In Hoc Signo Winky

Constantine's vision of the cross was supposed to be an even bet and an intervention. Constantine was, supposedly, bribed by... his subconscious? God? the pagan gods? a cloud?... to convert to Christianity purely to achieve a military victory. If he marched to war under the banner of his own nation's method of executing criminals, he would win. He would triumph under the sign of capture, ignominy, defeat, and desecration. It's a radical thing, alright.

The oddity of Constantine's vision is deeper merely than the symbology, deeper than the curiosity of God offering a goody to a pagan. For those of you who do not know history, Constantine was fighting the other emperors of Rome for sole rule. Who would be Caesar? Well, the sign at Milivan Bridge said, "You will be Caesar under the sign of the cross." He converted to Christianity, and he won.

The additional oddity is that the Christian God would have to have behaved exactly like a Roman god to be the one behind the vision. In Jewish and Christian scriptures, this is not how God works. God does not go up to strangers and say, "Build me a temple, and I'll give you riches." Look at David in 1 Samuel 19 or thereabouts, you find that David asks God first whether he should do battle or not, just as Saul had. Later, you see prophets coming to tell David that he must do X or Y, by God's decree. In the Pentecost, and in the vision that comes to Peter concerning kosher food, the vision simply appears and gives revelation without any offers, without any enticements. It is a truth and a law and a command, not an either/or. There is no indication that they have to show or boast or wear something, that they have to signify, but more that they must do or believe.

The New Testament's signs seem to reveal spiritual states within the recipient.

On the other hand, one of my favorite pieces of Epic is the end of Odyssey, when Odysseus has to make amends to Poseidon by walking inland with an oar on his shoulders until someone says, "Hey, what's that thing?" At that point, he has to plant the oar, make a sacrifice, and create a temple to the wronged god. Now that is a pagan god. The logic is the logic of the agora: "You ruined my temple, and so I ruined your life. To get me to stop it, you need to give me a new temple where the people would never worship an ocean god: far, far inland!" Poseidon is bargaining for cult. It's quid pro quo.

For years and years, I've been bothered by the idea of signifying the invisible, of "testifying" in public without being asked. Let's be extremely clear, here, lest someone accuse me of even more heterodoxy than I already have. "Testifying" (I'm not fond of the term, as it has a pretty heavy gender bias in it, if we're frank and aware, and a woman's testimony would be untrustworthy) is something I have no problem with.

Look, I don't want to take any chance of maligning the Holy Spirit. Again: I have enough weight cast on thin ice of fire as it is. Constantine's vision may have come from the Holy Spirit as an act of Grace. That, unlike a vision of revelation, makes perfect sense. That the Spirit would use the man's own innate voice to get him to the point of making a decision, that it would get him to the brink, is possible, but it just doesn't seem like God to go around looking to add converts. Let's be manifest for once: Why does Jesus command his disciples to spread the word? Is it to swell the congregation? Is it to get more money? Since Jesus didn't have any money, rode a borrowed donkey, stayed in homes people loaned him, slept in public fields, and dressed in common homespun, it's not very likely that the Lord wanted a new Reverend Ike Cadillac. Jesus tells his disciples to "preach the good news of Kingdom of God," not to preach the good news of a new church with four new video screens and a dynamite youth leader and three services a day and a radio outreach and several books of fascinating sayings that are guaranteed to save your marriage.

Well, never mind that. I may be wrong about Constantine.

I feel a bit more secure, though, in my disquiet with Constantine's descendants. "By this sign, I will drive." The ichthus symbol, which was used by early Christians as a furtive form of identification during an era of persecution, has become an ubiquity on American roads. One website promises, of the symbols, that, when you see them, "You will smile (in bumper to bumper traffic), because Jesus loves you." That these symbols are affixed the the rear bumpers exclusively is telling, as the symbol is intended to inform the person symbolically and literally powerless and inferior that the vehicle ahead, superior, and advanced is driven by the forgiven. I have seen the symbol combined with other placards of controversy, such as, "Not perfect, just forgiven" and the evergreen "If it ain't King James it ain't Bible." However, the symbol has occurred most often solo. People who would never plaster their cars with bumperstickers will put the ichthus on, and always on the bumper.

I will leave aside the fact that it finds a home on the vehicles often decried by the pastors who organized What Would Jesus Drive?, because there is no class or race or sex that owns the symbol. It's everywhere. It's a visual assumption these days. In fact, it has become so automatic a device and herald that it has generated a wide variety of parody symbols, and those, too, have become so common as to have lost their meaning.

The folks at Christianambassadors.com have the only answer I have seen for the purposefulness of the sticker. They suggest that, unlike every other bumper sticker in America, the ichthus is not there to tell the other drivers about the car owner, not there to identify, but rather to spread a message of healing to other Christians. I have to give them credit for their creativity, but I cannot quite believe that they are accurate. The ichthus sticker is an emblem of one's faith, a way of telling the poor schmo behind you, "I'm a Christian." From a way to identify and establish community in secret, it has gone to a method of boasting or taunting. It is a form of pride or antagonism. Is the agnostic or atheist behind you supposed to honk her horn, pull up, and ask to hear your conversion narrative? Is he supposed to see the sticker and be nicer to you, as a driver? Is he supposed to realize that there is an army of Christians, and his kind are outnumbered?

Further, what are you actually saying with the sticker? Are you saying that you are a Christian, or that you are devout? You tell me that you practice your faith in a way that I probably cannot share very easily. You tell me that you see faith as a matter of public action and political identity. I see my political identity as an outgrowth of my faith. Finally, is your soul something as fixed and clumsily two dimensional as a cartoon or cartouche? Does your soul flow from days of faith to doubt, piety to dullness, fire to chill? Is your faith alive, or is it a static accomplishment to be chalked up and then marked in chalk lines on the bumper?

Speaking of making the ineffable indelible, how different is the impulse behind the ichthus bumper sticker from the "Purity Ring?"

I went looking for an illustration for you. I found this: Generations of Virtue Purity Rings.

Let's
think
about that.

Generations of VIRTUE (see esp. #4 & #7). Yep... as Shamela would say, "He comes abed now, Mama. O Lud, my vartu! My vartu!" A generation of vartu would result.

Anyway, there are purity rings aplenty, and we need to maintain our Purity of Essence.

Now, of course, this "purity" and "virtue" are both references, not coded at all, to virginity. While the abstinence movement has a motto that is semantically and philosophically suspect ("True love waits"), as well as theologically null, they have learned exactly one lesson from previous attempts at genetic clamp down: they have chastity control for both male and female alike. Both boys and girls are encouraged to spend money on special rings that they can wear that will prove that they are virgins. Girls at school calling you a slut? Slip one of these on your finger, preferably from a fine jeweler, and you can show off your taste in jewelry, your class, and put those rumors to bed (but nothing else). Your son is hording stacks of Hustler, and his "history" tab on Internet Exploder shows Red Tube and other nasty sites? Weld this thing on the offending hand.

Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that the children want these items. I have not been convinced of it, but let's make the assumption. If they do, their motives will come from the sort of true purity that the adult world has forgotten and cannot access.

However, whether the desire for the rings comes from the children or the adults, let's step back and think about what they are for just a second. They are visible emblems of hymeneal state! These are the most primitive, pre-industrial, bride-price, gauche, commodifying, reductions of the value of the person to a single experience that we could come up with. They turn a single event into the meaning of the girl. The boy can be "pure" again. He can wait some more. She, though, is testifying. She is advertising her virginity.

I find this vile. I find it a horrific thing to do to one's daughter, to see in someone else's daughter, to accept in social behavior. It is advertising.

"By this sign, you may conquer," it says. It reduces our young women to flaps of skin, to incidents, to accidents, to crimes, and then it slaps a sign on them, a seal.

I pray we return to carrying our signs in our hearts and living our faiths rather than advertising them.

The Irrelevance of Evolution

"If a minister believes and teaches evolution, he is a stinking skunk, a hypocrite, and a liar." -- Billy Sunday, 1925Well, there are few stupid arguments as stupid and stupidly hot as "evolution," with the very name of the debate telling lies and the participants occupying increasingly weird positions in order to have absolutely nothing to do with the other. Instead of extending an open ear or mind to one another, they begin from the assumption that the other is either an agent of evil or intolerance and then proceed to revile and ostracize.

I, of course, have no real problem with the idea of the Origin of Species in adaptation to environmental pressure and the morphological and genetic changes necessary to create greatest fitness for an environment. I don't have a problem with the earth being quite old. I don't have a problem with God working over a very long time. I don't worry about it much, either.

I don't worry about the "theory" part, either, because there have been multiple adaptations to environment in my lifetime that have generated new organisms, if not new species (speciation is slow, even for bacteria, because we talk about species in terms of sexual reproduction and viability of young, and I don't think bacteria get it on). The moths adapting to soot.... Meh. I'm not a bird. If someone "proves" evolution tomorrow, my beliefs in the Advent won't change, and my belief in the resurrection won't change, and my belief in a single God won't change. If someone "proves" creation tomorrow, my beliefs will be similarly unchanged.

Does this mean that "the Bible is wrong?" Well, my illustration, above, is of Noah's Ark, and you can read Augustine's Civitas Dei for his allegorical reading of the Ark. To him, the Ark was the human body, and it would be saved by the dove, as Christ would save us in the sea of sin and death. If that argument by analogy bothers you, you can look at it another way entirely and ask whether or not God made a Covenant with the human race that, although they had sinned in Eden and shown that they were going to go for the sinful path every time and build every city on the master plan of Sodom, He would agree to tolerate the wickedness of the world if His people held true to Him? Does that seem like a valid understanding? Is it fit cosmology? In fact, if you put a time line out, where the events are spiritual rather than chronological, you have generation, choice, degradation, choice, degradation, choice, salvation, choice....

I was talking to a group the other day about sex and gender. The group had within it some people who don't believe in Evolution. They will not tolerate anyone who mentions evolution from the podium, either. That does not hem me in as much as you might think, I find. Why would I need to talk about it? What on earth do pre-humans have to do with any topic I'm going to discuss?

Do these students believe in genetics? That is all they need. They only need to have been to a farm, or had dogs, or seen children. They only need to know about primitive animal husbandry. If parents have an innate trait, or even an epigenetic trait from their environments, there is a strong chance that the same epigenetics (through gender) will be at play in their same sexed offspring and genetics will be at work as well.

The point I was getting to was the debatable science about masculine and feminine brains. According to this research, exposure to testosterone in vitro causes the brain to go off towards war toys and logic (and rape, of course, because men are all rapists). Lacanian "research" agrees that women's "polymorphous perversity" means that their egos are amorphous and marshmallow-like and therefore non-linear. The masculine is arrows and sticks and guns and spears... especially spears. On the brain side, the masculine is plot that moves strictly and rigidly from 1 to 10, while the feminine wanders and floats. Lyric poetry is feminine, and epic poetry is masculine. Masculine is Stephen King, and feminine is ... well, no one agrees.

When I've had these sessions with these skeptical students, I have pointed out, over and over again, that it is always possible that these people make correct observations and have silly explanations for them. I.e. it is possible that Freud's description of the "anal retentive" personality is spot on, that there are loads of folks who fit it precisely, but it's really unlikely that all of them are secretly clenching their sphincters and enjoying it.

Anyway, it occurred to me that I could go at sex and gender and brains and bolster this stuff, overcoming their reluctance, with evolution-ish explanations. I said, "Just think back to all of us living in tribes. We don't know anything about germ theory, and we don't know anything about machine guns. We don't know about viruses, and we don't know about advanced flight. Now, it makes sense that the men who go out to kill the bear without worrying about how the bear feels are going to be the best men in the village, doesn't it? It also makes sense that women who worry constantly about how clean their tents are are going to have the healthiest food, the healthiest children, the healthiest husbands, and the healthiest homes, and if they worry always about the health and emotions of the children that their mates are ignoring, they're going to be better mothers. We don't need evolution for that to get passed on, do we?"

I just thought I would share this. Everyone shrieks in horror, but "evolution" has to do with the derivation of species and genera. Genetics and inheritance is something I don't think even the most radical literalist would deny.

Hey, hold my place, will you?

This is what they call a place holder post.

I suppose a post is itself kind of a place holder, when you think about it. You dig a hole, put a piece of wood in there, and then tie fence to it.

I want to thank my persistent and indefatigable reader during that political diatribe.

From there, I have two directions I could go. First, I have thoughts of writing about being a scion. I wouldn't have given much thought to it, myself, except that being a scion means having a whole extended family telling you about it. It goes with the job. The problem with that is that it could quickly get personal, and I absolutely abhor blogs that are written about, for, and to their authors.

The other direction is to go toward a big Thought I had in church. Now, I realize that most of my reader(s) aren't religious. Of the one(s) with religion, I doubt (m)any have my slice of the orange on the subject, so that's a low yield topic. The thing is, this Thought was nearly a Revelation, but the problem with revelations is that they almost always get people in fire, holy or otherwise. This one would make me more heretical than I already am, but, like the way I already am, not so anyone would actually care about it.

I don't think I'll write about private revelation on the Internet. Seems like a bad idea to me. (Not to others, I know.)

Instead, my next will be comparing Purity Rings to Ichthus stickers (fish symbols on the backs of cars), with strong disapproval of both.

Heel America (part three)

The final part of this tedious argument. I apologize for taking so long, but I had me some things.

(That there is a GFDL photo from that website whose name I will not type.)

As John Gay's character said, "Money well timed, and properly applied, will do anything" (The Beggar's Opera II xii). This is because money is fluid, liquid, symbolic, transferable, "fungible." It moves and causes to move, as it contains within itself desires yet to be fulfilled and labor exchanged. It gets taken from one person to the next to the next. A worker exchanges laying cables for six hours for money that goes to a bank as a piece of an interest payment on a cell phone the worker got seven months before, and then that goes to the next person's pocket after the withdrawal at an ATM, in exchange for thirty minutes of her day in the office waiting for the phone to ring, but she will then be able to use it, holding it out, to get someone else to run back to a kitchen and bring out six meals for her family.

The paper of the money means nothing, of course. We all know that, don't we? If you didn't already know that you no longer follow the yellow brick road, that you're in Emerald City, where things are just a question of belief, then at least I hope you know that the thing has Caesar's name and face on it, so it belongs to him, so give it back. I'm sure that every child has stared at a piece of money at some point and wondered what it really means and concluded that, other than a nice piece of art, it does not actually mean anything. (The same could be said of gold or silver, of course.)

The reason we do not want a politician who has risen from a micro-town is that such a person has risen, almost certainly, from neo-feudalism, and neo-feudalism is, by its nature, corrupt according to democratic standards.

What separates what I call neo-feudalism, and I'm coining terms left and right and freely admit it, here, from feudalism is that feudalism was being bound to the land. Feudalism meant that workers and lords of land alike were bound to the land, rooted, and obligated to it. For every peasant unable to escape the manor, there was a pouting lordling or lady wishing to go to Paris or London to live but "having to" attend to the dull and boring country estates. The absentee landlords of the 18th and 19th centuries created a crisis and were ultimately complicit in the effective ending of the power of feudalism on the political side. As they stopped ever visiting their estates, they stopped "meddling" with minor civil service positions like local curates, judges, justices, and the like, and so, even as they abused their tenants more, they freed their regions from their control.

In the frontier American town and the post-Reconstruction Southern town, land was binding, too. The children of the town fathers/founders "had to" take over their parents' businesses, whether those were farms or industries. They also "had to" uphold the traditions of mediation and moderation and behave the way that they were "expected" to behave. The "lady" did not curse. The "gentleman" did not get drunk. All of those codes were explicitly embedded in a land/power exchange that required sacrifice. I am hardly the only person to compare it to aristocracy.

The neo-feudal, though, is flexible. The land conveys the position, but land is bought for money, sold for money, and bought again for money. The people "in charge" in the micro-town now will tell you, quite openly, that they are in charge because they have the money to be in charge. Like the dollar bill in Emerald City, it is not eminent, but simply a question of belief.
Frequently, it's a question of people believing that somehow they have a "right" to things because of the money. Since money comes as an exchange, they believe that it conveys at the same time equivalence and therefore worth. If I work for four hours and get paid, I accept that my four hours "equals" that pay, that therefore my hours are "worth" that pay, that I "earned" that money. So long as I think only of myself and I am ignorant entirely of the rest of society, I can think this way indefinitely. If, however, I think for a moment that an investment banker did less work in four hours than I did and got paid seventy times as much, I begin to think that he "didn't deserve it." For his part, he thinks he did.

Once you think you "earned" your money, you think that anything you get with your money is fair, deserved, earned. It's proper. If this is your only scale, if money is the only way you learn to think of land, politics, education, labor, and love, then you will think in terms of "deserving" whatever your money can get.

My problem with the micro-town is that, in the absence of its deserted founding cores, it has kept its structures of control and gained controllers who are taught at the knee of money. The class has risen because of money, because of overcoming educational shortfalls, delicate manners, political savvy, etc., with money, and they owe their allegiance and belief to money and hold a grave antipathy toward those things that stood in their way. Like L.B. Johnson with the Kennedy people, they're sure that smart alecks with education are making fun of them, and so they hold a grudge against schooling. The old generation never swore or got drunk, and so they believe it's time to use the "n word" in City Hall. The old generation was careful to separate church and state, and so they want to put their pastor on the payroll. They have chips on their shoulders.

Most of us in the United States focus obsessively on our national election for the President, and some of us focus on the U.S. Senate races in our states. Fewer of us focus on our House of Representatives races. How many people know who represents them in their state legislatures? How many people know much about that person? What is the voting like in that kind of a race? While the President might declare a war (even though Congress is supposed to do that), your state legislature is going to have a radical effect on your day to day life, and you will find some really surprising people serving there. Many states hold to the Cincinnatan ideal and want their parliamentarians to work other jobs, but the result is that most have assembly people who represent local wealth centers. One rarely sees "community organizers" in the assembly, especially when it comes to rural areas. Instead, one sees the local saw mill owner upset at some tax bill he got, or a John Birch Society member who sees a chance to get his state to be the first to independently declare itself God-fearing.

In the small, small towns, land money has meant politicians who have ingrained in them a belief that they have a right to whatever it is that they do. I began my diatribe with Sarah Palin because she is an excellent example of what we do not want, and what we would in fact get, from today's small town politician.
Near me, we had an episode (no link) where a county commissioner had a girlfriend and wife matching set. He also had a rich family in land, of course. Anyway, the girlfriend was not liked by the wife, and we can thank her, the wife, and her antipathy, for finding out about the fact that the girlfriend had embezzled several tens of thousands of dollars (nearly hundreds) from the county for her personal use (new cars, actually). Boring, I know. It hardly comes up to John Ensign level. However, what makes this worthy is what the Commissioner said about it. He said that it was alright. He forgave her, so he didn't think he would press charges.

Fortunately, the Sheriff and D.A. were able to explain the differences between civil and criminal law, but I'm not sure they ever could get him to understand the difference between meum et tuum.

See what's missing from his mind? He thinks in terms of money, the way I described above. He earned it. It's his. He gets to do with it what he wants. The world does not exist, and society does not exist. Despite micro-towns having less of a border between classes than large cities, they foster, with their easy status changes and easy power, narcissism.

Another town near me that does not appear on your satellite views had a mayor for life. Let's call him Perry Ellis and pretend that he was as well dressed as the men's wear designer. He managed to be in a bubble, at first, where he could make silly decisions, but slowly it accreted into a shell, and then the shell petrified, with Perry inside. Eventually, Perry was like a Mexican jumping bean. The problem with it was that the town was the bean getting hurled about. Senior citizen parks without trees and away from all amenities (but near his land), with contracts going to friends of his, five lane highways coming into town from nowhere to nowhere, new schools on interstates... all sorts of things where it looked like private gain was going along with public nuisance.

Sarah Palin's "house gate" scandal reminded me exactly of a small town mayor. The allegations are at Jot America and come from The Village Voice, with a great deal of follow up. Palin was mayor of Wasilla, AK. She awarded a huge contract to build an unneeded sports complex to Kumin Associates. The architect for the firm was the son of one of Palin's advisors on one side and of the state Republican Party head on the other. For the complex, there are many allegations of cronyism and favors and party contributions. One of the subs was Spenard Builders, and they later hired Sarah for a TV commercial, sponsored Todd Palin's snowmobile (yeah, I said it: snowmobile!) team, and may have given all the materials for Sarah and Todd's house that Todd "built all by himself" on Lake Lucille (this from Mudflats).

Does any of this sound like Perry? How about Sarah's reaction? She blocked laws that would have required builders to list their suppliers and contractors in Wasilla. She has come out afterward saying that all of this is hers, her right, and completely proper. Sound like the local County fellow with his girlfriend?

Sarah Palin's perspective is like the post-flight neo-feudal town's politician's in every respect. She thinks her money and her self-elevation has earned her the right to do whatever is best for her. The idea of other people's needs is irrelevant. It's all me. Climb, go, get, and take it all personally, because "personal" is the only medium, the only message, the only canvas upon which politics is painted.

I know that it possible that there are good small town politicians. I have met them in Carrboro, NC. I have seen them. I know they exist, and I have seen them jump up to the next level quickly, but the idea that we need/want "Real American" politicians? Don't make me wretch.

Site Review

I apologize for interrupting my philosophico-historico-politico-misanthropy about rurality and orality, but for once I'm going to write a blog entry like everyone else's blog entry. I'm going to write about something I did. I hope you'll all forgive me.

I ain't telling where I found that scene, because I ain't writing about that place. Instead, I want to offer a site review. Before we were all addicted to "microblogging" (as if blogging weren't already a miniaturized form of expression), people used to offer up reviews of websites. Before that, we used to write reviews of restaurants and stores and things -- reviews of places. That's what this is.

In NYC, a popular bit of graffiti was, "Pray for Pills." Well, let us take time to at least hope for Xanax. I went to Best Buy yesterday.

I went to Taulkinham, because I had me some things I needed to do. That's a 100 mi., 2 hr trip, but it's the nearest non-Wal*Mart shopping to me. While there, I visited Sabbath Lily, and Old Navy and Barnes Ignoble, as well as a mall-bounded Earth Bound Trading Company (where one can buy the religious objects of all sorts of exotic cultures and put your weed in them). When I left the behemoth mall, I thought that I would look at the world of appliances and noisy electrical gadgets at Best Buy. Like going to see a "Brokeback Mountain"/ "Time Traveler's Wife"/ "Julie and Julia" triple feature, I wish I hadn't gone. (Scenery is not a character. Trying to come up with ways to keep the man and woman apart so as to prevent having to explain romance's endurance is not interesting. Julia Child is fascinating; bloggers should do something half so interesting before they get to be part of the story.)

Best Buy has always been the place to find out what our corporate overlords want our future to be. They declare that they sell "what's hot," but, of course, they do no such thing. They, in fact,
participate very, very actively in creating demand. Ever since they went with an all-Windows/no OS/2 software policy, in order to get synergy with Microsoft, Best Buy has been a "synergy" kind of place.

Disney coined the term "imagineer." I have a new term: imaginerr. An imaginerr is a person who imagines a future that will generate maximum profit, and then shapes the consumer to fit the product. It is a person who designs people rather than entertainment. The Disney folks were evil for creating tinfoil simulacra and then saying, "This is American history." They Bowdlerized and forced narrative frames onto reality and sold the result as reality. That was and remains plenty bad, but in boardrooms of MBA's right now, marketeers (like mousketeers, but without the charm) are designing you.

Best Buy have been in bed with the imaginerrs of our future. They don't sell 3G phones before they're popular because 3G is hot: they sell them to make 3G ubiquitous and then to become the "the place for 3G." They have a long, long history of moving exclusively toward whatever product line or product type the major corporations are planning to shove us toward.

If you go to the Best Buy, be prepared to read the future. The subtext of their sales floor is what the goobers and yaboes of next year will be. They will show you tomorrow's yawning maw. When I went yesterday, the subtext was not below the line at all. It was bold, and it said: THE TELEVISION IS YOUR DEITY. Your television will eat your computer, your telephone, your games, your stereo, and everything else. You must serve your television, because your television will be the SOLE "entertainment module" in your home.

Everything, and I mean every damn thing, plugs into the television or the iPod. Their computer selection is off to the side, but those they have boast of their media server readiness. Their stereo equipment has ceased to exist, except in the form of A/V componentry that plugs into your television. Stereo speakers are ALL for your television, to provide the greatest Sens-o-round experience in Doubly 5.2 Direct X. Telephones are for video and send to your video server. Their DVD's are almost all Blu-ray now. Even small stereos were not to be found, as they were all extensions of iPods.

I looked for a CD player and some bookshelf speakers. Alas, fool that I am, I should have stayed in my cave. CD players are not good. Now, mp3 players rule. The irony that mp3, which was a compression method designed to allow us computer nerds to back up our higher fidelity .au files, has replaced the .au file because of the sheer gluttony of the idiocracy is only painful if you think. You see, the iPod/mp3 player is "better" than the CD player, because "you can get, like, thousands of songs on there." They sound like junk, but, when you listen on a 0.25" cell phone speaker, subtlety isn't your game to begin with. Speakers? Sure. Center channel, or satellite, or subwoofer? Is it for behind my television or beside my television?

The store was loud, extremely.

The blue golf shirts were following me around (they may have been people, but I'm not sure).

The customers, though, were that added element that made the soup's bilious toxins really pop. They were a mixture of extras from Axe body spray and Mountain Dew commercials, with some Ford Truck background extras woven between them, wallets extended like offerings to pagan gods. In the parking lot, these animated rag dolls were trying out the latest moves they'd learned on Grand Theft Auto or auditioning for MTV Rims, or whatever it's called.

Walking into the store was an insult. Looking at the merchandise was a confirmation that the corporations of the world want me to suffer needlessly for their amusement. Walking out was like surfacing after being held underwater by a bully.

So, do I want to go look at electronics again? The web is safer, closer, and, fortunately, devoid of people.

Heel America (part two)

I should give some background and dull the blade a bit on my attack, since I appear to be drawing more blood or causing more damage than I had intended.

I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." -- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Book II, King of Brobdingnag.

"Real America" is a term that Sarah Palin uses -- one endorsed and gathered into the flaps of the cloak of Republican discourse -- as code. For her, given her most recent usage of the phrase, it seems to mean only "my supporters," with the dullard's implication that those who do not support her are not only not patriotic, but not American. However, in the nibs and mouths of other Republicans, the ones who urged the phrase into her in the first place, the term refers to a geography that the party believes it can win and a demographic that interlaces a different geography.

The geography implied is the "blank America," the America between the cities, the America of the towns without names, the unincorporated America, the rural America. Facing an election in 2008 where they believed that they had lost the northeast and the west coast, they began to speak of "Real America" as everything between. In fact, the target of such talk was not altogether between the coasts, and it certainly wasn't really the 20% of the population living in the blanks on the map, but it was the South, which perceives itself as rural. The target was a demographic that believes itself to be rural, even as it commutes to work an hour on interstates in an SUV instead of a pickup truck, listening to anger radio the whole way in and back.

The demographic of angry (white) (male) voters isn't my concern, though. My concern is the reality of the "Real America" that Sarah Palin herself actually does represent. She may mean to represent angry white men with fixations, but her actual story as small town mayor and her rise are true representations of the microtown and the rural real.

This blank America is an artifact of the Interstate Highway system. Prior to the Eisenhower Interstate system, many, if not most, of these small towns had a reason to exist. At the very least, it had a deterrent to evacuation. Prior to the interstates, the few national routes slithered through hundreds of small towns, giving hotels and restaurants and novelty architecture and regional raree shows boosts. There was neither a possibility nor an incentive to have a franchised, uniform business conquer the whole of the stretch, nor for one business or business model to homogenize the whole. For small towns like Louisville, North Carolina to be cut off from the nodes and cities of the state, there had to be a line to make the cut, and the interstate provided that line. Prior to the rationalized, massively freighted lines, small towns had their own transportation and industrial routes. River traffic that had once been a logical and profitable localism ceased before the reliability of road transport. Money, then agriculture, then people flowed toward centers nearer and nearer to the line that would connect to the big dots on the map, and the shaded parts of the states grew more blank.


Therefore, the Real America of Sarah Palin's discourse is a post-1960 phenomenon (yes, the interstate system is 50's, but they have to get built, and then they have to have an effect). After that point, regionalism, both in accent and manners and identity, diminished as the cities and suburbs came into their own, and the idea of family roots and localism were less and less adherent for the wealthy and educated. We have seen many, many politicians on the national stage who have come from small towns. Many eminent women and men, many sages and saints come from small towns. Indeed, it seems that being from a small town is a great thing, especially.

Jimmy Carter, for example, came from a small town in Georgia. His was a semi-patrician family (his dialect, though, is purely patrician and not native), but we note that he took his talent and his values and left the small town. He left in order to practice his virtues on a larger stage than his town could offer. He left first to the U.S. Naval Academy, and then he sought to be Governor of his state, picking up from the rather odd traditions of Lester Maddox and the Talmages. Jimmy Carter's small town upbringing shows in many things about him. His religion and his marriage and his attitudes toward forgiveness are all shaded by the values instilled by the post-bellum Southern rural world, but one thing he has never been is a small town politician, a happy small town mayor.

My premise, you will recall, is that the last thing we should want is a politician from "Real America." I should take the ambiguity out and say that we do not want a person who is a politician in "Real America," rather than a person who is a politician and once was in or of "Real America." The latter individual may be superior. The former is an a priori disaster.


The microtown suffers from blight and recycles itself every year. Because building is more beneficial than renovation, large buildings are left empty more often than they are refurbished, but each part of the town experiences a spasm of paint and beams, new banners, crowds, closings, decay, demolition, and then building again. Where I am, steps along the sidewalk lead to empty fields over and over. Once, houses perched there, and the steps led to their stoops. Now, the gardens of 1925 are wildflowers.

In a city, power comes from one's job. In the Real America, power is land. "Real America" is neo-feudal, in that land ownership is common, and it marks out the basis of power and wealth beneath anything so transitory as a particular generation's children's inclinations. That feudal structure had been in place in the South in the Reconstruction era, and it was famously written up by Faulkner. However, that was feudal, not neo-feudal. That came complete with noblesse oblige, education, and its Atticus Finches. After Faulkner's people went to their mixed rewards, the next up dispensed with the bother of families and kept right on with honoring the owners of the land. The owners of the land were, by the 1960's, the working class whites who had bought every time an aristocrat in distress had sold, every time a well trained noble had gone to the city to make a large impression on the world with a small town upbringing (and first class education), every time an antique family died without issue. The land remained the power.

In the "middle," the pace was accelerated, as there hadn't been the bother with ancient rites. Ranchers, farmers, any "original settlers" or "pioneers" (i.e. the people who came in and displaced American Indians or flooded into the vaccuum, legal or military, after they "had been" displaced) that had been town founders had been town powers and had been town owners. Being from a small town before 1960 meant being from a well established family that guaranteed a strong drive for education, as well as values of service to the less fortunate and, especially in the midwest and west, constructing a town. In other words, town founders worried about what makes a town work and had to have a touch of the altruistic in them. Again, though, as the microtown develops, the people "from small towns" who have these skills and values leave, and the power stays with the land.

In a movie Western, good or bad, one hears about some character or other, usually corrupt, and then that "he's a major land owner in this county" and so, "You can't buck him, Sheriff." Of course that is all a shadow cast by the Lincoln County War, as Hollywood (and I am, too) is on the side of the sheep against the beef. But, at the same time, that line resonates, if it does not telegraph out to the real land owners who watch movies, with small town America.

I am the scion of both the fallen and risen groups. I am mainly, though, the son of two people who are "from a small town." Both grew up, one in a family that had been very important before the Civil War and become impoverished during Reconstruction, and the other that had been part of the southern professional class during the whole time and therefore had remained prosperous, before the interstate system, and both had memories of their towns as important places with set social orders and strong value systems. My observation is starkly different, because I return after their professional lives, after the interstates made their towns otiose. I had seen before, though, what I have seen here, more than once.

In the blank American town, the person with land owns, and retains ownership. That person has the capacity to generate wealth when necessary, and usually to gain more wealth. More to the point, such a person gains the ability to rent. In the actual terms of Adam Smith, such a person becomes a naive capitalist. Because the microtown is cut off, because the Interstate is forty miles that way or that way, because "those people in [Big City]" do things differently, the landed individual inherits the social position of the founder without inheriting the values of the founder.

The pioneer who crosses the plains to set up a community and decides to put his life, wife, and future at stake to live with the rest of his wagon train in a particular valley is dedicated, vitally, to the concept of cooperation. Contrary to NRA pamphlets, such persons were not dedicated to shooting things and people and "freedom." Even if the people who settled were weirdos there to get gold, the ones who stayed were pretty passionate about the idea of a town that functioned by law and fairness. Those "founders," like the aristocratic families of the south, took care to inculcate in their children a code of compassion and fairness (at the end of a lash, if necessary). The person who acquires simply to overcome the unfairness of the capitalist system, on the other hand, may inculcate a different set of values, may have a different lesson to teach. In microtowns now, that is the person, through abdication and abnegation, who is the town leader.

[I've detained you enough for one essay. I will continue with part three, but it will come sooner than this one did. Rising gorge wants out.]

Heel America (part one)

Alaska "governor" Sarah Palin has resigned. William "Wrong Way" Kristol had praised her last year as a vice presidential pick for John McCain precisely because she represented both "energy" and "Real America." This latter theme is something that Mrs. Palin was eager to promote. She was consistent in telling all who followed her that she was "real" in a way that other candidates for office were not.

Now, there are all sorts of questions that arise from this.

One is George Chapman's statement from 1612, "Ignorance is the mother of admiration." The more we know about anyone, the less we admire that person, and Sarah Palin was completely unknown -- a set of cheekbones onto which we could paint the cosmetics of our own political desires. All of us who had been snubbed by the junior high school Pom-Pom, either for a date or friendship, could project our nastiness, and all of us who wished still to cuddle up to that same bundle of confetti on a string could do so again. Was that all that Palin was? Was she just Dan Quayle in drag?

I think, instead, of something Swift said in one of his sermons: "The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit." Sarah Palin was a happy woman, a "pitbull in lipstick" and a "hockey mom" and a "small town mayor," and, most of all, a success story from real America.

Long before I moved (back) to "real America," I knew what it was. Long before I moved to a very small micro-town, I knew what it meant. I knew what it was to survive and thrive in one. It is not quite the same thing as surviving and thriving in high school, although my suburban high school in a major city had more students in it than my current "city" does citizens, but it means that rules and conditions that apply nationally are simply in abeyance, and, in their place, a different set of expectations and demands function. These are not, Republican rhetoric designed to pander to its only voters notwithstanding, better or more "real" than other expectations and demands, and they are certainly not more sincere. They have only one claim to greater "reality," and that is a greater realpolitik to them, a thinner margin between personal greed and political gain.

The "real America" or "real American town" is always in economic crisis. Whether there is a recession or not, but more when there is, it has trouble with unemployment. Its "underclass" is not abstract, not dislocated, not in a vague "other" place. The unemployed and underclass are visible every day, wandering through town, and the Section Eight housing is a major feature of city architecture. The town usually worries about "the plant." It may be "the textile mill" or "the bag plant" or "the control" maker, but there is a single monocultural employer that will dominate and overshadow the town's economy. Similarly, a single merchant will overshadow the retail opportunities for the town (usually Wal*Mart).

Towspeople will not congregate at "the mall," and "mall culture" and such talk as that is as foreign to them as talk of sushi bars. Instead, whether it's Bill's Dollar Store or K-Mart or Rite Aid or Wal*Mart, there is a single general store that will expand to take in most of the retail activity of the town, and it will have virtual monopoly power. Grocery stores will be scarce. Usually, there will be two. One will be general, and the other will be low cost, with a featured section for immigrant cuisine (brands known south of the U.S. border, with packaging written in Spanish). There will almost inevitably be a crisis of empty store fronts. If the empty store fronts are not the vacated downtown, they will be the evacuated Wal*Mart, and they will prove impossible to rent, long term. Agriculture will take place around the town, and so the city's population will never reflect the actual economic residents. Fast food restaurants will proliferate, with perhaps two or three older restaurants barely surviving on slim margins. The population will flange out, with old and young, but little in between. Children and elderly will outnumber mid-life adults, and so there will be a constant tax crisis for schools and social services and therefore a constant need for state and federal assistance in these places where state and federal agencies can least find the population. There will be community colleges and technical schools, but universities and four-year institutions will constitute "going away" and going into debt, and therefore they can only exist as online degrees or for the children of the upper class. As a result, the independent businesses that really boom are loan and medical supply businesses.

The disparity between upper and lower classes is personal, not abstract. It is encoded in families, in names, in street and place marks, and in attitudes. "Fallen" families do not get respected the way that Emily Grierson did, at least not since the 1960's. Rising families do not have to endow public works and make the Snopes municipal building, or the Tweed City Hall. Instead, the signifiers are more dynamic, as the fortunes are, and more affected.

Open the door to the homes of the real America, and you will find satellite televisions and Internet connections, and these are, in my estimation, the only actual changes and erosions in what had been a petrified forest of certitude and cultural ideolect. Inside, you will see the women decorating in Martha Stewart's imagineered New England style, or Paula Deen's reclaimed South, or a neo-native Southwestern, or a clumsily distilled and purified northern immigrant cute, but it will be as expensive as anything could be, and it will be practiced as a debutante's bow or a best man's toast.

Go out the back door, and you will find the disturbed soil of acres of all-terrain vehicle tracks or vainglorious gardening. The men will have thrown themselves outward in a jovial, lite-beer, back strain and hoed or roto-tilled or chain sawed or fenced or shot, and land will be desired or damned for its recalcitrance or promise.

This is the town, the village, the dimple.

When you who live in cities look at a map of your state, or when you who live in other nations look at the United States, you will focus on the centers and then see shaded areas inside the lines, as if cartographers had too much color and too little data. Within that big box of "state," you will know of things -- Chicago, Raleigh, Kansas City, Mobile -- and then you will, if you are bothered enough, notice all of these freckles on the surface of the plain. They have unimaginative or improbably hallucinatory names, and they do not appear at regular intervals. No one lives there. For all the evidence you have, sitting in an apartment or flat, these are mere accidents of penmanship at the map companies. When the elections occur, you hear about them, and you hear that all of these divots on the surface of the nation have only one opinion, one mood, one thought, and that is resentment toward the people who ignore them.

Well, I'm here, here in "Real America," as Sarah Palin puts it. I will take two more posts to talk about it, to be your spy, to report on it as a fact and artifact, and I'd like to tell you why, of all the things the world may or may not need, a politician from Real America is the one thing we need least.