Driving Home, page 47
That vocabulary, still relatively fresh when Lewis was writing his journal, has had an astonishingly long and resilient life in America, mainly because of the huge influence of John Muir, the sainted godfather of the conservation movement, founder of the Sierra Club, and prime mover in the establishment of the National Parks system. At a time when the cult of the sublime was all but dead, Muir brought it back to life, stamping it with his own brand of evangelical fervor. “Christianity and mountaininity are streams from the same fountain,” he wrote to a friend, and his work combines acute and precise botanical and geological observation with a kind of shivering religious ecstasy in the presence of nature’s “divine truth.” Muir was part scientist, part missionary, part hard-nosed salesman: selling the wonders of the West to railroad tourists from the East, he wrapped them in an irresistible package of expert natural history, lofty spirituality, and old-fashioned poetry.
Rhapsody was his natural medium. Traveling through the mountains with Muir, one is exhorted in almost every paragraph to thrill to their sublimity, grandeur, nobility, and majesty—words that dot his prose like currants in a bun. His message couldn’t be more plain: in the craggy aristocracy of the peaks and woods, we commune with majesty and nobility, and thereby rouse something noble and majestic in ourselves. In the National Parks—“Nature’s sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world”—spiritual uplift goes hand in hand with social uplift, and to hike through Yosemite is to enjoy a uniquely patrician experience in democratic America.
The distinct undercurrent of class and racial elitism that runs through Muir’s writing has always, I suspect, been part of his appeal. In My First Summer in the Sierra, he complained of how the Mono Indians polluted the purity of Yosemite with their “dirty and irregular life” in “this clean wilderness,” and went on to remark, “The worst thing about them is their uncleanliness. Nothing truly wild is unclean”—a sentiment worth dwelling on for its complicated tangle of implications. In A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, he sang the praises of Athens, Georgia, “a remarkably beautiful and aristocratic town,” admiring the “many classic and magnificent mansions of wealthy planters, who formerly owned large negro-stocked plantations [my italics]. Unmistakeable marks of culture and refinement … were everywhere apparent. This is the most beautiful town I have seen on the journey, so far, and the only one in the South that I would like to revisit.” What impressed him most was the deferential behavior of the blacks he encountered in Athens:
The negroes here have been well trained and are extremely polite. When they come in sight of a white man on the road, off go their hats, even at a distance of forty or fifty yards, and they walk bare-headed until he is out of sight.
There’s a connection here between Muir’s infatuation with a hierarchical, aristocratic society, where the lower orders know their places and doff their caps to their betters and the lords and ladies exhibit their culture and refinement (all rather odd, coming from someone who was raised as a Scottish Presbyterian), and his rapturous exultation in the nobility and grandeur of the mountains. In the thin, clean air of Muir’s beloved wildernesses lay a healing alternative to the plebeian jostle of the American city, where people led lives “mildewed and dwarfed in disease and crime.” Visit the high places of the West, he promised, and vacation like a king.
Today, Muir’s language flourishes and sometimes runs riot in guidebooks, in the writing of outdoors columnists, and, not surprisingly, in the newsletters put out by local chapters of the Sierra Club, where hikers and mountaineers report on their adventures. “The view from the aerie perch was sublime.” “I stopped frequently to absorb the majesty.” “Whitney’s regal profile towered over us.” The word “noble” gets attached to trees (“noble giants”), silence, summits, bighorn sheep, bald eagles, and, mysteriously, both snipe and Chinese bicycles.
The words matter because they define the north rim, as it were, of that great rift of sensibility which divides the nature tourists and conservationists from the majority of people who live and work in landscapes cherished by visitors for their grandeur. Anyone who’s driven through the mountainous West on twisting, unpaved forest roads and minor state routes knows the shock of arrival at the next town. For hours, you drive through the furniture of Muir’s sublime, the landscape of conventional majesty: dense pathless forest; lone pines clinging to needlelike crags; plunging cataracts; jagged, snow-capped peaks; sheer, thousand-foot drops from the edge of the unfenced gravel road. Then the gradient of the river-hugging road eases, the current slows, and the first speed-limit sign comes into view. From the T-junction where the gravel meets the highway, you get your first sight of the town, and the circuits of the brain go into overload as the eye tries to square what’s gone before with what’s to come.
It’s a generic western town—wide main street; single stoplight; a pair of competing motels; a pair of competing gas stations; a decaying mercantile block of brick and stucco, dating from the 1920s; the off-pink cinder-block bulk of a Kmart; a strip mall with the adult-video store next to the Mexican restaurant; a Safeway; a drive-through bank; a tavern; a school; a church or three; all of this set in a grid of bungalows that fills the narrow valley like a moraine.
If there’s an election on, yard signs in the side streets will supply you with the name of everyone running for sheriff, mayor, or city councilman, for local democracy functions here with an enthusiasm and an informed knowledge of the issues and personalities that put national politics to shame. The bungalows—apparently identical when seen at a distance—in close-up turn out to be entertainingly full of individual eccentricity and character. The town is well worth a wander, for it is, in its way, an American classic, an example of expressive vernacular architecture as distinct—and certainly as recognizable—as that of a Tuscan hill village.
But if you approach it with your head full of Muir-speak, it’s an eyesore, a blot on the landscape, a square mile of schlock. Its massive, boldly painted chainsaw sculptures, far from being marks of culture and refinement, appear as brutal assaults on the sacred nature of old-growth forest. Its neon signs are an affront, its broad streets out of all proportion to the low homes that line them. The one-storey (and largely one-class and one-industry) settlement, which got its start in life as a mining or logging camp, or an arbitrary railroad stop, is a world away from Athens, Georgia. In the elevated, quasi-aristocratic language of the decadent sublime, there’s no place for the ad hoc, democratic architecture of the working rural West. The casual visitor, fresh from his noble mountains, sees its glaring lack of nobility, wealth, beauty, antiquity, and height, and disdainfully regrets its existence—or would, if only he weren’t running short of gas. Ghost towns, of course, adorn the view, by reminding the romantic tourist of the mortal folly of all human enterprise when set against the enduring grandeur of nature, but living ones tend to ruin it.
Consider Leavenworth, Washington, which in its heyday had a railroad depot and roundhouse and a big sawmill, but lost both in the course of the 1920s. In 1965, after three decades of slow moldering and population loss, it did what westerners are famed for doing and set out on a program of fantastic self-reinvention. Taking its cue from its setting on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range, a two-hour drive from Seattle, it became a Bavarian alpine resort, the Berchtesgaden of Chelan County. The town has a draconian building code governing roof pitches, extent of overhangs, scrolled lookout beams, shutters, balconies, flower boxes, the proportion of timber to stucco, and so forth, and requires would-be developers to pore over such books as Bayern in Bildern, Häuser in den Alpen, and Wohnen in Alpenland. There are cuckoo-clock shops, German gothic street signs, restaurants serving wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut, at least one hotel where guests are woken for breakfast by a folk-costumed mädchen tootling on an alpenhorn, and the calendar is punctuated by fests of accordions, wine, and beer, and, for the holidays, the Christkindlmarkt.
Kitsch, certainly, but not quite Disney: Leavenworth is too earnest a replica for that, saved from mere whimsy by its ferocious attention to realistic detail and materials. Seattleites flock to it (as do, apparently, homesick German exiles) because the place reeks alluringly of castles, kings, prince-electors, its architecture in tune with the lust for antiquity and nobility that goes with spending a weekend in the mountains. By artfully obliterating from view as much as it can of its own history, nationality, language, and culture (no exceptions are permitted; even McDonald’s and Exxon have undergone Bavarian makeovers), Leavenworth has made itself acceptably picturesque. In the eye of the tourist, focusing her camera on the conventionally grand alpine scene beyond the town, there’s no incongruity between the streets in the foreground and all the majestic stuff in the middle and far distance. The usual problem in these parts has been ingeniously solved, though a little forgiving myopia helps.
One has to admire the town’s enterprise, and I’ve enjoyed my visits there, but one Leavenworth is quite enough. It’s time to retire the language of the sublime, with its implicit class snobbery, its muddling-together of aesthetic pleasure with social hierarchy, and to look freshly at the relationship between the un-gussied-up townships of the American West and their natural surroundings.
You can’t move around the rural West without bumping into the stereotype of the environmentalist as someone who is messianic, impervious to argument, insufferably superior in his manners, with a lofty disregard for the lives, jobs, and communities of ordinary people. “Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?” was a favorite bumper sticker in the 1990s timber wars here in the Pacific Northwest. As stereotypes go, it’s crude but not entirely baseless. Much antique rhetorical baggage is carried by the environmental movement, most of it directly traceable to Muir. There are powerful reasons to protect as best we can the federally owned forests and mountains from the chainsaw, the drill, and unregulated grazing—not for their majesty and grandeur, or the recreational opportunities they afford to visitors from the city, but for their ecological necessity for everyone. It isn’t a matter of mere aesthetics: the West, once seen as limitless in its myriad resources, as the oceans were, is perilously delicate and vulnerable—not least to the lines of tourists trailing up its mountainsides. But the environmental case is lost, like the baby with the bathwater, so long as the countryside can perceive it to be made in terms of the ennobling spiritual benefits of roadless hiking, and the snobbish taste for natural beauty of the urban leisure class.
The region’s history has always been one of rancorous battles between mutually incompatible visions of its use and future, from whites vs. Indians and cattlemen vs. sodbusters to our present multifrontal conflict between exploitation and conservation. We should at least remove from that debate, which is fought with righteous fury on every side, the outworn, undemocratic assumptions that covertly underpin our long, unthinking, sentimental attachment to the sublime.
Playboy, January 2008
Good News in Bad Times
BELIEF IS THE open-sesame word in Barack Obama’s vocabulary: on Thursday night he told his cheering audience that January 3 would stand as the moment when “America remembered what it means to hope,” and ended with the hoarse, exultant shout: “We are ready to believe again!”
At the University of Chicago Law School, famous for its faculty of conservative jurists, Obama, senior lecturer in constitutional law, is still listed as being on leave of absence. Six miles from the university on Chicago’s far South Side, in the nondescript, low-rent, mostly low-rise neighborhood of Brainerd, is Trinity United Church of Christ, which Obama attends and where his pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, apostle of black liberation theology, delivers magnificently cranky sermons on how the “African diaspora” struggles under the yoke of the “white supremacists” who run the “American empire.”
Obama’s membership in both institutions, the radical black church and the conservative law school, is a measure of the chasm that this latest candidate of hopes and dreams is trying to span. It’s also a measure of his political agility that the senior lecturer in law has managed to recast the language of black liberation theology into an acceptable—even, conceivably, a winning—creed for middle-of-the-road white voters.
Obama is cagey, in a lawyerly fashion, about the supernatural claims of religion. Recounting a conversation about death that he had with one of his two young daughters, he wrote, “I wondered whether I should have told her the truth, that I wasn’t sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure of where the soul resides or what existed before the big bang.” So I think we can take it that he doesn’t believe—or doesn’t exactly believe—in the afterlife or the creation.
His conversion to Wright’s brand of Christianity was “a choice and not an epiphany,” born of his admiration for “communities of faith” and the shape and purpose they give to the lives of their congregants. “Americans want a narrative arc to their lives. They are looking to relieve a chronic loneliness”; “They are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness.” As for himself, and his enlistment at Trinity United: “Without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone.” It’s typical of Obama that such a cautiously footnoted profession of faith rings sympathetically to both atheists and true believers.
To become a virtual congregant at Trinity United is to enter a world of metaphor, in which the manifold trials of the children of Israel at the hands of emperors and kings are transformed by Wright into the self-same sufferings of African Americans today. As Obama put it, describing his own moment of conversion in Wright’s church when, as a community organizer in Chicago, he was still a near stranger to black culture: “At the foot of that cross … I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lions’ den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories of survival, and freedom, and hope—became our story, my story.”
In a Christmas sermon on the theme of “Good News in Bad Times,” Wright fuses Nebuchadnezzar, Caesar Augustus, and George Bush into a single being, and the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Babylonian occupation of Jerusalem, and the Roman occupation of Galilee into one event.
Under a universal tyranny of “corporate greed and rampant racism,” AIDS flourishes, along with gang bangs, murders, injustices of every kind. Slavery is here and now, and fifth columnists, traitors to their own kind, are all around us—such as the black Republican Alan Keyes and the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Bad times. “But right now ain’t always,” and “great joy is coming in the morning.” Wright abruptly shifts gear, from a giddy tour of two and a half thousand years of oppression and tribulation to the good news, bringing his congregation to near-rapture as he launches on a rapid, high-decibel riff on the salvation to come:
The good news that’s coming is for all people! Not white people—all people. Not black people—all people. Not rich people—all people. Not poor people—all people. I know you’ll hate this … not straight people—all people! Not gay people—all people. Not American people—all people … Jesus came for Iraqis and Afghanis. Jesus was sent for Iranians and Ukrainians. All people! Jesus is God’s gift to the brothers in jail and the sisters in jeopardy. The Lord left his royal courts on high to come for all those that you love, yes, but he also came for those folk you can’t stand.
It’s a piece of merely rhetorical wizardry, this conjuring of hope from the grounds of despair, but Wright carries it off with exhilarating command, and one sees immediately how much Obama has learned from him.
The title of Obama’s latest book, The Audacity of Hope, explicitly salutes a sermon by Wright called “The Audacity to Hope,” and his speeches are sprinkled with Wrightisms, but his debt to the preacher goes deeper. While Wright works his magic on enormous congregations with the basic message of liberation theology—that we’re everywhere in chains but assured of deliverance by the living Christ—Obama, when on form, entrances largely white audiences with the same essential story, told in secular terms and stripped of its references to specifically black experience. When Wright says “white racists,” Obama says “corporate lobbyists”; when Wright speaks of “blacks,” Obama says “hardworking Americans,” or “Americans without health care”; when Wright talks in folksy Ebonics, of “hos” and “mojo,” Obama talks in refined Ivy League. But the design of the piece follows the same pattern as a Wright sermon, in its nicely timed transition from present injustice and oppression to the great joy coming in the morning.
In the speech that brought Obama into the national limelight, his keynote address to the Democratic convention in 2004, he tailors the rhetoric of Trinity United to fit the needs of America at large. First, the bad times: the Constitution abused, the nation despised around the world, joblessness, homelessness, crippling medical bills, a failing education system, veterans returning home with missing limbs, young people sunk in “violence and despair.” Then, the good news: “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and a white America and a Latino America and an Asian America—there’s the United States of America …” The voice of Jeremiah Wright haunts both the sentiment and the metrical phrasing as Obama comes to a climax with his unveiling of “the politics of hope”:
