The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  The first Perdist Poll, in 1790 (we’re jumping ahead for half a tick) (we’ll meet many a Perdist Poll along our way; we’re still doing them!), attempts to find some answers. Polls are unheard of, and why and how Brutus Herakles Perdist comes to conceive of such a notion is lost to history. He takes a pencil and a notebook and asks the same several dozen questions to assorted neighbors and strangers along his route as a self-appointed inspector of what passes for a mail service in rural Massachusetts. Actually, it’s not a badly constructed what today would be called “sample.” He discovers more Johnson than Zinn. This land and those who dwell here are doing very well indeed. Very few people gripe. Many answers are embellished with statements like “heaven on earth” and “the only way you could get me to leave this country is in a coffin.” America, it appears, is on its way to becoming the richest country ever, but its population is still too small to produce enough volume to be heard.

  And we do want to be heard, The American People. “We want for everyone here, yes we do, because more will lead to more,” advises Brutus Herakles Perdist in the preface to his study. “America is still too lonely, and if it is facts and figures that will bring them here, then here ye, hear ye!”

  Thanks to Alexander Hamilton (also still down the road apiece), it will be the pursuit of wealth, not excellence, that will form and inform The American People from their official beginning (yes, we’re getting there, but not yet). This wealth will become, like Mick’s Rolling Stone or Sisyphus’ boulder, increasingly visible as it gathers negotiability. Everyone will soon realize that everything is and can be and will be and really should be for sale.

  And all of this, miraculously, is now all right. God is keeping His lips sealed in His Holy Temple.

  For a bunch of religious bigots who conceive of the Lord as a wrathful punisher of overreaching, where in God’s name does such permission come from?

  John Locke.

  Yes, a man named John Locke, who wrote a lot of things that many think they understand when they do not, a man no one reads anymore, a man who lived in England and Continental Europe from 1632 to 1704 and never came to America (although he helped to write a constitution for the Carolinas), this man has more to do with forming the soul of The American People than any other preacher’s God.

  These are some of the things he said, stood for, and believed (with grateful acknowledgment to The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of American History, and The Blackwell Encyclopedia of British History):

  He wrote, in 1690, Two Treatises of Government, which played a large role in the debates leading to the Declaration of Independence.

  He believed government is a voluntary creation of self-interested individuals who consent to be governed in order to protect their personal rights to life, liberty, and property.

  He believed the unlimited acquisition of money and wealth is neither unjust nor morally wrong.

  He believed men are moved to community by a common “moral sense” that produces sociability and benevolence and a more rational perception of the common good, which is informed by sentiment and affection, not by fear of eternal damnation.

  A “moral sense,” John Locke says, is innate in all mankind, giving us all the intuitive knowledge of what is right and what is wrong.

  For Locke, “or else” means you don’t eat, not that you go to hell.

  Now, in the most fundamental sense of all, because of this universally shared moral sense, all people can be seen to be equal, because all people have the moral capacity for sociability and benevolence, for sentiment and affection.

  “God is love” is now “Man is love.”

  It is rich to be rich.

  All this is certainly a far cry from Cotton Mather’s “We Must Live on God’s Love Alone.” Locke’s very Protestant God commands men to work the earth, true, but in exchange comes not a fleeting respite from eternal damnation but the right to possess what they work for. Since God gives “different degrees of industry” to men, some have more talent and work harder than others, and it is entirely ethical for them to have as many possessions as they want.

  This is crucial to America’s emerging ideology. If individuals are to define themselves in terms of what they achieve in the race of life, and if this sense of achievement is seen increasingly in terms of work and victory in a market society where talent and industry have their play, then the earlier Christian moral barriers to unlimited accumulation have to fall. Achievement and sense of self are now measured by economic success.

  Take that, John Winthrop! Take that, Hookers and Mathers all! Take that, Jonathan Edwards! The cosmic struggle is not between God and Mammon but between industry and idleness.

  Yes, this is the beginning. Those who came here to preach self-sacrifice and defilement are swept along? away? farther west? The concatenation and tintinnabulation of damnation must now fight it out with the purrs of comfort and the grunts of greed.

  The philosophical decks are now cleared for America to be on its way to being the richest place in the world.

  So if you are rich and have no guilt, John Locke is the man to thank. John Locke made you rich, keeps you rich, and will bury you rich.

  And if you aren’t rich, it’s nobody’s fault but your own.

  But if you think the Devil has been banished from this earth, think again.

  THE STATE OF THE (STILL NOT QUITE) UNION

  The early Americans are subject to the same appetites, suffocated by religious hypocrisy though they may be, that accompanied their lives where they came from. God may inhabit the house, but bedrooms and crotches have their visitors. True, matters had got out of hand back in England, where licentiousness was a way of life. There was ample reason for the concerned to be concerned. The London that has been left behind is smutty and scurrilous. But once the immigrants are over here, why is there such denial that anything much is happening save for the worship of God?

  The South is way-out-of-control permissive; it is much too far away for law and order to hold sway. South Carolina is filled with scum. “Devil-may-care degenerates,” as one historian describes them. The tough guys wind up in South Carolina. The Mid-Atlantic is rowdy and free-for-all, though perhaps with self-appointed civil magistrates more plentiful here. There is rarely a shortage, anywhere, of neighbors eager to tattle on what they see or believe they see. In the major population centers of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, each with its growing abundance of hungry adults, as well as a superabundance of men of the cloth spouting God and sin, things are held better in check. Sort of.

  This is not to say that Philadelphia, for many years our largest “city,” is a spick-and-span kind of town. As we shall see.

  Bawdiness. It sounds a rather old-fashioned and sophomoric word, doesn’t it? But it’s the one attached to most offenses. Many are the complaints about and punishments for bawdiness. There are bawdy houses and bawdy almanacs. Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack will be filled with swipes at loose women and cuckolded men. But then, Ben never did like women much. And there will soon be more newspapers in the New World than even in the Old World. And newspapers will print almost anything. And do.

  Yes, God may be in His Holy Temple, but earthly thoughts are never silent. Miscegenation in the forests (big-time in the South). Bigamy in the towns (ditto in the North). Unwanted babies, abandoned or murdered, more of the latter than the former, pretty much everywhere. Self-pollution (i.e., jerking off in public). Bestiality (i.e., fucking animals). Dirty talk. Foul language. And adultery everywhere. Fucked, rogered, fuddled, or yarded, these folk are hungry! There are not enough magistrates to marry and not enough law enforcers to enforce. The statute may be on the books, but there is usually little save a neighbor’s testimony to go on when it’s disobeyed.

  So it can be safely said that while righteousness is galumphing through the pulpits, sin is slithering supremely in the alleyways. Everything that we do now they did then. Don’t you let any boring historian or chro
nicler tell you otherwise. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise! There has been little new under the sun in this department.

  Let us press on.

  It’s time to finally meet our Father.

  * * *

  It suddenly occurs to me … you do understand … and I don’t think that you do … that I have three completely different sets of problems in dealing with all of you. There is a penis, which you know a little about, and there is a vagina, of which you are most ignorant, and there is the asshole, which Dr. Sister Grace is so fond of profaning. Profaning. That is a new and big word for me. I learn from you. But you do not learn from me.

  Working with you is like taking ocean voyages to three entirely different continents. I think it will take a very long time for you to understand this geography of your own bodies. Good. I like long voyages. They are relaxing and refreshing and I meet so many new and interesting people.

  Who is this Father you speak of? I look forward to meeting your father.

  GEORGE WASHINGTON: A RECONSIDERATION

  “All our history will begin with me,” George Washington will say again and again, “and all our history will happen here,” he will say, referring to the town being built to honor him.

  To read what is written about him, George Washington is among the most boring presidents that The American People will ever have. Everything written about the man is as if from a catalogue of spare parts, The Great Men Catalogue. There is no warmth, no blood. There is only his “icy majesty” (Rhodehamel). And he is a snob of the highest order. He is always cognizant of who is above him and below him. For a man who liked to get fucked up the ass he certainly is uptight.

  “Washington eludes us, even in the city named for him,” Garry Wills begins his peculiarly unsatisfying biography, illustrating our theme:

  Why is George so eternally elusive?

  How mysterious to have our very first president so invisible and The American People so bereft of human knowledge about him.

  Surely someone must have known him a little bit.

  Apparently not. Or not so that he thought so.

  “I did not desire to be known,” he will lie. “And no one knew me,” he will lie again, in some final notes Hamilton finds and which make Alex cry. They had been in love with each other, mightily.

  He did have beautiful handwriting, exceptionally neat and pretty. It’s hard to get to know someone who writes like the best girl in penmanship class. For a man who kept every scrap for the posthumous record of his life and saw to it that each was stored carefully away, he is surprisingly difficult to pin down. Amusingly, the relative who inherited these papers passed out free samples of the great man’s handwriting to anyone who asked for a souvenir.

  George reminds one of Peter Ruester, another famous president hard to know. He, too, wrote reams of pleasantries, passionless records of events that were passed around for souvenirs.

  George is said to be tall by some and short by others (David Abshire nails him at precisely six feet three, one wonders how), and pasty white, not a healthy-looking chap at all. Not only biographers and historians but also artists have found it difficult to transmit a revealing portrait, to locate an essence. One painting by Trumbull shows a weak and effeminate man who begs for affection’s return. Ceracchi’s model for a stone rendering (called by Madison “an unrealizable project for a bombastic marble allegory”) is of a veritable movie star, an action-adventure favorite, the John Wayne of our early frontier; this man is so handsome that he is not meant for commerce with mere mortals. Surely by artist’s license, he is presented as six feet three indeed, with a huge bull neck, large feet, and long legs, muscled calves. He is the quintessential heterosexual; in no other “likeness” is he so starkly attractive and masculine. Houdon’s elegant bust (1787) is a likeness as no others; Rhodehamel names it “the finest portrait ever achieved.” Most other representations show an aging impersonal man in a wig, with cheeks sucked in and mouth somewhat pursed; you sense those false teeth in there, hiding a tongue that probably smacks when tasting food. Or cock.

  The eyes, it is the eyes. No artist is able to get his eyes.

  None of the many famous well-known portraits hanging in every American public library and classroom are ugly, like so many of Benjamin Franklin’s are ugly, but none much resembles the others. Rarely do they appear to be of the same person. In the most famous of them, like the one by Thomas Sully, he looks as distant and enigmatic as in all the others. There is one sort of sweet portrait, by Charles Wilson Peale, circa 1779–80, where George stands on one leg, the other cocked before it, in beautifully made uniform and regalia with sash and epaulettes, all color-coordinated. He is high-booted (over rather skinny legs), with a tiny bit of a paunch showing, an intimation of genital endowment, and a sort of nice half smile (a tidge of pudge in the cheeks and jowls), his left hand leaning against and rather caressing a very bold phallic cannon’s spout. A cute young subaltern behind him holds his noble horse, both lad and horse at the ready (the horse has particularly adoring eyes; no trouble for the artist with the horse’s eyes). George is trying to look regal and patrician. He also looks to be not terribly intelligent, and like someone too much enjoying dressing up in such a costume. Again, his head does not look big enough for his body, particularly with such a wide expanse of barrel chest, or is it stomach girth? Yes, it is rather a big barrel belly disguised by that sash. No one has ever portrayed him as fat! He does not look like a man who will become the president. He looks like the stand-in for such a person, an actor trying out for a part. (This portrait was sold to an anonymous buyer on January 21, 2006, at Christie’s for $21.3 million, setting a record for the sale of an American portrait. According to Christie’s it was expected to bring “only $10 million to $15 million.”)

  Peale paints another portrait, of his head and shoulders alone, in 1787, with his cheeks rouged up. This, too, is a peculiar likeness, of a man with no eyes and an inscrutable, almost imbecilic expression, the man in the beautiful uniform, the gay man all dressed up but offering nothing real. He does not welcome you, he does not repel. He just … is. A portrait by Rembrandt Peale, Charles Wilson Peale’s son, of 1795, could be of another person and from another family entirely.

  All these faces. All these bodies. Yes, he is so elusive.

  Is he frightened of anything? We don’t know. Is he in love with anything or anyone? We don’t know. (Well, we do now.) Obsessions? What are they? (MEN!) Even the goals for his people in his turgid prose seem rhetorical, too studied, too bloodless, no doubt well thought out (by Alex), but still.

  Try as anyone may to make him interesting, the results are usually leaden. There is not one biography of the man that can be called gripping. He is a cold chap you wouldn’t want for your father, though no doubt you had one like him. Perhaps he set the mold for every uncommunicative cold fish of a dad who has cursed the development of this country ever since. Who knows how to be a good father, even yet?

  As a general, George is a strict disciplinarian. Deserters are hanged and incompetents are sacked. There are many deserters and many hangings. These are never detailed or even mentioned by the many historians who worship George, who do not tell us that these portraits are elusive and passionless, that his prose is turgid and passionless, and, of course, that he was homosexual.

  He is not talkative. As has been said, he is not comfortable with the spoken word. He is a terrible soldier and an absent leader of them. He is a wretchedly inept fund-raiser better equipped to starve his men than locate the bread to feed them. He is appointed commander in chief and put forth as president because nobody else with a sufficiently impressive profile, or fortune, wants either position. It is not that he is the right person at the right spot at the right time; he is the only person at a time when this country is filled with men who aren’t interested in stepping forward for an infant country that may not outgrow its crib. And then he sort of plays hard to get, coquettish. That makes America want him even more.

  Listen to Thom
as Paine: “He had no friendships. He is incapable of forming any. He can serve or desert a man, or a cause, with constitutional indifference; and it is this cold, hermaphrodite faculty that imposed itself upon the world and was credited for a while, by enemies as by friends, for prudence, moderation and impartiality.”

  No, Paine did not like Washington. He accused him of abandoning the cause for which the Revolution was fought. He thought he was a phony.

  A hermaphrodite? Did Paine mean sexless or an equal-opportunity employer?

  John Rhodehamel of the Huntington Library writes in The Great Experiment (1998): “Every passing year makes him a less accessible human being.”

  Yet, despite all this, he remains monumental.

  And yet “he never seemed to have very much to say,” Rhodehamel tells us. People who talk to him were “often disappointed.”

  The strong, silent type? What better repository into which future historians can channel their own GW?

  Much has been written over the centuries to the effect that he is a clever duck, crafty and quiet, seeking opportunities to extend his family fortune. Gore Vidal sees him as our first great selfish venture capitalist, presiding over the country so he can buy it up cheap when his government puts huge parts of it up for sale. The man does seem to care most about his land. He is making a living as a surveyor at seventeen. Many are the occasions throughout his lifetime that he returns to the wilderness, alone, save for those cute young Indian fellows, or that sweet young French morsel, Gilbert Lafayette, who visits often.