David E. Whisnant – Southern Changes

The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music

David E. Whisnant — Sat, 01 Jan 1983 05:00:08 +0000

The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music

By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 20-24

The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music, selected and annotated by Bill Malone (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1981). Eight LP or cassette set, boxed, with 55 pp. illustrated brochure. $54.95.

Classic Country Music, prepared by Bill C. Malone for the Smithsonian Institution, takes one back to the clear headwaters: the first commercial hillbilly recording (Eck Robertson’s “Sally Gooden” for Victor in 1922); the first big sellers (Vernon Dalhart’s “Wreck of the Ole 97” of 1924, Carl T. Sprague’s “When the Work’s All Done This Fall” of 1925, Jimmie Rodgers’ “Waiting For a Train” of 1928); one of the earliest recorded examples of steel guitar playing (Derby and Tarlton’s “Birmingham Jail” of 1927); the first big hit by a woman performer (Patsy Montana’s “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” of 1935); Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys performing the Jimmie Rodgers hit (and later bluegrass standard) “Muleskinner Blues” in October, 1940 (with Monroe on guitar); the first recorded example of mandolin cross-picking (Jim and Jesse’s “Are You Missing Me” of 1952), and so on. Altogether a hundred and forty-three tunes, from Fiddlin’ John Carson and the Stonemans to Tammy, Willie, Merle and Dolly. “Funny,” as Willie sings, “How Time Slips Away.”

So friends, don’t delay. This offer is good for a limited time only. Send your check or money order for $54.95 TODAY to “Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. 20560.” That’s S-M-I-T-H-S-O-N-I-A-N, Washington, D.C., two oh five, six oh. The first one hundred orders will receive, in addition to these eight fine records or cassettes packaged in a beautiful fold-out box you will be proud to display, an autographed eight by ten glossy photograph of your favorite country singer, suitable for framing. You’ll hear the inimitable Carter Family’s “Wildwood Flower,” so beloved by many a parking lot picker; the Delmores’ “Brown’s Ferry Blues,” made famous later by Merle Travis, the Louvin Brothers, and Doc Watson; the original “Orange Blossom Special” by the Rouse Brothers; and the incomparable Roy scuff’s “Great Speckled Bird.” You’ll thrill to Cliff Carlisle’s wailing dobro, Lulu Belle and Scotty’s “Remember Me (When the Candle Lights Are Gleaming),” and many, many more. It’s an opportunity you can’t afford to miss. So send today. If you are not completely satisfied, your money will be cheerfully refunded.

Well, I “sent away,” as they used to say in the days of boxtops, and I am indeed (almost) completely satisfied. Bill Malone has done, on the whole, an excellent job; it would be folly to expect that his (or anyone’s) 143 choices

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(from a few tens of thousands) could ever satisfy everyone. Someone could always ask why this tune and not that one? So the task here is not to quibble about individual tunes, but to ask how well the eight records reflect the complicated and dynamic history of country music.

One the whole, very well indeed. Malone’s strong and sensitive commentary, arising from his recollections of growing up with country music as a poor boy in east Texas, is written with the grace and depth and gentleness that come from knowing–as most country songs tell us–that life is both very hard and very beautiful. Malone divides the history of country music roughly into five periods: the birth of the industry in the 1920s (Dalhart, Uncle Dave, Gid Tanner and others); national dissemination and popularization in the 1930s (southeasterners such as the Delmores, Monroes, Bolicks, and Mainers; and southwesterners such as Bob Wills, Gene Autry and the Sons of the Pioneers); the “honky tonk” period, ;94153 (Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, Hank Williams); rockabilly and country pop, 1953-63 (Cash, Ray Price, Chet Atkins, Lefty Frizzell and others); and the current scene since 1960. An additional category–bluegrass and the urban folk revival–cuts across several of the latter chronological periods. Malone’s historical essay is supplemented by extensive discographical, historical and interpretative notes on each selection.

In his essay and notes, Malone surveys some of the major social, political and economic factors that have shaped the music: developments in the radio, recording and television industries; the Depression and World War II; the urban folk revival; the movement of country people to the city; the proliferation of small record companies in recent years; the fusion of southeastern and southwestern styles; the responses of individual performs to social pressure and dramatic social change. He also explicates some of the major internal dynamics of the music: the movement from personally modest solo performers and small permanent ensembles to high-priced, self-conscious stars “backed” by large aggregations of anonymous session musicians; the shift from simple to complex, virtuoso instrumental styles; the replacement of traditional, public domain tunes by copyrighted material; the gradual evolution from fiddle, banjo and guitar to drums, dobro, and pedal steel; and the technological drift from single takes on wax to twenty-four track taping, mixing, and overdubbing.

By selecting carefully from Malone’s 143 tunes, one can also assemble some interesting “sub-histories” of country music. One can follow to some extent the emergence of women performers, from the Coon Creek Girls through Patsy Montana and Molly O’Day to Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton. One can observe the seemingly perennial ambivalence of the country music audience with respect to rough vs. smooth or cultivated vocal styles: Uncle Dave, Martha Carson, Molly O’Day and Wilma Lee Cooper on the one hand, and a rather surprising array of smooth singers on the other–Bradley Kincaid, Buell Kazee, Vernon Dalhart (a Texas-born light opera tenor who tried to sound rough again, but couldn’t), Jimmie Rodgers, Red Foley, Eddie Arnold, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Jim Reeves, and others. Or one can line up the brother duets (Callahans, Bolicks, Sheltons, Delmores, Monroes, Kershaws, Louvins, Everlys, Stanleys, MacReynoldses, Osbornes, Lillys) and wonder whether such duets were, developmentally, a way-station between the older family-based groups and the newer luxury bus-owning stars–the last remnant of the close rural family before its final atomization, the archetypal (Jacob and Esau) binary pair struggling for unity and harmony against the fragmenting forces of a culture.

A fine collection, then, and a fine job of selection and presentation, terms of both and order Malone brings to it, and the other interpretative orderings it invites. Still, there are some problems that go beyond quibbling about “significant” (read favorite) tunes excluded. Malone writes at length, for example, about rockabilly and country pop, but we get recorded examples of only the latter. There is no tune by Elvis, Carl Perkins, or Jerry Lee Lewis (a problem with permissions from Sun Records, perhaps?). And from my perspective, there are altogether too many bluegrass tunes (two complete sides; eighteen tunes; nearly thirteen percent of the total, including three by Bill Monroe; more than twice the number of gospel tunes–almost half in bluegrass versions). Could that have resulted from the Smithsonian’s exaggerated sensitivity to its local middle-class audience in Washington–rightly known as the bluegrass capital of the east coast? As for gospel itself, it seem rather seriously under-represented in view of its prominence among those people who gave birth to and sustained country music. Virtually every country music radio or television show ever broadcast, after all, included at least one gospel song.

One also wonders why there is not a single example of country blues, which admittedly was not featured on the major country music radio stations or barn dances, but which was every bit as important a part of the country music scene after 1920–both as separate idiom as influence on white performers–as were southern mountain string bands. Indeed, Malone himself treats these performers in his Southern Music American Music (1979).

But finally the larger questions beckon: why, toward what ends, and with what effect has the Smithsonian at long last ventured to dip its elite toe into the waters of commercial country music? The institution has been

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there since 1846, after all, and could well have documented at first hand most of the now long lost traditions from which country music draws its styles and idioms.

Why didn’t it? Partly because its directors have almost always been natural scientists with at best a limited interest in humanistic or artistic matters. The Smithsonian’s most significant foray into cultural work (prior to the 1960s, anyway) was the Bureau of Ethnology, formed by Major John Wesley Powell in 1879, and even that enterprise proceeded under the flag of scientific anthropology and archaeology. Nevertheless, for more than a half-century the BAE carried out extensive studies of American Indian history and life: language and literature; material culture; myth, ritual, and ceremonial life; music and dance. But the Bureau was never able to take what would appear to have been the logical step of moving from studying Indian life and culture to studying the rich and diverse culture of the country’s many immigrant and enclaved cultural groups.

That did not mean that such studies fared poorly within federal institutions supposedly concerned with culture. The Library of Congress established its Archive of Folk Song in 1928, but it was (and remains to this day) small and poorly funded, particularly in comparison with analogous European efforts. The cultural projects of the New Deal for the most part did not survive more than a decade. The National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, established in 1965, were initially oriented exclusively toward high culture, and more than a decade later had to be forced to begin to pay modest (rather grudging, as it turned out) attention to traditional, non-elite culture. The first major policy affirmation of federal commitment to the recognition of traditional culture (the American Folklife Preservation Act) was signed into law at the opening of the nation’s two hundredth year.

Meanwhile, since the mid-1960s, the Smithsonian has been inching toward a rather tentative involvement with non-elite culture. It staged its first Festival of American Folklife in 1967, and opened a neighborhood museum in the mostly black District of Columbia suburb of Anacostia in 1968. Those stirrings, hesitant as they were, came in response to both the social upheavals of the sixties (Resurrection City was set up virtually in the front yard of the Smithsonian) and the urgings of a few individuals who had become infatuated by traditional music during the “folk revival” of the preceding decade.

If one looks closely at the institution’s tentative gestures toward the culturally unwashed, however, they generally prove to have substantial ties to the old elitism. The Smithsonian’s first major phonograph record issuing project was its six-record Classic Jazz package of 1973, aimed at–and bought mainly by, I would guess–middle class whites, who form the bulk of the jazz listening audience. (The Smithsonian’s jazz recording series now totals about three dozen discs.) Not until country music–historically the music of lower and working class whites, primarily in the South–began to be accorded status by a growing national (and upscale) audience did the Smithsonian draw it within the institutional pale. Not, indeed, until country music became chic, and designer-jeaned and powder blue cowboy-hatted Junior Leaguers began to listen to bluegrass and pump quarters into mechanical broncos at scores of Gilley’s replicas all across the country.

Even at that, there are signs that the Smithsonian released Classic Country Music with some sense of peril. Consider, for example, the preface to the fifty-six page brochure, supplied by the Smithsonian’s Division of Performing Arts, which issued the set. It is the only official institutional statement in the entire package, and therefore presumably an index to the attitudes of at least some Smithsonian policy makers toward the project and its subject matter. In the main, the preface attempts to apply to country music concepts and analytical categories developed to analyze and interpret elite (“classical”) music. Thus we learn that most country songs are in “AABA form,” are “atrophic,” and have a “melodic sequence” that moves from tonic to subdominant and back to tonic. So far, so good. There certainly is a need to comprehend country music in terms more precise and analytically useful than those employed by disc jockeys and fans, most of whom couldn’t care less whether Freddie Fender’s “I’ll Be There (Before the Next Teardrop Falls)” is atrophic or not.

As in so many cases, however, the technical terminology quickly proves to be something of a mask for value judgments. The preface in fact uses musicological terminology partly to dignify music which someone et the Smithsonian apparently still judges to lack its own intrinsic dignity. Thus country songs, the preface continues, cannot be expected to display the “cultivated charm or sophisticated wit of the standard popular song.” The accompanying instruments are not played in a. “classical style,” but are “struck,” “twanged,” “scraped,” or “flailed,” and voices are “rough-edged,” without “artificial refinement.” Subject matter leans toward “cynicism and wish-fulfillment” (rather like Don Juan or Madame Butterfly, one supposes).

The most obvious problem with such evaluations is that they simply will not wash–unless one can reasonably describe Don Reno as “twanging,” Vassar Clements and Clark Kessinger as “scraping,” Jim Reeves’ voice as “rough-edged,” and Tom T. Hall’s songs as lacking wit. Any reasonably sympathetic hearing of the full range of country music would confirm that it is characterized by great breadth of subject, variety of form, and subtlety of theme. And for an untutored bunch of strikers, twangers, scrapers, and flailers, Eck Robertson, Lilly Mae Ledford, Bill Monroe, Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, Earl Scruggs, Vassar Clements and their like manage to achieve a rather dazzling level of instrumental virtuosity.

A more important matter, however, is that in modern society, public institutions such as the Smithsonian have considerable power to legitimize or de-legitimize certain cultural forms and expressions–to prescribe how and in what terms they shall be understood, and to define the very boundaries within which new legitimacy is to be conferred. In this set of records, it seems to me, the Smithsonian has sent the public a mixed message: country music is a “truly democratic” art form (as they tell us) which by now even the more timid an’ conventional amongst us can safely listen to in public, but

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it is withal a little scrape-y and twangy. And so we must distance ourselves from it, and confine our admiration of it to those aspects which can be described in language I (AABAs, subdominants, and vocal lines decorated with “melismatic effects”) whose very use reminds subliminally that we usually listen to and think about “better” music. At a certain level, the preface reads a bit like a letter one might write to a wealthy and sophisticated friend back home in Boston or Marin County after one’s elegant cruise ship has docked briefly at a funky cultural port. Oh, Millicent, the music of those people was simply so wonderfully primitive and wild!

In such a situation, those of us who can’t afford the cruise would do well to keep at least a couple of things straight. Historically, poor and working people in this country have kept hillbilly, country, Cajun, blues, and gospel music alive in the face of a consensus of condescension and disapproval by virtually every established public cultural institution from the local level on up. At this late date they hardly need any favors or assistance from the Smithsonian. One wonders, in fact, if Classic Country Music would ever have been issued primarily out of concern and respect for the audience which gave the music birth and sustained it. It took an avalanche of designer jeans to do that. The weather vane that tops one of the castellated towers at 1000 Jefferson Drive isn’t there for nothing.

That is one thing to remember. The other is this: country music has not only been nurtured and sustained by poor and working people with precious little assistance or approval from their own tax-supported public institutions, but it has also until recently been studied, archived, written about and reissued in much the same way. Like many a banjo picker or gospel singer, scholars Bill Malone, Bob Pinson, Judith McCulloh, Charles Wolfe, Archie Green, Norman Cohen and many others have kept their “day jobs.” They have done their writing about country music mostly at night and on weekends taken interview trips out of their own pockets, pasted record labels and stapled little newsletters and journals together on dining room tables, and run organizations from post office boxes. The spirit behind the enterprise–one might almost say the political posture that informs it–is a spirit (and posture) of love, of self-affirmation, of resistance, of advocacy, of defiant somebody too-ness. As such, it is invaluable and irreplaceable.

At length, then, it is less important that Classic Country Music was issued (re-issues are plentiful, after all) than that the Smithsonian commissioned Bill Malone to do it. The energy that Malone has poured into country music scholarship for twenty years–the very perspective he brings to it–comes ultimately from the physical, social, and cultural landscape of east Texas. That perspective both informed his choice of tunes and shaped his language:

When my brother came home on his last furlough before going overseas, he, my mother, another brother, and I sat around the Spring Street Bowling Alley watching the bowlers (pleasures were often simple and cheap for the poor) and waiting for the Trailways bus that would take him back to camp. I do not know

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what thoughts ran through his mind, but the possibility of not returning must have been one of them.

The brother keeps feeding nickels into the jukebox, listening over and over to the 1941 hit “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again,” which Malone calls “a song of parting and of hoped-for reconciliation.”

If the issuing of Classic Country Music betokens the beginning of a cultural reconciliation between the Smithsonian (indeed the whole federal cultural establishment)and the little people dropping quarters into jukeboxes in bus stations and bowling alleys all across the land, it is an event of not only musical but also profound social significance.

One of the worst sins a reviewer can commit is to judge a piece of work by irrelevant criteria, or to condemn it for not being what it does not pretend to be. Classic Country Music was not designed as a scholarly treatise. If one wants more extensive biographical, historical or discographical information on country music, there are places to get it–including Malone’s own other work. If one wants a fuller reissuing job done on the Carter family, the Blue Sky Boys, or the Sons of the Pioneers, one may turn to the fine albums produced by the tiny private John Edwards Memorial Foundation. If it is more intensive analysis one desires, that also is available.

The only fair question one may finally ask is whether Classic Country Music does what it may reasonably be expected to do to entertain and educate the rather select group who will even know it exists, and who can afford to lay down the fifty-five dollars. And beyond that, whether it is a reliable document to place in the thousands of community and school libraries that will probably acquire it.

My own answer–not in any way intended either to belittle Malone’s work or to underestimate the formidable task he faced–is a qualified yes. The qualification has less to do with any of the objections I raised earlier (too much bluegrass, too little gospel, no country blues) than with Malone’s having stopped short of raising some of the more embarrassing questions–as all of us partisans of country music are want to do upon occasion. Out of many possible examples, I mention two briefly: what about the “dark side” of country music, and what about its utility as a creative and correcting force in American life?

The dark side is almost impossible not to notice. To put it bluntly, a good deal of country music has been (and remains) maudlin, racist, sexist, and jingoistic. Much of bluegrass in particular accepts (even celebrates) demeaning images of women and puerile conceptions of relationships between men and women. (Grand opera does, too, but it is another matter.) The lyrics have been cleaned up a bit (or have disappeared altogether), but “rigger” songs (of minstrel and other origins) linger to this day in fiddle and string band repertoire. And our every domestic or military misadventure produces its musical apologia on the country charts.

If one were to condemn every form of creative expression for its lapses into bad taste, reactionary politics, or inhumane sentiment, no form would survive (not even grand opera). The point is not to condemn or to dismiss, but to understand the dialectic. Merle Haggard wrote both “Okie from Muskogee” and “Mama’s Hungry Eyes.” Johnny Cash has sung for Folsom inmates and for Billy Graham. Loretta Lynn’s coal miner’s daughter memories may live on “in a cabin in Butcher Holler,” but lately she has been doing commercials for Amax coal company. And Dolly doesn’t wear her coat of many colors anymore.

To understand country music, the agonizing dialectic must not only be faced as a feature of particular songs or individual careers; it must become the very foundation for analysis. Much of that task remains before us, and we who have grown up with the music must do it, or relinquish the task to those who know less about our values and perspectives than they need to to understand what happened between Eck Robertson and Willie Nelson.

David E. Whisnant is professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

The Electric Valley

David E. Whisnant — Wed, 01 Aug 1984 04:00:05 +0000

The Electric Valley

Reviewed by David E. Whisnant

Vol. 6, No. 4, 1984, pp. 18-22

The Electric Valley. Directed and produced by Ross Spears, music by Kenton Coe, narration by Wilma Dykeman, research and writing by Richard Couto, cinematography by Anthony Forma. Funding provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Film Institute. Knoxville: James Agee Film Product, 1983. 90 mins., 16mm color, videotape available.

TVA was “part of my life,” Nashville Tennessean publisher John Siegenthaler says as The Electric Valley opens; it was like “oatmeal in the mornings . . . and it was good.” What the film presents, however, is not so much TVA’s goodness, but its conflicted history. When he returns to the camera at the end of the film, Siegenthaler admits that confidence in TVA has been “badly shaken” during its first fifty years. But there is hope, he insists: “institutions can be renewed.” Some valley citizens are not so sure. “It was kind of like waitin’ to die,” says one whose land was taken and whose home was bulldozed for the controversial Tellico project; “I learned how temporary we are here on this earth,” says another.

The story of TVA is not just about dams and phosphate fertilizer and cheap electric power, but about some of the fundamental tensions in our national life: private property vs. the common good; private preference vs. public policy; centralized planning vs. organic drift; individuals vs. institutions; tangible goods vs. intangible values; tradition vs. change and “progress”; family and community vs. the state. Few other institutions in our national life have so consistently focused arguments on both sides of these questions. Partly because it articulates and dramatizes these oppositions, The Electric Valley is by far the best film ever made about TVA–and there have been a God’s plenty of them.

The film follows TVA’s history in a simple chronological sequence of well-marked segments: the birth of the idea through the christening of the first dam (Norris) on the

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Clinch River; the early valley electrification program; initial opposition from private power companies; the conflict between directors David Lilienthal and Arthur E. Morgan, and Morgan’s departure in 1938; the World War II period during which TVA supplied power for the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge (“We thank God that it has come to us, rather than to our enemies,” President Truman says of the bomb); the shift to coal-fired steam power during and after the war; opposition to TVA by political conservatives during the 1950s, and the Dixon-Yates scandal; the economic and environmental impact of TVA’s stripmined coal purchases, especially in connection with its steam plant at Paradise (“Mr. Peabody’s coal train has done hauled it away”), Kentucky; the agency’s subsequent commitment to nuclear power, and the near disaster at Brown’s Ferry; the Tellico/snail darter controversy; and the recent cancellation of TVA’s partially completed Hartsville nuclear installation.

The Electric Valley gets much of its force through the skillful use of archival film footage, interviews with early TVA officials and partisans, and interviews with ordinary citizens who have felt the negative effects of some TVA programs. Each has been used before in TVA films, but they have never been blended so effectively.

Some of the early dam-construction and rural electrification footage is almost too familiar from TVA’s own public relations films, but other segments are fresh and unfamiliar enough to fan the coals of the old idealism (and the old controversies) briefly into flame again: Norris Village residents working in shop and cannery; FDR opening the gates of Norris Dam; director Lilienthal presenting a $44 million private power company buyout check to Commonwealth and Southern president Wendell Willkie (“Good luck, Dave,” says Willkie); opponents Lilienthal and Morgan before Congressional committees; an under-the-big-top TVA promotion of electrical appliances, with a robotized refrigerator that hypes itself to the assembled crowd, and a voice-of-God narrator who promises “a way of life that is physically gratifying and spiritually uplifting”; Eisenhower at a press conference, linking TVA to “creeping socialism”; Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, announcing TVA’s victory over the Cherokees and the snail darter at Tellico.

A number of important early TVA officials are interviewed in the film: Lilienthal, engineer Harry Wiersma, chief engineer George Palo (who praises GE’s “turnkey” nuclear plants), Eisenhower-appointed director General Herbert Vogel (“TVA meant nothing to me, really”); director Aubrey Wagner, who presided over TVA’s entry into what he calls “the new world of the atomic age,” and who blandly assures us that the Brown’s Ferry incident was “not serious”; recent director David Freeman struggling with a forty-year legacy of policy contradictions. Taken together, these cameo appearances telegraph TVA’s history: early idealism and achievement, persistent liberal hopes and conservative opposition, hydro-coal-nuclear technological drift, corporate co-optation, perennial struggles with high social costs.

Some of TVA’s contradictions emerge most forcefully in interviews with lower-level TVA employees, and with local citizens who felt the agency’s impact most keenly. Since part of TVA’s early employment policy was to hire locally, the two groups overlap substantially. Norris Dam worker Curt Stiner talks of “a whole passer” of Clinch River Stiners

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who worked on TVA’s first dam; Henry Clark, the featured test-demonstration farmer in TVA’s early 1940s film The Valley of the Tennessee, tells of his experiences with the agriculture program. Clark and Stiner are older now, but look prosperous and peaceful, having benefitted (we seem urged to conclude) from the TVA experiment.

But others have not. In one of the more moving sequences, a man who was forcibly relocated from the Norris area tells of having bought forty acres of ancestral land from his father, logging his own timber, and building “a good barn, a good crib, and a good smokehouse.” “I dug me a good well and ever-thing,” he says, but he got to live on the place only a year before TVA bought him out and moved him off. A similar sequence introduces a black Fortana worker who recalls that racism in the area was so intense that black workers had to be guarded at night (Lilienthal’s “seamless web” still had a ravelling seam or two), and that TVA, needing the black workers (white workers “couldn’t get no [concrete] buckets down there and back”), acquiesced to the extent of building a Jim Crow wing on the mess hall.

Decade after decade, such costs and contradictions accumulate. Coal-fired steam power brings acid-laden fly ash that filters into the clothing and beds and takes the paint off the automobile of the Smith family who live near the Paradise steam plant (“Pardon Our Progress,” says a billboard on the fence). Before finally forcing them to leave, TVA offers free car washes. Similarly at Tellico: the Ritchie family loses their 119 acre farm because TVA wants three acres of it.

One thing films can offer better than any other medium is efficient and powerfully compressed narration. Thus one can learn more TVA history from watching The Electric Valley than could be learned in any other way in a comparable amount of time. Some excellent research, writing, shooting, and editing have given us images that linger, words that echo, issues that won’t go away.

And yet efficiency and compression come at a price. That price can be raised by poor research and editing–as it too frequently is in documentaries–or lowered by insight and skill, as here. But the price is there in The Electric Valley, nevertheless, and one has to assess it. Consider two brief examples.

One searches TVA’s own documentary films in vain for Arthur E. Morgan. He has been banished, non-personed, by the TVA commissars; it is as if he never was. But he is present in The Electric Valley; the temperamental and ideological differences between him and Lilienthal are at least sketched, and we are asked to consider the cost of his firing by President Roosevelt in 1938. Morgan emerges as a humane and creative public servant sacrificed to TVA expediency. That much is to the film’s credit. And yet the available books, articles, and congressional hearings tell a more complicated story than that: Morgan was also naive in some ways, an impractical dreamer in others, a cultural elitist in still others. And at last his own worst enemy. So the dialectic is too stark in the film; it lacks subtlety, and to the extent that it does, it misleads.

My second example is less familiar than Morgan. Test-demonstration farmer Henry Clark appears here for perhaps a minute or two, and sounds not very much different from the younger Henry Clark of The Valley of the Tennessee: TVA worked for him; he signed on the dotted line, deferred his gratifications, bought the phosphate, contoured his fields, raised the best crop of tobacco ever seen in the county, and tooled smilingly by his dumbstruck neighbors on his new tractor.

And yet when I located and spent several days with Henry Clark in 1980, preparing to write an article on the earlier film, I found him a complex and surprisingly conservative man who (like General Vogel) never really had much use for TVA. Through five or six hours of taped interviews (some of it done while we watched The Valley of the Tennessee together at a local high school) I heard him (echoing Wendell Willkie) express grave doubts about TVA-style “socialism.” He told me he had made a lot of money in Knoxville real estate, and I came away feeling that he had “played” TVA in the same way he played the real estate market. Ronald Reagan, he told me, was his candidate. Did

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Clark not say those things to Ross Spears’ interviewers? Did they not talk to him long enough to ask? I don’t know. But in any case, The Electric Valley does not in this instance carry us far beyond The Valley of the Tennessee–with its dumb hillbilly caricatures staring in grateful awe at the dam builders, like some primitive cargo cult–as it might, within the limits of compression and efficiency.

In a sense, this is the larger problem with the film: for all its excellence (which is substantial) it does not carry us as far as it needs to toward new formulations of the issues. It is still–in this darkening Reagan Age–Morgan vs. Lilienthal; hydro vs. coal vs. nuclear; fat nuclear construction workers’ paychecks vs. massive cost-overruns, rising electric bills, and falling demand curves. If Lilienthal and Morgan were idealistically trying to sell a seamless web, Reagan is shamelessly hawking a shoddy fabric of the rankest political, cultural, historical heresy. He and his minions are seducing the public into believing that “guvmunt” (the media mocked Wallace’s and Faubus’s speech in order to question their ethics and analytical powers, why don’t they mock his?) is not us but “them,” that unregulated private greed is the shortest route to public good, that public endeavors are by nature doomed to failure, that the most radically atomized social order is the healthiest.

It would have been unwise for Spears to conceive of this film as an anti Reagan tract; God willing, TVA will still be there after Reagan is gone. And yet the agency’s history might, it seems to me, have been better used–at least in the case of Morgan and Clark, and perhaps in others–to raise public dialogue to a new level. Here and there we catch a glimpse of the possibilities: Decatur, Alabama newspaperman Barret Shelton, who appeared in the earlier TVA public-relations film TVA Town, insists that “the federal government belongs to us,” that it is “our federal government and our people,” but the defense rests there; narrator Dykeman tells us that plan is a “four-letter word” in the Valley (as indeed it mostly is), but the Henry Clark contradictions are passed too lightly over, and some of those TVA victims for whom plan is a four-letter word are then presented as simple martyrs to simple TVA greed and bungling, and exponents of unconditioned (Reagan-like) private ownership.

If my own study of TVA has taught me anything, it is that the historical problems of TVA flow both from the context of political and economic power within which it operates, and from the conceptual limits of the public dialogue surrounding the agency. By themselves, films can’t do much about structures of power except to reveal and dramatize them. This film does that very well indeed: To my knowledge it is the first film on TVA even to attempt to do so in a serious way. Had it followed its own logic a bit further, however, it might have made an even more substantial contribution to sharpening the terms in which future public dialogue is to be carried on concerning one of our greatest–if nevertheless deeply flawed–efforts to address the question of the common good directly and courageously.

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The need is urgent as the chilly winds of Reaganisrn continue to corrupt the very terms of public discourse and–to borrow Siegenthaler’s metaphor–cool the oatmeal.

A Southerner in Nicaragua

David E. Whisnant — Sat, 01 Oct 1988 04:00:01 +0000

A Southerner in Nicaragua

By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 1-5

David E. Whisnant, longtime commentator on Southern Appalachian culture who is perhaps best known as the author of All That Is Native and Fine (The Politics of Culture in an American Region CINC Press, 1983), returned this summer from a five-month visit to Nicaragua as a Fulbright scholar. Whisnant, a professor of English, American studies and folklore at the University of North Carolina, was interviewed in Chapel Hill in June by Southern Changes editor Allen Tullos. The topic was Whisnant’s trip and the historical study of the politics of culture in Nicaragua that is his current project. His edited comments follow.

THINK THE FIRST thing to say is that I came to Nicaragua from a different direction and with a different set of expectations than those which were characteristic of many of the internacionalistas (and there were many) whom I met there. Some of them came out of a history of political activity that goes back in their families for a generation or so. One of my acquaintances was the son of a Communist Party organizer from New York in the 1930s. There were people who had come out of SDS or other kinds of 1960s organizing. I did not. I came there with political awarenesses and interests that had developed relatively late in my life, primarily through work I was then beginning to do in the Appalachian region.

As I got to know more people from the U.S. who were in Nicaragua, I discovered some other Southerners. I had a few discussions with a couple of them about whether and to what extent their being from the South had anything to do with the way they experienced being in Nicaragua.

One reaction we turned out to share was that as Southerners we frequently had difficulty conversing with Nicaraguans. The difficulty seemed not to have much to do with the language barrier, since we all spoke Spanish. As well as I could understand it, it had to do with people’s accustomed styles of verbal interaction. For a number of

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reasons, Nicaraguans, particularly Nicaraguan men, tend to be highly verbal and domineering in conversation. Such a style and dynamic are uncongenial to me, mainly I think because in the mountains where I grew up, people talked relatively little and listened a lot. They tended to be self-effacing in conversational situations. But most of the Nicaraguan men I met weren’t.

When a Nicaraguan man begins to talk, I learned to my utter astonishment, he may talk for an hour and a half without stopping. Although he may give certain verbal cues which are (at least formally) invitations for response, it is clear that he really doesn’t expect you to respond, because no time is left for a response to occur. I found that difficult to deal with, and so did the friends I made there from the South.

Men and Women in Nicaragua

I had more serious difficulties with Nicaraguan men’s treatment of women. Having grown up in the South, I am not unfamiliar with macho behavior, and I know also that macho, though it has a Spanish name, is a virtually universal phenomenon. Nevertheless, what I witnessed in Nicaragua was frequently shocking and depressing. In conversation among a group of adult married couples, for example, men frequently would literally shush their wives when they tried to say anything. Such a gesture offended me; I had never seen anything like it. Although women in the mountains where I grew up were somewhat more taciturn than men, when they did talk they were usually listened to.

Partly to try to avoid seeing such behavior, I spent a lot of time talking with women–frequently about machismo, about the ways Nicaraguan women and men interact, and about the general situation of women there.

Margaret Randall and others have written eloquently of the central and heroic roles Nicaraguan women played in the armed struggle preceding the overthrow of Somoza, and of their continuing importance in national reconstruction. What has not so often been talked about is that machismo is still a fundamental fact of life for virtually every man and woman in Nicaragua. Indeed a number of women told me it is worse now than ever. It takes a larger variety of forms than I ever imagined before I went. I had never imagined how pervasive it was, how many aspects of life it affects or even determines, how brutal it can be and frequently is. And how ultimately dysfunctional it is for a social order that is trying to go through the transformations that Nicaragua is trying to go through.

Besides being degrading and painful to individual women, machista attitudes and behaviors (personal and institutional) block and frustrate the potential contributions that a vast number of very bright, sensitive women could make and are trying to make to the process of reconstruction. They are making contributions nevertheless, basic and crucial ones, but much less efficiently and effectively than they might, and at an unconscionably high personal cost.

What Nicaraguan women say about machismo varies depending upon who one is talking with–on how self-consciously ideological they are, on their social class and profession. One woman friend of mine–a highly transitional professional who has suffered considerably from the operation of machismo–said in essence that dealing with this and some other women’s issues has to wait because the first priority must be the solidification of the revolution. In her mind there was a hierarchical ranking between the urgent needs of “the revolution” and the urgent needs of women. My own feeling is that it is artificial to partition those two dynamics in such a way. It is also damaging, because it leaves things too much in the hands of men, who are still for the most part setting the parameters of the revolution and controlling its institutions.

If one talks to working-class women–and I spent a lot of time talking with maids, with the women who came to wash clothes and iron, with women who were working in the markets–one finds that the forms machismo takes in their lives are sometimes very brutal. Wife-beating is quite common, and there is a great deal of drinking and philandering. Women know it and know what it costs them, and have little protection against it, though some recent laws expressly forbid such behavior. In any case, working-class women seemed to me less willing than some more ideologically oriented professional women to excuse machismo, or to comprehend it within some higher critique.

If I frequently felt out of sync with Nicaraguans in conversations, and if I felt put off by machismo, I also felt that we Southerners had a real commonality of experience with them in certain other ways. We knew in the first place what it was to be in a subjugated, dominated and deprecated culture. More particularly, as a hillbilly I felt that I had some intuitive feeling of what Nicaraguan people had experienced culturally and politically vis-a-vis the U.S. And that helped me in some ways with what I went there to do.

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Culture and National Reconstruction,/hi

I went to Nicaragua to work on a book on the politics of culture there, to follow up some questions I had dealt with in All That is Native and Fine. I took as my focus for talking about the politics of culture the development of cultural policy and programs under the Sandinistas since 1979.

But one obviously cannot begin to talk simply about what has happened since 1979. So I tried to do a lot of historical work on the dynamics of cultural change in Nicaragua since the middle of the nineteenth century. As soon as one begins to look at Nicaraguan cultural history it becomes clear that one must talk about intervention.

Certainly the Spanish conquest was a massive and destructive cultural as well as economic and political intervention. Many of the most fundamental dynamics of Nicaraguan cultural and social history since the 1600s flowed from that conquest: the virtual extermination of the original population, mestizoization and catholicization, the east/west division of the country, the Liberal (Leon) vs. Conservative (Granada) antagonisms and wars.

But the Spanish intervention was not the only or the last one by any means. The British, for instance, intervened in the seventeenth century on the east coast and dominated life there until the 1860s. Serious U.S. intervention began in the 1840s and has continued with few interruptions since. One of the best known nineteenth century books about Nicaragua, Nicaragua: Its People, Scenery, Monuments and the Proposed Canal (1862), was written by Ephraim G. Squire, the U.S. consul who was sent to Central America to do reconnaissance in preparation for building the proposed canal through Nicaragua. Passing up the San Juan river, Squire noted that a few American business establishments were already there, and some Nicaraguans had already picked up a few phrases of colloquial American English.

The arrival of the U.S. Marines in 1912 was a cultural as well as military and political intervention. The national sport of Nicaragua, for example, is baseball, brought there by the Marines. Following the ascension of the first Somoza to power in the mid-1930s, Nicaragua became a major consumer of the worst of U.S. commercial popular culture. That pattern continued through 1979 and in some degree still continues, though it has been modulated considerably by Nicaraguan’s lack of money to travel or buy goods, and of course by the Reagan trade embargo.

What have the Sandinistas done about those historical patterns? My answer is that the original intention was to institute a whole range of policies that were culturally sensitive and responsible, and they have attempted a number of things, some more successfully than others. They have tried in the first place to counter the history of cultural intervention, particularly that emanating from the U.S. They have also tried to democratize cultural activity, to make it more accessible, to legitimize more forms of it, to disperse cultural institutions throughout the country. Nicaragua had very few cultural institutions before 1979, and Managua had become almost the only center of institutionalized cultural activity. So an effort was made to build a new set of cultural organizations and institutions–museums, libraries, theater and dance companies–and to distribute them throughout the country.

They have also focused more on cultural production than on consumption–on empowering and training people to think of themselves as producers of culture rather than as passive consumers. They have tried to integrate cultural concerns into other arena of development policy, such as economic policy and housing policy.

Such a projection seemed very attractive to me when I began to read about it several years ago. After all, I had just spent a couple of years reading about cultural policy in the United States, and it was precisely the lack of such concerns–for democratizing cultural institutions, for extending respect to non-elite culture, for sensitivity to cultural values in other policy sectors–that seemed to me to characterize most cultural policy in this country, where there has been any at all.

So I went to Nicaragua with a very positive set of expectations. And having been there, I still feel that the Sandinistas’ intentions in the area of cultura1 policy were good. But the situation proved to be much more complicated than what I had read led me to expect.

In the first place, at present most efforts at social or cultural reconstruction are effectively at a standstill and have been for several years–as a result of the war. Unfortunately, the militarization of Nicaraguan society has been necessary to confront the real threat that U.S. policy has presented. The past eight years have made it clear that there is nothing the Reagan administration won’t do to

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destroy the Sandinistas if they think they can get away with it. Whether they can get away with it is the only consideration. So one cannot know what the Sandinistas would have done in the cultural arena if they had had the tranquility (and money) to do it.

If you look at the national budgets from 1979-81, what you find is that military expenditures were taking less than 10 percent. By 1987-88, it was about 50 percent. And the problem is not only the expenditures themselves, but also the social and cultural distortions that occur when you’re putting that percentage of the budget into warfare. Virtually all young men over the age of sixteen, and many young women, are going to end up in the military. And there are many losses because of that. People who might be poets, who might be writers, who might be singers or dancers or whatever are not doing those things with proper concentration and intensity. The years between sixteen and twenty-five, after all, are crucial years for the education and artistic formation of any creative person.

So the loss of human potential is enormous, and in a small country of three million people such losses are especially critical. The distortion of institutions, including cultural ones, is also serious. The country has managed to open several small new museums, start a number of new dance and theater companies, an art school, a school of dance, and so on. But the facilities of all are pathetic; there is no other way to describe them: tiny buildings minimally converted from other uses, and virtually no equipment. Clearly, things have not happened on anything like the scale envisioned in the heady days of late 1979.

On the other hand, as some Nicaraguan artists and writers have pointed out, revolution and war can also offer new creative challenges and possibilities. Nicaraguan poetry during the past quarter-century is a good example. If one reads it not only from 1978-79 and later, but also from the early 1960s on, one sees that it is remarkable in both quantity and quality. The forced transformations of people’s lives and consciousness led to enormous creativity. Poetry by FLSN people who were imprisoned by Somoza in the 1970s–such as that written by Ricardo Morales Aviles from Managua’s La Aviacion prison–is deeply moving and beautiful, and it could not have been written under any other circumstances. Similar things occurred in music and theater.

But the war and its economic consequences have not been the only problems in the area of post-revolutionary cultural development. It turns out that some of the Sandinistas’ thinking about culture, and therefore their programmatic projection of it, has not been as well-grounded as it might have been. The most dramatic case of their lack of cultural sensitivity and sophistication was of course their treatment of the Miskitos on the east coast. That has been much discussed. It arose out of a complex set of circumstances, but central among them was the fact that like the majority of Nicaraguans, the Sandinista leadership was from the west coast and knew very little about the east coast of their own country.

It also seems to me that there has been some tendency to romanticize and simplify the cultural history and the contemporary cultural realities of the country. In a way this is understandable because so little has been written about either. The kinds of detailed cultural studies that exist in abundance for the United States and for many other countries simply have never been done in Nicaragua. A researcher in the area of culture or cultural history in Nicaragua cannot hope to have the kind of research materials and facilities that would be necessary to do the job well. Archives, where they exist, are small and poor. So in some ways it is hard even for Nicaraguans to learn about their own cultural past or present.

Moreover, a good many of the Sandinista leadership came out of urban, middle-class backgrounds, which afforded them limited understanding of the culture of the majority of Nicaragua’s rural, agricultural population. So in a curious way I see the Sandinistas making some of the same kind of romantic assumptions that were made by the New England ladies who came to protect and revive Appalachian culture at the turn of the century: projecting some of their own somewhat romantic and simplistic cultural fantasies on a situation that is complex and dynamic, reviving “traditions” of debatable authenticity, and so on.

For instance, there is a fairly extensive folk dance movement in Nicaragua, supported by the Ministry of Culture and Sandinista Association of Cultural workers (ASTC). Some of the dance groups are splendid, and it is in any case extraordinary that such things are going on at all under such difficult economic and social circumstances. Nevertheless, as has happened at other times in many other places (the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico, to cite one well-known example), some of the dance productions amount to a rather prettified and romanticized version of what they may once have been.

Nevertheless, what is going on now in dance in Nicara-

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gua is far healthier culturally than what was going on before 1979, which was mainly importing second-rate ballet companies from the U.S. or Europe to perform for the Managua elite in El Teatro Ruben Darzo itself an Edward Durrell Stone white marble copy of Edward Durrell Stone’s Kennedy Center.

Perhaps what ought to be said finally is that these things are difficult and perilous to talk about. The processes are subtle and complicated, and I feel uneasy about making any generalizations at all. Although I have read a vast amount about Nicaragua, and have spent some time there traveling, talking, reading and observing, I am acutely aware of the dangers of commenting on the cultural situation in such a cursory way.

On the other hand, it is important for U.S. people to know these issues exist–that the cultural life of a nation moves forward even under the most difficult of circumstances–and must be understood if we ever are to play a positive role in the reconstruction of a small and struggling country we have done so much for so long to confuse and destroy.

I would hope that people in the South who have been put down culturally for so long by so many, who have been stigmatized as rednecks and hillbillies and crackers, who have been the pitied objects of many a cultural missionary effort, who live in a part of the world the snobbish and sophomoric H. L. Mencken dismissed as the Sahara of the Bozarts at about the same time the U.S. government was trying to discredit and destroy Augusto C. Sandino as a bandit–may find themselves able to draw upon their own experience to comprehend and empathize with the struggle of Nicaraguan people to survive, decolonize, recover and reinterpret their own cultural past, and shape a cultural future for their children.

Letting Loose of Liberalism: Some Thoughts on Cultural Work and the Limits of Polite Discourse

David E. Whisnant — Wed, 01 Aug 1990 04:00:01 +0000

Letting Loose of Liberalism: Some Thoughts on Cultural Work and the Limits of Polite Discourse

By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, pp. 1-11

IN Walker Percy’s story “The Last Donahue Show,” the topic of the day is “sexual preference.” Midway through, the show is interrupted by three intruders: a black-cloaked Calvin-like spokesman for the old culture of Puritan New England, handsome Col. John Pelham, a paragon of the gallantry and chivalry of the Old South, and a Cosmic Stranger from another planet. Calvin finds the concept of “sexual preference” completely incomprehensible, and Pelham considers the discussion unnecessary because “a gentleman knows how to treat women.”

Looking for all the world like Harry Truman, the Cosmic Stranger sees the self-indulgent maunderings of Donahue’s guests and audience as a symptom of a profound cultural disorder. Earthlings, he says, are “D.D.s” (dingalings, deathdealers, and deathlovers) who face an imminent apocalypse–explicitly atomic but implicitly historical and cultural. He confides that the only place of refuge is a cave in Lost Cove, Tennessee, which is stocked with corn, grits, collard greens, and sausage. The story ends with a question (“If you heard this Donahue Show, would you head for Lost Cove?”)

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and a box to check yes or no.

This story may seem an odd point of departure for thinking about the arts and humanities in the public sector. But to me it seems usefully provocative in this second (Bush-Quayle) phase of an era characterized on the one hand by Reagan’s narcolepsy, William Bennett’s meanspiritedness, the Valdez, fading ozone, and 82nd Airborne democracy, and on the other hand by Walesa, Mandela, Havel and falling walls everywhere. A bit less cosmically than the Cosmic Stranger, I read the story partly as a parable about vital small-scale vs. alienated mass culture–about soul food and straight talk vs. lean cuisine and Donahue drivel. In any case, you should know that the voice you are hearing comes to you as much from Lost Cove as from anywhere else.

I was raised, after all, not on what is usually called “good literature” and “good music,” but on the Reader’s Digest, late-night country music shows from WLS, WCKY, and WWVA, and the gospel music of the Southern Baptist church. Later, scouting the margins of elite culture, I spent years singing German lieder and Italian art songs in a thousand voice lessons, Monteverdi in madrigal groups, and Bach and Mozart and Brahms in oratorio societies. Still later, in my first timorous return to Lost Cove, it was Carter Family and Blue Sky Boys songs in a string band, and more recently it has been romantic and political songs from Latin America. I count myself fortunate to have realized in a few blessed moments of clarity that I can love it all, that I do not have to choose.

MY most transcendent cultural experiences have ranged across many boundaries: one was standing as a Georgia Tech freshman in an illfitting rented tuxedo in the top balcony of the Fox Theater in Atlanta and hearing the humming chorus from Madame Butterfly during the annual spring visit of the Metropolitan Opera to the Sahara of the Bozarts; another was hearing Cajun music for the first time as the Balfa brothers and Nathan Abshire sailed into “Pine Grove Blues” at the University of Illinois where I was a seared new assistant professor; another was hearing six aged black men from Port Deposit, Maryland, sing “I Don’t Care Where They Bury My Body” on the thirty-fifth anniversary of their performing together as the Little Wonders gospel

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quartet; still another one was watching my daughter and a Peabody Conservatory classmate perform the Bach double violin concerto on two violins I had built; another was feeling myself almost literally lifted from my seat when I heard “Dove song” from The Marriage of Figaro at the Staatsoper in Vienna; and–having grown up as monolingually as one possibly could–I was moved beyond words in any language when at the age of forty-eight I was finally able to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Cien anos de soledad in Spanish.

Thus whatever I have come to think about the politics of culture or about cultural programs and policy is grounded in my sense that all of this is good, that all of it is evidence of the magnificent creativity of the human spirit, and that if we are to keep our bearings, we have to read both Garcia Marquez and Faulkner, and to listen to both Mozart and Merle Haggard–not the “Okie From Muskogee” Merle who fascinated Nixon, but the Merle of “Mama’s Hungry Eyes,” who beneath the jingoism knows the cultural score.

My own work during the years I was stumbling through to learning these things has focused on the social and cultural history of the southern Appalachian region, on the music and culture of marginalized people, and upon the politics of culture, first in Appalachia and more recently in Nicaragua. In the public sector I have worked with folklife festivals and museums, state humanities commissions and national endowments, Foxfire and Highlander, film makers and record producers.

Through it all, my own evolving cultural politics have drawn from the most disparate of sources: from a San Francisco carpenter and shipwright; from a powerful Appalachian composer-singer who learned about Percy’s D.D. culture by watching family members being killed in coal mines and her sister becoming a prostitute on the streets of Baltimore, and who wrote songs about both; from Shaker cabinetmakers and Cremona violin makers; from a Sardinian who worked out much of his politics in a Fascist jail cell; from a North African psychiatrist, a Nicaraguan poet, a Uruguayan novelist, and a Quiche woman from the Guatemalan highlands. That is to say, I have learned in the first instance from those who have scribed indelibly the line between good work and poor work, but beyond that from those who have engaged with the

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politics of their circumstances, faced the contradictions, defiantly asserted their otherness, risked speaking their outrage, and crafted beauty and made sense out of their pain.

So how do things look to me in this arts and humanities sector of the public policy arena? Whose lips are really worth reading, whose tunes worth dancing to?

Obviously it is a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that the past twenty-five years have witnessed a long-delayed but on the whole healthy legitimation of the arts and humanities in the making of public policy in the United States. That process has paralleled a global resurgence of culturally energized political movements of both a progressive and a reactionary character: in the middle east, in the Baltic republics, in northern Ireland, in eastern Europe, in Tibet, in Latin America, in Africa, in the United States. Those movements have resonated to the rhythms of rockabilly, of Tex-Mex and nueva cancion, of rap and reggae, and more recently of long-forbidden national anthems.

All of that is good. But if you will permit me, I will focus–like the Cosmic Stranger–more on the bad than on the good news, for that is where the most vexing problems and demanding challenges lie, both conceptually and programatically.

One has to say at the outset that the social, political, and economic climate is not especially hospitable for our work, and that in some important respects it grows less so daily. At the same time that the data show increasing social and economic inequality, distress and dislocation, we find ourselves in the second Reagan-Bush decade of dramatic reductions in public expenditures for social programs of whatever character. The entire social infrastructure has been decimated. Sliding SAT scores, rising infant mortality, ugly racial incidents, a slew of toxic waste dump controversies, and new brands of cigarettes aimed at vulnerable young women and the Third World poor remind us that many of the promises of the sixties–relative to education, civil rights, the environment and women–have been deferred or reversed. Here in North Carolina, a university system that has no money to buy library books or xerox paper can afford a six-figure buyout for an arrogant, sleazy basketball coach, and a nation that can’t afford a few billion to feed or house the homeless can afford to buy out savings and loan sharks to the tune of hundreds of billions. In U.S. foreign policy we see a resurgence of culturally based jingoism, bellicosity, self-deception and simple-mindedness (in Grenada, Nicaragua, and Panama), of arrant cynicism (in China), of penuriousness (in eastern Europe), of timidity and temporizing (in South Africa and Lithuania).

In the cultural arena, public funds are drying up. Changes in the tax laws (as in the Tax Reform Act of 1986) are reducing private donations at the same time that the fact (and necessity) of increased dependence upon such donations threatens to make cultural institutions responsive primarily to well-heeled constituencies and corporate donors.1 Most public cultural programs are operating on bakesale budgets, and finding their work increasingly complicated by rising Helms-style censorship and intimidation, as was evident in the recent National Council for the Arts board meeting in Winston-Salem. An era in which the reactionary wife of the reactionary Secretary of Defense is head of the National Endowment for the Humanities is an era of serious threat to the work we are trying to do.

So what can and should we do in these hard times? I suggest that as a first step we admit that the liberal analysis and strategies we have long used to guide and shape our work are unequal to the tasks we face. What do I mean by “liberal analysis and strategies”? What are their limitations, and why are those limitations unacceptable?

At the risk of caricaturing rather than characterizing fairly, I will try to put it briefly: Within the usual liberal paradigm, cultural policy amounts principally to obtaining, allocating and monitoring direct public subsidies for established cultural institutions, which in turn build public collections, mount public exhibits and produce public

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programs. Characteristically, culture is thought of as a more or less self-contained sector, or as a superstructure. “Culture” means “the arts” (or more restrictedly, the “fine” arts), which are produced by “artists” and consumed by a listening/viewing/reading public. This public needs to be given information about, have “access” to, and “learn to appreciate,” the arts. Providing that information and “access” and engendering that “appreciation” is assumed to have a soothing, enlightening and together bringing effect–producing a unified public sensitive to and unthreatened by its own “rich cultural diversity.” Tacking on “the humanities” alters the paradigm only slightly, especially if by the humanities one means anything close to the National Endowment’s bland Shakespeare-Columbus-and-the-Constitution, great- works-and-great-men version of them.

It is no wonder that except for the Jesse Helms fringe, legislators don’t worry themselves unduly about the culture crowd. We can be thrown a sop; we can be tricked into scrambling for a few scraps; we can be depended upon not to challenge or upset the status quo in any serious way. Meanwhile, our low-budget exhibits and programs cast a comforting and legitimizing glow over business as usual.

So I suggest that the bland, essentially credulous liberal paradigm is pitifully unequal to the task if one conceives of the task in even moderately broad and sophisticated terms. Much tougher-minded analysis is called for if we are to get beyond these limits–even within our customary theaters of operation, to say nothing of within some larger and quite unfamiliar strategic arenas into which events are thrusting us.

So how do we get beyond these limits? What clarifications are possible?

In the first place, I submit that the arts (or fine arts) and humanities conception of culture has long since outlived its usefulness as an oasis for policy formulation, if indeed it ever had much. Culture is how people hold their babies, plant a garden, cook their food, answer the telephone, sing and dance. A little less palpably but even more importantly, it is how people love and raise their kids, and what they think is worth explaining to them. But most importantly, culture is also the basic orientation people have with respect to fundamental questions, the terms they use to make sense

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of things–like, for example, what they think it means to be male or female. Even more problematically, it is how people recognize and name what they love and hate and fear. It is how they decide who is us and who is them.

So why does this matter to us? It matters because if this is what culture is, it is therefore as productive of conflict as of harmony, as likely to divide and engender conflict across borders as to unite within them. We must therefore subject to serious scrutiny our habitual liberal confidence in the various forms of polite discourse–our touching confidence that multiethnic festivals and roundtable discussions and got-together “community dialogues” will be very serviceable. We must question our naive liberal expectation that when people come together to discuss their differences they will discover that they really don’t have very many, or that the ones they have aren’t very important, or that there are some low-cost solutions to them. Music may in some vague way be a “universal language,” but Pinochet killed Victor Jara for singing his songs nevertheless.

What I am saying–to take an example closer to our political and social realities here in the Southeast–is that the world of textile managers and their superiors in the boardrooms of the multinationals is not the same world as that of textile workers; the world of Alaska fishermen is not that of big-oil CEOs who build single-hull tankers because they are cheaper. And neither is their culture. The world of Bill Bennett and Jesse Helms is not our world, and we are not going to dialogue it out–not in a weekend seminar, and not in a thousand years.

Hence given the choice between arranging a “public dialogue” between any group of haves and any group of have-nots, or figuring out some way to help the have-nots understand the structural (and therefore inescapably cultural) relationships between the two, I would always choose the latter. There is no way of avoiding, it seems to me, the possibility that serious cultural work will sometimes lead to divisiveness, tension, and conflict. And the probability of conflict is directly proportional to the seriousness of the work.

Part of what this means, in turn, is that the familiar and reassuring walls between cultural and “noncultural” policy sectors must come down, and we must recognize that nearly all policy is cultural policy at some level: because it increases or decreases the life chances of some sector of the population, reinforces and affirms some and destabilizes and shames others, privileges and empowers some and marginalizes and disempowers others. Hence we must make ourselves cognizant of every area of policy, concern ourselves with it, and bring a culturally informed perspective and analysis to bear upon it. We must therefore conceive of our work as consisting at least as much in monitoring the cultural implications and impacts of policy in the noncultural sectors as it does in operating programs in the explicitly cultural sector itself.

Conversely, we must bear in mind that any analysis of or policymaking about culture has inescapable structural implications, and therefore must be consciously conceived in structural terms. A decision to fund a certain cultural form, practice, or sector is an inescapably social and political decision. If one funds elite culture, one inevitably legitimizes and solidifies the social position, values and selfunderstanding of the elites who mainly patronize it. If one funds a black performance or Hispanic folk arts exhibit, one inevitably affects public understanding (or misunderstanding) of structural inequality and marginalization.

Thus we must for example entertain the possibility that the time-honored practice of busing kids to symphony concerts or exhibits of oil on canvas may have shaming, alienating and disempowering–as well as affirming and liberating–effects. In the same way, we must think about the extent to which folklife festivals or exhibits of exotic and idiosyncratic folk art–if they present a simplistic and sanitized version of traditional culture–may confuse and mislead a naive public about the intensely conflicted and inescapably political dynamics of cultural survival and change.

A corollary to what I have just argued is that we must resist and subject to serious public scrutiny the increasingly prevalent argument that public funding for the arts and humanities may (or must) be justified in economic terms. It is common to argue these days that when one funds culture there are desirable “economic multiplier” effects–that for example museums and symphony orchestras make an attractive climate for new industries. Never mind that many of those industries are runaway ones looking for low wage, nonunion, female labor in the right-to-work sunbelt.

The economic justification argument for arts funding is dangerous and insidious. It concedes the legitimacy of the established economic and political order and turns culture into its uncritical handmaiden. It ratifies the facile assumption that economic considerations are primary and central, and culture superordinate and peripheral. It predisposes us to define culture in the terms preferred by managerial elites. Worst of all, it coopts and frustrates the transformative power of culture. It denies that the most vital culture

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is always critical, and more often than not insurgent and subversive–that it is precisely what scares the Bill Bennetts and Allan Blooms of the world to death.

I would go on to argue, moreover, that at the very center of the cultural policy and programming agenda must be the larger agenda of social critique and reconstruction. The time for quaint or pretty diddling around has passed. We are in a serious game, and the sooner we face that fact, the better. The primary question is not whether this or that exhibit is going to be mounted, concert held, play staged, or genteel “dialogue” arranged, but whether we can prove the Cosmic Intruder wrong.

We know in our guts that nation states as we have conceived of them are anachronisms–that they are not necessarily some universally and transhistorically functional mechanisms. We know in our guts that war is not a useful or acceptable instrument of policy, and that the environmental vector points toward disaster. We know in our guts that present gender definitions are not serviceable (for women or for men). What we may have less of a gut sense of–but which is profoundly true–is that all of these assumptions, forms, and issues are at their deepest level cultural. To the extent that that becomes clearer to us, our thinking and strategizing about cultural policy will get more sophisticated and our programming more effective.

It seems to me to follow, then, that in order to commit ourselves seriously and effectively to such an agenda of critique and reconstruction, we must think strategically and globally even as we plan and act tactically and locally. The days of fortress America are past; the myth of American exceptionalism has lost all credibility. After so many years of living mostly outside it, history has finally thrust itself upon us. Hence our work is not to “bring the arts and humanities” to people–or vice versa–but to help people shape and sharpen the analytical tools that will assist them in understanding their own historical and cultural circumstances.

Our work, I am suggesting, is about a kind of enlightenment that is neither conceptually nor practically separable from empowerment. Our work should be much less to provide essentially rarified aesthetic experiences for a small elite than to help the great majority of people come to an awareness of their own insight and knowledge, and of the links between knowledge and power.

Consequently our work is not mainly to “provide access”–as in the old liberal paradigm–but to push toward cultural equity and democracy in a period of intensifying social/political/economic conflict and the increasing consolidation of power. It is to demystify in a period in which obfuscation and public mystification have become such central functions of government that Dan Quayle signs a Jesse Helms fundraising letter one week and goes the next as an envoy for democracy to a Latin America already wracked by years of CIA-style democracy.

Finally, we must focus policy and programming increasingly upon cultural production rather than consumption, upon cultural action rather than passive “appreciation” or exhibition. This is necessary because for the culturally marginalized, actively making and doing culture are empowering, while passively appreciating is likely to have at least the secondary effect of rationalizing, legitimizing and solidifying the culturally marked boundaries of established power.

And so if we do all of this–or even some bits of it–will it be dangerous? Yes. Inescapably. If they begin to think that what we are doing will really change things very much, they will stop funding us. Period. It is that simple, for they may be meanspirited, but they are not stupid.

If they do stop funding us, there will be some real losses. But there would be gains, too, so that it is not at all clear to me that absent the public dollars the situation would necessarily be hopeless. Our own structural position as well as that of marginalized cultural groups would at least become clearer. The discourse might

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become sharper, more honest and sophisticated, and less bland, genteel and polite. Some limits would be recognized, and some more apt analytical paradigms might be discovered and employed. The inescapable politics of the cultural enterprise would be on the table for discussion, and we might get through to some further clarity about the operation of power in the cultural arena. We might even create some autonomous structures less subject to reactionary political pressure.

As we contemplate the risks, we should also bear in mind that public funds are by no means the only resources available to us. In the first place we have our own experience and knowledge–the knowledge we have gained from having conceived and put together scores of institutions and programs, as well as the negative but useful gut knowledge that makes us from time to time look up from writing yet another grant proposal and say (to no one more than to ourselves) “this is crazy.” The latter sort of knowledge tends to be mostly inchoate, but we have it nevertheless, and we can attach it to some energies that are also trying to move within us and amongst us.

There is also some extraordinarily pertinent analysis out there, bunches of books to be read that will tell us more that we need to know than shelves full of NEA and NEH annual reports or shamelessly elitist and ethnocentric tracts like Cultural Literacy and The Closing of the American Mind. The most useful analysis has been advanced, at least in my estimation, not by the too frequently alienated and elitist “theory” crowd, but by grounded, passionate, frequently self-educated intellectuals: by Paolo Freire and Frantz Fanon, by Rigoberta Menchu and Domitila Barrios, by Roland Bartes and Raymond Williams, by Carlos Fuentes and Eduardo Galeano, by Maxine Hong Kingston and Gloria Anzaldua, by Will Campbell and Vine Deloria.

We also have available to us the clarifying experience of marginalized subject peoples all over the world who are showing us how to use culture for purposes of challenge and liberation: Lithuanians and Estonians, the mothers of la Plaza de Mayo, blacks and Chicanos and Native Americans in the United States, Chinese students and smalltown working people in Michigan. We may end up grantless and on our own, but so are they. And they are teaching themselves to form organizations of their own, to stop dancing to the tourist industry’s tune, to talk straight to their opponents, to substitute lawsuits and injunctions for tediously polite discourse.

If we begin to do even part of what I have suggested, we will above all need a lot of historical and political perspective and considerable wit. Fortunately, there is a lot of it out there. One of my favorite country singers has the unlikely name of Kinky Friedman. Kinky is the son of a University of Texas psychology professor, and his shortlived band was called The Texas Jewboys (after the legendary Bob Wills’s Texas Playboys). Kinky spent a couple of years in the Peace Corps in Borneo just after college, and when he came back, he said that “Everybody needs to go to Borneo, wherever it is for them. A lot of wiggy things happened to me in that jungle, it anchored my mind to the past.” 2

During his short stay in country music, Friedman wrote some marvelous songs like “Wild Man From Borneo,” “They Don’t Make Jews Like Jesus Any More,” “Top Ten Commandments,” and the incomparable “Ride ’em Jewboy,” which synthesizes the historical agony of cowboys, the American West, and the United States itself, as well as the Jewish diaspora and the Holocaust. All of it is viewed–refreshingly wiggily–from Borneo:

Now the smoke from camps a-risin’
See the helpless creatures on their way.
Hey, old pal, ain’t it surprisin”
How far you can go before you stay….
While ponies all your dreams were broken,
Rounded up and made to move along.
The loneliness which can’t be spoken
Just swings a rope and rides inside a song.

My own Borneos have been the mountains of the Appalachian South and Nicaragua–the former of which I was born in but had to learn my way through almost as if it were some Borneo. Nicaragua I wandered into after having begun to learn the language beyond the age of forty-five, and I came to recognize its cultural history as more Appalachian than I ever would have believed. So I close with a little cultural parable about my two Borneos, written belatedly from Lost Cove.

Like many of us who are from the upland southeast, I grew up about as monoculturally as one could. In those tranquil preintegration days, the relatively few blacks who lived in that most un-Faulknerian part of North Carolina stayed docilely in Asheville’s small black ghetto and attended the all- black high school. Most of the city’s substantial Jewish population lived in Biltmore Forest and other upscale neighborhoods we had no occasion to go to.

I heard and spoke only English, of course, as did all of my white Protestant fundamentalist neighbors, and none of us had lived or traveled abroad. The only other cultural group we knew were the Dutch who had come over in 1929 to build and operate the rayon plant where my father worked: the Vanderhoovens, Schilthuises, and Vanderkaadens, who lived in the bigger houses of the mill village where we lived, sent their kids to private and parochial schools, and hired us to mow their lawns. I remember a vague sense of fascination with the way they talked and the things they had in their houses that we didn’t have, but mostly what I felt was confusion and inferiority.

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Not all the Dutch people in the village belonged to the elite, however. The Schoonderwoerds lived next door to us, and he was a mechanic in the mill. While certain theories might predict that our family would have felt some class solidarity with our working class neighbor–and indeed my parents were friends with Mr. and Mrs. Schoonderwoerd–culture appears in retrospect to have been a decisive (though completely unconscious) factor among us children in the streets. Their son Pete, who was our playmate, was Dutch, different, and the conflict between him and us was relentless. Hence our habit of making lightning guerrilla raids to bombard the fish pond and fountain his father had built in their front yard–a touch which I now recognize was for them an expression of their northern European habit of meticulous and artful custodianship of one’s own tiny bit of landscape, but which for us rowdies of the neighborhood was an alien object and thus an irresistibly magnetic focus for our resentment.

Since the white Protestant fundamentalist bubble in which we were encapsulated kept us apart from all other cultural systems except those safely remote African countries to which we vaguely referred when in Wednesday night prayer meetings we prayed that the Lord would “bless all the missionaries at home and overseas,” and about whose eternal salvation we solemnly strategized in the Baptist Training Union, I recall no other serious contact with or awareness of another cultural group throughout my school years.

My first adult encounter with a culturally distinct group was with the Hispanics who lived in my freshman dorm at Georgia Tech–Cubans whose wealthy pre-Castro fathers had sent them there to study. I didn’t know a single one personally, and recall feeling no desire to. We called them “spics,” and virtually all we knew about them was that they shouted to each other down the halls of the dorm in a language we didn’t understand. We eyed them from behind the cultural ramparts of the Baptist Student Union and the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, where ushers with a special color of carnation in their lapels were stationed as lookouts for any black worshippers who might try to force their way in in those tense days of the earliest bus boycotts and sitins. Hence although I spent five years in one of the biggest and fastest growing cities in the southeast, the cultural system in which I found myself was still about as parochial as might be imagined.

It was in fact nearly twenty-five years later, after many changes in my life, ideas and politics before I began studying Spanish, which turned out to be one of the most culturally useful and clarifying things I have ever done. Why did I start? At some deep level, I think, my passion to

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do so came out of the same threatened and anxious sense of cultural inferiority and encapsulation that had made me such a willing participant in our little hillbilly blitzkrieg raids on the fishpond. It seemed to me, I guess, that becoming bilingual might be an appropriate next step in what had by then become for me a multifaceted effort to deconstruct my own cultural world and break through to others of which I had previously known absolutely nothing.

In any case, I did start to study Spanish in the fall of 1984, and a little more than three years later I found myself in Nicaragua on a Fulbright, working on a book on the politics of culture there. During these past half-dozen years, I have immersed myself as much as I could manage in Latin American language, history and culture. It has been the most compelling, totally involving and joyful process of learning and change I have ever known, including the prior one that paralleled my Appalachian work.

More to the point here, it also has had a great deal to do with how I now think about working with culture in the public sector. Looking at things from this new angle has brought me to some poignantly ironic realizations. I will content myself with mentioning only one.

In 1851 Cornelius Vanderbilt secured an effective monopoly on the Nicaraguan canal route, turning himself into a power to be reckoned with in the national economic and political arena in Nicaragua and helping to shape the first major phase of U.S. intervention into Nicaragua’s affairs. About forty years later, his grandson George W. Vanderbilt came to western North Carolina, and in a similarly grand and imperial spirit bought 125,000 acres of mountain land and built a 300-room French chateau which he appointed with the finest European furniture, tapestries and paintings. His guests approached the estate through a half-timber and tile English village he built, named “Biltmore,” and outfitted with his own Episcopal

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chapel and curate.

Shortly after the Vanderbilt mansion opened in 1895, my grandfather and his brother left their small farm in Rutherford County and went up the mountain to Asheville looking for work. They found it driving streetcars–work my grandfather continued to do for the next fifty years, never returning to the house he had built with his own hands on the farm and had always meant to go back to live in some day. Many mornings when he arrived at the “car barn” at 3:30 a.m., he set out to make the Biltmore run.

About the time my grandfather died, my high school classmates and I were taken on a “field trip” to see the cultural wonders of the Biltmore House-to “expose” us to “great art,” of which we in our culturally benighted hillbilly ignorance presumably knew nothing. All I remember is feeling dwarfed by the scale of the place, and ashamed of my clothing and my ignorance. Whether that prepared me in any specific way to comprehend the concept and the realities of cultural imperialism years later in Nicaragua–to resonate with them in my gut–I do not know, but I have a feeling that it did.

When I was seventeen, however, my awareness of the Vanderbilt link between Asheville and Nicaragua, and of its significance in some larger political and social schemes–still lay years in the future. Standing in the carved walnut, multi-tiered library of the Biltmore House at that moment, I couldn’t have pointed out Nicaragua on the elegantly mounted globe if my life had depended on it, nor had I ever heard of the New York and Boston banks and corporations which had one firmly controlling hand on Nicaragua and were dabbling with the other in real estate and timber in the part of the mountains I could see out the window of my house. I didn’t even know the name of John Hill Wheeler, the North Carolinian whom President Pierce appointed minister to Nicaragua, who presided approvingly over the outrageous William Walker filibustering episode, and who declared that “the race of Central Americans have conclusively proved to all observant minds that they are incapable of self-government.”

I am embarrassed to admit that I began to make these connections only after spending a dozen years writing about the Appalachian region, exploring and mapping like a fascinated traveler in Borneo, and coming to understand it as something of an internal colony whose patterns of development were after all not that different from the Nicaraguas of the world. One of my most poignant moments of clarification occurred when I read that the vessel that carried U.S. troops from the Canal Zone and landed them on Nicaragua’s east coast to move against the rebel general Sandino in April 1931 was named the U.S.S. Ashville.3

Why have I reminisced about my wanderings through this personal-political landscape? To try to suggest that the dramatic political and cultural changes of the past little while in Latin America, in eastern Europe, in South Africa, are presenting us with yet another opportunity to make the politically and culturally clarifying connections C. Vann Woodward told us thirty years ago are there and have to be comprehended: connections between ourselves as southerners and the majority of the world’s people, who have also known poverty, exploitation, defeat, occupation, submission, humiliation, and cultural stigmatization. If we can admit and comprehend them, these connections offer us a splendid if psychically threatening opportunity for reconsideration, for clarity, and for realignment.

Until we get through to that, however, bland liberal strategies will continue to confuse us, confuse the public, and waste precious time and energy. Polite discourse with those in whose interest it is not to be persuaded (and within whose world views our reasons and our values do not compute) will continue to be at best ineffectual, and at worst obfuscating and depoliticizing. Unmonitored “noncultural” policy will continue to wreak its cultural havoc. Such status as our concerns and activities are grudgingly accorded, they will acquire by virtue of their perceived usefullness to whatever tawdry local versions of Trump-like boosters and “developers” happen to be on the scene. And most troublesome of all, the overarchingly important matter of social critique and reconstruction will remain outside our orbit of concern and work.

I submit, however, that such a scenario is not unavoidable. We know some things and have some skills and have developed some networks amongst ourselves that can help prevent it. We do have to question many of our fundamental assumptions and accustomed paradigms. We do have to seek new working alliances, thinking systemically and globally. We do have to accept some risks, and trust our resourcefulness. And we must continually re-ground ourselves in the lives of those whose labor and pliant acquiescence have heretofore been purchased far too cheaply by others who understand all too well the sector of culture in every equation of power. To the extent that we ourselves can remain clear about that, we will encounter a whole array of strategic and tactical possibilities we heretofore thought closed to us.

David E. Whisnant is on the faculty of the university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published widely on traditional culture, the politics of culture, and the history of the Appalachian region. Currently he is working on a book on the politics of culture in Nicaragua. This essay was prepared for the southeastern regional meeting of the state humanities councils, May 19, 1990.

Notes

1. See for example, Grace Glueck, “Gifts to Museums Fall Sharply After Changes in the Tax Code,” New York Times, May 7, 1989, pp. 1, 17; and William H. Honan, “Arts Dollars: Pinched As Never Before,” New York Times, May 28, 1989, pp. 1, 28.

2. Larry Sloman, “Kinky and the Money Changers,” Crawdaddy, April 1975, p. 31. I am grateful to Molly P. Rozum for calling this article to my attention.

3. Neill Macaulay, The Sandino Affair (1967; Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 193-97.

Farther Along The Next Phase of Cultural Work in the South

David E. Whisnant — Wed, 01 May 1991 04:00:01 +0000

Farther Along
The Next Phase of Cultural Work in the South
By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 13, No. 2, 1991, pp. 1-10

THOSE of you who know something of my work over the past two decades will not be surprised to hear that being asked to think about promoting Southern cultural heritage” would stir a lot of things in me. And indeed it does- more than Tam able to make sense of in my own head. But my hope is merely to draw us momentarily together to think about some common concerns.

I begin with three vignettes which I hope at least will convey a bit of the complexity we face at this historical moment. The first is of my father’s little shop off his carport in a suburban neighborhood in Anderson, S.C. It is as compact and orderly as a submarine galley. Tools collected over a lifetime line the walls. Shelves and drawers and neat stacks of labeled cigar boxes hold salvaged bits of metal and plastic, bushings and bearings, clips and hangers, links and shims, springs and switches, gaskets and fuses. Junk to some people, maybe, but to him a world of possibilities: a tin can poured full of lead and neatly painted black is a stand for

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a work light; a scrap of plastic and a bit of nylon fishing line automatically lowers the burglar bar against the sliding door to the patio; an old lawn mower starter serves as a motor to raise the anchor on the twenty-two-foot pontoon boat that at the age of seventy-six he still hooks behind his truck several times a week and takes to the nearby Corps of Engineers lake.
If Levi Strauss didn’t say it, he should have: bricolage is the method of the have-nots, born of have-to but raised to the status of cultural principle. Though my father’s circumstances are now in fact rather comfortable, they became so only late in his life, and the combination of the necessity to make do and the generationally-transmitted Germanic demand to do it well or not at all evoked early in his life both the habit of bricolage and a finely-honed sense of design. At length both became central features of his personality and world view. When I recently asked him to get me a router arbor I couldn’t find in Chapel Hill, he sent me two: one he had bought for $12.50 and another he had made out of scrap for thirty-seven cents.

My second vignette: a Labor Day festival in the tiny

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community of Silk Hope in northern Chatham County near Chapel Hill–skillfully rebuilt steam threshing machines and sawmills and lovingly reconditioned antique tractors scattered about the grounds under the trees; churches serving barbecue and fried chicken suppers; five-gallon churns cranked by Rotary Club men in John Deere and Southern States Coop hats, turning out innumerable big Dixie cups full of ice cream; bleachers full of part-time farmers and full-time textile workers facing a stage set up on a flatbed truck, listening to the Kearns, Buchanan and Swicegood brothers from Welcome, N.C., performing as the Sounds of Joy with drummer Kevin Buchanan laying down the oldtime ragtime gospel beat on a state-of-the-art drum synthesizer, and the elegantly stylish wife of the lead singer selling Sounds of Joy cassettes at a card table just off the corner of the flatbed.
Songs like “Fill My Cup Lord” and “Living In Canaan Now” capture me with memories of my own high school years singing in gospel quartets.

My final vignette: Driving back east a month later on U.S. 76 from Clayton, Ga., to Greenville, S.C., on a Sunday morning after attending the Foxfire board meeting–dropping fast out of the north Georgia hills to the Carolina Piedmont, body memory bringing back the swaying rhythm of the winding mountain roads I learned to drive on when I was barely sixteen: watch down the mountain for the clear curves ahead, roll with the bank, drift across the center line to stretch the radius, feel the reverse tilt as you catch the inside of the next one.

Up on the red clay banks the cultural panorama slides by: tumbledown brickpaper shack follows neat brick rancher; a jumble of single- and double-wides, and satellite dishes everywhere; bushels of apples and jugs of cider lined at roadside stands; one billboard says “Come to Jesus,” and another just says “no”; junk yards and church parking lots jammed, gun shops taking their one day of rest; gospel preachers and sports commentators on the radio, borrowing each other’s metaphors, offering your choice of binary worlds where things begin at the beginning and end at the end, where winners absolutely win, losers absolutely lose, and there is no column for politics. And on nearly all the mailboxes, yellow ribbon after yellow ribbon.

Dropping across the South Carolina line, back into the right-to-work country of Strom Thurmond and Roger Milliken, I recall that back up the mountain one local Foxfire board member (a wonderful and gentle man, and a good flattop picker to boot) is trying to help his fellow workers, non-union and anti-union as ever, fight Burlington Industries’ most recent stretch-out and speed-up demand, backed up (as ever) by a threat to close the plant, the town’s major employer.

The initial point of my vignettes, of course, is that when we start to talk about promoting or preserving “Southern cultural heritage” we are talking about an awesomely mixed bag. To try to sort through that bag a bit, I raise a few simple questions, no one of which has a simple answer: What have we done so far? Where do we find ourselves at this historical moment? Where is it that we are trying to go? What are we up against? And most importantly, what are the more and less usable bits of what we cultural bricoleurs have to work with?

The answer to the “What have we done?” question is relatively easy and rather comforting. Through these past several decades we have done a lot more than we were ever formally trained to do, most of us, a lot more than we really had the wherewithal to do with, a lot more than a sober reading of the odds might have suggested we could do. Mostly bricolaging our way through, we have learned to do festivals–a lot of them, and to do them well. We’ve started archives–good ones, important ones. We’ve organized and run oral history projects. We’ve established journals and published books, and made films and phonograph records. We’ve organized tours, mounted exhibits and opened museums in the mountains, across the Piedmont, down in the Delta and along the coasts. We’ve founded organizations and started academic programs about mountaineers and blacks and Native Americans and Cajuns. And in the process we’ve challenged a lot of neglect, cynicism, ignorance, badly-written history and bad policy.

All of this is good. We have good reason to be proud of

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it. We should defend it and try to keep it flourishing.
What has happened while we have been doing all this, however, is that the political ground has shifted seismically beneath our feet. As we project our work from this moment, we must remind ourselves continually that most of what we thought of and taught ourselves to do was conceived and took most of its characteristic forms in the narrow breathing space between the reactionary 1950s and the in-some-ways more reactionary 1980s. Consequently, we find ourselves with a set of assumptions, analyses, and organizational forms and activities, formed alongside of the political fault line, which are increasingly unequal to the challenges on this side.

Think about it coldly for a moment: What do the Reagan-Bush-Helms-Bill Bennett years mean for our work? With a rather grotesque symmetry, the Reagan epoch opened with the breaking of the air traffic controllers’ union, peaked with Irangate, and terminated with the savings and loan scandal. The social, political, and cultural costs are incalculable. Public discourse has become so corrupted that taxation itself rather than the uses of tax monies emerged as an absolute evil. Federal funding mechanisms for social programs were dismantled, and private institutions (including especially universities) were starved, cannibalized and sold bit by bit to private enterprise. One after the other, regulatory bodies were shamelessly sacked, defunded, and left to twist in the wind. The common good virtually disappeared as a conceptual category, and issues of power, control and domination were skillfully mystified. Gunboat diplomacy came back in Granada, Nicaragua, and now the Middle East. At length the very idea of humane government itself virtually disappeared from the dominant discourse.

In sum, as we are all painfully aware, the Reagan

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imperium is a period which surely historians will note primarily for its ugly machista and jingoistic swagger, its selfishness and stinginess, its policy cynicism and shortsightedness–for a level of malfeasance and flagrant criminality unmatched since the days of the Grant administration, the robber barons or Teapot Dome.
I recite these familiar details because we need to have them freshly if painfully in mind as we think about where we’ve been, where we are going, and what the odds are. The core dynamics of Reagan-Bush politics are especially critical to us because we have chosen to try to work in the public sector with the have-nots. Having just watched Ken Burns’s Civil War television series (a not unmixed boon, I think), I can’t resist comparing our strategic situation to that of Lee’s army just before Appomattox: some brilliant successes behind us, but confronted by an overwhelmingly superior force, and with the historical tide running heavily against us.

So what do we do? How do we maneuver from here?

We need at the outset, it seems to me, to take a fresh and more toughminded look at the culture of the South, question many of our accustomed assumptions, elaborate some more serviceable analytical and explanatory systems, reorient some programs and practices, and restrategize politically. So I would like to suggest some steps we might take, at least conceptually. What can and should happen practically will depend too much upon local resources and circumstances to generalize about very comfortably. That will be for each of us to figure out in our individual places of work.

If I have a central thesis here, it is that if our emerging cultural analysis and agenda are not fused to and integrated with a larger progressive agenda for social, economic, and political transformation, they will not be worth spending time on. Why? Because the relentless movement of the reactionary juggernaut in the years ahead will make transformation such a preeminent structural necessity that any oppositional cultural agenda not centered on transformation will be self-marginalizing.

We must not forget for even a moment that these are ugly, hardball times. I have little doubt that when the roll is finally called up yonder, this will go down as one of the ugliest, most willfully ignorant, corrupt, narrow-minded, meanspirited periods in the history of the United States government The Mapplethorp and NEA flap, tragic as it is, ultimately has little directly to do with art; whether clean or dirty; it is merely one of many red herrings being used to mask a broader and deeper ideological and political agenda of mystification and domination.

So how, in the midst of such times, do we achieve some clarity? How do we maneuver our ragged little battalion into the most advantageous position? What objectives must be given strategic priority?

In a recent piece in Southern Changes, I marked out what seems to me an unavoidable first step: to recognize the severe analytical and functional limitations of our accustomed set of essentially liberal assumptions and approaches to cultural work.1 I reemphasize the nub of that article as my point of departure: the grand fallacy of the recent silly and vacuous political campaign arguments over liberalism is that liberalism is far too little rather than too much, too puny rather than too strong, too circumscribed rather than too encompassing.

We must get ourselves beyond a liberalism that naively invests its energies in polite discourse with knaves and fools, grants outright the legitimacy of virtually every established institution, and makes easy peace with gradualist and meliorist approaches to urgent social needs.

More specifically, we must subject the very notions of “tradition” and “heritage” to more thoroughgoing criticism than we have usually been disposed to engage in. Central as those notions are to our discourse and practice, they are soft, ill-focused, and obfuscatory in some ways that have been problematic in the past and will be increasingly so in the future.

Through the last twenty years in which I have in some way been involved in these kinds of activities, “tradition” has been the pivotal buzzword. To call something traditional has been to say it is good, worthy of filming, recording, writing a book about, archiving, or putting on a stage or in an exhibit. Of course we recognize that there are bad traditions. So when we say tradition we implicitly mean good traditions, but even that understood correction is not sufficient The fact remains that we have hung much of our analysis and programming on a term that needs far more careful scrutiny than we have yet given it.

We all know, of course, that there are overtly reprehensible traditions: of violence, oppression, racism, sexism, bigotry, jingoism, xenophobia and the like. Part of what is so disturbing about David Duke, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and their like is that so much of what they are and do is profoundly traditional, and that the millions of southerners who vote for them (as well as the tens of thousands of nonsoutherners who send them money) recognize it as such. Thus when we contemplate the current regional, national or international scene, it is essential to remind ourselves of the scale at which “tradition” is implicated. One might indeed argue that as a source of mischief and grief in the world at present, traditional values, beliefs, practices, and structures easily

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hold their own with corporate cynicism, ideological rigidity and nationalistic fervor.
I suggest, in fact, that “tradition” is problematic precisely because it functions so readily as a kind of analytical short circuit, causing us to gloss over the internal politics of cultural systems (perhaps especially the gender-linked politics), not to raise certain questions, and not to push others as far as they need to be pushed. One could cite numerous areas in which the need for such pushing is indicated in our beloved southland. Some that come immediately to mind are the traditional anti-unionism of so many southern workers; the traditional disregard for the environment; the traditional sexism, anti-intellectualism and political regressiveness of much southern religion; the latent and overt violence of southern sports and car culture; the macho swagger and jingoism of much southern country music, and so on and on.

If one sums all of those traditions (and more of the sort) into “heritage,” it is clear that we have a good bit of toughminded self-criticism, reconsideration and restrategizing to do, and that the necessity to do it comes as much out of the unfortunate stability of the heritage itself as it does from the new political landscape produced by the seismic shifts of the past quarter century. My little vignettes were thus meant to suggest that while there is great strength and much to admire in southern culture, there is also much that is at once both profoundly problematic and profoundly traditional. Those problematics are abundantly in evidence in our new Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and in a raft of recent books.

The paradox that emerges from this mix is that we find ourselves engaged in a counter-hegemonic struggle with a dominant culture that has already (and long since) achieved substantial hegemonic control of and integration with southern culture. Hence we are armed with a double-barrelled weapon, one barrel of which is aimed straight at our foot if not back into our face.

What I am saying, then (to leave that grotesquely contorted image), is that “tradition” and “heritage” are not fine enough screens for the tasks that face us. The years to come are going to require some better analytical and programmatic instruments. As a starter, I would suggest that we accustom ourselves to subjecting every element of both “tradition” and “heritage” to at least two higher order tests: the test of serviceability within the cultural group itself, and the test of generalizability beyond it. Though both need careful definition and exploration, I hope two brief examples will suggest what I mean.

The first is all too familiar: though it is certainly traditional for cultures to be split antagonistically along gender lines, such a split is not serviceable within a culture because it displaces energy in unproductive directions, distorts and rigidifies potentially creative social processes, and denies and frustrates human potential.

And what of the generalizability test? Consider for a moment the fact that probably there is no more traditional aspect of southern life than the commitment to absolute private property rights. “This land is mine,” a Kentucky coal fields resident told me years ago, “and if I want to dig a hole in the side of the mountain, I’ll dig it.” More dramatically, many Ashe County, N.C., residents demonstrated in the latter stages of their years-long struggle against Appalachian Power Company’s plan to dam the New River that if it came to a choice between the dam and accepting Wild and Scenic Rivers Act restrictions on their absolute right to use “their” property, they would take the dam. (See Stephen W. Foster, The Past Is Another Country: Representation, Historical Consciousness, and Resistance in the Blue Ridge (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).)

Clearly such positions are neither serviceable nor generalizable. They are not serviceable because when used by others–multi-national coal and energy companies, for example–they serve as a rationale for precisely the forms of exploitation that historically have left so many southerners in poverty and servitude. And surely in the midst of the growing ecological crisis it is clear that such positions are not generalizable; this old creaking planet has already been poked so full of holes that it is screaming in protest.

So what faces us, I am suggesting, has at least as much to do with transformations as with continuities: the recent transformation of the political landscape; the consequent requirement to transform our own analysis and practice; and the absolute necessity to conceive of what we do culturally in the context of broader social and political transformation. What I want to focus on is the required transformation of some of our analysis and practice.

The first task, I fear, is no less than to help our constituency move with us from one explanatory system to another which, if not entirely new, is markedly different. Unfortunately, we are terrified by the interval, the chasm between deconstructing and dismantling one explanatory system and the emergence of another one. Moreover, most people, it turns out, have a rather low tolerance for indeterminacy and ambiguity in the first place. I sometimes think this may be especially true in the South, where most of us were raised on aphorisms, proof texts and a historical schemata rather than nuanced dialectical and historicized argument. (Within a broader frame one could of course argue that this sort of formation is characteristic of the people of the United States in general, but my concern here is with its implications in the South.) Such a predilection turns out to be particularly dysfunctional in

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times like these, when the structural subtleties, ambiguities, indeterminacies and contradictions of the interlinked social, economic, political, and cultural systems in which we find ourselves mount daily.
I think there is also a cultural preference for unidimensional, essentially exotic explanations of social and cultural phenomena, rather than systemic and structural ones. It matters little whether the exoticism is religious (sin or God’s will), economic (free enterprise or taxes), social (drugs or welfare cheaters), or political (communism or demonized despots); give the public the choice between an exotic, unidimensional explanation and a systemic, multidimensional one (which Lord knows they actually have access to seldom enough) and most will choose the former nearly every time.

Paradoxically, these preferences, traditions, and predilections are central structural features of both of the cultures we are dealing with: the mainstream hegemonic culture and the remnants of most subsystems that remain doggedly in opposition to at least some aspects of it. Regionally, they help account for the ugliest parts of the history of the South; nationally, they support George Bush’s simpleminded thousand points of light voluntarism, a commitment to an idealized free enterprise that has never existed in the world and never will, a destructive hegemonic masculinity, a biosphere-raping policy of open-ended growth, and the political Ludditism of minimal government and taxation. Internationally, they lead to (among other things) a rhetoric-shrouded, military-backed and hypocritical neo-dollar or petro-diplomacy. This suggests that the first part of our agenda is somehow to orient our cultural work toward a heightened understanding of multidimensional, nuanced and structural rather than unidimensional exotic and symptomatic explanations.

Hence it seems to me that our principal task in the future is no longer to preserve, conserve, protect or

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promote a whole culture as conventionally conceived, but to insure the health of, and a healthy trajectory for, a significantly reconstructed and integrated social, political and cultural order. And beyond that, to help ourselves and our neighbors to understand and accept the necessity for that reconstruction, and deal with the terror of bridging the chasm between the old explanatory systems and emerging ones that promise to get us beyond the present order to some new one.
If we are to begin to do either of these things, we are going to have to search through the traditions, the heritage to locate their most humane, progressive and transformative elements. We must look first of all for the transformative elements of southern culture, and then for ways to link their transformative possibilities to a larger humane agenda for change. This means that we are going to have to search through and relate ourselves to some other cultures as well, ending our cultural isolationism and reaching toward some kind of global solidarity.

This latter necessity derives from the inadequacy of our past analysis, from the tectonic political shifts I have already referred to, from emerging political cultural dynamics elsewhere in the world, and from the recent and ongoing demographic transformation of the South from a primarily bi- or tricultural region to a multicultural one, a demographic transformation that offers us at once a challenge and an opportunity. So what are some possible models, or components of models, and where are they?

What happens if we look for them first at home? Obviously it is a good news/bad news situation. The bad news is first of all that with Native Americans we blew it virtually completely. Genocide, ghettoization and forced removal rendered much of that critical and transformative potential forever irrecoverable. The remaining vestigial potential for creative syncretism continues to be mostly ignored and wasted. With blacks the record is more mixed, of course. There the bad news is about as bad as could be imagined, but we also find more good news. Much was destroyed, much was lost, but much remains, and the ongoing syncretism will continue to benefit the whole South. The arrival of so many Hispanics and Asians offers us yet another opportunity; hopefully we won’t blow it as badly with them as we did with Native Americans and blacks.

As an exemplary longitudinal example of the potential, one need only look at the development of southern music and southern rhetoric; as a dramatically transformative-political cultural event, the civil rights movement stands as paradigmatic. Other political cultural movements come to mind as well: the southern abolitionist movement, the anti-lynching movement, the populist movement, the brown lung and black lung movements, and of course numerous isolated strikes and other political actions.

So we are not without instructive resources within our own regional history. The problem is that political struggles have too seldom been fused to culture in a conscious way in the South, and even when they have, the fusion has too often either appealed to the most reactionary elements of the culture, or (even if that unfortunate scenario was avoided) they have not had much of a culturally transformative effect.

Moreover, far too many initially and explicitly cultural movements in the South have aborted politically. One thinks, for example, of the birth of country music in the 1920s, the growth of bluegrass in the 1940s, the advent of rockabilly in the 1950s and sixties, and the Appalachian and Cajun revitalization movements in the 1960s and seventies. Each arose out of some of the deepest structural contradictions of American life; none has yet pursued those contradictions as rigorously or as far as they beg to

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be pursued. The one I know best for the moment–I’ll call it hillbilly nationalism–for the most part stopped at the boundary of private property and free enterprise. Others stopped at still other marked or buried boundaries.
Fortunately, we are not left dependent entirely upon our own purely regional history and experience. There are important conceptual, analytical, and strategic lessons to be learned, and policy modules to be borrowed from other sectors: from the women’s movement, from gays and lesbians, from the peace and antinuclear movements, from the environmental movement Fortunately, the literature about all these is growing, and is instructive, the organizations are growing and proliferating, and a new generation of young people is coming along.

We also have much to learn from current Native American struggles. Through 400 years they have had ground into their minds and hearts and bodies the elemental truths that the juggernaut is relentless and essentially without conscience; that the vast majority of its agents cannot and must not be trusted, that whatever the rationalizing language; the agendas are at bottom cultural; that it is not inches they are interested in, but miles; that liberal consensus constructed across major boundaries of power is neither trustworthy nor durable; and that achieving clarity about one’s own culture and history is an essential guide to tactics and strategy.2 The next most proximate examples lie to the south in Latin America. The powerful new genre of the testimonial opens to us the experience of countless working class and indigenous people who have drawn upon the more transformative elements of their culture for purposes of political struggle.3

The post-1960s nueva canción movement that blended traditional music with politically transformative texts is also instructive.4 The journal Cultural Survival regularly documents not only the decimation of indigenous groups in Central America, the Amazon rain forests and elsewhere, but also their imaginative culture-based strategies of organization and resistance. Some are international in reach, such as the ethnopolitical Coordinated Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (CIOAB) ,designed to defend indigenous values, reinforce the unity of indigenous communities, press their interests before national governments and international bodies, and push toward autonomous and environmentally sensitive development outside dominant paradigms.5

I suggest, then, that we can no longer afford to keep ourselves so isolated from such analyses and dynamics, so great is their potential for cultural and political clarification, as well as for the building of crucial alliances. We must not only ally ourselves with such groups and movements, but must come to understand our own political cultural dilemma characteristically and habitually in the context of those insistently analogous ones of Quebec Mohawks, Quiché highlanders, Somoan islanders, Khmer refugees, and Andean campesinos.

In July 1990, to raise one specific possibility, representatives of 120 Indian groups met in Quito, Ecuador, to celebrate 500 years of Indian resistance to colonial and neo-colonial oppression, discrimination and exploitation. For some of us to begin to turn up at such meetings would constitute not only a major step forward but also a promising reorientation of our political-cultural vector. Such connections would at the very least open our own cultural past and present to more nuanced examination, but beyond that they would be inherently politicizing. And they would almost inevitably lead to an awareness of links to larger structures, and hence to a vitally necessary habit of structural analysis.

A potentially useful clarifying metaphor for this work would be one drawn from Frantz Fanon: the overall transformative task that faces us may usefully be thought of as a task of cultural decolonization and transcendence. Speaking of the agonized and violent decolonization of North Africa in the late 1950s, Fanon said that for “cultured individuals of the colonized race (or region, in our case) … the demand for a national culture and the affirmation of the existence of such a culture represent a special battlefield. While the politicians situate their action in actual present-day events, men of culture take their stand in the field of history.”

At least so far, our particular historical field is more tranquil than Fanon’s was, though it is less so every day. In any case, we must bear clearly in mind that it is a

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historical field on which we find ourselves arrayed. And that field–textured by swamps and bayous, paved over with highways and shopping malls, folded into mountains and valleys, punctured by deep mines and high rises, laced with creeks and rivers–has witnessed both many a lassy making and many a lynching, many a corn shucking and many across burning, many a hoedown and many a shutdown. We grew up to the whine of fiddles and of spindles, the clack of cloggers and of looms, the lonesome wail of honkytonk singer and of factory whistle. Our rhetoric is the rhetoric of talltale teller and snakeoil hawker, of black preacher and white television evangelist, of squaredance caller and mobile home salesman.
So our job is above all a job of sorting, of ransacking cultural systems here and elsewhere for their serviceable, generalizable, transformative elements. This is the difficult and threatening but also familiar bricolage job of imaginative reassembly that at its best has in the past produced the varieties of southern speech, built environments, dance and music. The difference now is that we must begin to pay less attention to what has pleased us in the past or pleases us in the moment than to what will serve us in the future.

As we do so, we must take great care that our work not be pacifying, mystifying, and depoliticizing. In his book Gender and Power, R.W. Connell notes ruefully that within the politics of gender, intellectuals are frequently finetuned into system serving behaviors: priests blessing the established sexist forms of social practice, male psychotherapists talking the tensions out of wealthy urban women and drugging or hospitalizing rural poor ones, social planners adjusting the welfare system to mute the evidence of structural, gendered inequality. Such tendencies are no less present in the politics of culture. As we try to move beyond defensive and celebratory regional strategies to critical and transformative global ones, it is supremely important that we keep our self-reflexive critical senses sharp.

One of the most moving and clarifying books I have read lately is Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldúa is a Chicana lesbian feminist who understands what it means to grow up as a border woman in the midst of multiple contradictions. Addressing herself at one point to what she calls “movements of rebellion and cultures that betray,” she speaks of how her own rebellion was complicated by the dominant paradigms of Latino culture–paradigms that shackle, shame, and cripple women particularly, but which “make macho caricatures” of men as well. “Conozco el malestar de mi cultura,” she says; “I know the sickness of my culture,” and “I feel perfectly free to rebel and rail against [it].” So although like a turtle she4 carries her cultural home on her back, she refuses, she says, “to glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me.” With other dark-skinned women who have been “silenced, gagged, caged, bound into servitude,” she “stokes the inner flame” and looks toward a new mestiza culture that may at last break through the “despotic dualities” of the past.

Anzaldúa’s images of borderland and turtle and flame are instructive, for our South is an ever more contested borderland between two ancient hegemonic orders. Like Anzaldúa we carry our culture on our backs as impediment, as refuge, as reminder of who we are and how we were formed. Like her, we can speak of those movements of rebellion that we have in our blood (movimientos de rebeldia que tenemos en la sangre). Like her, even as we love and defend the culture that is ours, we must keep clear about those parts of it that have betrayed us–perhaps most of all by denying us the freedom to move confidently and unapologetically into those new borderlands where elements of a newer, more vital, more humane culture must be forged.

David E. Whisnant teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since 1970 he has worked extensively with local, state, regional and national cultural Programs, folklife festivals, filmmakers and record producers, and private cultural institutions. He is currently working on a book on the politics of culture in Nicaragua.

Notes

1. David E. Whisnant, “Letting Loose of Liberalism: Some Thoughts on Cultural Work and the Limits of Polite Discourse,” Southern Changes 12 (August 1990): 1-11.

2. For the colonial period in North America, this history is laid out in abundant detail in James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), and for the post-Revolutionary period in Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

3. See for example I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman of Guatemala, edited by Elizabeth Burgos (London: Verso, 1984), and Moema Viezzer, Si me permiten hablar: testimonio de Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1977). For an excellent compact survey of culture-based resistance movements, see John H. Bodley, Victims of Progress, (3rd. ed., revised; Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing, 1990).

4. See Nancy Morris, “Canto porque es necesario cantar. The New Song Movement in Chile, 1973-1983,” Latin American Research Review 22, no. 2 (1986): 117-36.

5. Stefano Varese, “Los dioses enterrados: el uso politico de la resistencia cultural in digena,” presented to Smithsonian Institution symposium Seeds of Industry, Oaxtepec, Morelos, Mexico, September 6-8, 1990, pp. 13-14.

Recapturing the Language: The South and Right-Wing Tactics of Mystification

David E. Whisnant — Sat, 01 Feb 1992 05:00:01 +0000

Recapturing the Language: The South and Right-Wing Tactics of Mystification

By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 1-10

“God Almighty created women.” Mother Jones said, “and the “Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.” reminding us of who they are, what they are up to, and how they make up words to construct the realities they want us to believe we live in. Manipulating language has always been a central tactic of the best-dressed bands of thieves and liars, and as the years have passed and communications technology has improved. they have gotten better and better at it. and more and more shameless about doing it. Of late, in the semantic and semiotic twilight zone of the Reagan-Bush years, they have shown themselves to be limitlessly cynical manipulators of language, confident that if the war of words can be won, the rest will fall far more easily.

Nor is the twisting of language the only game they play. During the past quarter-century we have seen social service agencies gutted, scandal after financial scandal, public money and resources squandered, friendly dictators bought and sold, regulations ignored and regulators fired. We have been offered silly excuse after insulting explanation, convenient failure of memory

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after pile of shredded documents, and one patently incompetent but politically loyal nominee after another. We have been offered James Watt as environmentalist, Ollie North as patriot, Ed Meese as head of the Justice Department. Lynn Cheney as head humanist, John Sununu as an indispensable public official, and selectively forgetful Robert Gates as chief spook. No matter what strategies and tactics are employed, however, running though and tying it all together is the twisted thread of language.

Two things are critical for us at this juncture, it seems to me: one is to realize that these tactics are as old as politics itself, and that they are therefore not beyond comprehension and effective response. Twenty years ago, in the wake of the War on Poverty and in the midst of the Vietnam war, Murray Edelman published an elegant analysis of what he called “the systematic… dissemination of illusion and ambiguity through the language of government.” 1 Others have commented on the political manipulation of language in many other times and places.

The other critical point is that despite the ubiquity and essential predictability of the phenomenon, we must be clear about how and to what extent our particular historical circumstances give it a special character. We have to ask ourselves how the old tactics are being used in our epoch, our corner of the world.

While it is true that at least a comfortable voting majority of the entire population have been suckered into this high-stakes word game. I sometimes think we have been especially vulnerable to it here in the South. We have turned out to be a bit too much like the stuttering limousine-driver Sugar Boy in Robert Penn Warrens All the King’s Men, who serves the Southern-born and bred demagogue Willy Stark with such puppy-like affection because Willy talks so good.

But whether we have been especially vulnerable or not, the right-wing linguistic spin-doctors have found the South a field white unto harvest. The first step in the picking–begun long ago–was to mock and burlesque our language, and so to deny the realities it expressed. One early twentieth century commentator on the speech of coastal South Carolina blacks called it

Such judgments–and there have been innumerable ones–are by themselves more than sufficient warrant for us to take a long overdue close look at their language to see what it might have to do with where we find ourselves at present.

Where we are, I reluctantly observe, is in a dangerously quiescent state, enchanted and confused as if by the very sound of their words, being played like Fiddlin’ John Carson and Clayton McMichen played their fiddles: with consummate skill. The difference is that this time the effect is tragic rather than comic. We are dancing to an old and deadly tune from a devil’s box, and what we are dancing around are the ever more obvious results of their shabby political project: increasingly bought-off legislatures, starved and decaying schools and business-captured universities, crack babies and toxic waste dumps. a right-to-work, minimum-wage workforce, furloughed public employees, sorry health care and astronomical health-care costs, and all the rest of it.

So what is it they are doing to language, and how are they doing it? These questions are crucial, because what we are ultimately talking about is not merely the manipulation of language, but rather the formation of consciousness, and the relative usefulness of certain modes of consciousness for digging ourselves out of this historical and political mess.

Keywords

What words are they using? Where do they get them? And how are they using them to keep the right-wing roller-coaster on track? For the past while I have tried to listen carefully, to take note of how language is being used in the currently dominant political discourse. As I have listened, I have been making a little word list, and the longer my list gets, the clearer it becomes that there is something sinister going on here. These folks are talking about a world very different from the world I think I live in.

To start with, here are some words they use approvingly: bipartisan, bottom line, competitiveness, conservative, democracy, deregulation, economic growth, education, the family, founding fathers, free elections, free enterprise, freedom fighters, freedom-loving nations, free market, free world, individualism, liberation, law and order, market economy, morality, national security, new world order, patriotism, private sector, right to life, values, voluntarism, and (at every possible juncture) war.

And here are the names they assign to some things they profess not to like: bureaucracy, communism, crime, the “democrat” party, dictatorships, drugs, government, guerrillas, liberalism, political correctness, politics, quotas, red tape, regulation, revolution, socialism, special interest groups, taxes, terrorism, unions, welfare.

Since out of these and a few other terms could be constructed much of the dominant political discourse of at least the past couple of decades, it behooves us to try to comprehend the lexicon.

In the first place, my little right-wing dictionary suggests that their use of words is brazenly instrumental, almost completely ahistorical, and indeed very nearly scholastic. Why scholastic? Because so many of the words are used purely self-referentially within a closed discourse that bears little relation to the objective historical realities that most of us live in. Indeed since the privileged and protected elite who control the discourse have little interest in or grounded awareness of any realities at all except their own rarified ones, the lack of congruence between their words and the realities of the rest of us is of little import to them.

Perhaps more usefully than anything else, their education and life experience have taught them that to have or take the power to name things–to mark boundaries through language and style–gives one in turn the power to say who is inside and deserves to be, who isn’t and doesn’t, what is and isn’t worth considering or paying for.

Inventing, Stealing, and Twisting Words

One of my other favorite hell-raisers besides Mother Jones is Raymond Williams, who was wordier than she was but a kindred spirit nevertheless. “A distinctive… feature of any dominant social order,” Williams said, is its capacity to “[reach] into [our] whole range of practices and experiences in an attempt at incorporation.” To sucker us in and steal us blind, Mother Jones would have said, and to use what they steal to make themselves look good. Not surprisingly, it turns out that both of my lists of words–the ones they like and the ones they don’t–are made up of some they concocted themselves, but of many more they have stolen from more humane and honorable discourses and redefined to suit their purposes.

Among their “good” words, the implications for us of the ones they have invented are painful indeed. Among the most grotesque are of course those blandly Orwellian terms used to mask realities which if called by their proper names would provoke moral outrage. Such terms issue most prolifically from the Pentagon: “collateral casualties” or “carpet bombing” instead of dead babies and wanton destruction, for example. The less immediately offensive words are only too familiar: “economic growth” is used as if equitable distribution were not an issue, and as if trickle-down had ever been observed to work as they perennially assure us it will; “free market” means the

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freedom of publicly-subsidized and protected corporations to do as they please; “the bottom line” is the point at which profit takes precedence over all other considerations whatsoever; “freedom fighters” means Ollie North’s mercenaries who killed teachers and burned clinics; “right to life” means the right to be born, and then to shift for oneself as best one can; any constraint whatever on business as usual is “red tape”; “bureaucracy” means any governmental unit serving other than elite, corporate or military purposes; “political correctness” dismisses the political concerns of anyone whose politics they don’t share, while implying that they themselves are above politics; “new world order” means a new contraption wired together from the parts of the old world order that served them best, plus some others that they think might be even more to their advantage.

Thinking over the list, then, it appeals to me that although they make up some words to suit their purposes, their major tactic is to capture and contort, and thus to coopt the already established positive or negative resonances of words to serve ends opposite to those of the original discourse. So what about the words they have stolen? How have they redefined them to suit their purposes?

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A favorite a few months ago was “liberation.” But to them “liberation” means not the struggle of poor third world countries out from tinder the yoke of old or new colonialism, but rather deploying a half-million U.S. troops to reinstall the Kuwaiti patriarchs in their gold and marble bathrooms. Similarly with other words: “bipartisan” foreign policy means bipartisan agreement not to raise the issues that most need to be raised; “the family” means a small, alienated, patriarchal, hegemonically pacified consumer unit: “education” means training (preferably on the cheap) in corporate-designed, system-serving behavior; “free elections” means elections–rigged or not–that turn out the way they want them to; “free markets” are in fact markets they subsidize and control; and “democracy” therefore means (as Tony Bennett phrased it a decade ago) “a system of government by elites … in which the majority retain [s] the right to determine, periodically, which elite should govern.”3

Some of the worst wizardry, however, is performed on the words they steal from their political opponents and turn into categorical negatives. Thus “dictatorship” refers not to those friendly dictators upon whom we have lavished so much money, but the heads of governments who reject our ideology and refuse to do our bidding. Any concern for the commonweal, or commitment to humane government is dismissed as soft-headed, indulgent, impractical “liberalism.” “Socialism” of whatever variety is conflated with Evil Empire gulag communism. “Revolutions” are nothing more than diabolical insurgencies against “established order,” fomented by a “hard core” of deluded. self-seeking, “self-styled” “guerrillas” paid, armed and directed by the Evil Empire. “Government” is a temporary evil on the way to the new corporate world order. “Welfare” emphatically does not mean small public subsidies to the most needy and vulnerable, but “handouts” to the lazy and undeserving; it never refers to massive gifts of public funds to the corporate oligarchs. “Multi-culturalism” refers to any threat to their hermetically sealed monoculture. And they use “politics” to refer to any opposition to their own intensely political agenda.

Clearly some major contortions of meaning are occurring. But how do they do such contorting? How do they make it happen? One of the simplest tactics is to mystify by calling something by a name that connotes the exact opposite of what it is: calling U.S. puppet governments of El Salvador or Guatemala “democratic,” for example. Similarly effective is their habit of restricting to a preferred arena a term which otherwise would refer to a much larger class of phenomena whose existence must be denied. Thus violent opposition to our state-corporate interests is called terrorism; analogous behaviors engaged in by those corporations themselves, or by the state (as in Ludlow or Harlan County or Gastonia, in the Palmer raids, or against the Wobblies or the Black Panthers) is not terrorism.

Another tactic is to decontextualize a word, disassociating it from necessarily and complicating current issues and realities. Thus “taxes” refers to the simple, unjust and unjustified expropriation by a wasteful government of the purely private earnings of otherwise wholly (and happily) self-sufficient individuals. Such a semantic transformation also encourages those, individuals to view themselves not as interdependent and mutually responsible citizens, but as isolated, victimized and resentful “taxpayers.” Moreover, such “taxpayers” are far more likely to demand merely that there be “no new taxes,” rather than that tax policy be opened to thorough discussion, or that taxes be levied fairly and used equitably for humane purposes.

A similar abstracting proceeds from the habit of dehistoricizing key words. There was much talk during the Ollie North Iran-gate hearings, for example, about the United States’ commitment to “democracy” in Nicaragua, but not a word about our involvement there from 1849 onward, during which time we consistently demonstrated a virtually complete lack of concern for whether there was any democracy there or not. Similarly, there is no mention that one historical product of “competitiveness” was the robber barrons, or that the “founding fathers” wrote the founding women and mother’s out of the process.

What I’ve said so far has to do, however, with how they use the words they do use–wherever they come from, however they are invented, or however torturously they are twisted. Equally important is the complete exclusion of certain other words. It turns out, of course, that the ones excluded–such as class, gender, power, control, capitalism, systemic, or structural–are some of those most essential to clarifying, grounding and historicizing the discourse. Excluding the words denies the realities, and certain realities must be denied if currently dominant politics are to remain dominant.

Their Words and Our Realities

If these are at least some of the ways the discourse works, the danger could not be clearer: to use language as the current discourse demands that it be used, entails the tacit admission that the world is as we in fact know it not to be. But it is especially urgent that we admit no such thing, not only because it is untrue, but also because we face a special sort of historical paradox: the increasingly tense complexity of the national and international situation in turn increases the necessity for historically grounded, politically and ethically nuanced discourse, but it also increases the anxiety, anger, and sense of threat that most people feel most of the time. Such a state of mind

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decreases people’s tolerance for the grounded-nuanced discourse that is called for, however, and increases their demand for bumper-stickerable slogans (“Support Our Troops’; “Sportsmen for Helms”).

Public demand for simpleminded slogans in turn raises the electoral chances of reactionary ideologues, while lowering those of anyone capable of or willing to try to tell all of the complex, uncongenial, system-challenging truth. The nub of that truth, unfortunately, is that whatever way we as a nation ever did most of whatever it was we did (which by the way isn’t the way they’ve always told us It was done) wasn’t fair in the first place and in any case won’t work any more.

Thus unless we expose and challenge the currently dominant discourse, recapture the language and produce a new discourse, we have little chance of seeing our most urgent social and political problems addressed as they must be addressed. We have allowed ourselves to become mired to the axles in their linguistic muck, and until we figure out how to haul ourselves out of it, we ain’t got a prayer.

Our Words, Our History

What special character, if any, will this truly national task have here in the South? What history do we have with language, and how has it formed and predisposed us? Why do the current crop of linguistic spin-doctors find us such a particularly attractive mark?

Whatever else it may have to do with, it must be related to our formative history with words, with the rhetorical culture of the South. It must have some connection with long-distance resonances from those oleaginous planter-legislators who talked us into an unholy war with slogans like “states’ rights” and “peculiar institutions” and “our way of life” and “Southern womanhood.” It must have to do with the yankee ladies who fawned over what they fancied was the “Elizabethan” speech of mountain young ‘tins while the Peabody and Ford and Rockefeller agents fast-talked their daddies out of their coal land for nothing; with the Gastonia preachers who preached down unionizing textile workers while gun thugs gunned down Ella Mae Wiggins; with the boot-licking and bootstrap-pulling Clarence Thomases who have a genius for knowing which words will sound right to the powers that be; with the legion of snarling Faubuses, Wallaces, Helmses and Gingriches.

Having spent so many hours of my own young life squirming on a hard Baptist pew, I still have to remind myself not to be so swept away by a speaker’s metaphors, images, and rhythms that I forget to test what is actually being said against the realities I know most intimately. It has taken me a lifetime to learn how to read critically rather than simply to look for proof-texts like we used to do with our red-letter Bibles in Daily Vacation Bible School sword drills. How to move beyond aphorisms and to penetrate the nuances of metaphors. How to think in terms of nuanced continuums instead of Manichaean dualisms. What the difference is between a concrete historical reality and a social construct. I still too easily assume that if the words are there, the corresponding realities must be.

Fortunately, our rhetorical history here in the South is a mixed bag, full not only of bad news, but of some good news as well. Clearly we have rhetorical styles and traditions that have served us well and others that have served us badly. We’ve had not only Wallace but also Fulbright, not only Booker T. Washington but also Martin Luther King, not only David Duke but also Lillian Smith, not only the Klan but also the STFU. For every sleazy white TV evangelist, we’ve had a host of black preachers, for every Jim Walter homes salesman who lies for money a tall tale teller who knows that the only good reason to lie is for art, for the many Jimmy Swaggarts a few Will Campells, and for the all too numerous Tammy Wynettes standing by

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their good old boys, an occasional Hazel Dickens who knows when to call him what he is and throw him out.

Thus the task of turning the discourse around will have more to do with careful selection than with recovering some “Southern rhetorical tradition” wholesale. We have to figure out how to recover and revitalize the best language we have been able to generate–the language of those Southerners who have spoken most clearly–can be used to speak of our own realities, how it can guide us in a daunting project of linguistic correction and recovery. However we choose, the most serviceable Southern voices are likely to sound more like an Old Testament prophet than like an aspiring, double-talking Supreme Court justice, however black.

We need most especially to drop back historically and try to understand how the dominant rhetorical-cultural tradition in the South has primed us for exactly what we are experiencing now. A decade ago T. H. Breen told a remarkable story of how some of the setting up took place as early as the seventeenth century in the Virginia tidewater.4 In general the colonists hauled there by the Virginia Company were products of the English reformation–pious, hard-working, middle-class Puritans. Butthey were not. Breen reminds us, a random sample. Instead they were “a distinct sub-culture” lured by the promise of great (and easy) wealth–“extraordinarily individualistic, fiercely competitive and highly materialistic.” During the first ten years, those values proved disastrously dysfunctional, producing more factionalism and violence than anything else.

But then in 1617 the colonists shipped their first load of tobacco to England, and the race to strike it rich shoved every thing else into the background. Would-be entrepreneurs rushed up the James and York rivers to stake their claims to tobacco-growing land. Within two years, forty-four plantations were patented. Needful of hands to work, the Virginia Company concocted some flowery rhetoric to beguile more young people from England to join the enterprise. Far from encountering what Breen calls “small, self-contained communit[ies] held together by… shared, positive beliefs,” those who came found a strife- and inequality-ridden system overseen by profit-driven owners and run on the energies of indentured servants and slaves.

There were fabulous sums to be made, but those physically isolated plantation nuclei were also easy targets for Indian attack. In a coordinated, region-wide attack of 1622, 347 colonists were killed. Clearly, the logic of events called for a new cooperative policy of mutual protection, and for short time after the massacre, public ceremonies of commemoration and a rhetoric of caution suggested that such a policy might be forthcoming. But the planter-leaders of the colony–unwilling to deviate from their privatistic, profit-oriented agenda, and eager to return to business as usual–decided to turn over defense policy to hired mercenary troops organized by enterprising, eye-on-the-main-chance leaders such as the legendary Capt. John Smith.

Beginning what proved to be a long tradition, the hired military planners proceeded to demonstrate their greed and incompetence. One constructed an oyster-shell fort that was under water at high tide. Demanding up-front payments and cost-plus contracts, and forced to devise schemes to protect private plantations strung out for miles along rivers, the Virginia Company’s private-sector defense contractors produced virtually no reliable protection, and drained the public purse in the process.

Meanwhile, public policy consisted almost solely of stabilizing the inequitable social order upon which the fragile profit-extracting system rested. At the perilous moment when the Virginia Company lost its charter in 1624, concern that exploited servants and slaves would revolt led to the proclamation that

Working class colonists came to believe–usually rightly–that the authorities were using their offices for personal gain, and that there was therefore no point in ordinary citizens trying to work for the public good. In particular, public education went by the board.

All this no doubt sounds as eerily familiar to you as it does to me, sitting here in a southland dotted with military bases, mobile-home parking lots, the mansions of six-figure CEOs, and shabby schools.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that we are the very linear beneficiaries of the Virginia Company’s shaping of public policy and public consciousness. “Long after the 1620s,” Breen observes,

Those laws, those habitual acts, those traditions were passed on from generation to generation: “In the course of a century of cultural development,” Breen says, “Virginians transformed an extreme form of individualism, a value system suited to soldiers and adventurers, into a set

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of regional virtues, a love of independence, an insistence upon personal liberty, a cult of manhood, and an uncompromising loyalty to family.”

And in the next century, we know, that culture traveled tip the rivers, across the mountains, down the south-running valleys, across the deltas, and westward across the south and southwest until it collided with another culture in Mexico, defeated it, stole it blind, and pushed on to the Pacific.

And so here we sit in the historical and cultural backwash, trying to see what–so ungodly long after the fact–we can do with those laws, those habitual acts, those traditions, and with the language in which the whole has over the years been, and continues to be, encoded.

Myths, Metaphors and Mystification

Some of the highest-stakes codes are those that Stuart Hall has called “naturalized codes–those whose roots run so deep in the culture, whose use is so habitual and universal that they appear not to be codes at all.5 Their use, Hall cautions, has “the ideological effect of concealing the practices of coding which are present.” Whatever else the Reagan-Bush right understands, they understand what naturalized codes are, how they operate, and for what purposes they are useful.

Some of their most fully naturalized codes take the form of the metaphors and myths which again Edelman reminds us are a perennially central feature of political rhetoric. Their usefulness resides in their power to

What reactionary politicians in every age have known is that cultural formation is so powerful, so intractable, so reliable, and so enmeshed with language. We know that, too, but we need to bring it to consciousness in new, politicized ways. We must understand how language is being tised to set people against each other, make them as confused, anxious and angry as possible, and manipulate their anxiety through mystifying metaphors and myths that promise simple answers and a gratifying order to be benevolently administered by those currently in power.

What kind of metaphors are they using these days besides their phallic favorite, “standing tall”? Especially insidious are those one might call reductionist metaphors and organic metaphors of inevitability. One of their most preferred reductionist metaphors is that of a ball game, which they use to explicate every conceivable instance of political, social, economic and cultural competition or conflict. That metaphor encourages us to believe that we live in a binary, ball-game world of absolutely opposed teams, a single set of rules for everyone, a level field and identical equipment, disinterested and fair referees, absolute winners and losers, and tidy statistics that tell the whole story. I submit that here in the ball game-crazed Southland, littered with sports corruption and scandal, such a metaphor is far from politically benign.

Organic metaphors of inevitability such as “growth,” “development,” and “decay” (as of “the rust belt”) imply that whatever has happened, happened in a perfectly

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natural way, and could not have happened otherwise. Such metaphors imply that what happened had nothing to do with a policy decision on anyone’s part, with anyone’s power or interests, with anyone’s design for the future.

Words from Other Lives and Histories

The linguistic-cultural-political challenge we face is a painfully self-critical and meticulous process of selection, reconstruction, and deployment, fighting every step of the way. As we search, it is crucial that we not only survey our own history and experience, but also that we consider language and strategies available from other lives and histories. For example, it is true that from the beginning we Southerners have been burdened by reactionary religion, but the Wobblies knew how to take those old Moody-Sankey songs and turn them into hymns of liberation that reached across every line of race, gender and culture. “Would you be free from your burden of sin” became “Would you be free from wage slavery,” and “Take it to the Lord in prayer” found new life as “Dump the bosses off your backs.”

Southern blacks have long since understood and used their hymns in similar ways, but whites have grasped the possibilities only sporadically, such as in the labor songs Sarah Ogan Gunning and Aunt Molly Jackson built around hymn tunes in the eastern Kentucky coalfields in the 1930s. In any case, the doubly paradoxical lesson is that even the most hegemonic of forms have their counterhegemonic uses, and that as they are put to those new uses, they carry forward some of the moving resonances of their former lives.

One more potentially useful analogy, and I will rest my case. As you know, one of the most promising political-cultural developments in Latin America since the early 1960s has been the emergence of liberation theology out of a basically reactionary and authoritarian Catholic church historically allied with the oligarchies and the military. Drawing upon the deepest strands of Latin American culture, liberation theology has moved masses of people to reground their search for social and economic justice in the language, metaphors and parables of the Bible. For several years I have puzzled about whether such a thing could conceivably happen in the Bible Belt South, and recently I heard of an example.

Ivanhoe is a town of a thousand people on the banks of the New River, ten miles west of the I-77 / I-81 interchange in southwest Virginia.7 For a hundred years, its people have stoked iron furnaces, worked in the local lead and zinc mines, and filed in and out of the carbide plant that opened there at the close of World War I. But the last plant closed in 1983, leaving Ivanhoe nearly a ghost town. Desperate for jobs, people started casting around for somebody–anybody at all–who would open a plant or start a business.

Fortunately, the Glenmary order sent two imaginative and politically clear women to Ivanhoe to talk with people about a more local, community-based approach to the problem, and especially about the spiritual aspects of the community’s dilemma. Glenmary sister Mary Ann Hinsdale started Bible study sessions, and Highlander Center’s Helen Lewis organized some community-wide discussions about economic alternatives. True to local tradition, it was mostly women who went to the former, and men to the latter. But gradually the two groups and enterprises fused, their originally separate discussions merging, informing each other, and producing a Valley of Virginia version of liberation theology.8

Progress on the economic front was slow. Major foundations proved reluctant to give “economic development” money, because what was happening in Ivanhoe didn’t fit their notion of corporate-based development, but local people pushed ahead nevertheless. Out of their effort to understand local economic history came a two-volume history of the town. People organized the Ivanhoe Civic League and turned some abandoned Union Carbide land into Jubilee Park, now the site of local festivals that feature a parade of gigantic puppet figures celebrating local heroes such as a black midwife. The old company store has been turned into an educational center, and young people are starting a radio station.

But my point here is not to talk about economic development; it is to think about language. And in Ivanhoe, the regrounding of intimately familiar Biblical language in concrete, local realities provided a vital center for a self-critical, regenerative process of community change. A few of the preachers don’t like it, but it goes forward nevertheless. The community development group has become similar to the Christian base communities that have anchored the liberation theology movement in Latin America. Women especially are using Biblical language and parables to reassess their identities and roles. Not surprisingly, when some Nicaraguan women were brought for a visit to Ivanhoe, there was a shock of recognition on both sides.

What happened in Ivanhoe that has any suggestive use for us? To use some terms suggested by Raymond Williams, some old cultural and linguistic formations–the still-controlling residues of past circumstances–were opened for reflection and discussion, and some emergent ones were brought to light and given new names.9

I suggest that we could do worse than take Ivanhoe as an archetype of our present condition. In these waning years of the twentieth century and of industrial capitalism, we are all being Ivanhoed–bled dry and left to shift for ourselves west of the interstate. Worse yet, we are being

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encouraged to believe that what has happened is inevitable, and that henceforth what is left to us is to plaintively petit ion the captains of the new world order.

But if we are to do other than play our roles in their scripts, we have to look backward, like Ivanhoe, to the formative tidewaters of our individual and collective experience, and we have to write our own books in our own language. We have to look outward for analogies, but especially forward, imagining and re-imagining. We have to get clearer about what we want, about which costs are acceptable, and to whom. And most especially, we have to learn how to name a new world, because some of the realities that now present themselves to us we don’t yet have words for. In some cases, all we know is that the old words don’t correspond any more–neither ours nor the Reagan-Bush crowd’s, though for different reasons.

In the first lines of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins to describe another little town–the magical-real village of Macondo,

“The world was so new,” the narrator says [el mundo era tan reciente], “that many things had no names” [que muchas cosas carecian de nombre]. In order to speak of those things, he says, “one had to point to them with a finger” [para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo].

I leave you with that image, which is a powerful reminder of how eternally new and fragile (like prehistoric eggs) the world appears to eyes that are clear, of the necessity to keep pointing to the objects, and of the enormously important political task of naming things and then keeping clear about the names. “West Virginia!” thundered Mother Jones, “When I get to heaven I will tell God Almighty about West Virginia!” I’m sure she did, and equally sure she didn’t use their words to do it.

NOTES

David Whisnant teaches cultural studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has both worked extensively with cultural programs and published widely on the politics of culture. This talk was given at the SRC Annual Meeting in Atlanta on November 9, 1991.

Sandinistas and Mountaineers: Cultural Politics in Appalachia and Nicaragua

David E. Whisnant — Tue, 01 Dec 1992 05:00:02 +0000

Sandinistas and Mountaineers: Cultural Politics in Appalachia and Nicaragua

By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 4-15

The story I begin with will be familiar to you: the government needed both revenue and a way to exert tighter control over a population it considered morally lax and not entirely loyal, so it levied a tax on home-brewed liquor, authorized a few monopolistic entrepreneurs to brew most of it, and hunted down moonshiners and destroyed their small stills. As one historian of the episode notes, such tactics “drove the small dealers … out of business … raised the price of a drink, … [and deprived] many of their incomes. The [small dealers] protested government interference in their business and pleasure. Popular wrath over the … monopoly led to rebellion and the violent deaths of at least two [of the monopolistic entrepreneurs], who were also political figures.”1

This little drama did not happen in Appalachia in the 1790s or 1920s, however, but in Nicaragua in the 1840s, when President Fruto Chamorro imposed the aguardiente laws upon rural people, and a few sugar plantation owners made a killing as a result.

Sometimes when people ask me how I made such an abrupt move from writing about Appalachia to trying to learn about Nicaragua, I tell them it just meant moving from one Third World country to another. Now and then I even amuse myself by playing with parallels between the two. I imagine the rebellious Appalachian coal miners’ encampment at Blair Mountain in the 1920s, for example, as Gen. Sandino’s hideout at El Chipote a half-dozen years later. With no trouble at all coal operators become coffee planters, and the National Guard that served the operators’ interests becomes la Guardia Nacional that served

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those of the Somoza regime. Thomas Wolfe even looks a lot like the Protean, prolific, hard-loving and dipsomaniacal Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío—neither of whom could ever really leave or go home again, and so wandered forever in that ultimate diaspora of the mind. Appalachian studies pioneer Cratis Williams becomes the bearded and puckish Pablo Antonio Cuadra, both of them diminutive, witty and fascinated by what it really means to be a mountaineer or a Nicaraguan. The People’s Appalachian Research Collective of the late 1960s reminds me uncannily of the contemporaneous ventana group of radical students at Nicaragua’s national university. Had courageous Mountain Eagle publisher Tom Gish ever met La Prensa‘s dauntless Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, they would have had a lot to talk about, as would Appalshop film makers with the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers. Highlander Center’s Myles Horton—whom I saw for the last time at the regular Thursday morning protest in front of the U.S. Embassy in Managua—reminds me strongly of the patriarchal and always provocative octogenarian Nicaraguan writer José Coronel Urtecho.2

These fanciful associations are intriguing, but sometimes the actual historical connections between Nicaragua and Appalachia are both startling and sobering. To tell you about just one of them, I will borrow from a piece I wrote two years ago.3

In 1851—when thousands of men were in a hurry to get to the California gold fields—Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt secured a monopoly on the Nicaraguan transit route and made himself a tidy new pile of money. Some of it he used to buy a 270-foot steam-powered yacht. He panelled its salons with satinwood, furnished them with hand-carved and velvet-“American taste and skill.”4

Some of the rest of his money Vanderbilt passed along to his sons and grandsons. Grandson George W. Vanderbilt came to Asheville in the 1890s and in a grand and imperial spirit similar to his grandfather’s built a three hundred-room French chateau which be appointed with the finest European furniture, tapestries, and paintings. His guests approached the estate through a picturesque half-timber and tile English village named “Biltmore” and provided with an Episcopal chapel and loyal curate.

Shortly after the Vanderbilt mansion opened in 1895, my grandfather and his brother left their small farm in the Rutherford County foothills and went up the mountain to Asheville looking for work. They found it driving streetcars, work my grandfather continued to do for the next fifty years. He never returned to the house he had built with his own hands on the farm and always meant to go back to to live in some day. Many mornings when he arrived at the Asheville Street Railroad Company’s “car barn” at 3:30 a.m., he set out to make the Biltmore run.

About the time my grandfather died, my high school classmates and I were taken on a “field trip” to see the cultural wonders of the Biltmore house—to “expose” us to “great art,” of which we in our culturally benighted hillbilly ignorance presumably knew nothing. All I remember is feeling dwarfed by the scale of the place, and ashamed of my clothing and my ignorance. Thus one of my most poignant moments of clarification during my Nicaraguan work occurred when I read that the ship that carried U.S. troops to Nicaragua’s east coast to move against the rebel general Sandino in April 1931 was named the USS Asheville.

So my moving from Appalachia to Nicaragua wasn’t all that difficult, and in some ways it wasn’t much of a move at all, because I was so frequently reminded of connections. In other ways it was difficult, though, and still feels that way: threatening, disquieting, at times bewildering. But also at least predictable, and perhaps even inevitable. In a little piece I wrote a dozen years ago, I said that for me working in and on Appalachia has always made more sense as process than as position or condition.5 So it has remained, and the process eventually carried me to a small, poor, Catholic, Spanish-speaking, wracked and tortured country.

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Although I haven’t written much about Appalachia in nearly ten years, the region has never been off my mind. It has never been absent as a frame of reference, a ground to come back to in my thinking, a critical test-case for any elegant theory I encounter. It was in the mountains, after all, that I first began to learn about corporate capitalism and colonialism; about metropoles and peripheries; about intervention and cultural stereotypes; about the old-time music and rowdy banjo pickers the “good music” people were afraid to like; about the local color stories, dulcimer pluckers, and flaxen-haired ballad singers they did like, and why; about poor people’s movements and why they (too often) fail; about some everyday forms of resistance; and about the political and psychological necessities of revisionism—and a few of its perils as well.

No analogy is perfect, and all analogies are dangerous, but there are certainly worse places to go to Nicaragua from than Appalachia.

At least I went knowing that with a lot of help from my friends I had already managed to teach myself something about one corner of the world, and I figured maybe I could manage the process again. All of that has served me well as I have labored to learn a new language and to understand new things—most of which I had never even heard of that day when at the age of forty-six I registered as an undergraduate student in Spanish, walked into a classroom with a bunch of nineteen year-olds, and said my first hesitant buenos días.

So for the past six years, instead of thinking and reading about Kentucky coal baron John C.C. Mayo and settlement school founder Katherine Pettit, local color stories and Morris dancers, broadform deeds and pneumoconiosis, growth centers and hinterlands, it has been caciques and encomenderos, León Liberals and Granada Conservatives, filibusters and financieros, Carlos Fonseca and Ricardo Morales Avilís, the vanguardistas and the exterioristas, and of course the Somocistas and Sandinistas.6

Both the language and the materials are different, then, but many of the questions are those that have long intrigued me: What is the role of culture in processes of social and political reconstruction? Within such processes, what is the dialectic between elite and vernacular culture? What is the nature of tradition, and what contradictions lurk within it? How has tradition been used for purposes of political legitimation? What are the political functions of cultural institutions, and the cultural functions of political ones? What about the politics of the many ways of representing culture? And most intriguing of all to me these days, what does one do about the most recalcitrant and politically reactionary cultural formations? I will try to outline several of the things I am currently thinking about as I work on some of these questions in another part of the world that with eerie frequency reminds me of home.

Since the 1520s, when the conquering Spaniards first got serious about Nicaragua, culture has never ceased to be an arena of conflict. During the three hundred years between conquest and independence, that conflict took innumerable forms. Within less than a half-century, a genocidal assault reduced maybe a million original inhabitants to around 10,000 or so. Forced Christianization and hispanicization displaced habits and beliefs, foods and clothing, houses and communities, crops and animals, language and lifeways, even the very names of things. Two centuries of forced labor, disease and racial mixing took further heavy tolls. During the mid-nineteenth century, hordes of gold-seekers and adventurers boarded Commodore Vanderbilt’s steamers and poured through the short-cut across Nicaragua on their way to California, leaving ramshackle hotels, inflation, prostitutes, shabby business deals, and empty rum bottles and liniment jars in their wake. Less than a decade later, the demented filibusterer William Walker—the Ollie North of the period—had visions of turning Nicaragua into another Venice by forcing people to speak English, re-establishing slavery and deeding the land to enterprising white folks.

After the Walker war, ambitious coffee planters shoved indigenous people off the land and into the wage-labor market. And “economic development” schemes calculated to Europeanize language, thought, architecture, education and public policy led to sporadic but frequently bloody rebellions by mountain-dwelling Indians who got tired of it all.

In the twentieth century, cultural conflict in Nicaragua has taken more forms than I have time even to name: it came with the US Marines, who virtually ran the country from 1912 to 1933, and it was central to the struggle of Sandino’s “crazy little army” (1927-33) to dislodge them. It was evident in the cultural sycophancy of the three Somozas, and in the post-war rise of Miami as Nicaragua’s cultural metropole. In time, traditional culture became a critical weapon in the FSLN struggle against the Somozas. Following the fall of the last Somoza, the Sandinistas made a serious if flawed effort to integrate cultural programs and policies into the overall reconstruction of the country, and when the Sandinistas themselves lost the election a decade later, the new government—bought and paid for with U.S. dollars—moved swiftly to reverse

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the process.

A couple of specific episodes in this long-running drama put me in mind of the ongoing cultural-political process here in the mountains. The first one has to do with the political uses of what Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital.

The Political Uses of Cultural Capital

From the 1830s onward, foreign entrepreneurs were trying to buy and sell Nicaragua, and the native oligarchy were scheming to convert it into a coffee plantation and use the profits to Europeanize themselves, their cities, and their low-wage workers. At the same time, newly established archaeological and ethnological museums in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Washington, and elsewhere were beginning to scour the whole world for cultural treasures in order to build their collections. Racing each other to wherever such things were to be found—Egypt, Latin America, Asia, the Pacific Northwest—they either dug them up themselves or bought them from whoever had dug them up first.7

Most vulnerable in this process were small, weak, colonial or quasi-colonial states which needed cash and lacked museums of their own. They had few if any laws to prevent the removal of their antiquities, and they were mesmerized by European culture rather than their own anyway. Although Nicaragua had none of the fabulous cultural riches then being discovered in Mexico, Guatemala, or Peru, it had enough to command attention: massive carved stone monoliths, pre-conquest pottery urns and burial jars, and gold and jade ornaments.

And so archaeologists, graverobbers, dealers’ agents, and curiosity seekers plundered Nicaragua for such cultural valuables. To find them, they smooth-talked local leaders in indigenous communities, bribed informers, prevailed upon local priests, lobbied government functionaries, and blundered about on their own, led by hunch, rumor and the published accounts of those who had preceded them. Renting small boats to get to offshore islands, hacking their way through underbrush, paying local men with a few coins and a lot of liquor to do the physical labor, they excavated the mounds, piled what they found in bongos and carts, hauled it to the nearest port and shipped it to dealers and museums.

Such artifacts—or at least the ones that didn’t end up decorating Victorian parlors and drawing rooms—provided data for researchers vying to establish the emerging disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, and ethnology. They helped justify the lucky museums’ claims upon public funds, and enhanced their standing among competitors. In turn, having such museums boosted the cultural legitimacy of the growing nation-states of western Europe and North America. And viewing such collections helped their citizens to rank themselves above the “sav-

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age,” “primitive,” and “barbaric” peoples who inhabited the colonial corners of the world from which the raw materials and surplus labor required for empire-building were being extracted. Taken as a whole, it was a process that—however useful scientifically—expropriated the movable cultural capital of poor and vulnerable countries, transported it to wealthier countries, and used it to rationalize, buttress, legitimize, and extend domination.

As with my little moonshiner anecdote at the beginning, I suspect that much of this process has a familiar ring. Although Appalachia has no pre-conquest statuary or burial mounds laden with gold and jade, much of its marketable cultural capital has been collected and shipped out, nevertheless: ginseng, galax, and ghost stories; ballads, baskets and bawdy lore; jokes and Jack tales; fiddle and banjo tunes, quilts and pots and chairs.

Over the years, as we all know, such cultural capital has been peddled by middle-class magazines, record producers, film makers, and Park Service trinket shops.8 It has boosted the fortunes of political candidates, political parties from the Republicans to the Communists, and Protestant missions all over. It has drawn audiences for radio preachers and television evangelists, and helped to sell Crazy Water Crystals and Peruna, JFG coffee and Martha White flour, baby chicks and insurance, song books and even autographed pictures of Jesus Christ. It has been grist for the mills of serious (if chauvinistic) ballad collectors like Cecil Sharp, Jack Tale-telling or ballad warbling charlatans like Richard Chase and John Jacob Niles, New York concert singers like Josephine McGill, racist ideologues like the White Top Folk Festival’s John Powell, and elite composers like Aaron Copeland. And of course it has swelled the catalog of many a museum and archive.

Fortunately, unlike Nicaraguan stone monuments or burial urns, at least some of our cultural capital—songs and stories, jokes and language—perennially renews itself. We have also created some of our own museums and archives for local people to study and learn from, and some film and recording companies are representing Appalachian culture in thoughtful and honest ways.

These developments are encouraging, but some of the complexities of using cultural capital for political purposes nevertheless continue to perplex us. When we are analyzing how others use it for reactionary political purposes, we do pretty well; stereotypes we understand. But when we try to marshall our cultural capital for progressive purposes, we do less well. Too often we find ourselves making rather palpably romantic arguments, generalizing somewhat recklessly, and excusing things not easily excusable.

Why is this the case? I think the difference has to do with some of the intractable structural perils of historical and cultural revisionism. In this regard, some aspects of the recently deposed Sandinista government’s cultural policies are as suggestive as the aggressive digging and hauling of cultural artifacts in the nineteenth century.

The Perils of Cultural Revisionism

During their turbulent decade in power, the Sandinistas labored to comprehend Nicaragua’s cultural history, assess the cultural impact of a century of North American cultural intervention, design a new cultural strategy, build new cultural institutions, and integrate the whole project with the larger process of national reconstruction.9

I lack the space here to even sketch the barest outline of the process, but were I to do so, a lot of it would seem very familiar to you. I would talk about the role of mainstream culture in maintaining quiescence and domination; the criticism of cultural stereotypes; the revitalization of local cultural resources; the documentation of oral traditions; the creation of new museums and archives; the publication of new magazines, newspapers and journals; the staging of cultural competitions and festivals; the production of films, phonograph records, and radio and television programs; and new modes of expression in

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poetry, fiction, dance and drama.

Not everything the Sandinistas did was as historically and culturally grounded as it should have been; not everyone who was involved performed as well as they should have performed. There were losses and obfuscations as well as gains and clarifications. Some of it worked and some of it didn’t; some of it was brilliant and some of it was ill-considered. Some of it was politically clear and honest, and some of it was confused and dishonest. But when all was said and done, the country was at least slightly more culturally self-conscious, self-confident, and self-directing than it had been before. Although impeded early in its course by the budgetary pressures and social chaos of the contra war, and finally terminated by the US-financed installation of the current reactionary government, that decade-long process stimulated much positive ferment in Nicaraguan cultural and political life.10

For the moment, however, I want to think about a few of the structural problems of this enterprise, rather than any of its specific gains or losses. To those of us who worry ourselves over the Appalachian region, those problems are suggestive. I will call them (hang in, and I will eventually explain these admittedly somewhat cumbersome terms) the limits of counterpositions, the instrumentalization of the cultural past, and the recalcitrance of deep cultural structures.11 One at a time, now.

The limits of counterpositions: If the values one espouses are humane, there is something inherently clarifying, energizing, and empowering about taking a counterposition—about saying , it was not that way, but this way, and it is going to be another way in the future. Eastern Kentucky widow Ollie Combs didn’t speak Spanish, but she knew as well how to say ¡no pasarán! (They shall not pass) with her body in front of coal company bulldozers as Nicaraguan men and women did with their homemade weapons in front of Somoza’s tanks, and as they did later against Reagan’s contras.12 Such counterpositions are both noble and ennobling, wherever they are taken.

And yet as I watched and listened in Nicaragua, I kept being reminded of old arguments I used to make at meetings in the mountains. More than once I had made myself unpopular by arguing that explanations of oppression which locate causes solely outside are more seductively attractive than those which locate at least some of them inside. For all the very real pain of being a victim, there is something subliminally delicious and self-justifying about feeling oneself to be one, and the bonding among sufferers that arises out of such feelings has its costs as well as its benefits. If victimizing and blaming the victim are perennial dangers, so are collaboration and self-victimization. Such are the dangers of counterpositions. “Nosotros nicaragüenses,” my Managua taxi driver cautioned me over and over, “somos mentirosos” (We Nicaraguans are liars). He was, I slowly discovered, neither wholly correct nor (alas) wholly incorrect

Instrumentalizing the cultural past: Whatever the risks of counterpositions, the Sandinistas faced not only a Herculean task of physical and economic reconstruction, but also a psychological and cultural one. For that, history had to be recovered, reinterpreted, and mobilized. After more than a hundred years of systematic cultural intervention from North America and Europe, and nearly a half-century of the supine cultural sycophancy of the Somoza regime, it was imperative to recover the best of Nicaragua’s own cultural past and to marshall it in the larger process of reconstruction. That is, to instrumentalize it. And therein lay both the central challenge and the greatest danger.

There is nothing inherently wrong with instrumentalizing the past; ethical and political issues arise only with respect to the ends for which the instrumentalizing is being done. In any case, it is almost inevitable that a past recovered will be a past instrumentalized, and one might even argue that there is no other equally compelling reason to recover it. In the worst cases, the past is recovered (hence instrumentalized) to fabricate, erase, mislead, confuse, and dominate. In the best cases, we recover it to delight, to admonish, to

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remind, to instruct, to guide. But even then there are costs and dangers of doing so, and they arise because it is so much easier—at least in the short run—to instrumentalize a neat, essentialized and romanticized past than to instrumentalize a messy and contradictory one. And to the extent that we allow ourselves to be guided by a romanticized past we will find ourselves misguided.

Thus, to take a single example, the moment of the cultural-political past which most fascinated the Sandinistas was the late 1920s. At that moment, they argued, a unitedly anti-imperialistic Nicaragua, galvanized by General Sandino and relying upon moral superiority, native cunning and homemade weapons, defeated the technologically superior, air-borne, blue-eyed Marine Corps devils from the North.

Much of this counter-narrative was true: Sandino and his “crazy little army” lived and fought valiantly, and evidence of yankee devilment was easy enough to come by. But it was also pretty clearly not true that Sandino was either the Marxist revolutionary or the complete moral paragon the Sandinistas held him up to be.13

Nor was he the hero of all the downtrodden of Nicaragua. Indeed on the Atlantic Coast—a part of their country about which most of the latter-day Sandinistas knew next to nothing—Sandino was more likely to be either unknown or blamed for the economic collapse of the early 1930s.

For this reason and others, the latter-day Sandinistas—at least early in the post-Somoza era—experienced endless culturally-based political difficulty with the Miskito coast. Worse yet, some aspects of their political-cultural-historical paradigm frustrated and delayed their understanding of what the problem was. Meanwhile, the limitlessly cynical Reaganistas—as ideological heirs of the reactionary U.S. officials who had dismissed Sandino as a mere “bandit” in the 1920s—mercilessly manipulated the Sandinistas’ befuddlement as the contra war escalated.14

Like the Sandinistas, we in Appalachia have spent a number of years now recovering and re-instrumentalizing a cultural past that had been used so many times before, by so many, for so many purposes. So far, so good. But like the Sandinistas, we have romanticized as well. And to the extent that that is true, we complicate the work that still lies ahead.

Why? Perhaps most of all because it dulls our awareness of what I’ll call the recalcitrance of deep cultural structures. Maybe another little Sandinista analogy will help explain what I mean.

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Cultural recalcitrance: The Sandinista revolution was the darling of the global left—not without reason—and its revitalized culture was certainly one of the most marketable things it had going for it. Clad in white cotona and black beret, Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal jetted over the world talking of a new culture that would be revolutionary, national, anti-imperialistic, and popular. He enchanted people with the primitive paintings of Solentiname and the poetry of the poetry workshops.15 The brothers Mejía-Godoy took their dynamic musical groups everywhere, and their rendition of the hauntingly simple melody “Nicaragua, Nicaragüita” became the unofficial national anthem. In post-Somoza Nicaragua, cultural energy literally poured out in song, in dance, in film, in museums, and in lucid, powerful, and passionate poetry. For a while it looked as if the wave of political-cultural transformation and renewal would make anything possible.

As they say in Spanish, hubiera sido tan agradable (it would have been so nice). But policy has its limits, and sometimes those limits are severe. However hidden by the majestically breaking waves of change, those limits—like long-wave undercurrents—were thrust to the surface by some treacherous reefs and shoals of cultural history and structure. Some of them, surviving from the particularities of the Spanish colonial period, have no counterparts in the southern mountains. But others are worth looking out for. I will chart but one of several that come easily to mind. It is the problem of gender.

However much men stood to gain by a real revolution in Nicaragua, women stood to gain more because their oppression was more severe. And so women threw themselves into the revolutionary process with astounding dedication, courage, and effect.

Some stayed behind and kept the kids clean and fed, as women customarily had done. Some capitalized on traditional stereotypes to work underground as runners of supplies, messages, and arms. But vast numbers took up arms themselves, fighting valiantly beside the men. Eventually women constituted about a third of the entire fighting force, and some rose to command units before their twentieth birthdays.16

All along, urged forward by emerging women’s organizations, the Sandinistas proclaimed total gender equality as official policy. The new post-macho man was to be a key to the new society.

A whole string of laws were passed to implement the new policy on women.17 Gender issues became a focus of special attention in the writing of the new constitution.18 A few things actually changed, but much did not. And some of it, the women said, got worse—such as physical violence and the sexual double standard.

What was happening was that revolutionary resolve and official policy were colliding with centuries-deep layers of stubbornly recalcitrant machismo which post-revolutionary narratives of the past could not admit. That recalcitrance was easily traceable all the way back to before the conquest, and it had been repeatedly transformed and newly reinforced in every decade since. It was central to the elite patriarchy in nineteenth-century Nicaragua. It is ubiquitous in the twentieth, and remained embarrassingly evident even in Daniel Ortega’s final election campaign against Violeta Chamorro, when some Sandinista women wore “Daniel is my gamecock” T-shirts, and women who supported Chamorro but also unexpectedly favored abortion rights clashed from time to time with Sandinista women who opposed them.19

What does this have to do with Appalachia? It suggests to me, at least that we need to be very cautious in our expectations about cultural change, no matter how auspicious the policy context. It also implies that deep internal cultural contradictions deserve at least as much attention as do structures of external exploitation and domination, real and onerous as they are. For unless those internal structural contradictions are identified, addressed, and dealt with, whatever else we do is likely to have far less impact than it needs to. And there are a God’s plenty of contradictions in Appalachia and throughout our beloved southland.

Despite every political preference I have, every mountain-born-and-bred loyalty in my heart and body, I have

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been driven by all I have seen and read and learned these twenty-odd years to consider the terrifying possibility that some of the bedrock features of culture in the mountains are also its most recalcitrantly problematic substructures. My list of such features is short, and shares nothing, I hope, with those justly reviled ones of the local colorists and feud-fascinated journalists, or with those of Jack Weller.20 I beg you to consider it: a profoundly sexist gender system, religious and political fundamentalism, distrust of a broad social contract, and an embarrassingly mainstream entrapment in a free enterprise paradigm.

In sum, then, my argument is that cultural capital is a much-coveted political resource; that counterpositions, while useful and exciting, have their limits; that instrumentalizing the past is necessary but problematic; and that some self-critical introspection about those features of the culture that most stubbornly resist change is long overdue. These facts—if such they are—are critically important because from here on things are going to get much rougher.

And where is it we have yet to go? We each have our own priorities. In closing I will mention a couple of my own.

Beyond Coterie Politics

So much lately has conspired to make me think about how to make what we have learned these last years available and meaningful to ordinary people—to those whose votes were and are so avidly sought not only by the George Bushes and their ilk, but increasingly by the truly psychopathic Helmses, Buchanans and Dukes. We have learned how to talk to each other; the urgent need now is to synthesize a politics that will make sense—for good reasons—to your average insurance salesman, golfer, or computer programmer, and also to my Managua taxi driver who (besides telling me Nicaraguans were liars) kept assuring me that the country had no problems another invasion of the U.S. Marines couldn’t cure.

Whatever else is not clear these days, it seems to me, it is clear that both public political discourse and popular political conthat my politics were about as correct as it was possible for them to get. Shortly after I arrived, I was standing on a Managua street photographing a revolutionary mural someone had painted on a long fence around some ruins from the earthquake. Suddenly I realized that a group of women were shouting at me from across the street that that art was not their art, that it most emphatically did not represent their views, and that above all I should not use the photograph later to show folks at home that all Nicaraguans were united in Sandinista solidarity. Sometimes I think that a lot of our work is like that mural: colorful, dramatic and politically correct, but not persuasive to most people.

Which leads me to my second little incident. On a bitter-cold night this past winter I joined hundreds of students and townspeople jammed into the biggest auditorium on the UNC campus to hear Noam Chomsky say

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the New World Order is just the Old World Order only worse. At one level the scene was inspiriting and reassuring; somebody was finally talking sense, calling a spade a spade, tracing critical relationships and sequences, blowing covers that were begging to be blown. The longer I sat there, though, the more I felt that it was too easy. There probably weren’t three dozen people in that audience who hadn’t arrived already sure that Chomsky was right, and there weren’t enough votes there even to carry northern Orange County for decent, black, and by no means radical Harvey Gantt against arch-cretin Jesse Helms.

What I think this means is that the most urgent political necessity that faces us is to transform some of our most cherished political rhetorics and paradigms of political action—to break out from the already committed coteries to form some progressive new majority.

Far better than the left, it seems to me, the Reagans, Bushes, Dukes and Buchanans have assessed where masses of people are in their heads, and have opened political and semantic paths leading there. Having done so, they have effectively captured the political discourse, and are speaking to people’s worst fears and most virulent prejudices. They have, in a word, tapped into the most troublesome of the deep structures I have been talking about—fear, anger, suspicion, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia—and have mobilized them in the service of right-wing cynicism, greed, hostility, arrogance and all the rest.

As surely as machismo stalked the Sandinista revolution, the problematic deep structures of culture in Appalachia, in the Piedmont, in the Delta, and across our land will continue to impel our slide into fascist politics if they are not addressed far more effectively than they have been or have been recently.

We simply must address them; we are doing neither ourselves nor anyone a service by pretending they are not there. For far too long, the Democrats tried desperately to use the discourse of the right to convey a message of the (barely) center-left.

It was very late in the most recent electoral game before it dawned on at least a few of them (such as Wofford in Pennsylvania) that that was a hopelessly doomed strategy. And even at their best, Clinton and Gore still insisted upon trying to maneuver their buses along the rotten and creaky one-lane bridge of free enterprise, victim-blaming workfare, “strong defense,” and Norman Rockwell family values.

So how might we address them in the mountains (and elsewhere in the south)? First by shifting some of our analysis away from the incontrovertible historical and present realities of exploitation from outside, and toward the contradictory dialectics of life inside. For instrumental purposes, much of our history is useful and inspiriting, but much of it is not and the sooner we face that, the better.21

If we can negotiate such a shift, we must then make what we perceive and choose to say accessible and persuasive to somebody besides readers of Ms. magazine, The Nation, Radical History Review, the trendiest postmodernist journal, or, for that matter, Southern Changes. The troublesome truth is that there is a vast Miskito coast full of folks out there to whom our political heroes are either unknown or are not heroes at all, to whom the most transparent right-wing lie really does seem like an adequate explanation of the way things are and ought to be, and to whom our accustomed rhetoric therefore neither appeals nor is accessible.

And finally, partly to buttress ourselves against terminal depression in the midst of such psychic and political trials, we must find a language and a political strategy that will locate, excavate and mobilize countervailing resources of decency, integrity, generosity, and a larger sense of the common good.

While we restrategize and steel ourselves for facing some things we’d rather not face, we must figure out how to tap the veins of cultural energy still buried and waiting in people’s heads, how to mobilize the humane cultural stuff still scattered across the landscape, how to marshall the bits of serviceable cultural capital still credited to our account, and even that which has been carried off some where else and posted to somebody else’s account-like so many Jack Tales, fiddle tunes, butter churns or Tom Dooleys.

David Whisnant teaches Latin American and Cultural StudiesStudeis [sic] at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book, Beautiful and Pleasant Land: Perspectives on the Politics of Culture in NicaraguaNicaraqua [sic] , is forthcoming from UNC Press.

Notes

1. E. Bradford Burns, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 1798-1858 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 147. This paper was originally prepared as the keynote address to the Appalachian Studies Association, Asheville, North Carolina, March 20-22, 1992.

2. Sandino’s mythical-real hideout at El Chipote—atop a 5,000-foot mountain, was the target of merciless bombing attacks by U.S. Marine Corps planes. See Neill Macaulay, The Sandino Affair (1967; rev. ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), pp. 69, 87-90, 96, 103f. Rubén Darío (1867-1916) was Nicaragua’s best known writer, and a frequent critic of U.S. imperialism. Pablo Antonio Cuadra (b. 1912) is the author of the many times reprinted El Nicaragüense [The Nicaraguan]. Pedro Joaquín Chamorro was the fearlessly anti-Somoza editor of La Prensa during the 1970s; his assassination by pro-Somoza partisans in January, 1978 catalyzed the final FSLN drive against the regime. The Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers (ASTC; Asociación Sandinista de Trabajadores Culturales) was an aggregation of poets, musicians, graphic artists, and other artists united to relate cultural production to the larger task of social and political transformation after 1979. José Coronel Urtecho (b. 1906) is the dean of Nicaraguan writers, and has long been pre-occupied with the cultural (especially literary) interaction between Nicaragua and the United States.

3. “Letting Loose of liberalism: Some Thoughts on Cultural Work and the Limits of Polite Discourse,” Southern Changes 12 (August 1990):1-11.

4. David I. Folkman, Jr., The Nicaraguan Route (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1972), pp. 52 and 44.

5. “Developments in the Appalachian Identity Movement: All Is Process,” Appalachian Journal 8 (Autumn 1980):41-47.

6. John C.C. Mayo was an early twentieth century Kentucky coal baron; Katherine Pettit founded the Hindman Settlement School. Caciques were the native leaders of Indian communities in pre-conquest Nicaragua. Encomenderos were those to whom the Spanish crown gave the right to extract labor and tribute from specified groups of Indians. León and Granada, the principal cities on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast, are the historical centers of (respectively) the Liberals and the Conservatives. Carlos Fonseca, one of the founders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), was killed by Somoza’s National Guard in 1976. Poet and political theorist Ricardo Morales Avilés was also murdered by the Somoza regime. Somocistas were supporters of the regime of Anastasio Somoza García and his two sons (1936-1979); members of the FSLN and their supporters in the insurrection against the Somoza regime (1961-1979) were popularly known as Sandinistas.

7. For some of this history, see Douglas Cole, Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985; and Janet Greenfield, The Return of Cultural Treasures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

8. For two studies of the expropriation of cultural capital, see Jean Haskell Speer, “Commodifying Culture: Selling the Stories of Appalachian America” in Hellmut Geissner, On Narratives (Frankfurt: Scriptor, 1987), pp. 56-73 and “Hillbilly Sold Here: Appalachian Folk Culture and Parkway Tourism” in Parkways: Past, Present and Future (Boone: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1989).

9. My preliminary essay, “Sandinista Cultural Policy: Notes Toward an Analysis in Historical Context,” may be found in R. Lee Woodward, Jr. (ed.), Central America: Historical Perspectives on the Contemporary Crises (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 169-92. I have looked at another piece of the puzzle in “Rubén Darío as Focal Cultural Figure in Nicaragua: The Political Uses of Cultural Capital,” Latin American Research Review 27 (Fall 1992):7-49. My longer study, Beautiful and Pleasant Land: Perspectives on the Politics of Culture in Nicaragua, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press.

10. For a discussion of the specifically literary aspects of that ferment, see Margaret Randall, Risking a Somersault in the Air: Conversations with Nicaraguan Writers (San Francisco: Solidarity Publications, 1984); Steven White (ed.), Culture and Politics in Nicaragua: Testimonies of Poets and Writers (New York: Lumen Books, 1986); and John Beverley and Marc Zimmermann, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

11. I borrow the phrase “the limits of counterpositions” from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), p. 78.

12. Along with that of Uncle Dan Gibson, the widow Combs’ courageous action led to the founding of the militant Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People, and thence to the passage of the first serious anti-stripmining legislation by the Kentucky legislature. See Loyal Jones, “Mrs. Combs and the Bulldozers,” Katallagete, Summer 1966, pp. 18-24 and “Old Time Baptists and Mainline Christianity” in J.W. Williamson (ed.), An Appalachian Symposium (Boone: Appalachian State University Press, 1977), p. 128.

13. The standard history of the Sandino episode is Macaulay, The Sandino Affair, but the most nuanced reading of Sandino’s thought is Donald C. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

14. On these aspects of the Contra war, see Martin Diskin, “The Manipulation of Indigenous Struggles” in Thomas W. Walker (ed.), Reagan Versus the Sandinistas: The Undeclared War on Nicaragua (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), pp. 80-96.

15. A useful compendium of the Sandinistas’ ideas about culture and cultural policy—including several of Cardenal’s essays—may be found in Hacia una política cultural de la Revolución Popular Sandinista (Managua: Ministerio de Cultura, 1982). More accessible (in English) is Steven White (ed.), Culture Politics in Nicaragua: Testimony of Poets and Writers (New York: Lumen Books, 1986).

16. For engaging accounts of some of the young women’s experience as combatants and in other supportive roles, see Margaret Randall, Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1981).

17. On women’s organizations, see for example Gary Ruchwarger, “The Liberation of Women: AMNLAE” in People in Power: Forging a Grassroots Democracy in Nicaragua (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1987), pp. 187-217.

18. See Martha I. Morgan, “Founding Mothers: Women’s Voices and Stories in the 1987 Nicaraguan Constitution,” Boston University Law Review 70 (January 1990):1-107.

19. The fullest analysis of the pattern in the nineteenth century is E. Bradford Burns, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 1798-1858 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). For an example from among the Sandinistas themselves, see Omar Cabezas, Fire From the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista (New York: New American Library, 1985).

20. Weller’s Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965) was a classic victim-blaming account of Appalachian experience.

21. I take these to be some of the central lessons of some excellent recent books on Appalachia: Altina Waller’s Feud: Hatfields, McCoys and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), Rodger Cunningham’s Apples on the Flood: The Southern Mountain Experience (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), and Stephen Foster’s The Past Is Another Country: Representation, Historical Consciousness and Resistance in the Blue Ridge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

Gone Country: Cecelia Tichi and the Politics of Writing About Country Music

David E. Whisnant — Wed, 01 Mar 1995 05:00:02 +0000

Gone Country: Cecelia Tichi and the Politics of Writing About Country Music

By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 17, No. 1, 1995 pp. 4-10

Cecelia Tichi, High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. xiii, 318 pp., with 23-track CD. $39.95.

For a long time I have said, only half-jokingly, that the millennium cannot not come until everybody listens to and plays country music. And since so little serious attention was paid to it before about 1965, I usually welcome each new book–from the slick “as told to” autobiographies and Opryland coffee table books to the scholarly biographies and analytical studies. Even the most superficial books contain some useful information, and the best deepen our understanding of and commitment to the music. Having written some books myself, I am also aware of what a taxing labor of love it is, and of how hopeful and vulnerable one feels once the finished product is out there.

At the same time, the politics of writing about country music are at least as complicated as the politics of the music itself. This is especially so in the current environment of country chic (“gone country, look at them boots”) , cultural studies, and blandly tolerant multiculturalism, all of which tend to make country music both more legitimate in the academy and more lucrative in the market-place. So if one sets out to write a book about country music, it behooves one to be careful, and modest in one’s claims. But Cecilia Tichi has gone country full-speed ahead, with nary a look back and (one judges) nary a doubt about her competence to bring heretofore unheard-of insight to the subject, never mind that until seven years ago her ignorance of country music was (as she admits) “oceanic” (p. viii).

Well, seven years is quite a spell, actually, and one can learn a lot in such a time. So what has she learned? What does she have to say that is new, useful, insightful or important about country music? Tichi’s own estimate is that she has in a single stroke boldly thrust herself into the scholarly vanguard, her timid predecessors having shunned a music “linked to white poverty–white trash’–and racial oppressiveness” for fear of being “found guilty by association.”1Perhaps only a scholar/teacher of American literature” such as herself, she says, “someone steeped in the standard or canonical American texts year in and year out, then transported to Nashville . . . and immersed for five years in its musical traditions, [could] see the connections developed in High Lonesome” between Dolly and Ralph [Waldo Emerson], Hank and Walt [Whitman], and Emmylou and Mark [Twain]–in a word, between low country and high culture (p. x).

As Tichi claimed to an interviewer from the Cultural Studies Times, not only is this virtually the first book to do with country music what must be done in order for us mere listeners to truly understand it, but it is also an epochal event in the history of publishing on any subject. By the middle of the twenty-first century, she says, a book like High Lonesome, combining print, photos, and “an audio CD” will be seen “as an important transition between the traditional book and the computerized one, a way-station between Gutenberg and Bill Gates.”2

Well, now, as my favorite down-home comic Jeff Foxworthy says, “Wait just a damn minute!” These are some pretty high falutin’ claims: a single book jerks the timid academics up by their collars, puts Hank in touch with Walt and Dolly in touch with Ralph (what one wouldn’t give to see that!), builds a way-station between Gutenberg and Gates, and establishes belatedly but once and for all that country music is really about the Great Themes of American Literature and Art. Now, thank God, the rest of us can go on liking it not only without being secretly ashamed of ourselves, but also being both clued in and logged on.

Some critics have agreed. In a Christmas Day review in my hometown Raleigh (NC) News and Observer, Frye Gaillard praised Tichi as an astute scholar and a “sharp-eyed student of American culture” who “sees country in all its breadth” and “illuminates the strains and contradictions of our culture.” Instead of being the book’s merits, however, these are in fact precisely its major problems: its thin scholarship, its narrowness, its pretentious globalizing of country music into “American” music, and its very tentative grasp of the “strains and contradictions” within the larger culture.

As for scholarship, Tichi apparently hasn’t done much on country music itself. Her bibliography includes a total of seven of the dozens of serious scholarly books on country music of the past several decades (such as–just for starters–those in the University of Illinois Press’s Music in American Life Series), and–except for Doug Green’s long Journal of Country Music (1978) piece on singing cowboys–no serious journal articles out of the hundreds now available. A total of five interviews are listed (Barry Tashian, Holly Tashian, Patsy Montana, Rodney Crowell, Richard Bennett), although several more appear to have been conducted. Hence what Tichi presents as nothing less than a paradigm-challenging set of “new ideas about cultural relations” (p.6) turns out to be something considerably less than new–and scarcely even tenable–to anyone who has read much about or listened to much country music.

Breadth? High Lonesome is essentially ahistorical in its approach and narrow in its coverage. To Tichi, “country music” is country music is country music–in all times and places, by all performers, regardless of subgenre–and can be endlessly generalized about. Tichi’s grasp on either the contributing musical streams (traditional or commercial) or regional cultural differences is minimal. To her, late nineteenth century fiddlers (p. 151) fall neither less nor differently within the rubric than do Johnny Cash or opera singer gone country Kathy Chiavola. A thoughtful comparison between Chiavola in the nineties and Vernon Dalhart in the twenties might have been illuminating, but no such comparison is forthcoming.

This book, it turns out, is for all practical purposes not about the complex past and present of country music at all, but about Cecelia Tichi’s short-term, mostly serendipitous, and above all personal encounter with some bits of it–mainly, it appears, the Tashians and Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, and Dolly Parton. The latter three, she asserts, “are a pivot to the past and a touch-stone for the present and future of country music” (p. 18). Harris figures most prominently of all: there are at least seven photographs of her (pp. 14, 96, 97 [two photos], 164, 166). Moreover, Tichi’s 184-item discography (pp.279-84) includes one song each by Fiddlin’ John Carson, George Jones, Kitty Wells, and Tom T. Hall, two each by the Carter family, Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe, three by Johnny Cash, four by Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, a half-dozen or so each by Gene Autry, Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, nine or ten each by Dolly Parton and Rodney Crowell, and twenty-six [sic] by Emmylou Harris.

The best of the book is to be found in its final two chapters, which contain a long interview with Rodney Crowell and some thoughtful profiles of a couple of young producers (Mike Lawler and Richard Bennett), several young newcomers (opera singer Kathy Chiavola, classical violinist Andrea Zonn, bluegrass fiddler Laurie Lewis), and the ever-present Tashians. Some friend or colleague of Tichi’s could have done her a favor by advising her to focus her book on such materials–where, it appears, she might actually have constructed a sustainable argument and made a substantial fresh contribution. Such advice might have (mercifully) prevented her from leaping to the embarrassingly premature conclusion that it was up to her to explain in some all-inclusive way what she fancied had never before been dreamt of in anybody’s country music philosophy.

But one must take the book as it stands. Tichi’s principal thesis is that, properly understood, country music is national music, a quintessentially American music too long neglected by those whose business it is to know and understand things. The book’s epigraph comes from Chet Atkins: “Country music is our heritage. They oughta teach it in the schools.” Well, calling country music “our heritage” in any global or inclusive way is highly problematic, even if Chet himself did it. The assertion is reminiscent of the movement in Congress some years ago to declare square dance the “American national dance.” Understandably, a lot of blacks, Jews, Native Americans, and other cultural subgroups not accustomed to bedecking themselves in checked shirts and crinolines begged to differ. Country music is a very important part of our national experience, to be sure, and one worth taking seriously. But the leap from there to globalizing it as “our [national] heritage” is a long and risky one, and the means Tichi chose to do it riskier still.

What are the means? Logically, the formula is straight-forward: The term “country” in country music, she asserts, “is synonymous with nation” (p. 1; an assertion in support of which she would be hard pressed to offer one shred of evidence) . This country/national music, like the Best of Our Literature and Art, deals with the Great Themes of Our National Experience (home, the road, loneliness, the West, hillbillies, the spiritual journey, and nature). The music deserves, consequently, to be taken

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as seriously as the standard canonical works, to which it has heretofore not been (properly) understood to bear such a striking resemblance.

Practically, what happens in the book is that Tichi explores a long series of what she considers to be parallels (identities, she usually asserts) between selected themes of country songs (“country” in her indiscriminate, globalized sense) and those of canonical works: this, that, or the other Great Theme in this, that, or the other country song and canonical work (novel, story, painting, poem, statue, whatever). In her search for parallels, Tichi invokes not only the canonical Great Artists one might most expect (Whitman, Sherwood Anderson, Currier and Ives, Edward Hopper–though not Charles Ives, oddly enough), but also a raft of more esoteric and elite others presumably unfamiliar to the average philistine listener (Wallace Stevens, Pablo Picasso, Giacomo Puccini, Maria Callas, Ruggiero Leoncavallo).

But alas, there are serious problems both with this logic, and with how it gets implemented in the book. One persistent problem is Tichi’s apparent unfamiliarity with musical analysis in general. A glaring example is her “explanation” of the “Nashville number system” used to designate chord progressions (p. xi). Far from having anything in particular to do with Nashville, however, that notational system has been widely used in musical analysis at least since the eighteenth century.3 Other terminological problems abound: “Wayfaring Stranger” is “a traditional country-folk song” (p. 173); Hazel Dickens belongs to “the so-called ‘primitive’ country-folk tradition of singers” (p. 215), and so on. Even Tichi’s title itself is misleading: in its conventional usage, “high lonesome” has referred specifically to a certain vocal style usually thought of–appropriately or not–as Appalachian (as in John Cohen’s film on Roscoe Holcomb); more loosely, it has been applied to bluegrass vocal style. Using it as Tichi does to apply to country music in general conflates vocal style with overall musical style and repertoire, and elides the enormous differences one hears (vocally and otherwise) between Bill Monroe and Jim Reeves, Molly O’Day and Nanci Griffith, and countless other individuals, styles, and subgenres one might easily name.

However confused and confusing the terminology, three highly questionable assumptions lie at the base of the book’s many problems: (1) the repeated occurrence of a particular motif in country music is evidence that the music is in some deep, pervasive way “about” that motif, and that whenever and wherever the motif occurs, it is treated in the same highly predictable way; (2) if the same root motif (home, road) appears in two cultural artifacts, it means the same thing in both; and (3) the presence in country music of a set of repeated themes also prominent in canonical works certifies it as “our national music.”

The first of these assumptions seduces Tichi into innumerable facile and misleading generalizations about country music’s complex past and present, and blinds her to the nuances and contradictions wherein much of its expressive interest and power lie. When one reads, for example, of Merle Haggard “with his raw ballads of drifting, drinking, and chip-on-the-shoulder individualism” (p. 12), one wonders whether this is a different Merle Haggard from the one who sings “Hungry Eyes”

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and “The Way I Am.”

The second assumption drives Tichi’s dubious project of rehabilitating country music by promoting it to canonical status and by elevating the mere existence of a superficial similarity above the far more important issue of how any particular work (canonical or not) treats any particular motif or theme. And the third assumption is based on a concept of “national” experience long since rendered useless by careful analyses of regional, gender, racial, class, and occupational differences within the body politic.

So how does this scheme work out, chapter by chapter? Limitations of space demand that a few examples stand for a host of problems. Perhaps the most pervasive and fatal problem is that of conflation: to Tichi, a home is a home is a home, whether it is “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane,” “This Ole House,” “Home On the Range,” or Tom T. Hall’s “Homecoming” (pp. 20-25); all are grist for generalizations about “home songs in country music,” for which Tichi invokes Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House as the paradigm (pp. 32-35, 79-81) . Thus when Tichi asserts that in country music (as in the culture generally) the “mythic American home, is fixed and unchanging” (p. 45), one wonders what happened to “The Grand Tour,” “Yard Sale,” or “Pretty House for Sale.”

Similarly, one road is as good a comparative example as another for representing your “typical country music road song” (p. 54): the National Road, the Chisholm trail, Route 66, the camino real, the open ocean of Moby-Dick, Huck Finn rafting on the river (or slaves sold down it), the Trail of Tears (I am not making this up), and the road Frederick Douglass took away from slavery on the eastern shore of Maryland (pp. 58, 61, 63, 70, 71). Within such an analytical framework, Hank Williams “dies on the road to Canton and is reincarnated on the Western road of the cattle drives” (p. 69), if you can believe that.

In the same way, when you get right down to it, all loneliness is pretty much the same–to the Carter Family, to Jimmie Rodgers, to Hank Williams, to all and sundry. Thus Tichi’s “high lonesome” chapter–far from illuminating anything about how particular country artists or songs have made particular statements about particular kinds or states of loneliness–is about how the generic loneliness in generic country music is like the generic loneliness of a putatively American national character (p. 102).

These problems of conflation and generalization persist throughout the book. Tichi’s discussion of the “wild wild West” is nearly completely ahistorical both with regard to the West itself and with regard to country music (again, undifferentiated as to period, performer, or subgenre). Her chapter on the West claims that “From this music’s earliest years, country artists embraced the West in song” (pp. 104, 107). Titles, images and brief phrases intended to substantiate her global assertion tumble in undifferentiated profusion; only Tex Ritter’s “High Noon” and Willie Nelson’s “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” receive more than cursory mention. It is as if the complex changes one in fact observes in moving from Jule Lane Allen through Gene Autry to the Girls of the Golden West and on to

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Kinky Friedman’s “Ride ’em Jewboy,” Michael Martin Murphy’s “Cosmic Cowboy” and the current “hat acts” did not exist. The bulk of the chapter focuses, it turns out, not on country music at all (however defined), but on Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self Reliance,” and Gary Cooper’s performance in High Noon.

Thus when Tichi attempts to generalize from “American” culture to country music, the central problem is that country music gets blanded out–generic-ed, if I may be permitted the term. But when in her newfound enthusiasm she generalizes back from her generic country mu-sic to the larger culture, yet other serious problems emerge. Discussing loneliness, for example, she asserts that not only is country music “about” it, but that outside the music, the “subject appears muted, submerged, oblique, absent outright. Print texts and visual arts barely seem to register the lonely state of mind.” A “taboo of denial” surrounds the topic; it is “muted, half-hidden, suppressed, treated like a kind of skeleton in the American closet.” Fortunately, however, country “owns” the theme, which it “has a special cultural license” to treat. Country is a “reservoir for the expression of the loneliness of this nation,” a “secret map” to such a state of mind(pp. 82-87). There is no other way to say it: this is arrant nonsense. Certainly such assertions would come as a great surprise to a host of American writers, from Melville (Ishmael and Bartleby, pre-eminently) through Poe and Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wolfe’s Eugene Gant (“Lost, oh lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost come back again!”) and onward.4

But conflation and insupportable generalization are not the only problems. When the evidence she needs is not available, Tichi sometimes fabricates it. She argues, for example, that Hank Williams shows “a reluctance to say outright how profound is the cost of loneliness,” and that his listeners collude with him “not to state outright what both know.” Thus in “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “cry is a code word … [that] drives the real meaning into hiding.” So first-time listeners (who “know the essential word is die“) hear “cry” as “die” (p. 101) . Nonsense. In the first place, “die” is clearly articulated two lines earlier (“When leaves begin to die”) and the subsequent “could cry” alliteration is perfectly clear. Moreover, if loneliness and its costs are not overt and explicit in Hank Williams, then nothing is. Thus, what Tichi presents to us as dazzling insight comes off as considerably less than that.

The combination of conflation, insupportable generalization, and outright fabrication that characterizes much of Tichi’s book reaches its apogee in her discussion of the “red red rose” motif/theme. In what she implies is an uncommonly illuminative insight, she asserts that the rose “can open up certain American public attitudes to-ward country music” (p. 133), helping us understand the culturally biased politics of its public reception. Specifically, we are given to understand, country music is “about” a “war of the roses”: the cultivated American beauty (of the Biltmore House and Gardens, say [pp. 131-32]) vs. the wild rose, which is the “floral symbol” of the hillbilly–ergo, the “hillbilly rose” which is the “central figure” in American “free wildness” (pp. 136-41). So it is Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter vs. Eddie Arnold’s “Bouquet of Roses,” Notre Dame’s rose window vs. Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, George Vanderbilt’s rose garden vs. Dolly’s dulcimer (p. 139).

Some pages of this, and one is impelled to say, “Come on, now!” In the first place, the history of the Appalachian region and its status as a complex image and symbol in American culture have been carefully re-researched and rewritten during the past thirty years, and so far as I know there is not one shred of evidence to support Tichi’s contention that the wild rose is even a widely recognized (to say nothing of the central) symbol of the hillbilly.5 In the second place, Tichi’s determination that it shall be so, regardless, leads her to force and even to fabricate evidence. Thus Sally Rose of Emmylou Harris’s Ballad of

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Sally Rose

becomes “the backwood . . . wild hillbilly Rose” (p. 158) despite the fact that the first stanza of the title song says she was born “in the Black Hills of South Dakota,” and nothing else on the album (save one reference to “the Shenandoah hills”) ever links her with anything specifically hillbilly.

Tichi handles some of her high-culture examples in a similarly high-handed way: comparing William Merrit Chase’s two paintings “Portrait of Miss Jessup” (cultivated roses on her dress) and “Carmencita” (wild roses dropped by her feet), she asserts that the protagonist of Bizet’s opera Carmen is “a hillbilly wild rose” (pp. 160-61). Never mind that Carmen has consistently been portrayed (and recognized) as a gypsy rather than a hillbilly–between which there are major and important differences–and that the Chase portrait of her looks like every gypsy (and no hillbilly) you ever saw.6 There is in fact no end to it: the rose on Emmylou Harris’s guitar marks her as “wild”–“Wild like Thoreau … Hillbilly wild” (p. 164). Emmylou as a wild rose? Thoreau as a hillbilly? Go figure.

There is more (in numerous aspects of her consideration of country as “nature’s music,” for example), but one wearies. Ultimately one wonders for whom this book was written. To anyone who knows much about country music, the bulk of it will seem silly (the admiring statement by my good friend, Country Music U.S.A. author Bill Malone, on the dust jacket to the contrary notwithstanding). To the New York sophisticates (like reviewer Nicholas Dawidoff), it “glitters like rhinestones with Ms. Tichi’s enthusiasm but is, alas, something of an Arkansas diamond in the reading”; its observations tend to be “mere bromides” (as in the long riff on roses). Ultimately it is “a bit pretentious–quite a sin when the subject is country music.” 7 Writing for a less high-toned audience in Time (July 25, 1994), Malcolm Jones, Jr. is a bit more sensitive to the cultural politics of hillbilly symbolism (the “only minority not protected by the bylaws of political correctness”) and country music (which he says “forfeited its soul” when it got rid of “rhinestone suits and beehive hairdos”). Nevertheless, he finds Tichi’s treatment “entirely too tasteful,” and says her book “raises the suspicion that country will not be done in by friends in low places but by new pals in high culture.” Why? Because in his view “a unique American art” of universal appeal like country music emerges only when somebody like Hank Williams can wed “guilty pleasures” to those “great themes” Tichi is interested in. So far, so good. But what is Jones’s notion of what country music ought to be doing? Mainly making sure that the idiom “never stray[s] from the rudiments of hillbilly songwriting.” In his view, maybe only Bill Monroe among them all retains “that old spit-in-your-eye hillbilly defiance” he contends is the essence of country music. Which, unfortunately, gets us exactly nowhere, since what appears to trouble Jones is precisely that he likes his hillbillies and misses them when they are (apparently) gone.

So where do we go from here to write about country music? We are now in at least the third, and maybe the fourth, wave of serious writing about it. In the late 1940s and 1950s pioneers like Archie Green, D. K. Wilgus, Bob Pinson, Eugene Earle and others compiled the first primitive discographies and bibliographies, put out the first newsletters, and wrote the first articles. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Bill Malone, Ed Kahn and others wrote the first serious articles, dissertations, and books, which concentrated mainly on laying out the historical narrative and pinning down crucial details. Still later came more specialized biographies and studies by Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann, Norm Cohen, Robert Coltman, Richard Peterson, Nolan Porterfield, Neil Rosenberg, Charles Townsend, Ivan Tribe, Charles Wolfe and many others. More recently, a few books and articles have begun to explore more conceptually sophisticated lines of analysis. Pre-eminent among them is Robert Cantwell’s Bluegrass Breakdown (1984), but younger scholars such as Mark Fenster, Aaron Fox, Richard Leppert, and George Lipsitz are also making major contributions.8 All of this constitutes an enormous gain, and much of it was achieved by people working nights after long days on unrelated jobs (Pinson, Green, Earle, and Cohen come especially to mind), or whose conventional academic departments (English, History, Anthropology) couldn’t understand why they would want to waste their time writing about country music.

But now we are in a new phase–in the era of fuzzy

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disciplinary boundaries in the university, cultural studies as a modish orientation for scholars, multiculturalism as a focus in the media, and (above all) everybody and his brother and sister going country (look at them boots). This is a situation both promising and fraught with some peril. Since some of the books that most need to be written to carry serious analysis of country music forward will be unlikely to find commercial publishers, university presses will be called upon to publish them, as they should be. With the notable exception of the University of Illinois Press (with their now extensive Music in American Life series), Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas, how-ever, university presses have thus far done relatively little with country music.

Unfortunately, the opening to do something significant comes just as the presses find themselves under increasing financial pressure from stingier and stingier state legislatures, smaller university subventions, and declining library sales. Consequently they are scrambling to find a few highly marketable books to pay the way for less marketable ones (North Carolina recently picked up some of the best-selling Foxfire books, for example).

As the economic situation for university presses worsens within the current political climate (as it inevitably will), the temptation with regard to books on country music will almost inevitably be to shape and position those books for a niche as money makers in the popular market. Duke University Press has already invited Tichi to edit a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on country music). To the extent that such pressures continue to operate and such choices continue to be made, serious work on country music will suffer. And for that, we will all be the losers.

One might reasonably infer that the handling of Tichi’s book by the University of North Carolina Press was perhaps conceived at least partly to position the Press in this new potential niche. It was in any case lavishly designed and produced, and is being aggressively promoted. In these straitened times, there are nevertheless nearly 140 color and black and white photos (all but three of the color ones also reproduced in black and white). Pages are generously-sized, margins are wide, and typography is elegant. For good measure, a CD is tucked into the back; it has “23 tracks,” we are promised–double the number on your usual run-of-the-mill CD.“9

To return to my opening point: I welcome serious attention to country music, from whatever quarter, and applaud the new openings to write about it that issue from whatever changes, inside the university or out. But one risk of those openings is that scholars may be tempted by the presumed analytical power of their method to write about subjects about which they in fact know little if anything. As in this case, the results are likely to be disappointing.

NOTES

David E. Whisnant teaches courses on country music, Appalachia, American literature, folklore, and the politics of culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.