Nation Topics - Cultural Criticism and Analysis | The Nation

Mary McCarthy would have turned 90 on June 21, a fact that is itself
astonishing to those who remember her flagrant youth, when her sharp
style made her the most feared and forthright writer in New York. Her
birthday was marked by a symposium at CUNY's Center for the Humanities
and, soon afterward, the publication of an excellent new selection of her
essays, A Bolt From the Blue and Other Essays (New York Review
Books, $24.95), edited, with a penetrating introduction, by A.O. Scott.

McCarthy was born in Seattle in 1912, lost both her parents to the flu
epidemic six years later and, after graduating from Vassar in 1933,
began publishing witty, acid, even wrongheaded reviews in The Nation
and The New Republic. (In one review, for example, she missed
the strength of Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, easily one of his
best books, out of sheer dislike for proletarian realism.) In 1937 she
helped revive Partisan Review as an anti-Stalinist journal and
became its theater critic, but soon, with the publication of The
Company She Keeps in 1942, she found herself more celebrated for her
fiction than for her critical writing, a balance that would shift by the
late 1960s. She reigned for decades as one of America's most brilliant
intellectuals, until she died of cancer in 1989.

I didn't really know Mary McCarthy, though I visited her on two
memorable occasions when I was teaching in Paris in 1981. But from the
early 1960s I knew her work intimately, and I was enthralled by its rare
combination of abrasive intelligence and sexual bravado. I thought of
her as not one but many writers--the endlessly self-questioning
independent woman of her best book, The Company She Keeps; the
keenly observant satirist of The Oasis, The Groves of
Academe and The Group, with a highly developed sense of the
ridiculous; the autobiographer who re-created her abused and orphaned
childhood in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood; the richly
cultivated traveler of her books on Florence and Venice; and the prose
stylist of dazzling clarity in many literary and personal essays,
written with a scalpel as much as a pen.

Thanks in part to the weakness of her last novels, the consensus seems
to have hardened that in her fiction McCarthy somehow failed to impose
herself, and that she will be remembered primarily as an essayist.
Despite her formidable gifts as a polemical and discursive writer, this
makes very little sense. First, for all her reputation as an
intellectual who sacrificed feeling to intelligence, what powers
McCarthy's best essays, by and large, are her fictional rather than
strictly intellectual gifts. Again and again she makes her points by
telling stories, or by way of vivid description, arresting images,
subtle characterization. Unlike many of her Partisan Review
contemporaries, there are no special ideas we associate with her name.
As a thinker she was the perpetually bright-eyed student, enormously
impressive without really leaving a mark. "A Bolt From the Blue," her
ingenious dissection of Nabokov's Pale Fire, may be the best term
paper ever written, a marvel of ingenuity but not much more.
Realistically, she made only modest claims for her theater criticism,
and was quite amusing about how she fell into it. (Her first husband was
an actor and playwright, she tells us, and the "boys" at PR
didn't take theater very seriously.)

No critic of her period who hated Odets and the Group Theatre, who wrote
about A Streetcar Named Desire without mentioning Marlon Brando,
who wrote about the operatic version of Street Scene without
mentioning the composer, Kurt Weill, who dismissed The Iceman Cometh
simply as bad writing is likely to go down in history for any
special feeling for the theater. Instead her essays give ample evidence
of highbrow condescension toward the theater. Other essays, like
"America the Beautiful," are saved by wonderful writing, though they are
hemmed in by the intellectual prejudices of the moment, laced with a
touch of snobbery all her own. In that essay she is astonished that the
visiting existentialist Simone de Beauvoir would ever want to eat at a
"real" American restaurant, or take in a play, or see an American movie,
or have a peek at Congress in session, with its "illiterate hacks whose
fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical,
unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political
patronage." This sin of attitudinizing is compounded when she takes
precisely the opposite tack a few years later in reviewing de Beauvoir's
book, which had degenerated into an obtuse anti-American tract. She
accuses her French counterpart not only of being careless of facts,
unobservant--a cardinal sin, in McCarthy's book--but of a reflexive
condescension not so different from McCarthy's earlier viewpoint. In the
interim, many of New York's alienated intellectuals had come home.

McCarthy's essays are strongest where they overlap with her fiction and
memoirs. Her obituary pieces on Philip Rahv, Fred Dupee and Nicola
Chiaromonte are striking character sketches that emerge from a well of
deep feeling. One of her finest essays, "Artists in Uniform," about her
awkward encounter with an anti-Semitic Army colonel, is virtually
indistinguishable from a short story; in fact, Harper's first
published it as a story, as if to remove the bite of actuality from it.
Later she wrote another piece for Harper's ("Settling the
Colonel's Hash") reflecting on the differences between an essay and a
story; in her case, she recognized, the line was hard to draw. (Neither
of those essays is included in A Bolt From the Blue but can be
found in her superb 1961 collection On the Contrary, which gives
us McCarthy at the height of her powers as an essayist.)

For all her exacting sense of fact, one of McCarthy's ultimate
contributions was to blur the distinctions between different kinds of
prose writing, to show how fiction could be opened up to the thinking
mind and how essays could profit from the techniques of fiction. Her
first novel was a loose collection of linked stories. Because she was
imbued with the Catholic practice of self-scrutiny, her fiction could
grow as analytic and introspective as her essays. As A.O. Scott writes
of the heroine of that first book, Meg Sargent, she "marries and
divorces, goes to dinner parties, editorial meetings, and her analyst's
office, has affairs with pedigreed intellectuals and traveling salesmen,
but mainly what she does...is think, argue, criticize." Only the novelist in McCarthy could give her critical mind its rich texture and immediacy.

Several chapters of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood had already
appeared in a collection of stories, Cast a Cold Eye. Once
integrated into the memoir, they were followed by second thoughts and
factual corrections. Another of her best essays, "My Confession," is
really a reflective memoir that describes both her haphazard political
education and the progressive culture of the 1930s, built around the
peculiar mores of the Communist Party. How shall we take these pieces?
As she says of "Artists in Uniform," "I myself would not know quite what
to call it; it was a piece of reporting or a fragment of autobiography."
In her own way, she was a pioneer of the hybrid New Journalism of the
following decade. Along with another fiction writer, James Baldwin, she
created the serious personal essay of the postwar years.

A page later she adds a trenchant observation that offers a clue as to
why we should not slight her fiction in celebrating her essays. One of
the qualities that "Artists in Uniform" and "My Confession" share with
her early fiction is a sense of the woman herself not as prepossessing,
in control, but as tentative, ambivalent, even at moments cowardly and
ashamed. She looks back on her own confusions with unfeigned regret. A
schoolteacher had written to congratulate her on her so-called story in
Harper's: "We thought it amazing that an author could succeed in
making readers dislike the author--for a purpose, of course!" This
benighted response must have heightened McCarthy's awareness of what she
had actually done. "I wanted to embarrass myself," she says, "and, if
possible, the reader too." In the original essay this proved to be a
good strategy for exposing genteel anti-Semitism, along with the
awkwardness or complicity of engaging with it; but it was also much
more, perhaps a key to McCarthy's work at its best. Her writing was
strongest when she was as hard on herself as she could be on others.

We can readily recognize this embarrassment from the predicament of Meg
Sargent in "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt," when she finds
herself in an unthinkable sexual encounter on a train, or in "Ghostly
Father, I Confess," where she is caught in an impossible marriage to a
man very much like Edmund Wilson. Her social embarrassment is always
linked to the state of her soul. McCarthy's rueful feelings about her
own behavior run through "The Weeds," a story based on her attempts to
leave Wilson, and through some of the Dickensian early chapters of
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. The common denominator in all
these texts, whether comic or horrific, whether they focus on the safety
pin in the underwear or the protracted nervous breakdown, is the
protagonist's sense of vulnerability--the woman with her guard down.
This is something McCarthy habitually leaves out of her satiric or
critical writing, where a more self-assured, more destructive, though
also more witty side of her personality comes into play. Unfortunately,
this tart-tongued double is the only McCarthy some readers remember,
though it's not necessarily the woman her friends recall or the writing
they most value. One of her biographers, Carol Brightman, may exaggerate
when she refers to her "nearly inexhaustible appetite for remorse and
self-castigation," but this undoubtedly brings us closer to the welter
of emotions behind the icy sheen of her brisk intelligence, her famously
"cold eye."

The country is riven and ailing, with a guns-plus-butter nuttiness in
some of its governing echelons and the sort of lapsed logic implicit in
the collapse of trust in money-center capitalism, which has been an
undergirding theory of a good deal of the work that many people do. The
tallest buildings, real profit centers, fall, as "wogs" and "ragheads"
defy us, perhaps comparably to how the "gooks" in Vietnam did (from
whose example Osama bin Laden may have learned that we could be
defeated). But that was on foreign soil, and we believed that we had
pulled our punches and beaten ourselves, and so remained triumphalist
for the remainder of the twentieth century, as we had been practically
since Reconstruction.

Now we're not so sure. For the first time since the War of 1812 we have
been damaged in continental America by foreigners, having made other
people hate us, though we had never needed to pay attention to such
matters before. Proxies could fight the malcontents for us in places
like Central America, and the Japanese and Germans, would-be conquerors,
had not felt much real animus, becoming close, amicable allies after the
war. Our first World War II hero, Colin Kelly, three days after Pearl
Harbor, flew his B-17 bomber (as media myth had it) in kamikaze fashion
to hit a Japanese cruiser, before the Japanese made a practice of it. To
give your life for your country, like Nathan Hale, is an ideal that's
since evaporated.

Obese individually and as a nation, and trying to stall the aging
process, we talk instead of cars and taxes, sports and movies, cancer
and entitlements, but with a half-unmentioned inkling too of what more
ominously may be in store--a premonition that our righteous confidence
might have served us just a bit too well. We never agonized a lot about
killing off the Indians, or our slaving history either, once that was
over, or being the only nuclear power ever to incinerate multitudes of
people. We've hardly seemed to notice when free enterprise segues into
simple greed, because our religious beginnings countenanced rapacity, as
long as you tithed. Settling the seaboard in official belts of piety,
whether Puritan, Anglican, Quaker or Dutch Reformed (only the frontier
tended to be atheistic), we seized land and water with abandon, joined
by Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists and what have you, westward ho. Each
group encouraged its rich men to creep like a camel through the eye of
the needle, and political freedoms were gradually canted away from the
pure ballot box toward influence-buying.

We swallowed all of that because the New World dream envisioned
everybody working hard and getting fairly rich, except when undertows of
doubt pervaded our prosperity, as in the 1930s and 1960s; or now when,
feeling gridlocked, we wonder if we haven't gone too far and used the
whole place up. We seem to need some kind of condom invented just for
greed--a latex sac where spasms of that particular vice can be
ejaculated, captured and contained. Like lust, it's not going to go
away. Nor will Monopoly games do the trick, any more than pornographic
videos erase impulses that might result in harm. The old phrase patrons
of prostitutes used to use--"getting your ashes hauled"--said it pretty
well, and if we could persuade people to think of greed, as well, that
way and expel its destructiveness perhaps into a computer screen,
trapping the piggishness in cyberspace might save a bit of Earth. The
greediest guys would not be satisfied, but greed might be looked on as
slightly outré.

Some vertigo or "near death" experience of global warming may be
required to trip the necessary degree of alarm. The droughts and water
wars, a polar meltdown and pelagic crisis--too much saltwater and
insufficient fresh. In the meantime, dried-up high plains agriculture
and Sunbelt golf greens in the Republicans' heartlands will help because
African famines are never enough. We need a surge of altruism, artesian
decency. The oddity of greed nowadays is that it is so often solo--in
the service of one ego--not ducal or kingly, as the apparatus of an
unjust state. Overweening possession, such as McMansions and so on, will
be loony in the century we are entering upon--ecologically,
economically, morally, commonsensically. But how will we realize this,
short of disastrous procrastination? Hurricanes and centrifugal violence
on the home front, not to mention angry Arabs flying into the World
Trade Center? That astounded us: both the anger and the technological
savvy. These camel-herding primitives whom we had manipulated, fleeced,
romanticized and patronized for generations, while pumping out their oil
and bottling them up in monarchies and emirates that we cultivated and
maintained, while jeering at them with casual racism in the meantime,
when we thought of it, for not having democracies like ours. To discover
that satellite TV, the Internet and some subversive preaching should
suddenly provide them access to divergent opinions disconcerts if it
doesn't frighten us, as does their willingness to counterpose
rudimentary suicide missions to the helicopter gunships and F-16s we
provide the Israelis. "Don't they value life?"

They won't be the last. The Vietcong were as culturally different from
the Palestinians as we are and yet succeeded in winning a country for
themselves, at a tremendous but bearable cost, which the Palestinians
will also undoubtedly do. Self-sacrifice can be a match for weaponry,
not because the Americans or Israelis value Asian or Arab life--at key
junctures and for essentially racist reasons they have not--but because
of the value they place on their own citizenry. As many as fifty
Vietnamese lives were lost for every American's, but that was not a high
enough ratio for us, even though, unlike some Israelis, we don't ascribe
to ourselves a biblical imprimatur. So we let them have their land, and
the domino calamities that had been famously predicted did not result.

To equate our own revolution with anybody else's is quite offensive to
us. Mostly, in fact, we prefer to forget that we had a revolutionary
past and kicked thousands of wealthy Tories into Canada, seizing their
property. We were slow to condemn apartheid in South Africa, having
scarcely finished abolishing our own at the time, and have been slow in
general to support self-governance in the warmer climates or to
acknowledge suffering among people whose skins are beiger than ours. And
if our income per capita is sixty or eighty times theirs, that doesn't
strike us as strange. We are a bootstrap country, after all. They should
pay us heed. And the whole United Nations is "a cesspool," according to
a recent New York City mayor.

But primitive notions like those of Ed Koch invite a primitive response.
And box-cutters in the hands of Taliban fundamentalists are not our main
problem. We have gratuitously destroyed so much of nature that the
Taliban's smashing up of Buddhist statues, as comparative vandalism,
will someday seem quite minuscule. We have also denatured our own
nominal religions: that is, taken the bite of authenticity out of
Christianity, for instance. Our real problem, I think, is a centrifugal
disorientation and disbelief. There is a cost to cynicism (as in our
previous activities in Afghanistan), and the systematic demonizing of
communitarianism during the cold war made it harder afterward for us to
reject as perverse the double-talking profiteering implicit in phenomena
like Enron, when we had thought that anything was better than collective
regulation and planning.

But ceasing to believe in revolutionary democracy--whether of the
secular or Christian (or Emersonian) variety--has proven costly. A
decent regard for the welfare of other people, in international as well
as local life, is going to be more than just a matter of private virtue.
In a shrinking world it may be a survival tool. Fanaticism doesn't carry
as far unless catastrophic economic conditions lurk in the background,
as we learned in the case of Germany between the two world wars but
then, when non-Caucasians were involved, forgot. Our foreign aid budget,
once the cold war ended, collapsed into spectacular stinginess, and our
sole response to September 11 has been police work. This can probably
erase Al Qaeda--which became after its instant victory that one morning
quite superfluous anyway--but not the knowledge of our vulnerability to
any handful of smart and angry plotters in this technological age. We
might see an explosion of those.

Our national self-absorption (in which the focus seems more on trying to
stay young than helping the young) may give capitalism a bad name.
Simple hedonism and materialism was not the point of crossing the ocean.
Our revolution was better than that. It was to paint the world anew.

Southern Exposure, which somehow looks--even in its third decade,
in the twenty-first century--as if very advanced high school students
had just stapled it together and put it on your doorstep (that's a
compliment...The Nation strives for that effect, too), is still
doing a fine job on its old beat: investigating the strange mix of
culture and corporatism that has made the South what it is today. By
extension, every issue poses the same basic question: What exactly is
America? In looking at the South in great detail over many decades,
Southern Exposure has begun to propose, although not explicitly,
some answers.

First, America is a place that advocates equality but thrives on
inequality. In the 2002 Spring and Summer issue, which is subtitled "The
South at War," James Maycock has published a piece on the black American
soldier's experience in Vietnam--especially for people who did not live
through the civil rights movement and that terrible Southeast Asian
conflict, this piece will be riveting. "I'm not a draft evader,"
declares one African-American draftee on reaching Canada. "I'm a runaway
slave."

America is also a place where the Marlboro Man has not abdicated, as
Stan Goff shows in his gonzo essay on Vietnam and American masculinity
(in fact, it has crossed my mind that all those ads may have been psy-ops prep for George W. Bush's ascendancy). And last, America is a
place that loves the Army. In its useful and unassailable roundup on the
Southern states and the war industry, Southern Exposure comes up
with important facts. The dollar amount of military contracts to Florida
companies alone last year amounted to $15.2 billion. The military, of
course, is a good place to have your money right now. For example,
Florida's education budget was slashed by 4.2 percent last year while
the stock of Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, two of the largest companies
with investments in Florida, were up 25 percent and 40 percent,
respectively. Nutshell portraits of thirteen states provide a real sense
of the give and take between politicians, the military and the job
market, and population in places where the military chooses to spend.

Note also: Of the top twenty-one cities involved in military production
in 2001, excepting Hartford, St. Louis, Indianapolis and Seattle, every
city on the list is in the South or in California. According to
Southern Exposure, 66 percent of the weapons sold to Israel under
the Foreign Military Sales program were produced in the South. The South
has helped situate America in the world today; that puts it in a unique
moral position. But after reading this issue of Southern
Exposure, one really wonders: Do most Southerners care?

Yoga's Antiterror Position

After reading about B-29s and F-16s and macho men and Hellfire
missiles made in Orlando--of all places--I was happy to read a few
magazines that go to other extremes. Of the two big yoga magazines
available on the newsstand, Yoga Journal is the yogis' Vanity
Fair, and Yoga International is their Real Simple. We
can dispense with the latter except for the pretzel-position pictures,
but Yoga Journal is a very good niche magazine--good niche
publications take their subject and use it expansively, as a jumping-off
point. The June issue has an excellent and anthropologically important
piece by Marina Budhos on how yoga practice in the West, especially
among Americans, is changing the age-old practice in India, the
Americans behaving like cargo cultists in reverse.

Budhos found that many of the Indians in an Indian ashram (where, by the
way, the hatha yoga teacher was "a really tough Israeli") were attending
because they "were interested in teaching yoga as a career." Many of the
foreigners were simply having yoga fun on vacation--although, as I have
discovered while doing the tortoise position, the word "yoga" and the
word "fun" should never be used in the same sentence. Daniel Ghosal, an
Indian-American, says the Americans who come to India for yoga are seen
by the Indians as "kind of 'cracked.'" Indians don't think of yoga as a
social trend. "The lighting of candles and all that," Ghosal says
dismissively. "To Indians, it's just yoga."

"The Path of the Peaceful Warrior," by Anne Cushman, is also an amusing
piece. In it--after lighting a fire with newspapers in which she sees
headlines about terror and anthrax burning away, and after "folding into
the silence and surrender of a deep forward bend" (that's classic yoga
writing; you just have to push past it)--Cushman proposes a "Yogic
Battle Plan for the War on Terror." I suppose it's better than beefing
up your naval program at Newport News...

The first step: "Stop." I like that. That should be the entirety of an
Op-Ed piece on the Middle East crisis.

There is also "Contemplate death." Under that weighty heading, Cushman
includes this nice aperçu: "The American government's
instruction to 'Be on high alert, yet go about your ordinary life' may
have struck many people as all but impossible, but that paradoxical
injunction is actually...a core yogic practice." (Don't tell Rumsfeld!)
Under "Look Deeply," Cushman cites Tricycle editor James
Shaheen's remark that bin Laden was "inadvertently speaking the Buddhist
truth of interdependence when he said, 'Until there is peace in the
Middle East, there will be no peace for Americans at home.'" "Practice
nonviolence" is another step in the yogic battle; "take action," the
last. By the end, Yoga Journal is beginning to sound like the
editors of Southern Exposure.

Sad News

Earthtimes, the monthly environmental and social paper
spiritedly edited for twelve years by the effervescent Pranay Gupte, is
folding up shop after July for lack of funding. As Gupte said in a
farewell note to colleagues: "Undercapitalization is always bad for
business; zero capitalization is worse. Since my basement press is
beyond repair, I can't even print rupee notes any longer to sustain
Earthtimes." That's Gupte and the tone of Earthtimes,
too--in moments of pain and crisis, a quiet, self-deflating, sustaining
humor.

Dread ripples through me as I listen to a phone message from our manager
saying that we (The Doors) have another offer of huge amounts of money
if we would just allow one of our songs to be used as the background for
a commercial. They don't give up! I guess it's hard to imagine that
everybody doesn't have a price. Maybe 'cause, as the cement heads try to
pave the entire world, they're paving their inner world as well. No
imagination left upstairs.

Apple Computer called on a Tuesday--they already had the audacity to
spend money to cut "When the Music's Over" into an ad for their new cube
computer software. They want to air it the next weekend, and will give
us a million and a half dollars! A MILLION AND A HALF DOLLARS! Apple is
a pretty hip company...we use computers.... Dammit! Why did Jim (Morrison) have to have such integrity?

I'm pretty clear that we shouldn't do it. We don't need the money. But I
get such pressure from one particular bandmate (the one who wears
glasses and plays keyboards).

"Commercials will give us more exposure," he says. I ask him, "so you're
not for it because of the money?" He says "no," but his first
question is always "how much?" when we get one of these offers, and he
always says he's for it. He never suggests we play Robin Hood, either.
If I learned anything from Jim, it's respect for what we created. I have
to pass. Thank God, back in 1965 Jim said we should split everything,
and everyone has veto power. Of course, every time I pass, they double
the offer!

It all started in 1967, when Buick proffered $75,000 to use "Light My
Fire" to hawk its new hot little offering--the Opel. As the story
goes--which everyone knows who's read my autobiography or seen Oliver
Stone's movie--Ray, Robby and John (that's me) OK'd it, while Jim was
out of town. He came back and went nuts. And it wasn't even his song
(Robby primarily having penned "LMF")! In retrospect, his calling up
Buick and saying that if they aired the ad, he'd smash an Opel on
television with a sledgehammer was fantastic! I guess that's one of the
reasons I miss the guy.

It actually all really started back in '65, when we were a garage
band and Jim suggested sharing all the songwriting credits and money.
Since he didn't play an instrument--literally couldn't play one chord on
piano or guitar, but had lyrics and melodies coming out of his ears--the
communal pot idea felt like a love-in. Just so no one got too
weird, he tagged that veto thought on. Democracy in action...only
sometimes avenues between "Doors" seem clogged with bureaucratic BS. In
the past ten years it's definitely intensified...maybe we need a third
party. What was that original intent? Liberty and justice for all
songs...and the pursuit of happiness.... What is happiness? More money?
More fame? The Vietnamese believe that you're born with happiness; you
don't have to pursue it. We tried to bomb that out of them back in my
youth. From the looks of things, we might have succeeded.

This is sounding pretty depressing, John; where are you going here? The
whole world is hopefully heading toward democracy. That's a good thing,
John.... Oh, yeah: the greed gene. Vaclav Havel had it right when he
took over as president of Czechoslovakia, after the fall of Communism.
He said, "We're not going to rush into this too quickly, because I don't
know if there's that much difference between KGB and IBM."

Whoa! Here comes another one: "Dear John Densmore, this letter is an
offer of up to one million dollars for your celebrity endorsement of our
product. We have the best weight loss, diet and exercise program, far
better than anything on the market. The problem is the celebrity must be
overweight. Then the celebrity must use our product for four weeks,
which will take off up to 20 pounds of their excess body fat. If your
endorsement works in the focus group tests, you will immediately get
$10,000.00 up front and more money will start rolling in every month
after that--up to a million dollars or more." Wow! Let's see...I've
weighed 130 pounds for thirty-five years--since my 20s...I'll have to
gain quite a bit...sort of like a De Niro thing...he gained fifty pounds for Raging Bull--and won an Oscar! I'm an artist, too, like him...

We used to build our cities and towns around churches. Now banks are at
the centers of our densely populated areas. I know, it's the 1990s....
No, John, it's the new millennium, you dinosaur. Rock dinosaur, that is.
My hair isn't as long as it used to be. I don't smoke much weed anymore,
and I even have a small bald spot. The dollar is almighty, and
ads are kool, as cool as the coolest rock videos.

Why did Jim have to say we were "erotic politicians"? If I had been the
drummer for the Grassroots, it probably wouldn't have cut me to the core
when I heard John Lennon's "Revolution" selling tennis shoes...and
Nikes, to boot! That song was the soundtrack to part of my youth, when
the streets were filled with passionate citizens expressing their First
Amendment right to free speech. Hey...the streets are filled again! Or
were, before 9/11. And they're protesting what I'm trying to wax on and
on about here. Corporate greed! Maybe I should stick to music. I guess
that's why I hit the streets with Bonnie Raitt during the 1996
Democratic National Convention. We serenaded the troops. Bob Hope did it
during World War II, only our troops are those dressed in baggy Bermuda
shorts, sporting dreadlocks. Some have the shaved Army look, but they're
always ready to fight against the Orwellian nightmare. A woman activist
friend of mine said that with the networking of the Net, what's bubbling
under this brave new world will make the '60s unrest look like peanuts.
I don't want "Anarchy, Now," a worn-out hippie phrase, but I would like
to see a middle class again in this country.

Europe seems saner right now. They are more green than us. They're
paranoid about our genetically altered food and they're trying to make
NATO a little more independent in case we get too zealous in our
policing of the globe. When The Doors made their first jaunt from the
colonies to perform in the mother country back in '67, the record
companies seemed a little saner, too. The retailers in England could
order only what they thought they could sell; no returns to the
manufacturers. That eliminated the tremendous hype that this country
still produces, creating a buzz of "double platinum" sales, and then
having half of the CDs returned. Today, there is a time limit of three
to six months for the rackjobbers to get those duds back to the company.

Our band used to be on a small folk label. Judy Collins, Love and the
Butterfield Blues Band were our Elektra labelmates. We could call up the
president, Jac Holzman, and have a chat...and this was before we
made it. Well, Jac sold out for $10 million back in '70, and we were now
owned by a corporation. Actually, today just five corps own almost the
entire record business, where numbers are the bottom line. At
least we aren't on the one owned by Seagram's! Wait a minute...maybe
we'd get free booze...probably not. Advances are always
recoupable, booze probably is too.

Those impeccable English artists are falling prey as well. Pete
Townshend keeps fooling us again, selling Who songs to yuppies hungry
for SUVs. I hope Sting has given those Shaman chiefs he hangs out with
from the rainforest a ride in the back of that Jag he's advertising,
'cause as beautiful as the burlwood interiors are, the car--named after
an animal possibly facing extinction--is a gas guzzler. If you knew me
back in the '60s, you might say that this rant--I mean, piece--now has a
self-righteous ring to it, me having had the name Jaguar John back then.
I had the first XJ-6 when they came out, long before the car became
popular with accountants. That's when I sold it for a Rolls
Royce-looking Jag, the Mark IV, a super gas guzzler. That was back when
the first whiffs of rock stardom furled up my nose. Hopefully, I've
learned something since those heady times, like: "What good is a used-up
world?" Plus, it's not a given that one should do commercials for the
products one uses. The Brits might bust me here, having heard "Riders on
the Storm" during the '70s (in Britain only) pushing tires for their
roadsters, but our singer's ghost brought me to my senses and I gave my
portion to charity. I still don't think the Polish member of our
band has learned the lesson of the Opel, but I am now adamant that three
commercials and we're out of our singer's respect. "Jim's dead!" our
piano player responds to this line of thought. That is precisely
why we should resist, in my opinion. The late, transcendental George
Harrison had something to say about this issue. The Beatles "could have
made millions of extra dollars [doing commercials], but we thought it
would belittle our image or our songs," he said. "It would be real handy
if we could talk to John [Lennon]...because that quarter of us is
gone...and yet it isn't, because Yoko's there, Beatling more than ever."
Was he talking about the Nike ad, or John and Yoko's nude album cover
shot now selling vodka?

Actually, it was John and Yoko who inspired me to start a 10 percent
tithe, way back in the early '80s. In the Playboy interview, John
mentioned that they were doing the old tradition, and it stuck in my
mind. If everybody gave 10 percent, this world might recapture a
bit of balance. According to my calculations, as one gets up into the
multi category, you up the ante. Last year I nervously committed to 15
percent, and that old feeling rose again: the greed gene. When you get
to multi-multi, you should give away half every year. Excuse me, Mr.
Gates, but the concept of billionaire is obscene. I know you give a lot
away, and it's easy for me to mouth off, but I do know something about
it. During the Oliver Stone film on our band, the record royalties
tripled, and as I wrote those 10 percent checks, my hand was shaking.
Why? It only meant that I was making much more for myself. It was the
hand of greed. I am reminded of the sound of greed, trying to talk me
into not vetoing a Doors song for a cigarette ad in Japan.

"It's the only way to get a hit over there, John. They love commercials.
It's the new thing!"

"What about encouraging kids to smoke, Ray?"

"You always have to be PC, don't you, John?" I stuck to my guns and
vetoed the offer, thinking about the karma if we did it. Manzarek has
recently been battling stomach ulcers. So muster up courage, you
capitalists; hoarding hurts the system--inner as well as outer.

So it's been a lonely road resisting the chants of the rising
solicitations: "Everybody has a price, don't they?" Every time we (or I)
resist, they up the ante. An Internet company recently offered three
mil for "Break on Through." Jim's "pal" (as he portrays himself in
his bio) said yes, and Robby joined me in a resounding no! "We'll give
them another half mil, and throw in a computer!" the prez of Apple
pleaded late one night.

Robby stepped up to the plate again the other day, and I was very
pleased that he's been a longtime friend. I was trying to get through to
our ivory tinkler, with the rap that playing Robin Hood is fun, but the
"bottom line" is that our songs have a higher purpose, like keeping the
integrity of their original meaning for our fans. "Many kids have said
to me that 'Light My Fire,' for example, was playing when they first
made love, or were fighting in Nam, or got high--pivotal moments in
their lives." Robby jumped in. "If we're only one of two or three groups
who don't do commercials, that will help the value of our songs in the
long run. The publishing will suffer a little, but we should be proud of
our stance." Then Robby hit a home run. "When I heard from one fan that
our songs saved him from committing suicide, I realized, that's it--we
can't sell off these songs."

So, in the spirit of the Bob Dylan line, "Money doesn't talk, it
swears," we have been manipulated, begged, extorted and bribed to make a
pact with the devil. While I was writing this article, Toyota Holland
went over the line and did it for us. They took the opening
melodic lines of "Light My Fire" to sell their cars. We've called up
attorneys in the Netherlands to chase them down, but in the meantime,
folks in Amsterdam think we sold out. Jim loved Amsterdam.

How their wealth and power threaten democracy

It's boring but do it, says the playwright. Otherwise, you allow evil to
settle in.

In the United States a deeply rooted bias toward the practical renders
all knowledge, even the most sublime forms of wisdom, merely an
instrumental good. This pragmatic streak tends to push our literature of
epiphany toward pop psychology and self-helping boosterism unless the
work connects with something larger than the self. In some cultures that
larger-than-the-self thing would be God, and the result becomes
Spiritual Wisdom literature--a form that does not, in any serious way,
flourish among us. The chief Other we celebrate is our Great Outdoors,
and when moral epiphany connects with it the result is a distinctively
American product: Environmental Wisdom literature.

At 67, with nearly forty volumes of work to his credit, Wendell Berry is
undeniably a master of the genre. As poet, essayist and novelist, he has
been concerned throughout his long writing life with how humans live and
work in place, and with the moral and spiritual elements of their
relationship to land. His nonfiction should properly be seen as a
contribution to political theology, but in America we shelve it as
Nature Writing.

Berry is one of the few contemporary authors worthy of mention in the
same breath with that triumvirate of immortals, Thoreau, Muir and
Leopold. If Thoreau stands for romantic naturalism; Muir for the
preservationism of his creation, the Sierra Club; and if Leopold traced
in his life and work the intellectual distance between conservationism
(which treats nature as economically instrumental) and something like
modern ecology (which doesn't), Berry too is the chief articulator of an
environmentally relevant "ism": He is our foremost apostle of the
agrarian ideal.

Ah--the agrarian ideal. But farmland isn't "nature," and Jefferson died
centuries ago, right? Hasn't the Jeffersonian vision of a republic of
free and equal yeoman farmers been completely occluded by the success of
Hamilton's plan for a national manufactory? With only a minuscule
portion of our population engaged in farming, talk of an agrarian ideal
seems outdated at best.

Mainstream environmentalism seems to agree: It generally accepts that
not in agriculture but "in wildness is the salvation of the world," as
Thoreau famously put it. Thoreau meant also, of course, that in wildness was the salvation of the self. But Thoreau was a bit of a romantic poseur; during his idyll in the woods at Walden he was never out of earshot of the Fitchburg
railroad, and when he did enter actual wilderness (in Maine, on the
flanks of Mount Katahdin) he found it "savage and dreary," "even more
grim and wild" than he had anticipated. If Thoreau's virtue was that he
studied nature in detail while all around him men turned their backs on
it (when they weren't actively cutting it down, draining it and
otherwise "improving" it), still, he rarely saw the big picture except
through the distorting lens of his romanticism. Like many another
romantic, he did not see the ways in which his dissent from the
antiromantic realities of his day failed to transcend the evils he
railed against.

In 1850 it was not quite so clear that industrial culture, with its
dark, satanic mills and the increasingly complicated, spiritually barren
life that Thoreau bemoaned, could, without being deflected far from its
course, easily accommodate and even assign value to "nature" as the
romantics understood it. Even Robert Moses, the auto enthusiast whose
highway planning led us into the promised land of modern urban life,
understood the value of parks and green space; they were a necessary
anodyne, a complement to the city he helped to create. "Nature" has
exchange value. Within a market system, anything with exchange
value--anything that people will pay cash money for--will be preserved.
The market undervalues some things, yes, but market effects can be
controlled and augmented by legislation. (Sadly, neither the market nor
Congress has managed to preserve enough untrammeled nature for natural
processes to operate there. Oxymoronically, we have to manage wilderness
in order to keep it wild.)

The logic of industrial culture can preserve a bit of wilderness, but it
won't preserve the life of the planet on which all of us ultimately
depend. It won't even preserve the soil fertility that lets us fend off
our own immediate death by starvation. Berry takes articulate exception
to this failure, and he speaks with the authority of long practice as a
farmer. His love of his hillside farm in Kentucky, which he works with
horses, is evident on every page he writes.

Berry doesn't say that we all must become farmers in order to save the
world. As Norman Wirzba, the editor of this volume, points out in his
introduction, Berry isn't asking us to hitch up horses and become
tillers of soil. He merely wants us to adopt the values,
responsibilities and concerns of an agrarian life. Wirzba writes: "Just
as we have adopted...the assumptions of an industrial mind-set without
ourselves becoming industrialists--we are still teachers, health-care
providers, builders, students, and so forth--so too can we integrate
agrarian principles without ourselves becoming farmers."

One of the clearest contrasts between industrial and agrarian values
concerns the matter of garbage. Urbanites dispose of it at the curb,
where it is taken care of by jumpsuited specialists. Where these men
take it the urbanites know not, nor are they able to see their
responsibility for the damage it does when it gets there. The agrarian,
with the wisdom and clarity of the farmer, knows that there is no such
thing as a "sanitary" landfill. (No farmer would be so foolish as to
welcome a dump anywhere near land being cultivated.) Agrarians are led
to ask subversive questions about the origins of the waste they find so
problematic. Is this purchase necessary? Can the old article be made to
last longer? If the thing shouldn't be released into the environment
when I'm done with it, then it shouldn't be created in the first place.
Do I need it? What do I really need?

The contrast is between ideal types seen romantically, through the
shimmering heat of passionate belief. Even so, the difference seen is
real. There are those who understand culture's root in nature, and those
who don't. For all but hunters and gatherers, farming is the definitive,
determinative point of contact between culture and its environment. As
farming goes, so goes the nation and the planet. Both have been going
badly precisely because we have let the market assign valuations that
should have been made morally, practically, agriculturally,
ecologically. "A man who would value a piece of land strictly according
to its economic worth is as crazy, or as evil, as the man who would make
a whore of his wife," Berry declares in The Unforeseen
Wilderness. For him that comparison is not an illustrative simile
but an equation: How we treat the land is not separate from how we treat
each other. Our agricultural practice should be ruled not by the market,
whose cues and commandments are culturally and temporally parochial, but
by a clear apprehension of what is needed to insure the long-range
health of the soil, the communities it supports and the individual
organisms (both human and nonhuman) within those communities. Berry's
vision is trinitarian: These three kinds of life are one. He is enough
of a romantic to believe that health is indivisible--that human health
and the health of the planet are complementary, not antagonistic ideals.

Berry's romanticism is a source of hope. It doesn't distort his vision.
He knows we're not going to save the planet or the self by playacting at
being wild. Our world is neither completely a factory nor ideally a
wilderness but in practice is very much under cultivation: We are
inescapably agrarian. With even our wildernesses needing tender care,
the question we face is not, "Shall we be gardeners?" or even "What
proportion of garden to wilderness will we have?" but "What sort of
gardeners should we be?" The essays collected here are Berry's
thoughtful, comprehensive answer.

Berry throws off epigrammatic wisdom like a scythe sprays sparks when
held against the sharpening wheel. Thus: "There can be no such thing as
a 'global village.' No matter how much one may love the world as a
whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small
part of it"; "We live in agriculture as we live in flesh"; "We do not
understand the earth in terms of what it offers us or of what it
requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably
destroy what they do not understand"; "Marriage...has now taken the form
of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things
shall be divided"; "There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy.
Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and
irresponsible dependence." And, with an especially startling clarity:
"The basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral
ignorance and weakness of character." If the essential rightness of
these epigrams isn't immediately obvious to you, you need more Wendell
Berry in your life.

Part of Berry's brief against agribusiness and the rule of the market in
general is that both radically decontextualize human experience,
including the necessary experience of nurturing life to grow food. Fewer
and fewer of us have that primary experience any longer, and those who
do still make a living directly from the soil are continually pressed to
pursue their calling not in accord with its own standards of excellence
but in response to market imperatives, which push farmer and consumer
alike toward thoughtless, selfish, live-for-today exploitation. This
isolation from context--this replacement of a dense web of communal,
historical and natural relations with naked cash nexus--keeps most of us
from supporting, or even seeing, the sort of care, knowledge, honor and
integrity that good farming practice (and good neighboring) requires. In
a society ruled by industrial values, commerce is the only context, and
relations are dramatically simplified.

It's ironic, then, that the selections in this volume have been taken
out of context. The cumulative effect of reading through them is not the
effect created by reading Berry at his best. Berry is a farmer and a
moralist, one who speaks with the humble authority of a man who
regularly treads ground behind a team of horses. His contributions to
the rarefied discourse of political theology are earned by the sweat of
that kind of direct experience, and he knows it. In their original
context the selections here achieve a better balance between theoretical
rumination and chewy first-person detail, between wisdom gained and the
texture of the life that produced it. When Berry speaks his mind,
usually it's to the jangle of harness and hitch. In emphasizing Berry as
an agrarian theorist, this collection tends to underrepresent Berry the
farmer and neighbor and nephew and husband, the man whose experience
makes his agrarian theorizing compelling. Reading the essays assembled
here is rather like sitting down to a plate full of gravy and potatoes:
It might be just what you want, but be aware that what the waiter
brought you is only part of the meal the chef originally had in mind.

Berry is a master craftsman. His essays move from the personal to the
abstract, the reportorial to the indignant, the anecdotal to the
reflective as smoothly as an ecosystem moves through stages of
succession, evolving toward its climax. Throughout Berry's work comes a
strong sense of the narrative persona behind it: A kind and generous
man, one at peace with his lot but deeply at odds with the temper of his
times, a man of insight and empathy who never retreats into the solace
of irony or smug detachment. Berry has a poet's ear, which keeps his
prose from dissolving into the galumphing polysyllables and hissing
sibilants (the "-isms" and "-nesses") that infect abstract subjects in
the hands of lesser writers. He's constantly aware that, just as we are
food incarnate (sunshine and soil, condemned to mortal life), so too are
our ideas incarnated in our acts and organizations, each of which has a
history it cannot fully escape.

It's odd, then, that Wirzba's Berry is a rather disembodied, timeless
intellect. Sometimes the individual chapters in this collection aren't
effectively introduced, and often something as basic as the date of
original publication is missing. Occasionally Berry's text will refer to
"the point of this book," though we are of course no longer in "this"
book--we're in Wirzba's book, and he hasn't given us easy access to what
the original textual reference meant. (For most selections, you've got
to comb through the acknowledgments to discover the origin, and even
then the provenance of many of them remains unclear.) Berry's 1993
plaint against the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade still has
relevance--the issue of globalization hasn't gone away, and its portent
for agrarian values is enormous--but "A Bad Big Idea" would benefit from
annotation or an introduction explaining the current status of world
trade in agricultural goods and limning the continuing relevance of
Berry's analysis. Without that context, the reader may well dismiss the
piece as an outdated tilt against a fait accompli.

As with any collection, one can second-guess the selections. I longed to
read Berry's elegiac mea culpa, "Damage," in which he recounts
his misguided attempt to carve a stock pond into one of his farm's
hillsides. The piece, a kind of prose poem, could have served admirably
as part of Wirzba's first section, "A Geobiography," which aims to
"introduce Berry's person and place to the reader." Also missing is
Berry's notorious essay from Harper's in which he gave his
reasons for refusing to buy a computer (he writes with a pencil). Wirzba
has included Berry's response to critics of that piece, though without
the original essay the rebuttal's elaborate analysis of feminism seems
puzzlingly non sequiturish. (In his original essay Berry mentioned that
his wife types and edits his manuscripts, a circumstance that drew harsh
criticism from some readers. A wife, one letter writer said, meets all
of Berry's criteria for an appropriate technology: She's locally
producible, easily repairable, doesn't burn fossil fuel, doesn't
radically transform the community when exploited, etc.) Without a
clearer sense of the whole exchange, one can't fully appreciate why
Berry titled his reply "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," or why he
offers the telling insight that "one cannot construct an adequate public
defense of a private life." (It's clear he's not apologizing, but
admonishing those whose passion for political rectitude would destroy
the boundary between public and private life. But the full exchange
makes clearer why this is an agrarian's concern: It's that boundary, and
not some chimerical escape from meaningful work or moral duty, that is
crucial to the exercise of our liberty.)

Even with these limitations, this volume is worth a read. There is so
much good sense collected here that one is tempted not to review it but
simply to repeat it. Examples: "We must recover that sense of holiness
in the world, and learn to respect and forbear accordingly." "Economic
justice does not consist of giving the most power to the most money."
"Eating is an agricultural act."

As to solutions: Berry's advice for those of us wishing to do what we
can to make things better is simple, direct and difficult: "Eat
responsibly." His essay "The Pleasures of Eating" (taken from What
Are People For?) describes in detail what that means. Deal directly
with a local farmer whenever possible. Prepare your own food.
Participate in food production to the extent that you can--raise herbs
in a window pot if that's what you can do. Learn the origins of the food
you buy, and buy food produced close to your home. Learn what is
involved in the best farming and gardening. Learn as much as you can, by
direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of
food species. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy
and technology of industrial food production.

The imperative, you see, is to learn. Of course: This is wisdom
literature.

We are accustomed to our wisdom about nature coming from people who
write about wilderness. We don't think of farmland as nature, or of the
farming life as offering us much in the way of opportunity to accrue and
exercise wisdom. As this volume shows, on both counts we are sadly
mistaken.

In the past two decades, Richard Rodriguez has offered us a gamut of
anecdotes, mostly about himself in action in an environment that is not
always attuned to his own inner life. These anecdotes have taken the
form of a trilogy that started in 1983 with the classic Hunger of
Memory, continued in 1993 with Days of Obligation and concludes now with his new book Brown:
The Last Discovery of America. This isn't a trilogy about history.
It isn't about sociology or politics either, at least in their most
primary senses. Instead, it is a sustained meditation on Latino life in
the United States, filled with labyrinthine reflections on philosophy
and morality.

Rodriguez embraces subjectivity wholeheartedly. His tool, his
astonishing device, is the essay, and his model, I believe, is
Montaigne, the father of the personal essay and a genius at taking even
an insect tempted by a candle flame as an excuse to meditate on the
meaning of life, death and everything in between. Not that Montaigne is
Rodriguez's only touchstone. In Brown he chants to Alexis de
Tocqueville and James Baldwin as well. And in the previous installments
of his trilogy, particularly owing to his subject matter, he has emerged
as something of a successor to Octavio Paz.

The other trunk of this genealogical tree I'm shaping is V.S. Naipaul,
or at least he appears that to me, a counterpoint, as I reread
Rodriguez's oeuvre. They have much in common: They explore a
culture through its nuances and not, as it were, through its
high-profile iconography; they are meticulous littérateurs,
intelligent, incessantly curious; and, more important, everywhere they
go they retain, to their honor, the position of the outsider looking in.
Rodriguez, in particular, has been a Mexican-American but not a
Chicano--that is, he has rejected the invitation to be a full part of
the community that shaped him. Instead, he uses himself as a looking
glass to reflect, from the outside, on who Mexicans are, in and beyond
politics. This, predictably, has helped fill large reservoirs of
animosity against him. I don't know of any other Latino author who
generates so much anger. Chicanos love to hate him as much as they hate
to love him.

Why this is so isn't difficult to understand: He is customarily critical
of programs and policies that are seen as benefactors to the community,
for example, bilingual education and affirmative action, which, in his
eyes, have only balkanized families, neighborhoods and cities. In
Hunger of Memory he portrayed himself as a Scholarship Boy who
benefited from racial profiling. He reached a succinct conclusion: Not
race but individual talent should be considered in a person's
application for school or work--not one's skin color, last name or
country of origin, only aptitude. Naipaul too can play the devil: His
journeys through India and the Arab world, even through the lands of El
Dorado, are unsettling when one considers his rabid opinions on the
"uncivilized" natives. But Naipaul delivers these opinions with
admirable grace and, through that, makes his readers rethink the
colonial galaxy, revisit old ideas. In that sense, Naipaul and Rodriguez
are authors who force upon us the necessity to sharpen our own ideas. We
read them, we agree and disagree with them, so as to fine-tune our own
conception of who we are. They are of the kind of writer who first
infuriates, then unsettles us. What they never do is leave the reader
unchanged. For that alone, one ought to be grateful.

Apparently, the trilogy came into being after Rodriguez's agent, as the
author himself puts it in "Hispanic," the fifth chapter of Brown,
"encouraged from me a book that answers a simple question: What do
Hispanics mean to the life of America? He asked me that question several
years ago in a French restaurant on East Fifty-seventh Street, as I
watched a waiter approach our table holding before him a shimmering
îles flottantes."

The image of îles flottantes is a fitting one, I believe,
since the Latino mosaic on this side of the border (Rodriguez often
prefers to use the term "Hispanic" in his pages) might be seen as
nothing if not an archipelago of self-sufficient subcultures: Cuban,
Puerto Rican, Mexican, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Dominican... and the
whole Bolivarian range of possibilities. Are these islands of identity
interconnected? How do they relate to one another? To what extent are a
Brazilian in Tallahassee and a Mexicano in Portland, Oregon, kindred
spirits?

Judging by his answer, Rodriguez might have been asked the wrong
question. Or else, he might have chosen to respond impractically. For
the question that runs through the three installments is, How did
Hispanics become brown? His belief is that brown, as a color, is the
sine qua non of Latinos, and he exercises it as a metaphor of mixture.
"Brown as impurity," he reasons. "I write of a color that is not a
singular color, not a strict recipe, not an expected result, but a color
produced by careless desire, even by accident." It is the color of
mestizaje, i.e., the miscegenation that shaped the Americas from
1492 onward, as they were forced, in spite of themselves, into modern
times. It is the juxtaposition of white European and dark aboriginal, of
Hernán Cortés and his mistress and translator, La
Malinche. And it is also the so-called raza cósmica that
Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos talked about in the early
twentieth century, a master race that, capitalizing on its own impurity,
would rise to conquer the hemisphere, if not the entire globe.

But have Hispanics really become brown on the Technicolor screen of
America? Rodriguez is mistaken, I'm afraid. The gestation of race in the
Caribbean, from Venezuela to Mexico and the Dominican Republic, has a
different tint, since African slaves were brought in to replace Indians
for the hard labor in mines and fields, and their arrival gave birth to
other racial mixtures, among them those termed "mulattoes" and "zambos."
Argentina, on the other hand, had a minuscule aboriginal population when
the Spanish viceroys and missionaries arrived. The gauchos, a sort of
cowboy, are at the core of its national mythology, as can be seen in the
works of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Hernández and
Jorge Luis Borges. "Brown," in Rodriguez's conception, might be the
color of Mexicans in East LA, but surely not of Cubans in Miami. Some
Latinos might have become brown, but not all. And then again, what does
"brown" really mean? Rodriguez embraces it as a metaphor of impurity.
Mestizos are crossbreeds, they are impure, and impurity is beautiful.
But the term "brown" has specific political connotations as well. It is,
to a large extent, a byproduct of the civil rights era, the era of
César Chávez and the Young Lords, coined in reaction to
the black-and-white polarity that played out in Washington policy
corridors and the media: Brown is between white and black, a third
option in the kaleidoscope of race. A preferred term in the Southwest
was La Raza, but "brown" also found its way into manifestoes, political
speeches, legal documents and newspaper reports.

Rodriguez isn't into the Chicano movement, though. My gut instinct is
that he feels little empathy toward the 1960s in general, let alone
toward the Mexican-American upheaval. His views on la
hispanicidad in America are defined by his Mexican ancestry and by
his residence in San Francisco, where he has made his home for years. He
is disconnected from the Caribbean component of Latinos, and, from the
reaction I see in readers on the East Coast, the Caribbean Latinos are
also uninvolved with him.

Furthermore, Rodriguez limits himself to the concept of miscegenation,
but only at the racial level. What about promiscuity in language, for
example? Promiscuity might be a strong word, but it surely carries the
right message. Rodriguez's English is still the Queen's English:
overpolished, uncorrupted, stainless. How is it that he embraces
mestizaje but has little to say about Spanglish, that
disgustingly gorgeous mix of Spanish and English that is neither one nor
the other? Isn't that in-betweenness what America is about today? On the
issue of language, I have a side comment: I find it appalling that
Rodriguez's volumes are not available in Spanish to Mexicans and other
Latinos. Years ago, a small Iberian press, Megazul, released Hambre
de memoria in a stilted, unapologetically Castilian translation.
That, clearly, was the wrong chord to touch, when the author's resonance
is closer to San Antonio than to San Sebastián. How much longer
need Mexicans wait to read the work en español mexicano of
a canonical figure, whose lifelong quest has been to understand Mexicans
beyond the pale? The question brings us back to Paz and his "The Pachuco
and Other Extremes," the first chapter in his masterpiece The
Labyrinth of Solitude, released in 1950. It has angered Chicanos for
decades, and with good reason: This is an essay that distorts Mexican
life north of the border. Paz approached the pachuco--a social type of
Mexican youth in Los Angeles in the 1940s who fashioned a specific
lingo, and idiosyncrasies that Elvis Presley appropriated obliquely--as
a deterioration of the Mexican psyche. In his work, Rodriguez has
established a sort of colloquy with Paz, though not a direct address. He
embraces Paz's cosmopolitanism, his openness, and perceives him as a
Europeanized intellectual invaluable in the quest to freshen up Mexican
elite culture. But he refuses to confront Paz's anti-Chicanismo, and in
general Paz's negative views on Latinos in the United States. Once, for
instance, when asked what he thought about Spanglish, Paz responded that
it was neither good nor bad, "it is simply an aberration." In any case,
reading both authors on US-Mexican relations is an unpredictable,
enlightening catechism, filled with detours. While Mexicans might not
like to hear what Rodriguez has to say about them and about himself (he
has talked of "hating Mexico"), at least they will be acquainted with
his opinions.

All this is to say that Rodriguez's response to "What do Hispanics mean
to the life of America?" is partial at best. The trilogy shows a mind
engaged, but its subject is almost unmovable. Hunger of Memory
was an autobiographical meditation set in the United States as the
country was about to enter the Reagan era. It denounced a stagnant
society, interested in the politics of compassion more than in the
politics of equality, a society with little patience for Mexicans.
Days of Obligation was also about los Estados Unidos as
the first Bush presidency was approaching its end. By then the Reagan
mirage was officially over. We were about to enter another house of
mirrors under the tutelage of Bill Clinton. And this third installment
of the trilogy arrives in bookstores at a time when the melting pot,
la sopa de culturas, is boiling again, with xenophobia against
Arabs at a height, and Latinos, already the largest minority according
to the latest US Census data--35.3 million strong by late 2000, if one
counts only those officially registered--are still on the fringes,
fragmented, compartmentalized, more a sum of parts than a whole.

These changes are visible only through inference in the trilogy;
Rodriguez seldom makes use of political facts. He lives in a dreamlike
zone, a universe of ideas and sensations and paradox. Somewhere in
Brown he announces:

A few weeks ago, in the newspaper (another day in the multicultural
nation), a small item: Riot in a Southern California high school.
Hispanic students protest, then smash windows, because African-American
students get four weeks for Black History month, whereas Hispanics get
one. The more interesting protest would be for Hispanic students to
demand to be included in Black History month. The more interesting
remedy would be for Hispanic History week to include African history.

This sums up Rodriguez's approach: a micromanagement of identity
delivered periodically from the same viewpoint. Or has the viewpoint
changed? It is possible to see a growing maturity by reading the trilogy
chronologically. He started as an antisegregationist, a man interested
in assimilation of Mexicans into the larger landscape of America. His
feelings toward Mexico and toward his homosexuality were tortured at the
time. These became clear, or at least clearer, in the second
installment, in which a picture of a San Francisco desolated by AIDS and
an argument with the author's own mexicanidad as personified by
his father, among other changes, were evident. Assimilation was still a
priority, but by the 1990s Rodriguez had ceased to be interested in such
issues and was more attracted to his own condition as a public gay
Latino.

Brown is again about assimilation, but from a perspective that
asserts America is a country shaped by so many interbred layers of
ethnicity that nothing is pure anymore. At one point, he describes the
conversation of a couple of girls one afternoon on Fillmore Street. He
renders them and their dialogue thus: "Two girls. Perhaps sixteen.
White. Anglo, whatever. Tottering on their silly shoes. Talking of boys.
The one girl saying to the other: ...His complexion is so cool, this
sort of light--well, not that light." And Rodriguez ends: "I realized my
book will never be equal to the play of the young." This need to capture
what surrounds him is always evident, although it isn't always
successful, because he is an intellectual obsessed with his own stream
of consciousness rather than in catching the pulse of the nation. But
I've managed to explain the continuity of themes in Rodriguez's three
volumes only tangentially.

There is another take, summed up in three catchwords: class, ethnicity
and race. He appears to encourage this reading. The first installment is
about a low-income family whose child moves up in the hierarchy; the
second about the awakening to across-the-border roots; and the third
about "a tragic noun, a synonym for conflict and isolation," race. But
Rodriguez is quick to add:

race is not such a terrible word for me. Maybe because I am skeptical by
nature. Maybe because my nature is already mixed. The word race
encourages me to remember the influence of eroticism on history. For
that is what race memorializes. Within any discussion of race, there
lurks the possibility of romance.

So is this what the trilogy is about, finally? The endeavor strikes me
as rather mercurial. Because Rodriguez works extensively through
metaphor and hyperbole, future generations will read into his books what
they please, depending on the context. I still like Hunger of
Memory the best. Days of Obligation strikes me as a
collection of disparate essays without a true core. And Brown is
a book that is not fully embracing, not least because it refuses to
recognize the complexity of Latinos in the United States. In it
Rodriguez describes his namesake, Richard Nixon, as "the dark father of
Hispanicity." "Surviving Chicanos (one still meets them) scorn the term
Hispanic," Rodriguez argues, "in part because it was Richard Nixon who
drafted the noun and who made the adjective uniform." A similar
reference was invoked in an Op-Ed piece by him in the New York
Times, in which he declared George W. Bush the first Hispanic
President of the United States, the way Bill Clinton was the first black
President. Is this true? The argument developed is not always clear-cut:
It twists and turns, as we have by now come to expect. I've learned to
respect and admire Rodriguez. When I was a newly arrived immigrant in
New York City, I stumbled upon an essay of his and then read his first
book. I was mesmerized by the prose but found myself in strong
disagreement with its tenets, and we have corresponded about that in the
intervening years.

At any rate, where will Rodriguez go from here, now that the trilogy is
finished? Might he finally take a long journey overseas? Is his vision
of America finally complete? Not quite, I say, for the country is
changing rapidly. Mestizaje, he argues, is no longer the domain
of Latinos alone. We are all brown: dirty and impure. "This is not the
same as saying 'the poor shall inherit the earth' but is possibly
related," Rodriguez states. "The poor shall overrun the earth. Or the
brown shall." This is a statement for the history books. In his view,
America is about to become América--everyone in it a Hispanic, if
not physically, at least metaphorically. "American history books I read
as a boy were all about winning and losing," Rodriguez states in
"Peter's Avocado," the last of the nine essays in Brown. And with
a typical twist, continues, "One side won; the other side lost.... [But]
the stories that interested me were stories that seemed to lead off the
page: A South Carolina farmer married one of his slaves. The farmer
died. The ex-slave inherited her husband's chairs, horses, rugs, slaves.
And then what happened? Did it, in fact, happen?"

Our most cherished national symbols--from the Pledge of Allegiance to "America the Beautiful" to Lady Liberty's poetry--are rooted in liberal ideals.

Late in the evening in back-road America you tend to pick the motels with a few cars parked in front of the rooms. There's nothing less appealing than an empty courtyard, with maybe Jeffrey Dahmer or Norman Bates waiting to greet you in the reception office. The all-night clerk at the Lincoln motel (three cars out front) in Austin, Nevada, who checked me in around 11:30 pm last week told me she was 81, and putting in two part-time jobs, the other at the library, to help her pay her heating bills since she couldn't make it on her Social Security.

She imparted this info without self-pity as she took my $29.50, saying that business in Austin last fall had been brisk and that the fifty-seven motel beds available in the old mining town had been filled by crews laying fiber optic cable along the side of the road, which in the case of Austin meant putting it twenty feet under the graveyard that skirts the road just west of town.

Earlier that day, driving from Utah through the Great Basin along US 50, famed as "the loneliest road," I'd seen these cables, blue and green and maybe two inches in diameter, sticking out of the ground on the outskirts of Ely, as if despairing at the prospect of the Great Salt Lake desert stretching ahead.

So we can run fiber optic cable through the Western deserts but not put enough money in the hands of 81-year-olds so they don't have to pull all-night shifts clerking in motels. What else is new?

People who drive or lecture their way through the American interior usually notice the same thing, which is that you can have rational conversations with people about the Middle East, about George W. Bush and other topics certain to arouse unreasoning passion among sophisticates on either coast. Robert Fisk describes exactly this experience in a recent piece for The Independent, for which he works as a renowned reporter and commentator on mostly Middle Eastern affairs.

Fisk claims on the basis of a sympathetic hearing for his analysis--unsparing of Sharon's current rampages--on campuses in Iowa and elsewhere in the Midwest that things are now changing in Middle America. After twenty-five years of zigzagging my way across the states I can't say I agree. It's always been like that, and even though polls purport to establish that a high percentage of all Middle Americans claim to have had personal exchanges with Jesus and reckon George W. to be the reincarnation of Abe Lincoln, the reality is otherwise. Twenty years ago Fisk would have met with lucid views in Iowa on the Palestinian question, plus objective assessments of the man billed at that time as Lincoln's reincarnation, Ronald Reagan.

Some attitudes do change. White people are more afraid of cops than they used to be. A good old boy in South Carolina I've bought classic cars from for a quarter of a century was a proud special constable back in the early eighties. These days if a police cruiser passes him on the highway, he'll turn off at the next intersection and take another road. Reason: A few years ago a couple of state cops stopped him late at night, frisked him, accused him of being drunk. This profoundly religious Baptist told them truthfully he'd never consumed alcohol in his life. Then they said he must be a drug dealer. He reckons the only reason they didn't plant some cocaine in his car was that he told them to check him out with the local police chief, an old friend.

I know from the stats that a lot of Americans are poor, so how come I'm often the only fellow on the road, or in town, in an old car aside from some of the Mexican fieldworkers in California for whom such cars are home? Most everyone seems to be in a late-model pickup or at least a nice new Honda Civic. I know, I know. The poor are out there, lots of them, but the whole place just doesn't seem to feel as poor as it often did in the early eighties recession. Then, day after day you could drive through towns that felt like graveyards, with no prospect of fiber optic cable.

Take Grants on I-40 in New Mexico, west of Albuquerque, which became the nation's self-proclaimed "uranium capital" in the fifties after Paddy Martinez heard descriptions of what uranium ore looked like and led the mining prospectors to the yellow rocks he'd been looking at down the years. The mines closed, and I recall from the early 1980s Grants looking sadly becalmed, with its Uranium Café and souvenir motels from the great days of Route 66. The audio in the Mining Museum still speaks plaintively about radiation's bad rep, despite the fact that in modest amounts it's good for you and there was much more of it around when the world was young.

Well, 66 nostalgia is still strong in Grants, but aside from the Lee Ranch coal mine the juice in Grants's economy now comes in large part from three prisons--one fed, one state and one private.

No wonder people are nervous of cops. There are so many prisons for the cops to send you to. So many roads where a sign suddenly comes into view, advertising correctional facility and warning against hitchhikers. I was driving through Lake Valley in eastern Nevada along US 93, with Mount Wheeler looking to the east. Listening to the radio and Powell's grotesque meanderings I was thinking, Why not just relocate the whole West Bank to this bit of Nevada where the Palestinians could have their state at last, financed by a modest tax on the gambling industry? The spaces are so vast you wouldn't even need a fence. Then reality returned in the form of the usual sign heralding a prison round the next bend.

West along US 50 from Austin I came to Grimes Point, site of fine petroglyphs. A sign informed me that "The act of making a petroglyph was a ritual performed by a group leader. Evidence suggests that there existed a powerful taboo against doodling." The graffiti problem. Some things never change. On the other hand, some things do. Many thousands of years ago those rocks were on the edge of a vast sea, maybe 700 feet deep. The petroglyph ridge was once beachfront property. The world was warmer then, and we're heading that way once more, from natural causes. To leave you on an upbeat note: At least natural radiation is on the wane.