To many people the election of Donald Trump as president
was a soul-rending shock. What couldn’t
possibly happen actually happened. Much
time and effort has been spent on trying to explain what occurred and why. It is necessary to get the correct answers to
those questions and not rush to prematurely drawn conclusions. In that context, a potentially interesting
insight arose from an unexpected source.
Nathaniel Rich wrote a review of Joan Didion’s book, South and West: From a Notebook, for the New
York Review of Books under the title Joan Didion in the Deep South. Didion is
a highly-respected writer of novels, screenplays, essays and memoirs. She was born and has spent much of her life
living and working in California, and had an abiding interest in understanding
and describing the character of the state and its residents. Somewhat paradoxically, Didion decided that
she might be able to understand California better if she learned more about the
South because so many Californians had origins in the South. Consequently, she spent a month in 1970
driving across the region and taking notes on what she observed and the people
to whom she talked. The study she had
intended was never written and published, but her notes from the journey are
now about to be released (March, 2017) in book form. Nathaniel Rich provides this assessment of
the product.
“Didion’s notes, which surpass
in elegance and clarity the finished prose of most other writers, are a
fascinating record of this time. But they are also something more unsettling.
Readers today will recognize, with some dismay and even horror, how much is
familiar in these long-lost American portraits. Didion saw her era more clearly
than anyone else, which is another way of saying that she was able to see the
future.”
It is this notion that the past has predicted the future
that is of interest to us today.
One must begin by indicating the common preconceptions about
the two regions because they are assumed to be polar opposites in terms of history
and prospects for the future. We are
presented with this Didion quote about her home state.
“’The future always looks good
in the golden land,’ Didion wrote in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” ‘because
no one remembers the past’.”
But a region without a past to act as ballast or anchor
can be an unstable construct. Politics
can change quickly in California—at least in its major cities—where cultural
upheaval is a way of life.
“….in Los Angeles or the Bay
Area, which since Didion’s reporting has only accelerated in its embrace of an
ethic in which the past is fluid, meaningless, neutered by technological
advancement. In this view the past is relegated to the aesthetic realm, to what
Didion describes in “California Notes” as ‘decorative touches’—tastefully aged
cutlery and window curtains. In this view the past was safely dead and could
not return to bloody the land.”
The South is a quite different place, one where change
comes slowly—if at all.
“Even the glimpses of unlikely
beauty—the wild carrots growing around the raised railroad tracks in Biloxi,
the small girl sitting in the sawdust stringing pop tops from beer cans into a
necklace—contribute to the general atmosphere of uneasiness, rot, and ‘somnolence
so dense it seemed to inhibit breathing.’ There is a long tradition of northern
visitors seeing in the Gulf South an atmosphere of perpetual decline, in which ‘everything
seems to go to seed.’ Didion quotes Audubon’s line about ‘the dangerous nature
of the ground, its oozing, spongy, and miry disposition,’ though you could go
back to 1720, when a visiting French official described the territory as ‘flooded,
unhealthy, impracticable’.”
However, Didion saw, or at least sensed, something more
powerful and more permanent in her travels through the region. Here is a quote from her notes presenting a
startling hypothesis.
“….a sense which struck me now
and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the
South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were
still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the
future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic
center.”
How can a region viewed as being in an advanced state of
decay be considered to be a representation of the future?
“Didion admits the idea seems
oxymoronic, but she is onto something. Part of the answer, she suspects, lies
in the bluntness with which Southerners confront race, class, and heritage—‘distinctions
which the frontier ethic teaches western children to deny and to leave
deliberately unmentioned.’ In the South such distinctions are visible, rigid,
and the subject of frank conversation.”
“Everybody in the South knows where they stand. There is no shame in
discussing it. It is suspicious, in fact, to avoid the subject.”
William Faulkner, a writer from the South once wrote “The
past is never dead, it’s not even past.”
If true, then the past becomes the future as well. Didion seems to be sensing this. Will people be satisfied with a society that
promises an exciting but unknowable future?
Or will they prefer the comfort and stability of a society in which “everybody
knows where they stand?”
To many liberals, the ideal society would allow people of
different races and genders to move fluidly wherever their interests and
capabilities might lead them. They
cannot comprehend that others would insist on thinking differently.
“An unquestioned premise among
those who live in American cities with international airports has been, for
more than half a century now, that Enlightenment values would in time become
conventional wisdom. Some fought for this future to come sooner. Others waited
patiently. But nobody seemed to believe that it would never arrive.”
Nathaniel Rich accepts Didion’s hypothesis and points to
Trump’s election as evidence.
“…..this southern frame of mind
has annexed territory in the last four decades, expanding across the
Mason-Dixon Line into the rest of rural America. It has taken root among
people—or at least registered voters—nostalgic for a more orderly past in which
the men concentrated on hunting and fishing and the women on ‘their cooking,
their canning, their “prettifying”;’ when graft as a way of life was accepted,
particularly in politics, and segregation was unquestioned….”
“Two decades into the new
millennium, however, a plurality of the population has clung defiantly to the
old way of life. They still believe in the viability of armed revolt. As Didion
herself noted nearly fifty years ago, their solidarity is only reinforced by
outside disapproval, particularly disapproval by the northern press. They have
resisted with mockery, then rage, the collapse of the old identity categories.
They have resisted the premise that white skin should not be given special
consideration. They have resisted new technology and scientific evidence of
global ecological collapse. The force of this resistance has been strong enough
to elect a president.”
Is this a credible position to take? Could southern ideas and attitudes have seduced
citizens from other regions? That is not
a new idea.
From the era of slavery to today, those in power in the
South have fought to maintain it as a low-wage region. In such a situation people are bred much faster
than are living-wage jobs. The South has
a poor attitude toward immigrants, but it has been producing immigrants for other parts of the nation in large numbers throughout its history. The southern culture was carried with them
and likely had an effect on those with whom they cohabited.
Senator Jim Webb (Virginia) wrote a book claiming that
these immigrants were mostly the Scots-Irish (his ancestors) and they produced
a dramatic change in the areas in which they resettled: Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (2004). He makes this claim.
“Domestically,
Scots-Irish folkways had become deeply imbedded into the nation’s blue collar
communities in every region except the Northeast.”
Kevin Phillips agreed with this notion of migration of
southern culture and included a section dealing with “The Southernization of America”
in his book American Theocracy The Peril & Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, & Borrowed Money in the 21st Century
(2006). The “Great Migration” of blacks
from the South to the North and the West had a profound effect on the cities in
which they settled. Phillips reminds us
that there was a parallel great migration of whites as well. It likely had its own profound effect.
“In Dixie Rising, Peter Applebome profiled
the huge migration out of the South between 1910 and 1960. Besides 4.5 million blacks, mostly bound for
the urban north, some 4.6 million whites also left the South, principally for
the Midwest and the West.”
“So
many Kentuckians, West Virginians, and Tennesseans went northward to the
automobile and rubber plants of the Great Lakes states that most factory cities
had their hillbilly hollows and Little West Virginias.”
Much of the history of the United
States has played out as a conflict between competing views of the North and
the South. The North has maintained a
slight lead in the hearts of the voting public by winning in high population
urban areas. The recent election seems
to suggest that the South has won the hearts and minds of everyone else. It controls the terrain and that is what is
important in our electoral system. Even
in bluest of blue California, if one drives about 60 miles due east of San Francisco one enters a region that has
been described as being politically and culturally more like Oklahoma than the
Bay Area.
Nathaniel Rich provides this
conclusion.
“A writer from the Gulf South
once wrote that the past is not even past. Didion goes further, suggesting that
the past is also the future. Now that we live in that future, her observations
read like a warning unheeded. They suggest that California’s dreamers of the
golden dream were just that—dreamers—while the “dense obsessiveness” of the
South, and all the vindictiveness that comes with it, was the true American
condition, the condition to which we will always inevitably return. Joan Didion
went to the South to understand something about California and she ended up
understanding something about America.”
One fears that we will continue to be a fundamentally
divided nation for the indefinite future.
It seems that only world wars and massive social upheavals can draw us
together. If there is any good thought
to extract from this discussion, consider that Donald Trump seems capable of
causing both. Thus, perhaps, a
reconciliation of some sort may become possible. That is what passes for good news these days.
The interested reader might find the following article
informative:
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