Chapter 12
REPUBLICANS
I HAVE KNOWN
A bleeding heart liberal named John
Empathized hither and yon
And whenever he put
Down his small narrow foot,
He worried what he had stepped on.
IN THE fourth grade, I pored over a delicious book, Runaway Home by Elizabeth Coatsworth, about a family that moves from Maine to Washington State, traveling in a house trailer and having adventures along the way. I daydreamed that my family and I were nomads, migrating according to whim, camping in beautiful places and then moving on. (I think my dad had the same daydream.) I spent whole afternoons on the bank of the Mississippi, looking at the water flowing over the rapids, imagining myself on a boat heading downstream. I still think about it, standing on the landing in St. Paul and looking at the big curve of the river below downtown. I still love driving to the airport to get on a plane to wherever A Prairie Home Companion is playing that weekend. People tell me, “That must be hard on you, all that traveling,” but it really isn’t. You buckle up and rise to the skies and look at the patchwork quilt of farms pass beneath and feel loosened from the struggle of daily life.
The problem for a writer is that liberation from the struggle is tedious to write about: struggle is material for a writer and ease and comfort are not. And at 37,000 feet, a person starts to think like a Republican.
I didn’t want to write a political book. A writer resists marching under a banner. A writer claims the freedom to sashay into whatever heretical notion takes his fancy. Writing is so risky to start with—you might spend three years pecking away at your novel and accomplish no more than if you had sat watching football on TV and eating Cheez-Its—so you cherish your freedom, the thing that makes writing fun, the chance to irritate and enrage.
Early in my career, I wrote stories for The New Yorker living in a rented house on a farm in Stearns County, working in a tiny bedroom on an Underwood typewriter on a desk made of a 3⁄4-inch plywood slab set across two old filing cabinets, sat and tapped away for hours, looking out at the farmyard and old red barn and silo, and tried so hard to please New York that it queered my style and I had to go back to radio to learn to talk straight. Now I tell stories on the radio about Lake Wobegon and its God-fearing egalitarian inhabitants, and though I find grandeur in this, I feel that, at 61, I am still in search of what I was looking for when I was 18. What I really want is a long conversation with Grandpa and Grandma Denham who came over from Glasgow in 1906 with their six kids, Marion, Mary, Ruby, Margaret, Jean, and Bill, and settled into a big frame house on Longfellow Avenue. Grandpa was a railroad clerk who wore hightop black shoes and white shirts with silk armbands and spoke with a Scottish burr, so that girls came out “gettles.” He never drove a car or attended a movie or read a novel. I want to know why they came here, what they were looking for—the truth, not a children’s fable—and if I have found it, maybe I can stop looking.
Maybe I just need to take up golf.
Maybe I should write a book about Republicans I have met and liked. Chet Atkins was a Republican and one of the finest human beings I ever met, a gentleman and artist and storyteller and a man with a true gift for friendship. I loved Chet, as so many people did, and there on his office wall hung pictures of him with Reagan, Bush the First, Lamar Alexander, everybody grinning. Senator Dave Durenberger once put an arm around me and wished me a Merry Christmas and told me to “just go on being who you are,” after I had written a savage attack on a wretched despicable protégé of his. Years ago, when the National Endowment for the Arts was under attack over the Mapplethorpe pictures of naked men with things stuck in their orifices, I walked into the office of Senator Alan Simpson, the Republican whip, to make a case for the NEA and he couldn’t wait to tell me about a game played by Wyoming cowboys in which you drop your trousers and try to pick up a quarter on a wooden bench using only your cheeks. A fine gentleman. Justice Harry Blackmun was a Republican of the old school, and showed me a framed photograph of himself and the rest of the Harvard Glee Club posing on the White House lawn with President Hoover. And a framed bullet that somebody shot through the window of his home, payment perhaps for his having written the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade. Every day, this modest man went for a walk after lunch at his office. He declined to take a security man along with him and followed the same route every day, returning to the Supreme Court building by the front entrance, often passing through a crowd of antiabortion picketers holding up pictures of dead embryos and not recognizing the slight bespectacled man in the overcoat who had done the devil’s work.
I met President Reagan once back in 1991 with my stepdaughter, a film student at Columbia. Myself, I wouldn’t know how to get an appointment with the mayor of Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin but the New York Times has clout and an editor there arranged it, hoping I’d write something sharp and satiric about the old man. We went to the top floor of a building in Century Plaza with a fine view of west LA and the ocean and in he came, beaming, though he hadn’t a clue who we were or why we’d come. Had we had trouble finding the address? No. Were we enjoying LA? Yes. Had we visited the Reagan library? No. “But we got to see the old Warner Brothers lot,” Malene said. And that lit up the old man’s eyes. He turned and bestowed his full sunny warmth on her. Nothing, it seemed to me, not a battalion of Young Republicans or a gold plaque from the National Rifle Association could have warmed his heart like a beautiful young woman who felt (she really did) that the Thirties were the heyday of moviemaking and who revered motion pictures starring old pals of his, and he got all twinkly and Irish. No wonder he got elected, despite his cranky view of the world and the canned quality of his every utterance, and was let off so easily for the Iran-Contra business, an impeachable offense if there ever was one.
I’d enjoy writing that book. And yet my life depends on the social compact that Republicans are determined to cripple by cutting taxes so as to starve government and kill off public services through insolvency and reduce us to a low-wage no-services plantation economy run by an enclave class that I do not wish to be part of. I don’t want to move to a high-security building with a doorman and closed-circuit TV surveillance or a private suburban community with a guardhouse at the entrance and regular patrols by a private security force. I want to stay here in St. Paul where anyone can walk up to my front door, Jehovah’s Witnesses or Boy Scouts selling Christmas wreaths or candidates for city council or firewood salesmen or cat burglars casing the joint, and I want the freedom to walk the streets and enjoy the civility of the city, and for that, the Republicans must be fought before their success destroys the neighborhood. When the coyotes become too numerous and bold, then in defense of small children you must go and deal with coyotes, whether you want to or not.
What bewilders me about Republicans is the coalition of the corporate Bourbon wing of the party and the Bible wing, two groups with little in common, but the Bible wing supplies the votes and the Bourbons take most of the booty. The Bourbons get tax cuts and deregulation and the Bibleists get a few vague gestures on symbolic issues such as gay marriage and school prayer. Like the Pharisees, the Bibleists enjoy public displays of religion. A roomful of movers and shakers gathered for a prayer breakfast that is all about bonding, backslapping, hobnobbing, and the prayers are read off 3x5 index cards, and there is a complete lack of heartfelt witnessing as you’d find among people of faith. At the prayer breakfast, if the Holy Spirit speaks, it is always in favor of tax cuts and less government regulation and preemptive military action. The Holy Spirit never comes out in favor of anything without clearing it with the Republican Party.
The Bibleists vow to put God back in the public schools, as if He were a small plaster icon and not the Creator of the universe. Evidently, when they hear public prayer, they sense the Spirit’s presence. I don’t. The public invocation (O Thou Who didst turn water into wine, bless, we beseech Thee, this conference of the Water Sanitation Engineers of the North Central D
istrict . . .) is a piece of sanctimonious boilerplate with the spiritual weight of a postage stamp. It has no connection to true prayer, the throwing of myself down in the presence of the Creator: Lord have mercy, Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world have mercy upon us. Our Father Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Saying the names of loved ones, putting myself wordlessly under God’s wing. That is true prayer. Pharisee prayer is simply a political speech that is addressed to God, as if He needed instruction. Why are the Pharisees so willing to exploit the Christian faith for political mileage? They will have to answer that; I can’t. But God is not mocked and does not find political cynicism appealing in any way.
Faith is private. It demonstrates itself in good works and love of neighbors but it doesn’t need to puff up and blow a horn and bang on kitchen pans. Everyone must look in his own heart and ask, Do I really believe or do I not? Jews do this in the fall and Christians in early spring, during Lent. Most people do not believe. They have tried to believe and they wish they did believe and are sorry they don’t, because they like to be around people who do, so they come to church, and enjoy the music and decor and the hallowedness of it all, but the faith is not in them. They don’t need to tell me about it—they only need to answer to God on this matter. He will understand if the answer is no. He already knew that.
The tragedy is when people who don’t believe are so tortured by their unbelief that they set out to scourge their fellow unbelievers. When you try to find the love of Christ at work in the Republican Party, it may take you awhile. The Christian Coalition was a Republican front with about as much to do with the Christian faith as the Elks Club has to do with large hoofed animals.
My parents said grace before every meal, with the plaster Brethren plaques on the wall—JESUS NEVER FAILS, and PRAYER CHANGES THINGS—and faithfully attended the breaking of bread on Sunday mornings and gospel meetings on Sunday nights and Bible readings on Wednesdays and patiently awaited the Rapture. The Brethren were gentle dissenters devoted to the Lord’s Word who believed in separation from the things of the world. You shouldn’t make big plans, or think too highly of yourself, or curry the favor of nonbelievers, or devote yourself to gathering wealth. They were deeply suspicious of earthly success. On Sunday morning you sat in the Brethren meeting hall, which was plain, unadorned, with no pictures or statues or gold or expensive things because the Brethren lived by the Word and didn’t parade their Christian faith for effect. My father thought the baccalaureate “service” at the high school was silly on the face of it, mere religiosity, an attempt by the indifferent to play at religious ritual and thereby assuage their guilty conscience. And that’s the Republican Party: its Christianity is about half fake because it scorns Jesus’ command to love thy neighbor as thyself and it abuses any who take the commandment seriously. Better to be a principled atheist than a Christian for show. A man who employs the Lord as a special effect and makes a public performance of piety deadens his spiritual life and puts his own soul in danger.
America is not a religious country, no matter how many Americans say they believe in God. I’ve been in religious countries and this is not one of them. There is no Sabbath, no fasting or prohibitions, every day is a feast day. You can buy liquor on Sunday almost anywhere, find pornography in any Marriott or Wal-Mart, say any ugly, profane thing on the radio or anywhere—we’re fat and sloppy and as disciplined as a battalion of cats, an impulsive, dreamy people walking around eating ice cream cones and eyeballing the girls’ sweaters and dreaming of a big hit in the lottery. If God is looking for a nation to carry out His will on earth, it isn’t this one. And it wasn’t leftist professors who led us into the sins of the flesh: it was capitalist entrepreneurs. If the Pharisees really wanted to make this a God-fearing nation, they’d be taking up their cudgels against fellow Republicans.
Chapter 13
ARROGANCE
A progressive named Robert LaFollette
Said, “I don’t care what you call it,
Social welfare, the dole,
Or a black hole,
I just want to get in your wallet.”
DEMOCRATS are thought to be weak on foreign policy—fearful of the use of American power in the world—but what we fear is arrogance. History shows so clearly the stupidities of 1915—old men in power with little notion of where they were headed, afraid to betray uncertainty or fear, willing to sacrifice a generation of young men so that old men could parade around in their plumed helmets for a few more years—which was also the stupidity of Vietnam and is still with us today. Great harm has been done by strategists and theoreticians drawing lines on a map that represent real soldiers slogging through mud and mist toward impenetrable barriers that don’t appear so on the map. The strategists draw the lines and issue the orders and have lunch in the officers’ mess under the chandeliers and the soldiers move out into the rain and die in the desolate dark.
For my generation of college kids, travel to foreign places was a test of one’s character and intelligence. We grew up curious about Europe and Asia and hoped to really experience it and not an Americanized version, to see villages with no Coca-Cola signs. We worked at marshaling a little French, some Italian, some German, as our humble offering to the natives so they might accept us.
When I lived in Denmark in the late Eighties, I went to parties and listened to the dinner speeches and songs and when the Dane sitting next to me asked, “Shall we speak English or Danish?” I said, “Dansk, naturligvis. Vi er i danmark.” And off I went down the slippery slopes. The Dane might be a reader of Updike and Cheever, but I chugged along in my patchy Danish, little shattered sentences stuck together with lumpy participles, because I wanted to get far away from arrogance and also because it’s a unique pleasure to express your patriotism in a foreign tongue. You chatter in Danish about New York City and Graceland and LA and New Orleans, the magnificent West, Chicago, the redwoods, the Grand Canyon, all that Danes love about America, the mythological landscape of books and music. It isn’t our politicians they admire.
When I lived there, Danes were still talking about the visit of Vice President Bush to speak at the Danish Fourth of July at Rebild Park in Jutland and how his armor-plated limousine had sunk down in the sand en route to the speaker’s pavilion and how the man refused to get out of the damn car and walk 200 yards to the stage. He sat in his behemoth car with Old Glory flying from the front fender, surrounded by Secret Service, and it took twenty men on a hot day to push him and his tank through the sand to the pavilion where he disembarked and gave his speech on Freedom, America’s Gift to the World. Denmark is a country where big shots walk. Mr. Bush made a big impression on the Danes.
I went to the Danish Fourth of July celebration in 1992 and the day before to a reception at the American ambassador’s residence in Charlottenlund, a mansion with a swimming pool in back and a lawn big enough to play softball on. Thirty guests mingled in the sunshine, Danes from the ministry of education and various exchange programs and some Americans from the Embassy and a couple of Fulbrights, and then suddenly the Ambassador appeared, a beefy Republican with a big honk that made you flinch and look away, embarrassed that your country was represented by such a yahoo. He circulated through the crowd, grabbing people’s shoulders (“Hey, how we doin’ here? Need a refill?”), the perfect caricature of the self-made tycoon (“You want another beer? Hey! Go for it!”). The man represented the defeat of American satire. Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, George Ade, Sinclair Lewis, and James Thurber had all beaten on this man for a hundred years and there wasn’t a dent in him. He stood there, drink in hand, as fresh and happy and stupid as if Babbitt had never been written. He read his speech off a sheet of paper, bellowing into a microphone. “Velkommen and Tak,” he said. “And now I think I’ll switch to English. Danish always sounds to me like someone choking on a potato.” He paused for the laugh, not understanding that it’s only funny if a Dane makes fun of Danish: coming from an American, it’s rude. He read his little talk about the Fu
lbright program, said it was a good thing and he was in favor of it and stepped down, a Republican through and through, crass, smug, contemptuous of foreigners, inept at English, anti-intellectual and damn proud of it, and he got away with it because Danes admire America. Not for people like him but for jazz musicians, cartoonists, writers, and of course for the Americans who helped rescue Europe from the Nazis. He was a man writing a check on other people’s accounts.
We Democrats do not want to be him. We prefer to stand with the tradition of Adams and Franklin and Jefferson, who made the voyage across the Atlantic and polished their French and learned to make their way by their wits and not by throwing money around or at the point of a cannon. America has produced great travelers and explorers and missionaries. They didn’t stand behind a podium and thunder and threaten and strike a belligerent pose for domestic consumption, they went out into the world with courage and curiosity to take it on its own terms. They looked, they listened, they learned to walk lightly.
Chapter 14
9/11
A Republican lady of Knoxville
Bought her brassieres by the boxful,
Which she stuffed with corn kernels
Homegrown Democrat Page 13