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That last line is easily recognizable from another Indian epic, the Bhagavad Gita—“I am become death: the shatterer of worlds.” These, as I recall, were the very words mouthed by Robert Oppenheimer as he saw the flash and felt the fire at Alamogordo.
This fusion of the psychopathic with the apocalyptic—surely the essence of “terror” in our time—is transferred to America by another “factive” passage, this one interleaving Noman’s presence in Los Angeles with the riots of 1992 and with the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center, in 1993. Anonymous though he may prefer to be, Noman actually fits rather well into the crazed world of LA celebrity defendants, special wings for same in the LA county jail, and special attorneys for same in the LA courts. He also mingles fairly effortlessly with the city’s proliferating gang-and-maximum-security scene. One of his targets, meanwhile (I seek to give away as little as possible), has become an adept in the parallel world of private security—the latter being an area of expertise in which Mr. Rushdie requires no lessons from anyone.
This is a highly serious novel, on an extremely serious subject, by a deeply serious man. It is not necessary to assimilate all the details of the conflict in Kashmir in order to read it. Nor is it necessary to favor one or another solution, though we get a hint from the epigraph page—Mercutio’s “plague on both your houses,” from Romeo and Juliet—of Rushdie’s opinion of Indian and Pakistani policy. Rather than seek for anything as trite as a “message,” I should guess that Rushdie is telling us, No more Macondos. No more Shangri-las, if it comes to that. Gone is the time when anywhere was exotic or magical or mythical, or even remote. Shalimar’s clown mask has been dropped, and his acrobatics have become a form of escape artistry by which he transports himself into “our” world. As he himself says in closing his ominous message of Himalayan telepathy, I’ll be there soon enough.
(The Atlantic, September 2005)
My Red-State Odyssey
IT ISN’T RECENT, this psychic partition between the red and the blue states of our Union. One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan—a quintessential northeastern big-city boy, even if he was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma—was an assistant secretary in the “New Frontier” administration when he heard the news that his president had been shot dead in Dallas. While everyone else in Washington was rushing around, shouting importantly about going to the shelters or about “the loss of American innocence,” Moynihan called everyone he knew. The main thing, he insisted, was to “get Oswald out of Dallas.” If anything happened to him while he was in the custody of the Dallas PD, the tragedy and the mystery would last forever. Before everything, before anything, secure the prisoner Oswald.
That’s it, in a way, for a lot of people I know. The states of the former Confederacy are not quite American. The inhabitants—of course one strives to avoid cliché, let alone the deadly word “stereotype”—are perhaps slightly too much given to dark thoughts and bloody recreations; to snickering at out-of-state license plates in the intervals of their offenses against chastity with either domestic animals or (the fact must be faced) with members of their immediate families. An area where all politics is yokel.
Moynihan’s suggestive choice of phrase was to be echoed very quickly, when, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson had to defend his tragic and accidental incumbency against Barry Goldwater. Senator Goldwater had been visiting New York, where he tried to cash an Arizona check and to his fury was refused. It might be better for all concerned, he harrumphed, if the northeastern seaboard were sawed off the country and allowed to float away. He was later stomped and whomped by LBJ in the election (the last election in which both nominees were Southerners, unless you count George Bush Sr. as a Texan), but never since has a majority of white males, let alone in the South, voted for a Democrat. In 1956, when Adlai Stevenson was being trounced by Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, Democrats on Election Night could cheer as Alabama and Mississippi and the Carolinas came through for them, as they nearly always had ever since Reconstruction.
So in some ways we are looking at an inversion of an old picture. Not that it lacks contradictions: I interviewed Barry Goldwater for Vanity Fair on the occasion of his retirement from the Senate, and he was at his most vocal when denouncing the arrogant behavior of the Christian right. (“Kicking Jerry Falwell in the ass” was, I clearly recall, among his ambitions.) More recently, I was speaking with my friend Philip Bobbitt, the nephew of LBJ and a famous Texas liberal, who teaches law at the University of Texas at Austin, opposes capital punishment, and was a senior director on Clinton’s National Security Council. “If I am traveling overseas and people ask me where I’m from,” he said as we looked out onto Austin’s capitol dome, which had been inaugurated by his great-grandfather (and built to be fourteen feet higher than the original, in Washington), “I always say I’m from Texas.”
• • •
Like Moliere’s M. Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who was astonished to find that he had been speaking prose all his life, I was startled to realize when I embarked on this voyage that I have lived in the South for twenty-three years, or for most of my adult life. The Mason-Dixon Line is well to the north of us Washingtonians, dividing the country where Maryland becomes Pennsylvania and just below the stretch of high ground consecrated to Gettysburg. Aspects of the District of Columbia are Dixie-ish enough: it gets very hot and muggy in the summer, and its neighborhoods are very segregated. Its very existence is the result of a dinner-table carve-up between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, whereby Hamilton got his national debt–consolidation scheme and the Virginian slavers got a huge land deal for a plot of swamp. But our memorials tend to commemorate the Union more than the Confederacy, and we have the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and at election times in the District they weigh the votes rather than count them, and the Democrats always win either way.
Opinions differ about how far you have to drive into Virginia before you have entered the South proper. Some say Fredericksburg, hometown of the great Florence King, authoress of Wasp, Where Is Thy Sting? “Redneck” is only a rude word for Wasp. In any case, I have long believed that the acronym certainly doesn’t need its W and barely needs its p. (William F. Buckley Jr. is Waspy despite being Irish and Catholic; George Wallace could never have achieved Waspdom in spite of being aggressively white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. That’s because “Wasp” is a term of class, not ethnicity—another trick you can learn in DC.)
Anyway, by the time you hit Richmond the argument is over, and the South has begun. Here was the capital of the Confederacy, and its sylvan streets and squares, enclosing Monument Avenue and the massive statues of Lee and Davis and Jackson, are as firmly genteel and traditional as the heart could wish. (The recent addition of a silly statue of Arthur Ashe, waving a tennis racket while the others flourish their swords and banners and cannons, is exactly the sort of gesture that has allowed Southern courtesy to survive.) I have come here to bypass the chivalry and head straight to the NASCAR event. All right—NASCAR has its chivalry, too. Its heroes are known as “gladiators with radiators.”
You often notice, in the South, that people don’t at all mind if they live up to their own clichés and stereotypes. In the environs of the Richmond International Raceway, stretching to the horizon, are great tracts of pickups and trailers, fuming with barbecue and hot dogs and surmounted by flags. Old Glory predominates, but quite often the Stars and Bars is flown as well (though always underneath) or separately. I got close-up to one freestanding Confederate flag, to find that it had the face of Hank Williams Jr. on it, and the refrain of his song “If the South Woulda Won (We’d a Had It Made).” I liked the tone of self-parody. The black flag of the POW/MIA movement is frequent. The tailgates groan with huge coolers, and groan even more when proud, gigantic rear ends are added. People wear shorts who shouldn’t even wear jeans. Tattoos—often belligerent—are not uncommon. T-shirts featuring the late Dale Earnhardt, the Galahad of NASCAR ch
ivalry, who went into a wall at 160 mph in 2001, are everywhere. Should you desire to remove the right to bear arms from these people, you might well have to pry away a number of cold, dead, chubby fingers. Bailey’s cigarettes (“Smooth Start! Smokin’ Finish!”) are advertised and endorsed by NASCAR celebrities. The whole NASCAR tradition actually began with the drivers of souped-up cars who raced on dirt roads through the night, outrunning the authorities in the scramble to bring moonshine liquor to all who desired it. The showstopping sideshow at this event is provided by one Doug Bradley, who has converted a gas-powered lawn trimmer into a blender that can generate fifty frozen margaritas per tank at something close to warp speed. Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms—the only Washington job I ever wanted—must find NASCAR weekends their busiest time.
Indulgence ceases for a moment as the drivers finish their lap of recognition and the loudspeakers call for prayer. Baseball caps come off. Then all hands smite the breastbone as “The Star-Spangled Banner” is sung, and at the wavering climactic high note there comes a heart-thudding wham as four F-16 jets, in diamond formation, streak low over the racetrack and, to thunderous applause, head back to Sandston. The air force had a recruiting stand to justify this huge expense, and the army, navy, National Guard, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps each had a driver and a car in the weekend’s races, competing with Twizzlers, M&M’s, Advil, Home Depot, and Viagra. A beer stand just off the track advertised itself as being run by volunteers from the Marine Corps Weapons Training Battalion at Quantico (“Just raising funds for our annual ball,” the smart young man in charge told me).
You could certainly get the impression, from hanging out here, that god was a Republican, with a good chance of being white. The GOP has been registering voters at NASCAR events since February 2004—there were 180,000 people at this event alone—and Senator George Allen, the former governor of the state who has been making both godly and presidential noises, took care to be present. But so did the current governor, Mark Warner, who is “mentionable” as a future Democratic nominee. And, on the second night I was there, the Pledge of Allegiance was led by the mother of Private First Class Leslie Jackson, a young black woman who lost her life in Iraq. (NASCAR is doing a big “outreach” to African Americans, though it boasts only one black driver on its three circuits, and has recruited Magic Johnson to a “diversity” committee while banning the Confederate colors from anything that it franchises.)
Embraced by a couple of guys near the beer stand, I soon came to appreciate that they were using me the way drunks use lampposts: in other words, more for support than illumination. Charlie’s lard-like pallor was enhanced by the closing stages of a spectacular intake of fuel—he swayed gigantically as he leaned on my shoulder and sobbed out the story of his one-man rig: “Haul any fucking thing,” he said brokenly. “Any fucking thing.” He was just on that cusp between instant friendship and instant menace. His friend Mike was lean and wolfish and rather handsome, and able to talk quite fast as long as he employed the crutch of obscenity. In short order, I found that he got on well with the “sand people”—local Arab immigrants—who ran the gas stations; had a child with a Puerto Rican girl; owned three guns; couldn’t get along with black males who were any younger than he; and had a father and grandfather who had seen service. (He wouldn’t join up himself, because the Iraq war was “just for a fuckin’ barrel of oil.”) For all that, I doubt he was a swing voter. He was a carpenter, and when one of his favorite drivers had switched sponsorship from Home Depot to Lowe’s, he took his business right along to the new sponsor. “The thing to know about NASCAR fans,” said Jerry Reid, a local enthusiast and sportswriter, “is that if their man was endorsed by Viagra they’d start taking it even if they didn’t need it.” When the race is over, the victor does a lap of honor in the opposite direction—a NASCAR tradition hallowed ever since Alan Kulwicki started it seventeen years ago. He was later to die in a plane crash, of all things, the plane belonging to his sponsor, namely Hooters. In his honor, this gesture is called “the Polish victory lap.”
West Virginia went the other way in the Civil War, cleft from Virginia and staying with the Union. And as you push deeper into the hills, you start to pick up the kinds of songs that make you know you are in territory that was once fought over. Naturally, you get a lot of self-pitying wails from country-music types. (“If you play one of these backwards,” I was told, “you eventually get sober and then you get your car, your dog, and your wife back.”) But there’s some fire-breathing defiance, too, as from Lee Greenwood’s 1984 smash, “God Bless the USA,” now played at Republican conventions.
This time, though, I am in search of the genteel. At the Greenbrier resort, in White Sulphur Springs, you need a coat and tie to dine, and many of the staff are descended from previous staff. Verdancy is the keynote, with thick woods and immaculate lawns and golf courses stretching toward the misty Allegheny Mountains. In a cottage on the grounds, five pre–Civil War presidents (Van Buren, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, and Tyler) passed agreeable summer vacations while beaux and belles came to take the waters. It’s easy to see—from the Southern perspective, and if things had gone the other way just a teeny, tiny bit—how natural it would have been to have the capital of the United States in, say, Richmond. As it is, if things had gone just a teeny, tiny bit the other way during the Cold War, the Capitol of the United States would have been at the Greenbrier. In complete secrecy, during the Eisenhower administration, a provisional Capitol was built in a deep shelter right beside this palatial hotel. The bunker was encased in several feet of reinforced concrete and buried 720 feet into the hillside. Its western entrance was protected by a 25-ton steel door. The “chambers” for the Senate and the House have the right number of seats but not quite the same amount of space. There’s a power plant that could supply about 1,100 people for up to 40 days—this was as far ahead as planners could think when they contemplated the blast and radiation that would have been twilight’s last gleaming. This is where our final laws would have been passed. The Greenbrier would have been the last resort.
It says something for the locals that, during nearly three years of massive excavation, drilling, blasting, and cement pouring, nobody uttered a single word. The local construction industry had a serious boom, and many people now tell you that they sure knew something was going on, but between the start of work, in 1958, and the revelation of the place’s existence by the Washington Post in 1992, the rest of the country was quite unaware that Washington was only its provisional capital. Even today, one can’t help noticing that White Sulphur Springs has a very large airport for so small a town, and a direct rail link with DC from a nearby station. The bunker has been decommissioned now, and Homeland Security has taken a different form. In one of the spacious lobbies of the Greenbrier, I met Mr. John P. Carter, a fine man with a shield and crest embossed on his business card. He had had quite enough of being jerked around at airport security, and decided to get a pilot’s license and his own plane so that he could make business trips without being humiliated by the federal government. Old Cessna aircraft, he told me, were “quite good and quite cheap: cheaper in the long run.” I don’t exactly know how I could or would prove this, but there was something Southern in his attitude.
• • •
Take a short drive from the Greenbrier and pass through Lexington, Virginia, where the Virginia Military Institute stands like a fortress, and where the campus of Washington and Lee University has not only the sarcophagus of Robert E. Lee but also the grave of his favorite horse. Press on toward the small town of Natural Bridge, where US 11 passes over a rock crossing that is 215 feet high and 40 feet wide. Its arch, which appears uncannily man-made in its symmetry, spans 90 feet. This astonishing site was surveyed by George Washington in 1750 and then acquired as a property by Thomas Jefferson. But the people who run the place, and who charge you admission to see it, and who have made it tacky with waxwork and haunted monster museums, won’t leave you to admire the wonder
s of nature. Instead, every evening in season they put on a program entitled “Drama of Creation,” with readings from Genesis accompanied by devotional music. What could possibly be more ridiculous? The “design” of the world is conspicuous for its lack of natural bridges. The “designer” didn’t bother to connect Marin with the San Francisco peninsula, or Manhattan with Brooklyn. That had to be left to mere evolved humans, operating with hard-won scientific rules. One of the pioneers of this work was Thomas Paine, unacknowledged Founding Father and among the first to design an iron bridge, who ridiculed the Bible as a long fairy tale of crime and fantasy. His friend and patron Thomas Jefferson took a razor to the New Testament and cut out everything that was evil, silly, or mythical. This left him with a very short edition. These were the men who actually founded the secular United States, but on Jefferson’s home turf the pious believers now sell bubble gum and crappy souvenirs, and credit divine authority for an accidental rock formation.
• • •
But as fast as the South can get you down, it can pick you up again. The next Lexington I saw—Massachusetts has no monopoly on this place-name—was in Kentucky. Kentucky is also one of the states that were calved from Virginia, more peacefully this time, and its nicely named Transylvania University is even older than Mr. Jefferson’s University of Virginia. A bit like Cuba’s, Kentucky’s economy depends almost entirely on things that are good for you but are said to be bad for you: Cuba has sugar, rum, and tobacco; and Kentucky has bourbon, tobacco, and horse racing. When you see the Derby run on TV, the cameras linger on opulence in hats and horseflesh, and the farms often look like rolling feudal estates in Normandy or Oxfordshire, but if you go to the Keeneland racetrack at Lexington you see a crowd not unlike the NASCAR one: real popular participation in the sport of kings. My tour of a bourbon distillery was a slight disappointment, in that you no longer get offered a free sample, but later, in a Lexington restaurant, I was heartened to see the bar area full of blue smoke, only a year after the city had passed a no-smoking ordinance. “I guess,” said one of the patrons cheerfully, “that we just don’t take the law that seriously in these parts.” All over town, though, you can see the fading painted signs on what used to be tobacco warehouses and auction houses. The end of the tobacco price supports is also the end of “small tobacco” as a hereditary living, and with the vanishing of “Tobacco Road” the whole texture of the Old South will change in ways that we can’t predict.