Long Time Leaving (4 page)

Civilized people have got to dig on down past the head to that headspring. And I keep thinking I should be able to get to that place myself— because I believe I know what got El Greco there. Astigmatism, some say. I'd say stigma. As I will explain by way of a parable:

Grasshopper goes into a bar.

Bartender says, “We don't get many like you in here.”

Grasshopper: “No?”

“No,” says the bartender. “But we do have a drink named after you.”

“Huh? I don't get it,” the grasshopper says. “Why would anybody call a drink ‘Steve’?”

It doesn't have to be a grasshopper. (If he goes into a grasshopper bar, of course, this doesn't happen. In that case, the dubious milky green drink known as a grasshopper might be called a Bloody Mary.) It could be a lawyer or an Arab American or a guy with a duck on his head.

You've been there, I dare say, in some category. You're walking along feeling more or less like yourself, and bang, you're reminded that other people have got you pigeonholed. For me, living as I do in the North, it's Southerner goes into a bar. For El Greco, living in Spain, it was Greek goes into a bar. Or, spiritual equivalent for that time and place, into a confessional booth. “Father—” says El Greco, and immediately the priest gets this clever tone in his voice and says, “So where in Greece are you from?” He's picked up on the accent, see. Can't get anything past him. “Crete, actually…,” says E.G. “Gimme thirty Hail Marys,” says the priest.

El Greco is not Spanish—as if that would make him a model of due process. So immediately, in Spain, he's seen as this wild and crazy Zorba guy. What is El Greco going to fall back on, logical argument? No, he just
mumbles through the penance and then goes home and paints something as rich as three feet up a bear's ass, spiritual equivalent thereof. A swirl of local divines, looking like so many Raymond Masseys elongated and with a twist, reaching up after something in that Rottweiler-colored sky that is going to wrench 'em and wrench 'em till they dislocate every bone.

Outsider art. I could get into that, if I could find the right métier. I did once construct a free-form pile of firewood that caused more than one passerby to say, “Nice sculpture,” but “No, no,” I always said, “it's a woodpile.” And sure enough, bit by bit, I burned it. As art it was folkie, not folk. Like Janis Ian trying to sing a Sister Rosetta Tharpe song. It didn't cry out anything.

Once I visited the noted Georgia outsider artist Nellie Mae Rowe, now deceased. The works she left behind include busts fashioned out of chewed gum and, most impressively,
Pig on Expressway,
in crayon. I like the idea of getting a second, and higher, use out of Chiclets, but to tell you the truth those little heads looked kind of nasty. I've never lived with anybody who wouldn't have thrown those out. But that is a glorious pig. Where's your I-85 when you plop a multicolor, fully imagined pig down on it? It's the concrete that's out of place.

I have done a few things myself in felt-tip, on Styrofoam coffee cups. It's an unforgiving medium, but with practice you can get a firm, if slightly scraggly, intaglio groove going. Over the years, sitting around journalistically waiting for something to happen, I have achieved some striking abstracts and also faces. (When I was a boy, my grandfather showed me how to draw a whole head, in three-quarter or maybe seven-eighths profile—both eyes, one ear—with one continuous line.) Then I threw them away. You feel silly carrying around a used Styrofoam cup. And what was I trying to capture in it anyway?

Somebody took Nellie Mae Rowe up to a New York art museum, she told me, and the one thing that stuck in her mind was “the biggest picture of Jesus I ever saw.” I leave that to the Middle Ages. What in heaven's name kind of satisfaction did those people get out of those grisly Crucifixion scenes you see in the museums of Europe? There's often a dog present in them, I've noticed. Not in the museums, in the paintings. Giving the people a disgusted look. That art makes me want to say “Jesus!” all right but not in a spiritual way.

So—I'll be a secular humanist folk artist? Maybe when the TV preach-ers finally take over the culture as a whole, there will be a call for that. I'll fill my house and porch and yard with freehand quotations from Darwin
and signs of the square root. Maybe if I took a deep big breath I could draw a picture of Jesus reading a copy of
The Progressive,
with an expression on his face like “Hmmm.”

But I never know what expression a face I'm drawing is going to have until it's finished. And I don't want the TV preachers to take over. That would be like wishing for another Depression (something educated people up here, in my presence but not to my toleration, have been known to do) so a certain kind of hat would come back.

Maybe I could be a folk art critic. I don't mean a critic of folk art, I mean a folk critic of art. I could have a blog—folk blogger isn't a stretch. The Internet bristles with folk criticism of movies and books. Here's a comment I copied down from somewhere on imdb.com: “Not having been born yet, I can only suppose that this film turned heads on their ears upon its release.”

I can't bring myself to violate canons of English usage enough to be as inspired as all that, but when some art caught my fancy I could post a reproduction of it and write: “Now this is what I call a picture. Pretty, too, pretty as a picture. This picture here would be the picture to put next to the definition of picture in the dictionary.” Then, too, I could be real picky, a gadfly, have a regular feature called “You Missed a Spot.” Or I could be a folk gallerist. Organize a show entitled “Off-Hand: Right-Handed Artists Painting with Their Left Hands and Vice Versa.” Or call up a lot of nonrepresentational artists and get them to paint pictures of the House of Representatives. But as soon as I say something like that, I know I probably won't get around to doing it. Not up here where I live, anyway. It would just give people another chance to think, “Ah, yes. El Necko.”

A
s a pre-baby boom liberal Southern Democrat residing in semirural Massachusetts, what am I? A quidnunc, a curio, representative of no time or place and possibly concocted by a hoaxing taxidermist? Or can I have been preserved, cryogenically, for some purpose? Will I thaw out, any moment now, and step forward as the one who finally figured out how to halt the spread of immoderate Republicanism before it devoured all other forms of life?

No, I can't take all that much credit. The antireality-based folks were hoisted by their own petards. I will say, however, that the 2006 elections were a ringing endorsement of a column I wrote in 2005, when most of the country still thought Dick Cheney knew what he was doing.

The blue-staters I know seem to feel that they can swing the political pendulum back by means of logical analysis. Big “family-values” states turn out to be big watchers of
Desperate Housewives?
Aha! A “disconnect”! Now watch the whole red house of cards collapse!

I don't see it that way. For one thing, Republican strategists make duct tape out of disconnects. For another thing, the one time I watched
Desperate Housewives,
I thought maybe Karl Rove was behind it. Why
wouldn't
red-staters want to watch residents of California act trashy and be miserable?

Another tack I run into a lot up here is people priding themselves on their utter inability to
fathom
how
anyone
can
possibly
support those barbarians. This from people who stress the importance of being open to other cultures. Me, I'm from Georgia. I'm not too fine to wrap my mind around the Bushy Juggernaut. But can I wrestle it down?

Maybe the best way would be to egg it on. Anything can be run into the ground, even extremism. Republican legal minds have covered up the semitopless Spirit of Justice lady at the Department of Justice and have fought to preserve courthouse monuments to the Ten Commandments. I bet there are representations of underdressed women—or, anyway, blindfolded ones—all through the justice system, nationwide. Maybe I could start a campaign to replace those floozies with tasteful graven religious images in every court in the land. Far be it from anybody, in this climate, to speak out against that on the merits. But it's going to be expensive. Might even require some rendering unto Caesar.

But no. Republicans would say, hey, this statue swap doesn't have to cost tax money, why not let churches take over the legal system—or, hey, why not privatize it? Worshippers and corporations might find it advantageous to underwrite the courts.

Anyway, how could I, a non-Republican, float such a proposal? Well, if Republican officials can create fraudulent journalists—actors introducing quasi-TV-news segments and oddballs asking kissing-up questions at White House press conferences—why can't journalists create fraudulent Republican officials? Actors playing undersecretaries of whatever could pop up here and there around the country floating proposals that push the envelope just a wee bit too far.

Of course, Republicans paved the way for creating fraudulent journal-ists by playing up the notion that “fraudulent journalist” is redundant.
Creating fraudulent Republicans would be trickier. Since modern-day Republican governments are opposed to government, trying to create a fake official of such a government might leave a straightforward person such as myself more confused than surreptitious.

Maybe I could connive more honestly as a member of what we might call the postmature community. The Bush people want to semiprivatize Social Security, at a “transitional” expense to the taxpayers of however-many-trillion dollars? Well, a lot of people, including many in the Congress, are already drawing Social Security or about to start. If these proposed private accounts are going to be so great for future generations, how about some compensation for present generations? Or past generations—my mama would have loved to have had the government put her on to some hot stocks so she could have built up a nest egg she could have passed on to me. Say there are fifty million people in the sixty-three-and-older population. For one more trillion, we could toss us each twenty thousand dollars. And where would we get that money? Out of whichever pot those other trillions are supposed to come from.

What I am saying is, surely those who urge the country further and further toward tax-free, Deuteronomy-based world dominion can, in some way, be put on the defensive.

I would prefer, of course, a more constructive approach. I spoke recently with a man who was instrumental in creating the Republican Party in the South, pretty much from scratch (and abiding bad blood, of course) and high spirits. He was downright wistful. “It used to be a lot more fun,” he said, “before we got all these legislators.” I can't help suspecting that some Republicans are beginning to feel like teenagers acting wilder and wilder to keep up with bad-influence peers. They might appreciate it if the Democrats pushed back more effectively. What the country needs is a hardier strain of Democrats. The question is, more hybrid or more pure?

People say the GOP got where it is today by going pure, starting with Barry Goldwater in 1964. But it went on from there to elect Nixon, and I don't remember anything too pure about him. Reagan? An apparition. Is the incumbent pure? A base of fat cats and Pentecostals seems kind of hodgepodgy to me.

The Democrats, by making Howard Dean head of the Democratic National Committee, may be tending toward pure. But my Northern liberal friends give me the impression that pure, to them, means finding it unnatural not to have a president who is a Northern liberal. Even though we never have had one yet, at least since FDR. John Kennedy
appealed
to
Northern liberals—and I'd take him back now, because just as Bill Clinton evidently gathered from Kennedy that adultery in the White House is a presidential perk, Kennedy, if he were still around, would surely have gathered from Clinton that it's not. But as to policies, Kennedy was no Dennis Kucinich. I like Northern liberals, but believing that one should be nominated for president is like believing Harvard should play in the Orange Bowl.

Kennedy was elected by a highly impure coalition of Northern liberals, Catholics, African Americans, labor, and the Solid South. What Democrats need now is some strange bedfellows. But we can't say so, because Republicans would make that sound kinky. Being liberal used to be sexy, in a favorable sense, but a big voting element today, overlapping all walks of life, is parents scared of what their kids might be getting into. And the Democrats still haven't lived down Monica and Madonna. That's probably why blue states watch
Desperate Housewives:
it's a cold shower.

Howard Dean is a doctor, so presumably clean. And liberals trust his bona fides, so maybe he can go into red states like Nixon into China. It was Dean, of course, who spoke of reaching out to “guys with Confederate flags on their trucks.” He had a point there, but he didn't know how to put it. He needs some diversity training. He needs to watch
King of the Hill.

Whereas
Desperate Housewives
is real actors playing cartoon characters,
King of the Hill
is cartoon characters acting like real people: real Texans, in fact, who have hangups, who don't communicate well, and who do look after one another. And, yes, Hank cares about propane, because it's his living, but he's not imperialistic about it. I don't see why Hank and Peggy Hill, and maybe old Dale Gribble, can't be Democrats. Boomhauer, I don't know. But I say to Howard Dean: Before you start reaching out, picture yourself as a visiting character on
King of the Hill,
and ask yourself how you would go over. I'm not saying be fraudulent or desperate. I'm just saying—well, here's something Chet Atkins used to say to people of the North: “I'm not talking too slow, you're listening too fast.”

W
hen people of the Northeast ask what I do, I long for one of those professions that would certify me to respond as follows:

“Before I answer that question, I am ethically obliged to inform you that as soon as I do answer, our conversation will be billable at $200 per hour or portion thereof—and the answering of the question itself shall constitute such a portion, as will what I am telling you now, retroactively.”