a premium because of homecoming, according to the surly desk
clerk at the Days Inn. Jerry Falwell’s Sun Myung Moon funded Liberty University homecoming
was scheduled for later in the month; the demand for motel accommodation had come instead
from parents visiting students enrolled at the Christian fundamentalist college. I guess it was all
much of a muchness from the desk clerk’s perspective: October weekends were booked out
because of stuff happening at the university.
There might have been no room at the Inn but the wonderful African American waitress at its
diner made us feel at home. We ordered bacon and eggs and read the local rag over coffee. A
Charles Krauthammer article cemented the view that the American was on the verge of another
of his trademark transformations to make all things new. If the archetypal sour-faced rightwing
apologist could acknowledge Obama was far and away the better candidate then McCain’s goose
was surely cooked.
One pays the motel desk clerk for any diner meals. An arrogant Anglo, she seemed nasty enough
to pocket the waitress’s tip were it included on the Visa card so we dipped into the dwindling
cash reserves to head her off at the pass then pressed on up Interstate 29, green around the gills.
Whether it be coincidence or causal effect, I’m invariably ill in Chapel Hill. The absurd ‘LU’
monogram carved into the hillside reminded me of a lunatic claim made by an inmate of that
Lynchburg institution when putting a question to Richard Dawkins. The ignoramus had cited
Liberty University’s 4000 year-old dinosaur fossil as evidence of some biblical proposition.
Dawkins was flabbergasted. The item could be either 4000 years old or a dinosaur fossil but not
both, the champion of atheism had explained to the stupidly grinning student.
Amherst, another college town, had rooms at reasonable rates, but only for smokers. Neither of
us could stomach the thought of a tobacco scented pillow and it was on up the road to
Charlottesville where we paid through the nose for a bed because of a varsity game. The ‘don't go
i
See above, Chapter 9 ‘The Drifter’.
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near towns that are hosting events’ rule is only ever honoured in the breach. A ten-thousandstrong brass band was practising for the big night on the field adjacent to our ‘accommodations.’
The maestro marshalled fife and drum; flag twirlers were all tied up in knots; gymnasts jumped
through hoops. We stepped out into the sunset and strolled past bars where students sipped wine
and smoked cigars. The band was still marching madly across the grass when we walked back to
the motel.
Monticello is a testament to Thomas Jefferson’s seeing double. Archetypically American, he was
a true child of Mercurius. Even his slaves were given the names of Roman deities, I now
discovered. The fact that the founding father who had derived his notion of an ideal agrarian
republic from what he thought the ancient Roman republic had been counted Jupiter and
Minerva among his possessions struck me as worthy of mention but the tour guide didn’t go in
for quirky stuff. Her smile suggested that she’d already had her fill of nutters.
Meryn purchased seeds—the hyacinth bean her special interest—from the shop to add to her
Monticello garden bed back home and we went west through the extraordinary beauty of autumn
woods before falling foul of an event—the Forest Festival—that caused a traffic jam in Elkins,
West Virginia. A traffic jam’s nothing compared to what the mountain folk had suffered at the
hands of that pair of deceitful tricksters, Stephen Benten Wilkins and Henry Gasaway Davis,
who, masquerading as honest brokers, left their mark all over the region in the late nineteenth
century.54 The Forest Festival pushed up the price of accommodation there, as well, and drove us
on until we found a room at Buckhannon.
A political pundit said of Sarah Palin that she was ‘a quick study,’ meaning that the Governor of
Alaska was quick on the uptake, as we would phrase it. Avoiding answering a question put to her
by Rachel Maddow, a Republican strategist and spin meister said “… it’s not my bailiwick.”
When an American ‘flips’ a car it means he sold it and bought another; he won’t be back ‘in a
moment’ but ‘momentarily.’ So when instructed by the desk clerk at the motel to “… go under
the ‘forelein’ … ” in order to get to Audre’s Diner I knew right away that I was to take the road
that passed underneath the interstate highway. Appalachian folk use the term ‘four-lane’ to
denote a freeway, of however many lanes. Audre’s was a study in the effects of poor diet. We
made the mistake of opting for ‘home made bread’ rather than ‘regular’ toast with our bacon and
eggs; it consisted of two enormous fried doorstops oozing butter. Really gross.
Hurricane, West Virginia, looked like it might be a mountain retreat but the two dimensional
copy that we had consulted bore no relation to the down-at-heel industrial wasteland we found
and so moved on to Grayson, Kentucky, which turned out to be a rundown dump. ‘Dyers’
advertising signs said it all. The Main Street diner had closed. The former proprietor, Wendy, had
posted a notice in the window thanking people for all the support but she had an offer of a job in
Ashland (on the border with Ohio and West Virginia) and had jumped at it. The town was now a
truck stop and home for desperados. Poverty and decay.
There’s sometimes diamonds in the dust in such places and if you’re lucky you find ’em. We were
lucky. Lingering over a wholesome vegetable stew for a couple of hours in the middle of the day,
we listened to a group of men swap stories in a smoke-filled diner a couple of mile out of town.
The Stanley Brothers’ ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ was on the jukebox. A salt of the earth trucker
who had clocked up over 3 million miles was a topic of discussion: he’d had his licence revoked
when the authorities tested his vehicle and found cracks in the windscreen. Someone else had
won the lottery and gone to ruin; a member of the group said he wasn’t sure he’d like to win the
lottery, wasn’t sure whether he, too, might lack the character required of that much good luck. It
took me back to early 2007 in San Francisco.i We took a motel room and I opened my mail; a
work colleague had sent me the url for Ralph Stanley’s endorsement of Barack Obama.
Congress finally approved Treasury Secretary Paulson’s bailout package for the big banks at the
beginning of the fourth of our eight week tour. Prices on the world stock market fell all through
the first day of the new era but the Dow was only down 4% at the final bell. EEC member states
like Germany and Britain weren’t able to legally bail out European banks whereas the US Federal
government could prop up American banks. Some saw it as a great irony that the US was able to
switch more readily to socialism than was Europe but there was nothing new under the sun. All
that had happened was that the private sector’s loses had been socialised. Melville’s Confidence
i
See above, Chapter 22 ‘Alias the Outlaw’.
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Man was up to his old tricks. Mr Moneybags is contra moral hazard until the time comes and
then he points out that the whole house of cards is at stake so the government better do what’s
required.
The worm was still turning, though, and a letter to the editor of The New Yorker countering
American conventional wisdom that communities cannot co-operate in the management of
resources pointed the way to what may be a new day. Orthodoxy’s assumption that the market
mechanism is the be all and end all, here, is falsified by the evidence from both traditional and
online communities. The commons, says David Bollier in the letter Meryn read aloud on the
backroad out of Grayson, is an expanding sector. The confluence of open-source software,
Wikipedia, Craigslist, online political campaigns, and other such post-market organisational
structures suggests there’s something of a new republic in the offing.
It was not as worrying a development as the apparent onset of psychosis had been in 2006, but
I’d come down with shingles. A previous attack—on the train from D C to Richmond in 2003—
had been relatively benign, as had a subsequent flare up. Goaded by the all-powerful get-out
clause on the travel insurance, I emailed my Australian GP to ascertain whether my medical
record declared this particular viral outbreak came under the rubric of ‘a pre-existing condition.’
No response. That uncertainty allied to the prohibitive cost of a U S medical consultation, an
ailing Australian dollar, and Cody’s girlfriend’s fate left me with one option: paracetamol;
psyllium had worked wonders with respect to Hamilton but could not wipe away the encroaching
rash.
The Avenger rolled into Pikeville, Kentucky, by early afternoon and I called in to the Pinson
Hotel, Downtown. Established in 1947 to service an upmarket clientele, it seemed a little worse
for wear. A note at the front desk told callers to phone a number to summons the clerk. The
coiled cord was so tangled that I could not get the phone to my ear and had to dial then quickly
take the mountain to Mahommet. Nothing happened; I waited, nothing happened; so I tried
again. The woman in the adjoining jewellery shop looked at me as if I was a lamb to the
slaughter.
After another minute or so a voice called from the landing on the stairs asking if someone was
“down there.” I said there was and a friendly but strange and threadbare woman invited me up. I
asked how much the rooms were for a couple and whether or not they had MSNBC. $37.50. She
wasn’t sure about the TV but I could come up and take a look. I accompanied her to the third
floor, down a long corridor with rooms housing men and women past their prime. There was no
chance that we’d take it—the once elegant Pinson had become a doss house—but I followed her
into the room and went through the motions. There was no TV reception to speak of and the air
smelled heavy with age. Poverty and decay. There was no MSNBC, I said, and left. Though she
seemed to regard me as someone who’d spurned her, the woman was philosophical. Meryn had
tuned the car radio to a 1920s hillbilly programme; Dock Boggs’ broken voice and blues banjo
was music to my ears.
Many motels had gone out of business; others had fallen off the Super 8 or Days Inn twig as those
chains absorbed previously upmarket establishments. Over soup in the local diner—where
Meryn read the ‘obits’ of forty and fifty year old miners—we asked after the Pikeville Super 8 and
were told it was up behind the Lowes near the Walmart on Route 23.
It, too, had been disenfranchised. Yes, they had MSNBC, the desk clerk confirmed, but it would
be potluck as to whether the room had a microwave or fridge. Some did, others didn’t. A young
man next to us suggested that a staff member take a peek in each of the rooms someday and
record which ones had a fridge, microwave, and so on, so that they could pass on the
information to a prospective customer. He understood why we might want a microwave, he said,
because he’d been living on Walmart frozen dinners for the past two years. One dollar, he
thought, was a bit much; they’d been 88 cents not so long ago.
We checked in, then out when the promised MSNBC did not materialise and tried the downbeat
Daniel Boone Motor Inn at Coal Run. We’d forego Internet, fridge, and microwave, just so long as it
had Hardball, and Rachel Maddow. The ‘maid,’ as she called herself, was filling in for the manager
and gave us a key to be sure that the room had MSNBC. A type of kingfisher sang from a shrub
outside the window. Andrea Mitchell came on as soon as we tried the TV so the fridge, Internet,
microwave, and friendly maid amounted to bonus extras. This was our type of accommodation.
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Taken in by America
Hoisted high on a pole above the Hardball crowd outside the TV tent, John McCain’s head
provided the backdrop to a sign that read ‘Out of touch and reckless.’ Chris Matthews reckoned
that the McCain campaign had settled on a “fourth quintile” strategy to portray Obama as the
Manchurian Candidate, of belonging to a fifth column that would deliver the USA into the hands
of evil Muslim extremists. Directed at xenophobic, ill-educated—‘low-information’—types who
would react with fear and not cotton on to the fact that they were being manipulated, the ‘win at
any cost’ Republican campaign was pressing predictable rightwing buttons: Obama’s middle
name is Hussein; his campaign is funded by Arab money; he ‘consorted with’ terrorists and
others who hate America, and so on. Now it was Sarah Palin, ‘reckless’ McCain’s flip side, up
there on the pole with the caption ‘Out to lunch and brainless.’
The bathroom reeked of tobacco so I systematically unhooked the shower curtain and went to
ask the desk clerk to swap it for one from the ‘non-smoking’ pile. The maid happened to be on
hand and said that it wasn’t the curtain but the fact that our room backed onto the ‘smoking’
room behind. All we had to do was cover the common air vent with the rubbish bin liner that
she promptly provided. “We’re hillbilles,” she smiled, when she saw the look on my face. Kenny
Rogers stared down at me from a picture up on the shelf, the autographed publicity pic a
memento of the night he stayed.
Obama out body-languaged his adversary in the Tuesday night debate and the cameras continued
to roll as he and his wife, African-American Kennedys, now, stayed around to press the flesh and
work the room. The polls showed what any American with eyes could see: the Senator from
Chicago was way beyond the jittery Arizona Republican; nothing good would come of a McCain
Administration. The smoker in the adjoining room sounded like he was coughing up coal dust.
King Coal took over from King Cotton as the sovereign power of the South in the decades after
the Civil War. Coal company agents, tricksters, moved into what was essentially an agrarian barter
economy waving wads of cash under the noses of unsuspecting subsistence farmers who thought
all their Christmases had come at once. Simply by selling a few acres to the latter-day Yankee
traders who had turned up unannounced at the cabin door, Southern Appalachian families
believed the “never more you’ll toil” yarn they’d been spun.
Those who smelt a rat still came unstuck in assuming that everyman was equal before the law:
they were not; agents bribed county clerks, paid off magistrates, and worked hand in glove with
local newspaper proprietors to get hold of the precious coal and timber. Despite it being on a
lesser scale than the dispossession suffered by the indigenous tribes pushed aside by Scotch-Irish
and German immigrants during the eighteenth century, Trickster’s intrusion into the lives of the
descendants of those colonial pioneers, the Appalachian Mountain subsistence farming folk,
caused massive social upheaval. Applying the time-honoured principle of ‘divide and conquer,’
coal and lumber company robber barons—aided and abetted by elected representatives of the
people—exploited opportunities presented by torn communities to gain control of the region’s
resources.
Simon Buckner, Unconditional Surrender Grant’s unwitting foil at the fall of Fort Donelson in
the Civil War,i was Governor of Kentucky when an ongoing dispute between two mountain
families—the Hatfields and the McCoys—was transformed into the archetypal Appalachian
blood feud. The two families lived in the Tug River Valley on the Kentucky-West Virginia
border, the Hatfields in West Virginia and the McCoys in Kentucky. The McCoys traced their
origins to the birth of William McCoy in 1750 whilst the Hatfields were descendants of Ephraim
Hatfield, born in 1765.
The families lived more or less peaceably as good neighbours, co-operating and intermarrying
right up until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860 when they fell out over whether one should
pledge allegiance to the Union or the Confederacy; the McCoys were pro-Union whilst the
Hatfields backed the Confederate rebels. That dispute went off the boil in the decade after the
war but the underlying distrust continued to simmer. When a Hatfield stole a McCoy pig in 1878
and the presiding magistrate who heard the case, a Hatfield, adjudicated from the standpoint that
whilst justice might be blind blood is thicker than water, the whole thing escalated to the point of
i
See above, Chapter 1 ‘Mercury V8’.
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a lawless free-for-all that culminated in the Hatfield massacre of McCoys early on New Years’
Day, 1888.i
The last thing a state governor seeking to attract coal mining companies to the region wanted was
for the increase in violence which invariably accompanied the progress of Gilded Age extractive
industries in the Southern Appalachian Mountains to be perceived by prospective investors as
conspicuous unchecked lawlessness. Accordingly, Governor Simon Buckner of Kentucky
despatched his Adjutant General to Pikeville, the county seat—five mile from our motel—to
restore order.
West Virginia’s John O’Brien maintains that King Coal benefitted greatly from the celebrated
Hatfield-McCoy feud because it enabled the coal and lumber companies to brand the mountain
dwellers who owned the land that those big business organisations wanted to mine as primitive
‘hillbillies’, throwbacks engaged in endless clan conflict that thwarted progress. The real problem,
he says, is the ongoing disruption of the rural communities caused by “outside ownership of land
and resources and the political corruption that results from this ...”55 He cites Simon Buckner—a
politician who, upon leaving office, became “a wealthy coal executive”— as being part of the
problem.56
King Coal, then, succeeded in having the copy masquerade as the real thing. O’Brien goes on to
detail how the Missionary Society, too, substituted the copy for the real thing with its portrayal of
America’s Christian hostile twins—the backward hillbilly with his cyclical time and emotional,
visceral response to religion at odds with the civilised Protestant whose New England religion
was a cerebral appreciation of a logical Christian God.57
The ban on short selling ended on the Thursday before the Columbus Day weekend and the
stock market went into freefall. My shingles burned more fiercely. Were the banks to collapse
we’d be stranded; and Meryn would lose her house. Were we close to the edge? The metal
platform perched out over the precipice overlooking the Pikeville Cut-Through Project presented
us with a screen mesh through which to look down upon the 8th wonder of the world—a road
where a mountain had been.
Not everyone is impressed with the outcome of the extraordinary engineering feat, though. Apart
from the fact that the highway is hemmed in by a curtain of crass Taco Bell, McDonald’s and sundry
other bad stuff billboards, the whole thing is reminiscent of that Appalachian approach to mining
whereby an operator gets at the coal seam by blowing the top off of a few mountains. I
wondered whether the avenging angel of a New Depression might swoop down upon and sweep
away all engaged in commercial vandalism?
Lunch—catfish and beans with sweet potato—at the Daniel Boone Motor Inn site diner was good
quality fare, and then the Dodge took us up and back along that part of Route 119 which had
been Cut-Through. When Dock Boggs’ blues banjo came over the airwaves again it dawned on
me that we’d spent the last few days in that corner of the state where the Kentucky River’s North
Fork rises and the Boggs family had owned property. Like some character from Faulkner’s
Sartoris saga, old man Boggs gradually sold off the farmland to some Snopesian mining company
agent during the era of Reconstruction and White Redemption. So Dock—Moran Lee Boggs,
named after the local doctor—spent most of his life working in coal mines.
Coal trucks still barrel along at break-neck speed up and down the backroads of Kentucky’s
Appalachian border country delivering loads that are picked up by conveyer belts at railroad
sidings and dumped onto passing freight trains. American song owes much to Appalachian
Mountain folk who took custody of traditional tunes carried over from the British Isles and
transformed them through hardship into precious gems.
Saturdays are invariably tricky nights to get reasonable rate accommodation and there was no
room at the Inn. So we found a motel on the internet and followed a stunning path through
dense autumn leaves toward the river that winds all around Hazard, Kentucky. It was a sting: no
mention was made of a $US12.00 booking fee so we won’t fall for that again, we said to one
another, and then recalled having been caught out twice before. That stung.
Lawlessness was part and parcel of life in the coal-mining and timber-felling communities in the Southern
Appalachian border region of West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Dock
Boggs’ eye witness account of the casual attitude to endemic violence, including murder, which he and his companions
took for granted is a disarming description of one such life.
i
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Taken in by America
‘Whatever-it-takes’ Republicans had ratcheted up their campaign to prevent ACORN—the
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now—from doing their commendable
work. Detailing the nature of the false accusations made against her organisation in a C-SPAN
interview, the woman at the helm of ACORN put the record straight, then joined the dots to
show that the motive behind the rightwing attack was simply to prevent poor people from
voting. America’s county seat system of government might have been initiated in order to extend
the vote to the common man but it stands in the way of electoral reform and, more often than
not, serves to cement the power of narrow sectional interests.
Flicking channels, we learned that officials in New York had apologised for sending out absentee
ballot papers with ‘Barack Osama’ rather than ‘Barack Obama’ as the presidential candidate. An
honest mistake. Down in Virginia, the leader of the Grand Old Party (GOP) told a Republican
rally that Obama had enough in common with Osama to give the voter pause to think: both men
had friends who’d launched terrorist attacks on the Pentagon, he said.
Sarah Palin dished up red meat to the rabid ‘low information’ voter—the Republican Party
base—asking rhetorical “Who is Barack Obama?” questions and confirming Chris Matthews’
suspicion that there was a ‘connect the dots’ strategy to portray the Democrat Candidate as a
dubious un-American contender. She regularly revved up her audiences with the accusation that
Obama had “pal'd around with terrorists” so that it came as no surprise when a base Republican,
Gayle Quinnell, told McCain and anyone watching TV that she feared Obama because “He’s,
he’s an Arab.” She might have been imitating Summer Heights High’s Jonah characterising sundry
non-alpha males as ‘poofters.’
Congressman John Lewis, one of the Freedom Riders savagely beaten by a mob of crackers in
Montgomery, Alabama, on May 20th 1961, suggested that the McCain campaign’s tactics were
akin to those employed by Governor George Wallace of Alabama.i The Obama camp distanced
itself from Lewis when white America rallied round the old Vietnam War P O W and voiced
disapproval of the comparison. Lewis had hit the nail on the head but the American’s discomfort
concerning race meant that white supremacist tactics were okay just so long as nobody
mentioned Negroes.
Hugging both banks of the North Fork of the Kentucky River, greater Hazard’s a navigator’s
nightmare as it doubles back on itself and runs around converging railroad tracks.ii The Avenger
took wrong turns as a matter of course and county seats—Manchester (Clay), Hindman (Knott),
Jackson (Breathitt)—bobbed up everywhere. Come Columbus Day, there was news that the
Australian Government had guaranteed bank deposits. The shingles still shone like shook
strawberries but the pain-killer dosage was way down. Meryn’s house was safe and we could stay
for the election and complete our fall tour.
McCain, trailing Obama in the polls, moved into “I’m a fighter” mode, with remarks such as
“We’ve got Barack Obama just where we want him,” followed by an unconvincing cheesy grin.
Hank Williams Jnr had penned and performed a song of support for the McCain-Palin ticket.
Showed a film clip of the event and asked to comment, political pundit A B Stoddard said, “In
our family we have a saying that if you complain to the point of being pathetic then you’re a
country song. So I don’t think running that is gonna help.” She was right: one fool up on the
stage was more than enough; the sight of two only added to the perception that McCain must not
be allowed to live in the White House.
At first glance London, Kentucky—Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road put it on the map in the era
of trans-Appalachian westward expansion—was more upmarket than the coal mining towns in
the mountains, more country music than folk hillbilly, the type of place where the cops were
sharp and the crooks stupid.iii A couple of down at heel drifters asked a London policeman for
directions but the officer became suspicious when he saw a mask on the back seat of their
automobile; he arrested the robbers and the townsfolk breathed easy. The miscreants had done
the crime and will do the time. The U S Treasury bought shares in nine U S banks that same day.
See above, Chapter 20 ‘Crackers’.
When William Jefferson Clinton helicoptered into Hazard, KY, on July 5th 1999, he told the 5000 strong crowd that
had gathered on Main Street to catch a glimpse of the President that “I'm here to make a simple point. This is the time
to bring more jobs and investment to parts of the country that have not participated in this time of prosperity. Any
work that can be done by anybody in America can be done in Appalachia.”
iii See above, Chapter 24 ‘Real Copy’.
i
ii
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Since finance capital invariably exploits the principle of moral hazard, the fabulously wealthy
American’s masquerade is impenetrable. Private profit, socialised losses—Reaganomics 101.
First thing Tuesday, we were at the London Stock Market. A chance event, we’d gone
Downtown in search of a diner and found a Main Street café. It would do, but with time to roam
we went further afield; an off-street trading lot caught our eye; it had the smell of rural
Pennsylvania. There were no Amish but lots of goats and hogs. More chaotic than New Holland
had been—it was every man for himself in the car park—this was a Kentucky version of the
livestock market, a Faulknerian world of pre-industrial horse trading.i Every second cracker
carried a gun, or had one in a holster if not stuck in his belt. Some carried a bow and arrows, as
seen on the hunting TV channel. Most of the gathering suffered from a poor diet, a number wore
ten gallon hats, and one man, when another told his daughter that she was “real cute” and had
“purdy eyes,” said that he had a thirty-year-old who was real cute too, that there was twenty years
between the two sisters. A couple of fellas tried to help me find Jesus with a story about Satan
worship in Devil’s Gulch or some such place. Trade was the name of the game—trinkets, socks,
chickens, ducks, hens, roosters, turkeys, rabbits, and hound dogs. The people were dirt poor, like
those we’d seen on the backroads, and proud as punch.
We looked down on the pig pens and horse corrals from an elevated walkway in an old barn. An
old man puffed smoke all over his grandson; the four or five year old boy did just as he pleased
on that outing. A diner in the downstairs corner of the barn served home made hamburgers and
soup but it wasn’t cold enough for soup yet, the lady said. We ate our meal in a cloud of cigarette
smoke and surrounded by religious signs.
The sale started at 1 pm sharp with the usual saddles, halters and assorted knick-knacks, after
which the auctioneer called for a bid of $US300.00 on the first horse. No-one was buying at that
price. Not that horse, or the next, nor even the one after that. $US50.00 was the going rate; even
a fine horse mule not appreciably different from those we saw at the New Holland stockyard in
December 2006 went for $US125.00 or thereabouts. Had the livestock market fallen with Wall
Street? The New Holland mules had fetched upwards of $US700.00 not two years earlier.
Back on Main Street, we called in at Kroger’s supermarket, and grabbed a takeout from the motel
carpark Mexican Restaurant for dinner. Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame started
out in the nearby town of Corbin. So we called in there to get the Dodge a 3000 mile oil change
up on the hoist after a picnic lunch out on the Laurel River lakes. The woman at the Firestone
service desk recognised the accent because, she said, one of the local school teachers was an
Australian who had married an American.
John McCain made a complete goose of himself in the final presidential debate so we booked a
room in Springfield, Illinois, for the election on November 4th. It might have been more exciting
to have gone to Chicago and been part of the crowd but we were thinking of Lincoln in 1860 and
the demise of the slave trade. Did those good Southern Baptists really believe that the black man
was just so much horseflesh?
i
See above, Chapter 16 ‘Joseph the Carpenter’.
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Taken in by America
Chapter 28 Transformation and Redemption
The American breaks the year up into post-agrarian blocks—the driving season, shopping
season, and so on. He’s thoroughly modern. And yet he’s moved by a pagan spirit. Once a year
he pays homage to this wellspring of his being and openly dons the mask, indulges in burlesque.
He makes his house the Grim Reaper’s home, puts on a costume, becomes a copy, and
acknowledges that it’s all for show. Commercial enterprise cleans up. Nothing would stop the
American from celebrating the fall carnival. If Meryn and I were not deceived, though,
Halloween commerce had soured somewhat from 2006 to 2008: with less than two weeks to go
to the night of overt masquerade, shoppers at checkouts said they were making do with last year’s
spider web and inflatable pumpkins.
It wasn’t just Wal-Mart. Kroger customers, too, complained about the credit crunch and grim
prospects. It had become as much the ‘Kentucky Kroger’ as the ‘fall’ tour because of the hot soup
and fresh salad on offer. Northwest from London, we went to Lebanon and might have stayed
had the Indian couple who ran the motel known what caused the internet problem. Their
indecipherable accent, and ours, made a pantomime in the shadow of an impressive staircase at
check-in but we managed. Mr and Mrs Patel and their young children lived in the Holly Hill
residence, ‘Sunnyside,’ where Confederate soldier, Tom Morgan, lay in state after being killed in
the raid on the Federal garrison at Lebanon the day after Vicksburg fell to the Federals in July
1863. The ‘Lebanese’ must have witnessed much that was incomprehensible during that terrible
war. A very religious region of Kentucky—Saints Catherine, Mary and Francis are all mentioned
in the names of surrounding towns, and Loretto, too—it’s an area where the ghosts of the past
live on, and wonders never cease. We saw a UPS van take a left outside the Lebanon Wal-Mart.
Gujurat used provide a steady stream of motel managers to the United States and we seem to
have met most of them. Bardstown had the best and the worst. We’d been there for one night in
the winter of 2007 and would have made it three or four but for having to hurry to Boston.i So
we returned. Meryn had a voucher for the motel where we’d stayed on the first visit and I went in
to ask about non-smoking, microwave, fridge, MSNBC, and so on. The desk clerk was on his
high horse and having nothing to do with would-be guests until after 2 pm. It was 10.30 am.
Could we book? No. Could we be sure to get a room? Probably.
By 11.00 am we had found a place on the old Louisville to Nashville trail; Mrs Patel who ran the
motel was willing to match the coupon rate just so long as we didn’t waste her time. No
nonsense, efficient, aware of what we’d need and immediately on the phone to her son when the
Lebanon internet problem recurred. He explained that the local motel routers assumed Windows.
We ran Mac and Linux. Twenty minutes’ jiggery pokery altering the software settings and we
were on. I explained what had happened in Lebanon. He knew the Holly Hill proprietor, of
course, and said there was no point trying to teach him the workaround. Poor Patel.
Lucky us. The Bardstown Kroger salad bar was a treat but we started off with lunch in a diner
across the street from Bardstown Booksellers. A large family group of Democrats openly discussed
Obama’s prospects. Retired couples at other tables were paying serious attention to the election
coverage on TV.
Founded by William Baird and laid out according to the standard Dixie pattern in 1785, Baird’s
Town was incorporated as Bardstown; it’s the Nelson County seat and home of bourbon
whiskey production. Connecticut Yankee, John Fitch, inventor of the steamboat, died, penniless,
in Bardstown in 1798. A model of his absurd motorised rowboat squats awkwardly in the
northeast corner of the courthouse square. In the northwest, as Meryn photographed an
historical marker about the world’s first successful amputation of a leg at the hip having been
performed in Bardstown in 1806, a fellow smoking a ten inch cigar reckoned he hadn’t seen us
around town before and so we must be visitors. He said the same thing to a woman who aimed a
camera at the not-so-architecturally sound courthouse.
A self-styled guide to all things Kentucky, our man talked about his years drawing up car designs
in Detroit and how he’d then moved to Louisville where he met his latest wife, a woman from
the backwoods. They’d decided to move to Bardstown because it was more her size, and he’d
i
See above, Chapter 22 ‘Alias the Outlaw’.
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been a local artist ever since. A purebred Yankee trader would have said as little as possible about
himself and used the time to find out about his mark but our man was the generic scallywagcum-carpetbagger, a mongrel. Smiling like a slave trader, he took us into his confidence
concerning the fear and distrust he felt at the prospect of Americans electing a president whose
best friend was a terrorist. He made no reference to race but it was the elephant in the room of
his rightwing Republican mind.
Fitch wasn’t the only Yankee to have put Bardstown on the map and die in abject poverty.
Stephen Foster’s slave-owning cousin was massa of Bardstown’s Federal Hill plantation in the
mid-nineteenth century and it suits the local Chamber of Commerce to promote the unverified
claim that the great nineteenth-century songwriter wrote ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ after visiting
Federal Hill in 1852.i The appalling treatment of slave families chronicled in Foster’s minstrel
song was gently put aside so that good white folks could, and still can, merrily sing the sanitised
version which is the Kentucky State song. Seeing double down South is something else!
Elements of the tour of Heaven Hill Bourbon Distillery made it worthwhile. We learned that
whiskey must be aged for at least two years in a charcoal lined white oak barrel before it qualifies
as bourbon but the docent was all at sea and none too inventive with her ad hoc answers to
unanticipated questions—unlike the soror mystica who initiated us into the alchemy of
transforming grain into a ruby red elixir at Maker’s Mark distillery. The expert young woman,
there, began by explaining the dark stains on distillery barrel-houses. In doing so she
inadvertently answered a question which the Heaven Hill docent had dodged. Distillation involves
a process of fermentation powered by yeast; the yeast stains the barrel-houses just as it did the
trees in the vicinity of illegal distilleries in the woods.
Bootleg; tell tale signs. Our spirit guide conducted us through the still-house where maize and
wheat are crushed and fed into cypress tubs as corn mash. A sour liquid to begin with, the broth
bubbles through a cycle of fermentation to emerge as ‘white dog,’ fresh whiskey. White dog is a
clear liquid (hooch) which stimulates the back of the palate. After a minimum of two years in the
charcoal lined white oak at the barrel-house, it acquires the characteristic flavour of bourbon that
excites the front of the palate.
Following John McCain’s poor performance in the final debate, his brother—a feisty old
aristocrat who called 9-1-1 to complain about being stuck in traffic and then told the operator to
“Fuck off” for having the temerity to point out that the emergency help line was reserved for use
by those in genuinely dire circumstances—slammed the Republican presidential campaign for
presenting his sibling as a bumbling curmudgeon. Brotherly love. CBS TV’s Bob Schieffer had
moderated the debate. His brother, Tom, a former business partner of Dubya, was U S
Ambassador to Australia from 2001 to 2005.
Chris Matthews put it to the McCain folk that their candidate had become a two-dimensional
Jekyl and Hyde copy and wanted to know which one was the real McCoy; was it the honourable
fellow who sought to take back the words accompanying the idea that the Republican campaign
had planted in Ms Quinnell’s head—that Barack Obama was an Arab, un-American—or the
cynical politician who continued to play on the low information and fundamentalist Christian
voter’s irrational fears by peddling falsehood concerning women’s health issues, and so on?
As if the twin motif wasn’t enough, the Republicans put up a counterfeit—‘Joe the Plumber’—to
try and distract a tuned-in electorate. ‘Joe,’ from Ohio, had challenged Obama on his plan to
increase taxes on those earning more than $US250,000.00, a tax hike, said Joe, that would kill his
dream of setting up a business. McCain launched into a frenzied ‘Save Joe the Plumber’
burlesque that beggared belief. Joe’s real name was Sam and he was not a licensed plumber; the
average American plumber earned between forty and sixty, not two-hundred-and-fifty, thousand
dollars. Laugh all you want, said Republican strategists, the average plumber dreams of being rich
some day. Even so, said the Democrats, their opponents were drawing a very long bow in
arguing that the American who earned $50,000.00 per annum would want taxes lowered on the
rich because he hoped to be one of them.
Joe wasn’t the right wing’s last best hope, just one of them; Ohio was a so-called battleground
state and the Republican Party launched a case to force the state authorities to compare drivers’
i
See above, Chapter 5 ‘Buncombe’.
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licence data against registered voter lists. Those who didn’t have a current driver’s licence
wouldn’t be able to vote. Now which group of voters would that be ... ?
The Florida Democrat who took (Republican) Mark Foley’s Congressional seat in the 2006
elections was now under suspicion for having had various affairs with women, one of whom was
using him to get funding for her department.i But it wasn’t enough to stem the tide. On Sunday,
October 19th, George W. Bush’s first Secretary of State, Colin Powell, called Barack Obama a
“transformational figure” on MSNBC's Meet the Press, and endorsed the African American as his
choice for president. George H Bush’s fill-in Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, appeared
on Morning Joe to endorse John McCain on the grounds of foreign policy credentials. Pat
Buchanan and Joe Scarborough lapped it up but were immediately deflated when Lawrence
O’Donnell (writer, consultant, and producer on HBO’s The West Wing) asked the old fraud how
that squared with his having endorsed Reagan against Carter and Bush against Gore. Exposed,
Eagleburger bristled, then made matters worse by saying “What’s your point?” A ‘twofa,’ as the
American likes to say. O’Donnell spelled out the contradiction in Eagleburger’s stated position,
smiling calmly all the while. A week or so later, Eagleburger called Obama a charlatan.
Gasoline was half its mid-September price when we topped up the Dodge and took a trip south,
down the old Louisville-Nashville trail, to Lincoln’s birthplace at the Sinking Springs farm site,
near Hodgenville. The National Parks Service film screened in the small auditorium was an
ahistorical mythology of Honest Abe—‘show’ business. Lincoln was born in a log cabin on
February 12th 1809, near the spring for which the location was named. We roamed through the
woods where the farm had been, made aware, by low key signage, of the native flora and the uses
to which those Kentucky pioneers put the timber and vegetation and alerted, too, to an old
wagon track still discernible despite the land having long since been reclaimed by nature.
Inaccurate surveys resulting in land title confusion on the one hand and outright fraud and
violence on the other caused many early nineteenth-century Kentucky farmers grief, Abraham
Lincoln’s parents, Thomas and Nancy, among them.ii Forced off their land, they took their fouryear-old daughter and two-year old son to another property at Knob Creek ten mile up the
Louisville-Nashville track. Meryn and I followed, and walked across the land and up the
limestone creek bed in the childhood footsteps of the future president.iii An adult Lincoln
recalled that he had nearly drowned, once, when the creek was swollen, and remembered, too,
seeing African Americans being carted south down the turnpike by slave traders. Then, just prior
to Lincoln’s eighth birthday, his father was caught up in another land title dispute and the family
migrated to Indiana.
Heading that way, too, we called in at New Haven to catch a glimpse of the commemorative
Lincoln Campaign train as it pulled up to the platform of the Railway Museum in the late
afternoon. I can find no record of Lincoln’s ever having conducted a Kentucky train campaign
but the sight of a steam locomotive coming around the bend, its lonesome sound and the smell
of burning coal, made the stop worthwhile.
Back in Bardstown, Meryn made another trip to the bookshop so I deposited an ‘in memory of
Hamilton’ sign on an out of the way shelf. Then, next morning, the Dodge went as far into
Indiana as the Falls of the Ohio where in October 1803 Meriwether Lewis had invited William
Clark to join him in commanding an expedition to explore the territory President Jefferson had
acquired from Napoleon Bonaparte in the Louisiana Purchase.iv Lewis and Clark travelled down
the Ohio and up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Missouri but we returned to Kentucky,
rented a room a few minutes walk from the River, in Louisville, and saw the sun set on a
downstream bank.
That night, Colbert covered the ‘low information voter’ with a Hummer Club spoof and in the
morning, after a Downtown river walk under an Eat at Joe’s neon, we came across our first
American alcoholic: the woman in front of us on the ‘10 items or fewer’ line at Kroger was hoping
to use her debit card for some beer she was buying but it bombed each time the checkout
operator keyed in the amount; they went all the way down to where the customer asked to try a
combination of $US2.00 on the card and the rest in cash.
See above, Chapter 9 ‘The Drifter’.
See above Chapter 22 ‘Alias the Outlaw’.
iii Kentucky’s limestone is responsible for the high quality of the water necessary for distilling bourbon.
iv See above, Chapter 18 ‘Massachusetts and Virginia’.
i
ii
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Back at the inn, Meryn, unable to access the internet, phoned Mr Patel in Bardstown to
determine what Linux settings he had altered on her laptop. None, he said, but sit tight and he’d
send his friend Vinnie, a Louisville hotelier-cum-computer-geek, to fix the problem. Vinnie came,
an authority on all things digital, the hotel game, and doing business with the American. He tried
this, and that, but made no progress. So he phoned the motel desk clerk and demanded to be put
through to the IT Department. After providing an IP address, he insisted that a ‘pass through’—
a security workaround—be created, but hung up when he got nowhere. He then phoned the desk
clerk again and asked to speak with the manager.
The manager was not available. Vinnie Patel demanded that they page him, this Ramada Inn Patel.
I pointed out that since we were leaving the next morning there was no need to create a great
fuss, that the knowledge that it was another case of internet security protocols not accounting for
Linux was enough of a solution; his having established the nature of the problem had been most
helpful but we had no desire to involve the manager. “No, no, no. In America you can’t get
anyone to do what they should even if you grab them like this,” he said, tugging his ear in a
bizarre fashion, “So you have to do this,” he explained, reaching over his head and grabbing the
other ear, “and then they understand and take action.”
By the time we had checked in at the Days Inn across the Ohio in Clark County, Indiana, next
morning, panic had set in on the Asian stock market and the Dow was down 400 points in early
trading. A young woman had created news headlines by claiming that she’d been robbed, raped,
and her face scraped by a huge black man who had taken umbrage at her ‘John McCain for
president’ car sticker. But the whole scenario was suspect, not least because a McCain campaign
organiser had pushed the story to the press. The young woman in question—quintessential
gullible mark of the low road Republican—admitted under interrogation, that she’d concocted
the whole story, that the ‘B’ for Barack which had been carved into her face was indeed reversed
because she’d used a penknife and a mirror to put it there herself. So the vigilantes had to be
called off. McCain abandoned the public pretence of praying for the young fabricator and
resumed the search for a Hail Mary pass.
Rachel Maddow interviewed Princeton University’s Melissa Harris on the subject of the ‘white
woman falsely accuses black man of ravishing her’ lynching script. Ms Harris noted that things
had changed, that whereas in the past the accused black man had no rights, this time around he
had the protection of the law. The police conducted a professional investigation; not so long ago
they would have set the mob on the nearest black man that came to hand.
Artists had moved into Downtown Jeffersonville, Indiana, (opposite Louisville, Kentucky) on the
Ohio. The Avenger reverse parked on Spring Street—by chance, right outside the local Obama
campaign headquarters. The Democrats seemed really well organised, there. I photographed the
building and its surrounds while Meryn purchased thread to darn herself a pair of socks.
Costumed school children made their way into a building across the street from Joe the
Plumber’s premises. The American makes the most of opportunity: Jeffersonville kids celebrated
Halloween while the local businessman capitalised on his Ohio namesake’s notoriety.
Reminiscent of a Chinese walled city, the town’s 20 foot high protective barrier is designed to
prevent a repeat of the type of devastation that occurred when the river burst its banks in 1937.
On the last Saturday of October, Route 62 took us through rural Indiana, past grain fields dotted
with mills to Boonville, where we'd booked a room—a rare instance of adhering to the ‘…
hosting events’ rule—at the Manor Inn.i I might have overlooked the fact that the shower was
lukewarm and that the Venetian blind fell off the architrave had the non-smoking room not been
so heavy with the smell of stale tobacco. Boonville, Warrick County seat, was shaping up to go
down as one of those towns to which I had no desire to return. Abraham Lincoln, though, did
return—covering the twenty odd mile to Boonville from the family farm near Gentryville on
foot—with law books he’d borrowed from the County Court.
The Lincolns had moved to Little Pigeon Creek, Indiana, from Knob Creek, Kentucky, when
Abraham was seven. His mother, Nancy, died two years later in October 1818 and soon
thereafter Thomas Lincoln left his children to fend for themselves while he went back to
Kentucky in search of another wife. He found one—widow Johnston. Arriving at the Indiana
i
See above, Chapter 27 ‘Mercurius at Monticello’.
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farm, the new Mrs Lincoln was dismayed to find Abraham and his sister living like the wild
animals of the surrounding forest. She became a nurturing mother and civilising influence.
Abraham Lincoln grew to manhood (he stood 6 foot 4 inches tall on his nineteenth birthday)
with an axe in one hand and a book in the other. He worked as a farm labourer—splitting rails,
planting corn, husbanding animals, etc.—but had higher ambition. His brush with the system of
monetary exchange at the confluence of the Anderson and Ohio Riversi opened his eyes to a
wider world of commerce, one made broader still by the experience of carting local merchant
James Gentry’s cargo down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans.ii
Meryn and I visited the National Park Service site of the Lincoln farm and, once again, walked in
the woods where Abe had been. There’s no bears there, now, nor panthers prowling through the
night, but something of the pioneering spirit still lingers in the whispering wind that stirs the
trees. A bride and groom tied the knot in a ceremony conducted at the memorial’s stone vault as
we drove back through the town named for Mr Gentry to a Boonville ‘restaurant.’ Meryn was
dumbfounded by the orange plastic cheese sprayed all over her meal and I fared no better with
whatever it was I had ordered. We’ll probably never go back to Boonville. And I’ve no interest in
returning to New Harmony either. The site of Robert Owen’s communitarian dream, five
minutes in that Wabash River town was enough for me. Meryn thought me too cynical at first
but she soon tired of all the Carolyn Jones types and we fled from the utopian nightmare.
Fifteen mile further down the Wabash at Mt Vernon, we lay on an America’s Best Value Inn bed
and watched TV. A commentator on MSNBC pointed out that the next president will enter the
Oval Office at a time of great crisis where a steady hand and sound judgement are required:
Washington (1789), Lincoln (1861), Roosevelt (1933), and—he was clearly thinking—Obama
(2009). Do the math. I awoke during the night with the uneasy sense that there was a third
person in the motel room.
With the election a little over a week away, the Dodge went west in accord with my wish to stand
at the famous intersection in Kansas City, Missouri, then stick my head into Jesse James’ Clay
County. A sign on the entrance to Gary’s Diner in Freeburg, Illinois, congratulated the Dwarfs.
Meryn felt sure it referred to the local football team but I reckoned the dwarf on the counter
stool opposite had a sibling or significant other. A fellow diner, Liz, was celebrating her 90th
birthday; the waitress said to the cook that each of the partygoers wanted a separate check.
The roads were eerily empty on the St Louis spaghetti. Mondays were usually as crazy as could be
with trucks and tractor-trailers but there weren’t any that Monday. It was as if the economic
collapse that would surely follow the financial meltdown was looming up in slow motion. Meryn
mentioned in passing that, as silly as it might sound to say so, there had been a ghost in the Mt
Vernon motel room.
Nightfall saw us half way across Missouri in Columbia’s Regency Hotel—on a voucher. We didn’t
know much about the Missouri University town but Meryn took one look and wanted to stay. So
we booked a second night, and then a third and fourth when the news came through that on the
Thursday Obama would be holding a campaign rally at Mizzou Campus, a few minutes walk
from our Downtown accommodation. Robert Burns was right; things don’t always turn out the
way you have ’em planned. There’d be no Twelfth Street and Vine, no Kansas City wine—not
until September 2011, at least.iii
According to a news report, a pair of Tennessee neo-nazi skinheads—an 18 and a 20 year-old
who did not necessarily have the ability to effectively plan and carry out an attack—had been
arrested for plotting to assassinate Obama. It came as no surprise, of course, but I was reminded
of the young men in Oxford, Mississippi, who had informed me that some skinheads were
planning to kill Obama.iv
Meryn drew my attention to a passage from whatever she was reading. Apologists for the U. S.
invasion of Iraq had mocked George Bush’s critics as “reality based.” David Frum, Bush’s
speechwriter (the fellow whom Rachel Maddow had recently exposed as a fraud), the text went
on, had distorted FDR’s notion of the actual WWII military alliance between Germany, Italy, and
Japan in coming up with the Administration’s ‘axis of evil’ notation to characterise an altogether
See above, Chapter 6 ‘Twin Cities’.
See above, Chapter 7 ‘The Private Eye’.
iii See below, Chapter 29 ‘Mad Men’.
iv See above, Chapter 26 ‘Ole Miss’.
i
ii
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fanciful and imagined alliance between North Korea and sworn enemies Iran and Iraq. The
American puts a premium on the copy.
Jay Leno read newspaper copy on his late night TV show. He told of a fellow who had collided
with a moose; I anticipated hearing about how the beast ploughed through the windscreen and
kicked the occupant of the car to death but his story had a different ending: the driver involved
in the collision had just left Bullwinkle’s Restaurant.i Another of his newspaper clippings concerned
a typo in a classified advertisement for a dog that was “a very good poet.” Leno, straight-faced,
said drolly, “the fact that it is a poet at all is commendable.” I daresay he found the midDecember 2008 reports that the Wall Street confidence man who embezzled $US50 billion was
Bernie Madoff, pronounced ‘Made-off,’ equally amusing.
A week before the election, on a day trip to Boonville on the Missouri River half-way between St
Louis and Kansas City, we met an African-American Vietnam Vet who’d been drafted in the 60s
and still carried war wounds. He came out to say “Hello” and invite us in while we were reading a
sign in the Obama Campaign office window about the upcoming Columbia rally. He knew his
nation’s history and appreciated that we knew it too. A grandfather, he spoke with sincerity and
knowledge about the need for change in the USA, and was proud to think that the nightmare of
Bush-Cheney might give way to the phenomenon of Barack, the first black president.
The local county Democrat Party Chairman arrived and joined in the conversation. He’d never
been politically active, he said, but at 68 years of age had had enough of Bush and Cheney and
felt it his duty to get involved and do something for his country. The American—convinced that
Lincoln was correct in his assertion that defence of the Union is one and the same as upholding
the principle of “government of the people by the same people”—is patriotic in a way that
Australians will never be. The Missouri was magnificent viewed from the bridge, its sandy banks
devoid of any superstructure and manmade ‘improvements.’
The Phillys defeated Florida in the World Series baseball, Exxon Mobil announced the highest
quarterly profit in US history, jobless claims approached half a million a week, and the US was
officially in recession. While the other Morning Joe pundits talked about the McCain legacy now
that he’d almost certainly lost, Pat Buchanan reckoned the Republican presidential candidate was
closing well and that battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania might help him over the
line. Switching to ‘analytical-romantic’ from ‘partisan’ mode, though, the conservative warhorse
went on to compare McCain’s plight to that of the Buchanan ancestors who had taken part in
Picket’s charge at Gettysburg, who had made a valiant effort to get to the top of the hill but
failed. He clung to the fantasy that McCain would have won but for the financial meltdown.
MSNBC’s Morning Joe host, the rightwing ranter Joe Scarborough, asked inner circle Democrats
to put in a word for the Scarborough kids to be invited to the White House for the Easter egg
hunt. If there’s any justice, African American families will see a White House full of black kids
come April.
Obama addressed a huge audience. Having been in Columbia three days in advance of the rally
we might have been expected to get front row seats. Instead, we were relegated to the crowded
overflow area some distance from the main arena where the presidential front-runner’s voice was
almost in synch with his big screen visage. Those with the best seats had turned up at 9 am for
the 9 pm rally; we arrived an hour and a half before the venue was to be opened and were
surprised to find a long queue five or six people deep winding its way up the street. It took us 45
minutes to walk to where we could get in line.
One had to go back almost to the Kennedy era and Beatlemania for a parallel social
phenomenon. A couple we met who had driven up from Lake of the Ozarks spoke openly about
the need for transformation. The woman, a registered Independent, said that the 2008
presidential race felt to her more like a movement than an election. She and her partner could
make no sense whatsoever of our claim that Australia is a secular society where religion has no
place in the political discourse, and none at all, either, of the suggestion that America is the land
of the free and the home of the confidence man. Do the math.
Being part of that crowd, talking to the people in that queue, was the highlight of our fall tour.
Obama sang more or less the same hit tunes we’d been hearing on MSNBC but there seemed to
i
See above, Chapter 2 ‘Seeing Double’.
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be more emphasis on the pledge to provide a college education to those who undertook some
form of national service—in the military, as a community worker, or whatever.
Rachel Maddow, meanwhile, talked to Dan Rather, a former Mizzou student, about Obama’s
closing week speeches; Mr Rather regarded them as copies of FDR’s New Deal wrapped up in
JFK’s frontier vision. That, too, I guess, but for all they had to offer Roosevelt and Kennedy still
seemed to me to be the Missouri and Ohio to Lincoln’s Mississippi.
At breakfast in the hotel foyer on the Friday the desk clerk was in conversation with a man
hidden from view who guided her step-by-step through a reasoned argument as to why she
should vote Republican. But she was having nothing of gentle persuasion. Fear drove her. What
would become of her boy were Obama to be elected? Only those who’d fought in a war would
be able to get a college education, she wailed. Jesus wept.
A black man, one of the few we’d seen in Missouri outside of St Louis and the previous night’s
‘from outa town’ crowd, challenged the hidden voice but it pressed on calmly and quietly,
explaining that the government can never do anything as well as the individual, that the desk
clerk would be much better off with President McCain, that he would leave it to her to provide
her own health care because she would do a better job of it than any government ever could. She
wasn’t listening. All she knew was that it would be a disaster if Obama got in because he’d send
her son to die in Afghanistan. I moved over to where I might take a look at the Republican, a
white man in his thirties, and sporting the usual American peaked baseball hat, front on, in the
traditional style.
We checked out and drove back east to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.
Meryn spied a bald eagle, there, from the Illinois shore. Too far off to have made much
impression on the unsophisticated camera lens, it was nonetheless impressive. We had finally
glimpsed the iconic creature in the wild—on Halloween. It was winged Mercurius, surely? A day
had not gone by when the pagan god appeared again, this time, in the form of corporeal serpent.
American alchemy. [insert 2011 visit to the headwaters]
A retired couple volunteering as docents at the superb Lewis and Clark State Memorial Park
museum, Illinois, wanted to know what we outsiders thought about their presidential election.
They liked what we said, though it was news to them that, viewed from afar, the USA is ancient
Rome in modern guise. Their eleven-year-old grandson was across most of the issues and
inspired by Obama, they said. The husband and grandfather regarded Doris Goodwin’s Team of
Rivals as one of the better books about American politics, and the northern bank of the Missouri
as offering the best viewpoint of the confluence with Big Muddy.
We were well on the way to being there when the red ball of sun rose over the mist strewn river
the next morning. But a barrier across the entrance prevented our taking the track. That’s when
we saw the snake, a copperhead. The Mississippi River never looked so good as it did that day.
We hugged the Illinois bank of that sparkling quicksilver stream then sped back down Route-100
to Alton where, at the age of the mythical hero, Abraham Lincoln had crossed that River to
defend his honour in a duel.
Anxious to get past that barrier and put one foot in the Missouri while the other stayed in the
Mississippi, we went to the northside track once more. No luck. So we returned to the Lewis and
Clark State Park hoping to see the eagle fishing for breakfast. No luck there, either, but the
friendly Park Ranger who opened the gate to let us in said that earlier in the year the river had
been 8 feet deep where we stood, 150 yards inland from the existing bank. During the 1993 flood
it had been deeper still.
Little things he said made me reassess the approach to the point where the rivers meet. The track
we’d been trying had probably been washed away or reduced to mud during the previous
summer’s flood but there might be something on the south side, I figured. We found our way to
newly laid bitumen and pulled up close to the confluence.
A man who seemed to know us well said to ask about the snakes and showed us photographs of
the slithering black serpents. A man with a cane stood at the water’s edge and pointed into the
trees. “See how that branch, there, moves,” he said, “and this, here.” They were in motion, sure
enough. ‘What about the cane?’ I wondered. The snakes climb the trees to snatch birds’ eggs
which they swallow whole; they then wrap their bodies around the trunk to crush the eggs and
extract the goodness, he explained. Meryn took up with the Riverside Moses while I wandered
down to where Lewis and Clark had set off into the wild unknown where they might perish.
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Moses’ wife of one year was on some highway astride her Honda 750 but he, a long time resident
of St Louis, did not ride pillion and preferred roaming the river bottoms. He would not vote for
John McCain and was not swayed, he said, by Barack Obama’s having drawn a crowd of onehundred-thousand to the St Louis Arch. A return to St Louis had been in our sights but the River
won out. Still, come Sunday, we drove Downtown and took the tram to the top of the Arch for a
bird’s eye view of the city that the paddle steamer had created. The so-called Gateway to the
West, that impressive arch afforded a unique perspective on Eads’ bridge—the final nail in the
coffin of the steamboat era. Three times as many people had turned out for the opening of that
bridge in July 1874 as had attended the October 2008 Obama campaign rally on near enough the
same spot.
Herman Melville invites us to look upon the confidence man down there on Missouri’s St Louis
dock.i We’d just heard the report of a Wisconsin School board that had invested its teacher
retirement fund in another of those Wall Street Ponzi schemes whose chickens had recently
come home to roost. Melville’s American leaves an indelible mark, the long-suffering victim
whose job it is to celebrate chicanery while picking up the pieces of a shattered life.
The day before the election we spent a couple of hours in the first rate visitors’ centre at the
Army Engineering Corps’ Price Lock and dam #26 on the Mississippi River just south of the
Clark Bridge then took Route 100 along the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers to our room in
Abraham Lincoln’s Springfield. The pair of bald eagles which had soared above the Avenger that
day are mere specks in our photographic record but Meryn distilled the essence of that Illinois
autumn in a work of golden thread.
First thing in the morning, Tuesday November 4th, election day, we went Downtown. There was
no atmosphere, and even the voting stations were dead. I purchased a copy of Doris Kearns
Goodwin’s tome from the Lincoln home National Parks’ Service bookshop and left a sign.58
Back at the motel we learned from MSNBC that forty percent of North Carolina’s registered
voters had cast early ballots and that the problem of long lines in Kansas City had been
exacerbated when the wrong precinct books were delivered.
According to Dan Rather, the USA was not on the precipice of history but had already passed it
with Obama’s successful campaign. Rather had believed this day would not happen in his or his
children’s lifetime. Martin Luther King, he continued, had not expected the nation would elect an
African American president within forty years of the Civil Rights Act. But Robert Kennedy had,
according to Mike Barnicle. Everyone gave President Lyndon Johnson much credit for the
historic event.
We drove north to the town of Lincoln and Meryn took photos of the Postville Courthouse
whose window dimensions she had sent her architect in mid-September. A sign on the door told
us that the building was closed for the election. That town’s Kroger did not have a salad bar so we
returned to Springfield. Meryn purchased the Interstate 55 Rest Area dispenser’s last copy of the
Chicago Tribune and banked a book-royalties cheque at the Chase Bank on the corner of Sixth and
Monroe. Lincoln’s account ledger with the Marine Insurance Bank was on display. We resorted
to the Rest Area solution when, next day, the Chicago Tribune carrying the news of Obama’s
victory sold out early.
Evening brought news that eighty percent of Virginia’s registered voters had turned out. Georgia
went to McCain, and so did Alabama. But the copy—“In Pennsylvania there’s Philadelphia in the
east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in between”—didn’t deliver and the networks called
the Keystone State for Obama. The Republicans filed a complaint. Who would have thought, but
Florida was having trouble with the voting process? MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had long since
flagged Indiana as indicative of an Obama victory so the writing was on the wall when the
Hoosier State was too close to call.
The only microwave available was in the motel foyer so we prepared our TV dinners out there
and switched the large high definition screen to MSNBC. A group of blue collar workers came in
and were staring at the talking heads, trying to make sense of it all. I told them it was more or less
over, that Obama looked like the clear winner. The youngest among them, a nineteen-or-twentyyear-old, took umbrage. “It’s not over ’til the fourth quarter,” he reminded me and anyone else
who knew what was good for them. “Too true. You’re right, of course,” I acknowledged. Then
i
See above, Chapter 7 ‘The Private Eye’.
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the senior member of the group, a man in his early forties, offered a sage assessment: “Wait ’til
the white men get home from work and go to vote. Then it’ll change back,” he said with finality.
I hoped he had no idea which room was ours, or which car.
Obama won comfortably, capping off an almost flawless campaign to become—44 years after
the Democrats had “lost the South” when LBJ signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law—the
44th American president, its first African American. The land of the free had taken a century to
honour the spirit of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and outlaw racial segregation and half
as long again to make a black citizen what the American calls the leader of the free world but it
had done so. Almost as many people as had attended the 1874 opening of the Eads Bridge in St
Louis, Missouri, crowded into Chicago’s Grant Park to celebrate the Illinois Senator’s stunning
victory.
Meryn and I might have been there but had missed the boat, opting to witness the historic event
from where it all began, in Springfield. It must have been a bittersweet occasion for those
Republicans who still see themselves as belonging to the Party of Abraham Lincoln. Many of
them had marked their ballot for the Democrat, unable to vote for McCain whose run for office
might have been characterised thus:
Few presidential campaigns in American history have been caught in a quagmire so rapidly—with
a platform so out of touch with emergent conditions, a presidential candidate so ill-suited to his
party’s philosophy and running mate, and the odds of political disaster so overwhelming.59
This was said of the Democrat campaign for the 1864 presidential election. Back then, the
Democratic Party ran on the so-called ‘Chicago Platform’ championed by the Peace Democrats,
the Copperheads, who wanted to accommodate the South and end the Civil War before the
Federals defeated the Confederacy. Which was all very well except that the candidate, George
McClellan, was a maverick, a War Democrat who sought to subdue the Rebels. The Democratic
Party was a pair of hostile twins, each one wishing for what the other had not.
A Republican Party newspaper, The Campaign Dial, sought to exploit the division in Democratic
Party ranks by accusing the Democrat bosses of subterfuge, of putting McClellan up as cover for
the Copperheads. It was a masquerade, the newspaper claimed, behind which the Democratic
Party’s true intent lay hidden:
Here are the two candidates, working in harness together, to each being delegated the duty of
entrapping the wing of the party he represents. But when the candidates are elected, then the
mask can with safety be thrown aside.60
The Campaign Dial portrayed McClellan as, on the one hand, a mercurial wizard who, having once
imagined himself “by some strange operation of magic … to have become the power of the
land,”61 sought to thaumaturgically separate the Democratic Party into its opposites while
camouflaging the division, and, on the other, a failed Union General who had been fooled by
Quaker guns, mere copies made to look real.i One-hundred-and-forty-four years later, John
McCain, maverick, made a fool of himself in mounting a two dimensional copy of the McClellan
campaign in his run against a shrewd Illinois politician. His Party, too, was composed of a pair of
warring opposites, the hostile twins “Hell, no … ” and “Yes, but … ”
On the morning after McCain’s defeat, Condoleezza Rice (a black who grew up in segregated
Alabama) said how proud she was that her country had elected its first African American
president. Another proud black woman, Michelle Bernard of the Independent Women’s Forum,
talked of how in years gone by Ms Rice’s father had been prevented from registering to vote by
the Democrats: he had failed to correctly guess how many jelly beans there were in a jar. Mr Rice
had then gone over to the Republicans, who welcomed him, and that’s how Ms Rice became a
Republican, and the USA’s 66th Secretary of State.
America had effected another characteristic ‘all things new’ transformation. Whether or not it
moves beyond the Reagan era of deploying Evangelical Christianity to the dubious end of freeing
capitalism from restraint remains to be seen. Lewis Lapham chides Thomas Friedman for a naïve
conception of the real American as being governed by the Puritan ethic. He scoffs at Friedman’s
call for his compatriots to return to the glory days of hard work and saving because, says
Lapham, there never was such an era. When has the American ever “preferred hard work to the
fast shuffle and the artful dodge, the bird in the hand to the five in the bush?”62 When, that is to
i
See above, Chapter 8 ‘The Buzzard’.
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say, was America ever governed by other than the Roman god of trade, commerce, and profit,
Mercurius the trickster of medieval philosophy?
We left Springfield two days after the election and drove in light rain for many miles past halfharvested cornfields to a diner just off Exit 227 on Interstate 55 North. Off with the fairies from
driver fatigue, I ordered bacon, eggs and hash browns then sat entranced by the sight of another
Illinois dwarf, a male this time, at the counter. Had the transposition of Graeco-Roman deities
across the Atlantic to the New World begun to go beyond mere story-telling? Had Castor and
Pollux, the Gemini twins who protected ancient mariners and been associated with hooded dwarf
gods, the Dioscuri, Cabiri, and so on, come ashore? On the Great Lakes? God forbid that
Hamilton was waiting to repossess my spent psyche.
It all comes down to the point of view. Meryn, for instance, having discovered that there is
indeed a ‘Dwarfs’ sporting team in one of the Illinois counties, did not see the young man in
question, even when he climbed down off the stool then went and played in the yard outside the
window. Those who, like Friedman, situate the American within the traditional frame as a work
of Judeo-Christian monotheism will dismiss as iconoclast anyone who reckons on Trickster to
contend with in any approach to the land of the free. What you see is what you get.
Presidential candidate Obama’s overt referencing of Abraham Lincoln had been downplayed to
some extent but when—as if to draw attention to Constance Rourke's astute observation that the
American places a premium on the copy—the president-elect appointed Rahm Emanuel as
Whitehouse Chief of Staff, the role which The West Wing’s Josh Lyman finally attained, the cat
was out of the bag. The fictional TV character of Josh Lyman was based on Rahm Emanuel.
Real-copy-real interplay did not end with the uncanny parallels between The West Wing and
Obama phenomenon. The new Administration is re-running JFK’s Camelot, planning a reprise of
FDR’s stimulation package, and, with Hillary Clinton playing the part of William Seward, taking a
leaf from Doris Goodwin’s Team of Rivals.
The American is at home with the notion of an historical cycle of redemption whereby the
president of the day identifies with great presidents of the past. The fact that the first African
American president’s first big outing following the inauguration will be to preside over the
nation’s celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Great Emancipator, Abraham
Lincoln, will only serve to emphasize the degree to which the American inhabits a myth—that of
the trickster.
Abraham Lincoln, the backwoodsman who was transformed into the brave hero who gave his
life to preserve the Union, made his way to the top by applying the principle of sweet commerce.
Observing, early on, the effect that his father’s facility to entertain had on traders who passed by
the Knob Creek farm on the Louisville-Nashville pike, he put himself in the other man’s place,
saw things from the opposite point of view, in telling tall tales to and playing practical jokes on
the frontier folk of Indiana and Illinois.
Inadequate windscreen wipers on the Avenger made the arrival in Chicago that much more tricky
in the pouring rain but we reached the Days Inn in one piece. The locale, vaguely familiar, turned
out to be where we’d stayed—at Motel 6 on the corner of Busse Road and Oakton Street, Elk
Grove Village—for our first night of car rental travel in 2005. Even so, being near the perimeter
of O’Hare Airport somehow made finding our way around all the more confusing. We drove
Downtown—the exquisite sight of the metropolis looming up from Exit 45 on Interstate 90 an
experience in itself—and made our way to Hyde Park on the South side. The Obama residence, a
magnet, now, for celebrity spotters and history buffs alike, was cordoned off, of course.
America’s only fairytale first family since the Kennedys, the Obamas had attained Hollywood
celebrity status and we had gone along for the ride with all the other middle-aged groupies.
Abraham Lincoln hadn’t come to town for the 1860 Republican Party Convention, but the fact
that it was staged in Chicago played no small part in his receiving the nomination, facilitating, as
it did, the production of counterfeit entry tickets to that Convention for the Illinois candidate’s
supporters. As Edward Bates (the contender from St Louis, Missouri) noted in his diary, “the
nomination of Mr Lincoln ... was brought about by accident or trick … ”63
Lincoln had played a vital role in determining the outcome of the Republican Party’s choice of
venue. Masquerading as a bumpkin with little to offer as a candidate, the Rock Island Railroad
bridge lawyer had his representative—another railroad man—on the selection committee put
Chicago forward as neutral ground where each of the candidates for the Republican nomination
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Taken in by America
“would have an even chance.”64 Persuaded by the argument that the Convention should be
staged in a western frontier town, the committee came down to making a final choice between St
Louis and Chicago, and gave it to Chicago by a single vote.
“Concealed from his rivals, Lincoln had taken an important step toward the nomination.”65 His
railroad man, Norman Judd, arranged for cheap train fares so that Lincoln’s Illinois supporters
could afford to travel to Chicago and use those counterfeit tickets to gain entry to the
Convention. Then, with the mask still firmly in place, Lincoln wrote a biographical sketch of his
life as a backwoodsman on the proviso that “it must not appear to have been written by myself”
and the myth of the rail-splitter was born.66
After the groupie thing at Hyde Park we took an hour or more over lunch in the Greek-style
diner close by the University of Chicago’s International House (where we’d stayed for a few days
during our first visit to the windy city in March 2000). They’d maintained the high standard
through those eight-and-a-half years. From there to Reverend Wright’s Church on 95th Street was
20 minutes and a world away. We went for a drive-by of the place where the president-elect had
worshipped with the community he’d chosen to serve. But Obama had been forced to disown his
colourful pastor when the rightwing stirred up white hysteria over a video of Wright’s histrionic
performance concerning the nation’s chickens having come home to roost on nine-eleven 2001.
Obama defused that time-bomb set to derail his bid for the White House with sure-footed
confidence.
Masquerade, confidence, burlesque—the hallmarks of the American. We happened to reach the
church as the African American congregation poured out onto the street. It was the first Sunday
after the election and the people, Obama’s community, were out in style—a fairytale end to our
two month fall tour.
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Chapter 29 Mad Men
At O’Hare in November 2006 it had been Immigration. Now it was the other twin—Customs.
That I had nothing to hide that mid-September Friday in 2011 had to be seen to be believed and
to that end the official representative of the United States Government at Dallas-Fort Worth
International Airport assigned to my case had strewn its contents all over Paul Simon’s “little
room.” An inauspicious arrival, to be sure, but compensated for by the competence of the honest
broker we paid to take us to the Dallas Sheraton, Downtown, where Meryn had ‘Pricelined’ us a
room for the weekend. Honesty, there, was of the professional variety.
Strolling the streets on the Saturday, we suddenly came upon what everyman and his dog knows
as the Texas School Book Depository building. Yes we knew that Dealey Plaza was in Dallas but
stumbling upon (as against setting out for) the famous landmark made it eerie. Any sense of
unworldliness soon vanished, though, when we saw the tourists taking turns to stand on the spot
where President Kennedy had been shot, to peer up at the sixth floor window where the assassin
had waited with his rifle, to measure the distances between the sacred spot and various locations
from where eye-witness accounts had come, and to purchase ahistorical paraphenalia peddled by
conspiracy theorists at the edge of the grassy knoll. We followed the crowd into the Sixth Floor
Museum now situated in what had been the Book Depository building. There’s nothing
ahistorical about that. If you ever go to Dallas it’s worth the two or more hours it takes to tour
the exhibits.
Walking away from the Plaza, west along Elm where the presidential limousine had sped to the
hospital, I looked back at the Depository half-expecting to see the Hertz advertising sign that had
dominated the November 22nd 1963 scene. Madmen. It’s all Apple advertisements nowadays, of
course, American automobile manufacture no longer being the flagship of industrialization but a
mere subset of digital age technology. Which is not to suggest Meryn and I would make-do
without a motor vehicle while travelling around the USA: it’s the only way to go. And for this
trip—an eight-week run around the Louisiana Purchase with Idaho, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico
and Texas thrown in—we had booked with Hertz because its Priceline deal trumped those
offered by the previously competitive Thrifty and Enterprise rental car companies.
President Thomas Jefferson—acting upon his conception of the fledgling United States as
destined to grow into a nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and held
together by liberty—had purchased the land between the Mississippi River and Rocky Mountains
in 1803 then provisioned Lewis and Clark to journey northwest up the Missouri River and report
what they found.i
We collected a Chevrolet 4D Cruze from Hertz’ Downtown Dallas office (located in a building
with Apple emblazoned all over it) in readiness for our Louisiana Purchase journey. Before leaving
town, though, we contrasted the tall talk of the Texas Governor, Rick Perry, about the evil of
government intervention in the economy with the fact of the superb light-rail public transport
system that services the citizens of Dallas: we boarded the tram and rode it out to the suburbs,
alighting at Fair Park, site of the 1936 World’s Fair. The fairground’s Art Deco facades hark back
to the Great Depression era of government for the people. And, judging by the number of
families with whom we shared a Sunday afternoon there, Fair Park continues to respond to a
community need, just as the Interstate Highway answers the call of commerce and caters to the
corporation.
Departing Dallas on the Monday, we were unceremoniously launched into 65 mph lane swaps
that sorted the quick and the dead amid the soaring pylons of the most amazing spaghetti we’d
yet encountered. Though the Chevrolet didn’t miss a beat we weren’t yet firing on all cylinders
and failed to find a diner, settling instead for a restaurant that had run out of eggs and coffee.
Denison was first cab off the rank when it was time to scout around for the first motel of the trip
but we weren’t satisfied and so crossed the dry bed of the Red River into Oklahoma, carried on
until Durant (tribal headquarters of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) and checked in at the
Days Inn. That we’d still not found the groove was evidenced by the fact that a railroad ran past
our room in the back yard of the motel. On previous visits we’d grown accustomed to the
i
See above, Chapter 18 ‘Massachusetts and Virginia’.
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Taken in by America
mournful sound of a train in the near distancei but had never felt before the visceral impact of a
freight train rolling down the line with a resounding ongoing crunch, screeching out an urgent
warning to someone, somewhere.
A fine, dry crisp blue sky put us in a good mood on the morning of our first full day on the road,
travelling northeast on Route 69. The first diner for the trip—at Checotah—was a good one and
the first shopping expedition, for heel balm, a hairbrush, and cash-out at a K-Mart in Muskogee
made clear that this was America: there were two full rows of car parking for the impaired; the
first person we saw was in a wheelchair, the next was a small man who wore a cowboy shirt and a
ten gallon hat and a daughter was tsk, tsking her mother as the latter manoeuvred awkwardly
from a gopher into the front passenger seat of an automobile.
We stayed in Tahlequah that Tuesday night and, still finding our feet, paid too much for
accommodation at Oak Hill Inn and Suites. Meryn, though, soon found a way to format the
PriceLine login for an android pad and thereafter we could use McDonald’s free Internet to find
a clean room with a fridge and microwave at an affordable rate of around $50 per night. That,
together with a camera, phone, clothes-detergent, and TV dinners from Wal-Mart put us in a
position to make the most of any circumstance—the one drawback being that one had to adopt
the doubting Thomas technique to determine whether or not a motel had MSNBC.67
Next day, the Chevrolet cruised along Highway 10, the scenic route to the Oklahoma Wyandotte
Nation’s tribal headquarters—a small town in that State’s northeast. Meryn sent her grandson a
postcard of the Indian Chief and my accent caused a mild sensation at the gas station. The
American invariably says he’s enamoured of the sound we Australians make but it’s politeness,
surely? That postcard may be one of the last photographs of Chief Bearskin sent from the
Wyandotte Post Office because a Congressional impost on the operation of the US Postal
Service makes closure of thousands of such offices inevitable.
I saw no-one atop a telegraph pole that northern autumn equinox of 2011, nor on any other day.
Even if I had, there’d be no million selling song to show for it—as was the case when Jim Webb
noticed a solitary lineman while driving through rural Oklahoma in 1968. Whether or not he was
en route to Wichita at the time I cannot say but, having entered Kansas’ southeastern corner
soon after lunch, Wichita’s where we came to rest an hour as the sun was sinking low. We
checked in to the clean motel room Meryn had secured for less than $50.00 per night and then
went to look at the corner-block house Frank Lloyd Wright had designed for Henry and Elsie
Allen in 1915. Dusk lent an added dimension to the experience as we examined the architectural
landmark from the east, then the north, east, north, and so on, searching for the right angle.
Another Wright aficionado arrived just as darkness fell. Cut from the same cloth as Leo, our
North Carolina friend, the fellow was full of boyish excitement at the simple pleasure of being
there outside that house while fondly recalling having once sat in the original furniture of another
Wright house. Having come down from the north, he told the story of Ziolkowski’s life work
carving the (as yet incomplete) statue of Crazy Horse in the Black Hills of Dakota.
If Webb’s lineman and Wright’s architecture are exemplars of American exceptionalism, the
Lafferty brothers highlight the American’s tolerance for an exceptional degree of violence. Ron
and Dan Lafferty were fundamentalist Mormons who took Brigham Young’s notion of
exceptionalism to its logical conclusion. Young, the so-called prophet who guided the Church of
Latter-day Saints from 1847 to 1877 instilled in his followers the notion that Mormons should lie
and steal, ignore the rule of law that underpins government of the people, by the people, for the
people, and exact blood atonement from fellow citizens of the United States whom those Saints
believed had acted contrary to God’s laws, which laws He privately reveals to individual
Mormons on a whim.
In March 1984 Ron Lafferty honeymooned in Wichita, Kansas, with his ‘spiritual wife’. Then, in
May of that year he set out on a road trip around the American West with his brother, Dan; the
brothers discussed Ron’s having been told by God that it was His divine will that Ron’s estranged
lawful wife, Brenda Lafferty, be slain. The siblings needed time apart to meditate upon the
revelation, each one assessing whether or not it was in fact divine in origin. They split up,
agreeing to meet in Wichita the following month. And so it was that in that time and place the
Lafferty brothers concluded that God had spoken; they murdered Brenda Lafferty and her infant
i
Near Amarillo in 2007, for example. See above, Chapter 22 ‘Alias the Outlaw’.
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daughter on July 24th 1984. The genesis of that ritual bloodbath lies at the heart of the story of
the opening up of the American West, the land we had just set out to find on our road trip.
Another clear, blue sky accompanied us across a flat Kansas prairie to the Wild West’s citadel of
violence—Dodge City. Like most American towns west of the Mississippi River, Dodge City
sprouted in the era of railway expansion. The railroad was the sine qua non of the opening up of
the American West: prior to the arrival of the Iron Horse at the edge of the Mississippi River in
the 1850si, the territory Jefferson acquired by the Louisiana Purchase was almost exclusively
virgin land68, a world in which Audubon might have thrived.
Railroad construction was the trail-blazer of America’s post Civil War industrial boom. A less
obvious but nonetheless significant legacy of that war was the prevalence of firearms on the
frontier; the ubiquitous gun engendered the “Shoot first, ask questions later … ” mentality of the
Wild West—and Dodge City will be forever associated with that primitive outlook.
Originally named Buffalo City, it started out in June 1872 as a sod and board saloon at the
intersection of the increasingly crowded Santa Fe Trail with the 100th meridianii to serve whiskey
to soldiers, hunters and pioneers. The soldiers were from nearby Fort Dodge; the buffalo hunters
slaughtered bison out on the range then brought their hides to ‘catch’ the passing wagon trains;
the pioneers were westward bound along the Santa Fe Trail. Three months after the saloon
opened, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad reached Dodge City and displaced the wagon
train; mountains of hides lined the tracks, ready to be despatched back east. But the buffalo trade
had no future—the bison having been hunted almost to extinction by 1878—and Dodge might
never have become the ‘Babylon of the Plains’ had it not been for the cowboy.
In the 1850s, Texas longhorns had been herded north along the Shawnee Trail to the
southeastern corner of Kansas but the Civil War had interrupted the trade and longhorn droving
did not resume until the late 1860s. When it did, quarantine laws denied the longhorn access to
Kansas east of Wichita. So the cowboys drove the cattle north along the Chisolm Trail.iii When,
in 1876, the Kansas legislature extended the longhorn quarantine line further west, the Atchison,
Topeka & Santa Fe railroad was there to collect the livestock and, conveniently located on that
line, Dodge City became the focus of the cattle trade and gave the Santa Fe railroad a virtual
monopoly of the business.
The longhorns were shipped out upon arrival; not so the cowboys: cashed up and fancy-free,
they were prey to every type of trickster—from cardsharp gamblers and confidence men to
saloon proprietors and brothel operators.iv And so it was that Dodge City became synonymous
with Wild West lawlessness, the gunfighter its enduring symbol. The American is enamoured of
the outlaw, we know, but only insofar as there’s a protagonist who seeks to bring him down.
Dodge City’s lawmen during the 1870s—Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and so on—became as
much the stuff of legend as Billy the Kid, John Wesley Hardin, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid.
Kansas banned the longhorn trade in 1885 and Dodge City settled down to become just another
place in the middle of nowhere—which we drove into after passing a massive chemical complex
on the outskirts of town. Back then, in the Wild West era, the cattle were shipped to the meat
markets in the east; nowadays, the cattle are slaughtered and processed in Dodge City’s own meat
packing plant—the plant that we had taken to be a chemical factory.
One hundred years after the real Dodge City had attained notoriety for violent lawlessness, its
leading lights elected to have remnants of the 1870s architecture torn down so that today the
nondescript town is reliant on references to the Hollywood copy of the cowboy town with
nothing but a few manhole cover tributes to actors like Errol Flynn and Olivia de
Havilland from the 1939 movie, James Arness from the Gun Smoke television series, and so on.
We walked up Boot Hill—site of the cemetery where those who died with their boots on (i.e.,
violently) had been buried—and I left a sign in honour of Hamilton.
See above, Chapter 6 ‘Twin Cities’.
America’s east-west dividing line. See below, Chapter 30 ‘Coyote’; the Santa Fe Trail followed the Arkansas River at
this point so Dodge City is located where the Arkansas River intersects the 100 th meridian.
iii Named after Jesse Chisolm, the Cherokee trading post proprietor, as distinct from the ‘Chisum Trail’ named for John
Chisum, the New Mexico cattle baron. See above, Chapter 21 ‘Two Tricks’.
iv Railroad men visiting Dodge City brothels inadvertently gave rise to the term ‘red light district’ because they took
their caboose lanterns with them when they visited the prostitutes.
i
ii
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We asked the attendant at the tourism booth where the contemporary lawmen dined but she was
not in on the secret and directed us instead to the pancake café on Wyatt Earp Boulevard where
her husband and his buddies ate. Breakfast, there, had been slowly cooked to a crisp in the bain
marie and the whole experience would have been a waste but for the arrival of an effusive
Englishman who’d come to see an old acquaintance only to find the fellow had died four months
earlier. Our Englishman was overcome by and never stopped talking about the courteous
warmth and helpfulness of the American. He’d had the same trouble with Amtrak that had
driven us to rent an automobile for travel in the USA: arriving in town in the wee hours, he was
at the mercy of whomever happened to meet the train. Like Meryn and me when we had ‘detrained’ in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, at some godforsaken hour in 2004, his cab driver was
mindful of the train traveller’s plight.
The railroad is a prominent feature of Kansas. High demand for beef in the immediate aftermath
of the Civil War made it worthwhile for Texas cattlemen to drive their longhorns north to the
Missouri rail yards for swift transport to Chicago’s meat packing district. But in order to do so
they had to negotiate homsteaders’ fences in eastern Kansas. In the summer of 1866 thousands
of Texas longhorns were stranded, there, on the edge of the settled region of Kansas. The
mother of invention saw Joseph McCoy seize the opportunity to circumvent the problem: he had
a surveyor flag a path from the Arkansas River due north to the Kansas Pacific Railroad at
Abilene, where he had a stockyard and hotel built. Henceforth, drovers took their longhorns up
the Chisolm Trail from the Red River, along the Arkansas River, through the Wichita trading
posts and across the lush, open prairie to meet the railway and be shipped to market in Chicago.69
The expansion of the Kansas Pacific Railroad west beyond Topeka, then, had set in train the
cowboy era. But, as we’ve already learned, within a few years after that the Atchison, Topeka &
Sante Fe Railroad had all but monopolised the cattle trade. Once their track reached Newton,
Kansas, (twenty-five miles north of Wichita) in 1871, there was no need for longhorns to walk
the 75 additional miles to Abilene. Meryn and I left the Dodge City pancake café and drove
northeast for Newton, noting with admiration the steel toilet blocks at the Rest Area on Route
50. She Pricelined a discount rate at the Red Coach Inn on East First Street and we checked in
on the evening of the day we had left Wichita for Dodge, a round trip of 330 miles shadowing
railroads through rust hued prairie.
Knowing from experience that Friday and Saturday night accommodation comes at a premium,
Meryn booked the next two nights at Overland Park’s Extended Stay Deluxe on the Kansas
outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri. The room was luxurious, very reasonably priced at less-than$50-per-night, but lacked that most basic requirement—MSNBC; just as soon as a competitor of
PriceLine includes that option on their online booking form we will shift allegiance. Three whole
nights without Rachel Maddow et al is too high a price. More distressing still, UP with Chris Hayes
was only in its second week. America without MSNBC is like fish and chips without salt.
There’s no comparison between criss-crossing the Sunflower State in a rental car and, say,
walking around Manhattan but I’d put Kansas ahead of Texas on any itinerary. The grain
growing region’s golden grass prairie covers-up what the Lone Star State cannot—miles of flat
earth. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, on the other hand, exposed the fact that America is a
pair of warring twins.i
Railroads had been expanding inexorably westward and when the tracks reached the Mississippi
River in 1854 the pressure was on to open up more of the Louisiana Purchase lands to
settlement; i.e., to force Native Americans off their tribal lands and allow homesteaders to fence
it in. Dispossessing the indigenous people would be the easy part, the ultimate challenge that of
reconciling the competing interests of slave and non-slave states. Senator Stephen Douglas of
Illinois stitched up the deal that resulted in the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act by securing
the support of David Atchison of Missouri—spokesman for the Southern states.
Douglas had purchased Atchison’s vote in return for repeal of the legislation that had limited
slavery to the regions south of latitude 36° 30’. Whether or not Kansas would be a slave state or
free, then, would come down to a vote of the people who’d settled there. So Northerners stacked
the territory with anti-slave state settlers whilst Southerners did likewise with pro-slavery folk.
Sizing up the situation in the time-honoured fashion of his type, Senator Atchison rode with 800
i
See above, Chapter 18 ‘Massachusetts and Virginia’.
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Southern militia to attack Kansas’ anti-slavery town, Lawrence, in 1856, teaching the Northerners
a lesson in real politik and tipping the balance toward all out war between Massachusetts and
Virginia in the process.i
Meryn and my trip to Lawrence put flesh on the bones of the ’til then abstract understanding of
Kansas as America’s archetypal state. That visit coincided with an alumni basketball game so the
students—and their parents—were out in force, filling up the cafes, celebrating in the streets, and
being hail fellow, well met to everyone. We were strolling along the crowded Massachusetts Avenue
sidewalk in search of a suitable diner when a woman walked up to us out of the blue and said “I
just wanted to tell you that you’re a handsome couple.” She must have thought we needed
bucking up, being so unattractive and all, there, in our travel attire when most everyone else was
all decked out in Jayhawks sportswear.
Massachusetts Avenue’s Eldridge Hotel was more our thing—because it had been built on the
site of where the Free State Hotel had stood until burnt down by Senator Atchison’s pro-slavery
Kansans in 1856. As the name implied, the Free State Hotel accommodated anti-slavery settlers
who’d migrated from New England. It had been built by the New England Emigrant Aid Society
in 1855 and was an obvious target for the violent pro-slavery Southern militia.
The anti-slavery New England migrant, Colonel Shalor Eldridge, rebuilt the hotel and Quantrill’s
bushwhackers set fire to it when they destroyed Lawrence and murdered its male population on
August 21st 1863, clubbing or stabbing the victims to death in front of their womenfolk in order
to right all wrongs done to the Confederate cause. The colonel restored the building, naming it
the Eldridge Hotel, and it stood until 1926, when it was again rebuilt.
Meryn chose a place for bacon and eggs and we whiled away an hour watching the American
make much of a favourite pastime—eating breakfast with friends on Saturday morning. “I’m
going to Kansas City,” I sang, once we were out of there, and drove Downtown, to the corner of
Twelfth Street and Vine where, in the 1920s and ’30s, jazz music legends such as Count Basie,
Big Joe Turner, Pete Johnson and Lester Young (the multi-talented horn player who had dubbed
Billie Holiday ‘Lady Day’) had performed for their hometown audience. The gambling joints,
brothels and jazz clubs having long since gone, I posed for a photograph at the crossroads and
left a sign in the memorial piano park.
The Missouri River town of Kansas City had been home to thousands of African Americans
since the 1870s. Back then, it had become clear to disaffected former slaves in the cotton belt
that they would be in much the same boat post-war as they’d been during the Antebellum era so
they went elsewhere in search of the fabled Promised Land—many of them moving as far from
the Deep South as they could on the available transport: they boarded steamboats that chugged
north up the Mississippi to the Missouri River then west to the Kansas border.ii
A strange form on the Kansas City skyline had continued to intrigue us so we worked our way
through the one-way streets until it—the Kauffmann Performing Arts Center—loomed up out
of the streetscape. We parked next to the novel structure and went to take a look. Photographers
lay on the ground, stood on park benches, and twisted spines in efforts to snap (what turned out
to be the brand new) building from the ideal angle. We were conducted through the vestibule to
a vast steel and glass wall that stood at the edge of a green field; pristine front of house staff
prepared to dance attendance on the patrons about to burst forth from one of the auditoria
during an orchestral performance intermission.
Meryn struck up a conversation with a mother and son who’d come to see the landmark. It had
opened the week before, the woman told us, and was the talk of the town. She was from
Lawrence, Kansas, we learned, and her son had obtained a degree in architecture at the university
there before leaving home to move to Overland Park. Meryn and the son discussed Moshe
Safdie’s quirky but effective design before we slipped into the inevitable explanation of how we’d
come to be there, of our endless fascination with and extensive tours of their country. The young
architect was intrigued by the notion that the work of a contemporary American artist shapes our
travel itinerary and tried to catch us out by asking “Well, have you ever been to H… ?” We had.
William Quantrill’s bushwhackers attacked Lawrence, Kansas, on August 21st, 1863, killing every male resident that
they could. They executed these men and boys, clubbing or stabbing their victims to death in front of their
womenfolk stealing valuables and burning houses to the ground in order to right all wrongs down to the Confederate
cause.
ii See above, Chapter 20 ‘Crackers’.
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Taken in by America
On Sunday, September 25th, we went north from Kansas City to St. Joseph, Missouri, where I left
a sign at the site of the house Jesse James had been renting when Robert Ford shot him dead on
April 3rd 1882. The small timber dwelling has since been relocated to the grounds of the nearby
Patee House Museum. A grand hotel serving as a gateway to the west in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, The Patee House was the headquarters of the Pony Express that had
despatched mail across the western frontier to Sacramento, California, from April 3rd 1860 until
October 1861 (when the telegraph rendered the Pony Express obsolete).
John Patee had his luxury hotel built in readiness for the completion of the Hannibal and St
Joseph Railroad in 1859. St Joseph is due west of Hannibal, Missouri, the Mississippi riverbank
town where Samuel Clemens (alias Mark Twain) had spent his boyhood.i But in order to ship
their products to the Missouri riverbank fur-trading post of St Joesph in the steamboat era,
Hannibal’s traders had to take the long route south down the Mississippi to St Louis then up
around the bend in the Missouri to the final destination. An ‘as-the-crow-flies’ railroad running
due west from their town directly to St Joseph was the obvious solution from the point of view
of the Hannibal business fraternity—especially after the California Gold rush began in 1849. To
that end the businessmen met regularly in the office of the local justice of the peace, John
Clemens (Twain’s father), in the hope of getting a piece of the action supplying the fortune
hunters streaming west.
Railroad construction was still in its infancy in the 1840s; the paddle-steamer remained the major
form of transportation. Would-be players would have had to raise staggering sums of money upfront—to finance surveys, land acquisition, timber, iron, etc. Then, in September 1850, Congress
made a land grant to the Illinois Central Company so that it might raise money (by selling that
land to people who’d settle it) to build a railway from Chicago to the confluence of the Ohio and
Mississippi rivers.ii A good idea in principle, the land grant became the foundation stone of the
greed and corruption that characterised what Twain called ‘The Gilded Age’ of post Civil War
America.
The Hannibal & St Joseph Railroadiii company was formed in John Clemens’ office in 1846 but
he had died of pneumonia by the time the directors of the Hannibal & St Joseph had secured their
land grant. Instigating the novel technique of laying tracks westward from Hannibal and
simulataneously eastward from St Joseph, the Hannibal & St Joseph joined the Mississippi and
Missouri River townships in February 1859 then celebrated the fact with a golden-spike driving
ceremony and mixing of the waters from the two rivers in Chillicothe, Missouri, nine days later,
on Washington’s Birthday.
At that time, twenty-four year old Samuel Clemens had realised a boyhood dream of life on the
Mississippi River by qualifying as a steamboat pilot. That same year saw the formation of the
Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad which would follow the Santa Fe Trail southwest from
the Missouri River town of Atchison but its directors did not get their land grant until March
1863, at the height of the Civil War. The outbreak of war had interrupted railroad expansion and
so the Santa Fe railroad did not reach Newton, Kansas, until 1871. A few years afer that, though,
it had, we already know, a monopoly on the cattle trade centred in Dodge City, Kansas. The Civil
War had also put an end to Mississippi River commerce and, with it, Samuel Clemens’ career
piloting steamboats. He went to St Joseph and took a stagecoach from there to California.
Meryn and I went looking for a diner but failed to find one. When I asked a local supermarket
employee where the cops ate, an elderly man recognised the bizarre accent that had startled the
young woman and came to help. He directed us to the Hy-Vee. Impressed with the breakfast and
the St Joseph Hy-Vee staff, we took the Interstate 29 north overlooking the Missouri River, still
in flood from the spring thaw. Yet-to-be-completed repairs to the interstate highway had us
taking a thirty-mile detour around Council Bluffs, Iowa, the place where Abraham Lincoln had
been allocated a plot of land for his non-too-commendable military service fighting the Black
Hawk War.iv With a view to realising a profit from his land holding, he visited Council Bluffs in
See above, Chapter 18 ‘Massachusetts and Virginia’.
Scene of the seminal event in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn when Huck and Jim get lost in the fog and drift south down
the Mississippi instead of following their intended path northeast up the Ohio River.
iii See above, Chapter 7 ‘The Private Eye’, for Detective Pinkerton’s use of the Hannibal & St Joseph Railroad in his
quest to capture the notorious outlaw, Jesse James.
iv See above, Chapter 19 ‘The Poker Night’.
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the summer of 1859. Whether or not the future president timed his trip to coincide with that of
Grenville Dodge, the two men stayed at the same hotel and, according to Dodge’s later
testimony, Honest Abe obtained much information about the land surveys he (Dodge) was
conducting for Henry Farnam of the Rock Island and Mississippi Railroad.i
Implicit in any plan to lay railway track west from the Missouri River was the belief that it would
form part of a transcontinental railroad. Moreover, it was generally understood that the Hannibal
& St Joseph would form the Mississippi River to Missouri River link. Indeed, when he waved off
the Pony Express’s first rider, Johnny Fey, in 1860, the Mayor of St Joseph expressed the view
that the iron horse would soon thereafter leave St Joseph to cross the frontier hot on the Pony
Express’s heels. That’s not what happened, of course: Fey enlisted in the Union Army and was
killed fighting in the South while the Mayor commanded Confederate cavalry raids against the
Hannibal & St Joseph Railroad.
Together with Confederate attacks on that Missouri railroad, Quantrill’s Bushwhackers—Col
Younger and Jesse James’ older brother, Frank, among them—created enough anti-Union
mayhem throughout the Missouri-Kansas border regionii to guarantee Congress would not
approve a westward bound railroad extending from any town in the State of Missouri; it would
have to be based in some township on the Missouri River’s Iowa-Nebraska border. According to
the Act, this railway track (and accompanying telegraph line) would be built by the Union Pacific
Railroad Company on that border from a point “to be fixed by the President of the United
States”; the Act also authorized the Central Pacific company to construct a railroad to the eastern
boundary of California, the two railway tracks to meet, in due course, somewhere on America’s
western frontier.
The Pacific Railroad Acts, the first of which President Abraham Lincoln signed on July 1st 1862,
designated Council Bluffs-Omaha as the point on the Missouri River to be the eastern terminus
of the Union Pacific Railroad. Following established precedent, land grants were the means by
which the dauntingly expensive infrastructure was to be financed. In fact, land grants became the
means by which the first batch of Gilded Age robber barons made their fortune.
William J. Palmer, the Quaker who built the Kansas Pacific railroad and inadvertently gave birth
to the American cowboy,iii had recognised early on that the way to make big money in the USA
was to gain the confidence of capitalists. To that end, he had convinced financiers in
Philadelphia, New York and Great Britain that the best investment was in the American West.
While building the Kansas Pacific, Palmer had learned the important lesson that “more capital
could be collected from organizing land companies, laying out towns, and selling lots than from
the railroad itself. That the towns might wither and die for lack of any economic base was of no
concern … ”70 Herein lay the means by which Mercurius supplanted indigenous Trickster and
manifested as the spirit destined to govern the whole nation.
See above, Chapter 6 ‘Twin Cities’.
See above, Chapter 18 ‘Massachusetts and Virginia’.
iii See above, Chapter 29 ‘Mad Men’.
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Taken in by America
Chapter 30 Coyote
Though he does not know he’s in thrall to pagan Mercurius, the American throws himself at the
first confidence trickster with whom he comes in contact. He’s only now beginning to throw off
the shackles of the Fourth Great Awakening, the most recent in a series of medieval religious
revivals that periodically grip the nation.i The most successful conman in U. S. history, Joseph
Smith, invariably knew when the jig was up, and moved on. Driven out of Upstate New York in
December 1830 as a charlatan, Smith led a group of followers to Cleveland, Ohio, and to the
Missouri frontier soon thereafter. Having moved from one county to another in the years to
1839, Smith, the self-styled prophet, took his flock back across the Mississippi River to Illinois,
80 mile upstream from Hannibal, Missouri. In that place, Smith and his followers built their own
town, Nauvoo, which had a population of 15000 by 1844.
Joseph Smith had chanced upon the ultimate confidence trick: a home grown American religion,
one where God’s chosen people—the Latter-day Saints—came into this world inherently
virtuous, free from the European Christian stain of Original Sin; in Smith’s religion, God wanted
His people to be acquisitive, to obtain material wealth (even if it meant lying to and stealing from
‘Gentiles’, those who were not members of the Church of Latter-day Saints). Making money was
good; allowing women to challenge masculine authority was bad.
Joseph Smith went the way of most prophets and became a megalomaniac. A mob of Gentile
militia murdered him on June 27th 1844 and Brigham Young took over as prophet when Smith’s
brother, Samuel, died suddenly (in suspicious circumstances). Young, too, was destined to go the
way of most prophets but not before he had led 6000 Saints west beyond the border of the
United States to the Promised Land in Mexico’s Salt Lake Valley. Setting out from Illinois in
February 1846, Brigham Young’s congregation battled difficult winter conditions crossing Iowa
from the Mississippi River to the Missouri River at Council Bluffs. While they were there, the
United States declared war on Mexico and, ever the opportunist, Brigham Young prompted
young Mormons to volunteer.
On July 16th 1846 the 101st United States Army Battalion was enrolled at Council Bluffs. Twentytwo officers and four-hundred-and-seventy-four enlisted men along with thirty-seven women and
fifty-three children set off on the more than two thousand mile march to San Diego, California,
to realise Brigham Young’s scheme to have the Federal government shoulder the cost of the
westward migration of a contingent of his Mormon followers.
Those Mormons who had not enlisted followed the Oregon Trail to the vital trading post at Fort
Bridger, Wyoming, before veering southwest to the Wasatch Range on the western edge of the
Rocky Mountains. Legend has it that in July 1847 Brigham Young looked down from the
Wasatch and declared that the Mormons would build their Zion in the Valley below.
The sight of the still-flooded plain was something to behold as we clocked up 340 miles for the
day working our way up the ‘repaired-enough-to-take-traffic’ sections of Interstate 29 to the
confluence of the Missouri and Big Sioux Rivers in Sioux City, Iowa. Meryn had Pricelined us
Room # 208 at the Marriot Fairfield Inn for $36 plus tax.
The Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, had been fond of bragging about his State having increased
employment opportunities under his leadership. Whether or not his claims stand scrutiny, the
phenomenon whereby one state lowers taxes in order to poach business from a contiguous state
accounts for much of the so-called ‘success’ of a particular governor. Insofar as this mechanism
for lowering unemployment results in municipalities being unable to pay for the people it needs
to service the community—teachers, police, firefighters, etc.—it is counter-productive and
ultimately detrimental to the American way of life.
Next morning we went shoe shopping. The proprietor provided the usual friendly service
common throughout the USA and, picking up on the accent, asked where we were heading.
“Shoe Falls,” said Meryn, footloose and tongue-tied. I’m unsure whether it was the fellow
transacting the sale or one of his native customers but there was an audible gasp. Back in the
Chevrolet, we followed the numerous Sioux City, Iowa, businesses that had relocated north to
Sioux Falls, South Dakota. They had moved to gain a tax advantage; we’d gone to see the Big
i
See above, Chapter 18 ‘Massachusetts and Virginia’.
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Sioux River rapids. Let’s hope that there’s enough tax revenue to maintain the infrastructure that
made it possible for us to experience the Falls up close.
A couple of Hispanics from California had set up shop in a Mexican hole in the wall nearby. We
dined there for lunch and suggest you do, too, if you’re ever in town. Then we went west to
Mitchell, on the James River, South Dakota, and visited the Corn Palace, an architectural
statement about how an agricultural community’s settling permanently is contingent upon everchanging seasonal factors, history marching onward all the while. Impermanent thatchwork art
adorns the façade. When we saw it that last Monday in September, the Corn Palace sported
depictions of baseball, the scales of justice, ballot paper democracy, Harley Davidson freedom,
learning (in the Wesleyan tradition) and American Pride.
The poverty and decay of the South has no foothold in that region. Northern towns of the
Midwest are well-heeled and of noticeably different character from elsewhere in the USA. It’s as
if the ingrained knowledge of generations that there’s only a limited window within which to
raise, nurture and harvest a crop gives rise to an industrious nature, a psychology orientated by
the desire to know where things are coming from and going to (as against living each day as it
comes).
En route to Wall from Mitchell, the 4D climbed to the most impressive Rest Area to which
we’ve yet been—at Chamberlain, South Dakota, on Interstate 90. Perched on a hill overlooking
the wide Missouri River, the Rest Area doubled as a tourist information bureau, or would have
had it been funded. We chatted to Jim, a 75-year-old US Airforce retiree who, domiciled in Salt
Lake City, spends his days driving around the USA. A Republican, he lamented the sorry state of
the Grand Old Party as evidenced by its crop of candidates seeking the presidential nomination.
Too much religion and not enough sound policy was Jim’s diagnosis of the problem—and who
could disagree?
In the days leading up to the Autumn Equinox in September 1804, the Lewis and Clark Corp of
Discovery crew had ‘rested’ during fine weather along that same stretch of the Missouri after
having been drenched by pouring rain further downstream. They dried the equipment, washed
and mended clothes, dressed skins of bison, elk and deer they had killed and repacked a pirogue
(cargo canoe), covering it with the buffalo hides. According to Lewis, acorns that had fallen from
the “white oak” trees attracted the wild game. The expeditioners also enjoyed the ‘fruit’ of those
acorns, Bur Oak nuts, as well as the abundant ripe plums. They saw, Lewis wrote, “immence
herds of Buffaloe deer Elk and Antelopes [Pronghorns] … in every direction feeding on the hills
and plains … .” Clark tells us that among the animals Lewis had killed that day were a rattlesnake
found in a “barking squril Village … a remarkable Bird of the Corvus Species … a curious kind
of deer of a Dark gray Colr [and] a Small wolf with a large bushey tail … .” The youngest
member of the Corp, Sergeant John Ordway called that ‘squirrel’ the ‘prairie dog’, the name still
used to describe the rodent that lives in a network of burrows. The expeditioners were much
amused by the prairie dog’s antics. The Corvus Species bird was a Black-billed Magpie, the
curious grey animal a Mule Deer (because of its mule-like ears) and the bushy tailed ‘wolf’ a
coyote.
September 17th, 1804, then, had been the day of the Corp of Discovery’s first encounter with that
elemental being of Native American mythology—Coyote the trickster. Trickster transgresses
boundaries, creates disorder, is the safety valve of ordered society. Numerous tribal taboos had
constrained the individual Indian but he enjoyed the vicarious pleasure of forbidden experience
through the agency of Coyote (whose behaviour was a form of entertainment). As Trickster,
Coyote gives free rein to instinct—and suffers the consequences. He is cunning yet foolish, the
story-telling rogue71 who moves through a cycle from sub-human to super-human, from
destructive stupid brutality to wise creativity. Half-animal, half-divine, Coyote is the shaman,
medicine-man, a shape-shifter with a penchant for the practical joke, a saviour.72 Coyote
infiltrated white American consciousness at the frontier but came under the dominion of
Mercurius in doing so.
The Chevrolet spiralled downhill, merged onto Interstate 90, careened along the steel and
concrete structure that has spanned the wide Missouri since 1974—South Dakota’s Lewis and
Clark Memorial Bridge—and sped toward the 100th meridian, eighty minutes of longitude to the
west.
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Taken in by America
In 1878, the famous explorer, John Wesley Powell, laid out a strategy for settling the land west of
the 100th meridian, which region he deemed to be arid.i His scientific hypothesis about the United
States’ climate conflicted with a rival (cart before the horse) theory promoted by Cyrus Thomas
which held that the arid regions lacked water because they’d not yet been cultivated; just as soon
as the dry land had been tilled and seeded by homesteaders, the rain would come and the hitherto
low-precipitation climate would become humid.
Looney Tunes, to be sure, but that “rain follows the plough” climatic theory triumphed over
Powell’s because it suited the Gilded Age’s robber barons who, as we know, accumulated
fabulous wealth by selling land they’d been granted. Acting upon what they’d been led to believe
by newspaper editors such as Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune and politicians like William
Gilpin who had been seized by the romantic notion of manifest destiny, homesteaders purchased
the land out west and learned the lesson that trickster is afoot in the United States: they’d been
conned. The “rain follows the plough” ruse reaped its most bitter harvest when the widespread
erosion it caused yielded the devastating dust bowl harvest of the 1930s.
Somewhere between Chamberlain and where we crossed the line into Powell’s arid West, I
mused upon what Jim had told us: that he spent much of his time driving around; we’ve met
many United States military retirees who’re well-remunerated by comparison with veterans of the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is this another ‘baby-boomer generation lords it over the rest’
phenomenon? Or is it that those many former military personnel who retired before their 50th
birthday are on government pensions unavailable to the American of non-military background?
Seventy-five mile into the arid zone, we went in search of a diner at Kadoka—and found the next
best thing situated in a demountable. An unobtrusive but helpful indigenous American took our
order for and served Mexican Taco; called The Nibble Nook, the people there were friendly,
devoid of corporate insincerity, and good at their job. We drove to Wall, South Dakota,
purchasing an annual $80.00 National Parks pass en route. We’d crossed the prairie to the
Badlands; the change of scenery suited us, of course, but it must have been a nerve-racking sight
for nineteenth-century homesteaders.
The Spanish had introduced the horse to North America in the C16th. The Cheyenne, Native
Americans based in the Black Hills of Dakota from the early C18th, rode horses on the Great
Plains; they passed on their knowledge to the Lakota who then hunted bison on horseback in the
James River valley, South Dakota. The Lakota, like the Cheyenne before them, sought to expand
their territory further west but were prevented from crossing the Missouri River by the Arikara
and Mandan people. When a smallpox epidemic weakened their adversaries in the 1770s,
however, the Lakota made their move. They called the desert region we were now in ‘the
Badlands’.
Thirty or so years later, on September 25th 1804, a week after it had departed the Chamberlain
Rest Area, the Lakota prevented the Corp of Discovery from advancing further north.
Meriwether Lewis ordered his men to arms; the warriors prepared to fight. The tense standoff
might have put an end to the expedition but Chief Black Buffalo diffused the situation; the
opposing groups negotiated over the next few days and the expeditioners continued upstream on
September 29th.
The vast bison herds that Lewis and Clark had made note of were the mainstay of the Lakota.
The near extinction of the American buffalo by the voracious hunters for whom the Corp of
Discovery had opened up the prairie threatened to undermine the tribal way of life. The arrival of
the homesteader in the 1870s, naïvely tilling the desert and protected by the United States
Cavalry, made clear that neither the world of the Lakota nor that of any other Native American
nation could survive the onslaught born of the Republic’s manifest destiny.
Successive government interventions since the 1930s have sought to restore the Badlands to the
way they had been prior to the arrival of the hunter and homesteader. Meryn and I were back in
the Badlands National Park on Wednesday, September 28th, moving slowly along Sage Creek
Road in the pre-dawn darkness. Bison had been re-introduced to the Park and, with luck, we
might see some of them. The effort to be there at that moment was rewarded when we realised
that the ‘shrubs’ either side of the Chevrolet were buffalo, that the vehicle was at the centre of a
large group; we edged our way to the circumference, waited, and saw the sun come up on the
i
See below, Chapter 30 ‘Coyote’, for the Powell Expedition’s historic descent of the Grand Canyon.
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magnificent beasts as they moved back and forth across the dirt track, the adult males placing
themselves between us and the rest of the herd. Meryn filled the digital disk with jpegs, shooting
bison at a rate that would have made a nineteenth-century hunter proud. Just as we were leaving
she picked up a single bison horn that had fallen by the wayside. Since any such item should be
declared I showed it to the Ranger—who took it. Given a choice, Meryn would have bent the
rule.
Back at Wall, we visited the Drug store. The subject of most South Dakota billboards, that
much-ballyhooed enterprise is archetypically American: Wild West burlesque; masquerade;
flimflam; stuff and nonsense. From there to Rapid City and its wall-to-wall motels, Meryn
PriceLining us two-and-a-half star accommodation. Staying, now, in more up-market motels at
prices we’d previously paid for rooms with sticky carpet reinforced the sense that this was not the
South. Up at 5 am on September 29th, we set out on a 214 mile round trip through the Black
Hills stopping at Mt. Rushmore, Custer State Park, and so on.
Within fifty years of having been shown the ropes of horsemanship by the Cheyenne, the Lakota
had driven the latter tribe from the Black Hills and established it as their homeland. Named for
the hue given them by the dominating flora of the region—Ponderosa Pines—the Black Hills of
Dakota weren’t nearly so appealing as I had anticipated. Iron Mountain Road, the scenic route
through Custer State Park, was good—I left a sign at an overlook (lookout) adjacent to the
narrowest and longest tunnel cut through the granite—but nothing to write home about by
comparison with what else the United States has to offer. The carved presidential faces at Mt
Rushmore, on the other hand, were much less like the Hollywood sign, as Meryn put it, and—
their gaze following one around the mountains, as it were—closer to art works than we had
expected.
Custer State Park is named for General George Armstrong Custer whose U.S. 7th Cavalry, sent to
protect railroad surveyors in the Black Hills of Dakota from being attacked by Lakota, discovered
gold in 1874. Crazy Horse was one of the warriors who attacked those surveyors. Iconic hero of
his nation, Crazy Horse had long since taken a fierce stand in defence of his people, urging
Native Americans to fight for what was right. Korczak Ziolkowski’s Crazy Horse sculpture a few
miles southwest of Mt. Rushmore presents us with a view of the legendary Lakota chief as
dwarfing the wise heads of the Republic.
We had breakfast at Keystone in the shadow of those heads, the stone presidents. By contrast
with the standard issue Christian carry-on down South, the diner was a testament to Great
Depression era sex symbol, Betty Boop, depicted as a saloon gal from the old west. We’d been
due north of Dodge City at the 100th meridian but the Black Hills has its own lawless Wild West
town—Deadwood. Deadwood went a step beyond Dodge City by having been illegal to boot:
the Lakota had been acknowledged as the legal owners of the Black Hills in 1868 but the 1874
gold rush rendered that as just another broken promise made to the Native American by
Mercurius on behalf of the US Government.
On the Friday, the last day of September, we spent a couple of hours in Deadwood en route to
Cody, Wyoming. I left a sign where Wild Bill Hickok bequeathed ‘dead man’s hand’ to gamblinggunfighter lore. Shot playing poker, the cards Wild Bill held—aces backed with eights—have
become the stuff of legend; the town is still a gambling den and nowadays attracts viewers of
Deadwood, the HBO television series.
“A lawn mower. In the wilderness,” Meryn cried as we crossed the border into Wyoming. “Got
him!” I said and we laughed again about our experience of the preceding day. We’d stopped
where bison had been corralled on the previous Monday; South Dakota’s buffalo roundup,
conducted in the last week of September, had occurred on the previous Monday. Meryn was
taking photographs of bison racing down verges, sparring, grazing, etc. We’d been there for ten
minutes or so when a ‘truck’ (oversized ute) pulled up. The driver fell out out, ran toward the
perimeter fence as if there was no time to lose, arm outstretched; he raced past me, thrust his
hand through the fence wire and pointed a mobile phone.
That done, he regained his composure and spoke calmly to Meryn about the fifth annual
roundup. His wife had joined us by now and we learned that here was another of those retirees
who spend a good part of the year driving around the USA. They’d worked in New York, moved
to Florida like the Seinfelds and towed their ute behind a Winnebago for much of the year.
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Taken in by America
The couple informed us that the section of fence where we stood had been removed early on the
previous Monday morning. They’d been advised to arrive by 5 am for a good view of the 9 am
start when cowboys would arrive driving the buffalo into the field; they were thankful for that
advice, and glad that they’d had followed it because the 2011 roundup had attracted 1500
spectators, many of whom did not see much action. They had been impressed with the dusty,
noisy spectacle and recommended it.
The Seinfelds abruptly returned to their truck and drove off. Had there been one recalcitrant
bison that had got away from the fellow that Monday morning, a single buffalo that then
preoccupied him to the point where he’d suddenly snapped on the Thursday? Who knows?
Driving along the Iron Mountain scenic route later that day, we stopped at a particularly
picturesque scene of a lake with a granite mountain wall backdrop. Aiming to get the best shot, I
suggested we needed to be back where the fellow with the tripod was, on the bridge. But I’d no
sooner said that than the man in question was off the bridge, in the bullrushes, holding the
camera with a tripod appendage hanging functionless from it. As our paths crossed, he remarked
on the fact that the perfect setting was marred by the lawnmower. And yes, indeed, there was a
lawnmower on the path. He worked around it. The thing might have been moved but no-one
took that radical step. So it sat there, messing up the photographer’s dream shot.
Unable to locate a traditional diner in Spearfish, South Dakota, I asked for directions to one at
the Chamber of Commerce information booth; the friendly staff at those places invariably
promote the local instantiation of some corporate chain—which ‘restaurants’ we could have
readily found without bothering to ask for a recommendation. We chose McDonalds and then
crossed the border into Wyoming, calling at the first Rest Area in order to collect the
accommodation voucher booklets. It’s located on a rise, like Chamberlain’s—but lacks a ‘wide
Missouri.’ State of the art, with six or seven wide-screen displays, the impressive building is selfsufficient in (solar panel) energy and, together with its outdoor sculpture and landscaped setting
conveys an impression that Wyoming has wealth.
Gillette, Wyoming, where we stayed that Friday night, proved to be a nightmare: settling in to
watch a PBS blues music show featuring Hugh Lawrie and Tom Jones, we drove across the road
to the shopping centre at dusk to buy a TV dinner—without the GPS; ideally, one would leave
the car at the motel but in the United States that is not possible. Fabulous wealth has blinded the
American to the point where he’s unable to walk (because it’s not ‘factored in’ to ‘forleinhighway’ design). Autumn is the highway repair and/or re-route season, we should have known,
but had forgotten. I missed the turn for the motel and we were subsequently entwined in a series
of poorly signposted roadworks which had us driving along a stretch of unlit highway unable to
exit, except to backroads. Almost out of gas, having no idea to which point of the compass the
car was headed and forced to travel 15 mile to the nearest turn-around, I cursed the powers that
be for having denied me that night of New Oleans blues. We eventually returned to the motel,
having clocked up 45 mile on a round trip to the spitting distance shopping centre and fixed the
rule that Jane, our GPS guide, would henceforth accompany us on all road journeys.i
The proprietor of the motel where we stayed in Cody on the first night in October reckoned that
she, like the American in general, thinks of the traditional diner as a greasy spoon establishment
that serves canned vegetables to people who don’t know any better. She advised us to take our
meals at the restaurant attached to the Sunset Motel near the Buffalo Bill Museum. We walked
the few miles to the Museum but it was about to close. The Sunset wasn’t up to much and the
walk home went on forever because the town grid gave way to a series of switchbacks that
terminated in dead ends.
Most travellers in that region were either heading out of or toward Yellowstone National Park;
the proprietor’s photos of bears, elk, wolves and other wildlife invited the obvious request for
viewing tips. First and foremost, we should tour the Cody Museum, she said, and not believe
what we’d be told about how to spot a bear. She told us how wonderful the Mexican guest
workers were who returned every season to service the rooms. I missed the opportunity to get a
clear understanding of the motel guest’s responsibility with respect to those workers—the tipping
rule.
We learned, too late, that the GPS cannot cope at all with America’s Fall roadworks, that you’re better off paying
close attention to how far you’ve deviated from the direct route with each twist and turn of the detour route.
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William Cody started the town in 1895; it’s the seat of Park County, Wyoming.
Hosts of Wild West legends share a biography of having been Civil War veteran, bison hunter,
and sharp shooter. Like James Butler (Wild Bill Hickok), William Cody (Buffalo Bill) was also a
successful stage performer. Butler was gunned down in a card game but Cody turned his hand to
what P. T. Barnum had called ‘the show business’i and became an impresario. His Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West circus and its later incarnations toured the USA and Europe for more than thirty years
from 1883, becoming the defacto authority on the history of the opening up of the territory of
Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. William Cody, that is to say, made his fortune in the timehonoured American fashion: by selling a copy of the real thing.
Meryn toured Cody’s Buffalo Bill Museum and came away impressed with the exhibits, especially
the Native American child’s clothing, the hats and the wagons; I left a sign bearing an inscription
taken from Clint Eastwood’s copy of a Wild West impresario: “ … ride like Annie Oakley and
shoot like Belle Starr.”
“Do you like scenery?’ the motel woman had asked as we were heading out the door. So we
returned to the desk and I paid close attention as she gave directions for the Chief Joseph Scenic
Byway that would take us to Cooke City, Montana, at the northeast entrance to Yellowstone. Yes,
Virginia, we do like scenery—and that route through the Wyoming wilderness is an outstanding
example of what’s on offer for anyone contemplating driving to Montana. Cooke, though, failed
the test for a place to stay. We’d spend the night there because Meryn had PriceLined a room
but, check-in being rigorously enforced, we drove to Gardiner, Montana, and arranged for the
next few night’s accommodation in ‘Absaroka Lodge’ a family-owned motel overlooking the
rapidly running Yellowstone River a stone’s throw from the northern entrance to Yellowstone.
The 130-mile round trip through the Lamar Valley (where wolves had been re-introduced to the
wilderness in 1995) convinced us that the rush of one-night stays to reach the Yellowstone
National Park before the snow season had been worth the effort.
On their return journey from the Pacific coast, Lewis and Clark split up on July 3rd 1806 near
Traveler’s Rest (Missoula, Montana) in order to explore more of the Louisiana Territory. Clark’s
party headed south up the Bitterroot River as far as the Idaho border, northeast to the
headwaters of the Missouri River at Three Forks, southeast up the Gallatin River to Bozeman,
then through a mountain pass to arrive at present day Livingston, Montana (55 mile north of
Gardiner) on the Yellowstone River on July 15th 1806. Clark’s party arrived at the confluence
with the Missouri (near present day Williston, North Dakota) on August 3rd 1806. The Lewis and
Clark expedition, then, did not discover the volcanic wonderland at the headwaters of the
Yellowstone River. The first European American to write about that was James Wilkinson, in
letters written to President Jefferson and his Secretary of War in 1805.73
Meryn asked the man in charge at the Cooke Super 8 where she’d booked a room whether or not
MSNBC was available and when he said he was “a Fox man” Meryn replied “Enough said.” At
breakfast next morning, the first Monday in October, the proprietor regaled guests with stories of
there being a bear around town that broke into vehicles that contained food. Hmm. I slipped out
to check the esky in the Cruze boot. Nothing amiss, I went back to finish the cereal. The guests
were all ears, grateful for the knowledge gained from experience that the proprietor dispensed.
“You’ve nothing to worry about with the bear,” he revealed, “but watch out for those cats. They
hide in the overhanging branches of trees on the trails. When the prey walks underneath they roll
over and drop,” gripping whatever unsuspecting man or beast walks beneath.
Meryn didn’t want to rain on his parade but knew from having spoken to the manager’s wife that
they’d just arrived from Illinois and had been running the motel for three weeks. Her husband
had seen a television programme about cougars having moved into the Chicago suburbs and was
moved to start a new life out west. Meryn checked the National Park literature for information
about Yellowstone cougars but there was no mention of the mountain lion stalking humans. The
motel manager, it seemed, had the same approach to nature as to politics: burlesque is everything;
facts need not get in the way.ii We saw no mountain lions—well I may have but couldn’t be sure
that that’s what it was because the large creature climbing up that craggy hill quickly disappeared
i
ii
See above, Chapter 4 The Show Business.
To be fair, there are cougas in Yellowstone.
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behind a rock—but regular sightings of middle-aged men with pony tails all but confirmed
Meryn’s thesis that the long-haired male—old hippies with guns?—was the norm out west.
On our 97-mile tour around Yellowstone that day, we saw a bighorn sheep high up on a cliff and
two wolves through the telephoto lenses of that band of generous specialist spotters who
chronicle the lives of the packs. Neither Meryn nor I was firing on all cylinders but we soldiered
on, taking in extraordinary sights of waterfalls, geysers, valleys, mountains, canyon, cantilevered
roadway, overhanging boulders, and all round unbelievable stuff to see. Back at the ‘Absaroka
Lodge’ we settled for a foot-long from Subway, the Yellowstone River roaring past the dining
balcony and on down to where Clark’s group had camped beside it in 1806.
The ‘bubble, bubble, toil and trouble’ theme on a cold, rainy Tuesday, October 4th, reopened in
my mind those childhood school books, imported from the United States, featuring Old Faithful
and Vulcan’s boiling sulphur pools. The famous cone geyser erupts every hour to every-hourand-a-half so we were fortunate to have had to wait only fifteen minutes for the spectacular ‘disspray.’ It was quite a sight: down home folks pointed digital cameras while photographers staked
out spots to set their tripods. A fellow with a front row seat was somehow moved to give it up
for a silly old duck who had arrived at the last minute. She seemed to feel honoured yet also
entitled to the gesture. The American is like that.
‘Didn’t she blow more frequently than that?’ I wondered, when a bystander answered my
unspoken question, rightly or wrongly, by informing us that the 1970s earthquake had
significantly lengthened the interval. I might have double-checked while touring the high-quality
educational exhibits at the visitors’ centre, there, but was engrossed, instead, by geyser mechanics.
One gets a more realistic view of the planet’s dynamic heart when in locations like Yellowstone
we’re confronted with the fact that just beneath our feet there’s a molten mass of minerals that
melts ice and snow, that gives vent to an environment wherein primitive lifeforms—
extremophiles—begin that same evolutionary journey which brought us to the point of being
able to understand much of the ‘how’ we came to exist.
Meryn and my day on the boardwalks across the bubbling earth had us musing on what must go
through the mind of the American who knows enough of the science of geology and
concomitant theory of biological evolution to appreciate what’s in front of his nose, there, in the
magnificent mud. What does his religion do for him when all it has to offer is some feeble prescientific throwback to the effect that “Yes, I know how what I see here came to be but I still
need God to explain why.” Or, alternatively, the faithful old fallback position that “God must
have created the laws of physics.”
Coyote came out of nowhere early on the Wednesday morning. The Cruze was crawling along
Blacktail Deer Plateau Road, a sidetrack, as the archetypal animal crept stealthily through the
grass then crouched, arched its back, flew up into the air, and pounced upon its prey. Seeing
Lewis and Clark’s “Small wolf with a large bushey tail” would probably have been the the next
best thing to encountering a bear or lion for most but being present as Trickster’s totem sprung
his trap on an unsuspecting innocent came close to launching me, too, like a good American, into
the orbit of faith. It didn’t but.
In the late afternoon, a line of cars in Hayden Valley bade us stop to view three grizzly bears
through binochulars. As with the wolves, though, they were so remote as to be largely
constructed from gaps filled in by imagination. A hawk in a tree on the road from Roosevelt
Tower and a pronghorn deer just near the Park Archway at Gardiner made the flirtation with
Mother Nature more memorable.
Following a further 50-mile tour through Yellowstone on the Thursday, we drove the eightymiles to Bozeman and checked-in to the PriceLined Best Western. ‘Glitz, with servile staff’ is not
our thing, though, so we moved downmarket for the weekend.
Firestone serviced the 4D Cruze first thing next morning and reminded me of the automobile’s
pivotal place in America: the job’s done while you wait. For some it was a nervous wait—the
woman next to me’s catalytic converter was undergoing major surgery; for others—such as the
sleek black Mercedes’ sports driver who had her tyres inflated—there was instant gratification.
On the other side of the counter, a hapless employee was on the phone with someone whose
paperwork had gone missing.
“What price do you have on that low-profile in the window?” a fellow who was probably in his
late sixties wanted to know. “Five-thousand,” said the salesman, poker-faced. “I’ll take two,” said
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the customer, and they both laughed. “I heard there was a bear down your way,” said the
salesman. “A cougar scaled the neighbour’s fence Tuesday night,” said the man.
“I’m paranoid,” the jumpy guy carrying a rifle said to his sales assistant, “The pistol’s only ever
any good for covering you until you can get the long gun.” When he went on to discuss the pro’s
and con’s of the marked versus unmarked car I inferred that he was a cop and hoped the fellows
at Firestone would continue to humour him until one of us was out of there. A man who seemed
to be in charge was encouraging a mousy woman to spill the beans about whatever had brought
her to their door. She remained on the threshold of the entrance to the showroom for the two or
three minutes it took to whisper whatever it was in his ear. Having delivered the message, the
mouse minced away. The man in charge stood in the doorway a moment longer than necessary—
out of respect, perhaps, or to be sure she had gone—before returning to his post to take up
where he’d left off: pressing a didactic point with a bristling middle-aged employee about proper
paperwork procedure. He turned in time to catch me staring at the invoice inquisition and
motioned me to the counter.
“We have a problem,” he said.
‘Oh no, the Chevy’s developed an oil leak; or the catalytic convertor’s on the blink or … ’
“Hertz does not pay its bills,” he revealed, “So I’m afraid you’ll either have to pay cash or we’ll
need to contact head office to make other arrangements.”
“What’s the damage?” I asked.
“Is yours the rental vehicle, Sir?”
“Yes, the Chevrolet Cruze.”
“You had an oil change?”
“Yes.”
“That’ll be twenty-nine-dollars-forty. Will you be able to pay cash?”
“Will you take a debit card?’
“Yes, Sir; thank you Sir.”
Ah, America.
Meryn wanted to knit while Cruzing and so purchased wool and kneedles from the Yarn Store on
Main Street. I lost my spectacles while there and was measured up for a new pair from Bozeman
Optical, a couple of doors down. Then Meryn’s wristwatch gave up the ghost so we dropped it off
at Miller’s Jewelery on East Main and collected it twenty minutes later. Sweet Commerce.i The
comfortably well-off middle-class American has made a home in places with a beating heart like
that of Downtown Bozeman: restrained, with religion in the background. It’s easy to see Main
Street as the foundation of civilization; that’s how it looks to me, at least, when passing though.
“We are the ninety-nine percent,” the educated left wing had begun to say while we watched
from our motel room that first Friday in October. Mitt Romney told NewsHour’s Judy
Woodroofe that God had picked out America to succeed. My judgement, at the time, was that
the Fourth Great Awakening—which had begun with the election of Jimmy Carter, taken root
under Reagan, and been actively encouraged by the George W. Bush Administration—was on
the wane and that evangelical religion, therefore, would play a less prominent role in the 2012
Presidential election than it had since the year 2000. Now, as I write this on St Patrick’s Day, Rick
Santorum is gaining momentum in the Republican Party Primaries on the back of the Southern
white evangelical ‘we don’t believe in the theory of evolution’ vote. An Obama re-election victory
born of a middle-class rejection of religious intolerance would confirm my thesis that the Fourth
Great Awakening had run its course. Once Santorum’s had his hour upon the stage, though, the
face-off will be between Romney and Obama, and there’s nothing for the Mormon to gain in
rattling the evangelical cage.
October 2008 had seen us at the Missouri River’s confluence with the Mississippi. Just outside of
Three Forks, not far from Bozeman, we parked the car and walked to its headwaters. ‘Captain’
William Clark, leading the advance party ahead of Captain Meriwether Lewis, had reached the
Missouri’s headwaters on Thursday July 25th 1805. He wrote in his journal that it was
“a fine morning we proceeded on a fiew miles to the three forks of the Missouri
those three forks are nearly of a Size, the North fork appears to have the most water
and must be Considered as the one best calculated for us to assend middle fork is
i
See above, Chapter 3 ‘The Staircase Group’.
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quit as large about 90 yds. wide. The South fork is about 70 yds wide & falls in about
400 yards below the midle fork. …
“I wrote a note informing Capt Lewis the rout I intended to take, and proeeded on up
the main North fork thro’ a vallie, the day verry hot about 6 or 8 miles up the North
fork a Small rapid river falls in on the Lard Side which affords a great Deel of water
and appears to head in the Snow mountains [the Tobacco Root range] to the S W.”74
Captain Lewis arrived at the headwaters on the Saturday and wrote in his journal on Sunday, July
28th that
“I dispatched two men early this morning up the S. E. Fork to examine the river; and
permitted sundry others to hunt in the neighbourhood of this place. Both Capt. C. and
myself corrisponded in opinion with rispect to the impropriety of calling either of
these streams the Missouri and accordingly agreed to name them after the President of
the United States and the Secretaries of the Treasury and state having previously
named one river in honour of the Secretaries of War and Navy. In pursuance of this
resolution we called the S. W. fork, that which we meant to ascend, Jefferson's River in
honor of … Thomas Jefferson. the Middle fork we called Madison’s River in honor of
James Madison, and the S. E. Fork we called Gallitin’s River in honor of Albert
Gallitin. … the beds of all these streams are formed of smooth pebble and gravel and
their waters perfectly transparent; in short they are three noble streams.”75
Meryn and I examined the river too, agreed upon the nobility of all three forks, then drove to
Manhattan in search of a diner. A fortuitous decision to forego lunch in the café, there, saw us
arrive, after journeying up hill and down dale, back in Bozeman at what is surely America’s finest
food hall co-op—a socialist oasis: flavour-some soup with biscuit (scone) and scone (cheese
scone), followed by just-right flat-white; it’s too bad we discovered that food hall as we were
about to leave town—which we did, next morning, Sunday, October 9th, en route to Helena, via
the Raptor Festival at Bridger Bowl. That same community-spirit which had prevailed at the coop was part and parcel of the annual raptor migration that these latter-day Audobons come
together to celebrate.
Intrepid environmentalists perched up in the Bridger Mountains freeze their days away counting
raptors that pass overhead as they fly south from Northern Canada and Alaska from late
September to early November each year. The Bridger Mountain migration corridor, discovered in
the 1970s, has been monitored since the early 1990s; the rigorous scientific count conducted over
those two decades has revealed that golden eagle numbers are in steady decline.
Meryn struck up a conversation with the head of the Helena Audobon Group and we attended
his superb talk on how to identify the various raptors. He spoke of the ongoing battle to retain
the existing laws that had been designed to protect Montana’s wildlife. The golden eagle, we
learned, was one to keep an eye on; gas and oil drilling operations are pushing it to extinction.
Departing Bridger Bowl, the Chevrolet Cruzed along Route 86 to Route 89 and on up the Lewis
and Clark Highway past Canyon Ferry Lake (through which the Missouri River runs) to our
PriceLine two-night stay at the Shilo Motel’s room #213 in Helena which afforded a fabulous
view of the mountains. Privileged to be able to drive around looking at the Corp of Discovery’s
America in the glorious Autumn sunlight, we mused on Book TV’s presentation of Candice
Millard’s newly published book about the madman Charles Giteau having delivered President
Garfield into the hands of the arrogant, power hungry, inept and willfully ignorant Doctor Bliss.76
In his journal entry for Saturday, July 20th 1805, William Clark noted that
“…I left Signs to Shew the Indians if they Should come on our trail that we were not
their enemeys … ”77
Clark was in the vicinity of present-day Helena, Montana, at the time. Expedition leader,
Meriwether Lewis, was further north, toward the Missouri River’s Great Falls. During our 275
mile round trip from Helena on Monday, October 10th, we followed the Missouri downstream
through an awe-inspiring canyon (where we saw a number of golden eagles, mature and juvenile)
to Great Falls, Montana.i The rightwing conservative couple that staffed the tourist office gave us
tips on how to get to the majestic falls that had so enraptured Lewis:
i
Old U. S. Highway 91, I believe.
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“my ears were saluted with the agreeable sound of a fall of water and advancing a little
further I saw the spray arrise above the plain like a collumn of smoke which would
frequently dispear again in an instant caused I presume by the wind which blew pretty
hard from the S. W. I did not however loose my direction to this point which soon
began to make a roaring too tremendious to be mistaken for any cause short of the
great falls of the Missouri. here I arrived about 12 OClock having traveled by
estimate about 15 Miles. I hurryed down the hill which was about 200 feet high and
difficult of access, to gaze on this sublimely grand specticle.
“I took my position on the top of some rocks about 20 feet high opposite the center
of the falls. this chain of rocks appear once to have formed a part of those over
which the waters tumbled, but in the course of time has been seperated from it to the
distance of 150 yards lying prarrallel to it and forming a butment against which the
water after falling over the precipice beats with great fury; this barrier extends on the
right to the perpendicular clift which forms that board [bound? border?] of the river
but to the distance of 120 yards next to the clift it is but a few feet above the level of
the water, and here the water in very high tides appears to pass in a channel of 40 yds.
next to the higher part of the ledg of rocks; on the left it extends within 80 or ninty
yards of the lard. Clift which is also perpendicular; between this abrupt extremity of
the ledge of rocks and the perpendicular bluff the whole body of water passes with
incredible swiftness. immediately at the cascade the river is about 300 yds. wide;
about ninty or a hundred yards of this next the Lard. bluff is a smoth even sheet of
water falling over a precipice of at least eighty feet, the remaining part of about 200
yards on my right formes the grandest sight I ever beheld, the hight of the fall is the
same of the other but the irregular and somewhat projecting rocks below receives the
water in it's passage down and brakes it into a perfect white foam which assumes a
thousand forms in a moment sometimes flying up in jets of sparkling foam to the
hight of fifteen or twenty feet and are scarcely formed before large roling bodies of the
same beaten and foaming water is thrown over and conceals them. in short the rocks
seem to be most happily fixed to present a sheet of the whitest beaten froath for 200
yards in length and about 80 feet perpendicular. the water after decending strikes
against the butment before mentioned or that on which I stand and seems to
reverberate and being met by the more impetuous courant they role and swell into half
formed billows of great hight which rise and again disappear in an instant. this
butment of rock defends a handsom little bottom of about three acres which is
deversified and agreeably shaded with some cottonwood trees; in the lower extremity
of the bottom there is a very thick grove of the same kind of trees which are small, in
this wood there are several Indian lodges formed of sticks. a few small cedar grow
near the ledge of rocks where I rest. below the point of these rocks at a small
distance the river is divided by a large rock which rises several feet above the water,
and extends downwards with the stream for about 20 yards. about a mile before the
water arrives at the pitch it decends very rappidly, and is confined on the Lard. side by
a perpendicular clift of about 100 feet, on Stard. side it is also perpendicular for about
three hundred yards above the pitch where it is then broken by the discharge of a
small ravine, down which the buffaloe have a large beaten road to the water, for it is
but in very few places that these anamals can obtain water near this place owing to the
steep and inaccessible banks. I see several skelletons of the buffaloe lying in the edge
of the water near the Stard. bluff which I presume have been swept down by the
current and precipitated over this tremendious fall. about 300 yards below me there
is another butment of solid rock with a perpendicular face and abot 60 feet high which
projects from the Stard. side at right angles to the distance of 134 yds. and terminates
the lower part nearly of the bottom before mentioned; there being a passage arround
the end of this butment between it and the river of about 20 yardes; here the river
again assumes it's usual width soon spreading to near 300 yards but still continues it's
rappidity. from the reflection of the sun on the spray or mist which arrises from
these falls there is a beatifull rainbow produced which adds not a little to the beauty of
this majestically grand senery. after wrighting this imperfect discription I again
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viewed the falls and was so much disgusted with the imperfect idea which it conveyed
of the scene that I determined to draw my pen across it and begin agin, but then
reflected that I could not perhaps succeed better than pening the first impressions of
the mind; I wished for the pencil of Salvator Rosa or the pen of Thompson, that I
might be enabled to give to the enlightened world some just idea of this truly
magnifficent and sublimely grand object, which has from the commencement of time
been concealed from the view of civilized man; but this was fruitless and vain. I most
sincerely regreted that I had not brought a crimee obscura with me by the assistance of
which even I could have hoped to have done better but alas this was also out of my
reach; I therefore with the assistance of my pen only indeavoured to trace some of the
stronger features of this seen by the assistance of which and my recollection aided by
some able pencil I hope still to give to the world some faint idea of an object which at
this moment fills me with such pleasure and astonishment, and which of it's kind I will
venture to ascert is second to but one in the known world. I retired to the shade of a
tree where I determined to fix my camp for the present and dispatch a man in the
morning to inform Capt. C. and the party of my success in finding the falls and settle
in their minds all further doubts as to the Missouri. … the river was one continued
sene of rappids and cascades which I readily perceived could not be encountered with
our canoes, and the Clifts still retained their perpendicular structure and were from
150 to 200 feet high; in short the river appears here to have woarn a channel in the
process of time through a solid rock.78
Nowadays, of course, the great falls of the Missouri have been neutered, encased in concrete for
hydroelectric power generation. Taco Bell could not have rendered once-magnificent nature into a
more sorry state. Mercurius had sold the American a bill of goods with tall tales of ‘think big’.
Long before the myth of manifest destiny took hold, back when time passed slowly, Hamilton
had talked of controlling cascading rivers, of directing their power to his own ends. So I left a
sign at the Continental Divide.
Meryn and I had first come on Lewis and Clark’s trail in the summer of 2003 while crossing
Montana, ninety miles nearer the Canadian border, aboard Amtrak’s Empire Builder during the
summer of 2003. Ill-equipped to take the Chevrolet through Rocky Mountain snow and ice
which might set in, that was as far north as we’d drive—or had ever driveni—and returned to
Helena, passing a church that had been converted to a veterinary clinic on the way. Was that
church’s fate, too, indicative of the fact that the Fourth Great Awakening run its course?
“Missoula’s full of liberals,” the woman at the Great Falls tourist advisory had said and that was
enough for us—travelling 150 miles along Routes 12, 141 and 200 to there from Helena. Low
cloud and rain obscured what was probably superb scenery and we took a room for $53.90 per
night at the Downtown Bel Aire motel run by Indians from the sub-continent. Gudjurat’s Patels
had cornered the motel market in much of America but non-white motel proprietors were
unusual up there beyond the 42nd parallel. And while Bel Aire’s proprietor and staff were pleasant
enough, the room was sparse, smelled of mold and had nothing to recommend it other than
MSNBC—the hook that snared us—being available. I checked out more upmarket
accommodation but ran foul of the desk clerk and some of the guests there when making the
standard enquiry as to whether MSNBC was available: FoxNews is the cable de jour in those
parts.
So Meryn did another PriceLine deal for the Wednesday and Thursday at Missoula International
Airport’s Days Inn. We dined that evening at a Mexican restaurant near the University of
Montana: it was overpriced and the burritos we ate there were unappetising. MSNBC informed
us that the ‘occupy Wall Street’ protests (which we’d first heard of in Bozeman) were gaining
momentum. A group of protestors in Boston was apparently forbidden from taking a sign that
read “This bridge needs fixing” onto a bridge on the grounds that the bridge might collapse with
people walking on it. Missoula’s protesters seemed to be making a go of it all but a gloomy
atmosphere hung over their Downtown tent square.
Hibbing, Minnesota, to which we’d taken a Dodge Caliber in 2006, is a few minutes latitude south of Augusta,
Montana.
i
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Whether the liberals had anything to do with it we couldn’t be sure but Missoula wasn’t doing it
for Meryn and me. Next morning we set out for Seeley Lake and enjoyed a ham and egg
breakfast at the wonderful Pop’s Diner (where my accent staggered staff and patron alike). By day’s
end red blotches had broken out over my upper torso. An occupational hazard whenever we visit
the USA, the skin complaint invariably leaves me bedridden for a few days and Meryn high and
dry in consequence. As part of the necessary re-scheduling, the ever-helpful woman from
Bozeman Optical mailed my new specs to ‘General Delivery’ in Salt Lake City, Utah, following the
sound advice of a Missoula W. Broadway Post Office employee. We’d been aware of the
American’s generosity of spirit for more than a decade but that had not diminished our
appreciation, especially since it can be counted upon when the wheels fall off.
Downtown Missoula’s Walgren attendant prescribed Benadryl for the debilitating rash and the
pharmacist confirmed the diagnosis adding that it may or may not have been caused by bed bugs.
The attendant asked where we were from, how we liked Missoula, and how long we’d be
staying—standard questions which opened the door to my explanation that we were able to
spend so much time travelling around the USA because, by and large, the Australian worker gets
a fair shake, unlike the American, who is conned into allowing a small minority to grab the
greater part of the pie. The attendant removed her corporate mask and said with some bitterness
“And here I am, working my fanny off … .” Perhaps the protesters’ message about the 99% and
the ‘Buffett rule’ was getting through; or was it simply that Missoula’s full of liberals?
Antihistamines knock me for six but they eased the discomfort enough for us to leave Missoula
International Airport’s Days Inn early on Friday, October 14th. Jane—the GPS navigational
system advisor—informed Meryn that our next accommmodation stop, Challis, Idaho, twohundred miles due south was more than four-hundred miles away. What? We pulled off the
interstate. Still under the weather from the allergy, I knew we’d never make it and grabbed the
phone to cancel the hunting lodge room we had booked. Could I have so wildly miscalculated?
Was WalDry that wicked? No. This was just another instance of placing too much credence in
Jane: the GPS is correct 99% of the time but blind faith is folly. The Cruze’d stick to the
intended route and not have Jane take us up the garden path.
In the Salmon bar where we had breakfast, the waitress was so disoriented by the accent that it
seemed her face might have been slapped by a fish. The town took its name from the river. The
Corp of Discovery had been there in August 1805:
“halted 3 hours on Sammon Creek to Let our horses graze the wind hard from the
S. W. I met an Indian on horse back who fled with great Speed to Some lodges below
& informed them that the Enemis were Coming down, armd with guns &c.”79
The final fifty miles of our journey to Challis followed the Salmon through the magnificent
gorge it has cut into eastern Idaho’s majestic mountains. An additional twenty-mile tour around
Challis had us poking the 4D’s nose into the nooks and crannies of those mountains’ foothills.
The man in the room diagonally opposite at the hunting lodge accommodation warned the four
or five children with whom he shared not to let anyone in as he hopped in his truck and roared
off at sunset. The youngsters, crouched on the edge of the bed, left the door wide open and eyed
Meryn and me suspiciously as they cleaned their guns.
Most of the next day was of bright sunlight on stunning scenery as we drove down snow-capped
Idaho. Thirty miles south of Challis, Meryn spotted a signpost directing passers-by to a scarp line.
An earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale had shaken the Challis Valley on Friday
October 28th 1983 and caused Borah Peak, Idaho’s highest mountain, to rise 2.3 metres. We
stared at the visible evidence—the elevated scarp line—and shuddered at the thought of having
been in a flimsy Challis dwelling when boulders had rolled down from the mountains at the break
of day.
Twenty-five mile southeast of there we stayed awhile at a Mackay diner where the laconic Amy
Lou was owner-proprietor, cook and hired help. Atomic City, fifty-minutes away drive on the
southern border of what until 1975 was known as the ‘National Reactor Testing Station’, has a
speedway to entertain its thirty inhabitants. The high desert in which the nuclear reactor tests
were carried out is at the northern tip of America’s largest desert—the Great Basin. Beneath that
high desert, a vast well of groundwater was always at risk of contamination from the 52 nuclear
reactors built between 1949 and 1970 but information signs at the Rest Area on Route 26
reassure passing motorists that
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“Ongoing safe environment cleanup is focused on reducing risks and protecting the
Snake River Plain Acquifer.”
Across the state line in northern Utah, we looked down from the mountains upon the Great
Basin for the remaining 50 or so miles of the journey to the Howard Johnson motel in Brigham
City. An Australian couple in the room two doors down told us they’d discovered America
twenty years ago and had been regularly visiting and touring the country ever since; like us, they’d
concluded that the car is the way to go.
He looked to be in his early fifties but was more than seventy years old. She had a heart
condition and could not obtain travel insurance. And neither did they bother with rental car
insurance. They were heading to Vancouver so we suggested taking the Salmon River route
through Idaho. He dived behind the motel proprietor’s desk in search of a pen and paper and
gave us directions to all manner of ‘must-see’ sights south to the Mexican border.
We said goodbye and headed northwest to the superb National Park Service Golden Spike site at
Promontory Point. There, on May 10th 1869, the Central Pacific’s ‘Jupiter’ came pilot-to-pilot
with the Union Pacific’s ‘119’; modern replicas of those two brightly coloured locomotives come
cow catcher-to-cow catcher in commemoration of that historic event—the driving of a golden
spike into the final tie in the track of the first transcontinental railroad—annually, each May 10th,
in keeping with the American’s prizing the copy for the real thing.
The real story of the construction of the transcontinental railroad is an iteration of the tale about
America’s being governed by Mercurius: the robber barons built their fortunes on land grants
doled out by corrupt politicians; thirty-three-million acres were transferred from the people to
the transcontinental railroad men; one-hundred-and-fifty-five-million acres—a quarter of the
Louisiana Purchase Territory and more than ten-percent of the USA—was given to railroad men
in the decade to 1870.
The seriously ill Brigham Young, so the Mormon story goes, looked down upon Mexico’s Great
Salt Lake Valley on July 24th 1847:
“When we came out of the canyon in full view of the valley, I turned the side of my
carriage around, open to the west, and President Young arose from his bed and took a
survey of the country. While gazing on the scene he was enwrapped in vision for
several minutes. When the vision had passed he said, ‘This is the right place, drive
on!’…”
The Latter-day Saints came down from the Wasatch Mountains through Emigration Canyon,
planted potatoes, diverted a creek to irrigate the crop, and laid the foundations for the temple
they subsequently built at the heart of their city at the edge of Mexico’s Great Salt Lake. A year
later, the Saints were back in the United States, Utah having been ceded at the conclusion of the
Mexican War in 1848. U. S. President Fillmore appointed Brigham Young as Governor of the
Utah Territory in September 1850. Under Young’s direction, the close-knit Latter-day Saints built
an extensive network of roads, bridges and irrigation channels protected by a well-organised
militia.
Within a decade of their arrival in Utah, Brigham Young’s Mormons had established their Zion
as a pro-slavery society grounded in the principles of outright deceit and spilling blood for the
Lord as well as the practice of polygamy. Young’s power might have gone unchecked for another
ten years but for President Abraham Lincoln’s reining him in from 1862. John Wesley Powell’s
expeditioni down the Green River from Wyoming to the Colorado in Utah and beyond coupled
with the completion of the transcontinental railroad spelled the end for any Latter-day hope that
one could reside in the United States yet live outside its laws.80
The writing on the wall, Brigham Young was prepared to strike deals with the railroad men—to
build roads for railway tracks across Utah. In the Spring of 1868, the Central Pacific’s gangs laid
track down the eastern slope of the Sierra Mountains and across Nevada, establishing the town
of Reno in the process. The race against the Union Pacific’s gangs was on in earnest: Central
Pacific’s lobbyist, Collis Huntingdon, had been to Washington DC and secured right-of-way for
the extension of the Central Pacific railroad across Nevada and Utah. In June of 1868 Central
Pacific’s president, Leland Stanford, visited Brigham Young in Salt Lake City with a proposal that
the Mormons grade road on which railway tracks might be laid across the two hundred miles
i
The J.W. Powell of 100th Meridian West fame.
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from Humboldt Wells, Nevada, through Promontory Point to Ogden, Utah. That he had already
contracted to grade road from Echo Summit through Ogden to Promontory Point for the Union
Pacific did not prevent Brigham Young from signing on for the Central Pacific job. Duplicity and
deceit were the order of the day all round: Huntingdon obtained million of dollars from Congress
for a railway line that would never be built; Thomas Durant had been siphoning off funds from
the Union Pacific to line his own pockets; and the two railroad companies built road ultimately
paid for by the taxpayer that ran parallel with and past one another between Ogden and
Promontory Point. Moreover, despite obtaining funds and land from the Federal Government,
the Union Pacific did not pay the contractors who supplied the labour force.
“This empire of landed wealth, which had been stolen from the Indian tribes, was
transferred to a handful of enterprising buccaneers by members of Congress who were
elected to office by the people of the nation in the innocent belief that they were
choosing representatives to protect the public interest. In addition to the land, the
railroad promoters received millions of dollars in subsidies and bonds, an
undetermined amount of which found its way back into the pockets of the
congressmen who were giving it away.”81
The money that found its way back into the pockets of the corrupt congressmen was “sprinkled
around” by the respective railroad companies’ lobbyists, Oakes Amesi for Union Pacific and
Collis Huntingdon for the Central Pacific.82 Lobbying Washington DC was a vital part of the
railroad companies’ work. The railroad company whose tracks passed through Ogden would gain
control of the commercial trade in the Great Basin: if the Union Pacific took the prize then
products would be sent to market in Chicago, New York and the eastern seaboard whereas
Central Pacific success would result in San Francisco and the west coast benefiting from such
commerce. That’s why Collis Huntingdon’s persuading Secretary of the Interior, Orville Brown,
to accept Central Pacific’s claim to right of way across Utah was a monumental triumph.
Central Pacific’s papers were filed with the Department of the Interior in October 1868. The first
Presidential election since the Civil War had ended in 1865 would take place on the first Tuesday
after the first Monday of November 1868. The incumbent, Democrat Andrew Johnson (who had
attained the office following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican Party
President) was so unpopular that the Democrats nominated Horatio Seymour as their candidate.
The Electoral College swept Republican Party contender, Civil War hero General Ulysses Grant,
into office.
President Grant had close ties with the Union Pacific railroad company’s Grenville Dodge (who
had commanded troops in General Sherman’s Atlanta campaign). Dodge and Ames lobbied
Washington in January 1869 and succeeded in wringing a major concession from Orville Brown:
the Secretary of the Interior established a commission to settle the question of the
transcontinental railroad route through Utah. President Grant was inaugurated in March 1869
and, aware that the voting public might view the parallel graded tracks between Promontory
Point and Ogden as wasteful—forced the warring parties to compromise. The resulting
agreement, approved by Congress on April 10th 1869, gave both railroad companies access to the
Great Basin.
The ceremony to celebrate the completion of the transcontinental railroad was set for May 8th
1869 at Promontory Point. But it had to be rescheduled for May 10th because Thomas Durant’s
private rail car had been sidetracked in Piedmont, Wyoming, by five-hundred Union Pacific
railroad workers—encouraged, some believed, by Brigham Young—demanding payment of
wages. Unable to get word out to General Sherman (Army Commander and passionate protector
of the railroad men) because the hostage takers controlled the telegraph office, Durant finally
paid the owed wages and was at Promontory Point for the golden spike ceremony.83 Brigham
Oakes Ames was one of the Boston, Massachusetts, Ameses, the “shovel Ameses”, wealthy manufacturers. The
Union Pacific lobbyist was censured for his role in the Credit Mobilier finance scandal, in which James Garfield was
implicated. Candice Millard takes Garfield’s word for it that the 20th President had behaved ethically at all times with
respect to Oakes Ames’ nefarious railroad company jiggery pokery.
General Adelbert Ames of the 20th Maine who fought at First Bull Run and Gettysburg, etc. was one of the “Maine
Ameses”. The Maine Ameses were unrelated to the shovel Ameses at the time. That all changed, however, when
Adelbert Ames’ daughter, Blanche, married Oakes Ames’ grandson in 1910.
Still alive when John F. Kennedy published Profiles in Courage, Blanche Ames bombarded the president with letters
demanding that JFK retract his characterisation of her father, Adelbert, as a carpetbagger.
i
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Young accepted railroad rolling stock in lieu of payment of money owed to the Church of Latterday Saints.
Between five and six hundred spectators joined the officials on a sunny May 10th to listen to the
music of the military band. Few heard the speeches because the disorganized event transformed
the bystanders into an unruly mob; fortunately the crowd of 30,000 expected by officials had not
materialized.
At 11:55 am, the principals representing each of the hostile twins—Durant for the Union pacific
and Stanford for the Central Pacific—finally agreed upon the form of the ceremony and so,
come high-noon, Union Pacific engineer Sam Bradford’s locomotive number 119 approached
from the east and Central Pacific’s ‘Jupiter’ with George Booth at the throttle steamed in from
the west; the iron horses waited at either end of the gap in the line. At 12:20 pm the polished
laurel tie into which the golden spikes would be driven was set in place. The Reverend John
Todd then gave two-minutes of thanks to God and W. Shilling sent a telegraph message that
“We have got done praying. The spike is about to be presented.”
Stanford (Central Pacific) and Durant (Union Pacific) then each symbolically drove a gold spike
with a silver sledge into the laurel tie. The last spike, of standard iron into a standard tie, was to
complete an electrical circuit that would automatically transmit a telegraph informing the rest of
America that the transcontinental railroad was complete. Stanford swung—but missed; Durant
swung—and also missed. The mob went wild. Shilling sent the telegram anyway, at 12:47 pm,
informing Americans that the transcontinental railroad was complete.
Just as soon as the final tie had been secured, Jupiter and 119 advanced toward one another until
their pilots met on either side of the laurel tie. Men stood on the pilots and joined hands while a
bottle of champagne was cracked over the polished laurel.
Promontory Point remained the terminus of each railroad until negotiations over the price at
which the Central Pacific would purchase the Promontory-to-Ogden section of Union Pacific’s
track were completed in November 1869. During that six months Promontory Point became yet
another of the hell-on-wheels towns that had characterized the expansion of the Union Pacific
railroad and the opening up of the West.
“Three-card monte, ten-die, strap game, chuck-a-luck, faro, and keno flourished in the
gambling tents. A gang of cutthroat gamblers and confidence men called the Promontory
Boys set up headquarters and were ‘thicker than hypocrites at a camp meeting of frogs
after a shower.’ Their modus operandi was to put ‘cappers’ aboard the trains at Kelton
or Corinne to gain the confidence of passengers. At Promontory the cappers led their
victims to one of the gambling tents and into the clutches of the Promontory Boys.”84
The various swindles in which the ‘Boys’ engaged must have been galling for the victims but such
crimes were petty by comparison with those perpetrated by the railroad men, of course. That first
generation of robber barons departed the railways with the enormous private wealth they’d
creamed off from the public, leaving the railroads themselves in a derelict state and in need,
therefore, of more taxpayer funds in the form of additional “subsidies, loans, bond defalcations,
and high freight rates.”85
Meryn and I drove down from Promontory Summit and merged with the other cars on Interstate
15—what the American refers to as a ‘forelein’, parallel roads that constitute an Interstate
Highway—to head for Ogden where we took a room at the Days Inn. After a visit to the famous
train station, Meryn guided me on a tour of Ogden suburbia. Apart from its extraordinary Art
Deco High School building, the town is home to a number of Frank Lloyd Wright inspired
prairie house style dwellings as well as an architectural folly, a copy of Mark Twain’s Connecticut
house.i
For all his duplicity and seeing double, Brigham Young had been duped by the railroad men. The
transcontintental railway line did not pass through Salt Lake City as Young had been lead to
believe it would and the Union Pacific paid only a portion of the money owed to the Latter-day
Saints for grading track. Still, as noted, Brigham Young accepted payment in kind in the form of
rolling stock; those Mormon-owned rail cars ran on the spur line that was completed from Salt
Lake City to Ogden in 1870. Brigham Young, that is to say, controlled the Salt Lake City to
Ogden railway. Prior to its construction, many Union Pacific transcontinental passengers left the
i
See above, Chapter 3 ‘The Staircase Group’.
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train at Uintah Station and took a bone-crunching Wells Fargo stagecoach trip to Salt Lake City.
Having heard lurid tales about the frontier-dwelling Mormons and their weird beliefs and
practices, many returned to the train with pleasant memories of polite ‘orderly people’ living
peacefully in a veritable garden of Eden:
“Almost everyone was entranced by the streams of sparkling water that flowed along
the side of the broad streets.
… almost all had revised their opinions of a people who at that time were generally
depicted in popular print as depraved fanatics with no redeeming qualities.”86
Meryn and I rolled into town on Monday October 17th 2011 and set about locating Salt Lake City
Post Office’s ‘General Delivery’ counter. The long queue proved to have a rapid turnover and
just as soon as I had donned my new spectacles we went uptown to the exquisite Mormon
Tabernacle—completed in 1864—in Temple Square. I’d not yet read the accounts of the
transcontinental passengers cited above but was struck by the freely flowing water.
Outside the Temple, an excessively polite Mormon elder approached Meryn and suggested a visit
to the sightseeing ‘overlook’ on the tenth-floor (or thereabouts) of the hotel opposite. A woman
in the elevator engaged us in conversation; with us all the way, even after the doors had opened,
we realised that we were being chaperoned. There was no proselytising, just unrelenting
friendliness. Later, while reading those nineteenth-century accounts of an experience almost
identical with ours one-hundred-and-fifty years afterwards, I realised that the Latter-day Saints,
too, had donned the mask, that when he looks in the mirror the American sees the Mormon—
which fascinates and frightens him. Big Love, the HBO television series, ostensibly about the
counterfeit lives of a fundamentalist LDS businessman and his family, held that mirror up to
society.i
After consulting Google in our Midvale Super 8 suite, Meryn and I abandoned any attempt to take
a Utah version of the New Jersey Sopranos tour; by and large, Big Love had not been shot on
location. Instead, we went east along Fort Union Boulevard and up into the hairpin turns of the
spectacular Wasatch Range and walked along a mountain trail but, ill-equipped and too cautious
for our own good, heeded a warning about cougars and returned to the car. At the summit,
Reynolds Flat, a sign informed us that at the place where we stood a “… small, vigorous glacier
coming down Mill D. South Fork met the larger, sluggish glacier from the main canyon and the
two wedged together and stagnated … .”. I left a sign.
Meryn had tracked down a primary source for an upcoming publication to the Brigham Young
University so we threaded our way south through the Interstate 15 roadworks to Provo. The
main industry, there, is student car-parking and we joined those who’d succeeded in examining
technological innovation contest exhibits. None of the intelligent designs tackled the problem of
Provo’s having been overrun by the automobile. Up on the Range, we overlooked the Great
Basin from the road to rich houses high on the hill and then went north along the woe-betideanyone-travelling-less-than-twenty-miles-per-hour-over-the-speed-limit narrow-lane Interstate
obstacle course back to from where we had come.
On the Thursday evening, we went along for the ride with commuters on the good quality TRAX
light-rail track to Salt Lake City. Channelling Marlon Brando from Last Tango in Paris, the fellow
directly in front of us could not ignore the level of intimacy being displayed toward one another
by a pair of women opposite. When he finally popped the question to ask “Is that a motherdaughter thing you got going there?” they goodnaturedly confirmed his hypothesis and Marlon
relaxed, no longer disturbed, it would seem, by thoughts of butter being put where it doesn’t
belong.
The uninspired but dutiful Mormon Tabernacle choir must have run through a couple of dozen
“Give me the parsley” refrains by the time we left their regular practice session to catch the tram.
TRAX revealed its darker nature when we ‘de-trained’ and learned that there’d be no bus to take
us to the stop near our motel; it’s a one-way system. The two-mile walk along a poorly lit
pavement reminded us that the car is the only way to go in the land of the free. We didn’t come
across any gun-toting Marlons out prowling around to visit frontier justice on lesbians and other
iAfter
leaving St. Joseph, Missouri, on the stagecoach during the Civil War, Mark Twain spent a couple of days in Salt
Lake City. He was not fooled by the charm offensive and made clear in ‘Roughing It’ that the Latter-day Saints’ Book
of Mormon was a spurious document.
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lawbreakers (such as the man who, according to a local newspaper report, had been caught in the
act of changing the cover of a book in order to steal it from the library) and as far as we could
determine no-one round there knew that Meryn and I were co-habiting while unmarried.i
A month on from its inception, the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement had become the wind at
Obama’s back. On the fifth day of our Midvale stay, Friday, October 21st, we travelled forty odd
miles southwest of Salt Lake City to Bingham Canyon and paid the nominal fee to see the
Kennecott Copper Mine and view an eighteen-minute film about how well the Rio Tinto Group
manages its responsibility to the natural environment and wider Utah community.
Propaganda notwithstanding, the visitors’ centre exhibits gave a comprehensive account of the
history and operation of the open-cut mine. I left a sign near an explanation of how the
Kennecott logo had shifted from being the glyph for copper to that of mercury. All the better for
seeing double; it was, after all, Mercurius, not Venus, who had crossed the Atlantic.
Brigham Young’s expectation that the transcontinental railway would run through the Latter-day
Saints’ Zion had been dashed when the railroad men routed it north of the Great Salt Lake. We
hugged its southern shore on Interstate 80 as that Intersate stretched northwest across the
saltpan to Nevada, 90 miles further on. Childhood memories of 1960s land speed record
attempts weren’t enough of a temptation to head for Bonneville so we turned back and packed to
leave—which we did, at first light on Sunday, October 23rd—for Moab, 234 miles southeast of
the Midvale motel.
After touring the spectacular high desert of the Arches National Park (so named for the more
than 2000 natural stone arches found there) we purchased a delicious meal of beef and vegetables
with vegetarian fried rice from the Sichuan Restaurant on Main Street South and took Route-24
to Route-12 southwest through Escalante to Bryce Canyon on the Monday.
Meryn’s decision to take those ‘backroads’ (they’re sealed, and well maintained) had the 4D
constantly pulling over while we stared in wonder at the wilderness. We learned from a Route-12
sign that John Wesley Powell’s 1869 and 1871 expeditions down the Green and Colorado Rivers
through the Grand Canyon had traversed that same wilderness. Almon H. Thompson, Powell’s
brother-in-law, subsequently explored and “filled in [that] last blank spot on the U.S. map” by the
mid 1870s. Route-12 “follows the 2nd Powell Expedition’s exact route from Henrieville … to
Head of the Rocks, east of Escalante.”
Bryce Canyon is a tourist trap. Spectacular, like most geological formations in Utah, it
nevertheless has the pall of the ancient Roman god of trade, commerce and profit hanging over
it. The local game of ‘fleece the punter’ is naked and aggressive. Bringing all our experience to
bear, we obtained fair-priced accommodation at the Great Western Plus annex and ate at the
Subway located at the intersection of Routes 12 and 63. I asked the woman who serviced the
motel rooms about pay and conditions, explaining that where we came from it was the
employer’s role to remunerate the staff whilst in the USA there’s a vague arrangement whereby
the greater portion of the wage is left to be paid by the customer who may or may not leave a
‘tip’. In the American diner there’s a formal arrangement whereby the going rate of fifteen-totwenty percent of the invoiced amount is explicitly demanded; so what’s the arrangement for
motels, I asked. The woman told me that she was paid $2.00 per room and relied upon the tip
left behind by the motel guest to make it up to a living wage. We tipped her there and then
because she may not have been rostered to do our room on the day we vacated. Mercurius rules.
Sunrise, sunset; we fell in with the time and motion trip that was in vogue in Bryce Canyon
National Park and took note, too, of the iPad (held aloft) as the camera du jour. An exhibit at the
visitors’ centre featured Coyote’s role in a Native American Creation myth centred on the twin
motif.ii The canyon ‘hoodoos’, too, were Trickster’s handiwork: long ago, magical beings that
masqueraded as humans inhabited the region; Coyote took umbrage at their bad behaviour and
turned them to stone. They’re there to this day, the ‘Legend People’, standing in rows, sitting
down, or holding onto one another. The scientific account of the eerie red rock phenomenon is
more prosaic:
Cohabitation, per se, is not a prosecutable offence in Utah. That state’s cohabitation statutes are contrived to head off
would-be polygamists at the pass, not couples in a common law marriage.
ii Coyote, like Yahweh in the Judeo-Christian Creation myth, punished the ‘twin’ that broke some arbitrary rule.
i
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“About 60,000,000 years ago, during the Eocene Epoch of the Tertiary Period, most
of southern Utah was covered by water. Inland seas and lakes deposited silt, sand, and
lime in beds as deep as 2,000 feet thick. Minerals cemented rock particles together.
The weight of overlying deposits and incomprehensible lengths of time completed the
transition from sediment to sedimentary rock. Subsequently, about 13,000,000 years
ago, near the beginning of the Pliocene Period, diastrophic pressure from within the
earth caused the entire area to rise slowly. Beds of rock formerly located at sea level
were pushed to heights of several thousand feet or more. These beds cracked along
fault lines and separated into the seven major tables located in southwestern Utah.
Two of these plateaus, exclusive of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, are located within a few
miles of the park. The Aquarius Plateau lies to the east. To the west, the Markagunt
Plateau is visible across the Sevier Fault.
… Protean rock formations in Bryce Canyon are basically determined by the hardness
of the rocks themselves. Since rock strata exhibit different degrees of hardness, they
erode at different rates. More resilient limestones tend to form shelves and ledges.
When eroded, softer shales and sands leave grooves, recesses, and small caves.
The brilliant coloration of rock formations in Bryce Canyon results from the presence
of specific minerals originally present in the sedimentary rock. Once exposed these
minerals oxidize. Hydrous iron oxide compounds, such as hematite and limonite,
produce gradations of red and yellow respectively. Purplish or lavender rock likely
contain manganese oxides. White sections of rock—and to a lesser extent, cream—
have had most of the mineral content leached out of them. In places within the park’s
amphitheaters, the whiter limestones and siltstones of the Wasatch Formation are
coated with a thin layer of reddish sediment. This phenomenon results from a once
higher mineral deposit left by rain or snow-melt. Evaporation often leaves the colorful
residue plastered to a much lighter surface.”87
The 4D Cruzed cautiously northwest along a snow bound Route-12 in the pre-dawn darkness on
Wednesday, October 26th. The desire to carry on through the exquisite frozen wonderland was
checked by the better judgement of calculated risk and we abandoned the planned backroads
route to the Arizona-Nevada border region, taking the path of least resistance—Routes 89 and
20 to Cedar City—instead.
By the time Major John Wesley Powell had reached the junction of the Green and Colorado
Riversi, tension had developed between the leaders of the expedition (Powell and his brother)
and the backwoods trappers. The frontiersmen bristled at the military discipline that the Powells
had demanded but stayed aboard during the history making descent of the Grand Canyon. By
late August of 1869 three of the party—William Dunn with Oramel and Seneca Howland—had
had enough and left to take their chances in the wilderness.
The remaining members of the Expedition pressed on to their destination—the Colorado River’s
confluence with the Virgin—at what is nowadays Lake Mead, not far from where the Hoover
Dam was built between 1931 and 1935 (at the height of the Great Depression). Some Mormons
who happened to be fishing in the vicinity escorted them to St. Georgeii, Utah, where they took a
carriage to Salt Lake City. En route, they read a newspaper report about the deaths of Dunn and
the Howland brothers, apparently at the hands of the Native American Shivwits.
Jack Sumner, one of the Expeditionaries who had hitherto disagreed with Powell on almost every
subject, concurred with the Major that the newspaper report was dubious. Sumner regarded the
Mormons as double-dealing demons but John Wesley Powell, though he was the son of a
preacher man and still held firm to Protestant beliefs, respected the Latter-day Saints.
Circumstantial evidence soon convinced Sumner that the Mormons had killed his friends. The
Howland family asked Powell to get to the bottom of the case and he obliged, approaching
Brigham Young. The Mormon prophet put the by-then internationally renowned explorer in
touch with Jacob Hamblin, Young’s emissary to the Shivwit Indians.
i
ii
In what is now Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah.
Named after Joseph Smith’s cousin, George Smith, Brigham Young’s righthand man in southern Utah.
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Hamblin arranged for Powell to meet with the Shivwits on September 19th 1870, a year after the
three expeditionaries had died. Powell took Hamblin’s word for it that what the Shivwit chief had
said was that the Indians had filled the trio full of arrows in a case of mistaken identity.
Jack Sumner, unconvinced, believed Powell had been duped—that Hamblin had falsely translated
the chief’s remarks. Hamblin, that is to say, had engaged in the standard Mormon practice of
“lying for the Lord.”
It’s a long and involved story, mainly ignored by historians until 1980 when a Mormon science
academic, Wesley Larsen, discovered a February 17th 1883 letter indicating that Dunn and the
Howland brothers had indeed been slaughtered in a case of mistaken identity—but by the
Mormons, not the Indians. Hamblin had deceived Powell in order to cover up a much more
sinister event—the Mountain Meadows massacre of September 1857—perpetrated by the Saints
on the express instructions of Brigham Young.
Jon Krakauer’s chapter and verse account of the duplicitous history of America’s most successful
homegrown religion lays out the Mountain Meadows massacre case against Brigham Young in
some detail but the essence of the story is as follows:
During Pioneer Day celebrations for the tenth anniversary (July 24th 1857) of the
Mormon arrival in Salt Lake City, Brigham Young incited his followers with the timehonoured harangue of American demagoguery; the Mormon settlement was under
threat, Young told the gathering, and every Saint must prepare to defend the territory.
Quoting from while interpreting scripture, Young concluded that the Mormons must
form an alliance with the local Native Americans to defeat the Gentiles (in the form of
President Buchanan’s federal troops who were, said Young, poised to march on Salt
Lake). And, again in the time-honoured tradition of the religious maniac, Young
pointed out that this would usher in the ‘Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord’. Young
directed that the Gentile wagon trains that regularly rolled along the Spanish Trail
southwest through Utah for California not be provisioned, that nothing was to “be
sold to our enemies.”
A Latter-day Saint, Parley Pratt, had been murdered in Arkansas. That, like the murder
of Joseph Smith, must be avenged by a ‘blood atonement’. An Arkansas Gentile
wagon train “the richest and best equipped train that ever set out across the continent”
that entered the Great Salt Lake Valley on August 3rd 1857 presented Brigham Young
with the ideal opportunity for his Saints to exact that blood atonement.
On that same day in August, George Smith (Joseph’s cousin) took a carriage to
southern Utah with orders to have the Saints prepare for the coming holy war against
President Buchanan’s approaching Gentile army. Smith whipped up resentment
against the Gentiles at each stop along the way. In late August he delivered a letter that
Brigham Young had written to Jacob Hamblin urging the latter to convince the Native
American Paiutes that they must join with the Saints to defeat President Buchanan’s
army or else run the risk of being destroyed by the federal troops. Smith also met with
the Paiutes on the Santa Clara River, twenty miles from Mountain Meadow. John D.
Lee, the interpreter at that powwow, says Smith told the Indians that the ‘Mericats’
were amassing their force on the eastern slopes of the Wasatch Mountains and would
soon come down into the Valley and destroy both the ‘Mormonee’ and the Paiutes. It
was the will of the Great Spirit, Smith explained, that the Paiutes ready themselves for
war and do whatever the ‘Mormonee’ told them to do. As they rode off after the
powwow ended, Lee says, Smith canvassed the possibility of a combined attack of the
Saints with the Paiutes on a Gentile wagon train.
Pressured to move on by the hostile reception they met in Salt Lake City, the
Arkansans headed south. On August 25th they camped near a group of Mormons
heading in the other direction. Three of the Arkansans went to the Mormon campsite
and asked where they might feed their livestock in preparation for the trek across the
Mojave Desert. It so happened that the Mormons in question were Smith and
Hamblin. Hamblin suggested they do so at a location called Mountain Meadow, near
his cabin thirty-five miles southwest of Cedar City. Accompanying Smith and Hamblin
was a group of Paiute chiefs; they were on their way to meet with Brigham Young and
they coveted the Arkansans’ cattle. That meeting took place on September 1st 1857 in
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Salt Lake City. In return for allying themselves with the Mormonee, Brigham Young
gave the Paiute rights to all Spanish Trail wagon train cattle in Utah.
The Arkansans reached Cedar City on September 4th and, unable to purchase food
supplies, pressed on to where the only co-operative Mormons they’d come across
advised them they might find respite—Mountain Meadow. A group of Latter-day
Saints masquerading as Indians together with a number of Paiute warriors attacked the
wagon train on September 6th. The attack had been co-ordinated by John D. Lee
under orders from Isaac Haight, mayor of Cedar City and local battalion commander.
Lee assumed the surprise assault would render the Arkansans easy prey. But he had
been mistaken: the Gentiles circled their wagons and successfully defended
themselves.
The Paiute chiefs, disgusted with the disorganized Mormonee, were no longer
prepared to take the brunt of the attack and withdrew the bulk of their force. The
Saints would need Mormon reinforcements. Under siege, the Arkansans could not
move. The Saints resorted to duplicity, sending a white-flagged messenger, William
Bateman, to the wagon train with news that the Mormons had come to intercede for
them, that the Native Americans who had attacked the wagon train would allow the
Mormons to escort the Arkansans to safety in exchange for the latter’s weapons. The
Gentiles told Bateman they were prepared to discuss the matter and so Lee went to
their encampment. It took him “at least two hours to win the emigrants’ confidence”
but he succeeded. The Mormons then escorted the women and children to ‘safety’
before slaughtering the men. Mormons disguised as Indians, together with a number
of Paiute warriors then slaughtered the Gentile women and children. One-hundredand-twenty members of the Arkansan wagon train were murdered that day, September
11th 1857. Seventeen of them, those children under the age of five, were spared. When,
in 1859, a federal agent tracked down those children and returned them to their
Arkansas kinfolk, the Saints demanded compensation for having fed and clothed them
in the intervening two years.
In the immediate aftermath of the Mountain Meadow massacre, the Saints gathered
whatever booty they wanted for themselves and left the Paiutes with twenty of the
poorest horses and mules. When the dust had settled, local Mormon families felt that
they, too, had been swindled, that John D. Lee had expropriated the greater part of
their share of the plunder. But they could do nothing about it, because after giving
“thanks to God for delivering our enemies into our hands” the Mormon leadership
made it incumbent upon all Saints who knew about it to blame the Indians for the
mass murder and never speak a word to anyone about what had happened, who was
involved, or anything at all, upon pain of death.88
Coming down out of the snowy mountain onto Interstate 15 that Wednesday morning, Meryn
and I tucked into bacon, eggs and hashbrowns at a well-disguised diner in Cedar City unaware of
neither the Meadow Mountains massacre nor the subsequent cover-up by Brigham Young and
his Apostles. Had we known, we’d have gone in search of the site of the bloodbath, or called in
to Toquerville, thirty-five miles further southwest down Interstate 15.
Toquerville was home to the men who had butchered the Arkansans—most still there with their
wives and children in 1869 when President Ulysses Grant’s federal agents were combing the
countryside in search of the mass murderers. The Grant Administration had placed bounties on
the heads of John D. Lee and Isaac Haight so the people of Toquerville, fearful of arrest, had
been keeping a wary eye out for suspicious looking Gentiles, assuming them to be federal agents.
To be sure, Brigham Young himself had toured southern Utah in the summer of 1969 warning
the Saints to be on the lookout for Gentile bounty hunters and federal agents preparing to invade
the Mormon Zion.
The February 17th 1883 letter that implicates the Latter-day Saints in the murder of Dunn and the
Howland brothers had been stored in a suitcase in Toquerville until discovered in 1980.
According to the Mormon science professor, Wesley Larsen, who, as it were, reopened the case,
that letter leads to the inescapable conclusion that the three Powell Expedition members were
executed in Toqueville on suspicion of being bounty hunters or federal agents. Dunn and the
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Taken in by America
Howlands’ defence that they’d actually just come straight from descending the Grand Canyon
would have helped confirm the Saints’ conviction that they were indeed agents because it had
been ‘well known’ at the time that the Grand Canyon was impassable. When, soon afterward,
Major Powell appeared in St. George asking the Saints to keep an eye out for the three missing
members of his party, the penny would have dropped that they (the LDS executioners) had made
a grave error. Once again, the ‘Mormonee’ contrived to blame the Indians.
John D. Lee was arrested at Panguitch in November 1874 for his involvement in the Meadow
Mountains massacre. Realizing that the ‘blame the Indian’ defence had already worn thin,
Brigham Young contrived instead to frame Lee—and succeeded, deploying Jacob Hamblin as the
star witness for the prosecution. A carefully screened all-Mormon jury found John D. Lee guilty
on September 20th 1876, shielding the LDS hierarchy from scrutiny for their leading role in the
conspiracy. Nevertheless, the federal government forced the Church of Latter-day Saints to
jettison the institution of polygamy and buckle to the rule of law. Brigham Young’s successor,
John Taylor, sought to resist the dictates of Washington, stating that “when the Government
conflicts with heaven we will be ranged under the banner of heaven against the Government.”89
To that end Taylor dispersed polygamous Mormon families deep into the American wilderness
and to Mexico. The 2012 Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, is the grandson of one
of the Mormon families that crossed the border to Mexico in order to evade American law.
Had the 4D taken the intended backroads route that day and not skirted the possible pitfalls of
becoming snow bound, we’d have passed through Colorado City, Arizona, thirty miles southeast
of Toquerville—and the stronghold (until 2004i) of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints (FLDS), those who adhere to the teachings and practice concerning polygamy
of the first three Mormon prophets Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and John Taylor. Since the
Mayor, Police Chief, and other ‘authorities’ are fundamentalist Mormons, systematic sexual abuse
of fourteen-year-old girls is commonplace.
In the late 1990s Uncle Rulon Jeffs, the FLDS prophet from 1986 until 2002, married off a
number of teenage girls as brides to older, already married men on the grounds that the Year
2000 would bring “ ‘pestilence, hail, famine, and earthquakes’ that would sweep [non FLDS folk]
from the face of the earth.” Young, single women needed protection from the wrath of God,
which protection came from “living the Principle.” When the prophesied disaster failed to
materialise, the prophet said that the Armageddon ‘no-show’ was caused by the fact that FLDS
members had been insufficiently obedient.90 Warren Jeffs took over as prophet from his father,
Rulon, in 2002, and was convicted in August, 2011, of aggravated sexual assault of a child and
imprisoned for life.
The Lafferty brothers, Dan and Ron, who murdered Ron’s estranged first wife, Brenda, on
Pioneer Day, 1984, after a visit to Wichita, Kansas, were fundamentalist Mormons operating with
that same mindset that characterises fundamentalist religious folk of all persuasions: that the rule
of the prophets, in direct communication with some alleged god, supersedes the rule of law.ii
While the rule of law in the United States is dictated by an extremely wealthy minority for the
wealthy minority, religious fundamentalism will continue to provide an escape hatch for the
dispossessed—and readymade fodder for Trickster. What Bernard DeVoto had to say about the
Mormon prophet might have been said about the railroad men, the Robber Barons, and is said
about some of the most respected Wall Street bankers. Brigham Young, he concludes, was
“a great leader, a great diplomat, a great administrator, and at need a great liar and a
great scoundrel.”91
i
ii
The temple in Eldorado, Texas, is nowadays, apparently, the centre of the FLDS.
See above, Chapter 29 ‘Mad Men’.
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Chapter 31 Route 93 Revisited
Toquerville behind us, we sped southwest along Interstate 15 above St. George, across the
border through the magnificent mountain pass in Arizona’s isolated northwest, to the barren
wilderness that is Nevada. That night we took a room in the same Las Vegas’ Koval Lane Super 8
that had accommodated us in early March 2007i and followed Route 564 alongside Las Vegas Bay
(at the western end of Lake Mead) to the Hoover Dam the next morning.
Boulder Dam, the original name for the massive concrete edifice that stops the water in Lake
Mead from flowing freely through the Colorado River’s Black Canyon, was an altogether
different sight on October 27th 2011 from what it had been when it had arrived as a bolt from the
blue on March 3rd 2007.92 That had to be the case, of course, since now there’s a bridge—the
Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial—where there’d been earthworks and some pylons. We
had returned to the site in order to see and drive across the completed bridge. But it’s merely an
additional engineering feat to marvel at, another one of those concretizations of American ‘think
big’.
The “end of all our exploring,” the revelation, was the poetry of the Art Deco Dam—from the
nightclub water closets to the flagpole sculpture whose coordinates mark the moment when the
American took his place among the immortals who constructed the edifices of the Roman
Republic, honouring those ancients who had paid homage to Jupiter, Apollo, Mercury, and so on
in the gods’ eternal journey through the constellations of Aries, Taurus and Gemini all the way
round to Pisces, honouring them by continuing their great work. Meryn and I had arrived where
we’d already been and knew it for the first time.ii
The distiller of the republican ideal that inspired America’s founding fathers, Tom Paine, wrote
that the “sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them
separately.” The stars were out when we rolled down the same road to Sedona that Sarah Palin
had travelled in the autumn of 2008 as Republican Party presidential candidate John McCain’s
highly strung ‘Game Change’ running mate. She’d stayed at the homestead; Meryn and I went to
the Super 8.
First thing on the last Friday in October, we scouted around the backblocks of the town, went to
the visitors’ centre, then headed down Route 89A and Route 260 thirty mile south of Sedona to
Montezuma’s Castle, site of the pueblo Sinagua ruins that President Theodore Roosevelt had
recognised as being “of the greatest ethnological value and scientific interest.”93 The President,
acting in response to the Antiquities Act of 1906, had declared the (inappropriately named)
‘Castle’ as one of America’s first four National Monuments.
We flashed our National Park Service permit and tagged along at the rear of some Spanish
speaking group, peering up when they did at the sophisticated dwellings that the Sinagua people
had carved in the limestone cliffs above Beaver Creek when they lived in that drought prone
region for the four hundred years between when Europeans began building castles to the time
when Leonardo da Vinci’s parents had been born.
By the time we reached Phoenix, the price for a room was rising at the Great Western on the
Frontage Road, Glendale, overlooking the Interstate 17. But not for us, because Meryn had
‘Pricelined’ around the Halloween weekend rate. We Cruzed to the Sonoran desert winter home,
Taliesin West, that Frank Lloyd Wright built in 1937, a couple of years after President Franklin
Roosevelt had dedicated Boulder Dam. I experienced the same sensation at Taliesen West as at
the Dam—that the ghost of mediaeval Europe was afoot, that Carl Gustav Jung’s anachronistic
revival of pre-scientific alchemy with its ancient Roman deities reincarnated as archetypes had
born new fruit in 1930’s America. While the founder of Analytical Psychology was constellating a
group of women as trainee analysts in Zurich, his New World contemporary surrounded himself
i
See above, Chapter 22 ‘Alias the Outlaw’.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
ii
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with a bevy of beauties in the Arizona desert. Frank Lloyd Wright’s student architects answered
much the same prayer as had the Swiss ‘Jungfrau’. A number of Wright’s keepers of the sacred
fire are still in residence at his academy out there in the McDowell Mountains and one of them
conducted the group we were part of while touring Taliesen.
After lunch at the Cactus Street In 'n Out, we took a trip Downtown before heading southeast.
Paine’s ‘Age of Reason’ dictum was once again uppermost in Meryn and my collective
consciousness when, late that Saturday afternoon, we parked the 4D and walked around the
university town of Tempe. Halloween and a Homecoming football game between Colorado and
Arizona State University made for a madcap crowd in the Phoenix twilight. Colorado appeared
the more upbeat but it was mere masquerade: we learned later that Arizona had won handsomely.
All Hallows’ Eve, Halloween, what Australian Catholics grew up with as All Souls’ Day, holds the
American in thrall—a product, I believe, of the nation’s pagan culture. Halloween cemented itself
in the American psyche in the aftermath of the Civil War—when the departed souls of soldiers
who had died on the battlefield but never been identified found their way into traditional
campfire stories of evil spirits.
Thirty years after the war, at the turn of the century, Scotch-Irish Americans started the practice
of playing pranks and it, too, became part of the Halloween tradition. One could buy-off a
prankster who would agree not to set fire to the clothesline in exchange for a toffee-apple or
some popcorn. But pranks and tricks soon posed an unwanted threat to the good order of
middle-class society and its property; when no amount of popcorn was enough to persuade
persons unknown to desist from burning down the barn or destroying the stable, civic authorities
stepped in and sought to tame the pagan beast that had been let loose. They sought to
Christianize the festival by encouraging local business folk to sell Halloween decorations and
children’s costumes. In outsourcing it to commercial enterprise, though, the powers-that-be did
not so much Christianize Halloween as shift the emphasis of its governing spirit—from that of
Mercurius the medieval trickster to that of Mercurius the ancient Roman god of trade,
commerce, and profit.
By 1930, big business manufactured costumes for children to dress up in as well known
celebrities. Corporations kept the till ticking over by hitching trickster to the commercial
wagon—introducing the ultimate trade-off, trick or treat, in 1939 whereby adults no longer
bought-off adolescent pranksters with homemade popcorn but with Hersheys chocolates and
Mars Bars instead.
One hundred years after the American told horror stories of lost souls wandering abroad in the
wake of his own Civil War, he began telling that same tale to those against whom he fought in
the Indochinese civil war. Though it successfully exploited the primaeval fear of evil spirits
among the Viet Cong, that military tactic wasn’t enough to quell the nationalist aspirations of the
Vietnamese people in their struggle to defeat the American who had invaded their homeland.
Whether or not it gave rise to the phenomenon or merely preceded it, that attempt to scare the
bejesus out of the Southeast Asian warrior was immediately followed by adult Americans
dressing up in Hollywood movie costumes to celebrate Halloween.
The 1978 release of John Carpenter’s horror movie, ‘Hollywood’, is the more prosaic explanation
of the phenomenon but does not account for the fact that Harry, Nita and their friends were still
dressing up in movie costumes in 2006.i Perhaps, instead, the fact that the adult American turned
to that form of donning the mask just as the Fourth Great Awakening gathered steam is the
more significant correspondence. If there is a causal connection, here, there should be a
noticeable decline in demand for Hollywood costumes at Halloween right about now—assuming
that my contention that this latest Great religious Awakening has run its course holds true.
Interstate 10 took us on the other two sides of a right-angle triangle around Phoenix en route to
Route 60 and the Boyce-Thompson Arboreum in the Sonora desert at Superior where Meryn
extended her already impressive knowledge of cactus plants. From there we went south along
Route 177 to Ray Mine, an open cut copper excavation where the town of Sonora used to be. I
left a sign and we moved on, merging with Route 77 to ride into Pricelined golf club
accommodation not far from the eighteenth-century Moorish-style church, San Xavier Del Bac,
on the outskirsts of Tucson.
i
See above, Chapter 11 ‘Donning the Mask’.
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A Jesuit had set up a Sonoran Desert mission in the late fifteenth century to preach at the eighthundred O’odham Indian Wa:k villagers who lived there on the banks of the Santa Cruz River.
He re-christened Wa:k, naming it after Saint Francis Xavier, co-founder (with Saint Ignatius) of
the Society of Jesus. A century or so later, around the time Captain Cook was sailing into Botany
Bay, the Sonoran Desert mission church was destroyed by the Apaches. That coincided with the
Spanish Emperor’s having dispensed with the contrarian Jesuits in favour of the compliant
Fransicans—who soon put the Native Americans to work building San Xavier Del Bac. A few
miles downstream in what is now Downtown Tucson, the Spanish Army built a fort, the
Presidio, to stave off Apache attacks. The Presidio provided some protection, too, apparently, for
the Sonoran Desert mission. After invading the American continent, the Spanish had established
frontier forts—presidios—as their defence against attack from the indigenous inhabitants.
Presidios were guarded by Soldados de Cuera, well-provisioned frontier soldiers.
The Fransiscans are still conducting the mission at San Xavier Del Bac and Meryn and I saw
many devout Latino pilgrims praying to the panoply of Catholic saints—including Catherine
Tekakwitha, the Native American Maria Goretti immortalized in Leonard Cohen’s novel, Beautiful
Losers, and soon to be canonized by the Vatican—depicted on the walls, in wooden statues, and a
glass case when we were there. Coyote, too, is spoken of as the trickster who communicates the
will of the deities to mortal man in a text accompanying some O’odham Indian symbol.
We bought a honeyed pastry from one of the local traders, those devotees of Mercurius who
scratch a meagre living selling their wares from parking lot tents. Downtown, we walked around
the archaeological site where the Presidio San Agustin del Tucson had been until gradually
dismantled when the region became part of the United States in 1854 following the Mexican War
and Gadsden Purchase. (An inaccurate map had left a strip of land between Tucson, Arizona,
and Mesilla, New Mexico, as part of Mexico following the Mexican War. The Americans, wanting
to build a southern railroad across that strip, had negotiated the Purchase.)
A stone’s throw from the recently reconstructed fort, we examined the bronze memorial to the
Mormon 101st Battalion enrolled at Council Bluffs, Iowa, in July 1846.i Disease, hardship, and a
near-starvation diet had depleted the contingent to 350 men and four women by the time the
battalion reached Tucson on December 16th 1846. The military officers—men like Captain
Jefferson Hunt of the battalion’s ‘A’ Company—bartered for food and supplies with the
O’odham and Soldados de Cuera (contrary to what was in their best interest, surely?) then lead
the Mormons west along the path of the Gila River to complete their march to San Diego. While
on that riverside trail, the memorial text suggests, Captain Hunt established friendly relations with
the Pima Indians and this contact enabled the Mormons to colonise the Salt River Valley where
Phoenix now stands. The bronze text goes on to say that the more-than-2000-mile Mormon
Battalion trek blazed the trail that led to the subsequent settlement of the southwestern United
States.
Tucson’s Mexican residents did not immediately embrace the American and his rule of law in
1854. In fact, the people of the Mexican quarter—the Barrio Libre—lived outside the law, kept
to the old customs and governed themselves for another thirty years or more. The jig was well
and truly up, though, when the real estate developers moved in during the 1960s and pulled
down hundreds of the old Barrio dwellings to make way for a convention centre. The latter-day
recognition by the southwestern American of the value of artifacts, of cultural history, has
resulted in some old Barrio District houses being preserved. The tasteful gentrification of what
remains will have put the Barrio out of reach of the lower socio-economic group that had called
it home, no doubt, but if that’s what it takes to save something for posterity I’m all for it.
Come early afternoon on the last day of October, the 4D Cruzed east across the border to New
Mexico dropping Meryn and me in the cultural desert—no motel had MSNBC—of Deming.
Bacon and eggs, in the dining room of the Grand Motor Inn at which we had taken a room, gave
us a good start for Mesilla, where, on November 16th 1854, a military detachment raised the
American flag to signal confirmation of the Gadsden Purchase. When the time came to build the
railroad that had precipitated the Purchase, though, Mesilla’s townsfolk baulked so the Sante Fe
i
See above, Chapter 30 ‘Coyote’.
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Taken in by America
Railroad was routed through nearby St. Cruces. That was in 1881, the year that Billy the Kid went
on trial in Mesilla and was convicted of murdering the Lincoln County Sheriff, William Brady.i
Fifty mile south in El Paso, on the border with Mexico’s Juarez, I left a sign at a restaurant. I’d
forgotten that in 1895 Sheriff John Selman had gunned down John Wesley Hardin in El Paso,
and was unaware that we might have visited Concordia, the celebrated outlaw’s burying ground,
outside of town about a mile.ii Pressing on across West Texas, we stopped for the night in Van
Horn (another MSNBC-less desert town), left before sunup, drove all day to San Antonio, and
slept.
A bus ride Downtown to the Alamo put us back in the home of the brave American who
comments freely upon what he sees and feels in the daily ‘commute’ to and from work, who
turns a blind eye to every obstacle; it put us back in the land of the free, where burlesque takes
the place of reality. The Alamo, spiritual home of the brave, is a wonderland of make-believe
where docents lend the March 1836 events an heroic air, present reality in John Wayne dress, and
do what they can to maintain the Alamo’s status as the most popular tourist attraction in Texas.
President Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 Louisiana Purchase included a small slice of present day
Texas—the panhandle and a tiny area south of its Red River border with Oklahoma. Jefferson
purchased the land from France. The white man saw no need for sweet commerce, however,
when taking possession of land from non-Europeans. Immediately upon disembarking from the
Mayflower, the American colonist had begun extending his territory—and continued to do so as
a citizen of the newly formed United States, ignoring successive Administrations’ treaties with the
Native American. That defacto expansion of American territory brought about by frontiersmen
migrating beyond the national borderiii was given the presidential seal of approval with Jacksonian
Democracy’s elevation of the common man to the status of a self-governing sovereign individual
who was free to take what didn’t already belong to another white American.
That group of freedom loving Americans who migrated across the Sabine River to Mexico’s
Coahuila y Tejas region became known as Texians. They did more or less whatever they wanted
but grew uneasy when President Antonio López de Santa Anna abolished the Mexican
Constitution in 1835. The Texians saw this as a threat to their free and easy way of life and staged
a revolution, engaging the Mexican military and winning every battle from their first in October
1835 until their last, when the Mexican troops surrendered at San Antonio a few weeks later on
December 9 and withdrew from Tejas. The Texian soldiers then moved into San Antonio’s
Spanish Mission, the Alamo, and fortified it in a show of swashbuckling derring-do.
Affronted by these immigrants whom he thought of as having established an American outpost
in Coahuila y Tejas, the Mexican President wrote to President Jackson of the United States
warning that all the Americans should leave Mexico or be dealt with as pirates; i.e., they’d be
executed on the spot when captured.
Santa Anna chose San Antonio as the place to begin his campaign to drive out the American
invader. Adventurers for the most part, many of the Texians had returned to the United States by
the end of 1835. The 100 or so Texian soldiers still at the Alamo in January 1836 were in a
precarious situation: they had some artillery, few provisions, little chance of reinforcements and
an overweening confidence in their ability to defend the makeshift fort they’d made out of the
Spanish Mission.
Staging a revolution is one thing, sustaining it quite another. Four men claimed to be in charge of
the disorganized, strung out Texian Army. One of the four, Sam Houston, realized that the
Texians at the Alamo were sitting ducks and ordered them to pack up the artillery and leave.
They ignored the command, electing Houston’s messenger (Colonel James Bowie of knife and
slave-trader fame) to lead them to victory against Santa Anna’s Army. The burlesque was
complete when romantic backwoodsman, Tennessee’s Davy Crockett, boarded the Alamo ship
of fools.
The Texians inside the garrison seem not to have anticipated that Santa Anna might lay siege to
the converted Mission—which he did, from February 23rd. Twelve days later, the Mexican
See above, Chapter 22 ‘Alias the Outlaw’. Mesilla was the Confederate capital of Arizona during the American Civil
War.
ii See above, Chapter 21 ‘Two Tricks’.
iii See above, Chapter 3 ‘The Staircase Group’, on the French notion of ‘sweet commerce’ and Chapter 22, ‘Alias the
Outlaw’ concerning the violence of the American’s westward migration beyond Massachusetts.
i
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President carried out his threat to execute the pirates, his resolve having been strengthened by
the rebels’ March 2nd Declaration of Texan Independence from Mexico. The American’s
untrammeled confidence in the purity of his freedom mantra came up hard against reality. And
he responded with characteristic idealism, transforming the fact of the debacle into a burlesque
copy: rather than take stock of what his quest for freedom might carry in its wake, he rushed over
the border to fight alongside the Texian rebels until they’d established a Texan republic where
Coahuila y Tejas had been. Soon thereafter, he set about creating a legend where history had
been, beginning with the installation in the pantheon of American heroes those hapless Texians
who had died at the Alamo—and never ending, if the docent who addressed the crowd that we were
part of is any indication.
I left a sign and we strolled around town, wandering along the Broadway stretch of President
Kennedy’s 1963 motorcade through San Antonio, calling in to the shop at 119 to watch real men
don a John B. Stetson sombrero (ten gallon hat), taking the River Walk, before heading to the
backblocks in search of a diner—which turned out to be an unassuming Mexican restaurant
exactly to our taste. On the bus ride back to the motel, I took a shot of the seat that
commemorated a real American hero—Rosa Parks. That night on Hardball, Chris Matthews
talked of his hero, JFK, and the last official speech the president had given—in San Antonio,
Texas, on November 21st—the night before Kennedy was assassinated, in 1963.
You’d best know where you’re going if heading to Houston from San Anton’. We found
ourselves on the Northern tollway and blocked from getting into the correct lane to pay at the
cash booth—driving instead down the Tag lane, twice. We contacted the authorities, made out a
cheque for the offending $3.00 payment, and hand delivered it to the office we were advised to
contact. That wasn’t enough: we were subsequently charged a further $17.00, as if to reinforce
my conviction that Texas, like its Governor Perry, is all hat and prattle. Downtown Houston’s
architecture, including the spaghetti beltway, though, is worth the effort of witnessing first hand,
especially from the sky lobby on the the 60th floor of Travis Street’s I. M. Pei designed J. P.
Morgan Tower.
Meryn and I had whizzed through Houston en route to Galveston with Bernie in February 2007.
Not long after Chicago had triumphed over St. Louis as the pre-eminent city of the Midwest,
Houston challenged Galveston as the star of Texas—taking the mantle when the latter was
destroyed by a hurricane in 1900.i This time around, we made a point of examining the
Downtown architecture, starting with a collection of the city’s earlist homes housed in Sam
Houston Park at Bagby and Lamar.
Mirabeau Lamar had taken over from Sam Houston as President of the Republic of Texas in
1838. They were chalk and cheese, with Houston advocating that the USA annex Texas and
Lamar adamant that it remain independent. The republic became a slave-owning state of the
USA on December 29th 1845 when Texans voted to sacrifice their independence in exchange for
America absorbing its burdensome debt obligtions.
Ever since the Texians had established their republic in 1836, Mexico had made clear that it
would regard annexation of Coahuila y Tejas by the United States as a declaration of war.
Exploiting the Mexican rulers’ braggadocio, U. S. President James Polk sought to start a war in
order to satisfy the common man’s desire for America to realize its manifest destiny of
establishing an empire that spanned the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. As a means to
that end, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to occupy Texas, thereby setting off the train of
events culminating in the Mexican War of 1846 after which Mexico was forced to cede the
greater part of what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California to the USA. QED.
An African American couple and their two young children were moving with a photographer
through Sam Houston Park that Sunday morning of our visit. The boy donned a Stetson for a
number of shots and I found myself singing ‘Stacker Lee’ the blues song born of the 1895
murder of Billy Lyons in St. Louis, Missouri. The killing had been a spur of the moment thing,
the sorry outcome of a drunken political argument between Lyons and his friend, Stacker Lee
Shelton. When, at the height of the dispute, Lyons had taken Shelton’s hat off his head, the latter
pulled a gun and shot Billy. As the lyrics of the song had it:
“What do I care about your chillun
i
See above, Chapter 21 ‘Two Tricks’.
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Taken in by America
And yo’ darlin’ lovin’ wife?
You stole my John B. Stetson hat
Now I’m bound to take your life.”
I left a sign and we walked on down to the twin towers of the Enron Building—the architectural
statement made by the smartest guys in the room—just across from Houston’s grassy knoll near
the Antioch Mission on Clay Street. Bethany McLean, the woman who exposed Kenny Boy and
his pals’ confidence trick, is another of those real heroes the American never hears of.
Lee Shelton gave rise to an immortal copy—the trickster figure, Stacker Lee, of numerous blues
artists—and Houston’s Sugar Land gave us The Midnight Special. Sugar Land, a Prison Farm
providing cheap labour for the Imperial Sugar Company during the era of Jim Crow peonage,
was in a Houston suburb. Hudie Ledbetter was incarcerated there before John and Alan Lomax
set him up as the recording artist, Leadbelly. The Lomaxes believed that The Midnight Special was
the Houston train that ran through Sugar Land and, indeed, Leadbelly lent some credence to that
claim with his lyric that
“If you ever go to Houston
You better walk right”
in a recording of the traditional folk song.
We walked past a fast-filling church and followed the light rail down Main Street, past the Books
A Million store and the beggars at Lamar, around the corner at Texas to the Magnolia Hotel then
back to Louisiana where a construction crew appeared to be re-roofing Philip Johnson’s
postmodern skyscraper.
The room at America's Best Value Inn, not far from Downtown, wasn’t ready when we checked in
and an aimless drive through the rundown neighborhood of derelict houses took us to an
intersection where Aftican American children were raising funds from wound-down car
windows. Meryn threw a coin into the cup. We pulled in to the parking lot and went for coffee at
the McDonald’s. The woman at an adjacent table counted money, ran a pen down the page, kept
book. Down the aisle, four or five softly spoken men in their Sunday best deferred to a woman
who occasionally peered over the top of her newspaper to give the verdict on the matter at hand.
A sturdy fellow in a maroon suit tipped his matching derby hat each time she did so. Perhaps the
group had given up the devil’s music and gone gospel, to be on the safe side, now that their
respective races were almost run.
A child ran up to the bookkeeper and emptied his cup. We recognized it as the type for which
Meryn had wound down the window. The rest of the fundraisers came in, followed by two
mentors with a team of nine-year olds. Pretty soon, there was standing room only. Everyone
except Meryn and me was African American. The children waited patiently for their French fries
and listened attentively to the two adults who’d brought them there. The bluesmen, if that’s what
they were, drifted off one-by-one, and the woman with the newspaper too, in due course. We
stayed put because, as my Russian colleague would say, “What why we are in America.”
The icing on that Sunday cake came courtesy of the man in the derby hat: as we were about to
head back to the motel, he crossed our path carrying bags of supermarket stuff. Needing
groceries ourselves, we went in search of the store. The supermarket staff and customers were
almost exclusively non-white. There’s no such thing where we come from.
Our first sight of Downtown Houston had been at peak hour one Friday morning in February
2007; our last began with the Monday morning commute on November 7th 2011. We followed
the derelict houses down broken streets to an open-air parking lot, walked to the Enron building,
and entered the tunnel beneath the Houston skyline—a legacy, I guess, of the Space Center’s
having been in Soviet Union sights. Would the tunnel have served the intended purpose? It’s a
moot point, but if nothing else it puts the ‘down’ in ‘Downtown’.
The Pei Tower’s 60th floor glass wall space puts the Cold War era behind us, providing a bird’s
eye view of the metropolis instead. Anyone who happened to be up there to witness the work of
a religious fanatic in being able to fly a fully-laden passenger plane into a Houston skyscraper
would shudder to think. The authorities are not taking any chances, as was made clear to Meryn
when she took out her camera to get some shots of the lobby in the twin towers of the Philip
Johnson and John Burgee designed Pennzoil Place building. The fellow at the desk came over to
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tell her it’s not allowed. She engaged him in conversation and learned that he knew only that and
nothing else about the landmark.
Everything went pearshaped after that. We left town with an online ticket to the Space Center
and were sent on a wild goose chase by the gps. Meryn had gone American under the skin, as it
were, placing her trust in the navigational tool as saviour despite clear evidence to the contrary.
Once on the Space Center’s trolley tour, though, she came to her senses and was no longer
fooled by false prophets. We were allocated seats next to a pair of polite young men in baseball
caps. A tractor containing a youth (who turned out to be the group chaperon) towed the trolley
on which we travelled. The tractor exhaust drowned out a pre-recorded commentary that
accompanied the youth’s ostensive definition of nondescript Nissan huts dotted around the site.
The ordeal was almost over when the trolley pulled up alongside a sapling on the concrete
causeway. The tractor engine was shut down and we were informed that the tree in question had
been planted in memory of those who’d died on the Space Shuttle. The young men next to us
took off their caps and bowed their heads. The group became grave for the minute of silence.
Then the engine was cranked up and we never heard another word until the trolley pulled in to
the arrival-cum-departure lounge. If you ever go to Houston, you better keep right.
The windscreen fogged up and an ambulance cut us off on the 60 mph run up the freeway ramp.
I wrestled the 4D to the verge and made it to a shopping centre parking lot to gain composure
and find the cause of the condensation. A long way from where we were headed—Austin— it
was getting dark. We never figured out why the windscreen clouded over but were able to get by
with the windows wound down. A massive traffic jam made matters worse so we decided to
check in to a motel just as soon as circumstances allowed. Even that proved to be something of
an intractable problem until Meryn negotiated a navigational miracle that took us along this and
that Frontage Road to the Austin turnoff.
The only accommodation available at the Super 8 in Brenham, Texas, approximately 90 miles
east-southeast of Austin, was the ‘handicapped room’; it was one of the best places we’ve
stayed—though the Fall roadworks proved no less capable of landing one in a pickle than any
other. The castle outside our window revealed itself as a partly constructed retaining wall on a
runup ramp to the Austin-Houston highway, Route 290.
Our Waltz Across Texas was nearing its story-book ending as we drove into Austin—the place Bill
Bishop had dubbed Texas’ liberal hub.94 The pedestrian path along the Colorado River bank was
worth the effort to get to but only while we sheltered from the ripping wind. Those claiming to
represent the interests of the ninety-nine against the one percent seemed well organized and in
greater numbers than we’d yet come across but none of the banners was able to hold a candle to
the ‘999 + 666 = π in the sky’ equation displayed at the Tucson, Arizona, occupation. The liberal
Austin police seemed hell bent on causing anxiety. Aggressive, unfriendly; a motorcycle cop
booked a homeless man for j-walking. We ate a reasonable quality lunch in a pizza bar, I left a
sign in Sixth Street, and we walked back to the Super-8 overlooking Interstate 35. I wanted to use
the laundry but ended up in a heated exchange with the husband and wife proprietors when
seeking to exchange my one-cent piece collection for the requisite number of quarters. “We doon
take pennies” they maintained, ignoring my protest that the one cent coin is still legal tender in
the USA.
Glad to be leaving Austin, we drove on backroads some 90 miles or so to Moody where we
stopped for bacon and eggs at Lucy’s Café. A friendly woman introduced herself and gave us the
lowdown on what went on all around but I recall only that I came away nonplussed at the means
by which the American decides who’ll get his or her vote.
Less than twenty mile north of there is Crawford, made famous when local resident George W.
Bush became president of the United States. Ill prepared for the visit, we went in search of
Prairie Chapel Ranch where ‘forty-three’ had cut much brush. We were no better at locating
Prairie Chapel than Bush and Cheney had been at finding those weapons of mass destruction
“what why” they had invaded Iraq. Post Dubya, Crawford was in much the same state of decline
as the rest of the country.
The wonderful multi-lingual young woman at the Knight’s Inn desk a few miles north of Waco
might have been earning a small fortune in some metropolis but was there instead, much to our
advantage. Admittedly, she was unaware that there’d be a Veteran’s Day parade that morning of
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Friday November 11th 2011. Others had left Meryn and me in no doubt that it would be the most
significant event in Waco since time out of mind so we went Downtown to take it all in. The
usual down-home types were there, waving at the locals who lined Austin Street to watch them
pass by in some business-enterprise sponsored convertible ahead of a school band making the
most of the opportunity to strut its stuff. Two thirty-something-year-old men who had taken up
their spot with enough supplies to see them through any number of parading politicians seeking a
seat on the ladies’ auxiliary or to be re-elected Senator, Mayor, Sheriff, and so on, sat in their
comfy canvas chairs right up until school children in military uniforms appeared on the scene, at
which point they stood to attention, clicked heels, and saluted with the right arm while firmly
pressing the left against its sinister buttock. But for the killer look in their eye, that pair of
patriots might have been parodying the Space Center memorial sapling burlesque.
After a brief stroll around Baylor University campus, we headed for the Texas Rangers museum.
Now it was my turn to go native under the skin in that the copy—the 1950s television series with
its counterfeit uniforms, badges and flight-formation parade—trumped the real thing. We
assessed the likelihood that the experience would measure up to the price of the entry fee to be
nil and went in search of Mount Carmel Branch Davidian compound instead.
Short of the mark on our first approach, we returned early on Saturday November 12th and
found the entrance with its memorial to those who had died in the April 19th 1993 conflagration.
Being there crystallised our 2011 tour through the history of the opening up of America’s west:
the confidence man who had crossed the Mississippi River wearing a religious mask had one
more bridge to cross in order to become a fully-fledged American: he must acquire an arsenal.
Joseph Smith’s reaction to the experience of living through the Second Great Awakening in the
burned over district of upstate New York had been to invent the Book of Mormon and instigate
an American religion that did away with Original Sin in favour of acquisitiveness. He rewarded
himself by stealthily acquiring a harem. Seventh-Day Adventism was also a product of the
Second Great Awakening’s burned over district but it wasn’t until Vernon Howell had gained
control of a splinter sect—the Branch Davidians—that God bestowed a harem on the Adventist
prophet.
In 1983 the twenty-four-year-old Howell realized he was a prophet. It seems he was engaged in
sexual congress with the seventy-six-year-old Branch Davidian prophetess at the time, though
that’s only hearsay. A power struggle developed and Howell was forced off the Branch Davidian
Mount Carmel compound at gunpoint. Grounding himself in what the American regards as the
source of all wisdom—Holy Scripture—Howell divined that Daniel’s biblical prophecies
concerning the Davidic kingdom were to bear fruit in Waco, Texas. Which was convenient, since
he was already there. In 1987 he and his followers sought to regain control of Mount Carmel in a
gunfight that broke out over an inconclusive contest to raise the dead. When, however, the
Mount Carmel kingpin who had thwarted Howell’s ambition was committed to a mental
institution after murdering abother pretender to the role of prophet with an axe, Howell took
control.
By-and-by, God had revealed to Howell that he was a latter-day incarnation of the ancient
Persian Empire builder, Cyrus. To that end, Vernon Wayne Howell filed a petition to have his
name changed to David Koresh, and it was granted. The name ‘David’ was from the biblical
King David, heir to the messiah whilst ‘Koresh’ is apparently Persian for ‘Cyrus’.
Naturally, given his new status as bearer of the seed from whom the Messiah of the Second
Coming (Advent) must descend, David Koresh had to procreate sooner rather than later, and
spread the spermata. And so it was that Adventism brought forth a prophet who did not shrink
from those practices which are the sine qua non of home grown American religion: polygamy
and statutory rape. Driving home the fact that theirs was the genuine article, really and truly the
American religion, Koresh’s Branch Davidians became arms dealers; they transformed the Mount
Carmel ‘Mission’ into a fort, a latter-day Alamo—complete with a ship of fools prepared to
thumb its nose at the overwhelmingly more powerful authorities, daring them to attack. The
authotities obliged, and Vernon Howell, alias David Koresh, died—like a latter-day David
Crockett—at the end of the resulting siege.
While Meryn photographed the memorial stones of those who had died, there, at Mount Carmel
in 1993, I kept an eye out for the canine that had been barking ever since we had set foot on the
property. I was ready to walk back to the car when it was about half a kilometre away but Meryn
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operates on the “good doggie” hypothesis and showed no fear at the prospect of staring down a
gaping maw.
The 4D travelled the 174 miles to Irving’s Days Inn on the outskirts of the Dallas-Fort Worth
International Airport. I left a sign in the Forth Worth Whattaburger and purchased two books—
Elusive Hero95 and Destiny of the Republic96—at the Barnes & Noble. Fall roadworks once again
made a mess of the gps and convinced me not to risk negotiating the poorly lit and inadequately
signposted detours to return the rental car immediately prior to taking the flight home but to
drop it off a day early and take the ‘free’ shuttle from the motel. A large hawk posed for a
photograph on the airport’s perimeter fence when we went to Hertz on the Sunday. The
magnificent raptor was out of luck, though, because the camera was at the motel.
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Taken in by America
Bibliography
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Ringwood, Victoria, Australia: PenguinBrowne, E.M., 1976.
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Morison, S.E. The Oxford History Of The American People. Vol. 2. New York: Mentor, Oxford
University Press, 1965.
“O, I'm a Good Old Rebel (Song).” http://www.civilwarhome.com/pooroldrebel.htm.
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Taken in by America
References
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2005), 8
2 John M Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1997), 59
3 U.S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001), 146
4 Ibid., 163
5 George Brinton McClellan, The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860-1865
(New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989).
6 D.F. Hawke, Everyday Life in Early America (New York, NY: Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins, 1988),
1533.
7 C. Rourke, American Humor, A Study of the National Character (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books,
Garden City, 1931)
8 Ibid., 31.
9 D. Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow (Pan Books, 1979), 11
10 T.J. Stiles, Jesse James. Last Rebel of the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 2002), 334335
11 Ibid., 308
12 Ibid., 335
13 S. Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald. The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship (Woodstock, New York:
The Overlook Press, 1999), 16-17
14 Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2005), 309
15 J.W. Cook, The Arts of Deception. Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 2001), 144
16 T. Keneally, Lincoln (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2003), 14
17 M. Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mitcham, Victoria, Australia: Penguin, 1885), 13
18 Ibid., 98-103
19 H. Melville, The Confidence Man (New York: Prometheus Books, 1857)
20 Lott, Love And Theft, 18.
21 Shelby Foote, The Civil War, a Narrative, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 34-38
22 McClellan, The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, 69
23 “McDowell's Advance To Bull Run,” http://www.civilwarhome.com/advancetobullrun.htm
24 “The Manassas (Va) Journal, November 30th, 1895.”
25 David Hackett Fischer, Washington's Crossing, Pivotal moments in American history (Oxford, England:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 236
26 Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Jay,” August 23, 1785
27 Fischer, Washington's Crossing, 259.
28 Thomas J Fleming, Washington's Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge, 1st ed. (New York:
Smithsonian Books/Collins, 2005)
29 John 14:6 The Jerusalem Bible. Darton, Longman & Todd. London., 1974.
30 Abraham Lincoln, Illinois Senate nomination speech in the Hall of Representatives, June 1858. See
below, p 162.
31 Foote, The Civil War, a Narrative, 749.
32 Samuel Eliot Morison. The Oxford History of the American People. 3 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Mentor, Oxford
University Press, 1972:135
33 W. J Cash, The Mind of the South, Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 283.
34 W. J Cash, The Mind of the South, Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 285.
35 Samuel Eliot Morison. The Oxford History of the American People. 3 vols. Vol. 2. New York: Mentor, Oxford
University Press, 1972: 315
36 Abraham Lincoln, Illinois Senate nomination speech in the Hall of Representatives, June 1858.
37 E.M. Browne, Tennessee Williams Sweet Bird of Youth. A Streetcar Named Desire. The Glass Menagerie.
(Ringwood, Victoria, Australia: PenguinBrowne, E.M., 1976), 9
38 Cash, The Mind of the South, 237.
39 Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, 42.
40 Address to U.S. Senate March 2nd 1846
41 Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, 20
42 Pat F. Garrett, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. (Ghost written for Garrett by Ash Upson.)
43 Rourke, American Humor, A Study of the National Character, 68.
1
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G.F. Willison, Saints And Strangers (Time Reading Program Special Edition, 1945), 172.
Ibid., 173.
46 C. Bode, Mencken (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1969), 123-4.
47 Foote, The Civil War, a Narrative,V2, 317.
48 Ibid., 447-452.
49 Ibid., 551.
50 Ibid., 568.
51 Ibid., 569.
52 Richard Slotkin, Wesleyan University.
53 Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, 191.
54 John O'Brien, At Home in the Heart of Appalachia, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 2001), 117.
55 Ibid., 277.
56 Ibid., 132.
57 Ibid., 154-173.
58 Goodwin, Team of Rivals.
59 Gary L. Bunker | The Campaign Dial: A Premier Lincoln Campaign Paper, 1864 | Journal of the
Abraham Lincoln Association, 25.1 | The History Cooperative, 15,
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/25.1/bunker.html.
60 ibid.
61 McClellan, The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, 70.
62 Lapham, Lewis, “By the rivers of Babylon—By Lewis H. Lapham (Harper's Magazine),”
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/01/0082318
63 Goodwin, Team of Rivals, 252.
64 Ibid., 229.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 John 20:24-26, The Jerusalem Bible (Darton, Longman & Todd. London., 1974)
68 D. Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow (Pan Books, 1979), 12.
69 Ibid., 78
70 Ibid., 175
71 Karl Kerényi, commentary in Paul Radin. The Trickster. A Study in American Indian Mythology: Schocken
Books, New York, 1973:176 & 186
72 Carl G Jung. Collected Works. 20 vols. Vol. 9i: paragraphs 255-256
73 “Yellowstone National Park: Its Exploration and Establishment (Part I),”
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/haines1/iee1a.htm
74 “Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online July, 1805 ,”
http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=1805-07-25.xml&_xslsrc=LCstyles.xsl#n17072508
75 Ibid.
76 Candice Millard, The Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, 1st ed.
(New York: Doubleday, 2011)
77 “Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online June 13, 1805 .”
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid..
80 J. Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: a story of violent faith (Doubleday, 2003), 233
81 Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, 161
82 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/tcrr-huntington/
83
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/hh/40/hh40n.htm
44
45
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/hh/40/hh40n.htm
Ibid., 161 162
86 Ibid., 143
87 “Bryce Canyon NP: Historic Resource Study (Prehistory),”
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/brca/hrs1.htm
88 Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: a story of violent faith, 211-225. Thanks to Jennifer Halloran who
alerted Meryn to Krakauer’s book.
89 Ibid., 250.
90 Ibid., 27.
91 Ibid., 226.
92 ibid
93 “Montezuma Castle National Monument,” http://www.nps.gov/moca/historyculture/index.htm
84
85
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Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, 1st ed. (Boston:
Mariner Books, 2009)
95 Christopher Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, 1st ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011)
96 Millard, The Destiny of the Republic
94
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