And Yet... (12 page)

It says something for the locals that, during nearly three years of massive excavation, drilling, blasting, and cement pouring, nobody uttered a single word. The local construction industry had a serious boom, and many people now tell you that they sure knew something was going on, but between the start of work, in 1958, and the revelation of the place's existence by the
Washington Post
in 1992, the rest of the country was quite unaware that Washington was only its provisional capital. Even today, one can't help noticing that White Sulphur Springs has a very large airport for so small a town, and a direct rail link with DC from a nearby station. The bunker has been decommissioned now, and Homeland Security has taken a different form. In one of the spacious lobbies of the Greenbrier, I met Mr. John P. Carter, a fine man with a shield and crest embossed on his business card. He had had quite enough of being jerked around at airport security, and decided to get a pilot's license and his own plane so that he could make business trips without being humiliated by the federal government. Old Cessna aircraft, he told me, were “quite good and quite cheap: cheaper in the long run.” I don't exactly know how I could or would prove this, but there was something Southern in his attitude.

•  •  •

Take a short drive from the Greenbrier and pass through Lexington, Virginia, where the Virginia Military Institute stands like a fortress,
and where the campus of Washington and Lee University has not only the sarcophagus of Robert E. Lee but also the grave of his favorite horse. Press on toward the small town of Natural Bridge, where US 11 passes over a rock crossing that is 215 feet high and 40 feet wide. Its arch, which appears uncannily man-made in its symmetry, spans 90 feet. This astonishing site was surveyed by George Washington in 1750 and then acquired as a property by Thomas Jefferson. But the people who run the place, and who charge you admission to see it, and who have made it tacky with waxwork and haunted monster museums, won't leave you to admire the wonders of nature. Instead, every evening in season they put on a program entitled “Drama of Creation,” with readings from Genesis accompanied by devotional music. What could possibly be more ridiculous? The “design” of the world is conspicuous for its lack of natural bridges. The “designer” didn't bother to connect Marin with the San Francisco peninsula, or Manhattan with Brooklyn. That had to be left to mere evolved humans, operating with hard-won scientific rules. One of the pioneers of this work was Thomas Paine, unacknowledged Founding Father and among the first to design an iron bridge, who ridiculed the Bible as a long fairy tale of crime and fantasy. His friend and patron Thomas Jefferson took a razor to the New Testament and cut out everything that was evil, silly, or mythical. This left him with a very short edition. These were the men who actually founded the secular United States, but on Jefferson's home turf the pious believers now sell bubble gum and crappy souvenirs, and credit divine authority for an accidental rock formation.

•  •  •

But as fast as the South can get you down, it can pick you up again. The next Lexington I saw—Massachusetts has no monopoly on this place-name—was in Kentucky. Kentucky is also one of the states that were calved from Virginia, more peacefully this time, and its nicely named Transylvania University is even older than Mr. Jefferson's University of Virginia. A bit like Cuba's, Kentucky's economy depends
almost entirely on things that are good for you but are said to be bad for you: Cuba has sugar, rum, and tobacco; and Kentucky has bourbon, tobacco, and horse racing. When you see the Derby run on TV, the cameras linger on opulence in hats and horseflesh, and the farms often look like rolling feudal estates in Normandy or Oxfordshire, but if you go to the Keeneland racetrack at Lexington you see a crowd not unlike the NASCAR one: real popular participation in the sport of kings. My tour of a bourbon distillery was a slight disappointment, in that you no longer get offered a free sample, but later, in a Lexington restaurant, I was heartened to see the bar area full of blue smoke, only a year after the city had passed a no-smoking ordinance. “I guess,” said one of the patrons cheerfully, “that we just don't take the law that seriously in these parts.” All over town, though, you can see the fading painted signs on what used to be tobacco warehouses and auction houses. The end of the tobacco price supports is also the end of “small tobacco” as a hereditary living, and with the vanishing of “Tobacco Road” the whole texture of the Old South will change in ways that we can't predict.

•  •  •

Was I supposed to be looking for patterns? If you look for them, you find them. But it wouldn't be unfair to speculate, at this juncture, that if you consider yourself a Southerner you are more likely to come from a large family, more likely to have a family connection to the military or to the military-industrial complex, more likely to have some relationship—however twisted—with a personal savior, and more likely to take a “screw you” attitude to the federal government. To this one might add that you are more likely to live where your ancestors lived, and to feel the presence of American history. In Huntington, West Virginia, where the souvenirs at the airport tend to be made from coal, I was told quite simply, “You'll like it here. Most people hereabouts are English.” Indeed, H. L. Mencken, that great Anglophobe, who originated the term “Bible Belt,” also alluded to “the hook-worm belt” of Anglo-Saxondom to put down Dixie.
“The same people, living in the same place,” as T. S. Eliot rather more mildly put it in his famous lecture “After Strange Gods” at the University of Virginia. Many American cities and counties have some kind of “heritage” campaign, but one way of telling that you are in the South is the prevalence of roadside markers, battlefield memorials, equestrian statues, and plaques. This is by no means “the United States of Amnesia” that Gore Vidal scorns—it's an area where the past is taken seriously.

•  •  •

This goes double for Texas, as Texans invariably think no matter what the subject is. It was actually in Marshall, Texas, that the last headquarters of the Confederacy was located: there were just that many secessionist dead-enders who held on for the few days between the burning of Richmond and the ceremony at Appomattox. Doomed last stands are a special subject in this territory, but the Alamo also symbolizes the fact that Texas had its own declaration of independence, its own revolution, and its own statehood, as well as a disastrous adventure in confederation, before rejoining the Union. You can still see where the French embassy to Texas used to be, in Austin, just as you can still see where the Texas embassy used to be on St. James's Street in London. Schoolchildren in Texas have to recite the pledge to the Texas flag every morning, just after the Pledge of Allegiance.

One always strives to avoid “land of contrast” clichés, but in Texas the more people live up to their reputation, the more they don't. And the more it stays the same, the more it changes. You may be surprised to know that the famous bumper sticker “Don't Mess with Texas,” now seen on the back of many a pickup that is also insured by Smith & Wesson, was originally a green slogan, for a statewide antilittering campaign. I went to call on Kinky Friedman, at his combination ranch and animal-rescue center in the fabulously beautiful Hill Country outside Austin. The Lone Star State's most famous Jew and bohemian, now running for governor on a platform to be determined, was full of praise for the cowboy spirit. “ ‘Cowboy' is a great word. Gandhi
was a cowboy, Jesus was a cowboy, Mandela was a cowboy: stand-up guys.” The improbability of this formulation is underlined by the fact that less than 2 percent of Texans now work with ambulant cows in any capacity.

Larry McMurtry, who has spent years trying to discredit the cowboy myth in his fiction (“I've called them fascists”), manages to run four large bookstores, each of them a warehouse, in Archer City (at last, a civilized Texas School Book Depository), a town of perhaps 1,500 souls many miles from anywhere on the flatland, one of those places where if the wind drops, all the chickens fall over. He told me that anyone who walks into the stores is almost certain to be from out of town. Despite this philistinism, as he points out, the Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas at Austin, has one of the finest collections of literature in the world. You could see Evelyn Waugh's library, complete with its furniture, as well as the papers and manuscripts of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Robert Lowell, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Tom Stoppard, John Fowles, and all twenty thousand pounds of Norman Mailer's archives. There are three first-class art museums in Fort Worth, where some say the South ends and the West begins, and the names Rothko and de Menil are almost synonymous with Houston.

Texas's other great living writer, John Graves—author of the wonderful
Goodbye to a River
—also lives way out the hell and gone, near Glen Rose. He has a respect for the grain and grit of the Texan character, and for the Calvinism that enabled those raw settlers to survive and grow in a harsh land, but now that Calvinism isn't needed for that purpose, it can be a slight pain in the ass. “I wish I lived in a world,” he says softly, “where it was possible to be religious and think at the same time.” A few miles down the road from his place there stands the Creation Evidence Museum: a pathetic freak show featuring organisms allegedly so complex that they must have been invented and let loose by the divine hand all in one day. . . .

Texas has a land border that is 1,254 miles in length, so appeals to the frontier spirit seldom fall on deaf ears, and by the year 2025
a majority of the state's population may be Hispanic. But then, even the word “cowboy” originally comes from “vaquero” and is a Spanish imperial idea. You can see the reaction, though, in an emerging town like Plano, just outside Dallas. Here, rows and rows of new villa-style housing, punctuated by churches, schools, and the mandatory football fields, are creating a whole new white, observant, affluent constituency. This, and the feline redistricting plan that goes along with it, is one of the building blocks of the intended future Republican majority. (Ten years ago, the Texas Democrats had both houses and the governorship; now they can only whistle at how fast the state has metamorphosed from blue to red.)

•  •  •

I chose Atlanta for my last stop, intending to make a side trip to the town of Kennesaw, where local law makes gun ownership mandatory. (“An armed society is a polite society,” as some like to say.) But I ended up concentrating on Professor Eugene Genovese, the former Marxist from Brooklyn who with his scholar wife, Elizabeth, has moved south and become the preeminent historian of the area. I suppose I was looking for an encapsulating sentence: at all events they furnished me with one. Eugene had been praising some work on the South by the historian Eric Foner, who is a New Yorker to his fingertips, when his wife broke in to say, “It's not that good. It lacks the tragic sense.”

And that was it, in a phrase. Never quite able to get over a lost past, never quite at ease with the federal government (though very much at ease with the armed forces), and just not quite large enough to impose itself on the rest of the country, the South keeps on “reviving” and redefining itself, always pushing at its limits and limitations—and always finding them.

(
Vanity Fair
, September 2005)

C
ONCERNING THANKSGIVING, THAT
most distinctive and unique of all American holidays, there need be no resentment and no recrimination. Likewise, there need be no wearisome present-giving, no order of divine service, and no obligation to the dead. This holiday is like a free gift, or even (profane though the concept may be to some readers) a free lunch—and a very big and handsome one at that. This is the festival on which one hears that distinct and generous American voice: the one that says “Why not?” Family values are certainly involved, but even those with no family will still be invited, or will invite. The doors are not exactly left open as for a Passover seder, yet who would not be ashamed to think of a neighbor who was excluded or forgotten on such a national day?

Immigrants like me tend to mention it as their favorite. And this is paradoxical, perhaps, since it was tentative and yet ambitious immigrants who haltingly began the tradition. But these were immigrants to the Americas, not to the United States.

You can have a decent quarrel about the poor return that Native Americans received for their kindness in leading Puritans to find corn and turkeys in the course of a harsh winter. You may find yourself embroiled, as on Columbus Day, with those who detest the conquistadores or who did not get here by way of Plymouth Rock or Ellis
Island. (“Not for us it isn't,” as the receptionist at Louis Farrakhan's
Final Call
once glacially told me, after I had pointed out that her boss had desired me to telephone that very day.) Even Hallowe'en is fraught, with undertones of human sacrifice and Protestant ascendancy. But Thanksgiving really comes from the time when the USA had replaced the squabbling confessional colonists, and is fine, and all-American, too.