Partly Cloudy Patriot, The

by Sarah Vowell

  A California dairy farmer protesting the government’s milk pricing system poured milk down a drain in front of TV cameras, claiming that he had to take a stand, “just like Rosa Parks had to take a stand.”

  A street performer in St. Augustine, Florida, is challenging a city ordinance that bans him from doing his act on the town’s historic St. George Street. The performer’s lawyer told The Florida Times-Union, “Telling these people they can exercise their First Amendment rights somewhere other than on St. George is like telling Rosa Parks that she has to sit in the back of the bus.” (Which is, coincidentally, also the argument of another Florida lawyer, this one representing adult dancers contesting Tampa’s ordinance outlawing lap dancing.) I would also like to mention the rocker, marksman, and conservative activist Ted Nugent, who in his autobiography, God, Guns and Rock ’n’ Roll, refers to himself as “Rosa Parks with a loud guitar.” That’s so inaccurate. Everyone knows he’s more like Mary Matalin with a fancy deer rifle.

  Call me picky, but breathing secondhand smoke, being subject to unfair dairy pricing, and not being able to mime (or lap dance), though they are all tragic, tragic injustices, are not quite as bad as the systematic segregation of public transportation based on skin color. And while fighting for your right to lap dance and mime and breathe just the regular pollution is a very fine, very American idea, it is not quite as brave as being a middle-aged black woman in Alabama in 1955 telling a white man she’s not giving him her seat despite the fact that the law requires her to do so. And, oh, by the way, in the process, she gets arrested, and then sparks the Montgomery bus boycott, which is the seed of the civil rights movement as we know it. The bus boycotters not only introduced a twenty-six-year-old pastor by the name of Martin Luther King, Jr., into national public life but, after many months of car pools, walking, and court fights against bus segregation, got the separate but equal doctrine declared illegal once and for all.

  It’s not just people on the right like Katherine Harris and Ted Nugent who seem especially silly being likened to Parks. I first cringed at this analogy trend at the lefty Ralph Nader’s October 2000 campaign rally in Madison Square Garden. Ever sit in a coliseum full of people who think they’re heroes? I was surrounded by thousands of well-meaning, well-fed white kids who loved it when the filmmaker Michael Moore told them they should, like Rosa Parks, stand up to power, by which I think he meant vote for Nader so he could qualify for federal matching funds. When Nader himself mentioned abolitionists in Mississippi in 1836 and asked the crowd to “think how lonely it must have been,” he was answered, according to my notes, with a “huge, weird cheer.” I think I’m a fine enough person—why, the very next morning I was having people over for waffles. But I hope I’m not being falsely modest by pointing out that I’m no Harriet Tubman. And I’m certainly no Rosa Parks. As far as I’m concerned, about the only person in recent memory who has an unimpeachable right to compare himself to Parks is that Chinese student who stared down those tanks in Tiananmen Square.

  I was reminded of those Naderites watching a rerun of the sitcom Sports Night on Comedy Central. Dan, a television sportscaster played by Josh Charles, has been ordered by his network to make an on-air apology to viewers because he said in a magazine interview that he supports the legalization of marijuana. He stands by his opinion and balks at apologizing. His boss, Isaac (Robert Guillaume), agrees but tells him to do it anyway “because it’s television and this is how it’s done.” Dan replies, “Yeah, well, sitting in the back of the bus was how it was done until a forty-two-year-old lady moved up front.” A few minutes later Isaac looks Dan in the eye and tells him, “Because I love you I can say this. No rich young white guy has ever gotten anywhere with me comparing himself to Rosa Parks.” Finally, the voice of reason, which of course was heard on a canceled network TV series on cable.

  Analogies give order to the world—and solidarity. Pointing out how one person is like another is reassuring, less lonely. Maybe those who would compare their personal inconveniences to the epic struggles of history are just looking for company, and who wouldn’t want to be in the company of Rosa Parks? On the other hand, perhaps people who compare themselves to Rosa Parks are simply arrogant, pampered nincompoops with delusions of grandeur who couldn’t tell the difference between a paper cut and a decapitation.

  In defense of Ted Nugent, the street performer, the mayor, the dairy farmer, the lap dancers, the Naderites, and a fictional sportscaster, I will point out that Katherine Harris is the only person on my list of people lamely compared to a civil rights icon who, at the very moment she was being compared to a civil rights icon, was actually being sued for “massive voter disenfranchisement of people of color during the presidential election”—by the NAACP.

  Tom Cruise Makes Me Nervous

  During the three-plus hours I sat in the dark watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s ensemble epic Magnolia, I found myself wanting something I’d never wanted before. More Tom Cruise. As a white, middle-class American moviegoer who graduated from high school during the Reagan administration and subscribes to more than one cable film channel, I’ve seen every film Tom Cruise ever made, some many more than once, without even trying. Like a Tom Petty or a Jim Lehrer, Cruise falls into that category of competent if ubiquitous public figures that have never won my love or hate and therefore never truly caught my eye. Except for his memorably baroque turn as Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, which I, like the rest of the country, blame on his curdled blond hair. But somehow, Cruise’s work in Magnolia, as the male prowess guru Frank T. J. Mackey, so seized my curiosity that I walked straight out of the theater to go rent his 1983 film Risky Business.

  Tom Cruise is a mystery in plain sight. If one sets out to explain his appeal, all the normal movie star reasons melt away. For starters, his looks. Cruise has never been a breathtaking beauty. The shock of Risky Business, especially if your head’s full of the flawless teens currently steaming up the television, is how ordinary Cruise looks. He’s a regular, awkward kid, to the extent that I doubt he’d be cast in the lead now. Cruise’s face is too angular to be sensual. Whoever said that there are no straight lines in nature never bought a ticket to The Firm. His face reminds me more of a math problem than a love poem, the nose and chin right out of high school geometry, hard vectors of flesh. Picasso might have liked to paint him, though it would have been too easy—turning breasts and lips into rectangles is more of a challenge than making a box like Cruise boxier. Even his hair is drawn on with a ruler. Check out his short and sporty coif in Mission: Impossible; every individual strand is a line parallel to the y-axis. Which might explain a little of the Magnolia draw. Cruise’s longer locks in that picture do make his face look a little softer, or as soft as it’s possible for a man to look while swaggering around a stage inciting other men to date rape proclaiming, “Respect the cock!”

  I’d never given Tom Cruise’s cock much thought before. If I had been asked to draw a nude Tom Cruise before seeing the bulge protruding out of his white underwear as he strips in Magnolia, I probably would have given him the smooth anatomy of a Ken doll. Where Tom Cruise sticks his privates has been the subject of rumors and lawsuits, but I never gave Cruise’s sexuality much truck one way or the other. Because, watching his movies over the past couple of weeks, I am constantly surprised when Cruise is in the same room with another person, much less the same bed. He strikes me as utterly, quintessentially, fundamentally alone. Of course Stanley Kubrick wanted Cruise to play the doctor in his Eyes Wide Shut. Much of the movie requires the doctor to walk the streets of New York by himself at night, and when a director needs alone-in-a-crowd, he calls Tom Cruise. The running gag about his title character in Jerry Maguire was that Jerry hates to be alone, but he also can’t connect with anyone. In that sense, Jerry Maguire is the perfect fable of America’s relationship with Tom Cruise. Basically, we think he’s a stuck-up phony and we want to see him hit bottom, have his love interest notice for once that he isn’t paying any attention to her, a
nd then we want to see him humanized, i.e., cry. Cruise’s first two Oscar nominations—for Jerry Maguire and Born on the Fourth of July—display the public’s deep desire to see him put through a ringer. We want him to get his legs cut off (July), and we want to see him lose for a while to the even slicker, if that’s possible, Jay Mohr (Maguire) because we want to punish him. Because I think the only reason seemingly every man, woman, and child in America goes to see his movies is not that he blinds us with beauty or talent or emotion. We can’t take our eyes off him because he makes us a little nervous. Not too nervous—that’s why we invented Dennis Hopper. Cruise makes us stealth nervous, just jittery enough to keep us awake.

  Watch Barry Levinson’s Rain Man again and I guarantee you that the discomfort of Dustin Hoffman’s shticky autism does not compare to the heebie-jeebies of Cruise’s performance. Hoffman can dodder on about missing Jeopardy! every thirteen seconds and he’s fresh air, but Cruise, closed off and angry, is a twitch fest. When Huffman’s Raymond throws a fit as Cruise tries to give him a hug, the viewer more than understands. While autism is the most natural thing in the world, an embrace from Cruise defies the laws of nature. When the cute little kid in Jerry Maguire gave Cruise a hug, my first reaction was parental. I wanted to grab the child away, scolding, “We don’t do that. We don’t touch burning stoves, strangers’ candy, and we do not touch Tom Cruise.” Because Cruise is not, as the French say, good in his skin. Even in his most flawless, most affable performance, as Lt. Daniel Kaffee in A Few Good Men, Cruise seems the most comfortable on the softball field, having conversations with Demi Moore through a fence. Because Tom Cruise is the most talented actor of all time at keeping his distance.

  Like most screen icons, Tom Cruise is not of us. Us, with our faces lumped together out of concentric circles versus his straight-edge mug. Us with our nerves and fears and him with his lieutenant-lawyer cockiness. Him with his choreographed cocktails and us dripping gin on our carpets as olives splash on the floor. But that’s where Tom Cruise stops—better than. There’s no further inspiration to be gained. Like every time I see To Kill a Mockingbird I take one look at Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch and resolve to become more dignified. Even seeing Rene Russo in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair made me vow to dress better, which, if not a moral for our times, is at least some little something. Cruise’s best line in Magnolia comes when his character is asked by the reporter interviewing him why he’s stopped talking. “I’m quietly judging you,” he seethes, and that might be just what we’re afraid of with regards to Tom Cruise.

  The mark of a great performance is that it obliterates distance, gets under our skin. It’s simply harder for an icon to do that. But possible. Magnolia is the first time Cruise even comes close. It is far and away his most physical performance. If only because I’d never heard him breathe. About half of Cruise’s on-screen time is taken up with Mackey’s rooster struts—again, alone—across a darkened stage. His entrance, a ridiculous backlit pose to the strains of “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” isn’t his only Elvis move. His debauched bumps and grinds as he speaks, often fucking the air, punctuate his hilarious pigspeak with a new earthiness. He’d never seemed more human—which is to say funnier, more vulnerable—than playing a man without the self-awareness to know that barking the words “you are gonna give me that cherry pie sweet mama baby” might make him come off dopey, pathetic, and sad. We’ve never seen Cruise this lewd, and thus we’ve never really seen him get his hands dirty, dirty with the dopiness of desire. As my upstanding mother said when she called last night to tell me why she’d walked out of “that horrible, horrible Magnolia” and wanted me to explain what’s wrong with movies today, she sighed, “I’ll never be able to look at Tom Cruise again.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I feel like I’ve seen him for the first time.

  Underground Lunchroom

  I am a rube who reads guidebooks. That is how I learned that the Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone National Park is the world’s largest log structure, and that one may sit on its balcony and sip a gin and tonic while watching Old Faithful spout off. Another guidebook tipped me off that visitors to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota may partake in the nearby town’s “Pitchfork Fondue,” in which rib eye steaks are speared on the ends of pitchforks and dunked in barrels of boiling oil—crispy, theatrical meat as the sun goes down over the Badlands.

  In this fondness for these things, I am not alone. For I have sat on picnic tables among my countrymen, some of whom stood down the Nazis, and we’ve smiled at the landscape and at one another, the grease trickling onto our souvenir T-shirts.

  As I was paging through a guidebook entry on New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park, the words “Underground Lunchroom” caught my eye. The lunchroom is smack-dab in the middle of the caverns, 750 feet underground. The guidebook warned, “To modern eyes, this strange installation seems absurd, but moves to close it down have been stymied by its place in popular affections.” As I would come to find out, it is a restaurant so oddly placed that it requires an act of Congress repeated every year to keep going.

  If the geological marvels of Carlsbad Caverns came into being in the time before history, the Underground Lunchroom represents the time before arugula. Established in 1926, the lunchroom was renovated in the 1970s, and it shows. The food and souvenir stations are housed in sandy brown booths that remind me of the drive-through bank architecture of my childhood. The food—box lunches of cold chicken or ham sandwiches, wedges of pie in plastic, wedge-shaped containers—is the sort of fare my grade school washed down with Shasta cola on the Freedom Train field trip in ’76. Not long after the Bicentennial, middle Americans started eating better and dressing better and calling nature “the environment,” but the Underground Lunchroom is a throwback to our unpretentious if unenlightened past.

  The National Park Service wanted to get rid of it. In 1991 they began an environmental assessment of the lunchroom. Money was spent. Scientists conferred. It took two years. And, sadly for them, they were unable to find any evidence that food particles, Freon gas in the refrigerators, or the use of microwave ovens was harming the ecosystem and climate of the cave. In fact, all sorts of things pose a bigger ecological threat to the cave than the lunchroom does, like the existence of lights, of an elevator, of actual, bacteria-carrying tourists with their lint-covered clothing.

  In the end, the reason the Park Service wants to close the lunchroom is not thanks to science. It has to do with aesthetics. In the years since the lunchroom was built, we as a people have gone through a grand tectonic shift in the way we think about national parks. Basically, we don’t believe in putting crap in the middle of nature anymore. And not only that, we believe in taking out as much of the old crap as possible. This was codified in a 1991 Park Service policy called the Vail Agenda, which clearly states, “The National Park Service should use existing authority to remove, wherever possible, unnecessary facilities.”

  It’s the aesthetics of all this that Ed Greene talks about when we walk through the cavern and he makes the case for the removal of the lunchroom. Greene is in charge of visitor services at Carlsbad Caverns National Park, He contributed to that environmental study. And he spends so much time underground amidst the marvels of the cavern that he has a separate name for the world that you and I inhabit. He calls that world the “surface world.”

  “It’s hard to describe this for someone who can’t see it because there’s nothing in the surface world experience that prepares people to see something like this,” Greene tells me. “It is just unlike anything else on earth. There will be times that I will intentionally, if I’m having a rough day or something is getting under my skin a little bit, I’ll just intentionally come down in the cave and find a place just to sit and soak this up. This resource and this kind of beauty keep me humbled and keep me on the right path to do the things that I need to be doing here. Nobody created Carlsbad Caverns so that they could have lunch 750 feet underground. If you walk down t
hrough the natural entrance, what you are experiencing is this natural creation, and then as you exit out of that area and you walk into this area there’s this stark contrast. That’s the first thing you see when you walk out. You are coming to one of the world’s great natural attractions, one of the greatest attractions in all creation, and what do you see? Something not unlike maybe a mall somewhere.”

  If the Park Service reasoning for removing the Underground Lunchroom is essentially an aesthetic argument, the main reason to save the lunchroom is equally aesthetic. Namely, it’s cool to eat lunch in a cave. You can also mail a postcard from the lunchroom and stamp it “Mailed 750 Feet Underground.” It’s entertaining to mail a postcard in a cave. The lunchroom even has a bank of pay phones. Why would you need to make a telephone call from the cave? Well, you wouldn’t need to. You might do it because it’s fun, and you’re on vacation, and you’re at a place with the word park in its name.

  The Carlsbad business community partly depends on vacationers for their livelihood. A local Carlsbad company called Cavern Supply has operated the lunchroom since the 1920s and employs around sixty people in the summer. In a town of 25,000 people, this is significant.

  Frank Hodnett is the president of Cavern Supply. He runs the lunchroom. His view, which is not entirely self-serving, is shared by many in the Carlsbad community, who believe that the concessions associated with the cave are part of the cave’s history. He worked in the cave as a little boy, standing on top of Coke cases to make change. He was accompanying his father, who was also an employee of Cavern Supply. Hodnett’s father started working at the lunchroom in the twenties. Back before the elevators, Hodnett senior carried the food in and out of the cave every day on his back, acquiring the nickname Yo Yo. For Frank Hodnett, his own family history here is intertwined with the thousands of families he’s fed at the lunchroom’s tables.