I hear tell that there are caucuses, if not crocuses, coming up in Iowa. As far as I know, only two men in the mix—Ron Paul and Gary Johnson—come anywhere near the Iowa Idea. Not that politics is the answer. If the Mason Cities of our country are ever to reflower, they need peace and poetry and music—the mist and all.
The Beats Go Right
The American Enterprise, 1997
The recent deaths of poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist William S. Burroughs occasioned a round of impolite obituaries accusing the dear departed and their Beat Generation pals of being subversive perverts. Yet whatever unconventionalities went on behind closed doors, their politics were squarely American: the Beats were libertarian heretics in an age of statolatry.
Beat icon Jack Kerouac was a Robert Taft Republican throughout his life. In 1952, in the predawn of his notoriety, Kerouac supported the stolid Ohio conservative for the GOP nomination while his buddy Ginsberg, son of a “Communist beauty” mother, talked up plutocratic Cold Warrior Democrat Averell Harriman, of all people. (The Beat “Adonis of Denver,” cowboy drifter Neal Cassady, said “it makes not one whit of difference who gets it.”)
Kerouac’s political comments read like Chicago Tribune editorials. In a 1948 letter, he cursed Harry Truman:
The war scare I think is just for the sake of squeeze-playing Congress into voting Universal Military Training and the Marshall Plan. It’s a dirty administration with dirty tricks-creating “emergencies” for its own political ends . . . I think we should arm and just dare anybody to attack, but I don’t think we should be the aggressors, that wouldn’t pan out.
Kerouac subscribed to and avidly read National Review and once appeared on William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line,” where he drunkenly uttered the immortal words, “Flat-foot Floogie with the floy floy!” He painted pictures of the Virgin Mary and Pope Paul; he disliked the Vietnam War as well as its protesters: “I’m pro-American and the radical political involvements seem to tend elsewhere. . . . This country gave my Canadian family a good break, and we see no reason to demean said country.”
The prematurely cadaverous Burroughs was an anarchist who’d have fit very nicely into a conspiracy chat room. His favorite political writer was the hard-right polemicist Westbrook Pegler. In a typical passage, Burroughs imagined an American future of “ever-increasing governmental control over the private citizen, not on the old-style police-state models of oppression and terror, but in terms of work, credit, housing, retirement benefits, and medical-care: services that can be withheld. These services are computerized. No number, no service. However, this has not produced the brainwashed standardized human units postulated by such linear prophets as George Orwell. Instead, a large percentage of the population has been forced underground. How large, no one knows. These people are numberless.”
To be number-less, without a number or government ID tag choking your neck, was about the best the misanthropic Burroughs could hope for. He was fond of saying, “No problem can be solved. When a situation becomes a problem, it becomes insoluble. Problems are by definition insoluble. No problem can be solved, and all solutions lead to more problems.” Not exactly sloganeering for the Great Society.
The third member of the Beat triumvirate, Allen Ginsberg, was more predictable and less interesting than the others, but at least he outgrew his red diapers. He devoted his political energies to libertarian causes: the legalization of marijuana and homosexual relations, and, later, denunciations of the CIA. Despite his matrix, he never fell for the Communist con. He held Cuba and postwar Vietnam to be “police states,” and he accused American Sandinista-groupies of “cowardice.”
“I don’t like the government where I live,” Ginsberg sang, and his anarchistic bone was large enough that he’d have sung the same tune no matter where he lived.
The Beats ran deep in an American vein. They loved their country, whatever they thought of its government. In a 1959 manifesto defending baseball, the crucifix, and “the glee of America, the honesty of America,” Kerouac declared, “Woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality. . . . Woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back.”
The spitters have outlived the Beats. But softly the wind soughs.
Ray Bradbury, Regionalist
First Principles, 2008
Byzantium, I come not from,
But from another time and place
Whose race was simple, tried and true;
As a boy
I dropped me forth in Illinois.
A name with neither love nor grace
Was Waukegan, there I came from
And not, good friends, Byzantium.
—Ray Bradbury
Every summer solstice my daughter Gretel and I sit on the front porch and read the opening chapters of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (1957), the finest evocation of a boyhood summer I have read. If ever a science fiction writer has deserved the honorable tag of “regionalist,” it is Ray Bradbury of Waukegan, Illinois.
Critic Wayne L. Johnson once described Bradbury as having “one foot amid the tree-lined streets of Green Town, Illinois in the 1920s and ’30s, and the other foot planted on the red sands of Mars in the not-too-distant future.” He is a pastoral moralist who jokes that he eats metaphor for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; his line of descent has little to do with Jules Verne or Robert Heinlein and instead can be traced to the Nathaniel Hawthorne of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “Young Goodman Brown.” Like Hawthorne, he has Salem connections: in 1692, Mary Bradbury was convicted of witchcraft, though she escaped hanging. I’ll wager that her descendant hopes she really was a witch.
Bradbury’s people were among his hometown’s earliest settlers. A great-grandfather was mayor of Waukegan in the 1880s, and the author’s creative memory was carved by the ravines of his native city, as Sam Weller emphasizes in his fine biography The Bradbury Chronicles (2005).
He left Waukegan at age thirteen, when his family followed the sun westward, and though the starstruck boy loved Los Angeles (W.C. Fields once signed Bradbury’s autograph book and told him, “There you are, you little son of a bitch!”) he would forever recall, and transmute into myth, twilit summer evenings on the Bradbury family’s front porch. Not a day went by, said Bradbury, “when I didn’t stroll myself across a recollection of my grandparents’ northern Illinois grass, hoping to come across some old half-burnt firecracker, a rusted toy, or a fragment of letter written to myself in some young year hoping to contact the older person I became to remind him of his past, his life, his people, his joys, and his drenching sorrows.” (He really did write such a letter: As a forty-something-year-old man, Bradbury returned to Waukegan, walked the ravine of his childhood, and located the oak tree in which he had, decades earlier, deposited a note to his older self. He poked around in a squirrel hole of the tree until he found the message from boy to man. It read: “I remember you.”)
Like H.L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, Ernest Hemingway, and other original Americans, Bradbury “had the advantage,” wrote Russell Kirk, “of never attending college,” which “constricts people,” in Bradbury’s words. He was an autodidact, a library rat, who also cherished old people—not the self-pitying valetudinarians (though they, too, are made in the image of God, albeit a kvetching deity) but wise wizened elders. “I was a boy who did indeed love his parents and grandparents and his brother, even when that brother ‘ditched’ him,” he writes. The grandfather in Dandelion Wine is vintner of this “common flower, a weed that no one sees . . . but for us, a noble thing.” Grandfather Spaulding disparages the maintenance-free turf that a young newspaperman threatens to bring to Green Town (the fictive Waukegan), instructing the fellow in the joys of grass and its mowing, for “it’s the little savors and little things that count more than big ones. A walk on a spring morning