The Precipice

Shogun isn’t even his best book…

Was it happenstance? Or was it one of those little quirks that begs us to question the supposed randomness of the world? I suppose I will never know.

Either way, I happened to have been reading the most interesting of books when news broke of Her Majesty the Queen’s death, some two years ago last month.

I am today fuzzy on the cause of her demise and am too lazy to bother looking it up. Perhaps she died of a broken heart. The scorched state of her empire had to have been more than her ticker could bear. Or perhaps she died of exasperation. She came in with Churchill. She went out two days after Truss. That’s what we call precipitous.  

I was, at the time of her death, endeavoring a certain protracted convalescence. To help keep my mind off my uselessness, I had decided to at least catch up on some reading. So I’d buried myself in a book – it was a doorstop of a thing – one which I had actually begun earlier in the summer, with quite some earnestness.  But as with most books in my adult life, deadlines and children and bills and tax season and various other things had gotten in the way. Time is luck, as they say, and that year’s dreadful little summer had been short on both time and luck. Then came my convalescence. Time suddenly made itself abundant. Thus, before I knew it, I’d immersed myself in the novel and had become terribly, terribly hooked. Each page seemed like a cliffhanger.  Couldn’t put the thing down.

The doorstop in question was a novel, Noble House, which is part of the so-called Asian Saga by the late, great James Clavell, he of Shogun fame. It is not a criticism of Noble House nor a dismissal of its excellence to say that the best part of the whole damn thing might well be the dedication:

I would like to offer this work as a tribute to Her Britannic Majesty, Elizabeth II, to the people of Her Crown Colony of Hong Kong, and perdition to their enemies.

That’s a hell of an inscription. Perdition to their enemies. Right on, that. Bloody well right indeed.

At any rate, when the Queen died, and as I found myself neck deep in this novel dedicated to her, I couldn’t help but suddenly ponder, at some considerable length, what it once meant to be British.

To be fair, I have pondered this before. Anglophiles tend to do that. My own Anglophilia is primarily a matter of patrimony. But it is not helped by books like Clavell’s, which is so chock full of a stirring sense of British patriotism that one starts seeing hedgerows and Burke’s big oaks even where neon and pavement sprawl.  

Funnily enough, Clavell was an Australian by birth, but he came from a long line of British naval officers. For this and maybe for other reasons, the glory of the empire coursed through his veins and through his fingertips, and eventually on through to his typewriter keys, smudging the pages of every line of his writing with echoed cries for Harry, England, and Saint George. Each letter of every sentence might as well have been a Union Jack stamp.

That stamp is heavy in Noble House, ostensibly a novel about the tai-pan of Struan’s, a Scottish trading house in Hong Kong. Struan’s is unofficially known as the “Noble House” because it is the most influential and powerful of the trading companies that made Hong Kong the crown jewel of British colonies. Struan’s got its start in Hong Kong’s pirate days, running opium to fuel the silk and tea trade. It’s crackling stuff.

Noble House’s protagonists are corporate raiders and cunning tycoons of industry, in many ways the descendants of yesteryear’s pirates and opium smugglers. They are all full of a certain spirited ambition, as well as of whisky and brandy and more than a little bit of shrewdness (and good joss). Their spiritedness, of course, is a bit of an anachronism, and was so even at the time the doorstop went to press. It was, and is, I believe an anachronism borne of Clavell’s Australian birth. For, Britain may well be at the center of his books, but the Australian influence is noticeable. His heroes, you see, have a decidedly industrious, indominable independence to them, one that, though it may have been British once upon a time, really only survived as a virtue out in the distant ports of the realm, thriving there even as it waned among the hedgerows and rain swept oaks back home. Frontiers have that effect, I suppose.

Another thing that is unmistakably British in Clavell’s books, Noble House included, is a sheer dedication to trade and markets, to commerce as a decidedly British development and a cornerstone, not just of her economics, but of her culture. Napoleon derided Britain as a nation of merchants, but merchants we were, and on the backs of these merchant classes greatness was achieved. The empire upon which the sun famously never sat wasn’t really built by saber and mast and cannon but by trade. Trade backed by a mighty navy, sure. But trade.

Today in my country, the two major Presidential candidates are clamoring over one another to see who can outrace the other to subsidize factories and whole industries, to see who can tax this or tariff that at a higher clip. And most Americans are cheering one or the other on.  Newsweek was right. “We are all socialists now…” Don’t get me wrong. I like a good tariff. Disraeli was right about the corn laws. But we live in a global economy and wholesale turning our backs on free trade is going to get us what it got our forebearers across the pond. A backwards fall over the precipice.

At least we haven’t a Queen to exasperate to death.

Finding Little Miss Magic

“I was never the damn pirate,” he once said, referring to his dirge, “A Pirate Looks at Forty.” But he was telling a lie. He was always the pirate. Key West local Phil Clark may have been the official inspiration, at least as far as liner notes and biographies are concerned, but the heart and soul of the song – and everything it lamented: the loss of romance; the Melville-like sentiments of man and sea and death – was pure Jimmy Buffett, no question about it. Or at least, it was the Jimmy Buffett that Jimmy Buffett wanted to be, once upon a time. Perhaps a distant time.  

Buffett, these days, is closer to eighty than forty. He was born on Christmas Day, 1946, the same day W.C. Fields died. And in the three-quarters of a century since, he has managed to avoid cancellation by, both, the wokesters (Fifteen will get you twenty/ But that’s alright…), as well as the conservative pin-stripers (like this author) who can never seem to outgrow the Buffett catalogue even as they outgrow the slew of things a Buffett lifestyle represents; i.e., unlike the pirate in “Pirate,” I may be looking at forty, but I haven’t been drunk now for over two weeks for a long, long time.   

Of course, I am not sure I am the typical Buffett fan; nor are those who listen to Jimmy as I listen. Maybe we are typical. Maybe not. I’ll let you decide.

The parrothead prototype is a middle-aged fellow wearing a t-shirt with a witty beach slogan written across the excess cloth of its belly. He is usually full of tequila or Landshark beer; or both; he fancies himself a rebel; and he tends to behave as though he is “growing older but not up.” The flair and the reckless abandon he displays at tailgates reflects an effort to maintain an unrealistic devotion to that great DeForrest Kelly dream: having one, last, big chance to get away from it all. This dream survives in spite of, and also perhaps because of, mounting bills and pressing deadlines and some fleeting honey-do lists piling up at home. Yet much of this escapism is empty and hollow cosplay. How many parrotheads, if given the chance, would realistically trade in their current programming for a chance to actually live like the Twelve-Volt Man? Probably very few. This is because living life blender to blender is great for spring break in your twenties. But people tend to get used to things like Keurigs and Roku sticks and fast-food delivery and the Twitter-verse and being told what’s what by their government overlords (Mask UP!), whatever else they may otherwise wish about themselves in moments of grass-skirted fancy.

If this seems harsh, let us also consider Mr. Buffett, who is not that different from Mr. Parrothead. Richer, yes. But complicit in the same lie. And also victim of the same lie:

Today, you will find, in many of Buffett’s hotels and bars, plastic imitation road signs telling you the distance to Havana or to Singapore, as if you were island hopping the southernmost reaches of the Caribbean or the South Pacific; beneath this signage, one might sit restfully and a-splay, lounging among the tacky, island-themed décor while ordering up a bellyful of steeply overpriced margaritas. The treasure exacted for these indulgences – for the stay at the hotel, for the margarita, for the replica of the replica Singapore road sign – is probably counted by Mr. Buffett from his cool Long Island mansion, which rests many miles north and many lightyears away from a Stock Island tire swing. Taffy Brodesser-Akner described it this way: “Jimmy Buffett,” she wrote, “doesn’t live the Jimmy Buffett lifestyle,” which is true. But that doesn’t really get to the heart of it. It’s not simply that Mr. Buffett, the beach bum, became a businessman and cashed in on his gulf-rock persona; it’s that the same man who once wrote a John MacDonald-like excoriation of jet skis in Where is Joe Merchant?, and whose songs have been flatteringly covered by Dylan, and who lamented that “most of the people who retire to Florida are wrinkled and they lean on a crutch,” and who penned such masterpieces as “Death of an Unpopular Poet” and “He Went to Paris” and “Somewhere Over China,” is also the same man who currently runs a multimillion-dollar empire of overpriced cheeseburgers and plastic memorabilia and bad frozen seafood and retirement communities.

These criticisms may seem like the makings of a Lester Bangs gripe session. But fair is fair, as they say, and it is nothing but fair to point out that the king of the Margaritaville empire, an empire built on the backs of weekend warriors spending down their retirement on overpriced Landsharks, once sang scathingly of convention-goers for their weekend-warrior partying. (We’re stayin' in a Holiday Inn full of surgeons/ I guess they meet there once a year /They exchange physician stories/ And get drunk on Tuborg beer / Then they're off to catch a stripper/ With their eyes glued to her G/ But I don't think that I would ever let them cut on me). Granted, “Miss You So Badly” is a bit of a deep cut, perhaps, but not so deep we should ignore the juxtaposition.   

Juxtaposition aside, one must not begrudge Mr. Buffett his money, nor his station in life, nor his success. Who in his shoes wouldn’t have similarly sold out? I certainly would have. It still seems odd, though, to consider that our buccaneering pirate-fantasist of the 1970s has gone all-corporate, selling snake oil in Landshark bottles to people who – and this is the kicker, which can’t be expressed enough – clearly don’t believe in the fantasy any more than he does. They know that he knows that he knows that they know. A symbiotic relationship of plastic palm trees and fin-hatted baseball caps for thirty-five dollars a pop.

Maybe this is harsh… but as I said, fair is fair. So, try this for some turnabout:

For while it is fair to quarter Mr. Buffett on his duplicitousness, perceived or real, it is likewise fair to press his legion of fans. Most are in on the duplicity, it is true. But a few of us are not. Yet, aren’t we few, we happy few, we merry band of snobs guiltier of a greater sin than the sellouts precisely because we aren’t in on the wrestling-is-fake joke? Do we not owe it to ourselves, as consumers and connoisseurs, to be genuine and truthful to the art we consume? If we’re miffed at Buffett for selling out, why are we not miffed at ourselves for not living out the same songlines that Buffett no longer observes? Buffett sang of following the equator (and actually followed it), but how many of us have dared likewise? Buffett sang of flying into sunsets, but how many parrotheads – the diehards, not the weekend warriors – ever climbed into a sea plane out among the doldrums? Buffett sings often of throwing caution to the wind, but parrotheads are only people and people tend to be hypocritical. Die-hards most of all.

2.

His name is Fingers McGee and he’s been a friend of mine for as long as I can remember. We’ve always called him Fingers because he can twirl a whiskey bottle like Brian Flannigan and pick a guit-fiddle like George Harrison and he once had a finger roll that netted like Allen Iverson; in fact, he was one hell of an athlete back in the day, but that was many years and many packs of Parliament 100s ago. Many Blue Ribbon beers, too… A heavy beer that Pabst Blue Ribbon. It sits low in the stomach, like an anchor. Or a bowling ball. Fingers knows this well because he has been a professional drink slinger for the last two decades. Thanks to this Greek-chorus profession of his, he has learned very little about himself, but he has learned an encyclopedic amount about other people, which may not make him all that different than anybody else, but he gets to at least discharge his unsolicited advice while serving properly made old-fashioneds, which tend to make the advice go down better.

We were sitting, not long ago, at Fingers’s bar, catching up. This was right after I learned I was going to be somebody’s old man. I wanted to tell Fingers the news in person. We don’t hang much anymore. Such is life. But I owed him a face to face that he was going to be an uncle. I suppose he’ll be a black sheep uncle, but children sometimes need those, too. It was a black sheep uncle of mine who introduced me to Buffett. Also to the Beatles. To Seger. To the Boss. He died young. I inherited his music collection. He and Fingers would have really hit it off. Neither ever seemed to me compatible with the main.

After Fingers congratulated me on my soon-to-be-fatherhood – this would have been after the second or third Pabst – I rolled some silver into the jukebox. The opening notes of “He Went to Paris” sauntered across the stale open air.

“You still listenin’ to that?” he asked, his Parliament dangling from the corner of his lip.

“You know,” I said, “funny you should ask.”

“Why’s that?”

“When I learned that the missus was pregnant, I had a sentimental moment there where I listened to the whole discography. But it’s the first time I’ve listened to him in a while.”

Fingers laughed. It was a smug laugh. The smug laugh of a bachelor who feels part pity and part jealousy toward his friends as they matriculate the checklists of life: college; marriage; houses; children. “That’s because,” he quipped, “you’ve outgrown him.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s not part of your life anymore.” He shrugged as if he were explaining to me that the world is round or that midday is noon or that women are from Mars. Or Venus. Or whichever.

“And the Dead Fetuses are a part of yours?” He had just been to a Dead Fetuses concert – not the sort of thing I picture thirty-eight-year-olds patronizing. Of course, I haven’t been to any concert in years.

“Different.”

“How so?”

“You’re a yuppie, the backside of one anyway. Idiots in sandals singing about margaritas and beach chicks doesn’t fit. It ain’t spring break anymore. And we’re not eighteen.”

I shook my head. “Plenty of parrotheads are bankers and lawyers and drink slingers Monday through Friday. It’s a getaway, not a lifestyle.”

“Escapism.”

“Precisely.”

He jabbed the smoking end of the cigarette in my direction. “Yeah, but, see, they always saw it as a getaway. They never knew Jimmy as anything else. It’s like the Tarantino bit about Superman. He’s really Superman. Clark Kent is the alter ego. Nobody ever really wanted to be a fuckin’ pirate. Just you.”

“What in Jesus’s name are you talking about?”

“I’m just sayin’.” He dragged hard on the Parliament. “You’re in a different stage in life. You’re having a baby. But it’s not just that. People grow. Tastes change. Your music tastes…” He shrugged as his teeth clinched the heater. “Your tastes have grown.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Why? You’re about to have a baby girl. You’re a lawyer. It’s okay to like better music.”

“No, I mean that’s not fair to Buffett.”

He inhaled half the Parliament and smiled. “Isn’t it?”

3.

The thing is, Buffett’s appeal was never about the beaches or the margaritas or the goddamn boat drinks. Not with me. Even when I was a teenager and it finally became cool – or at least not uncool – to listen to Jimmy, it was never the party songs that turned me on. This was true even when that cute brunette took me by the hand and said, “I just love ‘Fins.’” She said this to me on a starlit night long ago. One would think the moonlight, the perfume, and the charm would have made great apologia for “Fins,” but what can I say? “Fins” is only “Fins.” It’s just fine. No more than fine. There’s nothing wrong with “Fins.” Nothing wrong at all. But in “Fins,” Jimmy doesn’t sing I read dozens of books/ About heroes and crooks/ And I learned much/ From both of their styles. In “Fins,” there’s nothing as lyrically impressive as Headin’ up to San Francisco / For the Labor Day weekend show/ I got my Hushpuppies on/ I guess I never was meant for glitter rock and roll. I mean, “Fins” is fine. And so is “Margaritaville” and “Pina-Coladaburgh” and “Remember That Time We Went to the Beach with Kenny Chesney and Zac Brown” and whatever else parrotheads like to get off to. These are all fine songs, and everyone’s taste differs, and music is subjective, etc., etc., etc.…

But Buffett’s prowess as an artist was always in his literary skills. It was the soi-disant “novelist’s eye” that set Buffett apart from many of his contemporaries. He always wanted to be Mark Twain with a guitar. And he was always honest about it – pay close enough attention to the interviews over the years and you’ll understand his Serious Southern Writer ambitions. It’s simply that his skillset manifested as a lyricist, not a novelist. But he did in fact have a novelist’s eye when it came to story arcs and character and plots. There’s real punch to some of his songs; genuine introspection; and subtle regret. Take “Incommunicado”:

Travis McGee's still in Cedar Key/

That's what John MacDonald said/

My rendezvous's so long overdue/

With all of the things I've sung and I've read/

They still apply to me/

They all make sense in time/

But now I'm incommunicado/

Drivin' by myself down the road with a hole in it/

Songs with no vibrato/

Takin' the long way home/

It’s not just the lyrics. There’s also real depth in the structure of some of his work. Music people tell me the chord progression in “Come Monday” was ahead of it’s time. But the writerly instinct is far greater than the musical workmanship. Consider the shifting point of view in “Livingston’s Gone to Texas,” which is as good of a country music song as a fellow could write, with all due respect to Hank or Chris Ledoux or whoever wrote for George Strait.

There’s also a real novelist’s penchant in Jimmy’s work for writing without autobiography. Consider the protagonist of “West Nashville Grand Ballroom Gown,” which once I loved. As a young man, I always thought: “Nashville” isn’t subversive so much as it’s thoughtfully articulate, putting the listener in the shoes of a gypsy soul who is running away from home, from traumas we only really understand conceptually because the real hurt is reserved only for the protagonist. Jimmy never explains why the young girl in “Nashville” leaves her well-to-do home. We intuit the emotion, which is enough. That’s good writing.    

Like other songs in the catalogue, these songs are really short stories put to tune and middlingly sung by a masterful storyteller. Hence, the Buffett appeal, as I said, was never about the beaches or the margaritas or the boat drinks. It was always about the ne’er-do-wells, and the pirates, and the barflies, and the needles who wished to stay hidden in stacks of other needles, somewhere southeast of disorder, amid the tropical frontiers and rusted shrimp boats and the desolate bars of broken dreams and discordant tunes. Buffett’s characters were Hemingway characters and Conrad characters and Twain characters and Louis L’Amour characters, peeking around the corner from the turn of an earlier century, “wonder[ing] why we ever go home.” Buffett wasn’t a party. He was a writer trying to sing a story. And the stories were good.

4.

Fingers was there, but so were seven others, plus myself. Friends for life we were, though most of us did not quite stay friends for life. In that moment, we took our friendship for granted, as young friends do, as they must; what we were not taking for granted was the challenge we’d set before us:

We’d decided on the ultimate road trip. We were hitting the open highway, mimicking the route Buffett took in the 1970s when he left Nashville for the land of the Conchs.

Drawn south like metal to a magnet, we were. And we were a motley sort to boot, still very green and nowhere near as salty as we pretended. As the man himself wrote, we were “impressive, young and aggressive, and saving the world on [our] own.”

Saving the world on our own… Unfortunately, not a lot of world saving has happened in the twenty years since we drove to Key West, although this is not from lack of trying. We became Air Force officers, and firemen, and teachers, and lawyers and political operatives, and professional drink slingers. Despite our efforts, the world is still a terrible place and getting worse by the day, and every single one of us made nary a mark on it at all.

At the time, no one much saw these failures coming, if failures they are – the rest of the crew would surely press against me on this point, and right they’d be to do so; they’re incredibly well adjusted and stable providers and, almost to a man, have been wildly successful. American heroes, actually. Right good men. Superb fathers. Some of the best people I will ever know. The only failure in the group, perhaps, is the dear author of this piece, but that is no matter. What matters for this essay is that we did not live out the songlines. Somewhere along the way, we even threw the songlines out. And yet, when we turned our caravan south on A-1-A, many summers ago, we generally thought – and I expressly so – that we would live out many adventures and perhaps leave something indelible behind. Our destination, in fact, was posterity as much as it was the southernmost point of the United States, where good times and Cuban cigars and jailers and sailors and mango men awaited.

Maybe this is just my own recollection. If I am being honest, I’m not sure what my compatriots thought they were going to find in Key West. Perhaps Fingers is right. Perhaps they were not as ambitious on this front as I was, and good on them for it. I do know they thought they’d find fun. But what else? Whatever it was, the outcome was nothing which would have made for a good, early, Buffett song:

Fingers found a bootleg copy of the Pamela and Tommy Lee video, which he purchased at an adult novelty store from a clerk who wore bad suspenders and Coke bottle glasses and smelled like peanut butter (it’s amazing the things the memory recalls). I’m pretty sure that guy had a back room of snuff films and a basement full of kidnapped children, but I digress…

One of the other guys on the trip found love, for at least a night (he was shown up a year later when, on a subsequent trip, with a different crew, another one of my friends found his future wife, at a wet t-shirt contest on Duval Street)…

Yet another of the guys found a stash of pre-embargo Cubans which were stout enough to put us all down for the count at Schooners sometime that week. I still remember the room spinning. I went back and bought another, which I smoked when one of the boys had their first child. It somehow wasn’t as delicious a decade and a half after the fact. But few things are…

Another of the boys caught a huge damn fish and fed half the island with it. Our fishing guide was a fellow named Captain Eddie. He had a scar beneath his left eye, an earring in the right ear, and he smoked Marlboros like they were going out of style…

As for me, I found a used copy of A Farewell to Arms, which I couldn’t wait to give to a young lady I had been courting back home. I remember calling her from a phone booth in Miami on the way back north. Funnily enough, six months later, I was dating one of her best friends, and six months after that, I wouldn’t speak to either ever again, simply because we each got swept up in separate jet streams. Ce la vie, as they say. (Incidentally, young men calling young women from phone booths on the corners of distant streets in faraway locales is the kind of no-longer existent thing that makes me melancholy…)

These events – the things we found at the southernmost point – were not life altering adventures or the beginning of a grand origins story, as I had envisioned. They were not especially poignant moments, and perhaps not poignant at all, although I often think of that phone booth. Despite my romantic intentions, I never stumbled across Phil Clark or Captain Tony or the ghost of Papa Hemingway. I did, I suppose, see the shrapnel-torn uniform Papa had worn in Italy in the war; and I toured Duval Street by bicycle early before dawn one morning, as the barflies stumbled home, zombie-eyed and pickled; and I saw the sunset at Mallory Square; and I caught a hell of a big damn fish myself somewhere out in the gulf, and unlike the Old Man, I didn’t let the sharks eat my prize on the way back. Most decidedly of all, I vowed that I would return one day, and return I did. Twice, in fact. The first return came the very next April, for spring break during my freshman year; the second return was many years after my first, accompanied by my beautiful bride. Hence, my Key West trips have rather a symmetry to them – the first trip had been during the summer of my eighteenth year. And the third trip came eighteen summers later, at thirty-six, newly married and on the cusp of my first child. In the half of my life in between, my resume had come into form, but there were many things missing from it:

I hadn’t lived on a boat, or smuggled guns or whiskey; hadn’t survived a seaplane crash or a hurricane; hadn’t run with the bulls, backpacked Europe, seen any front or roughed through any theater, or met the needles who were hiding with other needles in ne’er-do-well stacks of needles; I had ridden a bull, I suppose, and lived out many worthwhile tales which took me from Atlanta courtrooms to Texas boardrooms to John Lennon’s London flat to a near barroom tussle in Jacksonville with one of those Van Zant guys (not entirely sure which one). I’d also lost a couple of statewide runs and managed to publish a couple of things commercially, but to no real avail and certainly for no real pocket money.  

All in all, it’s certainly been a good life. A good life all the way, just like the song says. But the factual fictions never quite manifested the way the songlines had prophesied. There’s some regret about this, obviously, but there’s also a boatload of grace and thankfulness because, had the songlines come to fruition, there wouldn’t today be a beautiful missus – at least not this missus – and there wouldn’t be a beautiful baby girl who often and curiously glances at her old man, as if she somehow can intuit the things I did in those Key West bars those many summers ago. I hope she forgets all about these transgressions by the time she’s old enough to talk.

5.

So, again those songliness… they change. Or maybe, as Fingers told me, the songlines stay the same, but I changed.

I hate to admit it when Fingers is right, which is rare but not rare enough.

Maybe I’ve outgrown the songs. If so, it raises an interesting question. Do I still get to listen to the music if I no longer find the songs resonant? Do I still get to like the music if it doesn’t speak to me?

My initial instincts are “no.” And if the answer is no, I should repent my not-so-veiled contempt of Buffett for selling out. I’ve no right to harbor contempt for the priest when I no longer practice the religion.

Alternatively, why can’t I just listen to the songs and hum along? Yes, I am a pirate/ Two hundred years too late/ The canons don’t thunder/ There’s nothing to plunder/ I’m an over forty victim of fate… If I’m no longer a member of the religion, can’t I still just listen to the music? Call it the equivalent of those idiots who don’t count themselves Christian while telling you “But, you know, Jesus does have some teachings I’m down with.” Why can’t I just be that idiot?

My baby girl loves some of the songs. I’ve figured out she likes the harmonies. She also likes all things acoustic. It soothes her hyper baby brain. She does not necessarily care for – but I like to pretend she does – “Little Miss Magic,” which Jimmy wrote for his own daughter. She smiles when I play the music, even when I play “Little Miss Magic,” and sometimes I get lost for a minute, watching her play, reflecting on phone booths and Pamela Anderson videos and old Hemingway tales collecting dust in old book shops. These are songlines in and of themselves. I specifically reflect on how these songlines differed from the ones Jimmy penned and from what I had envisioned. Like the man quipped, I guess I am often Looking back at my background/ Tryin’ to figure out how I ever got here/ Some things are still a mystery to me / While others are much too clear… And as I reflect on these other songlines, what’s much too clear to me, here and now, is at least this:

• Jimmy was always the pirate… until he wasn’t.

• I was too, until I wasn’t.

• The songs don’t jive with anything I believe in or aspire to love, but despite my misgivings, listening to them, every now and again, isn’t a crime because:

• They remind me of how I got to where I got. I suppose everybody has a soundtrack. And for many years, Jimmy was mine.

• You don’t lose a soundtrack. Once it scores a part of your life, that part of your life is scored. There’s no undoing that…

…and I suppose I wouldn’t want to undo it even if I could, just like, if Davy Jones rose from the tide tomorrow and said, “I’ll grant ye three wishes,” I wouldn’t redo any of the songlines, regardless of whether they did or did not manifest. There’s still much to write about in this world, even if my daughter is the only one who ever reads anything I scribble. And what I write is worthwhile even if I never survived the Italian front or fought for forty days and forty nights with a great big marlin, because, damn it all, there are some gin joints in the Keys I barely escaped from. I need to memorialize them on paper so my daughter knows which doors never to darken.

That, as they say, ain’t nothin’.  Likewise with the poignant-not-so-poignant moments. She will want to read about lonely phone booths in distant towns and about court cases won and lost and road trips taken into the great unknown, because figuring out how I got there and back is the same story as how she got here.

That’s the best songline of all.

A Writer’s Prayer: The Hell of It

One writes because one is a writer. It is not something one can simply change about oneself, which is the terrible hell of it all.

You can never stop being a writer, even if you fail at it, even if you never succeed, even if you never sell a manuscript or get published or get read by anyone, anyone at all. Never mind the thought of attaining the rarified status of the all-time greats, like those Serious Southern Writers or the masters of pulp or the troubled artists who are always exorcising their demons. You’re simply a writer… because you have to write, because you’ve always written.

You wrote your first story when you were young enough that you cannot quite place the year, which is saying something because your steel-trap mind can normally recall, with striking specificity, any one of a slew of sepia-stained memories. These memories are sometimes grainy. Sometimes faded. But they are usually legible. And yet, your very first story must have been written early enough that you can’t quite excavate it from the darkness. You can, however, remember the first “masterpiece.” It came about when you were eight and you penned a yarn about a murderess who was jealous of her husband’s lover. It really was a masterpiece in its own way – you thought of it as literature, literature of the highest form, forgetting whatever it was that brainless vulgarian teacher said. It was parlor room stuff, yes, and a little derivative, but it was clever and portended toward deconstructive and sometimes subversive, even if, in the third grade, you didn’t quite know what these things meant; nevertheless, all things being equal, you were more than a little proud of it and more than a little sure it would have made Agatha Christie proud, too. But then, when you gave the goddamn thing to your friend’s mother to type it up on her fancy new word-processing contraption, she cut the ending because she couldn’t read your chicken-scratch. This was the first, but not the last, miserable and wretched time that an editor let you down, which is what editors always do. An editor will break your heart quicker than a fickle woman, and in much less forgivable ways.  

Life moved on from this heartbreak, but the writing never waned. Sports were played and girls pursued, both earnestly if not also poorly. And the writing was an outlet for these things – the sports and the girls and the grades. It was an outlet for other things, too. So, you kept at it, not even realizing that you were doing it, because why would you?  Writing was what you did. It was as elemental as breathing. As implicit as hooking a seven iron. As second nature as a second nature. Then, later, somewhere along the way, you realized that writing for a living was what you wanted to do. To really do. Forever. A writer was what you must be. What you had to be. There was no other first, best destiny.

But one needs something to write about if they are to have that title. Puzo once said something about how he couldn’t wait, as a young man, to have a terribly tragic romance so he could one day write like Hemingway. You’ve always understood this sentiment innately. You even wanted the same thing. So, you grew up; and you lived; you lived hard. Very hard. Only, sometimes you didn’t. Usually, you didn’t. Often you tried. But no matter what else was going on, or what else wasn’t, you were always studying. And observing. And keeping notes. Because you couldn’t help it. Because everything is copy. Because everything is inspiration. And because everyone is a character. And because life is a story.

But then came time, like a miserable thief. That’s what Peter Lorre called it: a thief. Another fellow said that time was something else: luck. Maybe both are right. Time… it just bit you one day, and ripped and tore and wouldn’t let go, like a goddamn big fish driving up at you from the murky waters, heretofore unseen and unfelt. It ate you alive. Swallowed you whole…

You suddenly begin to hear that big grandfather clock up in the sky ticking away – tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick… You suddenly hear it everywhere you go, like Captain Hook.

This ticking drives you mad, constantly. It is the sound of fear – real, palpable fear. For, it’s not dying or death or even the thought of failure that scares you most. It’s the thought of time running out. Bear Bryant once said that he never lost a game; it was only that the clock just sometimes ran out before he could get more points over on his side of the scoreboard. Well, time is running out for you, too. Fast. Faster. Faster by the second. In fact, in a way, time has already run out, for you and for everyone else, but in a good way, in a way that you take for granted as you wrestle with your demons. This, after all, is the point of Jesus Christ’s great, messianic moment. When he died for the world’s sins, he granted you, like the rest of his followers, eternal salvation, defeating, in the process, time; defeating oblivion; defeating death. This is a thought which should be, but is not, reassuring. You are, in fact, wrought with guilt over this salvation because you aren’t in much of a hurry to meet the Lord, not until you make those red-inked edits; not until you finish that last paragraph; not until you rewrite that last chapter and finish that essay and storyboard that novella and proofread that other long-lost manuscript, the one in that wasteland of wastelands: your bottom desk drawer. You must finish these projects. You must finish them before the clock expires. You must beat time because your words must live. They must breathe. Because they will die if you don’t get them on paper. They’ll die with you. And you’ll die with them. That’s what people don’t understand. These words, they are inside you and you have to get them out. You have to. They gnaw at you and poison you as they wither away inside you, taking your voice with them, the voice God gave you, the voice God gave you to share, which in the end may not be unique enough to matter. Or maybe you simply weren’t damn good enough. But it’s all violence if you can’t get them on paper. Terrible, earthquaking violence.

Either way, there simply is not enough time to work it all out. The hours seem more and more truncated. Life continues to take its toll. And the obligations of the everyday beget more obligations, which beget more obligations, which beget more obligations still, until eventually there really is no more time left to use the time you have.

But you still must write. No matter what. Even if you pack it all in and burn every word and courageously look at the sullen face in the mirror and come to grips with the many failures that stare back at you, angrily. Even in such an instance… even then you will write. You will write for penance. You will write to get out all the pain and the sorrow. You will write. You will write down your prayer to God the Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth, asking to be forgiven for your sullenness and your anger and the self-doubt. You will write this prayer down because the written word is more powerful to you than the spoken… because it is more. You will write it down so your wife may understand you. And your kids. One day, your grandkids. You write it down because you hate yourself too much not to. You will write to Holy Mary, Mother of God, so that she will pray for you, now and in the hour of your death, which is soon and sooner, as long as those words remain inside you.

You will write because you are a writer, for good or bad. For better or worse. In sickness and in death. You will write because you don’t know what else to do.

And that is the hell of it.

Hemingway’s Man: A Reconsideration

Author’s note… I still remember what the book smelled like. If ‘tattered’ and ‘worn’ had a smell, my copy of The Old Man and the Sea was it. It smelled of trunks and attics and long journeys, all of which it had survived, to be passed down and read by an eleven-year-old, somewhere between summer ball and lawn cuttings. I was mesmerized by the prose and by something else, something I gleaned between the lines, something which stung me. I would remain stung by the man who wrote that novella for the rest of my life. This essay is an ode to tattered books everywhere, and to the pangs which echo long after those books are read….  

__________

At this point, it’s more than trite to point out that Ernest Hemingway is complicated. Of course, he is complicated. Complicated seems rather the point. But in fairness to Papa, if not also to tropes, clichés, and archetypes everywhere, there are two very good reasons why Hemingway’s complexities remain worth our time and attention:  

First, we’ve just surpassed the centennial of his expatriating to Paris. And in a culture obsessed with empty anniversaries (i.e., we seem to publish think pieces at the five, fifteen, and twenty-year mark for every middling movie or T.V. program), this seems a genuine moment for worthwhile reflection, one which begs us to ask: what is American literature today and how did we get here?

Second, those who are, either naturally or by circumstance, conditioned to conserve, are all too often too quick to celebrate the man who has been framed, sometimes by his own tongue, as an impelling figure of the American Century despite epitomizing everything that went wrong during its tenure. 

Our focus, infra, is with the latter question, which is treacherous ground in an age of cancelation and critical theory and revisionist history and whatever else the snowflakes and the levelers have cooked up. Rest assured, cancellation is not herein the goal, not that this essay could accomplish such a feat. Quite the opposite is in play here. One must confront the devil to dispense with him. And it’s high time that conservatives did so with Hemingway vis-à-vis whatever Pazuzu spun his head.

Not so easy a feat this – for, the conservative mind is malleable on Papa, susceptible to a love-hate relationship in which the hate takes cultivation and thought while the love comes a little too easily. This is because the pugilistic, bullfight-loving, hard-drinking, hard-romancing, deep-sea fishing troubadour is every bit the man’s man many conservatives – prone as we are to patriotism and tradition, and loath as we are to patricide – wish we could be.   Even the writing itself is at times comfort food for traditionalists. There is still some Oak Park guilt in The Sun Also Rises. And it does not take much squinting to see the inherent conservatism in The Old Man and the Sea, where the eponymous fisherman simply goes out too far; he takes too much risk; he loses sight of his moorings; and the sharks take his prize.

Yes, Hemingway acclaim is easy. Meanwhile, the hate takes work. But come by it we must. It is not enough to simply say that Hemingway’s writing is imbued with the self-loathing of the decadent, as if that somehow excuses everything. And it is not enough to point out the many instances in which Hemingway’s myth is but façade, nor is it enough to declare his masculinity a faux masculinity or observe that his virility is a thin veneer for crippling insecurities. As conservatives, we must be more brutal. We must be more honest. Otherwise, the seduction wins out. And, my, what seductive powers Papa still commands…

At this juncture, it is worth noting, despite the risk of tangents, that if the conservative has a rough intellectual go of it with Hemingway, liberals do not. They love to deconstruct Hemingway, his myth, his legacy, his influence. Deconstruction, we must remember, is inherently a progressive practice. In some cases, it is used to tear down and raze; in others, as with Hemingway, it is a means for reclamation. This is why liberals – and others, too; scholars in general – never really seem to consider whether to “cancel” Papa even though other artists have been canceled for lesser sins than his.  Hemingway the libertine was, of course, the very man who wrote “Hills Like White Elephants.” For that alone he will be given an eternal resting place in the mausoleum of the modern experiment. But there are other notches:

Papa supported progressive policies his entire life. His life-long lone vote for President was cast for Eugene V. Debs in 1920. As anecdotal and insignificant as that may seem, it at least foreshadows a life of progressive misguidance. His approach to marriage (and sex) wasn’t anything save cavalier and sad. His friendship with Gertrude Stein – or, more fairly, the extent of his friendship with Stein, before their falling out – reflects a willingness to embrace a far too-tolerant stance on sexual openness. His support of communism is infamous, even if quickly discarded by critics as insignificant (his daughter-in-law, Valerie, wrote that communism, and political ideology generally, didn’t really interest him, only struggle did). But his support for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War was, and is, hard to ignore. The Soviets certainly didn’t ignore it; the KGB for years considered recruiting him “on ideological grounds.” And even if we accept the excuse that, despite his initial romanticizing, Hemingway grew indifferent and then wary about the distinctions between fascism and communism, his leveling roots are still there to be seen by all. And, despite his own, life-ruining vices, he thought the world was perfectible – “a fine place and worth fighting for.”  This is the prose of a misguided political mind.

Yet, it is the sex and virility, not the politics, if politics he had, which have most often obsessed me. This seems to be the case for other writers as well. A non-exhaustive list of such obsessives include: those who draw connecting dots between the bevvy of his female entanglements and his mother; those who wish to write laboriously about his fetishes, the impotence of Jake Barnes, the pegging, and “Up in Michigan”; and those who either wish to show the hollowness of toxic masculinity or defend the ethos of the Great White Hunter. To be fair, these obsessions are all there on the page. Hence, though we may have missed the crux of the matter, we should be forgiven our myopia because the sex and the virility are so prevalent in the writing itself. One mustn’t pretend that the observations of Mary Dearborn aren’t supported by the literature simply because one disagrees with her. It’s all there, for all to read.

This prevalence of sex and sexuality (i.e., virility) on the page has allowed the contemporary progressive, in light of his attempts to sunder traditional sexual roles, to easily deconstruct the Hemingway myth in an effort to rebuild him in their own mold. Liberals, in other words, are able to essentially say, He was really one of us, you know. Thus, the Hemingway they hate is easily remolded into the Hemingway they love.

For traditionalists, it is different. We owe it to the wisdom of the ages to be honest with our art, not to retcon it and certainly not to capitulate to it, which in the long run erodes our traditions. The art may survive, but it does not have to survive without objection. We owe it to our forbearers to take our great artists and tear away at the margins until we see the devil inside. In Hemingway’s case, it is tempting, while seeking this devil, to ask where Hemingway’s devil originated and perhaps finding myriad theories.

Oak Park is just such a germ. His mother was, doubtlessly, overbearing and the spring for many of Papa’s fetishistic flourishes. Momma Hemingway liked to dress Ernest and his sister Marlowe identically, pretending they were twins, which is the sort of tidbit that arrests those who think like Dearborn. Ken Burns’s recent documentary, in fact, comments thusly: “The world saw [Hemingway] as a man’s man, but all his life, he would privately be intrigued by blurred lines between male and female, man and woman…” This is perhaps so. More fascinating is the idea that it was momma who Hemingway always blamed, at least in part, for his father’s suicide. “He saw his father,” Burns tells us, “as weak and submissive; and he hated himself and was drawn to this submissiveness and hated himself for it.” It was also his momma who wrote him saying, “Unless… you come into your manhood, there is nothing before you but bankruptcy.” One might say he invented his own manhood, a bastardized and fallen variant decidedly apart from and inapposite to his mother’s Oak Park and Protestant vision.

But there are other germs, too. There is, obviously, the war. The Great War. The war to end all wars. The war that badly injured him, almost killing him; the war which left him helpless and guilt-ridden and foggy; the war in which he participated and, yet, stayed away from. It looms large in every retelling of the Hemingway myth. It spawned his first real heartbreak. It took his courage. It scared him. It defined him as much as any damn thing else.

There’s also the drinking, which is of a lore of its own. Guy Clark, Jimmy Buffett, Brad Paisley, and others, have all sung about it. It has been romanticized in book and on film. In fact, actors from Sterling Hayden to Darren McGavin have played some tropish version of the Hard Drinking Turtlenecked Bearded Writer, in productions as varied as they are numerous. The wry and recurring protagonist of Gregory Mcdonald’s I.M. Fletcher series once very wittily quipped that Hemingway didn’t have a sense of humor. In the same novel, Key West locals pine for Papa to return from the undiscovered country. In both instances, it is the hard drinking trope who Mcdonald is referencing. 

Lest we forget, there is another germ: the women. Edna O’brien says, “I like that he fell in love, and he fell in love quite a few times.” He probably fell in love with himself, or, more properly, with the character he created for himself, harder than he ever fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky or Lady Duff Twysden or Martha Gellhorn. All in all, there were many lovers, four marriages, and many more lusts.

But the women, the booze, the war – these, really, are symptoms, not diseases. Hemingway’s disease – in this writer’s mind, at least – is guilt. Catholic guilt. Of an acute measure. A guilt untended. A guilt unreconciled.

We forget – gloss over? – Hemingway’s Catholicism. Burns does likewise in his documentary. But the facts speak for themselves: Papa was baptized twice. Once on the battlefield when he was wounded, whereupon a priest baptized him and then read last rites. And once before his second marriage.

Admittedly, one should not presuppose he was a good Catholic. Or even a practicing Catholic. He was very obviously neither. But he was Catholic, just like he was raised a Congregationalist in Oak Park. And there seems to be an acknowledgment of the grace of God throughout Hemingway’s works, even as there exists ample evidence – “ All thinking men are atheists” – that he was a nonbeliever, his attitudes and vices chief among them.

Case in point: he once wrote to an acquaintance, “I have always had more faith than intelligence or knowledge and I have never wanted to be known as a Catholic writer because I know the importance of setting an example — and I have never set a good example.” I recently read a thoughtful piece by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell on this score. Others have written well on it, too. Hemingway’s Catholicism deserves to be written about more often. It is itself a question worth exploring. 

But how do we reconcile this question with everything else that we know about Papa? How do we reconcile the man who wrote I have always had more faith than intelligence with the same man who wrote All thinking men are atheists? For starters, we don’t. There is no need to reconcile. The incongruity is the point, i.e., it is the undergirding of the guilt which explains much, writ large and small by an un-diagnosable desire toward damnation and depravity, despite knowing better, despite having seen death on a battlefield where, in his own words, he “…died then. I felt my soul or something come right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner.  It flew around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead anymore.” He had seen and felt divine evidence of a world beyond this one, and yet he spent his literary career capitulating to anti-religious impulses, just like he spent his personal life purposefully failing to, as he put it, “set a good example.” The purposeful here is doing a lot of work, I will grant. But that’s the point.

Was he angry at God? Was he angry at Him for being wounded? At losing his innocence? At failing to be a real hero (he took to embellishing his exploits when he returned home after the war, evoking, for this writer at least, Dr. Johnson’s quip about men thinking meanly of themselves for never having served)? Or was he mad at God for something else? Maybe all these things are true. But he certainly was not an atheist. With this in mind, does his characters’ piousness toward worldly causes (think Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls) and his often atheistic prose not suddenly betray a certain wrangling? A guilt? A defiance? If a defiance, then also a damnation, a damnation he never repented but rather doubled down on. That, really, is the crux of the matter – the doubling down. The closest we ever come to a confession is with the Old Man and his marlin. His other works portend repentance or grace or hopefulness but end up as justification (“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”).

This doubling down on damnation, despite knowing better, suggests that the devil himself was Hemingway’s devil.  

Such talk about the metaphorical razing of the Church brings into focus the centrality of the Spanish struggle in understanding Papa, not that this helps us clarify things too much because the Spanish struggle, and its literal razing, remain largely ignored or misunderstood by so very many. Franco, for example, has long been villainized by the West, so much so that, eventually, conservative minds, so often quick to lost causes and contrarianism, were bound to reconsider both Franco’s place in history and the cause of the war he won. Peter Hitchens has cautioned those of us on the right to be reticent in praise of Franco. Perhaps he is right. But perhaps he is wrong, too, not because Franco is a hero but because Franco’s cause was noble. We often hear people say things like, “There were no good guys in the Spanish Civil War.” This is true. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a right side of things. Franco, not unlike De Gaule with France, had a question about Spain. Could Spain be Spain? The Republicans, when they burned the churches, were not just destroying emblems of (in their mind) oppression. They were destroying their history and the soul of their people and the thing which gave their world meaning. They believed, pridefully, that equality could replace the transcendent (this is the same idolatry of the modern liberal). They traded one God for a lesser one. Hemingway could gloss over this atrocity and blindly worship – that is the word: worship – the iconoclasts’ cause, waged as it was against his own religion, because of the defiance raging within him about God and about the things which reminded him of God, like station, obligation, and duty, all things which his mother had chastised him about in Oak Park. That’s the bit about liberals – it’s not just God they rage against. It’s everything that reminds them of God, of Christendom, damn the benefits that Christendom wrought and could still reap.  

Hence, when Pablo’s woman says to Robert Jordan that there is no God, she does not believe what she is saying; she is merely projecting her author’s own defiance. And when Robert Jordan can’t take a joke, his piousness for the communist cause displaces the humility that a man of God – a man of God who has seen war – would prioritize. In many ways Robert Jordan is precisely who Fletch is making fun of, supra, when he quips that Hemingway didn’t have a sense of humor.

Hemingway’s irreligious choices – literarily and in life – as nevertheless a religious man destroyed him. It taints works that portend religious themes; and it explains the passion he undertook in questionable causes, a la the Republican effort in Spain.

Other writers are more sympathetic to Hemingway’s struggle with God. Maybe I should be, too. But the praise we heap on Hemingway’s demons, which are seemingly an endorsement of his rage against God, should give everyone pause, as should our praise of his writing style, about which we have devoted few lines, and perhaps too few; hence a quick digression seems defensible: 

About his prose, the man himself once wrote, “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”

But it is also true that minimalism is a pretentious way to say that a writer can’t elaborate. John Irving put it in more acerbic terms:

“I thought, I surely don’t want to become a writer to write sentences as simplistic and short as this guy does … If you want to be an ad writer and write ad copy, OK, short sentences are appealing. But it seemed to me to be a dictum and dulling.”

Count me with Irving on this score...

Getting back to the matter at hand, we have surmised, thus far, that a religious man volitionally chose the irreligious in his writings as elsewhere. Thus, conservative minds should at the very least display reticence in heaping praise upon so belligerent an iconoclast… They should, but often don’t, which is why I never could get onboard with the John McCain bandwagon. McCain was shameless in his praise for Papa and particularly for For Whom the Bell Tolls. “There are times,” he says in the Burns doc, “when I don’t agree with it but it is understandable that [Hemingway] decided to end his life when his talent had left him... He had lots of vices. He was a human being and that, my friend, erases a whole lot of other what may be failings in life.”

Nope. Nope. Nope. Not true. Not true at all. McCain’s unabashed love for For Whom the Bell Tolls reveals a great deal about what conservatism – or, more aptly, what passes as conservatism – lacks in today’s minds. There is a systemic failure to understand what we are trying to conserve. There is nothing to preserve in the works of Hemingway. There is only to lament. That is why his stories should survive. That is why we should keep reading The Old Man and the Sea. That is why we must get to the last line in The Sun Also Rises – “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” – because regret must be real. Regret is the only thing that survives. Regret teaches us something. Regret can be poetic. It can be soulful. Very soulful. But should it be the goal? Should we want to sin?

Make no mistake about it. Robert Jordan was a tragic figure, not a hero, just like his creator. There is nothing romantic about burning churches. And there is nothing romantic about Hemingway, not really.

But isn’t it pretty to think so?

No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to… Pout ?

Some Bonds have more fun than others….

Let us dispense with childhood obsessions of the silver screen: Capes and cowls. Light sabers. DeLoreans that fly. Afternoons with the Baker Street Irregulars. Dreams of unearthing the Ark of the Covenant. All for one and one for all escapades. And never crossing the streams, ever…

The Good Book, let’s remember, beseeches us to put away childish things. So, for the sake of deadlines and commitments and bills and family obligations, away they have gone, to the attic, with all our other childhood artifacts... Sort of…  almost… not quite…

For there is still the case of a certain other obsession. He has been drug into adulthood with us, rather against his better judgment, kicking and screaming along the way, but only on the inside because his stiff upper lip prevents him from making a scene. He is, in other words, an Englishman, and in this particular case, he’s an Englishman who takes “particular interest” in certain passions: he is, for example, wildly fond of golf and chemin de fer; he is rather fiendishly drawn to dangerous, and sometimes taken, women; he harbors a rather expensive and copious obsession with bespoke suits, his four-liter Bentley, his Turkish-blend smokes, and any drink and every drink one could find, fathom, or fix (“It’s just that I’d rather die of drink than of thirst”).

We speak, of course, of James Bond, haberdasher’s muse and the world’s most famous secret agent. This fame – counterintuitive for a spy, no? – stems from his role as the protagonist of the most successful film franchise in cinema history, the first twenty entries of which see him living out every boy’s dream and epitomizing every grown man’s fantasy. Ditto the fourteen Fleming books which still provide source material. Of course, it has not all been baccarat and Bentleys. But that’s the point: When it’s death for breakfast, as it always is for dear old James, one must enjoy life with a certain exuberance, a certain attention to detail. The films and the novels traditionally did a decent, sometimes tacit, job of underscoring this point.

Unlike Coca-Cola, though, this formula was not meant to last. Mr. Bond was given a makeover at the turn of the century by his longtime handlers, all in the hopes of not only delivering him unto a new generation but also of repackaging him as “prestige” filmmaking, something fit and suitable for serious-minded people, namely: those who enjoy Sam Mendes dramas and who actually still care about the Academy Awards. If this was not the impelling cause of the makeover, it soon manifested as such.   

In hindsight, and in light of the rubbish that comprises much of the latest entry, No Time to Die, this decision to reboot the series has turned out to be a terrible debacle, at least to the extent that these things should ever be taken seriously enough to be called debacles. (The Bay of Pigs was a debacle. No Time to Die is really just a disappointment, although, in these hyper real times, one is tempted toward hyperbole; i.e., Donald Trump is the greatest President… Donald Trump is the worst President… and etc...)  

Casino Royale, the jumping off point for this prestige reboot, remains a celebrated piece of filmmaking, ushering in an elegant take on the superspy while jettisoning the double entendres and double-taking pigeons which had come to define the series prior. Daniel Craig, the new and improved blond Bond, seems, then as now, the right thespian for this more grounded job. Emotional. Wrought. Taciturn. In Casino, he is believably pained when his love interest turns coat. He is believably introspective in the grey and murky environs of cross-and-double-cross. And he is believably brutal as Her Majesty’s “blunt instrument.” Hence, looking back now on what the Craig era could have been, especially given Casino’s brilliance, one is left deeply frustrated at whatever seduced Broccoli and Wilson and certainly Craig towards perpetual pathos. For, increasingly with each film, and culminating with last year’s No Time to Die, Craig and his producers managed to achieve a level of immaturity that even the self-parodying Bonds of old could never quite reach, even had they tried. And the damnable thing of it all is that Craig & Co. managed all of this while taking smug bows for their prestige and their pathos and their broodiness. They needn’t have offered congratulations. It turns out, Commander Bond does not make for good adult drama. Perhaps this is because adults aren’t what we used to be.

Today we too easily conflate teen angst with adult suspense, perhaps because, as a society, we’ve never had to really deal with war or famine or the same grey and sterile environment from which Connery felt Bond was initially an escape. Sure, we’ve had economic crises, and, yes, world-bending terror attacks have landed at our doorstep, obviously, but how did we face these atrocities? By sending young men into foolish wars and by bailing out and propping up bad economic actors, all the while wiping our hands clean. We’ve not really been immersed in, or properly conditioned to recognize, adulthood, so we’ve rather missed the point in understanding the principle draw in juvenile, escapist fun. This is a failure not just of experience but of education. To understand why, consider for a moment the most heckled era, and thus the least “adult” era, of the Bondverse – the Roger Moore years, about which a few thoughts now seem relevant after bathing so long in the perpetual broodiness of Heathcliff Bond.

Consider first Live and Let Die, Moore’s debut. It plays now, many years on, as mere pulp, but perhaps pulp with a sense of the macabre and the bizarre. The next film, The Man with the Golden Gun, has a grimy smuttiness throughout, laced with what modern critics might call some problematic, white-savior imperialism. The Spy Who Loved Me is the only possible outlier here, masking, as it does, its more lurid details with a certain polish. But then, Moonraker is right back at it with a pulpy interplay between harrowing danger and sleazy sex, both of which are intertwined with some campy, not-quite-gaudy science fiction. (Or as Bond handler Cubby Broccoli called it, “science fact.”) All Bond films, of course, are pulp fictions, but the infamous “sex, sadism, and snobbery” associated with the character is at a particularly strange clip in Moore’s first four outings. Live and Let Die is perhaps the strangest Bond flick of all because of its voodoo elements and because of its rock-and-roll soundtrack (a first in the series) and because of its blaxploitation homages. However, its follow-up, The Man with the Golden Gun, is the film I have come to reassess the most. I once dismissively associated Golden Gun with its predecessor, not the least because in it, Moore is very clearly still trying to distance himself from Sean Connery. And distance himself he does, not through comedy or wit – nor through those other traits for which Moore would be known – but through taking a terribly cruel and rather sadistic turn. Consider the various transgressions of our hero in the film: he throws a child into a polluted river; he kicks a man in the groin; he threatens to shoot another man in the groin; he threatens to break a woman’s arm; and he allows this same woman to prostitute herself to him in return for his protection, a protection he does not in the end afford. But it’s not just Bond who is cruel. The film itself has a mean streak, not through double entendre or eyebrow-raising humor, but via things like: a smash-cut to a stripper’s ass; and a rather lurid episode where Bond hides a woman in a closet while he sleeps with another; and let’s not forget the crass set of lyrics in the theme song which clearly describe a man’s sexual organ. The movie also takes cheap shots at the “other.” For example:  All of Asia, midgets, third nipples, and sumo wrestlers share in the butts of the film’s several tasteless jokes.

So why defend it? Why reassess it?  Many reasons suffice: John Barry’s score; Moore’s acting; Christopher Lee; the gorgeous Maud Adams; the striking Britt Ekland. But what is really interesting is the political incorrectness of it all, taken in toto. Here we have Bond, the colonial Brit, saving the day and telling everybody else what’s what as he crashes his way across an amalgamation of Southeast Asia in which various countries and cultures are conflated with others. It is so outrageous and old-fashioned that it is amusing. My argument is that it would have also been amusing, and anachronistic, at the time of its release. That’s the thing the self-serious Bond fans of today don’t really grasp. This idea – that an old, colonial, Navy man, his occidental worldview in tow, would put on airs as he traipses across the Far East – was already anachronistic in 1974. To understand that this was so requires now, as it did then, a certain education and wit, which most modern audiences lack. Hence, Golden Gun is lost on most (not all) under thirty-five, an uninspired lot about whom it may fairly be asked: Have they ever read (or seen) “The Quiet American” or “The Year of Living Dangerously” or “The Honourable Schoolboy” (published after Golden Gun) or Sax Rohmer or Arthur Conan Doyle? In other words, understanding much about the world and about history and especially colonial history, and even a little about the history of the adventure novel and B-Movie hokum, is crucial to interpreting the classic era Bond films (think of Goldfinger’s laser beam, an ode to the buzzsaw of older cliffhangers). Meanwhile, in order to get the gist of Craig’s tenure, one need only understand boy-likes-girl-and-pouts-when-he-loses-her. Contrast this with the India-set, Macdonald Fraser-scripted Octopussy which somehow never mentions Kipling once. Because it didn’t have to. (Lest I be accused of glossing over cultural insensitivity, keep in mind that sometimes-fan-favorite J.W. Pepper, a send-up of Southern masculinity, is also a favorite of mine, despite my Southern sensibilities; i.e., one can laugh along if one chooses…)

This brings us to No Time to Die, which is the end of the line for Mr. Craig in more ways than one. Not only is it the last Bond film of Craig’s celebrated era, but in it, he and the producers conspire to write a final act in which (spoiler?) Bond dies a hero’s death.

But is it really a hero’s death? Does Bond really die for queen and country?

The answer, it seems, is no: He dies out of self-pity and in shame. And to understand why requires some scene setting:

In the looming moments of the third act, Bond and a fellow 00 infiltrate the island lair of the film’s main villain. As far as baddies go, this villain is rather lackluster, but he has somehow manages to kidnap Bond’s daughter while also arranging to sell some biotech weaponry. The buyers are off-screen merchants; it seems important to me to know the identity of these merchants, but the screenplay disagrees. At any rate, the British fleet is waiting out at sea as backup. So is the American fleet and the Japanese fleet and maybe the Russian fleet (I strain to remember). These allies, though, have not been briefed about the nuances of the mission because M, Bond’s superior, wishes to keep much of Bond’s operation to destroy the tech a secret. After all, the biotech weaponry was British-built, at M’s urging and in violation of probably a few international conventions. Hence, informing the ships out at sea about what is really happening would embarrass the empire and perhaps upend M’s career. So, Bond does his ablest to save the day but missteps when he is poisoned with the same biotech he was sent to destroy. Knowing that the contagious poison (really, DNA-targeting nanobots) will kill his family, who he does manage to rescue, Bond sees no reason not to stay behind, ensuring the destruction of the biotech even though it means he must suffer the same explosion that will fireball the weaponry.  

His death, then, is partly out of pity (the poison won’t kill him, only his wife and daughter should he come into contact with them, a point the screenplay tries to sell by claiming the nanobots are incurable), and partly out of cynicism (he endeavors to keep the weaponry a secret, lest the wrong people get fired). This is a grave embarrassment to the M character. The M of old, Admiral Messervy, was never so mired. He would have never been so cynical as to send an agent to die to protect the reputation of his own career. Yes, M gets Bond to do some pretty dirty things in the books. In “For Your Eyes Only,” one such favor is to avenge the deaths of M’s friends (not exactly state business, that), but M was never quite so sullied by Watergate-like corruption, and one can’t help but be shocked that the producers think so little of Britain and the West and the Secret Service that they would write an ending like this, or that they care so little about the internal logic of the series that they wouldn’t at least scribble for Bond an objection of some sort (this is more my objection than anything; pushing envelopes is fine but why not have some character continuity every now and again?)

Because of these contrivances and inconsistencies, No Time to Die’s curtain call withers, offering us less a hero’s death and more a just-put-him-out-of-his-misery-already anticlimax. I.e., He’s pouted around for five films now, so we might as well end things and get on with it… True, Bond’s death is at least extravagant. Blown to bits he is, but with no fanfare, no whiff of the Bond tune, no final straightening of the tie or adjustment of the cuff, no last smoke or last gulp of Old Grand-Dad. No heroic sacrifice. Nothing but cynicism. Not exactly the last stand at Thermopylae.

The sad thing is Craig could be, and often is, a brilliant Bond. His first out was brilliant. And even in his swan song, there are sequences - notably the ones in Havana - which are maybe the best thing ever put to screen in a 007 picture. But ours is a generation which is obsessed with being unhappy. Thus, the takeaway, in the end, is this:

Craig’s tenure was supposed to give us an adult, serious Bond. It’s really, though, given us just a series of angsty teenage pouting. It’s sheer truck in the end, specifically in the final act of Craig’s last outing, which somehow colors the entirety of Craig’s self-contained arc. Golden Gun has more sense of wit and maturity in one page of its problematic screenplay than No Time to Die could ever hope to have, even had its screenplay been scores of volumes of pages. Yes, Golden Gun treats women cruelly and Asians interchangeably and Britain like an empire ensconced in amber, but I rather deal with these shortcomings truthfully and forthrightly than sit through the oikophobia so prevalent in the final act of No Time to Die. Truck indeed.

To be fair, the producers are wildly successful, intelligent, and powerful movie veterans who time and again have proven their mettle. Not only do they know their craft, but they very obviously owe fans and fanboys and audiences absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. But they owe dear old James something, one thinks. They owed him a certain amount of respect if they were going to bring him into adulthood and they owed him something other than a cynical bon voyage if they were going to kill him off. He’s been good to them. One is sure they did not mean to be so low and cruel toward James. But they were. Granted, this is only one writer’s take. But it seems inarguable to point out, at the very least, that the attenuation between Bond and, say, George Smiley is less than it used to be (and the irony is I never thought Smiley was as down and out as his creator pretended; he at least had a poetry of the soul; he didn’t sulk, even when he lamented).

Hopefully, some approximation of dear old James one day returns. Until then, James Bond is dead. Long live James Bond.

Make Bushwood Great Again

Copyright 2021

Forty-one years ago this month, Doug Kenney threw himself off a mountain in Hawaii, and I haven’t felt the same since.

Granted, forty-one years ago, I wasn’t yet even a twinkle in my old man’s eye. But in these hyperbolic, Trumpite times, why let a detail like that get in the way of a good grievance?

That Kenney’s death preceded my birth does not change the fact that I lost a little something when Kenney died. I think we all did. And it wasn’t simply because we lost a great talent – although we did – so much as it was because we lost a great talent who made us all laugh together, a feat which has since become increasingly difficult. Dying is easy, the old adage goes; comedy is hard. 

This very adage – first heard by me in Peter O’Toole’s My Favorite Year – sprang to mind sometime late last summer when, on the fortieth anniversary of Kenney’s demise, I was suddenly feeling nostalgic for something funny. Of course, nostalgia in and of itself is not a newsworthy occasion for me. I am always feeling nostalgic. But the nostalgia that had me in its grips late last year was far greater, far more perceptible than normal, a condition no doubt borne, at least in part, from the crippling onslaught of the once-called China Virus, which had left more souls than just me yearning for anything of levity. The fact that this Eastern malevolence had besieged us in a year divisible by four had only made the yearning worse. But it had also made the dearth of good humor worse, so much so that I knew I wouldn’t find anything funny within our current culture: film; books; television, especially of the late-night variety. Consulting these, I knew, wouldn’t offer any levity at all. In fact, I would probably come away from them feeling even more dispirited than I already was.  

So, as September faded to October, and political season prepared for its no-holds-barred run toward November, I resigned myself to the old and the tried: to my hand-me-down National Lampoons; and my first edition Lewis Grizzards; and my library of Chevy Chase films, the latter of which my wife dismisses as dullish dad humor (I wonder if the wives and mothers whose husbands and sons watched these films during Chase’s heyday would agree?) In doing so, I battened down the hatches against the many punchlines of contemporary Hollywood, knowing that, until the election was over, our contemporary comics and present-day jesters would be on full tilt. No one would be safe from their acerbic, sardonic, biting bon mots, nor from their unflinchingly caricatured impersonations, nor from their slapstick or their Trump-is-Hitler witticisms, the latter of which they would assuredly offer with unrepentant smugness and then congratulate themselves for their originality.  

As we now know, I turned out to be more right than I could have possibly foreseen. Faster than one could say “Gunga Galunga,” the Trump-Biden showdown descended into madness; and lawsuits begot lawsuits; and little green men on grassy knolls were accused of stealing the President’s re-election; and an army of children from a William Golding novel stormed the Capitol like crazed zealots looking for their beast; and then Sleepy Joe slept through it all, whenever he wasn’t tripping his way through press conferences or moving the goalposts on masking or telling already-free Americans that they could see their families again and eat hot dogs once more if only they would get vaccinated by the same people who somehow still think cloth muzzles protect us from microscopic dangers. And all the while, our very “best” and “funniest” comedians tried to give this soaring lunacy a certain amount of color and humor and wit. But in the end, they struggled mightily to make me laugh, as I knew they would. Chances are, if you are anything like me, and you prefer your comedy to actually be funny, you probably didn’t laugh either. 

Admittedly, some of my waxing humorlessness has had at least something to do with age. I may have not quite hit the big 4-0 quite yet, but I’ve still endured more birthdays than Jesus and James Dean, and I suppose there’s something about barreling towards forty – and all that the big 4-0 entails, like mortgages, bills, deadlines, children, and so on – which seems to take the frivolity out of things, even ridiculing politicians like Our Big Man in Orange and Ol’ Sleepy Joe. I witnessed this very same thing happen to my own parents, of course. During my childhood, whenever I cracked up during a Phil-Hartman-as-Bill-Clinton skit or a Weekend Update monologue, they’d say, “Saturday Night Live just isn’t funny anymore.” This would inevitably confuse me because the Saturday Night Live of my youth certainly was funny. It’s just that comedy is often a young man’s game, like statewide campaigns and fifths of Old Crow.

I nevertheless insist: There is more to my inability to laugh at today’s comedians than my proximity to Social Security or, for that matter, everyone’s proximity to those acutely strange presidential politics of 2020. So, instead, I must contend:

The very nature of funny has changed.

WHAT IS FUNNY?

The philosophies explaining humor are as varied as they are detailed. But peruse enough papers and the gist seems simple enough:

Freud thought that humor was a pressure valve, releasing the many built-up energies that society represses.

Plato thought humor could be dangerous if not checked because uncontrolled laughter betrays a lack of emotional discipline, and laughter, which is often at someone else’s expense, reveals a malicious superiority which has no place in the ideal state.

The early church, influenced by Greek thinkers, imbibed a great deal of Plato’s don’t-laugh-because-it’s-bad-for-you vibe. As it happens, this explains a lot about my church upbringing.

Later thinkers started to discuss something called Incongruity Theory. Writers as disparate as Kant, Kierkegaard, and Charlie Chaplin have expressed some variation on this theory, finding humor and mirth in recognizing what they sometimes call the incongruous. In the theory’s most basic variation, the audience expects something very specific, but their expectations are usurped, frustrated, sometimes inverted. It is this frustration which is funny. For example:

In Caddyshack, (an endlessly rewatchable Chevy Chase vehicle which Mr. Kenney, supra, co-wrote) an aloof golfer named Ty Webb, played by Mr. Chase, asks Danny Noonan, his caddy, whether he does drugs. Danny answers quickly, with earnestness. “Every day,” he says. And because the audience expects Ty to admonish the young man, they laugh when he instead says, “Good.”  This is a variation on the old David Niven story (or Charlie Chaplin story; or maybe it’s Carl Reiner’s – I can’t remember where I read it) where a fat lady steps over a banana peel only to fall down a manhole.

Yet another variation of incongruity is where the audience recognizes something in the world that is incongruent with what they believe to be true or good. If, in this instant, an observant critic exacerbates the audience’s frustrated expectation, he is often rewarded with laughter. Think of the stand-up comic who expresses indignation at the expense of a tradition or routine which is outdated. Or think of Seinfeld exclaiming, “What’s the deal with…?!?”

In either variation, something conceptual is juxtaposed with something known (or believed to be known) and the recognition of the juxtaposition results in some kind of “a-ha!” moment.

* * *

Notice, though, that all these theories, although they offer different explanations of humor, at least share the same thing with audiences: a shared language. A shared understanding. A shared something. Consider:

For the Incongruity Theory, there must be a shared expectation in order for the juxtaposition to elicit laughter.

Alternatively, if humor is, as Freud claimed, the escaping tension of repressed energies, then there has to be a societal recognition of that tension or a shared understanding of the repression; otherwise, the joke falls flat.

Similarly, if you buy into the Superiority Theory, there must inherently be an “us” and a “them” that resonates with the audience; otherwise, how can someone share in the expense of the subject of the joke?   

Note as well that this shared understanding can be aspirational. When a Polish person laughs at a Polack joke or when a lawyer laughs at a lawyer joke, they aren’t really practicing self-deprecation. They are aspiring to initiation, to be welcomed by their audience. This is important for reasons I will develop below. The useful thing for now is this:

In all cases, there is some shared sense of culture within which the maliciousness or the repression or the incongruity is legible and without which, it would be illegible. This shared language, in either its accepted or aspirational sense, can happen at the macro level or the micro. But I’m starting to feel as though it is not happening at all.

WHEN WE’RE NOT ALL IN ON THE JOKE

A modern mind – perpetually grieved and ambitiously iconoclastic – will no doubt argue that, by definition, the comedy I grew up with, and for which I am here nostalgic, was not actually shared, but was rather exclusive. I.e., the magazines, television programs, and films of my misspent youth portrayed few strong women, almost no blacks, and no gays or transgenders at all unless they were the butt of a cruel joke. These modern critics would also say, I am sure, that in the us/them dichotomy, supra, there were more “thems” than America’s white, racist, sexist, repressive culture had led me to believe.  Hence, our comedy, even when it was pushing cultural envelopes, was dismissive of many and inherently discriminatory.

This is shortsighted criticism, though. To explain why, allow me a small tangent:

Harold Ramis, who co-wrote the script for Caddyshack, never belonged to a WASPy country club. Chevy Chase once said, “My father told me to stay away from Republicans on golf courses.” He took the role of Ty Webb in part to spoof golf, not to celebrate it. And Doug Kenney was the son a tennis pro, not the son of a member. He spent his whole young life making fun of a hypocritically phony establishment which he observed up close but never from within. Yet, one doesn’t matriculate Harvard and later move to Hollywood, as Kenney did, if they don’t want some measure of phoniness insulating them from the brutishness of real life. It’s a contradiction which reminds me, in a way, of the old Francois Truffaut bit about war movies. Truffaut (I think) said something once about being unable to make a true, authentic, anti-war picture because the more harrowing and grotesque the action, the more courageous, and thus appealing, the film’s protagonist.

Hence, the talent behind Caddyshack made a movie about working class stiffs sticking it to their betters. But without at least some respect for the betters, there’d be nothing resonating about the film for either the slobs or their betters. They made a movie ridiculing aspiration and success and establishments, but they couldn’t have done so without having some aspiration for joining the very establishment they were lampooning. Even the Judge Smails of the world had to have come from somewhere, long before they were sending children younger than you to the chamber. 

In point of fact, much of the snobs-versus-slobs, anti-establishment, irreverently upending comedy of 1970s and 1980s Hollywood was never really anti-establishment at all. Yes, Judge Smails is a prick, but when he demands for Smoke Porterhouse to shine the wax out of his shoes, and Porterhouse instead takes the Judge’s spikes to a belt sander, who among us laughing at this comeuppance doesn’t innately understand that Porterhouse, the black man, wouldn’t still want to be a member of Bushwood, not because it is an all-white club, but in spite of it?

Likewise, we inevitably laugh at the end credits of Animal House as they inform us of Bluto Blutarsky’s eventual rise to the United States Senate. But when we do, we are not merely laughing at the irony (and the incongruity) of it all; nor are we simply sniping at the halls of Congress. We are also inherently, and unequivocally, approving of the institution as an institution and worthy of aspiration.

Here’s another one: When Clark Griswold looks at his beautiful, all-American family and tells them, “You’re all fucked in the head,” we laugh not only because we, too, sense something perverse lurking beneath the typical, Rockwellian, Reagan-loving American family, but also because we are similarly fallen. Hence, we inherently think that perhaps the typical Reaganite family isn’t all that bad of an environment to grow up in. In other words, Vacation doesn’t undermine traditional notions of the nuclear family so much as it makes the traditional American family seem more approachable and more relatable, not just for those who have had similar experiences but also for those who come from a more openly perverse or fallen or broken background. Vacation is essentially saying, “Hey, the Griswolds aren’t that much different than your family,” but it says it in a way that is both resonating with other nuclear units and also aspirational for those who come from broken homes. 

Yes, it is true that there isn’t a lot of wokeness to the comedies of Landis and Hughes and Ramis and Kenney, but nor are they discriminative either. This is because, when these geniuses were in their primes, there was an assimilative nature to the culture. This assimilative ethos was embraced by even the liberals of the period, whether it was the whacky, sarcastic, adolescents of liberal Hollywood or the progressive lions of Washington.

Somewhere along the way, though, the left started to turn its back on assimilation.

This now-lost sense of something-shared was the undergirding reason as to why I could – and often would – laugh wildly at Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford bits even though I had great affinity for Mr. Ford. It was also why, when my hand-me-down Lampoons ridiculed Tricky Dick, I laughed despite my similar affinity for Mr. Nixon. Likewise for Will Ferrell’s Dubya routine, so famously portrayed live from New York on those long-ago Saturday nights. I would howl even though I voted for Dubya. Similarly, the idea that P.J. O’Rourke was a Republican never made me do a double-take on a masthead. Because why would it? Once upon a time, we were all aspiring to join the same Bushwood, whatever our politics.  

But as I said, things have changed. And maybe I should have never been laughing at all.

Funny people today don’t make fun of Trump the way they made fun of Tricky Dick or even Dubya. This is because they aren’t making fun of Trump at all. They are making fun of something they are conflating with Trump. They are treating him – Republicans are, too, sadly enough – as the next in line, as another Judge Smails, Dean Wormer, Church Lady, and Richard Milhous Nixon; they are treating him as part of the American tradition which traditionalists themselves defend. Hence, the underlying culture which comedy’s ribald and shocking jokesters used to wink-wink and nudge-nudge along, even as they attempted to innovate it, is now the enemy, not the closet aspiration.

Sometimes, I cannot help but wonder: Were the alarmists of my youth – were the alarmists of every generation – not ultimately right? When T.S. Eliot upbraided television and the BBC, or when Bob Dole criticized the violence in True Romance, or when Dan Quayle excoriated Murphy Brown… maybe they were all on to something… Still, though, the entertainments they were skewering were at least legible for mainstream America. Sadly, mainstream America is now fast becoming illegible in and of itself and our entertainments with it.   

This is why I can’t bring myself to laugh as much anymore. I don’t share in the experience. The experience is no longer legible. And even though today’s bloodthirsty Jacobins will doubtlessly chide and say, “Now you know how I’ve felt all these years,” I would argue that he, or she, is altogether missing the point about what once made funny funny.

BEFORE CHEVY, FISHER

Fisher Ames, the greatest of the founding generation, was also the wittiest and, pound for pound, the funniest.

For example, Ames, growing tired of being told that every man was created equal, once quipped, “But differs greatly in the sequel.”

His humor could be sardonic. He often resorted to it in his hatred of Jefferson. If only he would have had Twitter with which to take the Francophile down, maybe we all would have been spared the Second American Revolution. Fisher once wrote, “[W]e [Americans] love money. And if we had glory, we would joyfully truck it off for more money or another Louisiana.” I once recited that line to a fellow Republican politico who stared back at me blankface. When I told him it was the funniest thing maybe ever written, he replied that he didn’t get it and disagreed. Without giving due credit to Norm Macdonald, I told him that if he didn’t get it, he didn’t get not to like it. I went on to explain that Ames was making fun of Jefferson. When my colleague then riproariously defended Jefferson against those he called the lily-livered liberals in the Federalist Party, I reaffirmed what I already knew: there is no real room in the GOP for bona fide conservatives such as myself.

But I digress...

Ames prophetically wrote something once about the country being too large and too democratic to be governed as one nation. As with most things, Ames turned out to be right on the money, as prophetic, in fact, as Tocqueville, but funnier to boot. You see, whereas we once shared in a language which allowed funny to be funny, we’ve today torn that language to shreds so that nothing is funny. Or almost nothing. There are too many disparate groups, with sometimes fracturing interests, for us to share in any humor or for us to share in the set-up, never mind the punchline, or for us to even get to the set-up in the first place. Put another way – particularly if you buy into the Incongruity Theory – our country’s continued fracturing is ridding comedic art of the shared expectation that must be usurped for funny to be funny, as well as the usurpation itself. Falstaff stops being funny, you see, when we no longer expect Harry to turn his back on him, so that they instead keep whoring away together, like Bluto and Otter, bros ’til the end.

Fisher Ames also wrote once that the problem with the philosophies of those feverish Jacobins was that they might make “the rich poor, but [they] will never make the poor rich.” Similarly, today’s woke, enlightened, egalitarian march for equality might make our shared culture less hierarchal, but it will never create a new shared culture out of the fractured pieces. They might tear down Bushwood, but is that what they really want?

I’M (NOT) CHEVY CHASE AND YOU’RE NOT (EITHER)

Now that I’ve put these thoughts to paper and reconsidered my position(s) on humor, it may just be that my first inclination was right all along.

Maybe I’m just getting old. Forty beckons. Age looms.

But comedy still shouldn’t be this hard. And our politics shouldn’t be this fractured.

Sex, Sympathy, and the Undead

Copyright 2021 Published 6/14/21

A lot has happened to the vampire, hasn’t it?

The sexy, scary, pale bloodsucker has evolved. But I’m not so sure I like the evolution. I’m not so sure the evolution is good for us. Which is why I wrote a book about it.

Prior to penning Nobody Leaves Moss Crest Alive, I was taken aback at just how chic vampires had become. We were, for a while there, saturated with vampirism. From the silver screen to the small screen to the publishing houses, vampires were totally en vogue. They were sexy. They were charming. And even when they were dangerous, their plight somehow resonated with their audience. Then came the zombie craze around 2010, and the vampire moment ebbed. But the pathos remained. Hence, even though the vampire may not be Big Man on Campus anymore, he hasn’t exactly vanished either; meanwhile, he’s retained his cool status, which seems inapposite with the vampire’s origins:

The first vampire story, The Vampyre, was written by John Polidori in 1819. It hasn’t held up very well over the years. It is difficult to read and altogether uninvolving. It’s also in the public domain, so those interested should give it a glance. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 contribution, Carmilla, holds up far better; it is downright chilling. As I alluded to in my own novel, Hammer really did make Carmilla into a movie. In 1970, they produced The Vampire Lovers, starring Ingrid Pitt. A loose remake was made sometime in the last decade. It doesn’t do anything for me.

The Vampyre tells the tale of a bloodthirsty count who preys on innocents. Groundbreaking at the time of publication, it probably seems trite and cliché to modern audiences. Likewise with Carmilla, in which a seemingly young and pretty girl befriends and seduces the daughter of a widower; the young girl, of course, turns out to be a centuries-old vampire, which probably fails to send chills up anyone’s spines anymore: “lesbian bloodsucker” has a different connotation in 2020 than it did in 1872.

At any rate, to the extent that The Vampyre is discussed at all – in horror and literature circles, but certainly not in the mainstream – it is usually to discuss the notion that the titular count was based on Lord Byron.

Both stories eventually paved the way for Bram Stoker’s far more famous classic, which debuted in 1897. Despite these earlier efforts, Dracula is, in many ways, ground zero and a matter of first impression, at least as far as mainstream audiences are concerned. Not many people have read Polidori. But everyone knows about Count Dracula.

Readers can trace a great deal of Stoker throughout the history of most vampire literature. Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot is no exception. My own book is in small part a rebuttal to Lot, which is among my favorites of King’s catalogue and one of my favorite books in general. It was always billed as a horror novel. But I have always thought of it as literature. King, himself, once said something about wanting to write the Moby Dick of vampire books. I rather think he succeeded.   

In King’s masterpiece – one of his many masterpieces, I should say – one of the characters, Father Callahan, is tricked by the undead Frances Barlow into renouncing his faith. The scene in question is one of the better scenes of the novel, but it has, alas, never been accurately captured on screen. And even though it has haunted me for many years, I have always vehemently refuted the scene’s resolution. A weak man who succumbs to fear isn’t lost to Christ, or faith, as happens to Father Callahan, simply because of his fallible human nature. In fact, the shame that later comes from refusing Jesus is often the cornerstone of faith for many Christians. That’s something that most nonbelievers don’t really understand, and it was an impelling factor for writing my own vampire novel. I simply wanted, in my own way, to argue Father Callahan’s case.

But that wasn’t all I wanted to write about. There are reasons vampires haunt us. Or should…

Sex and the Single Vampire

 It has been argued by some conservative critics that vampires were rather asexual monsters, preying on innocent communities, but not so much seducing them. Rest assured, this isn’t so. Sex was always a large, even central, part of the vampire’s story. The moral of most early vampire fiction was to caution readers to restrain their sexual appetites. In The Vampyre, supra, for example, Lord Ruthven, our inaugural bloodsucking nobleman, has as devious a fetish for “those females who form the boast of their sex from their domestic virtues” as he does for “those who sully it by their vices.” Carmilla was all the more meretricious. Though her prey never really succumbs to Carmilla’s advances, she is nevertheless spellbound:

From [our] foolish embraces, which were not of very frequent occurrence, I must allow, I used to wish to extricate myself; but my energies seemed to fail me. Her murmured words sounded like a lullaby in my ear, and soothed my resistance into a trance, from which I only seemed to recover myself when she withdrew her arms.

In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust…

…Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, "You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever." Then she had thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling.

Dracula portrays the same sort of sensual pleasure, forbidden and strange and even foreboding. When the novel’s protagonist, Jonathan Harker, begins to drift to sleep one night, in the Count’s castle, he recalls:

I was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged in any way since I came into it. I could see along the floor, in the brilliant moonlight, my own footsteps marked where I had disturbed the long accumulation of dust. In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, they threw no shadow on the floor. They came close to me, and looked at me for some time, and then whispered together. Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like the Count, and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where. All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina's eyes and cause her pain, but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then they all three laughed, such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of waterglasses when played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head coquettishly, and the other two urged her on.

 One said, "Go on! You are first, and we shall follow. Yours is the right to begin."

 The other added, "He is young and strong. There are kisses for us all."

 I lay quiet, looking out from under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.

I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one's flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer, nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.     

Now consider, for a moment, that Victorian England was really no different than modern America in that sex was often on the brain, if not also on the tips of tongues. And indeed, within us all is a natural, primal, carnal thirst. The need to ravish and to be ravished is known to every man and woman alike; it burns so vividly within us that it calls on every bit of our civilized training to quell it. But this is one of the central points of civilization – to channel sexual energy into a productive outlet. It is likewise why I don’t understand the sexual mores of our time. They are adverse – even adversarial – to a sustained civilization. Say what you will about freedom or liberty or license – and I am sure you will; everyone does – but appetites which aren’t channeled are passions, and passions tend to undo things. Passions cause cultures to erode, and it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a traditional culture or progressive one - passions don’t discriminate. They raze and sunder and sometimes even eat people, one neck vein at a time.  

Today, of course, unlike Victorian England, sex is no longer verboten to talk about. In fact, little about sex is left to the private side of our bedroom doors. Divorces and bastards aren’t stigmas, and alternative lifestyles are not only accepted but endorsed.

In other words, how can the vampire story scare us anymore? The main thing the vampire was scaring us from is no longer verboten…     

Fear of the Unknown – it’s not really that unhealthy…

Of course, there’s more than just sexual deviancy at the (staked) heart of undead fiction.   The vampire, in most tellings, is often an unknown Eastern figure, wreaking havoc on the West. This depiction was traditionally never an accident, and bully for it. After all:

Fear of the unknown can be a healthy thing, albeit, when taken to the extreme, it can be quite unhealthy as well. To explore and discover without prejudice is dangerous, even if to refrain and ignore without fail is likewise. Moderation. That is the key. A healthy and checked sense of both is necessary for order and survival. The vampire, nocturnal and dangerous and altogether Eastern, taught Western men and women to adhere to Western values and the Western dynamic. But do vampires also tacitly teach us to be anti-immigration? No - merely to be wary of crewless ships which run aground along the English shore.

This wariness is a virtue seldom pursued by contemporary vampire fiction. Most writers and directors are too busy trying to make the vampire embraceable; empathetic; loveable.

Stephanie Meyer’s Edward, for instance, is a “vegetarian” in the Twilight series. He doesn’t drink human blood and he wants to walk among the living. This is, of course, utterly and inanely stupid.  Flaunting human blood around a vampire, by logic, is exactly like setting tumblers of single malt in front of an alcoholic. No matter how long the alcoholic’s been dry, you’re testing his sobriety. No good can come of that. But, of course, teenage girls just love a mopey rebel to reform…

Meyer certainly isn’t the only artist to give the vampire a relatable and encompassing sympathy. And it is for this reason that the supposedly “great” vampire fictions of recent years aren’t really all that great at all. Consider:

Werner Herzog’s creepy 1979 classic, Nosferatu: The Vampyre, which is a remake of Nosferatu, is chilling and brooding and melancholic. It is widely considered one of the classics. Its mood can be entrancing, its sounds and images spellbinding. Its scariness, in turn, is of the sort that should stay with you long after you watch it… In the still of night, when the moon’s glow shines pale blue through your window shades, you should see Klaus Kinski, as Dracula, standing there in the shadows, looming…

…and yet, much of the film lacks staying power. Why? Because once you’ve had time to compute the images that first engulfed you, your recoil from Kinski’s Dracula gives way to something more pitiful. Kinski, whose performance is pitch-perfect for what the film intends, has a scene where he laments the weariness that comes with centuries of loneliness. Touching, yes. But scary?

Kinski is shown-up years later in a related film, Shadow of the Vampire, where Willem Dafoe plays Count Orlock, the vampire from the original Nosferatu. In Shadow, the movie ponders a play on reality: what if Max Shreck, the actor who played Orlock in the original, was actually a real life vampire? Mayhem and murder, of course, ensue as the vampire plays an actor playing himself. But amidst the death and carnage, Dafoe out-emotes Kinski, channeling the same, pitiful, sad feelings. He remarks in one scene that the saddest part of Stoker’s Dracula is when the Count is depicted as having no servants during Harker’s visit to the castle. The crewman laugh at his observation. What could possibly be so sad about not having servants? Dafoe’s character elaborates: It’s not that Count Dracula didn’t have servants; it’s that he hadn’t had servants for four hundred years; he’d been alone, in no need of food or water or spirits for nearly half a millennium. How could he possibly remember how to host a guest? How could he remember how to set the table? The sum total of this observation is simply that Count Dracula, in his advanced age and isolation, couldn’t possibly remember his humanity or, for that matter, any human connection. It is a sad commentary to be sure. But then, as Shadow unfolds, Orlock proceeds to feed off the living, reminding characters and audiences alike that evil is evil, regardless of its otherwise mitigating circumstances.

Francis Ford Coppola’s take on Dracula, in 1992, is no different in its cheapening humanization. In Coppola’s version, the Count even gets the girl in the end, conjuring up, at least in this writer’s mind, the debate among some scholars about Helen – did she go with Paris to Troy against her will or willingly? It is a question that maybe is not so pointless.

Keep in mind, of course, that my arguments against humanization do not mean that one shouldn’t sympathize at all with the vampire. Good characters are hard to write if you can’t find some sympathy for them. Sympathy and empathy, though, are different things, as is sympathy and endorsement, a point which most moderns don’t understand.  

All this is to say that the best vampire films and some of the best vampire books aren’t always the “great” ones.

Sometimes campy, sometimes shallow, and often low-brow, films like Fright Night, John Carpenter’s Vampires, and the vastly underrated 30 Days of Night show the vampire at his menacing best, as do many of those pre-modern films that have slipped into movie oblivion – the Hammer classics with Christopher Lee, for example, which are still astoundingly fun to watch.

_________________

 A society that celebrates the undead can’t possibly possess the moral fortitude to champion sobriety, marital commitment, sexual restraint, and any of the other virtues necessary for ordered living. The vampire, according to its legend, is without virtue. Yes, while living, he may have had virtue, or maybe pursued it, but once undead, his virtuousness is altogether an impossibility.

Which brings me to my final point on the nosferatu:

Sympathy for the devil may not bring about damnation. But empathy for the crucifixion is guaranteed to bring about eternal life. Recall, then, one last passage from Stoker: when Harker finds himself surrounded by evil in Dracula’s castle, he finds solace in the cross that hangs around his neck; it was given to him by a village woman before he embarked on the final leg of his journey into darkness:

Bless that good, good woman who hung the crucifix round my neck! For it is a comfort and a strength to me whenever I touch it. It is odd that a thing which I have been taught to regard with disfavour and as idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help. Is it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that it is a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort.

Stoker was on to something, there, as was the good woman who hung the crucifix around Harker’s neck.

It is hard to have an ordered society without such good women, keeping an eye out against the unknown and the deviants, giving inspiration to the men, and reading lines between the lines and the pages between the pages and the spaces between the spaces.

That’s something the moderns – from feminists to moral relativists – don’t get and is just one of the many points I’d hoped to muse over with Moss Crest. There are others. And I think it is, in the end, a fine piece of work.

Savile Row Salvation

I believe it was Peter Hitchens who once wrote something about the last man to wear a tie on Saturdays.

Well, it turns out that I am the last man to wear a tie on Sundays. Or, at least, that’s how it goes at my church, where I am weekly reminded of such senseless nuggets as: “God doesn’t care what you wear.” And: “God doesn’t care what you look like.” This seems to me a rather audacious thing to utter. God may well care what I wear. He may well care a great deal, in fact. Then again, He may not. Either way, how should I presuppose to know?

These nuggets invariably come from my congregation’s senior pastor, an affably sincere gentleman who certainly means well and, for all accounts, is a fine and learned and inspiring man of the cloth. But his wisdom is shortsighted, at least sartorially. For while I am quite sure that one’s wardrobe is not a prerequisite for entry into Heaven, I am similarly sure that a Protestant congregation (read: a democratic one) needs no encouragement in lowering its standards. We’ve been doing that just fine on our own for the last five hundred years.

When I look around on Sunday and observe what passes for the latest in men’s Sunday best, I see t-shirts. And bowling shirts. And golf shirts. And jeans. And Sperrys. And tennis shoes. And sneakers. And sandals. Sometimes even shorts. Our pastor, quite naturally, leads the way. He seems partial to skinny jeans. And he loves to wear his shirt untucked. No one else wears a suit, at least at the particular service I attend, at 10:00. Nor is anyone else wearing a tie.

My wife invariably calls me a snob whenever I point any of this out, but I am nothing of the kind. Consider: 

Religion, dear reader, comes from the Latin religare, meaning to bind. This binding, in theory, applies to a group of followers. If you get enough followers together, you have a “people.” If in turn you get enough people together then, after a while, we might say that you’ve got yourself a culture. Mature cultures tend to fare better than childish ones, which is why a congregation full of Tom Sawyers bothers me.

I do not mean to pick on my fellow worshipers, from whom I could learn a great deal about many things, and have. It’s just that how to dress is not one of them. This is because if you dress like a child, you’ll act like a child, speak like a child, and be treated like one in turn.  The Bible, of course, speaks against such infantilism, not that many have noticed. Many times, in fact, have people told me, somewhat incredibly, that children are closer to God. It’s said so often, at least to me, I wonder if it’s not become an unofficial Christian tenet. Practitioners of this tenet often seem to rely on misunderstood passages in the Gospel, like this one:

At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven

In reading this passage, however, we mustn’t forget, although we often do, that Jesus was Jewish. Jewish culture has always very clearly delineated between childhood and majority. It is quite possible that, in the foregoing passage, Jesus simply means for his followers to rid themselves of the idea that life in Heaven, not to mention entry thereto, is based on rank, or station, or right. In other words, you can’t graduate into Heaven, and you can’t advance while there, at least not in the way one graduates into adulthood. Remember, he only tells his disciples of the wonders of children after his disciples ask him, “Who is the greatest in Heaven?” His point is probably that there is no greatest – there’s no matriculation, age of majority, or rank. Even if this isn’t what he means, we should all be able to at least see that he is speaking metaphorically, a point which is underscored when Jesus goes on to give some quite unsound advice, if taken literally:

If his disciples should stumble, he says, they should cut off the offending appendage which caused them to fall.

Well, now. Does anyone honestly think Christ literally wants his disciples to cut off their hands or feet? Admittedly, there is great confusion among the faithful, to and through this very day, over what is literal and what is figruative - one which immediately springs to mind is whether we literally or symbolically devour the lamb of God during holy communion.

Here, though, Jesus’s metaphor, intends only to compel his disciples’ hearts – and by extension, ours – to mimic that of a curious and obedient child. He doesn’t want us to actually be like children.

This is why children being closer to God is rubbish. If children were quite so Godly then children would be leading Sunday service, as well as the church itself, like a kind of Christian Neverland. But children are nowhere vested with the color of such authority. Because they’re children. And we should more often treat them as such. I understand, of course, quite why the church would like to romanticize childhood innocence – it’s a hell of a recruitment tool. Everyone, after all, can “relate” with a theology which accepts its acolytes as children, regardless of whatever adult angst they may carry. Another, similar, recruitment tool is used when pastors encourage men to dress down on Sundays. Notice, in fact, that the same motive is at play; i.e., since the common man dresses down, we should all dress down likewise, to give all worshippers – all comers, as they say – a relatable point of reference. The modern church loves to give its worshippers points of reference, whether it’s your inner child or your commonality.  Points of reference seem to matter more than anything else.

But our only reference point needs to be that we are all sufficiently depraved. Also, we must remember that God isn’t all that common. What’s more, He’s certainly not a child. Hence, I’m less concerned with relating to church or relating to God, and more convinced that it is better to feel small in the presence of either, overwhelmed by complexities that children cannot – and should not – comprehend.

Stanley Hauerwas once wrote, “As soon as a preacher begins a sermon with ‘I cannot believe what my seven-year-old daughter recently said,’ you can quit listening. The subject of the sermon, no matter what else is said, will not direct attention to the witness of the scriptures to God.” Similarly, whenever my pastor, God bless him, tells me the Lord doesn’t care about what I wear to church, I stop listening. Whatever else he says, the message is tainted with the last thing a democratic congregation needs to hear, which is Feel free to meet God on your terms. Granted, this is usually the exact opposite of what the pastor – the good servant that he is – is trying to say. Nevertheless, it’s the implicit import. For instance, even though my pastor is blessedly conservative about many things – marriage, for one – nothing he says is ever going to prevent, or even slow, anybody in our congregation from getting a divorce. We have already tacitly been told that God will meet us on our own terms. Not His. And we’ve not been challenged otherwise because the church has focused too much on making us feel at home, on being there for us, on therapy. This even applies to churches which fetishize “service” because often the service is its own form of therapy.

Admittedly, I am aware how strict and puritanical these points may seem. But believe it or not, I do not want a congregation of teetotaling blue hairs who slap my hand with a ruler every time I laugh at a sex joke, and I certainly don’t want to be a part of a congregation which refuses me entrance into the sanctuary if I don’t wear a suit and tie. I don’t think the God Who gifted His son, Jesus Christ, unto the world is either a tyrannical or doggedly puritanical entity. Hence, we shouldn’t mimic such strictness or piety. In fact, I understand well the dangers of a church which thinks it is better than everyone else. After all, Christianity is premised on the idea that we are all dirty, poor, miserable, and fallen; and the only way out of this miserableness is to accept God’s gratuitous gift of grace. We can’t work, buy, pray, or dress our way into salvation. But moderns, as I have written before, have lost the ability for nuance and distinction. And there is a certain amount of distinction between accepting the fallen, with whom we are all in league, and encouraging the fallen. A church, in other words, doesn’t have to have a dress code, but it shouldn’t have an anti-dress code either, or else I fear it has missed the point.  

Purposefully dressing like a child, not because of wealth or station or anything else but because of a philosophy which doesn’t purport to care about what we wear to church, does two things. It reinforces a childishness which I believe we, as a faith, have had quite enough of, and it also reinforces, even if tacitly, a commonality that doesn’t bring us closer to God, but rather brings our perception of God closer to us.

The scary thing is that our broader culture has led the way in this march toward casualness. That this is scary is because it is hard to imagine how the church is going to stand as a bulwark against the profane if it can’t even withstand an assault on acting, or dressing, one’s age.

__________ 

 A few notes are in order about this broader culture, which is infected with rot. Most Americans wear this rot on their sleeves, happily dressing down, happily dressing shabbily, taking pride sometimes in wearing the tackiest of attire. This, even as many of them – those who style themselves conservatives – loudly protest and Tweet and vote against the erosion of something called “values,” a point of fact which begs another:

Most of what I write, here and elsewhere, tends to be aimed at my fellow “conservatives,” those who fail to often see that the most destructive notions impelling our decline are usually borne of our own making. As the fellow wrote, maybe there’s a beast. And probably, it’s us.  

As conservatives, we must understand that it is inherently impossible to defend “values” when one not only practices but promotes the democratic catechism of leveling, especially of the slumming-it variety, which is what one inherently accomplishes when he or she refuses to admit that there is such a thing as taste or style, which is to say distinction.

Distinction, in a literal sense, is how the tie came to be, back during The Thirty Years War when mercenaries sought to wear them to denote affiliation. Despite researching the matter, I remain confused as to whether these mercenaries – Croatian, I believe – were fighting for or against Louis XIII. I suppose it doesn’t really matter because I’m not such a traditionalist that I wish to return to the cravats of the time of Louis XIII. But a little appeal to distinction can’t hurt a nation which vests its conserving hopes in a movement made up of people who love to slum it.

The opposite of slumming it isn’t being snooty and upper-crust, just like the opposite of having a dress code isn’t having an anti-dress code.

I suppose, though, there’s no coincidence that the American church – to the extent there is such a thing as an American church – as well as the American people are similarly arrested by not only a decline but a perpetual existential inquiry: i.e., who are we and where are we going? It’s hard to understand who you are when you don’t understand how to dress.

Clothes make the man in more ways than one.  

The Conservative’s Promise

ATHENS, GA –

Eighteen years ago, I strolled, midmorning, through the windowed door at 147 College Avenue, in the shadow of what would eventually become my alma mater. Looking back on it, it seems as though I should have tripped a shopkeeper’s bell, but I don’t really have a vivid memory of any such jingling. What I do have a vivid memory of from that day is the news rack on the outside of the building, as well as the sign next to the door which read Barnett’s News Stand in lettering which always reminded me of an old Strand Magazine cover, an evocation having something to do with its appealing illustration of two tobacco pipes crossed at the stem.

On the particular day in question, although I was literally standing in Barnett’s quaint little confines, I was likewise standing somewhere else – on the cusp of a great and wonderful chapter which too many children pursue and for which I, myself, was dreadfully unprepared. That day, you see, marked the end of the last week before my freshman year at the University of Georgia. I had popped into Barnett’s to buy a cigar on my way to North Campus where I intended to locate my fall classes. In retrospect, this was one of the few examples of vigilance and preparedness I can remember in an undergraduate career otherwise marked by procrastination and sloth…

Sloth. A deadly sin, that. And one which St. Peter may one day press against me. I shudder at the waste and neglect of my undergraduate days, so many of which I have locked away in shadowy grey vaults because of the nastiness and the knavishness which they represent.

That long-ago day at Barnett’s has also been locked away somewhere, at least until recently. It snuck through a bourgeoning crack a few months or so ago when I found myself again walking down College Avenue where Barnett’s once stood. But it wasn’t my surroundings which caused this bit of nostalgia. Something else – a series of things, in fact – had had me reencountering my yesterdays for quite some time. Granted, this is nothing to write home about. Conservatives are always and forever thinking about the past, some of us with more thoughtfulness than others. Lincoln – infamously not a conservative – once derogated conservativism’s veneration for the past as merely an “adherence to the old and tried.” Santayana showed a little more breadth and width. “I defended the past,” he once wrote, “because once it had been victorious and had brought something beautiful to light; but I had no clear expectation of better things in the future.” Well, I too have no expectation of better things in the future. Why would I?

Eighteen years ago, as I strolled North Campus, smoking a Punch amidst the late-summer greenery, I felt an excitement which stemmed from finally getting to let out on my own, an unknown and unwritten future before me. An unknown future, though, isn’t quite the same thing as an entirely undiscovered country, upon which I knew I was not embarking. This was because I had been bequeathed certain landmarks for my journey, as well as a starting point which oriented me. Hence, whatever unknown adventures were to find me, and whatever tragedies were to befall me, I at least knew the larger story into which my own drama would be woven. Forgotten, perhaps. But woven all the same.

These landmarks which I had been bequeathed have since been razed for future generations. And unfortunately, there’s nothing I can really do about it. Writing about it certainly won’t save them – it didn’t save Barnett’s, for example, which was a literal landmark now forgotten. But it won’t save the other landmarks either, the ones which barely remain in my mind, as grainy remembrances of things which might as well be as distant as Somme and which, though they may not all be locked away in shadowy grey vaults, are increasingly difficult to access.

A few months ago, after reminiscing about Barnett’s, I proceeded to retrieve a pair of resoled boots from Marvin’s Shoe Repair. As it happens, Marvin’s is relevant to this story in more ways than one. Athens, you see, was once home to half a score of shoe repair shops. As far as I know, there are now only two. As I understand it, the eponymous Marvin Eberhart, who I never knew, taught his cherished craft to his son, Frank, who has been repairing my loafers and boots since right about the time I smoked that Punch on North Campus, some eighteen summers ago. Then, as now, he only took cash. And then, just as now, he ran his little business in a shotgun nook directly across from Barnett’s once-prime perch. I don’t know what will happen once Frank Eberhart quits cobbling, but a great comfort of mine will have vanished along with his shop – a comfort not just in knowing that my Weejuns can be reheeled in lieu of being discarded, but a comfort – assuredly a latent one – in the beauty of passing down legacies, which is just another way of describing those aforementioned landmarks. Legacies – macro and micro – orient us as we venture along life’s trails, often toward parts unknown, our journeys at least partly illuminated by clearly understanding from whence we came.

After I picked up my boots on that recent day in Athens and quit Marvin’s – along with those wonderfully odorous leathers and oils which fill the shop – I gave thought of strolling once again through North Campus. But I refrained. For various reasons, even apart from football games, I have occasion to frequent campus, so it wasn’t as though I hadn’t visited the beautiful greenery in a while. Every time I do happen to visit campus, at least in recent years, I tend to think of an interesting passage from Brideshead Revisited. I confess to not having the passage memorized, but bits and pieces of it return to me here and there whenever I stroll adjacent to Herty Field or enter the main library to fetch a book. Admittedly, Athens may not be Oxford, but it is still full of knowledge and wonder and history and is no less for me the subject of pride, just as Oxford must have been for any of Charles Snyder’s compatriots.

Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.

I have already said that my own contribution to “centuries of youth” is something that I often try not to revisit. But that is not the same thing as saying that the friendships I made back then, as well as the lessons I learned, don’t remain steadfast and with me, at all times. There are, indeed, great and blessed things about modern times, and one of them is that one never has to lose touch with old friends.

Many such friends of mine – certainly not all – were, at some time or another, present during my college days among the premises at 990 South Milledge Avenue. The white-columned, red-bricked house which still stands there is  significant to the alumni of Lambda Chi Alpha’s Nu Zeta chapter. I, myself, lived there for three rather hazy years. Hence, it should come as no surprise that a preponderance of my foretold knavishness occurred there. But despite the ignorance and corruption of my youth, my fraternity has always been a source of good in my life. Had it not been for Lambda Chi– and, more importantly, for the people who comprised it, and comprise it still – I would have never grown up. The fraternity was where I joined my first Bible study, which sowed the necessary seeds for shedding the religious defiance of my rebellious years. The fraternity was also a place where I was taken down a peg – many pegs in fact – by an antiquated practice – i.e., hazing – which is today felonious in many jurisdictions and misunderstood by multitudes. The fraternity, in other words, was a place where I was made small. And small we must be if one day we are to be big.

Much like Barnett’s News Stand eighteen years ago, Greek life at college campuses is on its way out. Hence, on a brilliantly green August day, many years from now, my future children, if they should be so lucky as to attend the Good University, will not be able to scout out their fall classes and then return to nap on a couch at 990 South Milledge, mainly because the house probably won’t be there. It will have been razed. College fraternities – Lambda Chi included – have been scandalized more often than not in recent years, and Nu Zeta is once again on the brink of being shuttered. This, even though the brothers of Nu Zeta are by no means the only Georgia students going through life “fat, stupid, and drunk.” Still, they are nevertheless the target of a world which, irrespective of pandemics and Black Lives Matter marches and a resurgent Jacobinism, fails to understand things like station and hierarchy – it’s a world which fails to understand that sometimes you have to be made small to one day be big.

__________

The conservative’s promise, I once thought, was to pass something down, something inherited – the funded wisdom of the ages. But much like the eddying smoke from one of my cigars, this isn’t how the real world works. Great nations and states and universities and newsstands and crafts like cobbling – these things eventually dissipate into the atmosphere; and the conservative’s promise, I now know, is to learn to let them, free of resentment.  The conservative’s promise is also to take pride in these things of the past – the things which time won’t let us successfully preserve – for no other reason than because they were once there. Known. Orienting. Illuminating. And perhaps this particular conservative’s promise is to write about it, not in order to save it, but to make what was once known a little less grainy, even as we rightfully leave the rest of our yesteryears down among the floors of shadowy grey cellars.

With Pertinence to Masks, Voting, and Other 2020 Drivel

“There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

Conan Doyle’s reference to an eastern wind would have evoked something very generally understood to his contemporaries, steeped as they were in the Bible. It also bore an optimistic tone which would not prove prophetic once the war to end all wars came and went, leaving the empire anything but a cleaner, better, stronger land.

Interestingly enough, we’ve had our own east wind in this year of anxieties. A Far-East wind. And much as it was with the war to end all wars, it doesn’t seem all that reasonable to assume the United States will be a cleaner, better, stronger land in its wake, primarily because this latest eastern wind has reaffirmed certain proclivities. Tocqueville once very aptly described these proclivities when he wrote, “[N]ot only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

COVID-19 – our eastern wind – has exacerbated this solitude, even as it has created a mirage of bringing us together. This faux togetherness is nauseatingly reinforced every time another Willie Stark wannabe raises a fist and says, “We will beat this thing, together.” Will we? One should be forgiven for having doubt, underscored, perhaps, by the fearmongers who drive the national rhetoric. Their fear, their panic, which has been more contagious than COVID itself, seems disproportionate to COVID’s actual impact, which itself has been disproportionate to our governments’ various and rather inconsistent responses. I hesitate to blame these governments for their incongruity because I understand that they are only reacting to a concentrated neurosis among the nation’s masses, a neurosis which should seem funny to anyone with even the slightest sense of humor. For, somehow, a nation which often cares little about killing a human life simply because it hasn’t breached the birth canal yet has suddenly found sanctity in every human life, if only for statistical sake.

Think about it: in a nation of over three hundred thirty million people, a mere three hundred thousand deaths can only cause this kind of protracted neurosis if everyone has succumbed to Tocqueville’s prediction. What else can explain it?

Certainly, all life is scared. No ifs, ands, or buts. What is also sacred, though, is reason, which must inherently question whether complete economic shutdowns and reinforced panic (reinforced, that is, by our many institutions, both public and private), are  proportionate to a disease which, according to the CDC, might (might) account for a twelve-percent rise in deaths in 2020, especially when a twelve-percent rise still accounts for less than one-percent of the population. One-percent is a lot of deaths. But one-percent is not worth ruining the lives and traditions of the ninety-nine-percent.

Such a low percentage, of course, begs to question the nation’s recent fetishes. There’s our social distance fetish, never minding, for a moment, that the qualifier is unnecessary. There’s also the hand-washing thing. But do we really need less germs? Seems like we might need more. Most importantly, there’s our mask fetish, which should be proof that there is no right or left anymore – there is only a single, undifferentiated flock of sheep of occasionally different wool.

A week ago, give or take, this mask fetish again took center stage – had it ever left us? – when our enfant-terrible President, our own man in orange, was airlifted by Marine One to Walter Reed because he had tested positive for the novel coronavirus. To be sure, this was a development which resonated with our schadenfreude-obsessed populace for various reasons, often articulated by some form of, “That’s what he gets for ignoring the science.” Or, “That’s what he gets for not wearing masks.” One particular gentleman told CNN, “I don’t want him to die… yet.”

And to think, this vitriol all stems from the fact that, at one point in time, President Trump dismissed mask wearing as nonsense, shortly before he, too, caved to the “science,” whatever that means… Trust the experts, they implore – presumably the same experts who once told us the world was flat, black people were inferior, and eggs were and then were not and maybe are once more somewhat good for you. Admittedly, I, too, often lament how little we leave to the experts; in fact, I’ve often sympathized with Catherine the Great, who wouldn’t subscribe to the superior talents of cobblers and shoemakers in matters of government. But to presuppose that our experts are not somehow infected by the age’s democratic proclivities – those which Tocqueville foretold – is naïve.

Has mask wearing prevented the surges we’ve seen? What of the other science, like that reflected in this paper, which may momentarily be found here, in which previous experts questioned the effectiveness of masks against sub-molecular particles? How many experts – more importantly, how many people trusting the experts – have bothered to reconcile the old science with the new? This is not unimportant, primarily because many of the President’s critics were quick to say that his just desserts resulted from his nonchalant mask wearing. But masks don’t protect us, the experts now say, in a Kerry-esque flipflop; they protect other people.

So, which is it?

Perhaps masks help. Perhaps they don’t. They certainly aren’t a fix-all deserved off the mass campaign being waged by the media. Again, the argument here, like above, isn’t that masks should be discarded, but that the accepted wisdom is alarming, disproportionately encouraged, and religiously, even piously, defended. Religiously defended. Think about that for a moment:

Americans don’t religiously defend religion, but they religiously defend masks.

Recall, here, Orwell who wrote, “Bugs are bad, but a state of affairs in which men allow themselves to be dipped like sheep is worse.”

And yet, to question the sheeplike behavior of a nation of fervent, even feverishly, democratic people is dangerous, especially in this day and age of magic boxes and interwebs and a narrative-obsessed mass of people quick to recede into the solitude of their own respective hearts. One simply has to sit back and count the numerous advertisements which not-so-subtly display mask wearing to recognize the width and breadth of this craze and how widely it’s been accepted.

Note, though, that this is the same media, obviously, which nauseatingly reminds us of other societally important things, like hate is bad, love is good, and everyone should get out and vote.

This last bit – the bit about the voting – is most alarming. Does anyone rationally believe that everyone should vote? Why do news outlets, broadcasters, and interweb authorities constantly encourage us to vote? To register? Granted, many suffered long and hard for the franchise, and they unquestionably deserve the right to vote. But the right to vote does not denote the need or imperativeness for actually showing up and voting. The people who feel otherwise do not feel that way because they have reasoned themselves into such a position, but because they’ve been told by a neurotic nation, and reminded by institutions which have a certain self-interest, that they must. Hence, they’ve allowed themselves to be dipped into a fervor – a muzzle-wearing, world-changing, brow-beating fervor – at all times.

________

Contrariness, for the sake of contrariness, is, it should be noted, a heresy of its own.

But fading the public seems to have served sharps in the desert for a long time, a point which dovetails nicely with a certain conservative tenet, which says that people are fallen and depraved and therefore obstructed by self-interest from right reason.

So, perhaps certain alleged, societal heresies aren’t heresies at all – like omitting car restraints, and not-discouraging smoking, and refusing mask, and not voting, and opposing the mandating of public education, and perhaps many other things as well. Embracing or omitting these practices may well be dangerous, but they are enterprises which an allegedly free and ordered people should be able to volitionally choose or not choose on their own, without our institutions reinforcing the collected stigmas to the contrary.  

That our institutions have failed us seems inarguable, but their failure seems to be the fault of the masses who, like sheep, wander with the wind, eastern or otherwise.

Sin: The Last Vestige of Virtue

The South retained a sense of class and hierarchy long after the rest of the country democratized. But because History is a proper noun, despite what other conservative writers will try to tell you, this arrangement was bound to end.

Still, the South withstood the encroachment of egalitarianism for so long, I’m a little surprised about the extent to which Southerners are now averse to aristocratic sensibilities. Southerners have lowered their standards in every facet of life – politics, art, even sex. For instance:

The last vestige of stylized-aristocracy in Southern culture – and perhaps in Western culture generally – was discrete, upper-class infidelity (granted, it wasn’t always discrete, but more times than not…). Adultery, once upon a time, was not uncommon for the prestigious. Commoners, however, always cheated less. Why? Because they were far more religious and imbibed from their overlords a sense of propriety and decorum, even if it wasn’t perfectly accurate. But when every man became a king, although no man wore a crown, every man subsequently became accustomed to aristocratic privileges without the necessary virtues for enjoying them; i.e., adultery, being immoral, should above all things be discrete. But discretion, like all forms of restraint, is a vice for the average Southerner, not a virtue. Hence, rampant, no-fault divorce and deep-fried Oreos.

The South held out as long as she could, but eventually modernity prevailed. I’ve often wondered who or what is to blame for the devolution. A case can certainly be made against Protestantism. After all, a democratic religion is not actually a religion – not in any real meaning of the word – so much as it’s formalized justification. Indeed, obedience, much like Caesar, is dead and turned to clay, especially for Southerners, who are more partial to entitlements than to quaint restraints like discretion and duty. You won’t see Captain Butler running off to go down with the flag in today’s age; you’ll find him modifying Bonnie’s child support payments.

Southerners marry and divorce today as if it were their job. I’d rather Southerners simply cheat discretely. Taking an amoral stance on immorality is at least a little better than taking a moral stance on amorality. (The former at least admits immorality exists). That’s something Southerners once understood; indeed, that’s what Southern charm was. “Bless your heart,” after all, was not a proxy for, “Do what you want.” But understanding this is an idea too great for democratic peoples. Discretion is gone with the wind.

The American South was the last great hope of hierarchal order in a free society, discounting, that is, the Catholic Church (which is in danger of becoming as post-Christian as Protestantism’s several denominations). The British held this distinction previously. But talk about the loss of aristocratic virtue. Even the Royal Family doesn’t do adultery right anymore.

This article was firs published by Mainstreet News. It is reprinted here with express permission.

Keeping the British End Up

Fiction sometimes has a way of transcending its most ardent limitation, which is that it is fiction. Just ask Eric Holder, who probably never thought he’d be cast as the villain in a Vin Diesel flick. Fiction’s most successful transcending phenomenon, though, is probably Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007, haberdasher’s muse and the world’s most famous secret agent (never mind the oxymoron). Ever en vogue, Bond this summer made a cameo during the opening ceremony of the London Olympics—an impressive feat for any actual man, let alone a made-up one. But, then, transforming from fictional character to Olympic ambassador is probably an easier task for Bond than his other real-life obligation: defending the West against itself.

Kingsley Amis’s Bond

Two things struck me while recently re-watching “The Spy Who Loved Me,” the tenth James Bond film and the one that the 12 year-old in me still remembers as having starred Caroline Munro. Roger Moore’s turn as 007 may not have been as literary as Timothy Dalton’s or Daniel Craig’s, but he still interpreted the role as something far edgier than Beau Maverick in a tux, even if he doesn’t get credit for it.More importantly: even though I’ve always seen very little attenuation between Ian Fleming’s novels and Cubby Broccoli’s screen treatments, I could never explain why. Until now. I’ve finally realized that Fleming’s Bond (often brooding, sometimes sadistic and occasionally cruel) and the cinematic incarnation (often quick to quip and far more obsessed with sex) exist in the same world, one that shares very little with the world that you or I inhabit. But it’s not the metal-jawed giants, volcanic lairs, and poisonous gardens that differentiate Bond’s world from ours. It’s the politics.Bond doesn’t have a political agenda in the usual sense. In fact, much has been written about the apolitical context within which Bond is usually framed. The Soviets were seldom the primary antagonists, often giving way to politically nonaffiliated madmen who hate East and West indiscriminately. Domestic issues are rarely evoked: there’s some tangential racism in Fleming’s Live and Let Die (attributable to the mores of the time and a Tom Wolfe-like attempt at recreating some urban dialect); there’s a nondescript energy crisis that has everybody—even stiff-collared Tories—up in arms in Guy Hamilton’s underrated “The Man with the Golden Gun;” “Quantum of Solace” portrays an ecologically savvy terrorist. But other than that, and some similar peripherals, the only extent to which Bond has ever been accused of being political has been the occasional complaint from the enlightened left that the world of espionage entails a far greater moral ambiguity than all the girls, gadgets and martinis suggest. (Which is fine. But Jason Bourne is still a whiny bore.)

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t any political appeal to James Bond. In fact, the more I revisit the world of Bond, the more I find that there is a consistently recurring political subtext to Fleming’s novels and the soon-to-be 23 films. Kingsley Amis thought so, too. In his extended essay The James Bond Dossier he wrote:

The England for which Bond is prepared to die, like the reasons why he’s prepared to die for it, is largely taken for granted. This differentiates it, to its advantage, from the England of most Englishmen. … Negative virtues are even more important in escapist than in enlightening literature, and not the least of the blessings enjoyed by Mr. Fleming’s reader is his absolute confidence that whatever any given new Bond may contain, it will not contain bitter protests or biting satire or even witty commentary about the state of the nation. We can get all of that at home.… Politically, Bond’s England is substantially right of center. As the title of the eleventh volume uninhibitedly proclaims, royalty is at the head of things. … An unwontedly emotional passage near the end of Doctor No shows Bond … conferring in the office of the Governor of Jamaica and thinking of home. … ‘His mind drifted into a world of tennis courts and lily pads and kings and queens, of London, of people being photographed with pigeons on their heads in Trafalgar Square…’

The films largely share this trait, portraying Bond as “Her Majesty’s loyal terrier, defender of the so-called faith.” But why is royalty at the head of all things? British institutions, after all, don’t matter so much to real-life Britons. Consider the Queen’s Jubilee earlier this year. All pomp, but what of the circumstance? What the Queen timelessly stands for—empire, class, obligation, responsibility and even Britannia herself—are things today’s British, unlike Bond, reject. This—and not the sex, sadism, and snobbery—is the allure for the Bond fantasist. 007’s Britain is antiquated. It’s not the Britain of Cameron and Clegg. It’s the one with a penchant for staying tyrants—of either the mustachioed or the vertically-challenged variety—and the one that gave us pocket calculators, steel warships, jet airplanes, and loads of other cool stuff. Bond’s Britain is relevant, wealthy, and influential, still a beacon of Western ingenuity. This as opposed to the more accurate depiction of the sterile, cynical, stymied Britain of, say, George Smiley or Harry Palmer. Amis preferred the Fleming mold:

I also find a belief, however unreflecting, in the rightness of one’s cause more sympathetic than the anguished cynicism and the torpid cynicism of Messrs le Carré and Deighton. More useful in an adventure story anyway, and more powerful—so powerful that when the frogman’s suit arrives for Bond in Live and Let Die, I can join with him in blessing the efficiency of M’s “Q” Branch, whereas I know full well that given postwar standards of British workmanship, the thing would either choke him or take him straight to the bottom.

The next time you roll your eyes at the implausibility of invisible Aston-Martins, consider this possibility: it’s not that Bond’s adventures are completely inauthentic, as opposed to the realistic yarns of le Carré—it’s just that in Fleming’s universe, Europeans didn’t stop being industrious once they were introduced to paid leave and exuberant pensions. It’s been said that Bond’s Britain is okay with American superiority. This is preposterous. We “cousins” are well regarded in the Bond realm, but make no mistake, our purpose in a Bond adventure is to be told what’s what by our former colonial masters. Bond may well hold “individual Americans with the highest respect,” says Amis, but “in the plural they’re the neon lit, women-dominated, conspicuous consumers of popular sociology.” Of course, the movies are far more Americanized than the novels. But even there, Amis has a point: has Felix Leiter, Bond’s CIA ally, ever done anything other than take “orders from Bond, the Britisher [while] Bond is constantly doing better than he, showing himself not braver or more devoted, but smarter, wilier, tougher, more resourceful—the incarnation of little old England with her quiet ways”? Answer: No.

A Sexist Dinosaur

Britain’s postwar doldrums remolded Englishmen into something less than their former selves.  This was the real-world environment into which James Bond was born. Bond, Sean Connery told Playboy back in 1965, was a refreshing change of pace for the “predominately grey” Britain of the mid-20th century. 007 displayed characteristics that were then rare and appealing, chief among them: his “self-containment, his powers of decision, his ability to carry on through ‘til the end and to survive. There’s so much social welfare today that people have forgotten what it is to make their own decisions rather than to leave them to others. So Bond is a welcome change.” Yet Bond wasn’t really a change so much as he represented an inherited idea of high-minded masculinity—inherited, I think, not from Ian nor from the commandos and officers the author knew from Naval Intelligence, but from Ian’s father. Major Valentine Fleming was a Tory MP from Henley and an officer of the Oxfordshire Hussars during World War I. He died near Picardy, France, in the trenches, in May 1917, after which he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Order. Incidentally, a fellow named Winston Churchill wrote the major’s obituary:

[Major Fleming] had that foundation of spontaneous and almost unconscious self-suppression in the discharge of what he conceived to be his duty without which happiness, however full … is imperfect. That these qualities are not singular in this generation does not lessen the loss of those in whom they shine. As the war lengthens and intensifies … it seems as if one watched at night a well-loved city whose lights, which burn so bright, which burn so true, are extinguished in the distance in the darkness one by one.

It’s no coincidence that James Bond, like his creator, was orphaned. And if you read carefully between the lines—or listen closely to the give-and-take on screen—you’ll notice that Bond’s relationship with his superior “M” always plays much like the relationship between a headstrong adolescent and a stern, hard-of-praise father, as if both Fleming and Bond are straining for fatherly guidance. (That give-and-take, by the way, is something that Bernard Lee and Robert Brown always get right on-screen and that Judi Dench, by definition, cannot; in fact, the brilliance of “GoldenEye” lies in Pierce Brosnan’s discontent with having a female chief, while the shortcoming of subsequent entries lies in his acceptance of female superiority.)Ian Fleming always denied that he shared character traits with his creation—he said that Bond was merely a composite of his war colleagues. But it’s hard to say that he shared no traits whatsoever: Bond’s penchant for scrambled eggs, short-sleeve Sea Island cotton shirts, and liquor, women, and gambling are reflections of Ian. And Bond’s operational prowess is definitely drawn from the commandos Fleming knew during World War II. But Bond’s intangible virtues are Valentine’s—and, no, these virtues may not have been singular then, but they are quite un-plural now. Where Valentine’s contemporaries took to the trenches, the young men of today’s Britain riot in the streets.  That’s what a half-century of self-entitlement does to a society: it takes the backbone out of people while simultaneously giving them notions of grandeur. This makes them malleable. Make enough people malleable and you can make them, en masse, believe in any fancy or whim. Want to know why gay marriage is inevitable? Because today’s man, coerced into believing in his own emasculation, would introduce himself to a lesbian named Pussy Galore by saying: “I respect your lifestyle choice.” When James Bond met a lesbian named Pussy Galore, he slept with her.

James Bond: the opposite of self-entitlement.

Pieties, Shaken and Stirred

The New York Times’s film review of “Live and Let Die” noted that the Bond movies hold a “certain insolence toward public pieties.” This certainly seems true. But why then are the films—like the books before them—so incredibly popular? The answer is that, like with any good spy, Bond has proven adept at creating a little misdirection here and there. Raymond Chandler famously suggested that Bond was “what every man would like to be and what every woman would like to have between her sheets.” This is generally perceived to mean that men want to be Bond because he daringly saves the world from megalomaniacal madmen while bedding women who lust after him because he’s dangerous. But what if all of this were just cover? What if men wanted to be Bond because secretly—or maybe not so secretly—they wanted to be less neutered, more decisive, more graceful under pressure, more accountable, and less postmodern?

Until now Bond’s been a consistent character. The films sometimes have bordered on self-parody, but he’s always been the same decisive, sometimes cruel, woman-dominating Briton, believing in duty, obligation, and the Crown. Daniel Craig’s incumbency guarantees us that this will continue (with much less of the self-parody), but I worry for how long. I detected a hint of Jason Bourne-like cynicism in the last entry, “Quantum of Solace,” where, in a first for a James Bond flick, the CIA gets into bed with nefarious types and Her Majesty’s government willingly complies. Craig, though, is not only a good Bond, he’s a smart actor. He knows his character. I therefore wonder if he’s ever read Fleming’s original version of “Quantum,” which bore no relation to the movie. It was a short story, in the Somerset Maugham mold, in which Bond reflects that the dramas of ordinary people may be greater and more meaningful than his own. He’s right, of course. Men like James Bond are expendable for a reason. Take away that reason and you take away the nobility—and the purpose—in their expendability. If audiences thought of that, I wonder if they’d see past Bond’s sex and gadgets and superficiality, wonderful and fun though they may be, and realize what really makes James Bond appealing. The reality for ordinary men and women is that we need to reassert some dignity in our ordinary lives. But that reality can’t overcome the pieties of modern discourse: we claim to like our men less assertive and less masculine and less accountable, and we claim to like our governments mired and enabling.

James Bond may be unflappable. He may bed women like Caroline Munro, and he may be MGM’s saving grace. And above all he is durable—come this fall his latest big-screen adventure, “Skyfall,” hits theaters almost 50 years to the day after Sean Connery debuted as the suave super spy in “Dr. No.” But the one thing 007 can’t do is save us from ourselves.

A slightly altered version of this article was first published in The American Conservative in its October 2012 issue. It is reprinted here with express permission.

Chesterton, Call Your Office

St. Paul’s Cathedral, on a rainy, cold day in January 2015. St. Paul’s Cathedral has been the home of many important services, including the funerals of Admiral Nelson, Winston Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher. It is, of course, an Anglican cathedral, which is incongruent with the essay below’s defense of Catholicism. The article is really defending High Church in general. Besides, Florence King liked to tell me that Anglicanism was Catholic Lite. The cathedral is gorgeous. Makes me regret attending church in what looks like a dead-space Ikea.

Protestants, iconoclastic by our nature, eventually define God down to the point of ineffectiveness.

Troubled by this truth for some time, I was again reminded of it during a recent church service in which I was forced to listen to a New International reading of the 23rd Psalm.

Traditionally, the 23rd Psalm goes a little something like: “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want… Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me…”

But as I was sitting in the congregation the other day, I heard instead: “The LORD is my shepherd. I lack nothing… Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil…” Even though I walk through the darkest valley… Now, that’s a clanger if ever I heard one.

Whereas the King James passage flows rhythmically, the New International version sounds like Linda Blair regurgitating pea soup. More importantly, it makes no sense, theologically or otherwise. Who, after all, is afraid of a dark valley? I would think more people are afraid of Virginia Woolfe. Not a single soul ever said: Woe to us, for we walk through a valley of no light. It’s just not scary. A fellow can simply wait to walk the valley when the moon waxes. Or he can take a flashlight. Or a candle. Or he can navigate by the annoying glare on his smartphone. Or, hell, he can start a fire or shoot a flare. If nothing else, his eyes will adjust over time.

But the valley of the shadow of death? Now that doesn’t sound so easily traversed. And indeed, that is the point. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. I will fear no evil because a great and powerful God comforts me; I will fear no evil because an unfathomable Being, Whose transcendent order relegates even death far beneath Him, walks with me.

I’m incessantly told three things by Protestants: first, that Catholics place too much emphasis on works instead of Grace; second, that it doesn’t take a pope to talk to God; and third, that a formal pomp and circumstance – like flowery, arcane language – doesn’t cultivate a personal relationship with God. Hence such travesties as the New International 23rd Psalm – it’s all a part of Protestantism’s master plan to make God more accessible. Not unlike matriculation at Auburn, however, accessibility often means the opposite of enlightenment. For instance, Grace and works cannot be divorced. Moreover, the Catholic Church never said anything about believers not being able to directly communicate with God, merely that the Church, as an institution, is in a better place to receive Gods transmissions than are fallible, depraved commoners. Secondly, personal relationships are, to a varying degree, emotional, thus undependable. Hence, marriages are meant to be a threefold chord, uneasily broken, between man, wife, and God; so, too, are spiritual relationships threefold as well, with man and God connected by an institution that’s been mortared together by centuries of thought and order.

Having a God who’s only as impressive as a flashlight is why a Protestant nation will always be a nation in decline. Flashlights are no way to steer a people. Institutions are.

This article was first published by MainstreetNews (February 2012). Reprinted here with express permission.  

Died on the 4th of July

Fisher Ames, the best of the founders.

Fisher Ames (1758-1808) of Dedham, Massachusetts is not exactly a forgotten Founding Father. The general public may not remember him, but historians and scholars haven’t forgotten Ames so much as they’ve dismissed him. John W. Malsberger, in his 1982 essay “The Political Thought of Fisher Ames,” wrote that for much of American history scholars considered Ames nothing more than an extremist “who resisted the idealism of the American Revolution,” an unstable man whose writing was so “infected with hysterical and paranoid symptoms that it is difficult to believe that he represented a sane body of thought.”

Henry Adams was more poetic. Ames’s “best political writing,” he wrote, “was saturated with the despair of the tomb to which his wasting body was condemned.”

Yet much can be learned from the life of Ames, and not just from his rhetoric (which gave us the wittiest of all retorts when, in response to the declaration that all men are created equal, he quipped: “But differ greatly in the sequel”) or from his writing (“Constitutions are but paper; society is the substratum of government”). He was, in Russell Kirk’s words, a man many years dying. This was because in his youth, well before his tubercular demise, he displayed more promise than perhaps any of our other great statesmen. Fisher Ames personified two of conservatism’s most indelible tenets: life is fragile and all is vanity.

Ames began his political journey at Harvard, where he enrolled during the summer of his twelfth year—an early start for this oldest of souls. Providence could not have placed him in a better place at a better time, for he was afforded the opportunity to couch his education in the context of the single great political question of his time. As war with Britain loomed, one of the school’s benefactors remarked that Ames and his classmates were brought “to such a pitch of enthusiasm” that it was “difficult for their tutors to keep them within due bounds.”

At the time, Ames was enamored with notions of liberty and independence. As a member of Harvard’s Speaking Club, he gave such patriotic orations as a recital of Benjamin Church’s speech on the Boston Massacre (“When will the locust leave the land?”) and a rendition of Cicero’s defense of Titus Annius Milo (“by my single efforts has it been brought to pass that right, and equity, and laws, and liberty, and modesty, and chastity remain in this city”). But he was also unknowingly receiving his first lesson in conservative thought. Soon he would see how the people embraced their “liberty.” He would not like what he saw.

His eyes opened in 1786, when boom and bust hastily descended on the new republic. The bust proved difficult to weather, especially for rural inhabitants of New England. A precipitous fall in agricultural prices, a shortage of paper money, high taxes, and a rise in foreclosures led many rural New Englanders—believers in an inalienable right to protest the state—to take up arms against their newly formed governments. Led by Daniel Shays, an ex-captain in the Continental Army, the rebellion shut down numerous county courts and brought the impotence of the Articles of Confederation to light.

Though the uprising was quickly quelled, conservative interests in New England recognized the ease with which civilized men could regress “to barbarism . . . weary of liberty, and unworthy of it; arming their sacrilegious hands against it, though it was bought with their blood, and was once the darling pride of their hearts.” Ames believed that because the Massachusetts constitution was the product of “the free act of the people . . . treason against such a constitution implies a high degree of moral depravity.” He also believed that such moral depravity was unavoidable unless “sage politicians” could eradicate “the destructive notions that the seditious” had “infused in the people.”

Ames’s faith in “sage politicians” reflects the fading optimism that he still held for the American enterprise. About this time he wrote, with decidedly less predestination than in subsequent musings, “If we fall we fall by our folly not our fate.” And in defending the idea of biennial elections, he gave credence to the “sober second thought of the people.” Such credence he would never entertain later in life.

Whatever optimism Ames may have felt in the aftermath of Shays’s misadventure, the French Revolution would exorcise it. The Terror was one of two influences that finally molded Fisher’s conservative philosophy. The other was witnessing firsthand his fellow congressmen in action. He had first come to the nation’s capital—then situated in New York—with a great deal of enthusiasm and all the fire that political upstarts display. But by the time he left office in 1797, he had realized that the great orators and statesmen of our land were anything but “demigods” or “Roman senators.” According to biographer Winfred E.A. Bernhard, even some of the men Ames held in esteem—James Madison for one—he found too “pedantic” and “impractical” for governing.

Factions, sectionalism, and a growing democratic sensibility among the people left him with a jaded opinion of governing—“I despise politics when I think of this office”—and the uprising in France left him with an even bleaker view of those who were charged with electing him in the first place. The French Revolution’s bloodletting foreshadowed for Ames the future of the West and reflected for him the true nature of democracies. “Theories fit for angels,” he said of the Jacobins’ creed, “have been adopted for the use of a multitude, who have been found, when left to what is called their self-government, unfit to be called men.”

Despite his growing melancholy, Ames managed to parlay early success as a country lawyer into a seat at Massachusetts’s constitutional ratifying convention. From there he upset Samuel Adams in the nation’s first congressional elections in 1788. Once in Congress, he helped author the First Amendment, played a vital role in lobbying for Alexander Hamilton’s financial policies, and wrote the lower house’s address to Washington when he retired from the presidency. Most famously, he arose in opposition to Jefferson’s Republicans on the question of funding Jay’s Treaty. His words movingly evoked the faith that composes a nation and binds its pledges to others:

What is patriotism? Is it a narrow affection for the spot where a man was born? Are the very clods where we tread entitled to this ardent preference because they are greener? No, sir; that is not the character of the virtue, and it soars higher for its object. It is an extended self-love, mingling with all the enjoyments of life, and twisting itself with the minutest filaments of the heart. It is thus we obey the laws of society, because they are the laws of virtue. In their authority we see, not the array of force and terror, but the venerable image of our country’s honor. Every good citizen makes that honor his own, and cherishes it not only as precious, but as sacred. He is willing to risk his life in its defense, and is conscious that he gains protection while he gives it.

For what rights of a citizen will be deemed inviolable when a state renounces the principles that constitute their security? Or if his life should not be invaded, what would its enjoyments be in a country odious in the eyes of strangers and dishonored in his own? Could he look with affection and veneration to such a country as his parent? The sense of having one would die within him; he would blush for his patriotism, if he retained any, and justly, for it would be a vice. He would be a banished man in his native land.

Funding of the treaty helped stay a war with Britain and ushered in a decade of prosperous trade with the country from which we won independence.

Successes notwithstanding, Ames was forced to forego reelection in 1796 due to declining health. To his chagrin, nothing he achieved while in office seemed to carry any lasting influence. The United States were shifting culturally and electorally. The Federalists were declining as a party. The Republicans—the “Jeffs” as he called them—were growing. Soon, war with Britain would come; France under Napoleon would loom as a threat; rights-speak would become the vernacular of the governed as well as the governors; and Jefferson’s shadow would forever cast itself upon the nation.

Ames believed that there was little he and like-minded Federalists could do but “mitigate a tyranny.” His outlook not only struck many of his contemporaries as alarmist, but later thinkers—even conservatives—tended to agree. Russell Kirk, in The Conservative Mind, wrote, “Ames was wrong, so far as the immediate future was concerned; for already a counterbalance to American radicalism was making its weight felt. That saving influence was in part the product of an innate moderation in the planter society Jefferson represented.”

But Jefferson’s planter society happened to have hung its hat on an immoderate—and infamously peculiar—institution. And whatever Federalist ideals were in place before Reconstruction, we lost them in its wake.

Ames’s philosophy can be summed up as follows: the “power of the people, if uncontroverted, is licentious and mobbish.” But if checked by a powerful and well-led state, a more virtuous citizenry could be procured, one that feels a “love of country diffused through the Society and ardent in each individual, that would dispose, or rather impel every one to do or suffer much for his country, and permit no one to do anything against it.”

He realized, however, that a republican state cannot coincide with a democratic state—into which he perceived us slipping—and a democratic state cannot nurture a more virtuous citizenry. “A democratick society will soon find its morals the incumbrance of its race, the surly companion of its licentious joys. . . . In a word there will not be morals without justice; and though justice might possibly support a democracy, yet a democracy cannot possibly support justice.”

He warned of “schemes of an abolition of debts and an equal distribution of property” that would be “pursued with unremitting industry.” For Ames, the truth was that “our country is too big for union, too sordid for patriotism, too democratick for liberty. What is to become of it? He who made it best knows. Its vice will govern it, by practising upon its folly. This is ordained for democracies.”

This bleak prophecy sounds irredeemably pessimistic. Yet the skull grinned. “Our disease,” Ames wrote,

is democracy. It is not the skin that festers—our very bones are carious and their marrow blackens with gangrene. Which rogues shall be first, is of no moment—our republicanism must die, and I am sorry for it. . . . Nevertheless, though I indulge no hopes, I derive much entertainment from the squabbles in Madam Liberty’s family. After so many liberties have been taken with her, I presume she is no longer a miss and a virgin, though she may still be a goddess.

Even on the verge of death, he embraced a wry sense of humor and found solace, away from politics, in friends. “My health,” he wrote to one, “is exceedingly tender. While I sit by the fire and keep my feet warm, I am not sick. I have heard of a college lad’s question, which tolerably describes my case: ‘Whether bare being, without life or existence, is better than not to be or not?’ I cannot solve so deep a problem; but as long as you are pleased to allow me a place in your esteem, I shall continue to hold better than ‘not to be’ to be.”

A sheer pessimist would not have conveyed such warmth in his waning hours, nor would he have found Madam Liberty still a goddess.

Fisher Ames died on the Fourth of July, 1808. Everyone knows the story of how Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the Fourth of July, 1826, a half-century after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Every Independence Day, great respect is given to the memory of Jefferson—and at least a little to Adams. But no mention is ever made of that other Founding Father who died on the Fourth of July, primarily because he wasn’t a president. The arch-elitist Ames is forgotten beside two men whose 44-man fraternity resembles the closest thing we have to a monarchy.

You can’t make a democratic society remember something it doesn’t want to remember, which brings us back to where we came in. Anti-statist conservatives forget that we left the state of nature in the first place because the souls of men, which are inherently depraved, need nurturing, and only institutions can provide that. But democracy will not tolerate institutions of restraint, political or otherwise. Fisher Ames warned us well, if only we could recall his words.

This article was first published by The American Conservative in its July 2012 issue. Reprinted here with with express permission.

Maybe it’s the Heat: An Irreverent Look at Southern Politics

(Copyright 2012 by L.A. Hill)

It wasn’t all that long ago that the road to the White House supposedly led through Dixie. This perception owed much to the intermittent successes of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Their Southern ties were allegedly helpful in breaching the otherwise solidly conservative South. It also owed much to Richard Nixon, whose infamous Southern strategy helped end Democratic dominance in the region. Recent events, however, cast doubt on this wisdom.

Clinton, for instance, didn’t need to take any Southern states at all. He would have won the Presidency without Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas in ’92 and without Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas in ’96. Likewise, Obama, who managed to take Virginia, North Carolina and Florida in ’08, could have given John McCain all 55 of his Southern-fried electoral votes and still have won by a larger margin than Dubya enjoyed in either 2000 or 2004. 

So much for perception. Not only does the South presently mean very little in Presidential politics – irrespective of Rick Perry’s possible candidacy – but it meant as little twenty years ago.

Still, maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise. Maybe politics in the South often consist of more rhetoric than substance, more perception than reality, heavy on color and eccentricity but a bit thinner on long-term influence than her native sons would have you believe. You might say that, in today’s political arena, Southerners are more Sydney Greenstreet than Humphrey Bogart: colorful and informed, perhaps, but not exactly leading man material and not too terribly intricate to the plot. Case in point: Newt Gingrich, who, it turns out, is still running for President (who knew?). 

__________

Historically, Southern statesmen were rather prominent. There were, for instance, a slew of important Virginians, so many in fact that most school children only ever bother to learn the ones that were President, forgetting such luminaries as John Randolph of Roanoke (who was himself a bit of an eccentric) and a whole horde of guys named Lee who weren’t named Robert. But the Upper South (see also Maryland) seems to have been infected by the mediocrity, and the preposterousness, of the Deep South’s longer-term political dysfunction. After all, only the Deep South has ever produced an impeached President. And we’ve done it twice. What’s more: Only in the South could Zell Miller get a popularity bump from wanting to challenge Chris Matthews to a duel on national television. And only the South could cultivate a real-life John Grisham villain like John Edwards.

What Mencken once wrote about Southern art might well apply to today’s Southern politicians. “Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician.  It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity.” To the Sage of Baltimore, politics, even in the Upper South, were “cheap, ignorant, parochial, idiotic,” with “scarcely a man in office above the rank of a professional job-seeker…” And just think: Mencken wrote that light-years before George Allen went around calling people monkeys.

The question, really, is why? Why does the talent pool of Southern statecraft suddenly –and so often – double as a drowning pool? I can think of five plausible, though imperfect, theories. Consider:

 1. If They Could Ever Just Get It on Paper  

Maybe the South’s great politician shortage is due to the very credible possibility that many of her intellectuals take to writing.

Ernest Hemingway (not a Southerner) famously said something about how all American literature owes a debt to Twain’s Huck Finn, and although Twain was a Missourian (thus also not a Southerner), his white suits and penchant for smoking and saying genuinely witty things about Yankees made him a Southerner in all but birthright. And when Faulkner later said something nice about him, that sealed his fate as a de facto Serious Southern Writer.

With Twain’s legacy hanging in the balance, what kind of Southern man, or woman, would dare bother with such trivial things as statecraft? Indeed, the South’s firm grip on American literature must be preserved against the onslaught of the great many authors who may have read Faulkner, but never really heard him, the sort of gents who think Gone with the Wind is just another melodrama and who throw darts at worn pictures of Tom Wolfe during extended periods of boredom and writer’s block.

Of course, there’s no reason why a Southern politician can’t also write. Other great architects of statecraft have written. Disraeli did it (and he’s still right about the Corn Laws).   

2. Mad Dogs and Southerners 

Maybe it’s all on account of the heat. Geographically speaking, Old Dominions like Jefferson and Madison were only nominally Southern; for while it can be dreadfully swampy and muggy in the Mid-Atlantic – as anybody who’s ever visited D.C. in the summertime can attest – Virginia gentlemen don’t cook in the sun like their counterparts do in the deep, way-down South. Some say that the reason Sherman burned his way to Savannah so easily was because everything was already smoking.

“Mad dogs and Englishmen,” the song goes, “go out in the midday sun.” Well, so too do Southerners. Most Britons, however, finally retreated from their colonial outposts back to their homeland, which is a far more suitable climate for venturing forth midday. Southerners, on the other hand, have withstood Dixieland’s warm temperatures for well over three hundred consecutive years. All that heat and humidity is bound to boil your brain, to the point where, if you’re Lester Maddox for instance, you might forget which way to ride your bicycle.  

That said, the South has no shortage of ways to stay cool, air conditioning not always being among them. Ceiling fans are useful. Seersucker is essential. And no Southerner who’s any Southerner doesn’t occasionally partake in a few cocktails on the rocks, a point which segues nicely into…

3. The Southern Art of Inebriation, or Bourbon: America’s (Official) Native Spirit Since 1964  

Maybe there’s a shortage of durable Southern political talent because Southerners tend to drink. Famously drink.

The have-nots, for instance, drink in part because they have nothing else to do and in part because they have an incurable addiction for government exploitation – i.e., the more the gub’ment taxes cigarettes and alcohol, the more inclined are welfare recipients to smoke and drink. Their desire is irrepressible, like Dr. Strangelove’s hand. I don’t know if this is learned or if Radical Republicans put something in the water during Reconstruction.  

The well-to-do, on the other hand, drink because their ancestors drank. Some say this lineage of alcoholics is traceable to the aftermath of the late great unpleasantness, when planters and other stylized aristocrats drowned their sorrows in bourbon-filled decanters, but it can probably be traced back even farther than that, to the mother country in fact, where folks have an ancient penchant for slugging whisky; a good Southerner, after all, is essentially an Englishman on the wrong side of the pond.

Southern intellectuals drink because they want to be initiated into that fraternity of Serious Southern Writers, and they know, as does everyone, that Faulkner never got where he did sober. Admittedly, there are grave risks to drinking oneself into oblivion just for the sake of literature. Faulkner, after all, never could keep his tenses straight, and, Lord, did he love run-ons. But blackout often enough and you might come-to with a Pulitzer or a Nobel Prize sitting on your mantle. 

Such copious amounts of alcohol have to account for at least some of the reason why Southerners either fall off the wagon of political stability or, else, never even manage to board. But even this theory, which is probably superior to the others, has problems:

First, many Southern politicos wind up drying out when they eventually find Jesus, which they all do. 

Second, drinking excessively was never a problem for many non-Southern politicos. Buckley, for instance, liked a good nip, and Churchill, who wasn’t all that shabby at governing, famously drank like a fish.

4. The Religiosity of College Football

Folks in the South take their college football the way they take their bourbon – seriously. Maybe too seriously. The unbearable strains of the college football season are enough to make even the most resolute of men crack. And although a once-fanatic alumnus may eventually learn to temper his emotional investment, all it takes to send a man into perpetual orbit around the cuckoo’s nest is one, single, last-minute, heartbreaking loss to a conference rival.

Then again, it’s not always losing that drives men to instability; some men actually crack under the euphoria of winning. The institutionalization of Louisiana Governor Earl Long, who once attended Louisiana State, came a year after LSU won the Southeastern Conference. Coincidence? Probably not.

And then there was former Texas Governor Bill Clements, who, between stints as Chief Executive, paid Southern Methodist student-athletes from a slush fund.  Clements, though, wasn’t impeached, for reasons which should be clear to any Southerner – politicians down here may have quirks; they may have a short shelf life; and they may be incorrigible; but they’re only as crazy as their constituents. 

The problem with the theory that the intensity of college athletics sends otherwise competent politicians into the loony bin is that, because so many schools in the South have entrenched winning traditions, their politically aspirant alumni can coast through life comforted by the successes they’ve already witnessed and thereby refrain from stressing too terribly much about victories yet to come. Long droughts, of course, might cause some men to relapse into seriously poor decision making, a la Clements, but few schools go through long droughts. It’s simply not tolerated. South Carolinians, for instance, will keep Strom Thurmond in the Senate for a half-century, but go a few seasons without beating Clemson and the Head Ball Coach in Columbia will be looking for a new job – guaranteed.

5. Behind Every Good Man…

Traditional Southern women are particularly skilled at having fun. This is certainly true of the Southern politician’s wife.

Almost every future male Guvnah or Sinnittuh dated, for at least some period in college, a sweet sorority girl. This girl accompanied him to college football games and socials and band parties and picnics at Twelve Oaks, always with a Dixie-Cupped cocktail in-hand or with a longneck wrapped in a koozie. Her light feet on the dance floor and ability to consume copious amounts of alcohol (see above – it applies to Great Southern Women, too), all the while displaying mannerly charm, entrenched in her then-beau the theory of the consummate Southern socialite, an idea which he then looked for in every potential mate.

Later, after one of these socialites becomes his wife, she uses her social skills to host her own gatherings, which always include well-stocked wet bars and a graduation from Dixie Cups to some combination of old fashioned tumblers and thin-stemmed flutes. This lifestyle of perpetual socializing only intensifies as her hubby-politician climbs each rung on his way to the proverbial top. The higher he ascends, the bigger the parties; the bigger the parties, the bigger the cocktails; the bigger the cocktails, the fewer the brain cells. And so on.

In other words, this theory is related to the theory that Southern men perhaps drink too much, a theory which I’ve already disproved.       

Of course, it’s hard to discuss the destabilizing impact women have on Southern politics without discussing the obvious – sex. More than a few aspiring Southern political careers have been derailed because of adulterous affairs. The thing is, I’ve no idea why Southern men are so bad at philandering. They should be quite adept at it, primarily because the South retained a sense of class and hierarchy long after the rest of the country democratized; aristocracies, in turn, require restraint. But when every man became a king, although no man wore a crown, every man subsequently became accustomed to aristocratic privileges without the necessary virtues for enjoying them; i.e., adultery, being immoral, should, above all things, be discrete. But discretion is necessarily rare in our democratic age, even in the South, which, like everything else, eventually gave way to democratization and all of its egalitarian pitfalls. 

If former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford had been a noble, maybe he would have been better at keeping his quirky, extramarital affair discrete. Nothing can end your governorship more prematurely, and scuttle your presidential ambitions quicker, than going to hike the Appalachian Trail… in Argentina. A Windsor would have known better.

Incidentally, in today’s post-feminist age, it is necessary to ask whether men cause female politicians to come unwound?  Perhaps. But it hasn’t been long enough since the glass ceiling shattered to consider the root of female politico instability, which may or may not be the same as that of the male variety.  And at any rate, most – though not all – of the Deep South’s crazy female politicos are either minor, unimportant Members of Congress, or ex-Governors from Alaska. Admittedly, Alaska is about as distant as geographically possible from the South. But Southerners have embraced said ex-Governor as one of our own. Lord only knows why. We have more than enough of our own walking non-sequiturs to go around. We needn’t adopt others.

__________

The foregoing theories of Southern instability, as irreverent as they are, nevertheless conceal a sacred truth: Southerners may be strange, but we’re still infinitely better off than any Yankee. 

Yankees don’t write like we do in the South; they don’t drink like we do; it’s cold like the Siberian wilderness up there; and their brand of college football is far inferior; what’s more, their women…

…Well, reflect on the two most recent Yankee First Ladies:

Michelle Obama is to today’s school children what Nurse Ratched was to R.P. McMurphy, keeping red-blooded American boys away from their World Series games and s’mores; and Hillary – who only married a Southerner; she couldn’t convert – hasn’t seen a good looking skirt since her husband asked what the definition of “is” is. 

In that kind of environment – cold, aloof, sober and puritanical – you get a whole different kind of political instability. 

__________

All sarcasm aside, there is much to be proud of in Southern political history. Mencken, to his credit, didn’t think that the South would always be barren of culture and class, nor can it. But this doesn’t change the fact that the days of great Southern statesmen seem to be on hold, nor does it change the fact that the road to the White House, and thus the road to healthcare reform, to reining in the budget and to narrowing our foreign policy, runs around, and not through, Dixie. This is particularly unfortunate because Southern conservatism, historically unique in so many ways, could be a great bulwark against, both, the collectivist and individualist tendencies present in Washington. 

Southern conservatism once drew from a succession of such minds as James Madison, John Marshall, John Randolph and John C. Calhoun. Today, though, Southern conservatism increasingly seems less and less conservative, having transformed into a shallow, generic, anti-statist populism. Moreover, even though such men as Marshall and Randolph differed in their views on consolidation and local control, they sought the same ends: the pursuit of virtue and ordered liberty. Today’s Southern “conservative,” on the other hand, seems to value liberty and self-preservation more than order; he bears an optimism reminiscent of Jeffersonianism (which is neither conservative nor Southern); and he is as egalitarian as his progressive enemies. Hence the unique support in the South for the Tea Party, even though Calhoun, who is still revered in Southern history, would perhaps be reluctant: “Who knows not that if you would save the people, you must often oppose them?” Indeed.   

The South isn’t as Southern as it used to be. But nor is conservatism as conservative. I’ve tried asking my intellectual friends if this is a coincidence, but they’re too busy trying to pen their magnum opus amidst a bourbon-induced haze.

As it stands, though, I’d venture that the answer is “no.”

They Call it a Game: Why Sports Matter

(Copyright 2014 by Lucius Asbury Hill)

A Fine, Slow Burn

An essay on football’s cultural significance has been permeating my brain these last few years like a fine, slow burn. Although a thesis never really ignited, the words were always there, simmering, waiting to come together… Or maybe I was just being indecisive.

Up until very recently I figured this indecisiveness was just as well. After all, my essay was always anchored in the NFL’s pending concussion crisis, the effects of which – and, really, this is why it’s not a crisis at all – won’t be known for another twenty or thirty years, when the current crop of  high school talent eventually matriculates the game and retires from professional competition. By then there will be enough data to discern just how dangerous football really is – at all levels – and whether the safety measures instituted by the NCAA and the NFL are enough to mitigate the trauma that may well be the proximate cause of various neurological disorders, namely chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

The cause célèbre that we know as “player safety,” though, has had to share the spotlight these many years with a string of other scandals and controversies, controversies that have at times transcended sports. Chief among them, the Penn State scandal. But to be fair, I don’t think that the child abuse that occurred in Happy Valley deserves to be wrangled into a discussion on football, which is tangential to the crimes and whatever institutional malfeasance occurred there. The same goes for Jameis Winston. Last year’s bounty scandal in New Orleans, however, remains a different matter, as does the present controversy swirling down in Miami, where Richie Incognito is said to have tortured Dolphins teammate Jonathan Martin so pervasively that Martin chose to quit the team.

Sans Penn State, these controversies all share something in common. The public’s collective reaction to them has displayed more than a little of what George Will is always calling our cognitive dissonance. On the one hand football is more popular and profitable than anything since Roman chariot racing. On the other hand, this mass popularity seems invariably inept at resisting not just change, but contempt.  Increasingly, and without the irony, fans and pundits sound and look more than a little like Captain Renault who feigned shock and indignation that games of chance were being played at Rick’s Café Américain, all the while his pockets brimmed with spoils.  

The thing is, a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in sports is and always has been common place, as engrained in them, perhaps, as our best traditions and our most heated of rivalries. For instance, though the NFL is a multi-billion dollar enterprise; though college football coaches make more than school presidents and, for that matter, more than some countries; though grown men often wear jerseys with the same frequency as their children; and though this kind of obsession has been steadily on the rise for going on six decades now, how often have you heard somebody turn around and tell you, It’s just a game, you know…?  

It’s just a game. What does that even mean, exactly? I know it’s a game; that’s why it’s important. But most people don’t seem to get that… and there’s the rub. For, it was while contemplating this fact, as I was recently trying to sit through FRONTLINE’s League of Denial (the over-hyped hit piece which indicts the NFL, a la Big Tobacco, for covering up its relationship with neurological disorders) that I finally realized what this cognitive dissonance means. Finally, there it was – my thesis, staring at me right square in the face: Football matters for reasons unrelated to why most people care about football.

The interesting thing is that this is a lesson I’d already learned.  

Courage and Beauty: Moving Men Against Their Will

Boxing is real. Put another way, boxing is boxing. Joyce Carol Oates once wrote that boxing was not a metaphor for anything, that it was not “a symbol for something beyond itself, as if its uniqueness were merely an abbreviation or iconographic… Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.” Boxing, you see, doesn’t represent anything other than what it is – two men opposing the other, endeavoring to beat the other into utter submission. It is, therefore, precisely what it holds itself out to be and that is why – as we become more and more progressive, enlightened, “better” – fewer and fewer people embrace it.  The death of Duk Koo Kim. The tragedy of Muhammad Ali’s later years – our greatest athlete suffering physically, mentally. The death of Benny Paret. These are the natural consequences of combat in a ring, the specter that perpetually hovers over boxing. But because boxing does not pretend to be anything else, because boxing cannot pretend to be anything else, it can’t hide from its realities. Boxing embraces death because boxing can’t avoid it. Society, though, only deals in metaphor; society does not deal in realities. Norman Mailer:

“…the Establishment has no idea of death, no tolerance for Heaven or Hell, no comprehension of bloodshed. It sees no logic in pain. To the establishment these notions are a detritus from the past.”

Football, while inherently gladiatorial, has the modern advantage of being able to disguise its realities. It can hide under the aegis of society’s vanities. But when you strip it of all its flash; of all the fantasy points and rotisserie leagues; of the Super Bowl parties; and of half time shows and Jerry’s World; of the Raiderettes and the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders; and of all the pomp and circumstance of collegiate bowl games and their capricious national titles; when all is bare and stripped away, football is cut of the same cloth as boxing. Put another way:

The foundation of football has been, and always will be, blocking and tackling. No coach, from midgets to Gruden, has ever hypothesized anything different. That is to say, football at its foundation consists of two men opposing each other, endeavoring, as Russ Grimm once described it, to move the other against his will.     

But when you deal with sports as metaphor, that’s when “perspective” tells you it is just a game. But football is not just a game, it is a game, the premise of which is a real and tangible feat, difficult and grueling perhaps, but real and tangible nonetheless. There is real, perceptible value in moving another man against his will, just as there is real, perceptible value in running faster than another man or jumping higher than another man or beating another man into submission. Conversely, have you ever wondered what real value there is in social security? Or Obamacare? Or compulsory public education? Or affirmative action?  Or capitalism? If you are good at affirmative action, where does your skill lie? What does that sentence even mean? A society that is adept at information sharing is adept at what precisely? Social Security has importance – it exists in the first place – merely because a certain group of people attributed value to it. It does not exist in the real – authentic – world. Moving another man against his will, however, is an act that exists in the real world. When done well, when done with grace, it should be admired, for no other reason than that it was accomplished, than that it was even endeavored.   But that’s the problem: People don’t see football as anything but metaphor. It represents their childhood, or the innocence of youth; or determinism; or doggedness; or perseverance; or the American Spirit or the American Dream or the American Experiment or whatever. Football is a vicarious pleasure for most people, but a vicarious pleasure only. And that, really, is why the concussion crisis and the rules changes and the awareness which stems from it are so saddening. For football to survive in popularity, for people to be able to marginalize the Richie Incognitos of the world, the masses will continue to mask the game’s true nature, to turn away from the contest, shocked, shocked! that brutal men play it, brutally, unrelentingly and that it is beautiful precisely because it is a sport and because it is difficult and because there is no incongruence between the two.  George Will again: “Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic – in a word, moral – undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage.”

But people don’t lovingly contemplate football (or boxing, or baseball – which Will was writing about – or our other great sports) for reasons like beauty and courage. Instead, they contemplate football for vicarious reasons; for fantasy points or as an excuse to imbibe or as a distraction from their boring, mundane, digitally-centered life, a life where the safety nets of the modern State protect us from anything real – like death; injury; pain; Heaven; Hell…

People will continue to obsess over their sports teams – and I too obsess over mine – but as they do so they will every so often – because they think of sport only as metaphor – turn to you when things get real and say It’s just a game you know. It is, to them, just a game and therefore not worth fatigue or death or dismemberment or great contemplation because we’re entitled to have others contemplate such things for us. The individual mandate can circumvent death; the SSA can guarantee retirement; the Supreme Court can undermine sexual inequality; school boards can guarantee knowledge. And we accept this is the way it is because our heads are stuck too far up our collective asses to even contemplate the possibility that the things we believe are civically important – the things we think we are entitled to – actually matter none. In this sense, people will not change. Which means football will. In fact, football has already changed, and some of the players, too. Where this leads – the extent of the change – I do not pretend to know; it will perhaps be incremental. But if the white middle class; and the enlightened liberals; and the entitled of America,  even the so-called conservatives, never embrace football for football, then at some point I can’t help but wonder if, with their noses turned up, they leave football – because of its inherent dangers – to the inner cities or the inhabitants of our lower socio-economic classes, and to the blacks and the Hispanics, all the while they enjoy “their” team’s successes from afar, but for reasons unrelated to why football actually matters. Football is great fun, so long as it isn’t real.    

The Existentialism of Diggin’ Ditches

A lawyer once slapped me on the back while we were waiting on an order to come down from the bench. It was late on a Friday afternoon; neither of us wanted to be there. In an attempt at consolation, he said to me, “Sure beats diggin’ ditches, though, don’t it?”   

Well, no. Lawyering doesn’t beat digging ditches because there is something real and fine about digging ditches. Ditch diggers have my profound respect for the same reasons that Green Berets and offensive linemen and Ken Norton and midshipmen and Jake Scott have my respect. They did – and do – something real.  Something authentic. Something that has actual value in and of itself, not value that has been attributed to it.

I’m sure that many who read this essay, now that it has finally come to fruition, will themselves want to dig a ditch and bury me in it, alive, along with my pretensions and condescension and whatever else they find objectionable about me. Their criticisms, even if valid, don’t make me wrong, though, and, honestly, I’d probably accept burial at this point with welcomed relief, because underneath all that earth I wouldn’t have to listen anymore to people who are shocked, shocked! that football is dangerous. I wouldn’t have to listen to the rayformers, as Mr. Dooley called them, constantly trying to reform that which doesn’t need reforming. And I’d be done dealing with metaphors on a daily basis. There are, after all, no legal fictions down there, in all that dirt, no affirmative action, or strict scrutiny, or targeting, or defenseless receivers, or individual mandate and none of that the-ground-can’t-cause-a-fumble-nonsense.