Yet can town’s letdown alone account for the keenness with which my mother and father envisioned the ruin of each of their children in turn by coach or cousin or carny rapist? Can it explain the ease with which they came to believe that town’s alternative was not a bug-bit hell but rather a tit-cuddled arcadia? Can it excuse the swiftness with which these people determined to hurl themselves, and their children, headlong into the national briar patch, there to itch and to bleed?
I deny it.
I deny that town is the root of all harm to these United States. I deny that our blighted communities owe nothing to the land upon which they were made. I deny that this continent, unlike all the others, wishes to graze cattle and grow foodstuffs for the benefit of its invaders. I deny that tarnation has a grip only on those Americans who lay claim to more than one neighbor, and who direct no great suspicion at the universities, and who refuse to believe that the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was written (and then presumably revised) by the Baby Jesus, and who have yet to purchase, out of imagined or actual need, either a pickup truck or a soviet-issued machine gun. To my mind, he who turns his back on town is as prone as anyone to become evil’s eager and ignorant sponge.
For the sake of the republic
I wish for the sake of the republic that I could call our decision to flee town’s omens a mere reaction to them, but as gamely as town worked to push us away another force, of a much higher order, and with the potential to devastate all that humanity has raised up in defense of itself, tugged at us all the while, and muddled our thoughts, and drew us out into the trees to glare at omens more powerful than any we had seen with their pants off down on Main street. The very least of what awaited us, perhaps by way of reproach, were drunks with a better reason to imbibe than in town and a good deal farther to drive, and carnies whose rickety rides were less well cared for than in the populated areas but who nonetheless represented all the glamour a fourteen-year-old country girl was liable to encounter in her lifetime, and whores who were older and less toothsome renditions of that selfsame fourteen-year-old girl, and furious high-school football players whose Baptist prayers had never won them so much as a break-even season, and neighbors of such paltry means that they generally lacked the amperage required to electrocute a dog and so were left to use a firearm on it or on any other animal they happened across during the course of an otherwise empty day.
No more than ten at the time of our departure from civilization, if what we treaded in for so bleak a stretch can be said to warrant the term, I did not know, nor would I have approved, of our subscription to the very lie that had, some seven generations previous on my father’s side, and a competitive number on my mother’s, orchestrated the grand farce by which I first entered the American hoedown in the first place. That I emerged and took air in an Illinois hospital and not a cornfield I count as something of a miracle, given that my forebears were suckered out into the region not by a promise of suitable communities there, which anyway did not exist then and arguably do not exist now, but by a promise of land, countless acres of it, advertised to be rich and bountiful and blessed, if not actually occupied, by God Himself. It seems hardly to have occurred to my ancestors, or to my own parents, that this same God had for centuries shown a marked preference for town, and a tendency to yield the whole of the wild expanses to Satan, and had inspired (at least in His New England penitents) a fear and a hatred of the natural world intense enough that anyone who expressed an admiration for the woods, or a curiosity about the high grass beyond the village, was likely to be dubbed a witch and set directly on fire.
How exactly God was persuaded to leave town I do not know, but I assume He was removed by the same men, now rotted, who long ago condemned my bloodline to oblivion on behalf of the enormous real-estate hustle that today comprises the worthless plains adjacent to the Mississippi, and the obviously infertile desert beyond those plains, and the murderous mountains beyond that desert, and the perfectly alien far coast those mountains traitorously guard. He may have made a go of it on the steppe, or up in the hills, and He may eventually have come to take a stubborn pride in His predicament, as country people are wont to do, or He may have gathered Himself up and vacated the continent entirely, provided the soil had not sucked away His power to do even that. At any rate He appears to have become separated from His American flock, and He has since provided little real, as opposed to claimed, comfort to those millions of His presumed neighbors who once parted with dependable town money to work and inhabit, if never in truth to possess, an unkind land they had been told was proximate to Glory.
As an accomplice to this scheme, and perhaps a principal in it, Thomas Jefferson seems to me to have sinned cardinally, with his comfortable slaver’s dream of an agrarian wonderland and his criminal transfer of public funds to the Napoleonic war effort so as to avail us of the hectares needed to prove that dream a nightmare. I also hold accountable Daniel Boone, first realtor through the Cumberland Gap; and Fenimore Cooper, whose salesmanship of the prairie and the waterways as a playground for white boys continues to plague us with foreign-exchange students and unwatchable Hollywood films; and Mr. Greeley, who encouraged the young to believe that a westward trek would not, in fact, kill a number of them outright and deliver the rest into penury; and Mr. Audubon, whose still lifes do little to indicate that actual birds flap around overly much and tend to spread influenzas; and Messrs. Alcott and Lane and Emerson and Thoreau, who were not satisfied that the land should be thought benevolent and wise but sought also to equate these ludicrous properties with the American soul; and Senator Calhoun, who damned the nation to Armageddon (though he would not live to enjoy the scene) with his fantasy that somewhere between the smug agribusiness of the plantation and the observable grief of the tenant farm was to be found a “way of life” whose protection was worth the risk (and, as it turned out, the reality) of death and dismemberment and subjugation.
I would add to this list Mr. Whitman, who approached the senator’s war with no more insight than that both the bramble and the self should be celebrated, and came out of it with no better improvement to his art than that putrefaction and “democracy” deserved some say as well. I would also include here the worshipful Mr. Muir, and every pupil of the Hudson School, and every man named Benton who lifted voice or pen or paintbrush in the naturalist cause, and every Joel Chandler Harris who saw fit to attach pretty morals to an ugly rural past, and every Nashville Agrarian who failed, in this same facile nostalgia, to recognize Jefferson and Calhoun as madmen or liars. Special mention is due E. B. white, who prompted the rich to believe that a weekend retreat in the country qualified them for the position of calm rustic sage, and every back-to-the-land hippie who managed to further this absurd idea with his inheritance-funded commune, only to suggest something truer with his California killing spree.