Recently I was looking for the author Nevada Barr, who has a series about a female park ranger who works across the United States. The library didn’t have the early ones in stock, so I grabbed this one without really looking into the plot: it was tagged historical fiction and would give me an idea of the author’s style, so why not? Such is how I came to read a prairie romance about two women, though it’s more of a drama with some romantic elements. While I don’t read romance, this kind of relationship in a historical context struck me as unusual enough to try. I was honestly curious as to how Barr would develop Imogene in the context of the 1870s and 1880s. As it turns out, it’s quite the story of resilience, opening with one woman having to leave town in a hurry, heading west, and ultimately scratching out a life for herself as the manager of a stage stop in the wilderness — learning to hunt, manage roughneck visitors, etc. As the title indicates, though, the women — Imogene and her partner Sarah — have a life of hardship ahead of them, with happiness squeezed from it at great effort. As historical fiction, this is wonderfully detailed, driving home the harshness of life in the old west: as a “love story”, it succeeds on the characters’ emotional bond and avoids becoming overly graphic, though there is an attempt at rape and the novel is fraught with violence.
Bittersweet opens with Imogene having to flee her Pennsylvania hometown after her relationship with another woman is discovered — the scandal being made more volatile by the fact that the woman was a former student of hers. Armed with a letter of recommendation from someone who either doesn’t know or care about that exposed relationship, Imogene heads west and is able to find another teaching position. Her new town is small and its schoolhouse in need of attentive care, which she provides; she also becomes closely invested in the future of Sarah, an intelligent but extremely shy girl about to graduate. After Sarah graduates, she and Imogene become closer still, as Sarah gets married to an older man who is well-regarded in the community but turns out to be rather sadistic at home. Over the course of a few years, Imogene becomes Sarah’s almost sole source of moral support, rising where her parents fall. Unfortunately for Imogene, her habit of letter-writing reveal her address to the wrong people, and they expose her to the town — and Sarah is caught up in the ensuing drama, as her already-abusive husband now suspects that Imogene has corrupted her. They’re forced to flee, and wind up in the middle of nowhere managing a stagecoach inn together, a la Ruth & Idgie. (Fun fact: Idgie’s real name is Imogene, only she couldn’t pronounce it as a kid so she became known as Idgie. ) Finally, a happy ending? Hah! More sorrow awaits, but that’s life in the wilderness.
As far as historical fiction goes, I was impressed by the level of details that Barr works in casually: there are no info-dumps, but we’re subtly reminded constantly of our setting and the hardness of life — both materially and socially, since Barr doesn’t shy away from characters being casually racist or hardened by suffering. The story feels believable for its historical context: some of the men who frequent the stagecoach are former Confederates who left the war-broken South, and over time the stage struggles as railroads continue their iron advance across the wilderness. She features the changing landscape quite a bit, and since the characters are constantly on the move, there’s a nice variety — prairies and mountains. The challenges of the west are extreme for Imogene and Sarah after they begin running the stagecoach, since they’re isolated: everything that needs doing, they need to do. Fortunately, Imogene has a mannish build, something that comes in handy when she needs to pretend to be a man to protect their lease on the inn, leading to someShe’s the Man-esque humor amid people dying and coyotes harrowing the cattle. Interestingly, though this is described as a romance, it’s not particularly romantic: Imogene and Sarah have a strong personal bond that strengthens as they support one another through their shared adversities, but as written it’s more of an emotional intimacy than a physical one. The novel is at its most graphic when depicting attempts at rape, which I suspect most everyone thinks we could have done without.
In short, this was a surprise: when I realized it was romantic in nature I was tempted to put it back down, but Imogene’s resilience and Sarah’s journey from timid wallflower to confident young woman both impressed me. I have a couple of Barr’s park ranger books on hold and am hoping to see how her style matured, since this appears to have been her first book.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? The Fighting Little Judge, a biography of Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama and his political career.
WHAT are you reading now? Nixon’s White House Wars, an inside look at the Nixon administration.
WHAT are you reading next? Two possibilities are Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, or Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership. Still on a history and politics binge…
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is “Books We Loved But Didn’t Read”. TTT did that back in 2020, so I will revisit that list and check my reading lists of the last few years to see if anything new has joined.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is on my hopeful re-read list for this year.
Unnatural Selection, which I was sent as an ARC back in the day but shamefully did not post a review for.
The Age of Absurdity, which I’ve re-read several times but never posted a review for
The Once and Future King, on the return of over-powerful executives in America, Airstrip One, and Australia
This Brave New World, on DC’s relationships with India and China
The Way of Men, which I described as “Imagine if Tyler Durden wrote a book”. This one stands out as the only book I later reviewed!
The Evolution of Everything, on emergent order
The Roots of American Order, a cultural examination that looks at the role of Stoicism, Judaism, Christianity, and a few other elements in shaping American civilization
The Mind of the Market, Michael Shermer.
The Tell-Tale Brain, V.S. Ramachandran.
So, that’s the last list. What have I added since that were both bold end-year favorites and unreviewed?
2024: Abigail Schrier’s Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up; Jon Haidt’s Anxious Generation. I have a long draft for that one, just never finished it.
2023: The Filter Bubble: How the Personalized Web is Changing How We Read and How We Think; Feminism against Progress by Mary Harrington.
2022: Live not by Lies, Rod Dreher. (Again, long draft review.) How to Think like a Roman Emperor. David Brook’s The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life.
2021: We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State, Kai Strittmatter. How Emotions are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett
Almost another ten! Yikes. And if I’m not careful Provoked will join the list for this year, nevermind my long draft for it.
[Nixon’s] concern was my conservatism. “You’re not as far right as Buckley, are you?” he asked. “I’m a great admirer of Bill Buckley,” I replied. Nixon was then in a nasty dispute with National Review over a comment he made in private, that “the Buckleyites are more dangerous than the Birchers.” – Pat Buchanan, Nixon’s White House Wars
I ran across this title while looking for Nixon-related books, and it’s proving rather surprising. Although I knew “movement conservatism” was just coming of age in the 1960s, I didn’t realize Nixon put as much distance between it and his own politics. Buchanan’s book makes it appear that Nixon regarded the Goldwater crowd as an annoying subsection of his voter base that he had to throw the odd bone to. Given the period, there’s a lot of deja vu — student protests taking over college campuses, the president at war with the media, etc.
Related: Getting it Right, Willam F. Buckley. A novel about a romance between an Ayn Randian and a Bircher that explores the attraction and weaknesses of both approaches.
“There he goes. He don’t have no hobbies. He ain’t got but one serious appetite, and that’s votes.”
Back in 2016, I played with the idea of reading biographies of various populists, for obvious reasons. William Jennings Bryant, Huey Long, and George C. Wallace were the three figures who leapt most to mind. Although George C. Wallace is principally known for his symbolic stand in the schoolhouse door to stop the integration of the University of Alabama, he came into politics through the old Democrat tradition advocating for poor, rural Alabamians, and populism would be his mainstay. The Fighting Little Judge is a surprisingly fair biography of Wallace’s life in politics, one that reveals Wallace as a consummate political animal, striving for power from his teen days on.
Mention the name Wallace and the schoolhouse door image instantly comes to mind: defending segregation in the name of States’ Rights is what brought him national attention, fueling four presidential runs. When he began in politics, though — as a page on Goat Hill, serving the legislators — Wallace was more concerned with serving poor Alabamians in general. He rose from poverty, working his way through universityat a variety of odd jobs, and later served in the military. Smith writes that Wallace was offered OCS training, but declined on the basis of politics: he believes Wallace suspected a common soldier would do better in the polls than someone wearing brass on his shoulders. After the war, Wallace became a judge, the first step that would lead to him moving further in Alabama politics and ultimately becoming governor four different times.. He joked that he liked running for office more than he liked working in office, and the amount of time he spent running for president while living in the governor’s mansion reveals how true that was. It was a strike against him in one race, as the opposition declared that they would be a full time governor, not a part-time one.
It’s that vote-chasing that got Wallace in trouble and established his reputation as a bitter racist, a man who his haters half-expected to show up wielding a pitchfork or a whip. Judging by his personal behavior, Wallace exhibited no hatred for blacks. Indeed, when he served as judge, he frequently admonished white attorneys for not giving their black counterparts the respect due a member of the Bar, and Civil Rights attorney J.L. Chestnut commented that Wallace was the first member of Alabama’s legal community to address him as “Mr. Chestnut”. Wallace made an observation — long before he was shot — that life is too short to hate, an insight curiously close to MLK’s own saying about hatred being too heavy to bear. His first attempt at running for governor saw him being attacked by the KKK on the grounds of being too his lenient on black defendants in court, and too soft on the segregation question. (He was endorsed by the NAAACP.) Realizing that fighting for segregation was extremely popular among his base, though — presumed superiority over poor blacks being the only social thing poor whites had going for them — he flung himself into becoming Mr. Segregation. And it worked: the more he harped on the dangers of losing segregation, the more abuse he threw on the government and the intellectuals up north, the more popular he was. It was a Malthusian gamble, exchanging his soul for power. “When I talked about roads and schools, they listened,” he commented, “And when I mentioned the race issue they hooped and hollered.” Segregation was bundled with States Rights — resentment over the increasing role of the central government in people’s lives, a delayed reaction to how the New Deal had changed the relationship between DC and its subjects — and the fear of communism. The latter aspects must have surely been a large part of his appeal, too, since he was popular in states that had no race issue at all by the simple fact they were racially homogeneous. Interestingly, though, when in a different context like a formal debate, he would defend segregation on ‘rational’ grounds, pointing out that black-only schools created more opportunities for black educators, or that mixed-race football matches often created problems with racial fights between fans.
As readers may know, Wallace’s presidential ambitions and his role in the national spotlight ended in 1972, when a man who wanted to be an assassin of somebody (Nixon or Wallace, whichever was easier) shot the governor multiple times. Wallace would be paralyzed and live the rest of his days in pain, though astonishingly he ran again for governor and won. (The sympathy vote helped, one supposes: when he lost his first governor’s race it was against a man whose father had been murdered by the Dixie Mafia.) Wallace’s life definitely went downhill in the late 60s-70s: his first wife Lurleen died, his second wife left him after he was shot, and he’d been reduced to a man who could not only not feel his legs, but couldn’t control basic bodily functions. Getting shot was evidently a come to Jesus moment, though, as he began appointing blacks to office in Alabama, and continued to do so until the late seventies when he declined to run for a fifth governor’s term. Following his effective retirement, he became much more religious, and reached out to make amends to men like John Lewis, the Civil Rights activist who was beaten in the Selma to Montgomery march.
Smith ends the book by evaluating Wallace’s life and work and morals, commenting that while the governor always ran on populism, he didn’t actually do much in that realm. One of his contemporaries was interviewed and when asked to sum up Wallace’s role as a politician, the man replied: “George C. was good at winning elections.” Wallace was not a dedicated administrator, and appeared to devote more attention to rewarding his supporters with contracts and positions than making radical changes to impact the lives of poor Alabamians, black or white. Being absent while running for president didn’t help, of course. And yet…he must have done something, because rural/poor white boomers I know still speak with fondness about “George C”, and when I started researching on my own I found that he was responsible for the rapid expansion of trade schools and community colleges, highway-building, healthcare access, and so on. He also gained more of the black vote in every election he ran in: never compelling numbers (35% was the peak), but always more than could be expected from Mr. Segregation.
This was a fascinating volume to read, completely compelling for me as an Alabamian and a historian who has to wrestle with my state’s past every day. This is my first dive into George C.’s life, so I can’t comment too much on the facts: when the book intersected with my own specialty (Selma history), I noticed both good and bad. Smith correctly puts the site of Bloody Sunday as a quarter mile from the Edmund Pettus Bridge (contra the moronic media myth that marchers were attacked “trying to cross” the bridge), but he attributes the death of Reverend James Reeb to a deputy sheriff, which is baffling. There were four men involved in the beating of Reeb, and none had any connection to the sheriff’s office. (Reeb was a Unitarian Universalist minister who came to Selma in respond to King’s call for clergy, and within two days of arriving had gotten himself fatally beaten.) There’s also a…fantastical assertion that, following Wallace’s shooting, Elvis Presley met with him and offered to pay for an assassin to knock off the perpetrator: Wallace admonished Elvis not to ruin his career with violence. That sounds…all kinds of unbelievable, to be frank, and I’ve searched for anything to back it up but to no avail. Even so, I was impressed by its evenhandedness: Wallace is an easy man to villify, but Smith presents him as the messy man he was: a man driven by ambition strong enough to undercut morality, but ultimately shaken by the decisions he made. Quite good, I’d say.
Buckley: Conservatives find that Wallace’s background is that of a New Dealer, someone who is intensely concerned to multiply the functions of the state — George C. : You’ve made a statement here that in Alabama that I am for things you don’t exactly like. Name one thing — Buckley: If I may say so, your using public money for social functions — Wallace: Name the functions. Buckley: You want to care of of hospitalizations, of the senior citizens, of the poor — Wallace: Are you against taking care of the poor? Buckley: I hate the poor. I’m for shooting them. (laughs) I had a feeling you’d ask that (Buckley was …kidding.)
Quotes/Highlights
An expert at manipulating the masses, George C. sensed their uneasiness, “I guess you folks are sort of disappointed that I don’t have horns, after all you have read about me in the press.”
When the Ku Klux Klan endorsed John Patterson, the Attorney General did not publicly embrace the racist organization, but, more importantly, he did not refute their support. In contrast, Wallace made it a point to condemn the KKK in his campaign speeches. The Klan countered by spreading rumors that Wallace was actively seeking the “black bloc vote.”
After returning to Alabama, George C. mused aloud about how wrong the political elitists had been, “They thought I was gonna amble on the stage and say: ‘Hi, y’all. Sho good to see y’all. I’m just an ignorant, hookwormy redneck from Alabama come up to visit y’all. I ain’t had no education, and didn’t wear no shoes ‘til I was thirty. But, I come to ask y’all for y’all’s vote.”’
Never at a loss for words, Johnson immediately unnerved Wallace, “George, you have something in common with Martin Luther King. You are the only two fellows that have wired me to ask for an appointment with President of the United States, and then released the wire to the press before I received it.” Wallace was momentarily speechless.
JOHNSON: George, why are you doing this? You ought not. You came into office as a liberal. You spent all your life wanting to do things for the poor. Why are you working on this? Why are you off on this black thing? You ought to be down there calling for help for Aunt Susie in the nursing home.”
A distracted George C. often did not seem to hear his children when they called him “Dad,” but would reflexively look up when they addressed him as “Governor.”
Wallace continued, as the reporters scribbled notes, “Yeah, lots of folks think I’m a bad booger. They think I’m a hate mongerer. But, I ain’t no hate mongerer—shit, life’s too short for that. You can’t waste it hating folks.”
“If George had parachuted into the Albanian countryside in the spring of 1962, he would have been the head of a collective farm by fall, a member of the Communist Party by mid-winter, on his way to the district party meeting by the following year, and a member of the Comintern in two or three years. Hell, George could believe whatever he needed to believe.”
George C. offered his own assessment. When asked by a reporter which political figure he most admired, Wallace smiled sheepishly, “Myself.”
How does a man who fought Hitler come to deify him? George Lincoln Rockwell began life as the child of a popular entertainer, and by adulthood was well-poised for a successful life. He’d gone to a good university, though his education was interrupted by World War 2, and was a gifted illustrator. Instead, political passion for fighting the spread of Communism in the United States made of this Smeagol a Gollum, muttering nastily about Jewish conspiracies. His increasingly entrenched antisemitism cost him his Navy commission, his family, and would later lead to his death at the hands of an embittered follower. How can a soul go so wrong?
There was nothing in Rockwell’s early life to indicate the disturbing course his life would take; his father was well known as a comedian, and socialized with other performers like Groucho Marx. Rockwell’s first blush with racial radicalism and antisemitism came after he finished serving in the Korean War. He had become virulently anti-Communist, possibly as a result of fighting Korean and Chinese communists,, and in meeting with other anti-communists, he encountered literature which attributed communism to Jewish conspiracy. Intrigued, he flirted with taboo and decided to read Mein Kampf, and was so galvanized by it that he fell fully into neo-Nazism, founding the American Nazi Party and buying a home to serve as its headquarters and “hate monastery” , even decorating it with a giant swastika on the roof. Rockwell appears to have inherited his father’s gift for spectacle and showmanship, as he used Nazi imagery to provoke response and gain more attention than his organization’s numbers could otherwise achieve. In a Playboy interview, he stated outright that he was deliberately using racial epithets because they would attract more attention when it was printed — though he told (black) interviewer Alex Haley it was nothing personal. (Haley and Rockwell maintained correspondence after that until Rockwell’s own death.)
Oddly, although he and several others of his leading circle were agnostic or atheist, they claimed to be fighting for the defense of “White, Christian Civilization”: Schmaltz’s assessment is that Rockwell was trying to specify white non-Jews, and didn’t want to use “Aryan” because people confused it with the blonde with blue eyes trope. His expressed racial views were eclectic, in part because he deliberately used different approaches for different audiences: formal arguments with ‘intellectuals’, impassioned race rhetoric for the working class. This meant he could say to one room of people that of course, “most Negroes” were good people who wanted to improve themselves — while before another audience dehumanize them entirely.
As Rockwell’s career in hate was unfolding throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement was part of the drama — and part of his rhetoric, as he blamed Jews for promoting ‘race-mixing’. Bizarrely, he and the leader of the Black Muslim organization toyed with the idea of working together, since they were both race-nationalists who wanted the separation of blacks and whites. Rockwell personally contributed to an offering plate Malcolm X was passing around at a BM rally, and even gave tribute to the man in The Stormtrooper after his assassination. Rockwell and his group had little use for other radical right groups like the John Birch Society — and they, despite being anti-communist, understandably had no use for him, parading about in the uniforms of an enemy not twenty years defeated. (A point of trivia: Mel Brooks’ The Producers, which uses a Nazi musical as a plot point, came out in 1967. One wonders if Brooks’ lampooning of Hitler had Rockwell in mind.) Despite his contempt for much of the right, Rockwell appeared to respect William F. Buckley: after Buckley dismissed him in a National Review piece, Rockwell began writing to Buckley, leading to Buckley suggesting Rockwell meet with a priest. Rockwell did affiliate with some other groups of the period: some of his members were former Klansmen, and he toyed with the idea of using the strange Christian Identity cult — an extreme sect that believed Anglo-Saxons were the heirs of Israel and that Jews were demons — as political cover, but being an agnostic who didn’t believe in anything supernatural (besides “Destiny”) got in the way of that.
Rockwell always cautioned his followers to stay within the bounds of the law, even as he dismissed other radicals for not wanting to get physical: his preferred means of direct action was picketing events, being flamboyant, and attracting attention. During the Selma civil rights campaign, for instance, he arrived in town with plans of having one of his followers dressed in a monkey suit ambush Martin Luther King and do antics around him. Rockwell was frustrated to learn that few in Selma had any interest in assisting a self-declared Nazi: the Selma business community aired an open letter in the paper warning agitators of all stripes, from King to the Klan, to leave the town alone. Interestingly, King and Rockwell met on the city streets and had a conversation, whereupon Rockwell was invited to address the crowd at one of King’s mass meetings: the invitation was rescinded when one of Rockwell’s men punched King inside the Hotel Albert while he was registering. Rockwell believed, apparently sincerely, that racial agitation and race riots were part of a communist plot to create the downfall of the United States, but he also simultaneously believed that during an economic crisis or partial social collapse that more people would flock to his banner. Eventually, though, he was shot by an vengeful former fellower, just as his counterpart Malcolm X was.
This is not pleasant reading, given the subject matter. Being biographically-oriented, it largely focused on Rockwell, a man who threw away a happy life for hate and the pursuit of power. He and his followers, barely a hundred at any given time, are constantly scrounging for money and living in what one journalist called “a firetrap”. Their entire life was of conspiracism and antagonism. For students of the 1960’s social and intellectual currents, this may be of interest for the strange connections Rockwell had with other personalities like Malcolm X. There are occasional surprises, like Martin Luther King’s observation that race-hatred was far more intense in Chicago than anything he’d witnessed in the South. I chiefly read this because of the section set in my hometown: I try to read anything with a Selma connection, both out of personal interest and because I’m the local history librarian. On the whole, though, it’s a epithet-laden book about a man who narrowed his soul to oblivion and ultimately died for his nastiness.
This has been a quiet review week, in large part because I am trudging through a book I don’t like but have spent too much time trying to read to abandon it. Good ol’ sunk cost fallacy, how can I be aware of you and yet persist? I noticed recently that Vero at Dark Shelf of Wonders did a “Last Ten Books” tag, and I figured — why not?
(1) Last Book I Didn’t Finish: Congress for Dummies. I haven’t officially DNF’d it, but I have lost all interest in it. It’s over 20 years old and reading about committee processes is godawful boring.
(2) The Last Book I Reread. Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons.
(3) The Last Book I Bought. Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl. Currently waiting for me at the post office!
(4) The Last Book I Said I Read and Didn’t Really. Best I can do is reading an abridged version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame instead of the real thing.
(5) The Last Book I Wrote in the Margins Of. Write in a book?
(6) The Last Book I Had Signed. Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder. Funny thing, I’d actually preordered the ebook version, then bought the print version while in line to talk to him so he could sign it, then I wound up cancelling the ebook version and later reordering the ebook version because I’d lent it out to someone and wanted to re-read it.
(7) The Last Book I Lost. Um….me and books are like the Pentagon and billions of dollars. No only do I often not know where they are, I don’t even know that I don’t know where they are.
(8) The Last Book I Had to Replace. Mm…well, Living in Wonder would count, but I also reordered Rifles for Watie for a re-read I’ve yet to do.
(9) The Last Book I Had an Argument Over. Honestly can’t remember. My IRL friends who read rarely read the same books I do.
(10) The Last Book I Couldn’t Get A Hold Of. Erm……obscure books quoted in other books are always popping up onto my interest list and then disappearing when I realize I can’t find an affordable copy. Most recently was a trilogy by Eric Voeglin:
I’ve not quite given up on these, as I might have access via my university.
Today’s TTT is books set in _______, so I’m going to fill in the blank with….the American Civil War!
“I have even made attempts to see if I could finance a psychiatrist, not because I really do think I am nuts, but because I recognize that every nut thinks he is RIGHT. If I am NOT right, and am heading for this HORRIBLE battle, I DEARLY wish to be disabused of my delusion.”
(1) The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara. The story of Gettysburg, from the men and generals who fought it.
(2) Rifles for Watie, Harold Keith. I read this as a teenager and it was thought-provoking, exploring the reasons why different men fought in the war. It also introduced me to the Cherokee participation in the war: General Stand Watie was the last Confederate officer to surrender.
(3)Casualties, David Rothstein. A Union soldier who just survived the Battle of Gettysburg has been captured by the Confederates and sent to Castle Morgan in Cahawba, Alabama. His wife aims to go see him, war or no war.
(4) Selma: A Novel of the Civil War, Val McGee. A novel set in my hometown during an era when it was not only prosperous, but regionally dominant. The town was burned by Yankees during the last week of the war, but rebounded.
(5)All Other Nights, Dar Horn. An interesting mystery-thriller focusing on southern Jews and a Confederate spy ring. My review described it as the best Civil War novel I’ve read in a “long, long, time”.
(6) & (7) Gods and Generals and Last Full Measure I probably shouldn’t list these since I haven’t read them in more than twenty years, but they were Jeff Shaara’s attempt to make his dad’s Killer Angels into a trilogy. Gods and Generals covers the outbreak of the war and its first two years, ending with Stonewall Jackson’s death, and Last Full Measure covered the last year or so of the war.
(8) The Copperhead, Harold Frederics. A look at a Northern town that destroys itself in its attempt to silence a man who speaks out against the war on Constitutional principles. Later turned into a movie.
(9) The Starbuck Chronicles, Bernard Cornwell. A trilogy about a Bostonian who finds himself fighting for the South after he’s hired to be a bodyguard. A woman is involved, too. (There are always women involved in a Cornwell novel.)
(10) Gone with the Wind. A Civil War novel list without GOTW? Fiddle-de-dee!
(11) The Unvanquished, William Faulkner. A novel about a family living through the South’s collapse.
I’m not sure that posting something about this here is altogether appropriate given that it’s not an audiobook, despite being listed on Audible. This is the audio recordings of Fawlty Towers, the award-winning British comedy from the 1970s, made available with introductions from John Cleese and additional narration from Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel on the show. Listening to this made me more appreciative of the level of physical comedy that Fawlty Towers employs: Sachs does in-character narration to “fill in the blanks”, so to speak, but mere audio doesn’t translate all of the humor. Take, for instance, “The Germans”, which is one of the funniest episodes on the show, which has in its first half enough comedy for an entire hour, let alone fifteen minutes. Sachs/Manuel does a fine job providing narration to set up the hysterical scene where The Major confuses Manual practicing his English with a talking moose, but when the concussed and confused Basil is unwittingly antagonizing Germans in the dining room, there’s nothing at all. (“Here! I’ll do the funny walk!!!”) I can appreciate Sachs’ narration being limited to scene intermissions, but it didn’t serve all of the humor. Still, as someone who has watched this show an unhealthy amount of times, these recordings gave me laugh after laugh. I just don’t know that they’d work for someone who doesn’t have the shows in his head.
At the end of last week, I read Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent an interesting little book that chronicles May – June 1776 when the American colonies shifted from “having disputes with the King” to desiring outright independence. The author, William Hogeland, provides the additional interest of focusing on how local Philadelphia politics impacted the shape of the Second Continental Congress’s discourse. Philadelphia had a strong artisan class, one that was active and wanted a larger role in the government: there was a reason Pennsylvania’s state government was the most ‘democratic’ of the states, with a unicameral legislature and barely an executive at all. (John Adams, on reviewing its new constitution, snarkily commented that within a decade Pennsylvanians would be writing to King George and asking for relief from their constitution: sure enough, in 1790 Pennsylvania adopted a new constitution that was bicameral and had a stronger governor.) This book features John Dickinson and Samuel Adams in more elevated roles than they usually get, and was fun reading. I picked it up because it covers the period where the colonies effectively asserted independence long before they formally proclaimed it, by creating state constitutions that made no reference to George III’s authority. The book focuses narrowly on Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, though, instead of looking at the variety of constitutions the new States were creating.
It is impossible to be truly conservative nowadays without being consciously counter-cultural. This book will show you how lots of us are doing it and living it every single day.
Eleven years ago I stumbled onto a book called Crunchy Consby Rod Dreher. I’d begun moving towards ‘localism’ in my later progressive period (circa 2009 – 2011), and had found unexpected insight in online magazines with some localist-oriented writing like Front Porch Republic and The American Conservative, the latter of which Dreher wrote for. Though then still a progressive, the part of me that yearned for cooperation rather than partisanship found the magazine incredibly interesting: TAC writers’ New Urbanist and anti-war writing were nothing like I expected of Republicans. Something about Dreher especially intrigued me, and I sent off for this title. Although my review was mixed at the time, it would be the beginning of a long literary relationship with Dreher. He’s since become an absolute favorite — the only author I’ve ever wanted to meet, and in fact have done several times now. Because so much has changed in the last decade — myself, the world, Dreher himself — I wanted to go back and see what would happen.
The premise of Crunchy Cons (2007) is that there is a growing conservative counterculture, one created by the increasing lack of a difference between the uniparty’s wings, and more importantly the fact that political policy is failing, or simply can’t, address people’s needs for meaning and an authentic life. Instead, both parties, and indeed the general zeitgeist of modernity appear to see humans as purely economic creatures, getting and spending: the economy and material concerns are all they promote. While it’s common to associate the counterculture with 1960s-70s young people who scorned materialism and the ‘burbs and yearned to go back to the land, Dreher writes that there’s a kindred conservative counterculture that is rapidly emerging as creature-comfort goals continue to numb our souls and make it hard for us to breathe. (Okay, the Monkees reference was mine, I’ll admit.) He refers to these fellow travelers as “crunchy cons”, and offers that one thing that unites them — regardless of location, religion, etc — is an emphasis on “living sacramentally”. That phrase is one hard to define, but one I understood almost immediately — living with meaning, perhaps, and living and acting with intention.
What we do matters, Dreher writes, as does how we live. Consider our relationship with food. He devotes an entire chapter on our relationship with the food supply, questioning whether those who consider themselves conservative Christians can countenance a food supply based on horrors like confined animal feeding operations, where thousands of creatures live miserable existences, filled with medications to counterbalance the insanely unhealthy setting. Is this ‘dressing and keeping the garden’? — or is it plundering it? Against this, Dreher offers his and his wife’s experiences with their local organic farm’s CSA, and points out that not only is the food healthier from a nutritional point of view, it’s building relationships and contributing to creation rather than abusing it. Farmers like Joel Salatin and Wendell Berry (who has a heavy presence here) restore Earth through their husbandry, rather than consume it the way industrial agribusiness does. While Dreher believes the free market is still the best economic approach on offer, he’s staunchly against deifying it, or worse still, deifying Efficiency. CAFOs have made chicken cheap, but the price is exacted elsewhere — in the quality of the food, in the destruction of our right relationships with animals and the land, in the predatory ways big-ag treat their suppliers, who are sometimes little better than tenant farmers . Chasing cheapness in other areas has its prices, as factories shutter and the towns and families that depended on them fall apart. We ought to live in such a way that grace is present, that holiness comes down to Earth. On the subject of living gracefully, there’s a strong aesthetic sensibility in this, one that appears not only in the food chapter but throughout: Dreher argues for slowing down and focusing on the good, the true, and the beautiful, rather than thoughtlessly participating in the rat race. He and his wife made the decision to simplify their lives so that they could raise their children without daycare, and later doubled-down by homeschooling them to maintain participation in their lives. For the Drehers, family mattered far more than chasing the Joneses.
This was a fascinating book to return to, originally reading it as I did during a transitional period in my life — and not necessarily a transition I was at ease with. I had to laugh at the amount of overlap between books Rod and I had both read before I picked this up, and books he mentioned that would later have a big impact on me. Wendell Berry, as mentioned, is a heavy presence here, but I hadn’t yet discovered him — and while surely his insight would have of interest to me at the time, I didn’t read Berry until later that year, prompted not by this but by a Art of Manliness booklist recommending Jayber Crow. While reading this, I tried to remember my cast of mind in 2012 – 2013: it was a time of both confidence and confusion, as physically I’d gotten on a health kick and was really enjoying life, but mentally my college worldview had fallen apart and I was reading far and wide looking for answers. Currents of thinking and reading were not taking me to places that my “self” at the time necessarily wanted to go, though: this was back when reading Hayek and Kirk felt positively transgressive. When I read Crunchy Cons the first time, a lot resonated with me — more, I think now, than I was comfortable with at the time, hence the mixed review. In my head, I was still the confident college progressive: realizing my thinking was increasingly at odds with that identity was just as uncomfortable as my secular-humanist college self finding the writings of mystics and monks inexplicably fascinating.
It’s amusing to read that review in retrospect because of the way my thinking and my values have changed over the years: 2012 me was not too far removed from my Pentecostal past and my emotionally charged exit from it, and so was more hostile toward Dreher’s homeschooling his kids for religious-values reasons, among others, then ignoring the fact that his wife’s cohort of homeschooling moms were largely liberal women who wanted to be more involved in their children’s education and life and believed they could do it better than a teacher having to deal with a hundred kids a day. These days I’m far more critical of the public education system — having witnessed it via the library for 13.5 years now. What’s more, I regard a system in which parents are separated from their children for most of the day as profoundly abnormal and unhealthy, just as it is unhealthy for children whose very being wants to bound into the world instead be confined into boxes all day, compelled to stare at screens and work on developing their future emotional-mental disorders. While it’s easy for me to say that this owes in part to my ingesting a Chestertonian or say, Catholic view of the family over the years, I think it has deeper roots than that. I resonated with the Catholic social doctrine when I began studying it around this time (2014, I think) for the same reason I resonated with the Buddhist eight-fold path’s emphasis on “right livelihood”: there’s something in me that recognized the need for an integrated or holistic approach to life that serves the needs of the human person — not only our material needs, but our need to live the good, to have lives shaped by virtue and wisdom in which the various roles we play are not separate, but like the petals of a flower creating a beautiful whole. This emphasis on human flourishing has been one consistency in my thinking from say, 2006 forward.
I rather enjoyed going back to this, and the challenge it and my first review posed to me to reflect on my worldview as it changed. When I began reading it then, Rod and I already had points of agreement: a strong criticism of consumerism, a worldview that rejected materialism, and an interest in slower, simpler living. Areas where we diverged, like Rod’s more observant religion, I’ve actually grown closer to: back then I was a church-goer, yes, but liturgy hadn’t seeped into my soul yet, and I hadn’t yet gotten serious about Christian formation and praxis the way I would in the years to follow. Reading this made me like Rod all the more, simply because of the amount of bookish overlap we have: I’d read books he references, and in the years to come I’d read others he referenced, not because he referenced them but because that was where my currents of thought were taking me. Wendell Berry, for instance, would become a favorite in both nonfiction and fiction. There was additional interest in seeing how Rod’s thinking would develop over the years, with some chains of thought that would lead to The Benedict Option and Living in Wonder. His interview with Catholic and Orthodox crunchies also hinted at storms to come in Rod’s life — his already present anger and grief over the Catholic church’s behavior during the sex abuse scandal, and his attraction to Orthodoxy. While I can’t say “in short” given the length of this review, I can only reiterate how much I enjoyed going back to this, both for my fondness for the author and for the amount of thought it provoked as I read it.
So Many Quotes
Maybe instead we should create a new politics by asking: What’s good? What’s true? What’s beautiful? What’s authentically human?
Too many people who call themselves conservative share the same fundamental conviction of many liberals, namely, that individual fulfillment is the point of life. Conservative, perhaps, in their sexual views, they are, however, libertarian in their economic principles, and believe that the free market should be the guiding light of our lives together. Thus they believe that a merchant or a manufacturer owes no loyalty to his community, nor the community to that merchant or manufacturer. They feel no particular responsibility to be good stewards of communal life or the natural world; if something of real value has been lost because of economic decisions, hey, that’s the free market. Cultivating an appreciation for art, architecture, and the world of beauty used to be considered by a previous generation of conservatives the mark of a civilized person; today, it is often disdained by many mainstream conservatives as an elitist pursuit. A college education is something you get solely as a ticket to a moneymaking career.
There is an older, less-ideological tradition, a sensibility that comes out in people I call crunchy conservatives. We are conservatives by conviction and temperament, and usually vote Republican (though to call us “liberal Republicans” is to fundamentally misunderstand us), but we’re “crunchy”—as in the slang for “earthy”—because we stand alongside a number of lefties who don’t buy in to the consumerist and individualist mainstream of American life.
Mainstream liberalism and conservatism, as the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry said, are “perfectly useless” to combat the forces in contemporary American society that are pulling families and communities apart. Berry says most liberals won’t take a stand against anything that limits sexual autonomy, and most conservatives won’t oppose anything that limits economic freedom.
The liberty we enjoy in America today is certainly worth prizing and defending, but it is insufficient to produce virtue, stability, or happiness. The free market in ideas, commerce, sexuality, and so forth offers various possibilities of how to live, but it tells us nothing of how we should behave to live as well as we ought. Both mainstream liberalism and conservatism are essentially materialist ideologies, and we should not be surprised that both shape a society dedicated to the multiplication of wants and the intensification of desire, not the improvement of character.
The answer is not to be found in a set of policy prescriptions, but in a considered critique of the assumptions on which mainstream American life is built, and a secession of sorts from the mainstream —all to conserve those things that give our lives real weight and meaning. Every one of us can refuse, at some level, to participate in the system that makes us materially rich but impoverishes us spiritually, morally, and aesthetically. We cannot change society, at least not overnight, but we can change ourselves and our families.
We should ask ourselves what kind of society we want to live in, and want our descendants to live in, and ask whether the way we’re living today is likely to get us there. Ideas have consequences, after all, and too many conservatives have unthinkingly accepted the mainstream Republican view that there is nothing wrong with the country that the free market cannot x, at least over time. Unmoored from our philosophical grounding, we allow ourselves to be carried along on the swift currents of consumer culture, and end up in a place where “conservatism,” practically speaking, ends up as general approval of whatever commercial interests want to do.
We have become a society that gives the place of prime honor to material progress, placing the demands of the economy above the considerations of family, of community, of country, and even of religion. Consumerism has become our religion, and it is difficult to identify anything within the contemporary Republican Party that stands against the dogma of the Market Supreme.
Americans naively accept new technologies, thinking only of what these technologies can do, but never, said Postman,what they can undo.
“The number one advice I give to my students is to be a culture creator, not a culture consumer,” Schuchardt continued. “You have to have time to create, and to create, you have to get rid of those things that steal your time. TV is the great time-stealer in American life.”
A society built on consumerism must break down eventually for the same reason socialism did: because even though it is infinitely better than socialism at meeting our physical needs and gratifying our physical desires, consumerism also treats human beings as merely materialists, as ciphers on a spreadsheet. It cannot, over time, serve the deepest needs of the human person for stability, spirituality, and authentic community. We should not be surprised that it has led to social disintegration. What kind of economy should we have, then? I don’t know; I’m a writer, not an economist. I do know this: we can’t build anything good unless we live by the belief that man does not exist to serve the economy, but the economy exists to serve man.
The point is, we learned in this way that food, properly understood, is sacramental; it carries within it the care of the farmers who raised it and the merchant who sold it, the love and devotion of the hands that prepared it, and the happiness of the friends and family who share it.
I started looking into how the government regulates the meat industry. It was shocking to see how agribusiness has gamed the system to keep small meat producers marginalized. Our regulatory system is designed to favor industrialized meat production, with its factory farms, its cattle jacked up with antibiotics and growth hormones, and its chickens raised in cages filled with their own feces. As a conservative, I am angry about this, not only on behalf of the small businesspeople slapped around by the deep-pocketed agribusiness behemoths, but because of how industrialized agriculture has made a traditional agrarian way of life difficult if not impossible.
When I asked Robert what he has in common with liberal counterculturalists, he said that there’s a lot of antiestablishment contrariness in all of us—echoing the quip of Juli Loesch Wiley, a Catholic pro-life pacifist friend who says she went all the way from the left wing to the right wing without ever once trusting the government. (Hah!)
But something struck me, a quote by Saint Francis de Sales, who said that we should treat everything we have as a gift from God, and that we are a gardener caring for the king’s garden. That struck me so much, because what I’m talking about is the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit. I don’t see how God could be pleased by the way so many of us eat. And that’s what motivates me. It’s stewardship of the body and of the earth. I just don’t understand why people have a problem with that.
How long do you think we can keep living as we do, destroying country life, rural traditions, and the countryside to produce mountains of processed food that makes us less healthy, and letting lay fallow the sacred trust we’ve been given by our forebears? Care for this trust obliges all of us, but conservatives, because we profess a particular commitment to upholding tradition, are especially responsible for stewardship of the land and its cultural legacy. If we live as if we have no duty to the land and the agrarian traditions of the people who live there, then we ought to be ashamed to call ourselves conservatives. We are no more than market-mad consumers who vote Republican, and whose commitment to conservative ideals ends the moment it costs us something.
If you’re like me, you’ll find as you grow older a strange new respect for the middle-class clichés you spent your smart-ass youth making fun of. Knife. Fork. Crow.
Thought experiment: You are standing at mass in the great Gothic cathedral at Chartres, beneath the vast symphonic complexity of the building’s soaring arches; now you are standing at the same ceremony inside an equally vast modern American suburban megachurch, which looks like an expensively built gymnasium or theater. Theologically, the ceremony has precisely the same meaning. But in which place do you feel closer to God, more aware of the holiness of existence? From which of these churches are you likely to emerge with a glow of exaltation? If a terrorist with a truck bomb forced you to choose which of these structures you’d rather see destroyed, would it make a difference to you? Why?
Notice: “outside of the norm that you see on TV.” The mark of the twenty-first-century nonconformist—the ability to imagine a life outside of the boundaries set for us by media culture.
“The common agonies we call ‘socialization’—playground cruelties, intimidating classroom snickers at mistakes, disabilities, or differences—more often serve to harden than to heighten the child’s sensitivity to other people’s pain. Homeschooled children for the most part don’t have to deal with that, and are more likely to retain their natural compassion.
Technology and wealth have given mankind dominion over nature unparalleled in human history. Everything in the tradition of conservatism— especially in traditional religious thought—warns against misusing that authority. Yet the conservative movement has become so infatuated with the free market and human potential that we lose sight of what Matthew described as our conservative belief “in man as a fundamentally moral and not merely economic actor, a creature accountable to reason and conscience and not driven by whim or appetite.” If we lose our ability to see nature with moral vision, we become less human, and more like beasts.
“Conservatives I respect a great deal are always telling us that man is not just an economic being, but a moral actor,” he said. “Well, there are moral costs to efficiency.”
“In America especially, we live beyond our means by consuming the portion of posterity, insatiably devouring minerals and forests and the very soil, lowering the water table, to gratify the appetites of the present tenants of the country,” [Russell] Kirk wrote.
Almost all on the religious right are Christians—and in this broad sense, I am on the religious right—but it’s odd how we limit our political concern to sexual issues. Jesus had as much or more to say about greed as he did about lust. But you will not find most American religious conservatives worrying overmuch about greed.
To see the world sacramentally is to see material things—objects and human actions—as vessels containing or transmitting ideals. To live in a sacramental world is to live in a world pregnant with meaning, a world in which nothing can be taken for granted, and in which no one or no thing is without intrinsic worth. If we live sacramentally, then everything we do and everything we are reflects the things we value.
In short, if one’s religion is to mean anything, if it is to last, it has to stand outside of time and place. Its truths have to be transcendent. And though we moderns have to nd a way to make the tradition livable in our own situations, we must never forget that we don’t judge the religion; the religion judges us. To be blunt, a god that is no bigger than our own desires is not God at all, but a divinized rationalization for self-worship.
“I don’t understand why the social-justice people don’t drop their attachment to socialism and embrace the ideal of widely distributed property,” he said. “I don’t understand why patriotic conservatives don’t seem to care that soulless corporations are destroying the old weird America—a phrase coined, I think, by left-wing rock critic Greil Marcus. This is the rich, vital, genuinely diverse, eccentric America that conservatives love, or claim to love.”
A religion in which you can set your own terms amounts to self worship. It has no power to restrain, and little power to inspire or console in times of great suffering. No matter what religion you follow, unless you die to yourself—meaning submit to an authority greater than yourself—it will come to nothing.
American politics has come to resemble the First World War, when powerful armies clashed endlessly and fruitlessly, with neither side gaining much ground, both having forgotten what they were fighting for, remembering only who they were fighting against.
Recently an article at The Free Press which attributed the decline of the public library to the fact that they’ve become homeless shelters has been causing some chatter in some online librarian communities. While looking into it, this book was mentioned and I decided to give it a shot. As an urban librarian, I can testify that homeless patrons have become an everyday part of my working life, including mentally ill and often physically aggressive ‘patrons’ who have precipitated our installing panic buttons at desks throughout the building. Patrons who have witnessed the kind of drama we see on a weekly basis have often whispered, “Y’all need a cop up in here!”. Overdue is a memoir from a librarian who served in a Washington, DC library with such security concerns that female staffers were not advised to go into the stacks by themselves for fear of being accosted. It details a lot of the stress that Oliver and her colleagues endured on a daily basis the fear of being attacked, the anxiety caused by being thrust into social worker and first responder positions with no training or real support from the board, and the psychological drain that spending all day listening to people talk to themselves takes on a person.
As interesting as that element was, her chronic self loathing detracted enormously from it: regardless how stressed she is, Oliver hates herself for not being up to it, and appears to dislike that libraries are not completely re-orienting themselves (i.e. installing public showers) for this new ‘mission’. When the city assigns a police officer to monitor the branch, she feels utterly relieved at his presence, and simultaneously hates herself for feeling relieved that now there’s an armed man standing between her and her frequently-menacing public. (Not surprisingly, she burns out, quits, and is diagnosed with PTSD.) The memoir is only perhaps a third of this book, though, as there’s also an obnoxious history of public libraries that makes men like Benjamin Franklin — who created a lending library for a club he’d also created — out to be villains because their privately-created and self-financed library wasn’t inclusive enough. Her self-loathing and long train of irritating PC writing (capitalizing White, Black, and Brown like these are ethnicities, for instance) made for a generally tiresome read despite the salience that parts of the book had for me. I recognized, for instance, her need to completely retreat from social interactions for a time after work — though whereas I turtle-up for an hour, she confesses to withdrawing completely. It does provoke the question, though — what is the mission of the modern library, and how can American societies better respond to the mental illness crisis in a way that doesn’t simply shove it into the laps of librarians and cops?
Generally, I didn’t mind reshelving, but I tried to never linger in the area. Male coworkers had warned me early on not to—female employees were particularly vulnerable back there. If something was going to go wrong, it was going to go wrong in the Adult Fiction area.
As we approached the second door, he explained that if I’d started the day before, we wouldn’t have met because he’d been in court. A patron named Ms. Lee was suing him for the third time. He quickly explained that Ms. Lee thought she was responsible for creating a secret café on top of the Spy Museum at the behest of the FBI.
[L]ibrarians expect to encounter people from many backgrounds, experiences, and moods. Empathy is an essential part of the work if you want to do it in any meaningful way. Find empathy before anger, fear, or confusion. Find empathy before you lose your cool. Find empathy before you lose your shit. Empathy is a first line of defense in public servant jobs—people are less likely to yell at a calm and patient person.
The actual work of being a public librarian, of showing up to that same building five days a week to perform an unending range of tasks in an environment that was unpredictable, chaotic, and sometimes violent, had warped everything in my life. If someone had told me ten years earlier when I first entered my MLS program that this would be the trajectory of my career, and that I would be diagnosed with complex PTSD in large part because of my work as a librarian, I don’t think I would have believed them.
“I’ve found myself becoming more cynical and jaded as a librarian. I also find it disheartening that so few people outside the library realize just how much library workers put up with. It’s like a dirty secret people are fearful to talk about. We have to put on this happy, cheery facade of ‘everything is fine’ for fear of what? Losing public funding? I can’t even decompress and share the horrors of my experience with nonlibrary people because the attitude is ‘you read books all day, how bad can it be.’”
In a 2009 speech to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point, author and literary critic William Deresiewicz cautioned the graduates about their constant exposure to social and news media: “You are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.”
Reading Freely 
