The Partly Cloudy Patriot

by Sarah Vowell

  I called my friend Kate, asking her if she could figure out why I do the things I do. Kate is a psychologist who counsels people with actual historical problems, like Kosovar refugees, at the Bellevue-NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. (If you really want to dampen your excitement about seeing the new Tom Hanks movie, just call Kate at her office to pick a show time and hear the receptionist answer the phone, “Program for Survivors of Torture.”) Kate asked what was wrong, and I told her that I’d just gotten back from Salem and I had a really good time.

  “Is that normal?” I wondered. “How come I never go to the Caribbean or Martha’s Vineyard or someplace that’s a travel magazine’s idea of fun?” I told her how much I enjoyed the Rebecca Nurse Homestead near Salem. “Why should I want to spend my Saturday seeing the farm where a nice old lady who was hanged three hundred years ago used to live? I’m a pretty happy person. Why am I drawn to these gruesome places?”

  “Well, its not denial,” Kate responds. “It’s the opposite of denial. Something is playing out in your unconscious. Maybe you feel guilty about your happy life.”

  “But it’s not like I’m going to Gettysburg or Salem just to earnestly mourn. I go there and joke around. When I had breakfast in Salem, I ordered bacon, the food of joy.”

  “So,” she says, “you enact your ambivalence. You feel two ways about American history. Your life turned out great, but you’re disgusted by the creepiness. So you take your own happy self to sites of disaster in order to deconstruct your ambivalence.”

  “Isn’t that immoral?”

  “No, that’s how we try to make sense of the worst horrors. We use humor to manage anxiety.”

  Which got me thinking. I’ve been “managing” my “anxiety” pretty well lately. In fact, the last year has probably been the happiest of my life. So what does it mean that in the last twelve months I’ve taken trips to the sites of so many historical tragedies? Besides Gettysburg and Salem, I’ve dropped by Little Bighorn Battlefield (more ominous than Gettysburg in that a bunch of headstones mark the spot where soldiers in Custer’s 7th Cavalry fell down and died); the North Dakota ranch where Theodore Roosevelt escaped when his wife and mother died on the same day; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; and the George W. Bush inauguration.

  If I had to nail down the objective of my historical tourism, it’s probably to collect evidence in support of my motto. And my motto in any situation is “It Could Be Worse.” It could be worse is how I meet every setback. Though nothing all that bad has ever happened to me, every time I’ve had my heart broken or gotten fired or watched an audience member at one of my readings have a seizure as I stand at the podium trying not to cry, I remind myself that it could be worse. In my self-help universe, when things go wrong I whisper mantras to myself, mantras like “Andersonville” or “Texas School Book Depository.” “Andersonville” is a code word for “You could be one of the prisoners of war dying of disease and malnutrition in the worst Confederate prison, so just calm down about the movie you wanted to go to being sold out.” “Texas School Book Depository” means that having the delivery guy forget the guacamole isn’t nearly as bad as being assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald as the blood from your head stains your wife’s pink suit. Though, ever since I went to Salem, I’m keen on “Gallows Hill.” As in, Being stuck in the Boise airport for ten hours while getting hit on by a divorced man with “major financial problems” on his way to his twentieth high school reunion is irksome, but not as dire as swinging by the neck on Salem’s Gallows Hill.

  So if I have gleaned anything useful from reading and day-tripping through the tribulations of the long dead, it’s to count my blessings, to try and quit bellyaching, buck up. Can’t you just hear the children’s song:

  Gallows Hill and Andersonville

  It could be, could be worse

  Another reason I’m intrigued with the hanged of Salem, especially the women, is that a number of them aroused suspicion in the first place because they were financially independent, or sharp-tongued, or kept to themselves. In other words, they were killed off for living the same sort of life I live right now but with longer skirts and fewer cable channels.

  On the first day of school when I was a kid, the guy teaching history—and it was almost always a guy, wearing a lot of brown—would cough up the pompous same old same old about how if we kids failed to learn the lessons of history then we would be doomed to repeat them. Which is true if you’re one of the people who grow up to run things, but not as practical if your destiny is a nice small life. For example, thanks to my tenth-grade world history textbook’s chapter on the Napoleonic Wars, I know not to invade Russia in the wintertime. This information would have been good for an I-told-you-so toast at Hitler’s New Year’s party in 1943, but for me, knowing not to trudge my troops through the snow to Moscow is not so handy day-to-day.

  The other sort of useful thing the history teacher in the brown jacket never really said, probably because he would have been laughed out of the room, was this: knowing what happened when and where is fun. The next time I go to Paris, before I get my first croissant, I’m heading straight to that street and look for that hole. That hole was the best part of my trip. It’s even more enjoyable to learn hole-like factoids about where you live, because you can see them all the time. Picking up my dry cleaning in my neighborhood, Chelsea, seems more festive since I found out that this is where Clement Clarke Moore wrote “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” (Well, until some historian proved that Moore lied and stole the poem from someone else, but, hey, the plot thickens.)

  The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey caffé mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle’s Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bitter-sweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much. And, thanks to Sophie and Michael Coe’s book The True History of Chocolate, I remembered that cacao beans were used as currency at the moment of European contact. When Christopher Columbus’s son Ferdinand captured a Mayan canoe in 1503, he noticed that whenever one of the natives dropped a cacao bean, “they all stooped to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen.” When you know such trivia, an act as mundane as having an overpriced breakfast drink becomes imbued with meaning, even poetry. Plus, I read a women’s magazine article called “5 Fabulous Morning Rituals,” and it said that after you “bask in bed” and “walk in nature” you’re supposed to “ponder the sins of the conquistadors.”

  The New German Cinema

  When I was growing up pretentious in Bozeman, Montana, I got all my ideas about going to the movies in New York City from the Woody Alien oeuvre. That’s the word I would have used too, oeuvre. Because I was a teen cinéaste. These days, I’d describe myself as a moviegoer, but back then I was gaga for the accent aigu. In Woody Allen movies, people stood in line for Ingmar Bergman films or holocaust documentaries, talking up media theory to pass the time. At sixteen, that was my idea of fun. Now that I live in New York I can tell you that people lined up for tickets don’t debate theory; they talk about cute guys at the gym or whether or not they live within walking distance of a Krispy Kreme.

  I was such a young fogy that growing up involved becoming less mature. In my defense, I was a product of my environment. My hometown is a college town populated by a minority of city-slicker refugees who taught Western kids Western civ. Marooned at cow college, these humanities types pined for pretense. So they organized a weekly film festival, slanted heavily toward foreign product. I remember one night so cold the cars wouldn’t start, moviegoers sprinting in the forty-degrees-below-zero cold to watch something Danish. And I remember I once overhe
ard a teenager telling her mother after the actually entertaining Wings of Desire that Wim Wenders had “sold out.” See, we were mad for the New German Cinema, the sixties generation of filmmakers from West Germany who made gritty, questioning art in the shadow of their parents’ Nazi barbarism. Like, people in Bozeman would do impressions of characters from Volker Schlöndorff films, walking up behind you and screaming at the top of their lungs, then asking, “Who am I? Who am I?” and you’d say, “Duh. Oskar from The Tin Drum.”

  The New German Cinema craze started in the mid-eighties, thanks to the head of the local college’s film school. I took his class once. It was called something innocuous like Introduction to Cinema, so a lot of frat guys and cowboys signed up, thinking they’d fulfill humanities requirements by watching “movies.” You should have seen the looks on their faces the day we saw the black-and-white film where a teenage girl gets her period on camera. Or the day we screened Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? In it, a humdrum businessman goes about his humdrum business—listening to his harpy wife, helping his son with his homework, talking to his visiting parents—for what seems like hours, until the last five minutes, when he goes berserk and bludgeons his family to death. Afterward, we were supposed to discuss existentialism. The professor asked if anyone had read Camus. I, of course, had read L’Étranger in the original French, and raised my hand. I mentioned the protagonist who doesn’t care about his mother’s death. Then I said that I often washed dishes with my mom. When she’d hand me a knife to dry, I would have the fleeting thought that it would be pretty easy to kill her if I wanted. I should mention that I usually sat in the back, so when I said this about a hundred heads whipped around to stare at me. What I should have said was, “But I don’t want to kill her!” What I actually said was, “Oh, like you never thought about killing your mom.” It was at that moment that I realized how small the New German Cinema community really was.

  I have friends here in New York who occasionally invite me to some plotless downer at the Film Forum, but I always decline. They probably think I’m just some rube. But the truth is, I outgrew existentialism and subtitles. At some point in my mid-twenties I discovered fun. The only film by a German director I’ve seen since I moved here is Wolfgang Petersen’s The Perfect Storm. But I earned the right to munch popcorn as the ocean messes up George Clooney’s hair, because I sat through The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant—twice.

  Democracy and Things Like That

  It all started in 1999, when Joanne McGlynn’s media literacy class at Concord High School in Concord, New Hampshire, invited all the presidential candidates to speak. Known to loiter in New Hampshire ceaselessly before the state’s primary elections, a whopping 50 percent of the eight major candidates accepted: Alan Keyes, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, and Al Gore. They were asked to speak on the subject of school violence, not just because of the murders at Columbine earlier that year but also because a Concord High student was killed at school a couple of years earlier.

  Gore spoke to the student body on November 30, 1999. And, contrary to conventional wisdom regarding his charisma deficiency, he was a hit. Students Lucas Gallo, Ashley Pettengill, and Alyssa Spellman recall the event.

  Lucas claims, “He wasn’t as stiff as people say he was. He comes out, takes his jacket off. He walks around, talks to the audience.”

  Ashley remembers, “There was the question that said, ‘What do you like to do for fun?’ And he mentioned that he liked The Simpsons.”

  “He understood that we are people,” Alyssa says. “We are kids but we’re not dumb. We understand what’s going on, and he respected that.”

  Lucas laughs, admitting, “He was still Gore. But he wasn’t quite as stiff. He didn’t just get up and talk like the other candidates did. He was kind of a neat speaker to see.”

  While the students were impressed by Gore’s easygoing manner—his form—Joanne McGlynn was pleased with his content, the way he talked about school violence. “He was very careful to describe the complicated nature of what might have caused what happened at Columbine,” she recalls. “He didn’t say, ‘It is just because those two boys played video games.’ He used a little analogy about when you catch a cold or when you don’t. He said that some kids in this auditorium had the insulation of a loving family, of teachers who cared about them, of a supportive school system and said perhaps they were insulated from some of these outside forces. And, therefore, were immune from committing those kinds of acts.”

  Then, during the question and answer period, something happened that seemed unremarkable at the time. A boy stood up and asked a mundane question about how high school students could become more involved in politics.

  “He answered in a lengthy response,” McGlynn recalls. “He thought for a moment, paused, and said, ‘I know there’s a lot of cynicism in the country right now, especially among young people. He said, ‘I think it’s caused by a number of things. Maybe we need campaign finance reform.’ And he went on and talked about how he supported McCain-Feingold. He then said, ‘But I think you kids should look in the mirror.’

  “I think that leaders can make a difference,” Gore told the student. “But I think you also have to examine your own hearts. We are so privileged to live in this country. If that sounds corny to you, you should examine that attitude. Seriously. Think about South Africa. They just recently became a democracy. When they had their first election, you know what the percentage turnout was? It was like 95 percent. People waited in lines to vote that were seven miles long. Here we have a constantly declining voter turnout. I think it’s because a lot of people feel like they cannot make an individual difference. But you can.”

  McGlynn says, “So he challenged them to get involved, and then he said, ‘Let me tell you a little story.’”

  In the days that followed Gore’s appearance, this little story was twisted, distorted and, ultimately, more fought over than a piece of Jerusalem real estate. And so I will quote his anecdote in its entirety:

  Let me tell you a quick story. Twenty years ago, I got a letter from a high school student in West Tennessee about how the water her family was drinking from a well tasted funny. She wrote me how her grandfather had a mysterious ailment that paralyzed part of his body, that she was convinced was related to the water. Then her father also became mysteriously ill. People thought she was imagining things. We investigated, and what we found was that one mile from her home a chemical company had dug a big trench and they were dumping millions of gallons of hazardous chemical waste into the ground. It had seeped down into the water table and contaminated her family’s well and the wells of other families in that rural area. I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue and Toone, Tennessee—that was the one you didn’t hear of. But that was the one that started it all. We passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dump sites. And we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country. We’ve still got work to do. But we made a huge difference. And it all happened because one high school student got involved.

  The night after the speech, Joanne McGlynn’s at home, and a friend calls her, asking if she’s seen The New York Times. “He said, ‘Did you notice the Love Canal comment?’ And I said, ‘I remember he told a story about Love Canal.’ And he said, ‘The Times says that Gore’s taking credit for finding Love Canal.’ And I thought, Uh-oh. I got a bit nervous. I thought, Is that the way this story is going to be covered?”

  The New York Times article in question, by Katherine Seelye, ran on December 1, 1999. In a seventeen-paragraph piece about one day in the Gore campaign, four paragraphs are devoted to the Concord High appearance. Seelye quoted Gore, “‘I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue and Toone, Tennessee,’ he said. ‘But I was the one that started it all.’�
� It is curious that The Washington Post made the exact same mistake. Also on December 1, the Post staff writer Ceci Connolly quoted, “‘I was the one that started it all.’”

  Alyssa recalls, “We came into class and Ms. McGlynn was like, ‘You guys are not going to believe this.’ And she wrote the quote up on the board and she said, ‘Did he say this?’ and we were like ‘What? What?’ ‘Did he say this: I was the one that started it all.’ Then we were like, No, he was talking about the girl. That event started it all. And then we looked at all the newspapers and we were like, Wow.”

  Ashley: “She then played us back the tape that our TV production class had made and the actual quote was ‘that was the one that started it all,’ referring to the city in Tennessee.”

  According to Alyssa, “We definitely said we have to do something about this. And we were definitely I think shocked that, that one little word, one little word, totally changed the context and totally changed what everyone thought about it.”

  After the Times, and the Post, the Love Canal mistake snowballed. U.S. News & World Report listed “I was the one that started it all” as one of its quotes of the week. There was the following little roundtable about Gore and Love Canal on ABC’s This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts, among the two hosts, George Stephanopoulos and Bill Kristol.

  “Gore again revealed his Pinocchio problem,” quips Stephanopoulos. “He says he was the model for Love Story, created the Internet, and this time he sort of discovered Love Canal. It was a kind of exaggeration.”