Tribal Weather, Man

Politics and government are expressions of culture. This is as true of politics as of any other sphere of human life including, but not limited to religious practice, war-making, law, science and it’s close cousin philosophy, economics and business, architecture, and all forms of art and craft.

As such, I am not especially interested in commenting on a given days political events. I usually merely observe and note my own thoughts to myself. I am much more interested, however, in noting prevailing currents, winds of change, forecasts of upcoming societal weather which can be discerned in the higher clouds of the cultural skies.

My friend Assistant Village Idiot has long been using the concept of Tribes as a model for understanding the cultural weather. He recently posted a link to a very insightful essay in the American Spectator on the nature of today’s “ruling class” along with some excellent commentary – with more of his own commentary to come.

The language in the American Spectator article is the language of "class," as opposed to AVI's use of the term "Tribe." They are both talking about the same idea. I think "Tribe" is the better term here, but the way Dr. Codevilla describes it in his essay is thorough and revealing and well worth the read.

Go to AVI's blog and also look at his writing in his Tribes Collection.

If Bob Dylan was right that “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” I would say you might need a bigger weather map to see what’s coming down the jet stream.

Periodically Speaking

In my younger days at the University (lol) I would often spend time browsing the periodicals at the library. I would often come across The New Yorker Magazine, take it down and riffle through the pages. Somehow, I always got stuck on the "Talk of the Town" section and never seemed to get past it. In those days, before I had ever spent much time actually living in a city, I was generally anti city life, as a matter of principle. Coming from a rural background, and a family where my mother was afraid to drive into town on Friday nights because of the traffic -- town being Concord NH, a city of perhaps 30,000 in that time -- I had been raised with a broad distaste for the urban. A visit to Boston was a major undertaking, carrying a frisson of danger and peril from crazy Boston drivers, inscrutable maps and the unwashed mass of humanity driven to life in concrete warrens and asphalt deserts. Now after having lived for several years in Detroit, if I don't prefer urban life, at least I can speak from personal knowledge that it's not as bad as I had been raised to think.

New York is of course the City of all Cities. While for some, like Garrison Keillor, this seemed to make it an object of great fascination, I approached anything to do with that sprawling human hive as vaguely suspect from the start.  Yet I had heard someplace the The New Yorker was a great literary magazine, worthy of attention. So I would open it and begin to read The Talk of the Town column which resides toward the front pages.

Reading it now, with the wider perspective that comes with age and experience, I find some of the items in TOTT to be interesting and engaging. At the time, however, it seemed more of a parochial account of a certain narrow segment (perhaps the stem?) of New York to which I did not relate well. I would read of art openings, charity events, business and social gossip of the highly placed and highly falutin', all taking place on streets and neighborhoods that were names on the page, but not places in my mind. Now I have learned just skim the section, lighting on articles of interest, and letting the rest go. But in my early earnestness I tried to read it all through until I got bogged down and just gave up. Because I stopped there and went no further I really didn't find the excellent articles that lay further in.

Not too long ago I recently rediscovered the New Yorker in a waiting room. I was floored by the writing, and dismayed to think of what all I missed out on. The article that grabbed me was about uncontrollable itching. Yes. You read that right. I have since discovered many other that contain fascinating stories on people and events in a broad cross section of human culture from all over the world. Fascinating and compelling. I have since read many other articles from various issues. I am now a convert to the New Yorker.

I guess that the days when The Grand Periodicals like the New Yorker defined the literary style and direction of our culture are gone. New fiction is comparatively rare in the magazine landscape, limited to those like TNY that have a strong tradition of fiction that they feel they must uphold. Nevertheless, I get the sense that their heart really isn't in it. Most are almost exclusively bent toward writing that is flavored heavily with journalism. It would seem that the news story, in various forms, is the defining literary style of our time. That's not necessarily bad, but I suspect that it ain't what it used to be. Even so, it's still pretty good.

Perhaps I was just too young to appreciate TNY back in the day. I wonder if I just persevered beyond the Talk of the Town to mine the rich lode of full length articles further in if I might have fostered a greater appreciation. After all, I am predisposed.

You see, I love magazines, all kinds, but especially the ones with fewer pictures and lots of text. I like in-depth explorations, broad and beautiful descriptions of people, places, times and events. I like that even the longest articles can be completed in a half hour but the good ones will leave my brain buzzing for days. I like good strong evocative language, and analysis that nudges my noodle toward new perspectives. And I like that sort of thing in large doses. That's the kind of magazine I really like.

But I'm really not that picky. If I had the time and the money, I would subscribe to dozens. New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Harper's, Weekly Standard, Mother Earth News, Mother Jones, Utne Reader, Time, Newsweek, Wired, Inc, Fast Company, National Review, Outdoors, Men's Journal, Men's Health, Christianity Today, First Things, New Oxford Review, just to name a few in no particular order.

And that doesn't even begin to touch the special interest rags on topics like history, martial arts, guns, physical culture and physical training, science, technology, hiking and outdoors, hunting, farming, forestry, and so on.

But for now, I will have to content myself with various free back issues of whatever I can find in waiting rooms and libraries -- occasionally even picking the odd issue out of the mixed paper recycling pile at the local dump. Hey...I'm recycling. You got a problem with that?

(Just Slightly) Hopelessly Midwestern

Now, I was born a New Englander. A Yankee by birth, most specifically, a New Hampshireman. I like it that way, and I’ve always been proud to be from this far northeast corner of the country. I love it here -- unashamedly owning as my spiritual and physical home.

At 18, I moved away. I did not intend to be away for long. I expected to go to college, get my egdeykayshun, and then move back to New Hampshire. As I said, I love it here, and knew that I always wanted to live here. It is good, though, for a young man to strike out for parts unknown, to get away from home to make his way in the world, and that is what I did. To my surprise, it took my 21 years to find my way back. I didn’t exactly get lost. I know pretty much where I was the whole time. The most surprising thing about the whole escapade is where I spent the time.

Given my interests and inclinations, one would have thought that I might have gone to…Colorado or Wyoming. Perhaps Idaho, or maybe even Alaska. Nope. I went Midwestern. 5 years in Indiana. 9 Years in Michigan, and 7 more in Wisconsin. I was not trapped, nor held hostage. No. My time there was by choice and to a certain degree a matter of expedience. A man has to make a living, and sometimes it just makes sense to take what’s offered.

Now there is an assumption that easterners look down on folks from the Midwest as parochial, excessively nice and not too bright. It’s a myth borne out by television, which seems to be mostly written by people who actually feel that way. Folks in the Midwest, who seem to function under the general misapprehension that the entire east coast is New York City, reciprocate the feelings. My upbringing was culturally half a continent away from New York City, even though geographically I spent my childhood a only a good day’s drive from the Big Apple. So when I moved to the Midwest, I actually found the culture generally to my liking. The landscape grew on me.

I grew up among forested hills and mountains. I drove 2 lane roads, and played in streams and wooded glades. Agriculture in New England has been a fairly limited institution for many years now. Most farmers left long ago for Wisconsin. A few hardy souls remained and so occasionally, I would get to play on farms with cows, horses, pastures and barns. Still, I knew nothing of straight roads, soybean fields, and long low straight horizons.

The landscape of the Midwest tends toward the simple, pastoral and orderly. It has little of the wild messiness of the northern woods. Of course, this changes, as you move up into northern Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Those areas actually share many similarities to the woods of northern New England. Below those areas, though, the countryside is dominated by agriculture. You can see it from an airplane. Fields tilled and orderly in their patchwork quilt layout. Roads set in Cartesian order, east by west and north by south. The countryside is mostly composed of fields dotted with patches of woodland or brushstrokes of forest where a river or stream may cut through. It tends to roll gently, except in places where the glaciers left drumlins, moraines and other features that make for more abrupt elevation changes. They are small by the standards of both east and west, but large when compared to the surrounding landscape, which makes my point. There are not much in the way of mountains.

I came to love it though. For itself. It is what it is, and it has it’s own beauty, if you are willing to look for it. It is not wild. It is settled land, cared for and used by generations. That use is good. There is a tendency to romanticize wilderness, as if that is the only form of landscape that deserves to be though beautiful. But the world is made for humanity, and humans live in it, and when it is used well, it is beautiful. I learned to see that during my time in the Midwest. This ability to see the terrain for what it is, and accept it, and appreciate it – this ability is one of the things that made all that time away from my home more than bearable. For I always that whole time, still considered New Hampshire my home. It has always been my first love. Yet, I opened my eyes and my heart and came to appreciate the Midwest for itself, and I am glad for my time there.

And, you see, it’s not just the shape of the soil and the rocks. It is also the people and the culture. My upbringing was shaped first by Puritans, then by English merchants classes, and then by French immigrants, and all their descendants. There is an odd combination of assumed sophistication (The Puritan institutions ironically gave birth to the Universal Unitarians, for instance – to me the supreme example of people who are just way to smart for their own good) and bedrock flinty self-sufficiency (Local democracy still rules supreme through the town meeting – a form of government notoriously cumbersome, but very entertaining).

In the regions of the Midwest where I lived, I experienced heavy influence of German, Norwegian, Swedish, and Dutch culture. The people are mostly openly social and communitarian (as opposed to independent) and religious (as opposed to intellectual). It’s not that they don’t believe in self-sufficiency or that they aren’t smart. It’s just that the emphasis lies in a different place. We're all American, so the words we use still come from the same books. It's just that the accent of the culture falls on different syllables. And, I must say, my wife and I came to love it very much. We made so many good good friends, and got used to the warmth and open easy hospitality that seemed so common there.

So now, after steeping in that brew for so long, I find that I am a hybrid. I am still 100% Yankee (in all the good and bad things that that means, I guess) but I have also absorbed the flavors of the Midwest. What does that mean? I think a song called Hopelessly Midwestern sums it up beautifully. I am most familiar with the version performed by Mustard’s Retreat, a Michigan folk duo. But, Youtube only offers a version done by the original writer of the song. It’s good too. Take a listen, and I think you will hear some of what I came to love about living in the Midwest.

Casual Fridays Ad Absurdam?

Found this at Blog and Mablog:

The heroin addict "was under the influence of the idea that some aspects of reality are more real than others: that the seedy side of life is more genuine, more authentic, than the refined and cultured side—and certainly more glamorous than the bourgeois and respectable side. This idea could be said to be the fundamental premise of modern popular culture"

(from Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, p. 119).