[Enough of the somber, ennui-laced posts. Obviously I'm entering a transitional phase in mah life, but I doubt you folks want to keep reading about that. A dear friend of mine said to me just a few days ago: "You know, you can't look back at all, you can only look forward. So look forward." Simple, but I love it.]
Back to some literary postin' and some book recommendin'--
Until I read Sarah Vowell's The Partly-Cloudy Patriot, I was embarrassed to admit the REAL reason why I love to play tourist at even the most cliched of American places. I study history, so I just always let anyone and everyone assume that I visited places like Gettysburg or Salem, Mass., or the Alamo out of scholarly reverance. The truth is that I love the grisly stories, the ones that make your skin bump all up. I don't necessarily believe in ghosts, but I adore the places that are "haunted"--because whether they're haunted with injustices or actual spirits, their stories can scare the hell out of us all, and make us run for the metaphorical hills. (Usually we find our way back, though, and all the while becoming educated and informed.) Vowell is a woman after my own heart, I've known this since I began reading her work a few years ago, and in this set of essays she full-on freaked me out...with historical revelations eerily similar to those I've thought up but been ashamed to discuss. In this book, she asks us all if history is really a series of trainwrecks that none of us can stop watching. It is. Take the Civil War. Not only are some folks still fighting it (and NOT because it was about states' right--it wasn't--but for other gross reasons), but the tourism associated with it makes more money than all the other historic sites in this country combined! Talk about a time when America was most on the brink--of both physical destruction and permanent psychological disunion. I think that's the American story in many ways. Reverance comes from realizing not only what was lost but also what more could have been lost. It also comes from thanskgiving. Take Salem. I drug my friend Brian (who grew up there, so it's all old news by now) around on the "haunted tour" of the town just so I could feel some goosebumps and also feel really thankful that I live in an era in which Americans don't often hang from gallows for their religious beliefs...and often live past the age of 30. Enough said.
It's okay to love the scary stuff, to enjoy the fear, if you're also made more human by it. Vowell writes about this too. She's most touched by the smallest of details--the placement of a tree that shades many graves at a battle site, or the pothole on a street that revolutionaries may have stumbled over. When confronted with the physical sites of tragedy, or of hope for that matter, our minds start to really believe that places are worth fighting for, or that people really can be heroes with their might or with their words. Vowell is so liberal that I doubt any American could stand to the left of her, but she concedes that American democracy is like a religion to her; she may be vocal about her politics, but she's proud to be able to choose them.
Her books are quick airplane reads--witty, frenetic at times even. In this collection, her best essay is about putting a "geek" in the White House. Forget these lame-o politicians who claim to be "of" the people (when we all know they're wearing designer duds and eating caviar, so why the front anyway) and dumb themselves down to complete the picture. We need leaders who are voracious readers, she says; we need memorizers, dorks, men and women with so much passion that yes, we might call them "nerds" in everyday life. I couldn't agree more!
I've certainly been cynical about the idea of an "America." I guess for a long time all I saw were strip malls and Hummers and Pottery Barn-freaks. I feel a lot more hopeful these days. Thanks to Vowell for writing about the experiences that unite us all--in fear, in joy, in whatever. The more we all talk, the more we all learn.
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