Embarrassed by Old Things

My mother's generation had a love/hate relationship with the past. I suppose we all do. We choose carefully what we'll talk about--the early triumph that grows larger with each telling, or the early victimization, which grows similarly more decisive, more defining, every time we think of it.

But back to my mother's generation. My mother is nearly 80. She spent her early years on a farm in Indiana, and for a while there was not even any indoor plumbing. After her Dad died in an industrial accident at the Cummins Engine plant in Columbus, her mother moved the family into town. In other words, she took part in the massive demographic exodus from country to town that marked the first few decades of the twentieth century.

In doing so, they came up against good old fashioned social prejudice. Being "country" in the Columbus high school was a label you wanted to avoid. Country meant out-houses, gingham dresses, no phone, and infrequent trips to the theater (thus no knowledge of the latest fashions, the latest heart throbs, etc.). So, when you moved to the city, it was best to put country things behind you forever. And to some extent that city snobbery may have seemed to make some sense. Just imagine a child's awe at progressing from a sometimes snake-infested outhouse to flush toilets in a warm gleaming bathroom where hot water emerged magically from the tap upon command.

Perhaps that's part of the reason that my mother's generation held so strongly to their belief in technological progress. New inventions would make life easier and easier. To cling to "the old ways" was completely counter-logical to them. Even canned vegetables purchased at the grocery store was progress. For another example, I can remember when we got our first color TV. From that day on my parents would not watch a black-and-white movie. Why watch black-and-white when you can watch color?

My mother grew up hearing the Grand Ol' Opry on the radio every Saturday. But in high school she learned to love Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, etc. They were modern, whereas the Opry was backward. They were city, the Opry was country. Zoot suits vs. straw hats.

See, this was something more than simply disliking country music. This was a kind of embarrassment about the past, and an eagerness to put it behind us. So, whereas country music was extremely popular in the 30s (think Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family), right alongside big band and swing, by the late 40s it was only a regional phenomenon, associated by northerners with the "backward" South.

But embarrassment with the past is, by definition, embarrassment with our roots. My mother always seemed a little embarrassed by her Hoosier accent, for example, and tried without success to kick over the traces. For a country girl in the town, facing the threat of social ostracism by your classmates because your mother made your dress by hand, it became important to brush over those traces of your past. Never show your roots. Never get caught trailing behind in the parade to a glorious future.

But the next generation, growing up in the 60s, was deeply troubled by the modern. There is a cliche about that generation rebelling against their parents, but for some that rebellion meant a rediscovery of the "hidden" past. We would rediscover the things of the past that our parents had seemed to want to bury forever. It was the young folkies and hippies, after all, who unearthed the roots of rock music (when much of that music had grown slick and glittery), and in so doing re-invigorated country, blues, and bluegrass. Old blues and bluegrass players who had been cutting records as far back as the 30s found their careers revived on the college circuits. It was the most important musical contribution of my generation, in my opinion.

Listening to bands like the Stones and the Animals (and soon the Allman Brothers), we began to understand that rock 'n' roll had its roots in the Blues. I can well remember buying Lightnin' Hopkins records (and Muddy Waters, and B. B. King) from the discount bins at the local department store, simply because I'd read on the back of an Animals record that these men were among that band's musical influences. Blues music was a revelation to our generation, and it came to us straight out of the past. And discovering the Blues, we inevitably discovered its close cousin, country music.

Bob Dylan was hanging out with Johnny Cash. Joan Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, and even the Grateful Dead were dusting off old bluegrass numbers. Not to mention The Byrds, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, as well as songwriters like Kris Kristofferson, all of whom helped to turn a younger generation to a form of music that our parents had repudiated. When Ray Charles sang Hank Williams, when Janis Joplin sang Kristofferson's Bobby McGhee (first performed by country singer Roger Miller), when the Byrds sang Merle Haggard, and when Willie Nelson shucked his tie and grew out his hair, country music was clearly no longer a relic of the past.

As I've grown older, I've grown less and less "contemporary." I discovered old movies, old books, and old music when I was a teenager, but my love has only deepened with the years. For many, nowadays, embarrassment with the past has been replaced by nostalgia for old things and old ways. Too much, it seems, has slipped away. And quite remarkably, we live now in an era when a new generation of musicians, not having to work through embarrassment to appreciation, is freely experimenting with "old time" music. We're living in a wonderful moment for lovers of traditional music.

The past is alive and well. If we take off our "presentist" glasses, we might learn to appreciate that. Last year I took my mother back to her hometown of Columbus, Indiana. We saw the movie theater where she used to watch double features for a quarter (provided she'd done her chores). We saw the Cummins plant where her dad, my grandfather, was killed. And we stopped by the ice cream parlor which was the place to be for a teenager in the 40s. It was a wonderful journey for all of us, and it reminded me that the palimpsest of history is all around us.

Musical Americana

On Saturday (Sometimes) I'm a Litblogger: The AD Reading Plan

The AD Reading Plan is a long term project for reading through history by reading interlocking biographies. Here are the basic guidelines.

Historical fiction is allowable, although it probably should be the exception rather than the rule. Biography and autobiography will form the basis of this plan.

Begin within a generation or two of the Year 1. Browse the biography section at your local library or do your research online. Choose a life you think will fascinate and inform, someone who stood at the center of important events. This is the first "link" in the biography chain.

In the course of this "life," you will come across mention of numerous people and events which may help in choosing the next biography. These are intended to be "interlocking biographies," so the the second subject should not only be younger than the first, but his or her life should have intersected in some way with the life of the first. And, obviously, the second life should carry us further along the historical stream.

In the same way, the second "subject" will lead the reader into contact with the third, and so on. In a real sense, then, these lives intersect one another, and the next choice of the reader will be somewhat constrained by the events and the setting of of the previous. This is why one should choose the books carefully, and always be looking out for the next life as you read along. That next life will no doubt carry you into new lands, new conditions, and of course a whole new generation.

Thus, the plan may start in Rome (or ancient China, or the Middle East, wherever you choose), but the life of one's subject may in time carry you off to England or Spain or North Africa, and the next life to yet another locale. But you are not leaping through history (or geography) randomly; instead you are reading history, generation by generation, by reading lives.

After all, history unfolds life by life and place by place, and so to read history in this way, life by life, generation by generation, is in accord with the actual nature of time and change (aka "history").

This is a long term plan. It may take several years to complete, and at times it may be a challenge to find the next book. Other possibilities are to read through the history of a nation in the same manner, or, say, the history of a great city (like Rome, or London, or New York). In this latter case, one is constrained not only generationally by locationally, but in the end one achieves a deep sense of the history of that place.

I'm going to begin my reading plan with a kind of stage-setting book, going back to the time of Julius Caesar, who (you history buffs may recall) crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, bringing an end to the Roman Republic and setting in motion a chain of events that would establish a far-flung "empire" that stretched from England to North Africa and to the border of Persia in the East. So my first book will be, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland.

And where I go from there . . . only time will tell!

Reading History

I'm casting about for a history book to read. You do recall my reading plan: I never want to go too long without delving back into a work of historiography. Here are two candidates I've come across this morning:

A newish academic blog called Religion in American History tipped me off to a book about the role of religion in the post-Civil War South. the book is called Freedom's coming : religious culture and the shaping of the South from the Civil War through the civil rights era.

Meanwhile, at Contentions, the group blog associated with Commentary Magazine, I see mentioned a book about the Armenian genocide, called A Problem from Hell.

Hmmm, decisions, decisions.

A Christian Nation?

A friend of mine told me recently that ours used to be a Christian nation, but that sadly it no longer is. He was miffed. He was longing for a national return to our Christian roots. I told him that in my opinion ours never was a Christian nation. That bothered him a little, as if I were questioning one of the verities, and our conversation was not very productive. Consequently, I’ve been thinking the matter over, wondering what we mean when we say something is "Christian." We sometimes use that adjectival label to describe books, movies, nations. It seems that we mean that the book, movie or nation embodies certain presumptions that we associated with a "Christian world-view." Prominent among these: presumptions about the world (i.e, that it was created), about human nature (i.e., that it is fallen), and about God (i.e., that he actively rules over his creation); presumptions that are distinctly Biblical, or Christian, or (often) Judeo-Christian.

And yet, of course, the word "Christian" means, at its most fundamental level, "of Christ." When we look at American history, we do not find a nation of disciples, committed to following Jesus in all things. Well, yes, you do find a nation rife with Christianese, and leaders that refer to "the God of the universe" early and often in every speech, but what you see upon looking closely, if you are honest, is a nation of sinners bent upon their sinful pursuits. There is no point in our history as a nation that was in some sense a golden age of purity, humility, and Christlike behavior.

Now, this is not to say that we did not have some great leaders. Some, like George Washington, were models of humility. But what God, pray tell, did Ben Franklin worship, and wasn’t it Thomas Jefferson who cut all the miraculous passages out of his New Testament because they did not conform to his rationalist world-view? What a mixed-bag Hamilton was, and let’s not get into the beliefs of the most popular polemicist of the revolutionary period, Tom Paine.

But what’s really going on here, I think, is a confusion of terms. The way we use the term "Christian" in application to a person is quite different than the way we use it in application to a nation. When we speak of a person being a Christian, sometimes we simply mean that he goes to church? But other times we mean that he counts Jesus as his savior, and himself as saved by God’s grace and nothing more? In other words, in the latter instance we are speaking not of a man’s church-attendance (even though everyone agrees that church-attendance does not save), but of the state of his immortal soul. But hardly ever do we refer to a man or woman as "Christian" simply because they have a Christian world-view. That’s a usage we reserve for books, movies, and nations.

Was the "Christian world-view" more widely held (and indeed more or less unquestioned) in the early days than it is now? Certainly. But that’s all. Was Jesus glorified in our founding documents? No. Was the behavior of our populace morally purer then than now? Maybe, maybe not. Read if you will about the widespread brawling and alcoholism of the period; the keeping of mistresses among the well-to-do, the conspicuous consumption of the rich, and the national economic dependence on the enforced enslavement of Blacks. Hmm, some Christian nation!

In my opinion, it would help if we settled what we really mean by "Christian." According to my personal lexicon, the word simply refers to a follower of Jesus Christ. Not simply a good person, nor a person with certain views and allegiance to certain ancient virtues, but a person who has cast his lot with Jesus in answer to his simple call, "Follow me." A Jesus-person. According to this definition, a nation cannot ever be called Christian. It can be sort of Christianish, yes. But God saves individuals, not nations. We are better served when we see the past without our rose-tinted shades.