A Cry from the Far Middle
Page 15
But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction . . . turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
[Even] without . . . an extremity of this kind . . . the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
[The spirit of party] serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds . . . access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.
[Italics added because—wow!—G.W. predicts Russian hackers two hundred years before the Internet was invented.]
[The spirit of party is] a fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.
* * *
**** Letter to Benjamin Waterhouse, the first doctor to employ smallpox vaccine in America thereby keeping a number of young men alive long enough to become Methodists, Baptists, and so forth.
***** Adams was, of all things, acting as defense attorney in the murder trial of British soldiers who had fired into an angry Patriot mob during the 1770 Boston Massacre. Although Adams was a prominent opponent of British rule he felt morally obligated to ensure that the soldiers received a fair trail. (Also, he detested mobs, patriotic or otherwise.)
****** Hamilton believed these rights were already protected under common law and that if a federal government were allowed to meddle in common law the meddling would never cease. (Which it hasn’t, but God knows what kind of meddling the federal government would have gotten up to if we didn’t have a Bill of Rights.)
******* Horatio G. Spafford, author of the 1824 Gazetteer of the State of New York, who, given the mercantile basis of New York’s economy, should have told Jefferson to put a sock in it.
******** From a 1776 letter to that husband.
******** Richard Steele, playwright and essayist, founded the British magazine The Spectator with Joseph Addison in 1711. The magazine was popular in the American colonies. Steele was a stern moralist—and, as Franklin’s audience knew, a duelist, drinking man, and father of an illegitimate child. Thus Steele’s name itself was a laugh line.
******** “There’s no one who is always right but me.”
What I Like About U.(S.A.)
Always look on the bright side of life!
—Eric Idle, Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Three things I like about America are fast food, suburban sprawl, and traffic jams.
The Traffic Jam as Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor
My own personal form of taking Zoloft is to listen to “Traffic on the 3s” every ten minutes on WBZ Boston news radio, 1030 on my AM dial. Nothing cheers me up more than a Boston traffic jam—when I’m not in it.
I live far and gone in the New England back country where there isn’t any traffic. But I get lonely out here, feel isolated and down in the dumps sometimes, especially when New England weather is awful the way it’s been this winter, and last winter, and last fall, and last summer, and the way it will be this spring.
Good weather is so rare here that we don’t even have a word for it and just stand around with our mouths gaping open, rendered speechless by sunshine.
Anyway, when I get depressed I tune in to the WBZ traffic report, and I’m instantly full of optimism, good feelings, and love of life—compared to the people in Boston who are stuck in traffic. Which would be all of them. WBZ has a slogan for its traffic report: “Boston—it’s an hour’s drive from Boston.”
Why Boston traffic is so bad I don’t know. Boston isn’t a huge city, less populous in fact than Columbus, Ohio, or Charlotte, North Carolina. And Boston drivers are notoriously aggressive—curb-jumping, left-turning-on-red, one-way wrongwaying lead-foot lane-hopping lions in the zebra crossing.
They should, by all rights, be able to hot rod their way out of any traffic tie-up. (Why don’t Boston drivers use turn signals? That would be giving classified information to the enemy.)
But Boston has something called the “Leverett Connector.” This is where I-93, Rt. 1, Rt. 3, Rt. 28, Storrow Drive, the Charles River, Boston Harbor, the Zakim Bridge, the Rose Kennedy Greenway, and the Callahan Tunnel to Logan Airport all meet. If you’re coming into Boston from the north . . . or the south . . . or the east . . . or the west you will end up in the Leverett Connector. You may not mean to but you will.
If you want to go to Faneuil Hall, Old North Church, the Bull and Finch Pub (the bar that inspired Cheers), Fenway Park, or a Celtics or Bruins game you’ll end up in the Leverett Connector.
Even if you’re headed someplace that’s nowhere near the Leverett Connector, such as Gillette Stadium, you’ll end up in the Leverett Connector. It’s the Murphy’s Law of driving in a city where a lot of people are named Murphy.
However, if you’re not in Boston—the way I’m not in Boston—it doesn’t matter into what depths of despair you may have fallen. You can turn on WBZ any time night or day, even 5:03 a.m. on a Sunday morning, and hear those wonderful inspiring words that will snap you out of your gloom and put joy back into your heart: “It’s a sea of brake lights on the Leverett Connector.”
Actually, I like traffic jams even when I am in one. (Though not on the Leverett Connector. People have gone through puberty, grown to adulthood, become middle-aged, and gotten Alzheimer’s between the exit from the Zakim Bridge and the entrance to the Callahan Tunnel.)
I like traffic jams because they give me a chance to look at my fellow Americans while they’re doing what most defines us as Americans—being stuck in a traffic jam.
And what a land of equal opportunity this is! Seeing hundreds of my fellow countrymen in their cars makes it clear that, in America, no one is too intellectually challenged, differently abled, emotionally fragile, beset by anger management issues, encumbered by dementia, or burdened by obsessive-compulsive disorders involving personal communication devices, burritos, and Grande Caffe Lattes to have a car. (And, presumably, a driver’s license.) There may be discrimination in this country but not on the highways.
It’s better for everyone that these people are stuck in traffic—you don’t want them at home. Traffic jams ensure they’ll never get there.
And the cars are interesting. Pickup trucks have grown enormous. (Living in the country, I myself own a pickup, but its model year is 1984.) Today’s pickup trucks are full-size four-door luxury sedans except as tall as a house and with doorsills so high that you have to stand on a Prius to get inside. What are these pickup truck drivers picking up? The pickup beds are the size of a backyard aboveground pool and there’s never anything in them. Yet, in the next lane over, there will be a Fiat 500 with a mattress and a box spring bungee-corded to the roof, a backseat full of moving cartons and kitchen appliances, and a sectional couch hanging out of the hatchback. Do we need to introduce these folks to each other?
Also, where did minivans go? You see fewer and fewer of them. Almost every family used to have a minivan. They’re inexpensive and space efficient with room for six or eight kids in the back and all of their skateboards, terrain park skis, mountain bikes, lacrosse sticks, and a full-size soccer goal net. But minivans seem to have been replaced by much more expensive and much less space efficient SUVs with the kind of off-road capability I had no idea that ordinary parents needed. We know America’s average family size is getting smaller. Is it possible that parents are using SUVs to dri
ve their children deep into the wilderness and feed them to wolves?
Suburban Sprawl—Beauty Is in the Me of the Beholder
I like suburban sprawl because it all looks alike. When we leave our rural home and “go into town,” we go to a commercial strip on Rt. 101A in Nashua, New Hampshire. It looks exactly like every other commercial strip in America—same big box stores, gas stations, franchise restaurants, car dealerships, vape shops, nail salons, and hairdressing establishments with “funny” names . . . Curl Up & Dye.
You’d have no idea you were in New England unless you happened to catch sight of the leaves turning orange in the fall on the couple of sickly maples that Target has planted in its parking lot islands. You could be anyplace—Los Angeles, Phoenix, Orlando. This cuts down greatly on travel expenses. No need to take a flight to Los Angeles, Phoenix, or Orlando.
Newspaper op-ed columnists, social critics, stand-up comedians, and other aesthetes often make derisive comments about suburban sprawl being all alike. What’s so bad about being all alike? People are alike. Why is it a bad thing when people eat and shop alike? People should be treated the same way no matter their gender, sexual preference, race, ethnicity, or religion. And what’s wrong with them being treated the same way at the same big box stores, gas stations, franchise restaurants, car dealerships, vape shops, nail salons, and hairdressing establishments?
Yes, suburban sprawl is ugly. Or is it? I’ve been to Venice. A great beauty spot, I’m told. All I saw in St. Mark’s Square was a waving field of selfie sticks from ten thousand Chinese tourists. The sickly maples in the Target parking lot are scenically glorious by comparison. And just try parking in Venice. There are limits to the off-road capabilities of even the best SUV. Bring your snorkel. (And get a tetanus shot.)
Parking is easy in the suburbs. Everything is easy in the suburbs. It’s the best place to grow up. You’ve got lots of other kids to play with (unless their parents have been feeding them to wolves).
In the suburbs, unlike the city, you’ve got places to play where you aren’t constantly being run over by Uber drivers. And, unlike the country, you’ve got fresh air and sunshine without your only friend being Lassie, who has to rescue you from a well every week. (I know about these things. We raised our kids in the country and, lacking a collie with a Mensa IQ, had to do it ourselves, standing on the back steps yelling, “Get the @#$% out of the well!”)
My only worry about suburban sprawl is that Internet shopping will drive malls out of business. Without malls where will suburban kids hang out? (Kids hate fresh air and sunshine.)
Malls are good places for kids—compared to the Internet. There are no “alt-right” shops at the mall. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t have a retail outlet where she sells socialism to young people. The “messaging” at malls is inclusive and all about good old-fashioned capitalism.
There’s no porn at the mall, if you don’t count Abercrombie & Fitch shopping bags. There’s not much that’s truly loathsome, unless you hate the Marvel superhero movies at the Cineplex as much as I do. At the mall the scope of evil is pretty much limited to shoplifting. Which is bad. But, according to Barnes & Noble, it’s something that Jeff Bezos has been doing for years. Would you rather have your kids hanging out at the mall or hanging out on the Internet? Zara is closed at 2 a.m. when kids are supposed to be asleep. The Internet isn’t.
Fast Food—It’s Fast and It’s Food
Anyone who complains about American fast food is too young or too dumb to recall the greasy spoons that came before franchise restaurants. You’d be driving down the highway, and everybody in the car was hungry, and you’d have to pull over to whatever was along the roadside with a big sign out front that said “Eat and Get Gas.”
And, depending on the circumstances, pricier sit-down restaurants aren’t necessarily what we want instead of McDonald’s. Now that legalized marijuana has become ubiquitous, we can be frank about this. Has anyone ever smoked a joint and had a “foie gras attack”?
Fast food may be contributing to America’s obesity problem. But take me to a Michelin three-star French bistro and I’m going to order things that are much more fattening than a Big Mac. Starting with that foie gras and going straight to escargots in garlic butter sauce, roasted duck breast (1,500 calories and 25 grams of fat), asparagus hollandaise, potatoes au gratin, crème brûlée, and a big wedge of cheese washed down with two bottles of 1996 Château Latour. At least when I emerge from between the golden arches I’m just fat, not fat and broke.
Plus some fast food is delicious by any standards—In-N-Out Burger, Chick-fil-A, Whataburger. I fondly remember when that icon of suburban sprawl Popeyes fried chicken first came north. It was in the 1980s, when I lived in New York and was dating a stylish young lady from New Orleans who was full of scorn for Yankee cooking. She claimed a decent meal could not be had north of the Mason-Dixon line. Every few weeks she’d give a dinner party, inviting New York guests for “a real southern treat.”
But the stylish young lady could not cook. What she did was sneak down to the only Popeyes in the city, which was in a scary neighborhood on Forty-second Street. She’d come home with her Vera Bradley bag full of spicy white and dark, biscuits, Cajun fries, red beans and rice, and jambalaya. She’d stick them in silver serving dishes and everyone would rave.
It’s a Free Country
And I like that. We Americans are supposed to be able to do what we want to do. And what we want to do is obvious. Fifty-two percent of us live in the suburbs. On any given day 37 percent of us will eat fast food. And, as far as I can tell, a hundred percent of us are stuck in a traffic jam on the Leverett Connector.
Acknowledgments
Herewith the part of a book that nobody reads except for the people whose names the author accidentally left out. And me. I’m a fan of “Acknowledgments.” Often I’d rather read the acknowledgments than the book in which they appear.
Acknowledgments are informative. If, right at the start, the author thanks someone you’ve never heard of in lavish terms but for vague reasons, that person is the ghostwriter. And the more lavish (and vague) the gratitude, the less likely it is that the author has read his or her own book that the ghostwriter wrote.
No such person will appear in these acknowledgments, partly because I can’t afford one but mostly because even the most mercenary ghostwriters do have standards.
Likewise, in nonfiction books, expansive compliments to “research assistants” mean that people more intelligent than the author—not usually hard to find—are responsible for the content. Fulsome praise of a particular research assistant indicates the author and that assistant are having a torrid affair. My lack of research assistants proves (a.) I’m no hunk and (b.) nobody with any intelligence is responsible for this content.
Also be alert—in the bibliography as well as the acknowledgments—to authors’ long lists of “other works that have made this book possible,” especially if those works are little known, out of print, or available only in downloaded microfiche digital images. I’m not saying nonfiction authors are plagiarists. They may also be lying their heads off about having read all that shit.
No plagiarism accusations, however, are to be made against humorists. Why accuse us of something for which we already stand convicted? The whole world knows we’ll steal jokes from anywhere. No T-shirt slogan, bathroom graffiti, or Snapchat cat meme is safe from our thievery. Although there are a few humorists who are innocent of this crime. The technical term for them, in the humor trade, is “not funny.”
Another acknowledgment sentence to be on the lookout for begins, “This book could never have been written without . . .” What follows is usually an encomium to a spouse or partner. What should follow is the word “money.”
People who don’t write for money exist. They include sensitive poets—sensitive to everything except meter and rhyme. Also, old duffers pecking away at personal histories on t
heir Royal portables. The children of the old duffers had better pretend to be thrilled if they want to stay in the will. (I believe a close reading of the First Amendment would indicate that sensitive poets with execrable scansion and old duffers with self-published life stories—along with TikTok rappers, social media influencers, people who use “journal” as a verb, and Donald Trump—are tacitly excluded from the constitutional prohibition against abridging the freedom of speech.)
So let us get to the heart of the matter. This book could never have been written without money from my friend, editor, and long-suffering (having commissioned every book I’ve ever written) publisher Morgan Entrekin, president of Grove Atlantic.
Morgan paid me money. What he got in return was this book. Call it one of the mysteries of late-stage capitalism. I don’t understand late-stage capitalism and, thank God, neither does Morgan.
But let’s not forget the encomium to a spouse or partner that usually goes about here in an acknowledgments, in place of vulgar talk of pelf.
In years gone by, when most writers were men and most writers’ spouses or partners were wives, what was really meant by the obligatory panegyric was this: “She retyped the whole manuscript including my indecipherable scribbles in the margins and fixed the spelling, punctuation, and grammar. She took care of the house and the kids, cooked all the meals, mowed the lawn, and changed the oil in the car because I was drunk when I wasn’t writing and sometimes when I was. She held down a full-time job of her own because this book is six years overdue. She never got nosey and discovered the torrid affair I was having with my research assistant. I’m filing for divorce the minute I cash the check for the movie rights.”