I spent what felt like a lot of time driving through West
Virginia this weekend on a 13-hour road trip from Washington, D.C. to Columbus,
Ohio and back (six and a half hours each way), and found myself thinking about
this comment. It’s from a lovely article by Larissa Macfarquhar in a recent New
Yorker Magazine, a deeply sympathetic and informative portrait of Donald Trump
supporters in a small town in southern West Virginia. It’s a highly descriptive
statement; the hills in that country are so compressed together they do seem to
make you feel enclosed. (During my first exposure to rural West Virginia on
school trip when I was 12, I remember then being impressed by exactly this feature,
and being rather scared of it; from suburban Washington, it was for me startling
different and made me feel cut-off, entombed possibly in a vale of mist and
shadows, and it exacerbated, perhaps, the lonely homesickness I was feeling on
my first extended time away from home.) The crowded hills leave no space for
the kind of expansiveness that one normally associates with a landscape, but
create instead the characteristic hollows or ‘hollers.’ When fogs fills the
hollers it becomes a world folded in on itself, shrouded, as it were, in its
own distinctive self-history; it is out of this haunted landscape that the
“high lonesome” sound of bluegrass was born. These impressions, and others I
gathered 35 years ago when I took a bus trip across the country and then, a few
years later, drove across the country, have caused me to think more than once
about the effect of landscape on one’s perceptions of the world.
On this weekend I was driving between northern Virginia and
Columbus, Ohio, and back the tops of the trees all over the hills were touched
with the beginning of autumn. Bright
color, but still only dappled—one can imagine a careful child’s sponge painting,
the reds and yellows and orange crenellated, and lots of greenery still carpeting
the lower reaches of the ancient hills. In another two weeks it will be a riot.
******
Listening to the
radio for six-and-a-half hours on a Sunday drive through the near-midwest
and Appalachia is an interesting experience. A social historian, listening to a
tape years later, might draw some interesting inferences about our country. Country
music, “classic” rock stations, preachers of every stripe. Oddly, a large
number of preachers with Scottish or Irish accents. Preachers relating (not
explicitly, but still transparently) the meaning of being Christian to the
importance of not voting for Hillary Clinton. Football games broadcast through
static. A commercial in which an avid sounding 20-something fellow opens with,
“I’d like to talk about an issue of grave social importance—condom use.” It was
an advertisement for Trojan.
There is also a station I have lighted on many times driving
through the East Coast mountain region—We Are One Body: WAUB, operated
(according to the station’s website) by the diocese of Greensburg, Pennsylvania,
out of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. There are no commercials, but the station does
rely on contributions and there are occasional solicitations for donations. It is otherwise a continuous reflection on
Catholic Christianity hosted—most of the time I have ever tuned in—by the
kindest sounding, most soft spoken, most brotherly young man, reflecting either
on Scripture or very often on arcane doctrine of the Church. (I have heard him
reflect—he doesn’t really “expound” the way preachers and pundits do—on the
meaning of specific paragraphs and nuances of obscure Papal proclamations.) If
there is a political or doctrinal inflection in one direction or another along
the familiar cultural fault lines, I haven’t detected it. Certainly, the station would
be appealing to the most orthodox Catholic; it is appealing to me, a
non-Catholic skeptic. The website states that the station is “catechetical and
contemplative” and “the programming is intended to present the life of the
Church in a way that makes the Mystical Body of Christ more apparent.” (Catechetical
and contemplative or not, the Brothers behind We Are One Body are living fully
in the digital age. The website offers a downloadable App, and several venues
for listening online at http://www.waob.org/.) The
reflections are interspersed with Gregorian chant, a musical form well suited
to contemplation and especially resonant driving alone through those
old, old hills, and with periods of silence. A radio station that promotes periods of silence. I think it’s a
concept that should catch on.
Somewhere else on the radio dial, far away from We Are One
Body, a devout, exasperated Catholic was asked what the Church could do about
the fact that young people—“Millennials”—were drifting away from the Church. He
grumbled about the intellectual vacuity of what he termed “the atheist idea”
and seemed to believe that the way to get young people back in the pews was to
argue them back. I would like to have told him he would do just as well to go
outside and beat his head against a rock.
But it has occurred to me later that in fact the Catholic Church has an enormous gift that could draw in many of the disaffected—namely this rich, rich inheritance of contemplative mysticism, of which We Are One Body is a such a charming representative for motorists driving 65 miles an hour across the Interstate highways of the Appalachian mountain range. (Protestants, having no such inheritance, are left with offering to the un-churched these ubiquitous folk and “alternative” worship services with the rock band and the theatrical trappings.) If Catholic parishes began thinking about creative ways to offer the Church’s ancient treasure of contemplative mysticism to their communities I believe they would find young followers. Actually, I think young people might eat it up.
It is not, after all, the life of the Spirit that young people (and others) are fleeing from in their flight from the Church (and from religion in general); it is rather from what I would broadly call—by way of shorthand—“clericalism,” the deification of little men in robes and vestments, the perfumed odor of pharisaical righteousness, the itchy, obsessive preoccupation (inherent, it seems, in every orthodox religion) with what everyone is doing with their poor, sad sexual organs, and the habit of most organized religions and many “religious” people to fabricate a God who conveniently just happens to look (and vote) as they do.
On the Sunday I was driving, the young Brother was reflecting on the Incarnation, the distinctiveness of the Christian belief that Jesus was God made flesh, and the need to meditate on this most paradoxical of all doctrines—that Jesus was fully man and yet also God.
******
When I wasn’t
listening to We Are One Body, or trolling the airwaves for music that wasn’t
deeply depressing, I hung around the high upper 80s on the radio dial where, if
you are close enough to a major city, you can pick up public radio. West
Virginia public radio is quite good. There was a lengthy interview with J.D.
Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.”
Vance’s book sounds fascinating—he sounds like an interesting and likable man,
with a rather tortured family history—and its garnered a lot of attention, in
part, Vance acknowledges, because of the election, which has focused attention on
poor working class whites. (In this, his book has been joined by the way, by
“White Trash: The 400-year Old Untold History of Class in America.”)
But about this particular “meme”—Donald Trump and the white working class. Among the countless things that anger me about this election and Trump’s ascendancy, perhaps this is the most infuriating: while it is certainly true that white working class men are almost entirely voting (or saying they will vote, or showing up at rallies) for Donald Trump, there is absolutely no way in the world he could have come this far in an election on that demographic alone. (Leave aside the preposterous delusion—bewildering to all those who see Trump for what he transparently is—that the New York real estate tycoon is some kind of honest broker for poor white working class people, or that he could give a damn about the West Virginians depicted in Larissa Macfarquhar's New Yorker article.)
The Trump phenomenon, in fact, is fed by legions of invertebrate
Republican "leaders" at all levels, the usual low-IQ loud mouths in conservative media , and
many, many perfectly comfortable American men and women whose jobs are not
endangered and have never been anything but elaborately privileged, even
judging by American standards, let alone the standards of how most of the rest
of the world lives.
When I reflect on this and this sad and miserable election,
I think of a profoundly sorrowful statement by Garrison Keillor. “If we elect this man president we are not
the country we think we are….The churches should close their doors.”
*****
My trip took me through Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia again and Western Maryland before coming into the mad traffic of the greater D.C. area.
The drive out from D.C. on Friday was miserable—it took at
least two-and-a-half hours in northbound traffic to get as far as I might have
gotten normally in one hour, and it rained the rest of the way. I had hoped to
get to Columbus that night, but thought it better to stop for the night. I was
visiting my daughter in college. We had a lovely time with her mother on Saturday,
ignoring the Parents Weekend organized events and doing our own thing. But on
Sunday I was impatient and crabby (I had a fuming fit standing in line at the
Panera because a couple in front of us took too long placing their order) and
eager—why? For what reason?—to get on the road.
I think my daughter was embarrassed for me at my immaturity. Or I was embarrassed for myself. Actually, she’s an adult and the necessary steps of separating she began as a teenager are all but completed. I doubt she gives me a lot of thought when she doesn’t absolutely have to. I haven’t quite let go of her—being her father has been the only aspect of my life in which I unquestionably knew what I was doing. All the rest of it, I have been making it up as I go along, a blind man groping along in the dark. I should let go of her, but I don’t know exactly what’s next.
It reminds me of a story I like a lot, “To Know a Woman,” by Amos
Oz. The novel is a favorite of mine—I don’t read a lot of fiction—but I will
admit it is a strange one. A lot of readers who love Amos Oz are stumped by it,
understandably. Yoel Ravid is a middle aged Israeli, recently retired from the
Mossad, the nation’s storied intelligence service. His wife has died in
circumstances that are slightly mysterious, possibly involving a neighbor with
whom she may have been having an affair. His teenage daughter seems to have
some incompletely defined illness—which may or may not involve a certain amount
of deliberate playacting on her part. Yoel’s relationship with her is scratchy,
but not much more so than that of most fathers and teenage girls. He is befriended by a middle-aged real estate
agent, an odd fellow, a bit of a playboy whose admiration for Yoel is ever so
vaguely erotic, something like a schoolboy crush.
The story is told in short, terse chapters in which not a lot
happens. There is an atmosphere of tense uncertainty throughout, of frustrated
action, of something being always uncannily “off,” not quite right—an ambience with
which I somehow feel quite at home. Yoel’s is a keen intelligence, far seeing
and penetrating, but hobbled by ambivalence—or rather, by a preternatural
caution. He’s a cautious man by training (I am one by nature) and like me he
wants to make the next step in his midlife a right one.
There is a pleasant, convalescent tenor to the resolution of
the story, a relaxation—like a clenched fist slowly uncramping—of the low-grade
anxiety that grips the story throughout, a sense of things out-of-balance
suddenly righting themselves. Uncertainties are not so much resolved as let go
of, as when Yoel (admonished by his daughter’s precocious boyfriend) agrees
that he must let his daughter go and breathe on her own. For himself, Yoel is
an observer, and he finds late in life a sudden pleasure in observing, only observing
for its own sake and nothing more.
Well, it’s a long drive back home from Columbus, not a fun
one necessarily and I wasn’t wrong to be impatient, regardless of what my
daughter thinks. On the other hand, I have always experienced driving to be somewhat
meditative and as I found myself paying attention to those hills and valleys
and the voices on the radio, and meditating on these observations as I wrote
them over the following week since my return, I felt in a similar way that this
too is who I am, an observer, whatever else may come as I grow old. Maybe that
is all I will ever be.
It is not a bad fate. “Since he was capable of observing,
Yoel grew fond of observing in silence. ... And if it was necessary to focus the gaze and remain on the lookout for hours and days,
even for years, well there was no finer thing that this to do.”
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