Piranesi In Exurbia: Political Geography in America, Part Two

Political Geography in America, Part II

Piranesi in Exurbia:  Rotting Utopias at the American Edges

In the fall of 1991, Washington Post writer Joel Garreau released, in book form, a version of his Post feature series on the rise of a new form of American landscape.  Not city, not country, not suburban, these edge cities, as Garreau named them, were located in previously underpopulated areas, within a reasonable distance of a major metropolitan airport, but otherwise forcefully independent of the older American geography that saw cities as the locales for industrial and manufacturing economies, suburbs as the place where the luckier members of the meritocracy lived, and the areas beyond given over to agriculture, scenery or resource extraction.

What Garreau noticed first were planned communities springing up along major outer-ring traffic corridors; simultaneously, corporate office parks and research centers would occupy a swath of former farmland, even as a combination of suburban-style subdivisions and new-urban townhome communities would appear, almost instantly, off nearby roads. Both forms would be marked by their isolation. The office parks would be ringed by camouflage plantings hiding electronic fences with one, two, at most three entrances, guarded by gatehouses occupied by security officials who monitored incursion, or by unmanned security gates activated by corporate employee identification cards.  Similarly, the subdivisions would often take the form of so-called “gated communities” (privatopias, my friend and colleague Evan McKenzie named them, in an important premonitory book, published in 1994), in which internal regulation and contract bound the individual community occupants together, but isolated them from the financial, social, or political life outside their walls or fences, in the guise of protecting them from outsiders.

Garreau’s interest was in those edge-city clusters in the Northeast Corridor, from Washington, DC, to the Massachusetts-Vermont border.  They’re striking, and their fates deserve the attention we’ll give them in later essays. But to see the picture in sharpest outline, we might begin with a Midwestern example, not least because it’s so easy to observe its shape, thanks to Google Maps.

Abbott Laboratories is a global pharmaceutical company; relatively early in the edge city movement, it moved its corporate headquarters out to the largely underpopulated Illinois farmlands far north of Chicago and west of the older, super-affluent lakefront suburbs of the far North Shore. Theirs is a relatively unsophisticated version of the more sprawling and heavily landscaped “campuses” of places like Sears Holdings in nearby Hoffman Estates.

 Start by googling Abbott Laboratories, Lake County, IL, though, and you’ll get a false site, a small office down in Lake Forest, one of those older, super-affluent suburbs where wives pick up their husbands at the train station in their Mercedes SUVs still wearing the jodhpurs from their horsemanship lessons. Instead, you’ll get your fastest hit if you googlemap Abbott Park, IL. It’ll come right up.  But notice that the google entry on the left lists Green Oaks, Illinois as the municipality where the lab is located.  That can’t be:  Abbott employs more than 15,000 workers within Abbott Park, and the village of Green Oaks only had a population of 3,855 in 2010.  The village doesn’t even list Abbott Labs among the businesses within its boundaries. Somewhere along the line, though, Abbott declared itself a separate metropolitan location—it just happened to sit atop little Green Oaks. 

Of course, you already know that there aren’t any green oaks in Green Oaks—that old joke that Americans name their communities after the picturesque feature they’ve destroyed to build:  it applies here.  As landscapes go, Green Oaks is a bit of a wasteland, a Midwestern desert.  There are some forlorn water features, the rigid linearity of their outlines indicating that they were at one time, or perhaps still are, artificially made, meant to drain off the ground water in the surrounding agricultural land, or to serve as industrial or agricultural waste ponds, or both.  One forms a lovely triangle that you’d swear you’d remember from high-school geometry class if you remembered anything from high-school geometry class. Another, visibly choked with algae from the runoff of industrial-strength fertilizers, is hopefully named Shady Lane Resort Lake.  It’s bordered to the south by the railroad tracks, on the west by the Illinois Tollway, on the north and east by no-longer-arable industrial farming wastes. There’s no resort, no lane; there’s no shade, either, unless you’re small enough to huddle under some marshy scrub that runs along the older farmfield divisions.

Almost due north of that, though, is Abbott Park, a picturesque greensward if you’re on Waukegan Road driving past it, with grassy knolls, ornamental trees, clumps of shrubbery, hiding what’s behind.  From above-- that is, via googlemaps-- you see that it’s really just sham parkland;  the vast preponderance of land behind the screen is taken up with warehouselike utilitarian structures surrounded by parking lots full of upscale sedans—sunroofs galore, not a pickup truck or rusting minivan to be found.

Cross Waukegan—virtually, of course, as to do so on foot would be dangerous, indeed (in that regard, Garreau was spot-on:  no sidewalks, no crosswalks, no walk-don’t walk appendages bolted to the traffic signals)—and you get a sense of how those who work within the buildings at Abbott live their off-work lives. The clustered townhomes look like idealized interpretations of the tenets of so-called New Urbanism, the sort that made itself famous with the Disney Corporation’s planned community, self-satisfiedly named Celebration. Here the ideals of the New Urbanists seem exemplified—essentially to turn back the clock and turn on the airbrush to produce a replica of an imaginary American town circa 1905, with manageable lawns to water, porches upon which to sit, sidewalks to walk from home to neighbor, friend, grocery or hardware store, or to the park, where the bandstand would feature a Sousaphone and a big drum surrounded by trombones and piccolos, pumping out patriotic piffle:  God Bless America, followed, perhaps, by Joy to the World, Jeremiah the Bullfrog transliterated to the bass saxophone.

The townhome communities around Abbot Park aren’t so fully orchestrated;  they cluster around a commons, they’re appropriately intimate but with sufficient common greensward to give the impression of gentility and spaciousness. Look carefully, though, and you’ll notice:  the structures are modular prefabs, with faux clapboard fronts and brick-it faux stonework on the false chimneys. Each townhome is built around and above a two-car garage.  There’s a reason for that, and it’s not so the earnest mental worker can drive a block or two to Abbott Park.  The nearest supermarket is many miles away; much further is that hardware store, and the nearest public space is probably in the middle of Market Square, in Lake Forest, far to the east.

Market Square is the earlier type of edge-community planned development—it’s arguably the first planned shopping center in America (though Kansas City, Missouri makes a strong competing claim), set across from the Lake Forest commuter train station.  If the parking lots in Abbott Park are filled with Lexuses and Infinitis, the small parking lot for the train station is populated by Porsches, BMWs and Mercedeses.  It’s small, though, not just because it’s trapped in an older tradition of land use, but because it serves a very different social and cultural class, one in which wife collects husband at the station, still dressed in those jodhpurs we ogled earlier. Over at Abbott Park, the family units are most commonly two-worker professionals; in many cases, both of them work for Abbott, but if not, there are plenty of similar high-skill professional corporate and research campuses scattered about.

As Garreau pointed out, though, proximity is a highly relative matter out in edge city’s geography.  To go from Abbott Park to, say, the Sears corporate office park in Hoffmann Estates, would take you just under an hour in regular traffic, close to two hours each way in traditional rush hour.  You’d have to go down Interstate 94 to Interstate 294 and then over to Interstate 90 west, exiting at Beverly Road and winding into the Sears campus—along with close to 6,000 other workers entering or leaving that campus. What this means, then, is that the professionals who live in the vicinity of Green Oaks, Illinois, eunequally split their commute:  on average, one worker is in transit less than 30 minutes a day, while the other is stuck in traffic on average 3 hours, 47 minutes, more or less. 

This is the sacrifice that exurban edge city denizens make in order not to live or work in the dense core of the old American city.  The reward is clear:  median family income in Green Oaks is close to $140,000; since the median salaries at Abbott and Sears Holdings are in the $85,000 range, one can assume that double-income professional families are reaching close to $200,000 per year. And they live and work in environments that are comfortingly, relentlessly, homogeneous. In Green Oaks, 96% of the population is white or Asian. African-Americans constitute just .14% of the population. The schools, too, are considered excellent—Oak Grove Elementary School in Green Oak is rated A+ on the standard measuring metric.  If you were among the 866 pupils there, however, there would be a better-than-even chance that you would never see a black face among your schoolmates.

Part of the reason professional families settle out there is encapsulated in those two telling facts about the school system:  it is excellent, and it is astoundingly homogeneous.

But that implies a level of autonomy that is only found in the mythos of freedom-loving, adventurous, frontier-seeking America.  The reality is that high-skills professionals go where the work is, and the work has been out there, where the absence of crumbling infrastructures needing costly repairs, underemployed citizens needing social safety-net support, environmental and safety regulations that might require costly remediation, and savvy political and social activists looking to require the full costs of settlement be paid by the incoming corporations—all those urban disincentives were (at least, back then) blissfully absent.  Corporate planners made the decisions; high-skills workers moved out there for the jobs.

Of course, many of those high-skills, high-tech workers reveled in the bland homogeneity of the exurban environment. If you are working 18 hours a day, six days a week, and you need to prepare yourself to pack the moving van in a year or three or four to go to the next opportunity, the amenities of the sensual, emotional and intellectual life afforded by cities, older suburbs, or real rural communities don’t matter much.

If you’re a couple that shudders at the prospect of a life lived above a two-car garage, surrounded by people just like you, the nearest independent coffeehouse located more than forty miles away, the nearest independent bookstore located all the way down in Chicago proper, you might consider a different trajectory.  You might decide to live in the city and commute out to your workplaces.  In Chicago, this would probably mean that your double-commutes would continue to be dramatically unequal—one of you commuting by CTA or bicycle or walking to work somewhere in the inner-core city, the other trapped in the car on the freeways, listening to Marcia or Jim giving Traffic and Weather on the 8s, doling out, every ten minutes, your dolorous fate for the next one hundred minutes.

Yet to the surprise of the urban planners, the New Urbanists, the corporate office-park designers, the upper-level corporate decision-makers and the exurban county economic development cheerleaders who made the edge city phenomenon happen, this is exactly what has begun to take place.  The new American meritocrats are not dreaming of a townhouse with a small concrete patio in back, upon which sits a gleaming stainless-steel gas grill. They are, instead, the new hipsters, riding their fixed-gear bikes down Milwaukee Avenue from Humboldt Park to downtown.  Given the choice between a job at Abbott Labs and one at a small startup in the West Loop of Chicago, they’re not even bothering to show up for the interview out in the picturesque parking lots of Abbott Park.

(Part of this concerns a more complex cultural phenomenon.  The new generation of high-skills workers are not just information workers,  or knowledge-workers, or even, more boldly, high-skills workers.  They are, instead, minds;  their skills are found in their ability to think critically, hold multiple conflicting ideas in balance while evaluating complex strings of possibility, push past the instruction to fabricate and instead push on to actually make. They are, in sum, creative workers. One important corollary of this shift is that these creative workers consider themselves the owners of their own value, portable engines rather than fixed information-assembly-line workers. Partly this is a consequence of the cybernetic revolution they entered at birth. When most high-skills mental work can be off-loaded to a bank of high-end servers in an air conditioned basement room—hell, when you can buy the computing power of the entire Cold War anti-ballistic-missile defense system and NASA and the nuclear war arsenal combined for less than a grand and put it in your backpack or fake Louis-Vuitton bag or your man-purse, programming it yourself while you’re on the subway or waiting for another beer at the Hopleaf—it doesn’t take much mental wherewithal  to see that the shining path requires, rewards and promises adventurousness, intellectual risk, social and cultural flexibility. This generation doesn’t go hat-in-hand to Abbott Laboratories hoping for a white-lab-coat job modifying the molecular structure of a pediatric ear-infection drug like Omnicef so as to keep the corporate monopoly.)

This new generation is actually the second to reject the siren call of the edge city life.  A decade ago, the commute pattern along Chicago’s freeway system tilted decisively:  in the mornings, the roads were full and slow going out from the city.  In the afternoons, they were packed with people escaping the edge city for the edgy one. These were people trapped by the decisions made decades earlier to uproot corporate life from the dense downtowns to the dispersed disaggregations of exurbia;  they had to work out there but they were damned if they had to live there or, worse, raise their children in that zombie-land. This was the interim generation, cautioned by the dot-com bubble and crash, but not young enough to have grown up the wiser for it.

These days, the commute patterns are far murkier than traffic planners and urban designers ever thought they’d be.  In city centers like San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Pittsburgh and the like, urban life has returned.  In the early stages of resuscitation, these resurrected cities are decidedly youthful—colleges and universities have bought into underpriced downtown building stock, and their graduates are the ones comfortable enough with the complexities of the edgy city to hang around—after graduation, but also after six, seven, ten pm. As these reborn city centers mature, they draw empty nesters, who find the 24-hour street activity comforting rather than threatening, and the youthful energy on those streets rejuvenating.  The result is, temporarily, a doughnut-hole demographic.  What’s missing is the school-age-children cluster. In Manhattan and Brooklyn, and in San Francisco and other urban centers, that’s already shifting:  that’s the hidden push behind charter schools in places like Chicago, and it accounts for the dramatic rise in alternative private and semi-private schools like Avenues in New York’s Chelsea, or the Manhattan Country School on the Upper East Side, or the International School for Peace, in Tucson, Arizona.

Avenues School is across the street from The Projects. At least, they were The Projects, 20 years ago.  Now we live across the street from a park just a block north, a park that’s full of hipsters in hipster soccer and lacrosse and even kickball leagues. The project kids are playing basketball with 27-year-old VP-for-Product-Development types and 25 year old MFAs with their own edgy Chelsea galleries. To keep the creative workers commuting down to those Silicon Valley office campuses for a few more years—till they can be abandoned, that is, having served their economic purpose—companies like Oracle and Google are running private buses that pick up in the Mission and Pacific Heights and Noe Valley, breakfast on board and full 4G wifi.

Out there in the edge cities, matters are more forlorn, more dour.  Communities like Green Oaks, Illinois, and the larger community of Libertyville that engulfs it, were swamped by the infrastructure demands and the municipal responsibilities that came with the influx of the corporate office parks and their privatopia housing communities. They had to build or expand schools and that required bond issues and long-term debt, swaths of new teachers with their salaries and their pension obligations, and curricula that were targeted to the demands of a new elitist constituency.  Most of them didn’t plan well:  they were so enthused by the short-term benefits of growth that they didn’t calculate the long-term costs of sewer systems, of streets and sanitation, of snow removal and school bonds. They usually built on the cheap and, two and three decades in, they are facing big repair bills. Meanwhile, those corporate campuses aren’t generous in ponying up the cash.  Most of them got major tax abatements to start things off, and they’re grumpy enough at suddenly having to pay taxes at all. 

Some of them are even preparing to pick up and leave.  As Garreau noticed in his study of the just-maturing edge cities, the cultural environment of one is pretty much identical to the next, and the citizens of edge cities are not tied by the bounds of place.  There isn’t any there there, so they have nothing to regret when they go.  The corporate planners are working off much more sophisticated financial algorithms; those older campuses have lost their shiny luster, and they need anything from a major sprucing-up to a complete gut-renovation.  At that point, a no-tax offer from some other uncomprehending municipality in, say, North Carolina, or Texas, or Indiana, can make it easy to pick up and leave.  Two years ago, Sears contemplated abandoning that Hoffman Estates campus;  the tax abatement deal that brought them out there was about to expire, and the numbers no longer added up.

That’s happening, sure.  But it’s not the smart, the flexible, or the happening move.  That’s occurring to the hottest and most savvy corporations;  they’re looking for smaller but funky, interesting, sensual locations—Tucson, yes, or Austin, but also San Antonio, Pittsburgh. And they’re moving back into town—into the South of Market area of San Francisco, for example, or the old Center City of Philadelphia and the Loop of Chicago.  Last year, Motorola Mobility abandoned a sprawling Libertyville corporate campus and took over three floors of downtown Chicago’s venerable Merchandise Mart, right on the Chicago River, surrounded by icons of architecture and bustling with energy-nodes, from the Art Institute Al’s #1Italian Beef  to Buddy Guy’s Legends, arguably the best blues club in the country.

Motorola has 84 acres, complete with buildings, canteens, an employee gymnasium, and nicely maintained privatopian roadways (Technology Way circles the outside, separating the campus from the forested campus of St. Mary’s of the Lake Seminary).  The sales agent, Binschwanger, Inc., says it thinks the 1.1 million-square-foot facility would be best for a single corporate entity—perhaps as a regional headquarters, or back offices.  That last phrase signals the new trend:  the real offices will be back downtown.

If you want to know what the edge cities might look like in a decade or so, you can drive in on I 94 toward Chicago and get off in Skokie.  That’s where the high-tech exurbia of the Cold War years was located— where they invented, fabricated, and manufactured tape recorders, microphones, vacuum tubes, precision gauges, innovative gaskets for new-tech motors. They were made in sprawling factories in corporate parks that are now all but invisible behind the overgrowth of once-tidy shrubs and ornamental trees.  The prairie is returning, and these modest masterpieces of modernist industrial architecture—derived from the famed factories you learned about in art history classes:  Fagus factory, the Bauhaus—are hidden, their terra-cotta brick still shiny, only a few of their metal-and-glass lightwells and glass-brick curtain walls shattered by vandals.

Out there in Green Oaks and Hoffman Estates, the future in ruins won’t look so pretty.  No Piranesi will draw fanciful exaggerations of these exurban campuses, crumbling grandly, bedecked by vines and explored by lovers.  They were too quickly made, too cheaply built; their planners and designers and owners had no illusions that their institutions were destined or deserving to last more than the length of their tax abatements and a little more. They’ll be easy enough to demolish, though where to put the toxic waste of their construction and their production will be a conundrum for villages, towns and counties already saddled with the cash-flow problems once reserved for the deindustrializing cities.

Meanwhile, those cities are returning to full life.  You can make fun of the hipsters of Brooklyn, of Hoboken and Jersey City, of Harlem and now the Bronx all you want.  They have returned urban life to the entropic zones where deindustrialization seemed a permanent hammering of doom on the hollow drums of emptied factories and neighborhoods.  Wicker Park and Humboldt Park in Chicago, but also Edgewater and the Pilsen:  they, too, are places where the creative generation makes its mark. 

Back up to the high-map satellite views of Google maps.  Turn on the traffic feature.  Watch the patterns over a day.  Look closely at a Friday afternoon—maybe this early June in Chicago, when the Blues Festival is going on, or Manhattan when there’s a live concert on Strawberry Fields in Central Park.  Observe the shifts of color and then, if you’re fully hooked, add the traffic camera sites. Then start mapping trajectories of movement, and watching how Google calculates the time-of-travel at different times of day (36.4 miles, 48 minutes; in current traffic, 1 hr. 28 min.).  You’ll see the skeins of possibility, the ebb and flow of commerce and culture.  You’ll fix your attention on one spot, then another, perhaps for weeks at a time. 

Check back here.  We’re going to look at some of those places over the next few essays.  Malvern, Pennsylvania.  San Jose, California.  Danbury, Connecticut. Tucson. Penn Hills, Pennsylvania. There are patterns in them, and patterns in the patterns.

Political Geography in America: Part One

Political Geography in America:  Part One

If you don’t live in the US of A, and maybe if you do, the notion of American political geography is pretty opaque.  Hell, they haven’t even taught it as a separate university discipline since Mark Twain wrote a devastatingly witty satire on its vaporous imprecision.  No, actually, Twain’s satire concerned political economy and, when it was published in 1870, it was widely viewed as a send-up of celebrated authors writing without knowledge or even a trace of shame about whatever a paying editor might imagine would draw a readership.

Which is not to say that political geography hasn’t always been essential to understanding America.  But the best writers on the subject never mentioned the discipline.  They wrote fiction:  William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty on the South; William Steinbeck and Wallace Stegner on California; Ken Kesey on the Northwest states. Elmore Leonard has recently brought the strip-mining areas of Kentucky, western Virginia and West Virginia proper into stark relief. 

There is a demandingly difficult academic journal devoted to the subject.  Political Geography recently ran a scholarly article about “enclaves of abandonment,” places that were “resolved” by a political process that made life within them impossible.  One Indian spent his entire life in such an enclave, ceded to Bangladesh but far from its borders, leaving him an illegal immigrant to India whenever he needed shoes or fertilizer, never able to enter his legal state because his enclave was surrounded by Indian territory.  This is the subject of political geography—the ways landscapes and spaces lie at odds with, or bring into being, political institutions and systems.

   But most of the public writing on America’s political geography has always been, at best, shallow and simplistic.  In the later 19^th century, and then again in the 1960s, the recurrent distinction was between The South and The North. Having spent a good deal of the 1960s in West Virginia, which after all became a separate state by seceding from Confederate Virginia over the issue of slaveholding, I had no illusions that it held greater kinship with, say, Connecticut or even Ohio than Kentucky and Mississippi—except insofar as Mississippi had a far greater, if largely silent, black population.  In the ‘70s, I played guitar and pedal steel in Austin, Texas, while getting a Ph.D. in American Studies, and there the political geography was so fine in distinction that not just different bars on the same street, but different tables at the same bar, conformed to radically different political geographies. At Threadgill’s on a Saturday night there were two-steppers who’d voted the Communist party in 1936 and Houston corporate lawyers with manufactured tans and endangered-species cowboy boots moving side by side with Kinky Friedman, the Texas Jew-Boy. In one band, I was the only non-Chicano;  when we opened for Saul and Rueben’s uncle’s conjunto orchestra, there were long comedic passages concerning my dress, my hair, and my gringo-stupid inability to speak either Castilian or streetwise Spanish, none of which I could understand, as I spoke no Spanish.  In an earlier, ill-fated attempt to monetize my musicianship I played pedal steel in a C&W band so Christian that the other members couldn’t play past midnight Saturday, minimizing the bar-take, and refused to break down, move, load or unload the equipment on the grounds it was work on the Sabbath. Leaving me to do all the work but not receiving any recompense.  I first met Saul and Rueben coming home discouraged after one of those gigs, and followed some spectacular guitar playing into a shitkicker fratboy birthday party.  I wheeled in the Twin Reverb, took the axe out of the box, and became the band’s first and only White Boy. I grieve that band daily.

People said Texas was different, and Austin was different than Texas, but I knew better.  Driving down the first time, in a wornout VW squareback with the Twin and the pedal steel and about six guitars and a box of books filling the back, I had to stop in Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA for the night when a big piece of steel belt emerged from the side of the radial tire, causing everything to shake madly at anything over 45 mph. I had never been south of the Mason-Dixon line.  The only thing I knew about the South in the counterculture years I had learned from watching Easy Rider in a theatre in Paris in 1970, but it was dubbed into French, in a sort of muffled way and I could not follow the language. The South was where pickup trucks pulled alongside you and blew you away with a shotgun. Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA was a Merle Haggard song and I’d played it enough times to know the lyrics:

We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee;
We don't take no trips on LSD
We don't burn no draft cards down on Main Street;
We like livin' right, and bein' free.

I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,
A place where even squares can have a ball
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,
And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all

We don't make a party out of lovin';
We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo;
We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy,
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.

            At the time, I had hair about to my waist, and while I was wearing cowboy boots, they were the wrong sort (leather Fryes, well-worn) and my jeans had a zipper and a slight bell-bottom “flare” to them.  I was pretty sure I’d be sleeping in my car in the tire shop.  Instead, I met a very nice motel keeper and his wife, and had my first chicken-fried steak at the urging of everyone around me at the diner, who were thrilled to see a Yankee eat his first bite of what is still one of my favorite foods in the world.  After dinner, I walked out to the small park, redolent of newmown hay and irrigated alfalfa.  The next morning, I was introduced to biscuits and gravy, and also grits.  The tire shop gave me the new tire just over wholesale because I was a musician.

   Today the pundits still speak of Red and Blue States, which is something like hitting a soufflé with a hammer until the pyrex breaks and then declaring the concoction and the glass to be of the same family, since you could have called both of them dishes—before you went at ‘em. American political geography isn’t defined by state boundaries.  State boundaries are arbitrary and dangerous in much the same way the postcolonial African states were rendered arbitrary and dangerous—no attention paid to belief, to loyalties, to kinship patterns, to climate and crop and foodways.

If there’s a difference, between us and postcolonial Africa, it’s been in the ways that the democratic political system has, until very recently, forced not just compromise, but something more important—mutual learning among unlikely and unsympathetic groups.  In Evanston Illinois in the 1980s, the school board decided to move white children by bus to a predominantly black elementary school.  Until this time there had been, in the US, virtually no successful busing of white kids out of their neighborhoods, and this experiment had its typical sad future ahead of it—the wealthier whites would send their children to private school, the empowered white would whine and finagle their political representatives until quiet exceptions were made and their children were grandfathered back into the old school.  By some very happy coincidence, I went over to the school in question and met the principal who at the time was dressed in a light-up Christmas Tree of a dress, to which no fewer than six small children had managed to attach themselves.  She seemed utterly unfazed by this style of meeting a representative of the apartheid-loving white side of the town.  Then and there, I fell in love.  I grieve Clara Pate daily.

But I digress.  When I started going to meetings of the mostly-black PTA of the new school, I was treated with the suspicion, even contempt, I deserved.  These parents didn’t want privileged white parents barging into their lives, with their self-righteousness and their sense of entitlement and their ten-dollar words. 

I learned this the hard way, when the School Board announced that they were not going to increase the number of teachers or staff to accommodate the 100 or so new students due to arrive.  This was, of course, outrageous:  I had no idea that the Board members knew that when those two buses drove through the white neighborhood to pick up those 100 students, only three would get on:  Caroline Winter-Rosenberg, Rocco deFilippis, and my son.  At the time, I thought most of the kids would be on the bus, and by my lights, this was an invitation to overcrowding and cheapening of resources. I got up to speak about this, in an impassioned way, hardly noticing that all the black parents were looking at me as if I were perhaps the most naïve rube to have arrived in the Midwest since the Civil War. When I railed against the Board’s niggardly treatment, though, I heard an audible gasp and a rising torrent of response.  I was too het-up to hear what was being said until one parent got up and dressed me down for speaking of the nigger-treatment. It took me a good fifteen minutes to understand what had happened.  It took me six months before any of those parents would speak to me, and it was Clara Pate who took them aside and told them to get over it:  I was a professor and I used ten-dollar words when I should have used regular ones because I was an ignorant naïve rube, but I was good of heart.  I hope she was right;  certainly I have spent the rest of my life trying to live down my flaws and live up to her kind assessment of me.

That, my friends, is political geography in America. Boundaries matter;  when they are well-drawn, they confirm and amplify the strengths and weaknesses of the citizenry.  When they are badly drawn, perhaps something new will emerge:  something better.  Or something worse.

Medals of Warfare

The Old Man was sitting at the table in the Little House we built for him, basking in the brilliant light off the snow and reading the paper.  He likes to read me excerpts of stories that seem particularly funny or absurd or telling.  Today his hands were shaking as he read out the news that the Pentagon had developed a new class of combat medals, a Distinguished Warfare Medal, to be given to those who operate the unmanned drones that target bad guys and take them out from above.

What are they rewarding them for? The Old Man asked.  Courage? Are they sticking their necks out?  He paused and put the paper down. You know, he started to say. I….

But he stopped there.  He put the paper back down, carefully, between the coffee and the plate of toast. He looked at me for a moment. I wonder what this guy Panetta’s military record is. After another long pause, he sighed, turned the page, and started to look at the used car ads.

I am a Quaker.  Not a practicing Quaker in the sense that I go to meeting house.  When I was in college, and the Vietnam War was on, meeting house was a sacred place, full of the crackling energy of a hundred people arrayed on rows of plain benches, all of them facing inward toward an empty center.  After the war wound down, and I was in Texas, going to meeting was a different thing.  It seemed no longer to focus me or to bring into the room what I had understood as the indwelling of the holy spirit.  I took my meeting outside, by myself, and I’ve done so ever since. My alternative service was to run an Institute on American Culture and Life for the U.S. Department of State for 16 years. 

The Old Man is 88. He was a Marine, and he landed with the Marines at atoll after atoll to face the withering fire of pillboxed Japanese and their kamakazi pilots.  And he watched, time and again, as his friends to his left and right went down and he had to leave them to continue the charge up some coral reef or stony hill. He never talks about it.  Except once or twice to me, and to his son Eddie, who was in the Peace Corps in the Marshalls and had to evacuate the Bikini Islanders that second time, after the U.S. had told them it was safe to return, the land was cleaned, and then conceded that it wasn’t, and would never be. The Old Man and his son are bound together by shared sorrows on blue-water havens full of hidden dangers, far from here.

The announcement this morning was brief.  The medal is to be called a Distinguished Warfare Medal. It is meant to reward especially competent service among the technocratic corps manning the controls of the drones. It was invented and pushed through by outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. I’ve never liked Panetta.  He has always conveyed a sort of unctuous manliness that’s the very opposite of the Old Man’s reticence. He’s paid lip service to the Veterans’ Administration, but we have to beg the V.A. to repair the Old Man’s hearing aid. When he needed a wheelchair they told him he'd have to come down to the hospital to be "fitted." 40 miles away. It didn’t excite any interest when we suggested that the necessity of a wheelchair precluded a nice little drive, a long wait, and then a long drive back.  Besides, they told us, we’d have to come back to pick it up.  Sometime.  When it was approved.  And delivered.

Panetta joined the armed forces of the United States in 1963, after law school.  He stayed for three years, starting as a second lieutenant, and leaving in 1966 as a first lieutenant.

1963-1966 were tough years to be a soldier.  Lyndon Johnson had decided to drastically escalate the Vietnam War, with a surge that brought the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—the Vietnam equivalent of George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq after his invention of “weapons of mass destruction.” Between 1961 and 1964, the Army's rosters multiplied from about 850,000 to nearly a million. Shortened tours of duty increased the dangers for inexperienced troops and, more importantly, for the young lieutenants who were to lead them into the jungle battles.

Leon Panetta never went to Vietnam. Despite the vacuum of intelligent, well-trained lieutenants, he stayed at Fort Ord in California, after a stint in Army Intelligence School. Fort Ord is on the Monterey Peninsula, just off the Coastal Highway from the dunes and the ocean.   Panetta was Chief of Intelligence Operations at Fort Ord.

Somewhere along the way, Panetta earned an Army Commendation Medal.  It’s given out, the Pentagon tells us,  to any member of the Armed Forces of the United States other than General Officers who, while serving in any capacity with the U.S. Army after 6 December 1941, distinguished themselves by heroism, meritorious achievement or meritorious service. 

In my old office at the university, I had a string of odd awards given out for various reasons.  They were interspersed with a very impressive collection of bowling trophies I had inherited from an old roommate, Bradford Collins, who liked to collect them at yard sales.  I think of Panetta’s Medal as falling in the same category as all of those—somewhere between a meaningless reward for the activities expected of the recipient, and overblown, meaningless junk.

But it’s not surprising that one of Panetta’s last acts as Defense Secretary was to invent a Medal rewarding activity as trivial and yet as deadly and morally, ethically, legally and tactically insubstantial as no doubt was the labor for which he was once rewarded, in another war. It was not hard to volunteer for combat duty in Vietnam if you were a lieutenant.  There was a desperate vacuum of intelligent, educated, well-trained young officers.  Fort Ord, by contrast, is about two hours from the Condor Club on Broadway in the North Beach section of San Francisco, where, in 1964, Carol Doda first danced topless. 

Here’s an excerpt from the DoD’s press release: 

“This new medal recognizes the changing character of warfare and those who make extraordinary contributions to [drone and cyberwarfare],” said Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The criteria for this award will be highly selective and reflect high standards.”

The most immediate example is the work of an unmanned aerial vehicle operator who could be operating a system over Afghanistan while based at Creech Air Force Base, Nev. The unmanned aerial vehicle would directly affect operations on the ground. Another example is that of a soldier at Fort Meade, Md., who detects and thwarts a cyberattack on a DOD computer system.”

There is an Army recruiting page devoted to the category of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Operator (15W). It shows a boy—perhaps 12—wearing army fatigues, holding up a model airplane glider.  Further down the page is this:

HELPFUL SKILLS

*Interest in remote/radio control vehicles

*Organize information and study its meaning

*Think and write clearly

*Attention to detail

It’s not important that the grammar is wrong at a level to make any 7^th grade English teacher cringe.  It’s not important that being able to think…clearly is merely considered helpful. It is important to see the conjunction between that picture of a boy with a toy, and the notion of a grownup with a murderous weapon directed via heads-up video-game technologies. It puts the enterprise within that young boy’s limited moral universe—of good guys and bad guys—that’s also central to the wave of new video games that mimic war without threatening to cause the player pain or consequence.

Almost nothing about the drone program makes sense to me except its extraordinary power to do military and diplomatic harm without the inconvenience of dying American soldiers. What this new reward clarifies is the way the old values of American military mission—courage, bravery, risk, injury or death at the hands of clearly defined military of enemies in declared wars—has been utterly upended. 

The Distinguished Warfare Medal is the first new medal designated since the Bronze Star was initiated in 1944, during the worst of World War II. The Bronze Star also can be given for meritorious service… in a combat zone. 

Only four words.  But they make all the difference.

Big pickups, wood-burning fireplaces, and the Hawk Above the Hayfield

Last Friday they forecast a storm of the century, but our little valley was right in between the two big storms that collided over Connecticut and Massachusetts to devastating effect.  The Old Man, who’s living with us now, was worried she wouldn’t make it out of New York before it hit, remembering with his long view the time she spent three days in a rest stop in Ohio, and the time she ended up on the floor of some airport for a couple of days.  She made the last bus out—at 3:30 pm.—and was home by 7.  The next day I shoveled for three hours, clearing a path for the EMT ambulance in case the Old Man took a turn for the worse.

Yesterday started with a frozen rain that coated the piles of snow with a crust of ice. Today a warm burst from the south pushed the clouds aside for tears of blue that ranged from pale pastel up to the east on the ridge, to a brilliant saturated Technicolor over to the south.  Tomorrow it was supposed to plummet back down ahead of a new storm, but now it looks like sunshine for the next week. 

This is normal winter weather here in the rural stretches of New York a couple of hours north of New York City.  Down there, though, where the coastal regions whip up winds and froth the weather with salty air, floods and freezes, high winds and surge tides aren’t giving up. Out in the Midwest, in Chicago where we used to live, there’s been almost no snow at all, and the temperatures have been wildly off their averages.

I’ve been reading back copies of Life magazine—starting with its first issues in 1936 and ending up around the moon mission. Weather is a favorite subject for American obsession, and sensational picture journalism loves to ramp up the rhetoric.  But Life started publication two years after what had been the hottest summer and hottest year on record in the United States.  1934 seemed to confirm the dour predictions that the Dust Bowl was not an isolate phenomenon. After that, though, a long stretch of temperate weather led us back through the rest of the Depression and the war.

Actually, Life had a hard time with the weather for its entire active lifespan—the climate in the U.S. seemed pretty temperate all the way up into the ‘70s.  There were tornadoes in Tornado Alley, always good for a sidebar, and local news photographers made a little cash with time-lapse pictures of the twisters eliminating barns and false-front Oklahoma and Kansas towns. There were hurricanes in the late summer and fall. Typhoons and floods and earthquakes hammered the rest of the globe, but Life didn’t have the best luck with freelancers in places where they took place.

The Missouri River flooded nicely in 1955, and Margaret Bourke-White did her trademark fly-around yielding a flood of aerial views of the spreading waters. There was a good flood in Texas in ’53, and Life’r John Dominis got a great shot of a man astraddle a homemade raft made out of three inner tubes, some scrap lumber, and an orange crate, floating in the midst of a fruit orchard with only the tippy-tops of the trees showing in neat rows. In ’53, Life got some official pictures of a flood in the Netherlands—dull, but serviceable, and one or two even showed a picturesque Dutch windmill. ’52 was a hot year, thanks to some very picturesque flooding of Venice, enabling the return of the ever-popular gondola moorings, this time with some newsworthiness.  Kansas also had some good flooding, and Life got a man out there to show the U. of Kansas students heroically piling sandbags. ’47 was good because both the Mississippi in the U.S. and major rivers in the U.S.S.R. flooded, providing a we’re-all-in-this-together counterpoint to the Cold War rhetoric of the moment. Oddly enough,1938’s great flood of the Huang He River in China, a location dear to the heart of publisher Henry Luce, didn’t get any photo-play at all, probably because the magazine hadn’t yet set up a sufficiently wide net of stringers in the backcountry there. But ’37 had sent superstar Bourke-White down to Kentucky for some heartstring-tugging images of pitiable victims of the floods there.

‘53’s North Sea flood, though, is worth returning to, because it’s the one that drove the Dutch to invest billions in a flood control system that’s now being touted for the New Jersey-New York-Long Island coastline that was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.  The Delta Works, begun shortly after the ‘53 flood and still being modified today, has so far cost each Dutch citizen 16 Euros—not a bad price, but wildly outdated. Building it today would require something more like 100 Euros per capita. Doing the same to the East Coast of the U.S. would cost, at a low estimate, a hundred times the Delta Works cost, and it would take decades to get into service, even as it deflected the floods and troubles elsewhere. Staten Island doesn’t have much of a future;  nor does the Jersey shore, or the Far Rockaways, or much of the coastline of Long Island. The Outer Banks of the Carolinas won’t be there long. Georgia, Florida, Texas…

Not that we need to worry about that here in the Rondout Valley. Yet. We have the Shawangunk Mountain ridge to our east, and the Catskills to our west. But every river and stream running through here takes its source up in the mountains, and every year the flooding has shocked oldtimers and flooded houses and barns dating to the 1600s and 1700s.  Two years ago, we got a swimming hole where our property abuts Harry’s.  Last year, it filled in again. The farmers are losing their ability to predict a year’s season; Hurricane Irene left the Davenport’s farm almost entirely underwater, and the Gill’s up 209 toward Kingston was pretty much a washout, too. Rumor had it, if they’d had a buyer, both families would have packed it up.

This year the price of firewood plummeted as the devastated woodlots of Irene’s winds came in the market fully seasoned.  Propane hasn’t moderated, and heating oil’s still high and going higher.  Natural gas prices have dropped quite a bit, but that doesn’t do a rural dweller much good, since the nearest pipeline is all the way up in Kingston, 20 miles north. A lot of wood is being burned this winter.

Around here, there are three classes of people when it comes to climate change, and all three of us are contributing to the problem, all three of us have our heads in the sand and our short-term interest driving our daily actions.  There are the non-believers. Kurt, Jr. up the hill has a top-end 4x4 pickup—long bed, double-cab, flare fenders, the whole bit. He’s put stacks behind the cab with glass-packs and when he downshifts they make a lot of noise.  At night, you can see the flames popping out the top.  God only knows how he gets the thing to pass state inspection.  Last year and the year before he and his friends used to smoke pot and drink beer around a campfire they’d build in Harry’s clover field and then when they were ready, usually around 10 at night, they’d fire up the Snowmobiles and race around the field doing figure-8s before crossing the stream to run an obstacle course set up in our hayfield, then hit it up to Paul and Sarah’s, then onto the Rail-Trail for a little illegal drag racing. Somebody talked the Staties into running a few patrols, and that led to some DUIs and some trespassing charges and fines and safety school stints.   This year the Snowmobile crowd has tiptoed quietly along the edge of our woodlot before ducking into Harry’s  and heading for the rail-trail.

But Kurt, Jr. hasn’t forgotten. He knows who made the calls—hell, we all told his dad, Kurt, Sr.  Every time he comes past the house now, he downshifts and hits the accelerator, hard. He’s my alarm clock. He does the same in front of the Baker’s up the hill—God knows what crime they committed to deserve it, but there it is. In the summer, Kurt, Jr. races dirt-track Modifieds over in Accord.  He’s got a few other toys too—an ATV I seem to remember, and a dirt bike. 

Kurt, Jr. doesn’t believe in Global Warming.  It’s too inconvenient.  Everything that gives him pleasure contributes to the problem. By contrast, his father, Kurt, Sr., has worked for the Ulster County roads crew for thirty years or so.  After Irene, he and his crew had to repair just about every culvert and county-road bridge, and he knows damned well that things are changing.  He also knows damned well just how much money it’s costing the county and the state with every disaster.  Our county’s small enough in population that you can see the effect on your property taxes and it’s not pretty. He’s got a fair amount of land, between him and his wife and his mother, and like a lot of people he’s gone over more and more to woodburning stoves and furnaces as the taxes eat at the heating oil budget.

Around here, a month’s propane in winter runs you $500 or more—and that’s with a well-insulated house and a habit of keeping the thermostat low.  Heating oil is worse. So the winter mornings are aromatic with the smell of woodsmoke, just as the clear fall days are a symphony of chain saws and mechanical splitters and tractors dragging the sledges full of split wood out to be covered and allowed to season for a year or two. 

It’s a romance of the senses, especially for the weekenders who like to think they’re embraced in the bosom of the rural life. But most of the wood stoves and furnaces around here are old-school, which means each one contributes the equivalent of four of Kurt, Jr.’s 4x4s worth of climate-change pollution.  Moreover, the trees being cut down for firewood aren’t being replaced at nearly the same rate as they’re being depleted.  This is an area full of forests dating to the years after the great blueberry burns of the early 20^th century gave way as blueberry farms made wild blueberry picking uneconomical.  The good burning trees, like oak, are at full maturity now—a century or so later.  If they’re replanted one-to-one, they’ll be back to soaking up CO² in the early 22^nd century.

Meanwhile, the weekenders drive up from New York City on the Thruway, doing 80 and 85 to get here sooner, stuck in interminable traffic jams down by the city where they idle and inch, idle and inch for sometimes hours.  Their houses with the picturesque huge stone fireplaces ablaze on Friday and Saturday nights and all day Sundays are paid for by hard corporate labor, long hours, and lots of travel—air travel. A single New York-L.A. round trip contributes about as much to global warming as a year’s worth of driving a moderately new car. A weekender doing two round-trip flights a week makes Kurt, Jr. look like a Sierra Club eco-hippie.

The sun is setting on the hayfield, turning the snow shades of pink and red. The hawk is perched in the top of the ash tree that will soon be dead from the devastations of the Emerald Ash Borer, a virulent parasite brought to the U.S. from Asia by international trade in the ‘90s. The creek is rising as the snow melts up in the Catskills and by tomorrow it will have overflowed its banks, depositing small icebergs within the treestand that separates Harry’s clover field from the hayfield. The trees are already compromised; the rise and drop of the creek so accelerated this last decade has undermined the old ones, leaving them to topple into the water where they capture the branches and logs and scraps of old farm structures during the spring thaw, making dams that push the creek up over its banks. The old outhouse, once far above flood stage, has listed to the side and will probably collapse this spring.  I didn’t have time to shore it up this year;  I was too concerned with getting culvert and French tile and working with the Bushes, Wayne and Wayne, Jr., to dig drainage swales in the hayfield and between the house and the barn so the dirt could hold topsoil and nutrients. All summer, all fall, the hawk watched as we did this work.  Now he has the hayfield to himself, except for the evenings when Kurt, Jr. and the boys run the Snowmobile caravan along the edge of the woodlot, duck onto the old timber road, and head out into nature. 

Good Guys, Bad Guys, and Loss of American Mission

I have been very busy this last couple of weeks at my new job as an American hero.  Last night, in the midst of a desperate firefight involving violent jihadists attempting to take over an abandoned Soviet missile site that was, CIA informed the SEAL commander, still weaponized, I carried a wounded medic on my shoulders, fording an icy stream while my colleagues provided cover with AR-15s and an RPG-launcher.  It was nighttime and my night-vision goggles turned the scene an eerie pixilated monochromatic green. Earlier, I had been heli-dropped into a Middle Eastern desert city—I was just a soldier:  they didn’t tell me what city, or even what country it was, just that we were going in after some bad guys.  With my radio picking up the chatter of my fellow grunts, I went house-to-house trying not to engage innocent civilians, though it seemed there weren’t any—even the young women hid machine pistols under their flowing robes.

When the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school shooting occurred a few weeks ago, there was a brief silence from the shill-organization for the major weapons industry.  Most Americans have heard, though far fewer believe it, that the National Rifle Association is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the major American arms manufacturers.  That interruption in shrill declarations of a constitutional apocalypse soon to come from jackbooted federal gun-confiscators was a dead give-away to the power behind the organization.  No genuine American sodality could have remained quiet in the face of such horror; corporations, however, are not human and so they operate under the rules of efficiency found in algorithms and statistics about the depth and longevity of citizen response to actionable tragedy, and unrecorded phone conversations with the congressmen and senators they have bought and paid for.

For nearly twenty years, I directed and served as a principal faculty member for an international institute on American culture and life.  It was a vocation I happened upon, and it took a little time for me to realize just what was entailed.  Every summer, 30 or so teachers, teacher-trainers, university faculty members and education-ministry specialists would arrive for six weeks of intensive training on the current state of the study of the United States.  Early on, I and my colleagues thought it was our mission to provide high-order scholarly briefs on new trends in scholarship here in America.  What we learned was that this was not even remotely the job that needed to be done. As my friend and fellow faculty member Christian Messenger (great name for an Americanist!) declared, it was “our privilege to explain America to the world.” But even that wasn’t right.  We learned that the subject, the verb and the predicate of that statement were all laughably imprecise. We didn’t know America, at least not the America that came to be the subject of the Institute.  And so “explaining” was not a responsible activity.  Moreover, the world that sat around us in the blandly efficient classroom wasn’t a monolith, and it certainly wasn’t going to sit still and drink in our wisdom.

 

Our constituency arrived, over the life of the Institute, from almost every country on the globe.  We despaired of ever getting a Cuban, till one day Frank arrived;  not only that, but his cousin ran an excellent Cuban restaurant in Chicago, and Frank had already mapped out an itinerary for himself with the help of the surreptitious extended network of Cuban-Americans in the area. Was it Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan from which tiny Yana arrived, with only a pair of high-heeled slippers (despite our instructions to all to pack “sturdy walking and hiking shoes”) with which she hiked the Petroglyph Trail at Mesa Verde National Monument and managed to get herself left behind accidentally-on-purpose in a truck stop outside Gallup, New Mexico, where she was surrounded by handsome, cowboy-booted truck drivers with whom she demurely flirted while showing them pictures of her home country?

There were America-loving Provencal teachers and America-hating Egyptian school principals, and we quickly found ourselves baffled by the Americas of both.  They didn’t resemble in any way the worlds within which we lived—and we were a pretty motley crew of Americans:  a guitar-playing country boy with a Ph.D. from Austin, Texas, and a Peace Corps alumnus from New England via Ethiopia, and a political scientist who’d grown up in the high-rise projects in Chicago and was, with his wife and his mother and a few sisters, still fostering an average of ten kids at a time.  There was a lesbian economist and a neoconservative historian and a libertarian specialist on architecture and the city. Why the Department of State kept funding us, year after year, seemed a strange miracle to us.  We thrived under the first George H.W. Bush administration, and we thrived in the Clinton years and we thrived under George W. Bush and we thrived in the first Obama administration.  The Great Recession finally killed us off—we couldn’t build a program in Chicago that could compete with isolated state-college campuses in places we didn’t even consider for our road trips.  We had a good run of it.  We put the documents in front of our participants-- Dred Scott and The Declaration of  Independence and The Plow that Broke The Plains and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and The Great Gatsby and The Statistical Atlas of the United States.  We took them to black gospel churches and 4th of July picnics and corporate law offices.  They listened to Navajo hat'aali and James Brown and Los Lobos and Dwight Yoakam, whose Guitars, Cadillacs and Hillbilly Music was a favorite of the woman from Senegal who won our "how many languages do you speak" that year-- 1987, with a still-unmatched record of 27-- not counting a few dialects here and there. She was the first person to click Xhosa to me-- a language my daughter now speaks with some imprecision.

One of my jobs as Director was to serve as the teaching faculty member during the two-plus week tours of the U.S.A. that culminated each program.  Though there was a running joke that a lecture by me on the subject of the changing vertical ecosystems of the Rocky Mountain Plateau after a big Southwestern tamale lunch at a diner on the Res was the best way to guarantee a long nap, I grew to love the work of close observation as we passed through small towns and big cities, ranchlands and industrial parks, weaving together the fabric that was this country to which I had devoted my intellectual and creative life.  After it was over, the alumni of those Institutes that had developed close-knit and continuing virtual Institutes via Facebook and websites extracted from me a promise to continue my tourbus lectures. 

That was what began this series of essays.  I warned those alumni that I wasn’t going to go political on them.  That I would remain what I had always sought to be—a quizzical observer, pointing out the hidden significance of the details of everyday American life. 

When the National Rifle Association’s shill, a man named Wayne LaPierre, gave his stump-speech after the Newtown murders of small schoolchildren by an automatic-weapon-toting young man, I struggled to keep my promise. 

I am going to skirt as close as I can to the edge;  I’m going to use a deeply personal voice to keep from seeming to throw some academic weight to what follows. 

I was raised in the woods and farmlands of Connecticut.  My father came from Mormon rancher stock, from the foothill communities outside of Salt Lake City.  My mother’s family came from Mille Lac, Minnesota.  Every one of them owned guns, hunted deer and turkey with them, shot snakes and coyotes when necessary.  My grandfather’s World War I service revolver was in a canvas bag in the attic of my house.  My father’s service weapon turned out to be up there too—we found it when going through his boxes after he died.  I had a bb gun, then a pellet gun, then a .22 rifle.  My Boy Scout troop master taught me to target shoot, and I once won a turkey in a turkey shoot in North Guilford, Connecticut.  I was probably 13. The Bushes, Wayne and Wayne Jr., hunt deer on our farm, and we get a portion of the venison in return.  We are glad to see the overpopulation of deer, who infect the dogs and the people with Lyme Disease and wander into the road to cause bad crashes and who die of starvation or parasites:  we are glad to see it diminished, though not enough, by the New York State hunting season. 

Some years ago, a dear friend who is a bit of a gun nut took me to a range to shoot, after an interval of two or more decades of increasing rustiness at the task.  We were shooting at targets with pistols, and it was fun—a sport requiring precision and strength and intense concentration and an affinity between self and machine that’s not dissimilar to road cycling, though less demanding and less thrilling, by my lights.

But what struck me that day, and the days after that at the range, was that there seemed an inordinate number of fellow range-users who had what can most charitably be called paranoid ideation.  They were convinced the economic apocalypse was upon us and only a hoard of heavy weaponry would protect them.  They believed that jackbooted federal officials were conspiring to take not just their weaponry but their houses, their trucks, their children. They believed that crazy-haired black teen thugs were at any moment going to drive out of the city to rape their daughters.

All of them had very specific accounts of people very close to them who had been attacked in some way and saved from death or worse only by brandishing or actually shooting their weapons at shadowy marauders.  None of them could tell me just who it was this had happened to.  If they claimed it had happened to them, they couldn’t tell me when, or where, and when I asked, in what I thought was a tone that mixed curiosity and naivete, they became increasingly agitated and threatening. 

There are many documented cases where this scenario either took place, or was alleged to have taken place.  One site, gunssavelives.net has recorded over a thousand reports involving homeowners, residents, shopkeepers, carjack victims and vigilant citizens whose weapons killed, wounded, caused to surrender, or scared away bad guys.

But the count reaches back more than a year and a half. In 19 months, across the entire U.S. guns have purportedly beaten back the bad guys just over a thousand times. Around fifty a month.

There are two glaring problems with this statistic.  There are close to 115 million households in the U.S. Just in sheer numbers, guns have saved .00096% of households over an 18 month period. As important, the number of households saved is just about 20% fewer than the number of households in which a member was accidentally killed by a gun in the house.

There’s more to this.  If you read the stories in gunssavelives.net, you notice pretty quickly that the notion of salvation by guns is pretty flexible.  One homeowner shot a man whom he reported was attempting to break into his house;  he killed him after, he reported, the man refused to leave despite repeated warnings.  But an onlooker who had noticed the man earlier looking into parked cars and come out with a baseball bat to scare him away decided it wasn’t an issue-- the man was talking to his hand and yelling incoherently.  The onlooker then watched as the man approached and began banging on doors;  the last one he banged on was the one with the armed family protector on the other side. 

In report after report, home protectors provided the reports, often with no corroborating evidence.  Many of the cases read disconcertingly like that of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who was talking to his girlfriend on the cell phone inside the gated community where he was living, and was shot in what a community-protector called self-defense. 

This is the issue of disproportionality:  most of the cases I’ve read in a random sampling of those on gunssavelives.net involved unarmed “home invaders”—read, burglars, breakin-thieves, or smash-and-grabbers—shot and often killed by multiple gunshots. 

And it is the reason, I think, that Wayne Lapierre, mouthpiece of the gun industry, broke the silence of the N.R.A. with a statement crafted entirely around the concept of “bad guys” and “good guys.”  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, Lapierre declared.  The disproportionality of gun use—unarmed, nonviolent criminals or even noncriminals mistaken for criminals and shot—cannot be allowed to stand.  The moral argument evens the score:  one bad guy/one good guy.

In fact, many of the stories on gunssavelives.net concern lone individuals heroically holding off more than one bad guy.  This is also very useful as arguments go.  It sets the shooter as the victim of disproportionality.  It defines the gun as the great equalizer, as it’s often called by gun advocates.  And it links often-sordid, trivial confrontations of today within the context of America’s long mythos of the Western.  Each one of these home protectors carries the mantle of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and Gary Cooper.

Wayne Lapierre’s diatribe about the Newtown shootings focused on violent video games and movies that, he said, emboldened and incited bad guys to action.  I’m ready to grant that premise, on one condition—that Wayne Lapierre concede the corollary—that the shootings of unarmed people in the names of home-defense, that the accidental deaths and injuries of gun-household children,  that the numerous self-inflicted injuries by incompetent or inexperienced gun users, and the violent deaths of partners, spouses, friends and houseguests by gunowners: all be placed at the feet of the American mythos of the Western. 

Let’s return to that other, brushed-aside circumstance:  killings of family members by family members.  I don’t have good statistics on this at the moment.  What I do have dates back to 1995, when just around 1,500 households saw one adult member kill another.  As far as I can tell, about ¼ of these deaths were by firearm.  I don’t have statistics on the number of children killed by adults in their household.  I don’t have statistics on the number of forcible rapes by gun-owning family members occurred, either.  Or the number of children killed by other children in the house by a gun left there conveniently close in case of home invaders-- loaded and ready, in the bedside table drawer, or under the mattress or pillow, or on top of the dresser.

. 

What has emerged from my recent obsession with gun-violence data in the United States, is this.  There seem to be three broad categories of gun owner in America.  By far the largest consists of people like me, and like my neighbors:  gun owners whose guns are used for the purposes of hunting or, in some cases, recreational shooting—from target practice to skeet  to the annual Thanksgiving Turkey Shoot.  At the opposite extreme is a smaller but much noisier group of people who see the world as a place out to get them or theirs, and who view guns—big guns—as their only recourse.  This group believes itself to comprise the good guys.  What’s disturbing is that increasingly they are pushing those who don't embrace their vision into that other role:  bad guys. In their eyes, I'm a bad guy. I threaten them.  I need to be protected against.  Maybe, soon, I and mine need to be taken out.

But I'm not worried.  After all, there is my own recent change of identity, from bad guy to good guy.  I’ve achieved this magical conversion by shooting down dangerous foreigners, murderous children (Arabs, so it’s ok), bomb-wielding women (Muslim), and, most recently (in Call of Duty: Black Ops) buffoonishly incompetent African Negro rebels and marauders whose faces seem drawn from Amos and Andy as much as from Muammar Gaddafi or Idi Amin Dada. Playing those games, I appear to be embracing their strange, paranoid vision, in which Americans are always good guys and everyone else... well...

I do not see in these digital bad guy  faces any resemblance to my friends the world over—to Assam, to Yana, or Hiram, or Mohammed or Mamadou—men and women who teach small children and sullen teenagers and overly-materialistic university students and overly-obtuse graduate students, men and women who look at America as a place of failing promise, and who worry about us. 

Consider that, Wayne Lapierre.  All over the world, good-hearted people who love this nation and its heritage and promise are worrying about us.  They aren’t worried that we’re not fighting enough wars, or that our drones aren’t killing enough bad guys or that we aren’t going to enter a small, insecure nation and attempt to eradicate its questionable nuclear capability, or threaten and bully another much like it until it starves its people to death and decides to nuke Japan.  They aren't worried that we're losing our masculinity as a nation.  They don't think that, without our rocket propelled grenades in their nation's capital all will fail.

They're worried we've lost our way. They are worried that we’re caricaturing our own Constitution and trivializing its humanity-uplifting propositions while celebrating its long-outmoded trivial features. They’re worried that American toleration of rage and intolerance and paranoia inside our border is undercutting the very doctrine of skeptical tolerance at the heart of the American Experiment.

They're worried that it's not just a small marginal minority that has abandoned evidence-based thinking or critical thinking in the name of bizarre, Judeo-Christian-seeming  jihadist fundamentalisms, whether in Kiryas Joel, New York or Waco, Texas.  They fear our increasingly paranoid behavior at home and abroad has already destroyed our ability to set an example in the world for fairness, kindness, generosity, hope, opportunity, tolerance and welcome. They worry we have lost our way and they wonder how any other nation or civilization can take our place.

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.  The eyes of all people are upon us.  So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world… We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till be be consumed out of the good land…

Therefore let us choose life

That we and our seed may live…

John Winthrop, aboard the Massachusetts Bay Colony ship Arbella, on the way to America, 1630

Shells: The Old and Empty Houses

The Old Man is sitting on the white couch in the Little House we built off the back of the Old House.  He has a fleece-and-down throw wrapped around him and on top of that there’s an electric blanket. The heat is set about six degrees higher than we have set it before.  He is watching the Fox Business Channel and drinking Diet Cranberry juice. He is 88 years old and he has come to live with us.

This isn’t news these days in America.  A string of trends has been woven together. The children born after World War II, the so-called Baby Boomers, are in their top earning years, and there are many of them.    Many of them, perhaps most, are in the middle class, owning houses that are larger than they need, now that their children have left for college or careers. Those houses aren’t worth what they were six years ago, and in many cases, they’re valued at less than the combined debt on them.  For many of this group, that’s not so important—they have stable jobs for the moment, and their houses have a patina of memories and associations they aren’t eager to give up.  But they also know there will come a time soon enough when they will want to move to warmer climates or into more hospitable surroundings.  They are an in-between generation, adjusting to a bustling family life that left the house echoing and empty when it left.

At the same time, their parents’ generation is entering the final years of life.  They are in their 80s, or 90s.  Their own houses are impossible for them—they have stairs that can’t be maneuvered, bathrooms too small for wheelchair or walker, yards that have to be maintained, and the terrible surprises of older suburban houses—furnaces that give out, roofs that start to leak, air conditioners that fail or are inadequate. Their houses are mostly paid off, if the housing statistics are accurate, but the equity in them, meant to support them in graduated or assisted living facilities during those last years, has evaporated.  They need a place to live, contact and stimulation.  They are afraid, even if they won’t admit it:  afraid of falling in the shower; afraid of running out of money or food; afraid of dying in pain, alone.  They are also afraid of being burdensome, of giving up their independence, of ending up like furniture, shuffling between an antiseptic room with its too-glossy paint and its too-cheerful wall decorations hiding the grimy corners, and a chair in a “day-room” with others too immersed in their sorrow to speak.

Houses, too, grow forlorn when they are not tended to, when they are left behind.

There is a particular type of empty house that you might not notice if you weren’t hipped to the subtle signs.  In the sweeps of postwar suburbia you might see them dotting most blocks—one or two.  But they tend to blend in with the others.  Out in the countryside, though, they stand out boldly, particularly if you pass them regularly.  They are of a certain age—built, that is, in the decade after 1948.  They are relatively modest.  They are often made of brick; if they are traditional wood-frame, they’ve been sided with vinyl or aluminum, and there are often awnings over the windows and odd little porchettes added to the front door area. There may be concrete patios in the front or rear, and in some cases tidy, smaller swimming pools in the back. 

That’s the place where you’d most clearly recognize the house has been abandoned.  Swimming pools need to be drained and then covered if they’re out of season or out of use.  The covers aren’t usually particularly hardy.  After a season, they fill with leaves and water.  When the warm weather comes, they disintegrate, or the loam on top hardens and the cover cracks and breaks. 

There are other signs, subtler, but more easily seen from the street if you’re attentive. Gutters fill. Window shades have a bleached-out look, and if you go by the house regularly, you notice that they’ve not moved.  Weeds grow in the cracks in the driveway.

Usually the lawn gets mowed, though not as regularly or immaculately as it once was.  And the car, if it’s outside, doesn’t ever move. Or there isn’t a car there. The paper delivery box overflows with old newspapers or it’s stuffed with circulars and solicitations.

Those are the houses of the abandoned generation.  When the laissez-faire push to replace traditional retirement plans with self-managed 401-K plans came in, that generation was already in its 60s, 70s or even 80s. The daytime tv stations overflowed with reassuring promises from financial advisors and stock brokers.  When the next burst of laissez-faire enthusiasm came through, this was the generation faced with a blizzard of Medicare option plans.  Another blizzard of ads and plan prospectuses overflowed the mailboxes.  When the George W. Bush administration gave full free rein to financial institutions in the name of the “virtuous efficiency  of the free market” these were people whose retirement funds evaporated by half or more, just as their health declined and their needs increased.  Their houses dropped in value and the class of Americans who might have been on the market, ready to take a modest, older, slightly out-of-style home at the right price—those people seem to have been swept away.

So the old ones were trapped in their houses, houses that couldn’t adapt to their diminishing powers, houses they couldn’t afford to adapt.  An electric stair-climber costs thousands. Retrofitting a bathroom so the old tub-shower combination is replaced by a zero-clearance wheelchair accessible or walker accessible sit-down shower costs many more thousands. Kitchens need to be reorganized with the material for cooking right at hand, not up in a high pantry or down on lower shelves.  And regular maintenance work that they’d prided themselves on doing was now impossible, and it wasn’t a matter of hiring a neighbor boy or girl to mow the lawn or clean out the gutters.

Perhaps they fell.  Perhaps someone came to the door and saw they were dressed in clothes that needed washing. Perhaps even their pride wasn’t enough to hide the struggles from their children and grandchildren.

And so someone came and took them home.  The empty bedroom on the second floor became the new family room, and the family room on the first floor became the old one’s place. There was a certain awkwardness all around.  It’s hard to express gratitude to those who’ve moved you out of a place you built, and one that built you, to find yourself in a small, awkward room with a strange bathroom down the hall, and kitchen privileges if you’re lucky and your hosts decide you can be trusted.

We were luckier.  We had seen things coming, and when contractors were desperate for work and interest rates low, we worked with a dear friend to design a place that looked like some farmer’s add-on, but inside was subtly adapted to the rhythms and requirements of the old. We would need it someday ourselves.  It wasn’t a decision difficult to make.

 And now the Old Man sits in the chair that was my father’s once, the one he sat in, too, as he watched his 80s pass and his 90s approach, and waited for me, or Su, or Mart, to come.

And now the dusky light outlines the houses that can’t be sold and can’t be lived in by those whose love affair with America and its promises seems about to end in betrayal and loss:  they sit, still furnished, the heat still on, though turned as low as you dare—52, or 48—a few lights on timers, lighting rooms unoccupied. Walking past them with the dog, or riding past on a summer bike or driving by on the way to the market or the bank, you might chance upon the moment when the kitchen light turns on, and then the bedroom light, as if ghosts still lived there, ghosts whose lives were so caught up in these places that they left the living bodies of the old ones, and stayed behind, where the epithelia of their lives still clung to the walls and the furniture.

Sometimes, on bad days, it seems that way to me.  It seems the Old Man eating his cereal or watching the business channel with the sound too low for him to hear it, out of deference to me and my habits, left the strongest part of himself back at the old house, the one I go to now and again, to change the lights, to mow the lawn, to empty the mailbox of circulars. On the good days, the brilliant light that comes across the hayfield has a strange and novel beauty that startles him; last week he awoke in the night to see the full moon huge beside the barn, lighting up the clothes-tree where his robe hung, and putting a silvery glimmer to the oxygen tank in its black-wheeled cart. He is grateful to be cared for though it is something he would never have considered dignified or honorable before.

I am glad he’s here. He is going to teach me the secrets of penny-stock fraud, and the scams of gold investing, and he knows the names of all the actors and actresses who ever played in the movies, and every detail of their careers.  He has read every Larry McMurtry novel twice or three times.  He looks forward to the night when his daughter comes back from the city to live, however briefly, with us, her weeknight bachelors.

When I was small, my grandmother came from Mille Lac Minnesota to live with us.  She taught me how to make a pie crust and how to cheat at rummy. My children are grown, living far away, but they look forward to their times with the Old Man.  They see in his long life not the past but history itself.  And in their interest, their sense of his momentousness, he swells a bit, surprised that what was to him the inevitable rhythm of life is to them a key to understanding what was never theirs.  

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