Home Free: Has America Turned a Corner?
On November 17, I posted a link on my Facebook page. The article, “This Is What Revolution Looks Like” by Chris Hedges, is not for the faint of heart:
Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. … Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss.
We can and should debate whether Hedges’ strong words are justified. But debating is not what the Ed Burhops of this world are interested in. Here’s the comment Ed posted on my Facebook page: “This is what morons look like…..come on get serious.”
I single out Ed Burhop by name because he asked for it; writing publicly implies preparedness to take responsibility for one’s words and their consequences. I invited him to do just that, by calling him out:
Ed, you might disagree with me (and tens of millions of other Americans), but your comment is just a gratuitous personal insult – not so much to me as to the many, many thousands of people who have been camping out the last two months because they care deeply about the future of our society. If that’s all you have to say, don’t post on my wall. On the other hand, if you have something intelligent and/or constructive to say, please do.
I haven’t heard from Ed since then, which is disappointing albeit not surprising. Ed is a longtime good friend of my brother’s, and in person he’s a nice guy. He comes to mind whenever I try to believe that friendship should trump politics. But sometimes it shouldn’t. Personal loyalties notwithstanding, indulging in drive-by rhetoric in today’s climate is both hateful and unhelpful. Is Ed – I single him out, but there are many like him – interested in doing something useful, or simply in bullying and shutting up the rest of us?
Last week I quoted Dorli Rainey, the 84-year-old woman who gave a defiant interview to Keith Olbermann after being pepper sprayed by Seattle police. “I remember Goebbels,” she told him. A friend who read my article praised me for my “point about paying heed to Dorli Rainey … When the last of the Holocaust survivors is gone, the deniers will come out of their holes.” That’s a good point, but it’s not the point Ms. Rainey made. Of course we should remember the Holocaust. But Ms. Rainey was talking not about the Holocaust, but about the domestic repression and official lying for which Joseph Goebbels, as Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, was responsible. If you listen to her full interview with Olbermann, which I highly recommend, you’ll hear her talking not about the killing of Jews but about how non-Jewish Germans allowed themselves to be lied to.
The uncomfortable truth is that foreign war, persecution of unpopular minorities – Jews in Germany then, Muslims in America now – and the repression of mainstream society go hand in hand, in any country that lets itself slide down the slippery slope. The questions for Americans today are how far down the slope we’ve slipped, and whether we can still scramble back up it. In the decade-plus since 9/11 – more accurately, since the national trauma of the disputed 2000 election – a lot of water has gone under the bridge. Each time we let something slide without taking honest and self-critical stock of our national situation, it becomes harder to retrieve the self-confident middle-class America we still vaguely remember from the now-distant late 20th century.
It’s probably already too late to go back, but that doesn’t mean that all is lost. We’re still alive together on this planet, and we still have choices to make. For my part, I want to live in a decent country and a decent world, and one thing I know is that there’s no hope of these if we don’t struggle and, if necessary, fight for them. If we do struggle and fight, a decent society just might be possible.
I don’t mean fight with weapons or fists, but I do mean fight politically, and the Occupy movement shows that this is something Americans are finally remembering how to do. Political action in today’s America does seem to require street action, because the sad trajectory of the Obama administration and its enemies shows that the official institutions of the republic are no longer likely to provide the leadership our society needs.
It may or may not end well. The clearly coordinated crackdowns on Zuccotti Park and many other Occupy encampments nationwide is a signal that the powers that be understand the challenge the movement represents to their hegemony both material and ideological, and that they’re prepared to defend it. As Michael Greenberg put it in his excellent recent account “Occupy Wall Street Turns a Corner”: “The larger question the movement now faces is whether, without Zuccotti Park (and dozens of other occupation sites around the country that have been similarly raided) it will be able to hold the focus of its supporters. The movement has been re-energized. It has turned a corner. But to where?” The powers that be understand that the best defense is a good offense. Does the movement?
One thing I’ve started telling myself and others is that I’m prepared to fight for the America that I want to live in. Not the America I believe in, because that’s an abstraction. I think it’s more helpful to think and act concretely. What kind of America do you want to live in, and what are you prepared to do to bring it into being? It feels as if not only the Occupy movement, but America itself has turned a corner. If so, the question is whether it has turned right or left. One thing I know, regardless, is that I’m not going to let drive-by right-wingers like Ed Burhop call me a moron and hector me to “get serious,” without holding them accountable.
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Home Free: Rhymes with Nineteen Sixty-eight
A couple of weeks ago, in response to my article “Microsoft, Chase Bank, and what’s good for America,” a Pakistani-American acquaintance emailed me:
An interesting perspective with a very ominous undertone. For someone like me and many others who waited years to get the blue passport so we could call this country a home, we are even more stranded than the American born. We don’t belong to our country of birth, nor our country of choice. Is it time to fix this country [America] or to flee, like we fled from our home when the going got tough? I say we stick it out, but I am not sure I have the answers. It’s up to the intellectuals, thinkers, writers (like yourself) and ideologists to create a movement to make the future brighter for our children. Your burden just became heavier, because people like you must take the lead with your words.
If there’s anything our times cry out for it’s leadership, and if I can provide some tiny portion of that with my words, so be it. Words do count as action. But the real leaders of the new America we find ourselves stranded in are people like 84-year-old Dorli Rainey, who might go down in history as the Rosa Parks of our day. Watching her extraordinary nine-minute interview with Keith Olbermann, I found myself wondering why I hadn’t been there with her. The downtown square where – if there’s any justice in this world – Seattle’s finest will be remembered for having pepper sprayed a little old lady is a 20-minute ride by city bus from my front door. Why wasn’t I there?
I’ll cut myself some slack for now, because different people play different roles, but this is not a time for timidity. If you’re not willing to put yourself, in one sense or another, in harm’s way, then you’re not part of the solution. For my part, the least I can do is to try to use words that depict reality accurately and convey meaning and hope.
A telling detail is that, like my friend quoted above, Dorli Rainey is an immigrant to America: She grew up under the Nazis. “I remember Goebbels,” she told Olbermann. (There aren’t many people left, in Germany or America or anywhere else, who do, so I think it’s a good idea for us to listen when one of them has something to say.) One of my premises, as an American writer and citizen, is that my relatively privileged mainstream background makes me no more American than any other American; this was drummed into me by my parents, my grandmother, and the tradition of civics education that was still (barely) current when I was in school in the 1970s. Last month in Oklahoma City – deep in the heart of America – I told a conference of international educators:
Orwell defines patriotism as a good thing, and nationalism as a bad thing. Making the distinction between the two explicit in today’s America is important, because it’s important for young Americans to know that loving our own country does not have to mean hating or fearing other countries and other people. This is important partly because millions of those “other people” are in fact also Americans, here to stay, just as (for example) I’m here to stay because my Irish and German and French ancestors came here and stayed. We’re all in this together, and there’s a lot of work to do to try to make a new, improved America in the 21st century, so it behooves us to get to know each other and to work together.
The point I was making to that mostly white audience was that immigrants are, by right and by tradition, welcome in America. The corollary point I would turn around and emphasize to Pakistani-Americans and other immigrants is that, if you hoped that by coming here you were leaving behind the instability, injustice, and other afflictions of the country you came from, it turns out you were mistaken. You’re here now. Welcome to America; make yourself at home – and please make yourself useful. If, up to now, you’ve enjoyed the middle-class (or better) way of life that America has allowed you to make for yourselves and your children, now America needs you to give back, no less than your country of origin does (and the two needn’t be mutually exclusive).
Last week I quoted another immigrant, Pierre Labossiere, saying that seeing Oakland police fracture the skull of protester and Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen made him say, “That looks like Haiti!” This sort of global perspective, based on experience, is one thing America needs that immigrants have to offer. But, if comparing the United States to Haiti is a rhetorical step too far for some, it should suffice to compare 2011 to 1968. Read Norman Mailer’s book Miami and the Siege of Chicago, then ask yourself if there is any real difference between Mayor Daley’s police brutalizing antiwar protesters in Chicago then, and Mayor Bloomberg’s police clearing Zuccotti Park in New York last week. For an almost literally blow-by-blow account of last week’s police action, read “Occupy Wall Street Turns a Corner” by Michael Greenberg, on the NYR Blog:
Various protesters told me of the use of pepper spray and freewheeling beatings with batons. Retired Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Karen Smith, acting as a legal observer at the park, told the Daily News of “a black woman standing next to me … frantically telling the cops her daughter was in the park and she wanted to make sure the girl was okay. All of a sudden, a cop takes his baton and cracks her in the head. She hadn’t done a thing. Then they started chasing people down the street.”
This is a time to keep in mind Mark Twain’s old saw that, while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme.
You can follow Ethan Casey’s work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
It’s not about Greg Mortenson
Jerene Mortenson (left) at the Building Bridges of Peace conference, Chicago, October 29, 2011. Photo by Aasil Ahmad.
I wrote this article originally as an installment in my twice-monthly column for Dawn, but I wrote it largely so that, from now on, when people ask me about Greg Mortenson, I can say, “Please read my article.” So I’ve also published it in full here. – Ethan Casey
Ever since April, when the U.S. newsmagazine show 60 Minutes and writer Jon Krakauer aggressively raised questions about Greg Mortenson and his bestselling book Three Cups of Tea, wherever I go someone inevitably asks me to comment on the situation. I’ve tried to be careful and judicious in my replies because I don’t actually know much, and I’m not directly or officially involved with Greg’s work, although I have been and remain an admirer. But now that it has been more than six months, I feel some things need to be said.
I don’t really mean that things need to be said about Greg himself. My understanding, from people I trust, is that Greg is very close to being able to speak for himself, publicly and forthrightly. Like many others, I look forward to that.
But I’m not waiting around for it, because there’s too much that needs to be done in the meantime. Pakistan’s burgeoning younger generation needs to be educated, for starters, and to do that requires sustained dedication and hard work from many, many people. Anyone who knows the situation in Pakistan knows that Greg’s Central Asia Institute is meeting only a tiny fraction of the need, and in very limited, distinct, and remote geographical areas. There’s a lot more to Pakistan than Baltistan. Anyone who knows the situation also knows that there are other excellent organizations working in education all around Pakistan, such as The Citizens Foundation, Developments in Literacy, the Human Development Foundation, and Zindagi Trust (to name only a few).
But well established, competent, Pakistani-run and ambitious though those groups are, they still are meeting only a fraction of the enormous need. If anything game-changing is ever going to be accomplished, it’s going to require a serious and large-scale engagement with the American public – yes, the American public – for two reasons. One is that the wider American public is a largely untapped reservoir of potential goodwill and funds to support the cause of a better education system in Pakistan. But, in truth, that goodwill and those funds might not even be necessary, if only Pakistan’s own substantial resources could be properly mobilized.
This is the second and much more important reason the American public must be engaged: The destructive and sinister geopolitical dance of death in which America and Pakistan have trapped themselves and each other is draining material resources, emotional energy, political wherewithal, and attention from urgent human needs. And if the two countries’ governments won’t take the lead in either extricating themselves or working together constructively and with mutual respect toward positive shared goals, then it’s up to private citizens to do that.
This means you and me. And this is where I believe Greg Mortenson has shown real leadership, almost regardless of the truth behind the 60 Minutes allegations. Before the scandal, Three Cups of Tea was more than a bestseller; it was almost a talisman for millions of Americans who wanted to believe not just that girls in remote parts of Pakistan could be educated, but that human beings – all of us – could be better than we apparently are. The last decade-plus has been such a dark time for Pakistanis, Americans, and everyone else, that we desperately crave a constructive and life-affirming project to believe in and support.
Three Cups of Tea met that emotional and spiritual need. And before you retort that Greg’s alleged falsifications undermine the book’s intentions, consider that the need is still just as real regardless. If it is the case that Greg – and his co-author David Oliver Relin, who to his shame has said nothing that I’m aware of since the scandal broke – made stuff up, one thing that most certainly does not imply is that the better world Greg helped us hope for is either impossible or unworthy of our effort. If you have ever heard Greg speak to a student audience, as I did at Texas Christian University in January 2011, then you know how desperately hungry young Americans are for something positive to believe in.
Zarqa Nawaz, writer-producer of the acclaimed CBC show Little Mosque on the Prairie, at the Building Bridges of Peace conference, Chicago, October 29, 2011. Photo by Aasil Ahmad.
The catch is that reading a book or hearing an inspiring speech is only a first step, not an end in itself. Admiring Greg Mortenson, or anyone else, achieves exactly nothing unless it inspires us to do something ourselves. As Tracy Kidder puts it in Mountains Beyond Mountains, an analogous book about an analogous figure, Dr. Paul Farmer, such people force us to redefine the meaning of the phrase “doing one’s best.” (I addressed similar issues of how Farmer’s work is not the be-all and end-all of what needs to be done in Haiti at an October 15 fundraiser for the Colorado Haiti Project. You can read the text of that speech here.)
And just as it’s unfair and a cop-out to put all the pressure and responsibility on one person to do things we’re not willing to do ourselves, so to demonize that person for failing to be perfect is a corrosive avoidance of our own potential and duty to make ourselves useful. The question Greg’s failures and flaws should be forcing each of us to ask is: “What am I doing?”
Stay tuned for more from me on this topic, including an article about the Building Bridges of Peace conference held October 28 and 29 in Chicago. I moderated a panel at the conference that included Greg’s mother, Jerene Mortenson, and I saw there a rare mixed group of Muslims and non-Muslims, Pakistanis and Americans, meeting in nearly equal numbers, in an encouraging spirit of shared purpose.
Ethan Casey’s book Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti will be published in March 2012. He is also the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He is currently planning a book of topical travel with the working title Home Free: An American Road Trip, for which he will travel around the United States during 2012. You can join his Facebook page or contact him directly.
Home Free: California and the global connection
RICHMOND, CALIFORNIA – “What do you think of Arnold?” a young Pakistani asked me as we passed the time at a cricket match in Lahore in 2003. “I like his movies very much.”
“I like his movies too,” I said politely, “but I don’t like him as a politician.”
“Yes. Now he is going to be governor of which state?”
“California.”
“Yes.”
“You know that California is the biggest state?” I asked.
“Yes, I know.”
“I think that if Arnold wins in California,” I ventured, “Bush will win California [in the presidential election] next year.”
I was wrong in that prediction: Bush won re-election (just barely, if that), but he failed to carry California despite Arnold’s governatortorial victory. I included the conversation in my book Alive and Well in Pakistan, partly as a reminder to myself to stick to my principle of never making specific predictions, because the world – in this case California in particular – is more complex and unpredictable than we tend to allow for.
Eight long years later Bush is sort of gone, though his fell legacy lingers around America and worldwide, and Arnold Schwarzenegger has come and gone, trailing a stench of sexual scandal offscreen. But California, for better or worse, isn’t going anywhere. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Americans have long looked to California for omens and portents of where our country as a whole is headed. That felt good when California was thriving. These days we might be more inclined to avert our eyes, though it will be better for us if we don’t.
Tom Petty, who had the good sense and good timing to get the most out of California when the getting was good, composed a ditty around a clever couplet: “California’s been good to me/ I hope it don’t fall into the sea.” California hasn’t been as good to me as it’s been to Tom Petty, but that’s partly because I didn’t give it the chance. Less than eighteen months after moving here in 1989 for the most time-honored of American reasons – because I had no good reason to be anywhere else and, well, because it’s California – I left, because my brother invited me to travel with him in Central Europe during the summer after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That eye-opening adventure led to many others, but the great what-if in the back of my mind ever since has been how my life might have turned out if I had stayed in California.
Before I left, I lived in Berkeley and commuted to a tie-wearing customer-service job in downtown San Francisco, at a small company called The Information Store. The company’s business model – soon rendered hopelessly quaint – was to send a guy on a motorcycle to various university libraries every day, to make photocopies of articles from scientific journals to Fedex or fax to scientists at pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey. The job was a job, but it was my early-morning commute across the Bay Bridge, with its glorious view of the bay and of the City’s skyscrapers as the AC Transit bus emerged from the tunnel on Yerba Buena Island, that I fell in love with. Ever since I left abruptly in 1990 without really saying goodbye, California has been like the girl I might have married.
I’m writing this, at the end of a weekend business trip to the Bay Area, in the kitchen of friends in Richmond, a scorned and neglected working-class town at the north end of the East Bay. Every American metropolitan area has a nearby place that serves the ostensibly better class of people as a scapegoat for their fear and ignorance; in the Bay Area, that role is filled by Oakland and other East Bay cities like Richmond. If there’s anything I’ve learned as a traveling writer, it’s that it’s precisely in such places that one finds the truest and most telling stories, if one makes the effort to look for them beneath the rubble and obfuscation.
So I’m eager to return, on my American road trip next year, to this home of a long and still living tradition of militant labor and popular activism. On Sunday evening, my friends took me to a meeting of the local Haiti Action Committee. You might think that Haiti has nothing to do with California, but you would be mistaken. “The struggle is one,” Pierre Labossiere, a Haitian who has been active for decades here in local labor and protest movements as well as Haitian causes, told the meeting. “It’s the same struggle. It’s that same one percent that operates internationally.” He told us that when Oakland police attacked Occupy Oakland protesters on October 25 and fractured the skull of young Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen with a tear gas canister, “I said, ‘That looks like Haiti!’ A lot of times, we don’t see the global connection. They don’t want us to see that.”
Richmond mayor Gayle McLaughlin also spoke at the meeting. “America is awakening to the fact that we need to take the power back, just like the people of Haiti are taking the power back and trying to build a better society,” she said. McLaughlin took heat nationally last week when Fox News made hay out of her decision to visit the Occupy Richmond encampment instead of a Veterans Day event. She got an appreciative ovation for her unapologetic explanation: “Chevron sponsored the Veterans Day event, and the people of Richmond sponsored the Occupy Richmond event.”
You can support Ethan Casey’s book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Home Free: Microsoft, Chase Bank, and what’s good for America
Ethan Casey at a Seattle Mariners baseball game, June 2011. Photo by Jeff Mandell.
The other day, I went into my local branch of Chase Bank. It moved recently to a new location, not far from the previous location in Seattle’s University District. The bank had to move because its previous location will be the site of a station on the wonderful new light-rail line. The light rail’s wonderfulness is somewhat compromised by the fact that we should have built it twenty years ago, but that’s a different story.
Actually, it’s not really a different story at all. The light rail’s single line runs from downtown Seattle to the airport, south of the city. Unfortunately for me, I live north of downtown, so the light rail won’t be of much use to me until the U District stations at Husky Stadium and 45th & Brooklyn (where the bank used to be) are opened, and that’s supposed to be some five years or more from now. Until then, my wife will (I hope) continue driving me to and from the airport for the many trips out of town that my work requires. She loves me and supports my work and usually doesn’t complain, but we’ll both be happier when I can conveniently get to the airport and back by light rail.
But will that day in fact come? Put differently, under what conditions will I be doing my work five years from now? Do we – specifically in this case the citizens and leaders of King, Pierce and Snohomish counties, but more generally American society as a whole – have either the money or the funds of collective optimism and shared purpose that are required to follow through on such a project? I hope we do, but these days the question is always in the back of my mind.
If we had built the light rail twenty years ago, when Seattle was in the midst of a Microsoft-led tech boom, not only would it have been a lot less expensive to build, but the public would have been making use of it all this time, burning much less gasoline in automobiles and contributing less to global warming. But Microsoft Corporation and its reactionary enablers on what we call the Eastside – the mostly Republican-voting suburbs east of Lake Washington, where Microsoft world headquarters is located – have undermined all efforts to build adequate public transit for the Seattle area.
Now, finally, we have one light-rail line that doesn’t yet serve either the suburbs or my neighborhood. Is it too little, too late? The question is a microcosmic version of one that now looms over America as a whole. Microsoft made a definitive statement (or rather gesture, with its middle finger) regarding where it stands, three or four years ago when it built a massive parking garage right where a light rail station should be. To consider that Microsoft is the General Motors of our time, and to ponder the condition in which GM and the other car companies left the city of Detroit, is to see in a new light the once-proverbial saying “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” Indeed I tremble for my country, just as Thomas Jefferson did way back when, as well as for my city.
What does all this have to do with my visit to the bank? Well, I happened to have business there just as the “Occupy” people were calling for us to “Make Wall Street Pay” by moving our accounts from the few remaining big national banks like Chase to local credit unions. I’m sympathetic to the idea, and I’ve been keeping a close eye on the banks and considering options, up to and including stashing Confederate dollars under a mattress. Given how unstable the American economy and political system have become, and how severely our trust has been violated, who’s to say anyone’s money is safe anywhere?
Coincidentally, Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was in town to give a talk sponsored by the University of Washington business school. Dimon seems like one of the relative good guys of American banking, which is one reason I moved all of our personal and business accounts to Chase a couple of years ago from Bank of America, which is definitely not one of the good guys. But I don’t have any visceral or ideological loyalty to Chase; my premise is that I’m okay with them making money off my small amount of money, as long as I can trust them (there’s that word again) to keep it safe. And, as long as the national economy continues to function, I need a national bank. Or so I tell myself. And having invested or squandered (depending how you look at it) my twenties and thirties seeing a lot of the world but making very little money, in middle age I’d like to establish and enjoy a measure of personal stability. And I’d like to think that stable institutions exist to help me do that. So I’m not crazy about the idea of pulling the plug on Chase Bank.
In his remarks in Seattle, Dimon said this about the Occupy Wall Street protesters, according to the Seattle Times: “They’re right. In general, these big institutions of America let them down. That’s not the same thing as to say that every bank was bad, every politician was bad. That’s where I would disagree.” But he claimed that big corporations are good, because they “pay their people more, are more diverse, with health benefits. It isn’t like they’re the bad actors here.” And here’s the free advice he offered young people who can’t find jobs: “Keep the faith. I wish we hadn’t put them in this position. Remember those fundamentals always when you wake up: You are in the best country and it will come back.”
This is where people like Dimon, who according to the Seattle Times “considers himself a fiscally conservative Democrat,” and 99% of the rest of us part ways. As rich men go, he seems like a relatively humane and thoughtful one. But, in his coiffed silver hair and pinstriped suit, he doesn’t sound credible telling others to keep the faith. The question he’s begging is: Are “those fundamentals” that he’s urging us to remember each morning really bankable anymore?
The new location of my Chase branch was, until a few months ago, a dingy but excellent little used bookstore. It had cats and a rule against using cell phones while browsing; I wish I had patronized it more. I guess in the end it couldn’t afford the rent, and Chase could. The new bank branch has big windows at street level that let in lots of natural light. The other day, as I sat there endorsing checks and filling out deposit slips, I found myself wondering how long it will be before a protester throws a rock through one of them.
You can support Ethan Casey’s book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Home Free: A Whirlwind Tour of the Real America
Muzaffar Ahmad, president of the Pakistan American Friendship Association, and Ethan Casey in a Steak 'n' Shake restaurant, Indianapolis, October 22, 2011
I returned to Seattle on Saturday after a week on the road – or rather mostly in the air, flying back and forth among some pretty obscure places around America’s vast midsection. It’s good to be home and, even more, to be looking forward to spending next weekend nowhere but here, in my own house.
Last week’s whirlwind tour gave me tantalizing glimpses of places I know I’ll need and want to revisit next fall when I travel to write my planned book Home Free: An American Road Trip. After I wrote here a week ago about spending an afternoon in Martinsville, Indiana, rather nostalgically setting it up as a representative Midwestern small town, a black friend informed me that Martinsville used to be a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan. That would explain, I suppose, the 98.62% of Martinsville’s residents listed as white on the town’s website.
Similarly, my friend John Singleton took me to task for failing to do justice to Houston two weeks ago. “Personalizing the freeway issue, by naming it ‘Houston,’ is a bit hasty,” John argued.
… Houston is, actually, the anti-Seattle, ground zero for our refineries and terminals, home and hub for a global model that is going to dry up. Those freeways move millions to and from an amazingly diverse economic base, but one which began with petroleum, and thus Houston’s links – both direct and indirect – to much of what you write about (including an educated and thriving Pakistani upper class) makes it pertinent. In that sense, those freeways seem like an easy jab – or as in the case of William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, the main argument to get off of them to see the real world.
I might argue in my defense in both cases that journalism is a first draft of history, sometimes a very rough draft, and that my first impressions are just that, thus inevitably incomplete and provisional. But I’m not here to argue. (Of course now, especially after reading John’s challenge, I must strive on my road trip and in my book to do a measure of justice to Houston.) What I’m here to do in these weekly dispatches is to seek and tease out the topics, themes and locations that I’ll be in a position to treat with fuller attention and respect a year from now, when I’m traveling around America on the ground researching Home Free. Which makes it feel all the more auspicious to have received this nice note from Brent Kent, whom I don’t know, on my Facebook page:
Ethan, I am from Martinsville, Indiana. Contact me the next time you are passing through, and I will happily give you an introduction. When I escaped, I toured the heartland from the Atlantic to the Pacific on my bicycle, spent some time in Palestine after college, and always find excuses to come back home.
Come to think of it, Brent’s experience and personal choices read like my own in a nutshell. I’ve lately been telling my fellow Americans that, nearly twenty years ago, I (figuratively) ran screaming away from a country I found intolerably self-regarding and boring; that I didn’t return to live here until 2006, and even then to as geographically and culturally peripheral a city as exists in the contiguous lower forty-eight states; and that I’m belatedly discovering that America became a much more interesting country during my years away – or maybe that it was interesting all along, but I just didn’t know it.
Which of those is the case, and what I mean by the word “interesting,” are among the themes I’ll be exploring in my book. I hope you’ll come along for the ride. In the meantime, I feel both obligated and glad to bring to your attention another writer who is paying attention to the real America. I hasten to add that, in appropriating Sarah Palin’s term, I intend to reclaim it from her odious usage. The point Timothy Snyder makes in a thoughtful reflection on the NYR Blog is not that the real America is places like Indiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas (all of which I visited last week), but that it includes them. This point would seem obvious, but it escapes the attention of most American media outlets. Whimsically but incisively, Snyder argues:
We should have bailed out the newspapers back in 2008: it would have cost a tiny fraction of what we spent on bailing out the banks. But since this opportunity was missed, only this fantasy remains: what if, to legally describe themselves as news channels, our national television carriers had to post a correspondent and a production team in all fifty states, and devote a certain amount of their air time to stories generated by these crews? What if CNN and Fox had employees who actually prepared for things that might happen and ran segments about what they like to call “developing stories” throughout the United States of America? What if Fox and CNN anchors, in other words, had to be as well briefed as the crews that cover college football for ESPN?
Snyder, who grew up in a part of southern Ohio where I lived briefly years ago and whose small towns are not far from (and bear a strong resemblance to) Martinsville, Indiana (see his similarly excellent August dispatch “As Ohio Goes: A Letter from Tea-Party Country”), describes well what I recognize as the current real America:
Our country is divided, now, between those who have the most to lose as public goods diminish but whose pride and politicians tell them that they can go it alone, and those who are willing to pay for public goods but feel ever more distant from a country they cannot really envision. A long drive gives me a sense of home, for which I’m grateful; we’ll all need better ways of seeing one another if we want the homeland to have anything that resembles a common future.
Five years after returning to live in the new (and improved?) real America, I have yet to rediscover it properly. Last week’s whirlwind tour has left me all the more eager to get on the road next fall.
You can support Ethan Casey’s book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
