| THE UNDERTOW Scenes from a Slow Civil War Jeff Sharlet W. W. Norton & Co., March 2023 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-324-00649-7 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-324-00649-8 | 337pp. | HC/BWI | $28.95 | |
I expected this book to be a litany of the disinformation-induced anger and despair perfading our country. It is not what I expected. The disinformation, anger, and despair are there, for sure; and the author wants us to know about them. But his purpose in writing the book transcends that. I'll let him explain.
Many of the stories that follow are about performances of Whiteness, the delusions with which it disguises and reveals itself. There is a difference, though, between delusion and imagination—that's the hope of this book. I've tried to pull a thread of imagination through these pages, to notice moments of generosity, small solidarities, genuine wit, actual funny, real sorrow and love. Although this book is "about" a period of dissolution the documentary filmmaker Jeffrey Ruoff has described as "the Trumpocene," it's anchored against the undertow of these times at its beginning and end by such stories—of real sorrow and love—from other days of struggle. They are portraits of singers, their best songs forgotten or worn smooth by time and seemingly safe. Such is the effect of the undertow, which too often pulls our voices beneath. The losses these chapters chart are just as real as those of the pages in between, and deeper. But so, too, is the care for one another to which the songs these singers sang once summoned us. I've named the first and final sections of the book for two of those songs. Harry Belafonte's "Day-O," turned by the tide of American Whiteness into a charming novelty tune, which still carries within it for those who'll listen a kind of secret code, a current of resistance; and "Goodnight, Irene," sung now as a lullaby but once upon a time given voice as an elegy, a song of mourning, which, its first singers knew, is essential to survival. In between, a middle section: "Dream On," named for an Aerosmith song, "classic rock," a real banger. Trump put it in heavy rotation at his rallies, where the truest believers, the most far gone, would sometimes spin to it, arms akimbo, lost in fantasy. We will need new songs if we are to make it through what is to come—what is already here. I am not the one to write them. My hope is less than that: only that this book may reveal fault lines within our fears, in which others will find the better words our children may one day sing. – Pages xi-xii |
In that central part of the book, its author leads us on a journey through alt-America: a land where people operate in a different time, a sort of dreamtime — not in the Australian aboriginal sense, but more like an alternate history coming to fruition alongside the conventional version. Its residents may consider it a land of truth, justice and the American way, but it is not the land portrayed in our history schoolbooks or covered in our great metropolitan newspapers. Superman would not recognize it. Roughly speaking, it is the land that existed before the Civil War.
On his pilgrimage through this land, the author carefully notes the names of its original owners: Iriquois, Mandan, Shoshone, Utes. But they also, were they still here, would see this alternate America as nothing familiar. It is a place of simmering resentment against city rules, against Washington rules, politics and laws. Inspired by a militant version of God, its dwellers envision a sort of libertarian paradise — which is really a paradise only for the strong. They are angry, they are armed, and they expect a nationwide convulsion, even a civil war, in the near future. If it comes, they will be ready.
Movements are born from the problems of everyday lives, but they're not limited by them. "We're not in ordinary time," a writer visiting Occupy Nashville told me. "This is movement time." She wasn't speaking in slogans.What she meant was a sort of slow motion, sped up, outside the flow of minutes and days, the temporal experience suggersted by the Christian theological term kairos, ritual time, a moment that is unique and suffused with moments past. Holidays are a kind of kairos. Each is its own, but for celebrants it is also all the iterations past that they can remember, and all the holidays of the future, anticipated, imagined. – Page 37 |
Gil Scott-Heron1 might have saaid, "It's nation time." But Gill Scott-Heron spoke of an incipient emancipation, a time when Black Americans would get to the promised land Martin Luther King mentioned in his "I have a dream" speech: a land of genuine justice. The denizens of the alt-America Jeff Sharlet shows us may think they are fighting for justice; but so deeply in thrall to Trump's MAGA are they that they cannot see he cares only for himself and the elites who enable him.
Jeff Sharlett, on his journey, frequently risked physical assault as an outsider asking questions. But the people he met, misguided as so many of them are, face a greater peril. And if their anger and despair spill over into violence, democratic governance may be imperiled in our country.
"What is it that will put us over the brink?" I asked. Had he not told me about the guns at his grandma's? He thought that the fact that he had to hide his guns meant it might well soon be time to use them. "Veterans, myself included, will rise up when the moment comes." He'd had six months in the Army. What had he learned? "I was almost blown up." I didn't follow the lesson. It happened twice, in training. Mortars landed next to him. His mistake or the artillerist's? Not the point. Here he perched, polishing off another fat plate from Shooters.2 The point was that he'd been in the shit, even if the shit was self-inflicted. The point was, he was prepared. "I'm indestructible," he said. What ended his Army career? "Something like asthma." Now he was a UPS driver. "Not a single army in the world can stop us." The UPS drivers? The veterans. The men with hidden guns. The world pushes them, he said. It does. It pushes, this world. It takes. "Little bits at a time. taking little bits from us." Like erosion, like the wind. You don't notice. You think you're standing your ground, but the ground crumbles. You step back. You eyeball the green cards. Possibly, you tweet. Maybe you march. Up Constitution Avenue, January 6. Now the course of things is reversing: You take. You take ground. Press forward— – Pages 213-214 |
This encounter is fairly typical of the disgruntled people Sharlet met — often men, but not always. Then there is the Brumm family of Marinette, Wisconsin. Find their story beginning on page 275.
"Yes, the Brumms are unusual. Their flags are not. Their "Fuck Biden" and their "Don't-Tread-on-Me" and their blacked-out American flag, meant to signal the deepest distress, the fullest "readiness"—like those window decals I'd been seeing on trucks that said TRY ME with a gun or a skull—was the visual drumbeat the whole of my long drive, the lawn décor cosplay of a populace preparing for an imaginary war that threatens to will itself real. – Page 282 |
It's not a given that civil war will erupt. But the possibility alarms me.
Ashli Babbit figures prominently in the narratives of alt-America, as a martyr. Also prominent are a number of militant preachers whose sermons warn of the great peril that looms over the land.
Martyrdom is a magic trick, a sleight of hand and soul by which the dead, who have no say in the matter, substitute as the center of the story for those who survive to tell it. "She did not die in vain!" cried Pierce. Her death was a "warning." Of what? Slavery, slavery, slavery—"our" liberties stolen, "the worst political divide in our nation since the Civil War." A subtle move, that, just like the speakers who conflated the insurrection with Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. *
* * But it's different now, isn't it? "We live in very bad times," preached Pierce in Sacramento, "in the eternal battle between freedom and tyranny." But all is not lost, he said—literally, he said "all is not lost"—for God so loved the world that he sent us an "angel like Ashli Babbitt," to "remind us" that freedom "comes at a cost," and that the price is "blood." – Pages 167 & 168 |
Jeff Sharlet writes of a young family from Eau Claire he met at a gas station in Tomah, Wisconsin. The father, pictured on page 293, is concerned about the fall of the Second Amendment, which he views as imminent, and haunted by the question of what he'll do with the family's 35 guns when it happens ("I won't be handing them in, that's for sure," he told Sharlet.)
The father is also concerned about abortion, and Sharlet describes his murderous fantasies about abortion doctors. "I thought of the man's brightly smiling son," Sharlet writes.
I thought of the brightly smiling son and my own children, who must now forge their future selves at the precipice of rage to which we've brought them. I had, in fact, brought my eldest child to Wisconsin. I'll call them Y. They are thirteen, nonbinary, bright and funny and kind, and furious at the world into wich they're coming of age. What should they do with that anger? They were in Wisconsin for a residential program they hoped would help them find some equilibrium. They like to follow the news. They read our local paper. First the horoscopes, then Dear Abby, then local reports. Schools, arson, selectboards, murder, zoning, fentanyl, Covid-19. Then the wire, the national: "Don't Say Gay" in Florida, the January 6 investigation in Washington, the heat, everywhere. The fires, the floods, the extinctions, the collective inaction of Y's elders—me, writing this, you, reading it—to save this withering world. After Dobbs, Y showed me a drawing they'd made: a woman jumping to her death from a hot-air balloon. Because, Y explained, the woman in their drawing was pregnant and did not want to be. I was alarmed. "Look," said Y, pointing down the page. They'd drawn a story in pictures, a vertical comic strip. The would-be suicide lands, alive, in an inland ocean, where a wave carries her from Wisconsin to Vermont, our home state, where abortion remains legal. Where she would not have to live a life others decided for her. "It took me a while to get there," Y told me. In their imagination, Y meant. It's getting harder, they said, to think up happy endings. – Pages 294-295 |
It is for me too. I'll warrant that a lot of people have trouble imagining a happy ending to our current, multifaceted crisis.3 True to his promise, Jeff Sharlet ends this book with glory. It is a bitterly defiant glory, to be sure — but still glory. The year is 1955 and the Weavers — Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman, and Pete Seeger — are in full voice. But an era is ending: the stalwarts of the folk-music revival, many little known today, are passing. Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter), source for many of the songs the Weavers turned into hits, is gone. Woody Guthrie is fading in the grip of Huntington's chorea. The twin scourges of McCarthyism and HUAC are burgeoning; they will challenge the Weavers, and indeed anyone who protests injustice. But Pete Seeger defies HUAC, earning a year in prison. Today McCarthy and HUAC, formidable as they once were, are seen as abberations. Pete Seeger is still regarded as a hero, and well he should be.
One Weavers song drew special attention from HUAC. That was understandable, because it has a verse that condemns unjust wars. Here's that song as the Weavers sang it in 1981.4
Jeff Sharlet lives in Vermont, one of the saner states. He is the Frederick Sessions Beebe '35 Professor of the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College, located in west central New Hampshire. It lies near the border with Vermont, along good highways, making for an easy commute. Jeff Sharlet has eight books to his credit. I must confess that the grimness of the central account in this one had me down on first reading. I suspect that's a common reaction. But I took another look at that last chapter. It too has its grim aspect. But then, grimness often goes hand in hand with glory. Few triumphs are painless. Our triumph over Trumpism will not be — but it will happen. So I recommend this book as a must-read. And even though it has no index, I consider it a keeper.
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