American Life

Anarchists have gotten a black eye over the past year, what with the antisocial cretins of antifa laying claim to a name that befits them as illy as ‘artist’ does Hunter Biden. It’s reminiscent of the late 19th century, when the A-word, which accurately described promising ventures in mutual aid and voluntary cooperation, was besmirched — and how! — by the disturbed Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President William McKinley in Buffalo, thereby casting a serious pall over the Queen City’s Pan-American Exposition and escorting into the White House the bloodlusting Teddy Roosevelt, whom novelist Henry Blake Fuller derided as the ‘Megaphone of Mars’. American anarchism has always been a literary conceit more than a political (or anti-political) program.

A visit to another state should be prefaced by reading one of its poets, so for a trip to Greenville, South Carolina, I chose Henry Timrod, the poet laureate of the Confederacy, over Hootie and the Blowfish. ‘Cling to the lowly earth, and be content!’ commanded Timrod, a favorite of Bob Dylan’s. The Nobelist borrowed a few words (‘along yon dim Atlantic line’) from Timrod for ‘Cross the Green Mountain’, an eight-minute Stonewall Jackson-flavored masterpiece he wrote for Ron Maxwell’s Civil War film Gods and Generals (2003). Dylan, an equal opportunity sampler, also filched lines for the song from ‘Come up from the fields father’ by that barbaric yawper of the Union, Walt Whitman.

A friend of mine, a lawyer of radical disposition who typically defends nuns who pour blood upon weapons of war, or peace activists who trespass upon military installations, recently told me of his latest case. He is representing a young person who defaced a statue depicting a Confederate soldier. I told him that while I usually applaud his vandal-defendants, I am not in sympathy with this one. The answer to monuments of which one disapproves is not destruction or removal or whinging about your hurt feelings, but rather the creation and emplacement of new monuments. I don’t mean glorifications of dead politicians or military figures — we’ve had enough of those to last a national lifetime, thank you.

Batavia, New York For years I was vice president of the Batavia Muckdogs, one of the only community-owned teams in professional baseball. (There is no ownership setup more roundly detested by profit-minded speculators in pro sports.) We teetered on the financial ledge, the poor sister of the New York-Penn League, and it wore on us. Sometimes during a game I would stare at one of the faithful — maybe Alice, a lifelong fan whose bandana covered a head balded by cancer treatments; or Mark, a retarded older man whose imagination, like mine, was coterminous with Dwyer Stadium’s boundaries — and think how crushed he or she would be if we lost our team.

Whenever New York governor Andrew Cuomo — that churning mass of grating sanctimony, unwarranted arrogance and personal nastiness — hurls petty edicts (No gatherings greater than 10 at Thanksgiving! Chicken wings don’t count as food in restaurants!) at his subjects, Steve Hawley, erstwhile pig farmer and our assemblyman, is usually there to throw them back. I spoke recently with Hawley while sitting on a bench outside his insurance office in the Genesee Country Mall. An imbiber at the fountain of youth, he looks a good 15 years younger than his age of 73, and the imp within coexists easily with his role as deputy minority leader of the New York State Assembly’s Republicans.

Batavia, New York To think I almost let 2020 slip by without recognizing the centenary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed women the right to vote in all (then) 48 states of the union. Shame on me! This is a matter of Upstate New York regional pride — and confusion — on several counts. The 1848 ‘Declaration of Rights and Sentiments’, a rewrite of the Declaration of Independence along feminist lines, was drafted in Seneca Falls (the village generally thought to be the model for Bedford Falls in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life). The suffragist avatar Susan B. Anthony spent her adulthood in Rochester.

Batavia, New York On a brutally hot and wasp-swarming late summer mid-afternoon I walk our town’s old cemetery, as is my wont — hey, if I’m gonna live here for eternity I may as well get to know the neighbors. Walt Whitman swooned over one of this boneyard’s residents, and I have come to read the relevant passages to the boy who rests under the sod. His name was Stewart Glover, and he appears in Whitman’s diaristic Specimen Days to illustrate ‘the terrible and tender realities’ of war-death. Glover, Whitman tells us, grew up in Batavia with his father, John Glover, ‘an aged and feeble man’. (I dunno: his gravestone says Pop lived to the ripe age of 83, dying in 1873.

Batavia, New York When I toiled in the world’s greatest deliberative body back in those carefree days before 9/11 and COVID-19 had given the state an excuse to try to make Every Man a Caitiff, an old US Senate hand told me a story about the crone who ran a little newsstand perhaps a punted football’s distance from the Russell Senate Office Building. It seems that the aged proprietress had been the paramour of James Eastland, the law-and-order worshipping, segregation-championing Democratic senator from Mississippi who never met a civil liberties violation he didn’t like. Eastland, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was well regarded within the Senate, however, and considered a fair dealer by his colleagues. One of them was Sen.

This article was originally published in Batavia, New York Paranoia will destroy ya, as the great Muswell Hillbilly Ray Davies sang, but so can blithe unconcern, and damned if I can find the equipoise. Case in point: a saintly friend of my mother’s distributed masks to those of us who had been engaging in acts of unprotected grocery shopping. Mine bore the emblem of the Buffalo Bills. (I’m surprised some underemployed NFL patent attorney isn’t hounding the mask-maker as I type.) I dropped by to see my parents en route to the grocer’s. ‘I dunno,’ I said to my father. ‘A mask. Whaddayou think?’ ‘You’d look like a candy ass,’ he replied.

Batavia, New YorkWhen our daughter was growing up, she and I would sit on the front porch every summer solstice and read the opening chapters of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, as fine an evocation of a childhood summer as has been written. True, dandelions are a May flower — don't you dare call them weeds! — but old Ray had earned his literary license. A stiff shot of dandelion wine would be welcome fortification for those of us voting in the special congressional election in the 27th district of New York on June 23, coincident with our state's presidential primary. That day we will choose the successor to the disgraced Republican resignee Chris Collins, who has yet to begin serving his 26-month sentence in the federal pen for insider trading.

Batavia, New York I’m motoring down Route 98 on my yearly trek to the triannual Alexander Gun Show, held in the Alexander volunteer fireman’s hall. I’m croaking, blissfully off-key, to the music of Gram Parsons, the Florida trustfund Harvardian (one semester) who countrified the Byrds and sought to bring together hippies and rednecks and truck drivers and churchgoers and groovy chicks under his Cosmic American Music banner. It’s a dream still worth dreaming.