by Sarah Vowell
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Text copyright © 2002 by Sarah Vowell
Illustrations copyright © 2002 by Katherine Streeter
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
First Simon & Schuster paperback edition 2003
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Vowell, Sarah.
The partly cloudy patriot / Sarah Vowell.
p. cm.
1. United States—History—Anecdotes. 2. United States—Politics and government—Anecdotes. 3. United States—Description and travel—Anecdotes. 4. National characteristics, American—Anecdotes. 5. Vowell, Sarah, 1969-—Anecdotes. I. Title
E178.6.V68 2002
973—dc21 2002066988
eISBN 978-0-743-23336-1
These pieces first appeared in the following places: “The First Thanksgiving,” “Ike Was a Handsome Man,” “Democracy and Things Like That,” and “Underground Lunchroom” (with support from Hearing Voices) on This American Life; “The New German Cinema” in Esquire; “Pop-A-Shot” in Forbes ASAP; “Dear Dead Congressman” in Open Letters; “Rosa Parks, C’est Moi” in Time; “Tom Cruise Makes Me Nervous” and “Wonder Twins” in Salon; and “Tom Landry, Existentialist, Dead at 75” in McSweeney’s.
TO AMY
After every great battle, a great storm. Even civic events, the same. On Saturday last, a forenoon like whirling demons, dark, with slanting rain, full of rage; and then the afternoon, so calm, so bathed with flooding splendor from heaven’s most excellent sun, with atmosphere of sweetness; so clear, it show’d the stars, long, long before they were due. As the President came out on the Capitol portico, a curious little white cloud, the only one in that part of the sky, appear’d like a hovering bird, right over him.
—Walt Whitman, witnessing Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, Memoranda During the War
CONTENTS
What He Said There
The First Thanksgiving
Ike Was a Handsome Man
God Will Give You Blood to Drink in a Souvenir Shot Glass
The New German Cinema
Democracy and Things Like That
Pop-A-Shot
California as an Island
Dear Dead Congressman
The Nerd Voice
Rosa Parks, C’est Moi
Tom Cruise Makes Me Nervous
Underground Lunchroom
Wonder Twins
Cowboys v. Mounties
The Partly Cloudy Patriot
State of the Union
Tom Landry, Existentialist, Dead at 75
The Strenuous Life
Acknowledgments
THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT
What He Said There
There are children playing soccer on a field at Gettysburg where the Union Army lost the first day’s fight. Playing soccer, like a bunch of Belgians—and in the middle of football season no less. Outside of town, there’s a billboard for a shopping mall said to be “The Gettysburg Address For Shopping.” Standing on the train platform where Abraham Lincoln disembarked from Washington on November 18, 1863, there’s a Confederate soldier, a reenactor. “Which direction is south?” I ask him, trying to re-create the presidential moment. When the fake Johnny Reb replies that he doesn’t know, I scold him, “Dude, you’re from there!” Around the corner, the citizens of Gettysburg stand in line at the Majestic Theater for the 2:10 showing of Meet the Parents. Bennett, the friend I’m with, makes a dumb joke about Lincoln meeting his in-laws, the Todds. “Things did not go well,” he says.
It is November 19, 2000, the 137th anniversary of the cemetery dedication ceremony at which Lincoln delivered a certain speech. “Four score and seven years ago,” Lincoln said, referring to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Always start with the good news.
I could say that I’ve come to Gettysburg as a rubbernecking tourist, that I’ve shown up to force myself to mull over the consequences of a war I never think about. Because that would make a better story—a gum-chewing, youngish person who says “like” too much, comes face to face with the horrors of war and Learns Something. But, like, this story isn’t like that. Fact is, I think about the Civil War all the time, every day. I can’t even use a cotton ball to remove my eye makeup without spacing out about slavery’s favorite cash crop and that line from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address that “it may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” Well, that, and why does black eyeliner smudge way more than brown?
I guess Gettysburg is a pilgrimage. And, like all pilgrims, I’m a mess. You don’t cross state lines to attend the 137th anniversary of anything unless something’s missing in your life.
The fighting at Gettysburg took place between July 1 and July 3, 1863. The Union, under the command of General George Meade, won. But not at first, and not with ease. In the biggest, bloodiest battle ever fought on U.S. soil, 51,000 men were killed, wounded, or missing. I am interested enough in that whopping statistic to spend most of the day being driven around the immense battlefield. Interested enough to walk down a spur on Little Round Top to see the monument to the 20th Maine, where a bookish but brave college professor named Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain ran out of ammo and ordered the bayonets that held the Union’s ground. Interested enough to stop at the Copse of Trees—where the Confederate General George Pickett aimed his thousands of soldiers who were mowed down at the climax—and sit on a rock and wonder how many Southern skulls were cracked open on it.
I care enough about the 51,000 to visit the graves, semicircular rows of stones with the otherwise forgotten names of Jeremiah Davis and Jesse Wills and Wesley Raikes laid right next to Hiram Hughes. And the little marble cubes engraved with numbers assigned the unknown. Who was 811? Or 775? The markers for the unknowns are so minimal and so beautiful I catch myself thinking of these men as sculptures. Here, they are called “bodies.” There are slabs chiseled MASSACHUSETTS 159 BODIES and CONNECTICUT 22 BODIES and WISCONSIN 73 BODIES.
So I pay my respects to the bodies, but I’ll admit that I am more concerned with the 272 words President Lincoln said about them. The best the slaughtered can usually hope for is a cameo in some kind of art. Mostly, we living need a Guernica to remind us of Guernica. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln said of the men who shed their blood, “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Who did he think he was kidding? We only think of them because of him. Robert E. Lee hightailed it out of Gettysburg on the Fourth of July, the same day the Confederates surrendered Vicksburg to U. S. Grant—a big deal at the time because it gave the Feds control of the Mississippi. And yet who these days dwells on Vicksburg, except for the park rangers who work there and a handful of sore losers who whine when they’re asked to take the stars and bars off their godforsaken state flags?
The Gettysburg Address is more than a eulogy. It’s a soybean, a versatile little problem solver that can be processed into seemingly infinite, ingenious products. In this speech, besides cleaning up the founding f
athers’ slavery mess by calling for a “new birth of freedom,” Lincoln comforted grieving mothers who would never bounce grandchildren on their knees and ran for reelection at the same time. Lest we forget, he came to Washington from Illinois. Even though we think of him as the American Jesus, he had a little Mayor Daley in him too. Lincoln the politician needed the win at Gettysburg and, on the cusp of an election year, he wanted to remind the people explicitly that they could win the war if they just held on, while implicitly reminding them to use their next presidential ballot to write their commander in chief a thank-you note.
Privately, Lincoln has mixed feelings about Gettysburg because he’s certain the war could have ended right here if only General Meade had not let General Lee get away. According to a letter written right after the battle, Lincoln is “deeply mortified” that “Meade and his noble army had expended all the skill, and toil, and blood, up to the ripe harvest, and then let the crop go to waste.” Because Lincoln is a good man, he does not say this in front of the families who came to the cemetery to hear that their loved ones “shall not have died in vain.” Because he is a good politician, he looks on the bright side. Though I personally suspect that in Lincoln’s first draft, the line about how “it is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced” was simply “Goddamn fucking Meade.”
Abraham Lincoln is one of my favorite writers. “The mystic chords of memory.” “Better angels of our nature.” “The father of waters flows unvexed to the sea.” All those brilliant phrases I’d admired for so long, and yet I never truly thought of him as a writer until I visited the David Wills house in Gettysburg’s town square.
In 1863, Wills was charged by Pennsylvania’s governor to oversee the battlefield’s cleanup and the construction of the cemetery. His house, now a museum, is where Lincoln stayed the night before delivering the address. I walk into the room where Lincoln slept, with its flowerdy carpet and flowerdy walls, with its canopy bed and its water pitcher and towels, and for several minutes the only possible thought is that he was here. There’s the window he leaned out of the night of the 18th, teasing the crowd outside that he had nothing to say. And, this being a sweet old-fashioned tourist trap, there’s a gangly Lincoln mannequin in white shirtsleeves, hunched over a small table, his long legs poking out the side. He’s polishing the speech. The myth is that he wrote it on the back of an envelope on the train, but probably he’s been slaving over it for days and days. Still, he doesn’t finish it until he’s in this room, the morning of the 19th, the morning he’s to deliver it.
To say that Abraham Lincoln was a writer is to say that he was a procrastinator. How many deadlines have I nearly blown over the years, slumped like Lincoln, fretting over words that didn’t come out until almost too late? Of course, the stakes are lower when one is under pressure to think up insightful things to say about the new Brad Pitt movie instead of, say, saving the Union. On the other hand, I’ve whipped out Aerosmith record reviews that are longer than the Gettysburg Address, so where’s my mannequin?
Looking at Lincoln rushing to stave off failure, I felt so close to him. Or let’s say I felt closer. My grandest hope for my own hastily written sentences is that they would keep a stranger company on an airplane. Abraham Lincoln could turn a pretty phrase such as “I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind” and put it in the proclamation that freed the slaves. Even Mailer wouldn’t claim to top that.
At the Gettysburg National Cemetery, there’s a ceremony every November 19 to celebrate the anniversary of Lincoln’s speech. I sit down on a folding chair among the shivering townspeople. A brass band from Gettysburg High School plays the national anthem. The eminent Yale historian James McPherson delivers a speech he may have written a long time ago to make college students feel bad. Because when he accuses the audience of taking our democracy for granted, there’s a rustling in the crowd. While people who commemorate the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address surely have a lot of problems, taking democracy for granted isn’t one of them. New Jersey’s governor, Christine Todd Whitman, then takes the podium, proclaiming, “Our government doesn’t have all the answers, and it never will.” That is code for “Sorry about that icky photo that shows me laughing as I frisk an innocent black man on a State Police ride-along.”
I sit through all of this, impatient. I didn’t come here for the opening acts. Like a Van Halen concertgoer who doesn’t high-five his friend until he hears the first bar of “Jump,” all I’ve been waiting for is for the Lincoln impersonator James Getty to stand up and read the Gettysburg Address already. This is what Garry Wills says happened after Lincoln stopped talking in 1863: “The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America.” This is what happened after the Lincoln impersonator stopped talking in the year 2000: The eight-year-old boy sitting next to me pointed at Getty and asked his mom, “Isn’t that guy too short?”
I glance at the kid with envy. He’s at that first, great, artsy-craftsy age when Americans learn about Abraham Lincoln. How many of us drew his beard in crayon? We built models of his boyhood cabin with Elmer’s glue and toothpicks. We memorized the Gettysburg Address, reciting its ten sentences in stovepipe hats stapled out of black construction paper. The teachers taught us to like Washington and to respect Jefferson. But Lincoln—him they taught us to love.
The First Thanksgiving
When I invited my mom and dad to come to New York City to have Thanksgiving at my house, I never expected them to say yes. Not only had they never been to New York, they had never been east of the Mississippi. Nor had they ever visited me. I’ve always had these fantasies about being in a normal family in which the parents come to town and their adult daughter spends their entire visit daydreaming of suicide. I’m here to tell you that dreams really do come true.
I was terrified we wouldn’t have enough to talk about. In the interest of harmony, there’s a tacit agreement in my family; the following subjects are best avoided in any conversation longer than a minute and a half: national politics, state and local politics, any music by any person who never headlined at the Grand Ole Opry, my personal life, and their so-called god. Five whole days. When I visit them back home in Montana, conversation isn’t a problem because we go to the movies every afternoon. That way, we can be together but without the burden of actually talking to each other. Tommy Lee Jones, bless his heart, does the talking for us.
But my sister, Amy, is coming and bringing her lively seven-month-old son, Owen, along, so the cinema’s not an option. Which means five days together—just us—no movies. We are heading into uncharted and possibly hostile waters, pioneers in a New World. It is Thanksgiving. The pilgrims had the Mayflower. I buy a gravy boat.
It’s lucky that Amy’s coming with Mom and Dad. Amy still lives six blocks away from them in Bozeman. She would act as interpreter and go-between among my parents and me. Like Squanto.
Amy’s husband, Jay, has decided to stay home in Montana to go deer hunting with his brother. Everyone else arrives at my apartment in Chelsea. Amy and Owen are bunking with me, so I walk my parents around the corner to check them into their hotel on Twenty-third.
“Here we are,” says Mom, stopping under the awning of the Chelsea Hotel. There she stands, a woman whose favorite book is called, simply, Matthew, right on the spot where the cops hauled Sid Vicious out in handcuffs after his girlfriend was found stabbed to death on their hotel room floor.
“No, Mother,” I say, taking her arm and directing her down the block to the Chelsea Savoy, a hotel where they go to the trouble to clean the rooms each day.
It is around this time, oh, twenty minutes into their trip, that my dad starts making wisecracks like “Boy, kid, bet you can’t wait until we’re out of here.” My father, a man who moved us sixteen
hundred miles away from our Oklahoma relatives so he wouldn’t have to see them anymore, makes a joke on average every two hours he is here about how much I’m anticipating the second they’ll say good-bye. I find this charming but so disturbingly true I don’t know what to say.
By halfway through the first day, I discover I needn’t have worried what we would talk about, with the baby preventing us from seeing movies. When you have a baby around, the baby is the movie. We occupy an entire entertaining hour just on drool, nonnarrative drool. At this stage, baby Owen is laughing, sitting up, and able to roll over. He is the cutest, the funniest, sweetest, smartest, best-behaved baby in the world.
Then there’s the sightseeing. First stop, Ellis Island. The thing about going to Ellis Island is that it’s a lot like going to Ellis Island. Perhaps to help you better understand the immigrant experience, they make you stand in line for the crammed ferry for an hour and a half in the windy cold. By the time we step onto the island, we are huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Our great-grandmother Ellen passed through here on her way from Sweden. We watch a video on the health inspections given to immigrants, walk past oodles of photos of men in hats and women in shawls. Though no one says anything, I know my father and mother and sister are thinking what I’m thinking. They’re thinking about when we moved away from Oklahoma to Montana, how unknown that was, how strange and lonesome. I read a letter in a display case that says, “And I never saw my mother again,” and I think of my grandfather, how we just drove off, leaving him behind, waving to us in the rear view mirror. And here we are in New York, because here I am in New York, because ever since Ellen’s father brought her here, every generation moves away from the one before.