An American Sense of Place
You can't always just talk about the nation. You have to talk about the country.
I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered.
You can't stay here with every single hope you had shattered. — Big Country.
Several things are coming together for me as I write my way into the future. Writing has always been this for me, an intellectual place for me to put things. You see, the second most extreme aspect of my personality, my OCEAN tells me, is my conscientiousness. It is only only slightly edged out by my lack of emotionality. So I am with deadpan and earnest seriousness living out my mother’s refrain:
There is a time and a place for everything.
So my career in decision support and information technology has always been about finding things and putting them where they belong in a timely manner. So it should come as no surprise that as a writer, all of my stuff is online, and has been since the invention of blogging. You’re not likely to find my prior stuff at Cafe Utne or The Well or Slate’s Fray, but if you could you’d find at Slate an excellent set of provocative exchanges between myself, Sherman Alexie and David Horowitz. That was ages ago.
I only have about 1400 weeks remaining, so I think a lot more about place, and it’s not the entire planet. I’m not interested in saving the planet so much as savoring what I know is here. But I’ve had a lot of travel - its one thing that makes my life different. I have had the time to be many places. In a way, I have a kind of rootlessness that makes it all the more important for me to organize my thoughts into writing.
All this goes to say that I think most of my writing has been about that process of squirreling away experience into a framework of concepts. Once upon a time, that was for the sake of my emotional rescue from political partisanship. But the path out has always been simple, I’ve just been conceptually completionist. But in my recent putting of my Black Nationalist heritage in concise context, as well as my GenX coming of age, I’ve covered a lot of ground. I think I have nailed enough of that down to consider a different way of looking at America rather than conceptually. I’ve done it before but not quite enough. In other words, I think I need to dive into my John McPhee bag and talk about America as a physical place. Our love may not be here to stay, but the Rockies won’t crumble.
Law, Liberty, Love & Land
Of all my inheritance of parental aphorisms, this is probably the most simple yet expansive. I’ve written an essay for the upcoming publication from the Woodson Center, and I’m happy to have this be part of my writing. I’m going to be anchored around that for a while because it brings up something fundamental which is deeply embedded in my life and eminently shareable. It is the sense of place and the duty to preserve that. It has something to do with home. It has something to do with civilization. It has something to do with courtesy and hygiene. But most of all it has to do with self-determination. Of having the space to create.
I don’t know how many times I have told people to simply get out of the city and out from behind their screens in order to find peace of mind. To camp, to backpack, to hike, to cook over an open fire and then to sing. To look out for people on the trail. It’s all very cowboy. It’s all very American. This land was made for you and me. Well, so was the entire planet but every place doesn’t equally generate a sense of belonging. If Americans don’t have a sense of belonging here in our conceptual citizenship, whipsawed as it may be by the forces of populist partisanship, fast fashion and intersectional identity, maybe it’s because these are first world city problems. The city is not our destiny.
If we ever lose law and liberty, we will not be totally lost. We can still have our love, and we can still have the land. This is the underlying premise behind every zombie movie. Every disaster story of the sort we Americans eat up is a story of civilization lost and what heroics it takes for us to protect our loved ones and gain back the land. That includes a lot of Westerns too. It’s about what character requires us to do to carve out some space where lawlessness and injustice rule. But when we’re not actually engaged in loving and caring for the land, we can abstract questions of law and justice into any arbitrary form that has nothing to do with a real sense of place and a real set of people to love. It morphs into power struggles between partisans over abstract talking points that are thrown back and forth through cyberspace. That’s bullshit. People who can’t turn off the electricity without feeling a loss of ‘community’ are only avatars of their true selves. God help them if they never quite figure that out.
I have heard it testified several times that the most zombified teenagers, when forced to leave their phones at home, blossom socially within a couple weeks. You would think, as so many have, that GenZ and Alpha are fundamentally crippled by the interwebz. Nope. Just a little retarded. They’ll figure it out. Twenty years of Apple iPhone development cannot outlast millions of years of evolution - social media is just another predator to outwit. Even if we forget it, another flu epidemic will remind us. There is no ringtone as compelling as a hungry baby’s cries.
It is not my aim to suggest that only catastrophe hitting Americans in the teeth will wake us up. Somewhere on the planet a catastrophe is in full throat, and the more satellites we put up, the more likely we’re going to find out. I’ve always kind of wanted WarTV, but that dream was born in the days of high quality photojournalism, long before Jussie Smollet and other deep fakery. Look at the floods in China. That’s real. Yet somehow we Americans have abused a privilege we didn’t architect. So we’ve outsourced our own skillsets and much of our connection to America the place. That’s why we’re getting on each other’s nerves, dip dunked into first world problems. If you get off the road, you’ll have no need to road rage. If you get out of the political ring, you won’t have to walk backwards with your dukes up. There are any number of ways for us to un-corner ourselves.
Lived Experience
I find that the excuse of lived experience is something I even find myself using. But my context is never wholly dominated by that small town called Black. Most of my sibs all went to schools outside of the neighborhood. We are all testament to that that political football with ‘school choice’ tattooed on it. My baby brother and sister were bussed 20 miles away from home - for elementary school. Scoobie ended up in Minnesota - for high school. They called it A Better Chance. I wish my folks had the money for private school for Scoob. But that’s how things were done in the 70s; we were getting out there. That’s the thing about being underprivileged, you play with other rich kids’ toys in ways they never imagined. That’s what we did with skateboards. That’s what I did with computers. But I digress.
My lived experience is all over LA County, from West Adams to Inglewood to Northridge to Panorama City to Hermosa Beach to Altadena to South Pasadena to Redondo. But I’ve also lived in Prospect Heights Brooklyn, The Boston Fens, Outside Northeast Cobb County Georgia and Bellaire Houston. Work? Don’t get me started. I’m perfectly comfortable living and working in the overwhelming majority of large American cities. From Providence to Portland to Philly to Phoenix. Tacoma, well. I didn’t have to be there long enough to get used to the smell, same with Lake Charles. Internationally, I’m somewhat light, but most of my trips have been for work rather than pure touristy enjoyment. The point is that lived experience has a great deal to do with place. Not ‘community’. Place. How does the place shape you? How do you shape the place? I am not a singular product of a singular environment, and I enjoy how I’ve been shaped by people of particular places. It’s the first thing I want to know about someone, as soon as I know their name. Where are you from?
So it’s easy for me to be an American. I’ve seen the place. I’ve been all over the place. I have different experiences from different parts of the place, and I’ve found what I’ve looked for in many parts of this big old country. Then again, I’m also highly open to new experiences. That’s part of my OCEAN too.
A Dark Age
So I don’t mind the understanding that we’re in a dark age. But that is a factor of the leadership. It’s about the determinations of the Rulers. So I’m taking a look at Candidate Vance and I see that he sees what it’s like to bounce from here to there. He’s still young and still represents from his hometowns, but he’s had a few of them. I care about the impressions of the well-traveled and the well-read. That’s why we’re the Chatting Class, it’s part of our obligation to give words and metaphors to our insights and experiences. And once you figure out that you can live anywhere, you have that advantage to give perspective without fear. Why? Because the more places you go, you step out of time, and you know that it’s not equally dark everywhere. The more you stack all your lived experience at one physical location, the less you have of that. You have to rely on your screens. Your screens aren’t truthful. Well it is right this moment, but you’ll scroll away eventually.
The country is full of steak and whisky and fish and fries. Scallops and noodles, leafy greens and polenta. More of that’s coming too. The history and politics and the AIs are never going to cook for you.
You have finally provoked me into doing a Substack, because my response to this is too long for a comment and deserves more than the bitter quip I gave to a Russian ally so long ago on EVE-Online ("Home? What is this 'home' you speak of, my Russian brother?)