The White Album (12 page)

“Would the
...
the Nancy Reagan rose be something you might be likely to pick now?”

A silvery peal of laughter
.
“I could certainly
pick
it
.
But I won’t be
using
it
.
”
A pause
.
“I’aw use the rhododendron
.
”

“Fine,” the newsman said
.
“Just fine
.
Now I’ll ask a question, and if you could just be nipping a bud as you answer it
...
”

“Nipping a bud,” Nancy Reagan repeated, taking her place in front of the rhododendron bush
.

“Let’s have a dry run,” the cameraman said
.

The newsman looked at him
.
“In other words, by a dry run, you mean you want her to fake nipping the bud
.
”

“Fake the nip, yeah,” the cameraman said
.
“Fake the nip
.
”

3

Outside the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica a hard subtropical rain had been falling for days
.
It scaled still more paint from the faded hotels and rooming houses that front the Pacific along Ocean Avenue
.
It streamed down the blank windows of unleased offices, loosened the soft coastal cliffs and heightened the most characteristic Santa Monica effect, that air of dispirited abandon which suggests that the place survives only as illustration of a boom gone bankrupt, evidence of some irreversible flaw in the laissez-faire small-business ethic
.
In any imaginative sense Santa Monica seemed an eccentric place for the United States Junior Chamber of Commerce to be holding a national congress, but there they were, a thousand delegates and wives, gathered in the Miramar Hotel for a relen
tl
ess succession of keynote banquets and award luncheons and prayer breakfasts and outstanding-young-men forums
.
Now it was the President’s Luncheon and everyone was listening to an animated singing group called The New Generation and I was watching the pretty young wife of one delegate pick sullenly at her lunch
.
“Let someone else eat this slop,” she said suddenly, her voice cutting through not only the high generalities of the occasion but The New Generation’s George M
.
Cohan medley as well
.
Her husband looked away, and she repeated it
.
To my left another delegate was urging me to ask every man in the room how the Jaycees had changed his life
.
I watched the girl down the table and asked the delegate how the
Jaycees had changed his life
.
“It saved my marriage and it built my business,” he whispered
.
“You could find a thousand inspirational stories right here at this President’s Luncheon
.
”
Down the table the young wife was sobbing into a pink napkin
.
The New Generation marched into “Superca
li
fragilisticexpialidocious
.
”
In many ways the Jaycees’ 32nd Annual Congress of America’s Ten Outstanding Young Men was a curious and troubling way to spend a few days in the opening weeks of 1970
.

I suppose I went to Santa Monica in search of the abstraction lately called “Middle America,” went to find out how the Jaycees, with their Cou
é
istic emphasis on improving one’s world and one’s self simultaneously, had weathered these past several years of cultural shock
.
In a very real way the Jaycees have exemplified, usually so ingenuously that it was popular to deride them, certain ideas shared by almost all of the people in America’s small cities and towns and by at least some of the people in America
’s
large cities, ideas shared in an unexamined way even by those who laughed at the Jaycees’ boosterism and pancake breakfasts and safe-driving Road-e-os
.
There was the belief in business success as a transcendent ideal
.
There was the faith that if one transforms oneself from an “introvert” into an “extrovert,” if one learns to “speak effectively” and “do a job,” success and its concomitant, spiritual grace, follow naturally
.
There was the approach to international problems which construed the underdeveloped world as a temporarily depressed area in need mainly of People-to-People programs
.
(“Word of Operation Brotherhood swept through the teeming masses of Asia like a fresh wind from the sea,” reads a Jaycee report on one such program in the late Fifties
.
) If only because these ideas, these last rattles of Social Darwinism, had in fact been held in common by a great many people who never bothered to articulate them, I wondered what the Jaycees were thinking now, wondered what their mood might be at a time when, as their national president put it one day at the Miramar, “so much of America seems to be looking at the negative
.
”

At first I thought I had walked out of the rain into a time warp: the Sixties seemed not to have happened
.
All these Jaycees were, by definition, between 21 an
d 35 years old, but there was a
disquieting tendency among them to have settled foursquare into middle age
.
There was the heavy jocularity, the baroque rhetoric of another generation entirely, a kind of poignant attempt to circumnavigate social conventions that had in fact broken down in the Twenties
.
Wives were lovely and forbearing
.
Getting together for drinks was having a cocktail reception
.
Rain was liquid sunshine and the choice of a table for dinner was making an executive decision
.
They knew that this was a brave new world and they said so
.
It was time to “put brotherhood into action,” to “open our neighborhoods to those of all colors
.
”
It was time to “turn attention to the cities,” to think about youth centers and clinics and the example set by a black policeman-preacher in Philadelphia who was organizing a decency rally patterned after Miami’s
.
It was time to “decry apathy
.
”

The word “apathy” cropped up again and again, an odd word to use in relation to the past few years, and it was a while before I realized what it meant
.
It was not simply a word remembered from the Fifties, when most of these men had frozen their vocabularies: it was a word meant to indicate that not enough of “our kind” were speaking out
.
It was a cry in the wilderness, and this resolute determination to meet 1950 head-on was a kind of refuge
.
Here were some people who had been led to believe that the future was always a rational extension of the past, that there would ever be world enough and time for “turning attention,” for “problems” and “solutions
.
”
Of course they would not admit their inchoate fears that the world was not that way any more
.
Of course they would not join the “fashionable doubters
.
”
Of course they would ignore the “pessimistic pundits
.
”
Late one afternoon I sat in the Miramar lobby, watching the rain fall and the steam rise off the heated pool outside and listening to a couple of Jaycees discussing student unrest and whether the “solution” might not lie in on-campus Jaycee groups
.
I thought about this astonishing notion for a long time
.
It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history
.
It was supposed to have been their time
.
It was not
.

1968-70

1

elder
R
obert
J
.
theobold,
pastor of what was until October 12, 1968, the Friendly Bible Apostolic Church in Port Hueneme, California, is twenty-eight years old, born and bred in San Jose, a native Californian whose memory stream could encompass only the boom years; in other words a young man who until October 12, 1968, had lived his entire life in the nerve center of the most elaborately technological and media-oriented society in the United States, and so the world
.
His looks and to some extent his background are indistinguishable from those of a legion of computer operators and avionics technicians
.
Yet this is a young man who has remained immaculate of the constant messages with which a technological society bombards itself, for at the age of sixteen he was saved, received the Holy Spirit in a Pentecostal church
.
Brother Theobold, as the eighty-some members of his congregation call him, now gets messages only from the Lord, “forcible impressions” instructing him, for example, to leave San Jose and start a church in Port Hueneme, or, more recen
tly
, to lead his congregation on the 12th of October, 1968, from Port Hueneme to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in order to avoid destruction by earthquake
.

“We’re leaving the 12th but I don’t have any message that it’s going to happen before the end of 1968,” Brother Theobold told me one morning a few weeks before he and his congregation piled their belongings into campers and cars and left California for Tennessee
.
He was minding the children that morning, and his two-year-old walked around sucking on a plastic bottle while Brother Theobold talked to me and fingered the pages of a tooled-leather Bible
.
“This one minister I heard, he definitely said it would happen before the end of 1970, but as far as I’m concerned, the Lord has shown me that it’s definitely coming but he hasn’t shown me
when!’

I mentioned to Brother Theobold that most seismologists were predicting an imminent major earthquake on the San Andreas Fault, but he did not seem unduly
interested: Brother Theobold’s
perception of the apocalypse neither began with nor depended upon the empirical
.
In a way the Pentecostal mind reveals itself most clearly in something like Brother Theobold’s earthquake prophecy
.
Neither he nor the members of his congregation to whom I talked had ever been particularly concerned by reports in the newspapers that an earthquake was overdue
.
“Of course we’d
heard
of earthquakes,” a soft-voiced woman named Sister Mosley told me
.
“Because the Bible mentions there’ll be more and more toward the end of time
.
”
Nor was there any need to think twice about pulling up stakes and joining a caravan to a small town few of them had ever seen
.
I kept asking Brother Theobold how he had chosen Murfreesboro, and over and over he tried to tell me: he had “received a telephone call from a man there,” or “God had directed this particular man to call on this particular day
.
”
The man did not seem to have made a direct entreaty to Brother Theobold to bring his flock to Tennessee, but there had been no question in Brother Theobold’s mind that God’s intention was exactly that
.
“From the natural point of view I didn’t care to go to Murfreesboro at all,” he said
.
“We just bought this place, it’s the nicest place we ever had
.
But I put it up to the Lord, and the Lord said
put it up for sale
.
Care for a Dr
.
Pepper?”

We might have been talking in different languages, Brother Theobold and I; it was as if I knew all the words but lacked the grammar, and so kept questioning him on points that seemed to him ineluctably clear
.
He seemed to be one of those people, so many of whom gravitate to Pentecostal sects, who move around the West and the South and the Border States forever felling trees in some interior wilderness, secret frontiersmen who walk around right in the ganglia of the fantastic electronic pulsing that is life in the United States and continue to receive information only through the most tenuous chains of rumor, hearsay, haphazard trickledown
.
In the social conventions by which we now live there is no category for people like Brother Theobold and his congregation, most of whom are young and white and nominally literate; they are neither the possessors nor the dispossessed
.
They participate in the national anxieties only through a glass darkly
.
They teach their daughters to eschew makeup and to cover their knees, and they believe in divine healing, and in speaking in tongues
.
Other people leave towns like Murfreesboro, and they move into them
.
To
an astonishing extent they keep
themselves unviolated by common knowledge, by the ability to make routine assumptions; when Brother Theobold first visited Murfreesboro he was dumbfounded to learn that the courthouse there had been standing since the Civil War
.
“The
same building”
he repeated twice, and then he got out a snapshot as corroboration
.
In the interior wilderness no one is bloodied by history, and it is no coincidence that the Pentecostal churches have their strongest hold in places where Western civilization has its most superficial hold
.
There are more than twice as many Pentecostal as Episcopal churches in Los Angeles
.