Connexion
Le rappeur français PLK durant le festival We Love Green au bois de Vincennes, à Paris, le 2 juin 2023.
‘Donald Trump may be full of gas, but his supporters seem to be running out’
Des cosplayers russes, fans du jeu vidéo chinois Genshin Impact, lors d’un concours de costumes en novembre à Moscou.
Checking a dead otter for bird flu infection last year on Chepeconde Beach in Peru.
A rickshaw passing by a water fountain during an ongoing heat wave in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Saturday.
Food safety officials have issued a nationwide public health alert for ground beef that may be contaminated with E. coli.
The post Health Alert: Officials Warn of Ground Beef Contaminated by E.coli appeared first on Breitbart.
Supply management brings stability, but at a price.
La chorégraphe Blanca Li, à Cannes en 2023.
A farmer in Zimbabwe last month. Several countries have declared national emergencies.
Belgian police blocking the entrance of the Claridge, where the National Conservatism Conference was being held in Brussels on Tuesday.
‘A sort of time traveler. A murderous ghost from the past’ writes Rushdie in ‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder’
I’ve been going back to eastern Kentucky for over a decade. Since 2016, something there has changed.
Kevin Rogers has five rules: love God, love others, don’t do dumb things, don’t die, and “Get ye, therefore, over thyself.”
“Roger’s Rules” govern the work of Big Creek Missions, an inter-denominational Christian ministry center in eastern Kentucky, the heart of Appalachia. Every year, Big Creek Missions hosts hundreds who come to serve the Lord through service projects to communities in Leslie and the surrounding counties, Clay, Harlan, and Perry.
I was 16 the first time I visited Big Creek, on a trip with my high school, Orange Lutheran. As a kid who had only ever known the Southern California beaches and suburbs, I found an entirely different side of America waiting for me in eastern Kentucky, an America rife with poverty, riddled with drugs, and wrung out of opportunity. It was an America no one—especially in Washington or the other power centers of the nation—seemed to want to talk about. Why was that? How did America forget Appalachia and its people? Why was it left behind in the first place?
The trip triggered a fascination with Appalachia, its history, its people, its culture. It caused me to rethink and, over time, fundamentally change my view of politics. What kind of politics can seek the good for the people I met in the hills of eastern Kentucky? It’s not an easy question. My efforts at answering it myself have been downright embarrassing at points, and I still don’t have all the answers. I likely never will.
Between my first trip junior year and my return as a senior, a presidential candidate emerged who talked as if he hadn’t forgotten the people of the American heartland. In a bizarre twist, that candidate was a billionaire—a real estate mogul and a reality TV star from Queens.
Candidate Trump preached protectionism and derided so-called free trade deals that had hollowed out America’s manufacturing base. Immigration both legal and illegal, Trump said, was undermining the ability of working-class Americans to get good jobs and fundamentally changing the nation’s character. He vowed to unleash American industry and extolled the virtues of energy independence. He aimed to end the forever wars in the Middle East that cost America trillions of dollars and thousands of its sons and daughters’ lives. These issues, and the way Trump pilloried the establishment’s approach to them with ruthless delight, became the foundation of Trump’s political movement.
More importantly, Trump declared what Appalachians had already intuited: “The American dream is dead,” especially for people like them. What Trump was saying on the stump was what Appalachians have been saying around the dinner table for decades. By no means were Appalachians condemning their country by saying these things—Appalachians are the most patriotic breed of Americans you’ll ever encounter—they were simply observing reality and had the courage to say it aloud.
Nearly a decade on, a lot has changed. I’m engaged to be married. Trump’s first term has come and gone. A redux could be in the making. The right has coalesced around Trump’s platform and vision. What, if anything, has changed for the forgotten people of Appalachia?
In November, I returned to Big Creek with my sister, now a freshman at Orange Lutheran, to chaperone her first trip to the hills of eastern Kentucky.
Founded in 1878 from portions of Harlan, Clay, and Perry counties, Leslie County’s history reads more like folklore than fact. Records explain how the area’s creeks and streams received their curious names. Cutshin Creek received its name after an unnamed pioneer slipped and cut his shin on one of the sharp rocks while crossing. “Hell Fer Sartin” creek was named by two prospectors. Upon finding the creek, one prospector turned to the other and said, “This is hell.” The other, in the region’s throaty, rhotic Appalachian dialect, croaked, “Yes, hell fer sartin.”
Leslie is named after Preston M. Leslie, the governor of Kentucky from 1871 to 1875. Though he started out as a Confederate-sympathetic Whig and moved to the Democratic Party, Preslie became renowned in the region for driving out the KKK presence and the roving bands that were wreaking havoc in the backcountry in the aftermath of the civil war. Clay, Perry, and Harlan were pockets of some of the strongest Union support in the nation. More men enlisted in the Union Army relative to population in these and the surrounding counties than anywhere else in the nation.
Leslie has never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since its creation in 1878. From 1896 to 1928, no democratic presidential candidate managed to capture more than 10 percent of the vote. The closest a Democrat has ever come to winning Leslie was in 1964 when President Johnson captured 47 percent of the Leslie County vote against Barry Goldwater.
In both 2016 and 2020, Trump received 90 percent of Leslie County’s vote. This was an improvement on the internationalist Republican candidates of the 90s and 2000s—Bob Dole, George W. Bush, and John McCain—who each lost at least 25 percent of the vote in Leslie County in their respective bids.
Trump’s message echoed through the hollers of eastern Kentucky. So, too, did the scorn of the former president’s political enemies. One Appalachian I met told me, “I feel like they hate Trump so much because he stands up for us and says what a lot of us think.” They’re out to get Trump, but “they want to go after us, too.” Another chimed in with a chuckle, “They already are.”
In my travels to eastern Kentucky, nearly every person I talked to also told me some iteration of, “Here, we have to look out for one another because no one else will.” The Jacksonian strain of American thought is alive and well in the hills of eastern Kentucky, befitting for a place which started as a backcountry settled by yeoman farmers.
While Appalachia has been the target of substantial government aid on paper, you won’t hear many Appalachians suggest they are much better off than they once were. You also won’t hear many Appalachians credit the government or the NGOs for the improvements that have been made. They credit other members of their community, such as Kevin Rogers of Big Creek Missions, who have started local nonprofits to provide for the oscillating needs of these holler communities.
“I grew up in a house that struggled financially,” Rogers told Orange Lutheran students gathered in the Big Creek gymnasium. The financial constraints Rogers faced at home extended to his church community, where economic insecurity and social instability led to a revolving door of church leaders. “In my church, we didn’t have a lot of money. We had four or five youth pastors in four years.” When he graduated high school, Rogers took over as the church’s youth pastor, “because I got sick and tired of the church running them off,” he explained. “I wanted something deeper for my friends and for my students.”
Shortly after taking the job, Rogers found out that “you can do disaster relief mission trips for really cheap.” In the next three to four years, Rogers and his high schoolers took 17 mission trips to disaster areas. “Because they were looking out for the needs of others, our youth group was growing spiritually. Their hearts were being changed.”
Some time later, the pastor of Roger’s small church approached him and said, “Kevin, my home church is looking for a youth pastor, and I think you should do it, get out of your home church, go do something else.” The pastor’s former church was in a whole other league compared to Kevin’s home church.
“I’m like, ‘Man, I don’t want to do it. Not me—I’m happy here,’” Rogers recounted.
Three months later, Rogers was settling into his new role at the larger church. The youth group Rogers was tasked with leading was four times larger than that of his home church. The students Rogers initially found there seemed to think youth ministry was for their entertainment, not for accomplishing the mission God had given them.
“Their idea of a mission trip was much more elaborate,” Rogers explained. Luxury charter buses would take students and their families to nice hotels. Recreation got in the way of the mission. “From the outside looking in, it appeared that their trips were more of a vacation than a mission trip,” said Rogers. He would do things differently.
The church also held a toy drive around Christmas time. Rogers, joined by members of his youth group and the media team, were tasked with taking the busload of toys northward to a small school in eastern Kentucky called Big Creek Elementary.
“We set up this big production, we had lights, we had a stage, we had sound, all this fancy stuff to share the story of Jesus with these kids,” Rogers recalled. The production was not a classic retelling of the Redeemer’s humble origins. After the show, the church group distributed the toys to the children, but the way they gave the toys out left some of the elementary schoolers in tears.
“We go back to the church and all the students get up there and say how amazing it was, how everybody was changed in Appalachia, and how we changed all these kids’ lives—blah, blah, blah, blah,” Rogers said. “And I’m like, ‘did you not see the kids crying?’”
The time came to plan the church’s summer mission trip. “The student threw ideas at me: ‘Let’s go to Chicago! Let’s go to New York! Let’s go to Virginia Beach! Let’s go back to Orlando!” But Rogers had already made up his mind. “I asked my youth leaders, ‘Y’all love those kids and Big Creek School? Because y’all told me that you love those kids.’ ‘Oh, yeah. We love those kids.’ ‘Are you committed to those kids?’ ‘Oh, yeah. We’re committed to those kids.’ I said, ‘Cool. Because this summer, we’re going on our first mission trip to Big Creek Elementary School.’”
Big Creek was not the vacation destination students in the youth ministry had envisioned. There’s no Six Flags or white sand beaches in the backwoods of eastern Kentucky. “I ticked them all off,” Rogers admitted. Just 30 students and adults made the first trek to Big Creek.
For those who went, the trip was transformational. Students told stories about things they’d never seen before—homes with empty pantries where children had no toys to play with while mom and dad were strung out on meth in the bedroom.
The trip lit a fire in the bellies of Rogers’ students to serve Big Creek and the surrounding community. Word of the small but deeply spiritual trip to Big Creek made its way to the leadership of the association of churches. He was asked to lead an association-wide trip to Appalachia. The next summer, 100 students made the trek up to Leslie County. In the span of four years, the trip grew from 30 to 750 stretched across four weeks at Big Creek.
In 2007, Rogers’ pastor sat him down for a serious conversation. “‘Kevin, it’s time,” Rogers remembers the pastor telling him. “All you talk about is Big Creek missions. You need to ask the Lord if you need to be here, or you need to be there.’”
Rogers replied, “I love my students, and the youth group has grown so much spiritually and numerically.” The pastor told him to pray about it. “God said yes. I kept saying no,” Rogers said. That same year, Rogers received a call from the superintendent that oversaw Big Creek Elementary. “‘Kevin, we’re shutting down Big Creek Elementary, these kids are going to be going down to Mountain View Elementary in Hyden.’” Rogers recounted.
Rogers’ heart broke when he initially heard the news. But the superintendent had another proposal—for Rogers to buy Big Creek Elementary and turn it into a full-time mission. Again, Rogers prayed. Again, God said yes and Rogers said no. A few months later, “through a series of amazing things that happened, and a series of challenging things that happened, I knew it’s time to go and do this Big Creek thing.” Since, Rogers said, “we continue to do simple things. We serve people in need, we look in the community, find the greatest needs, and we go and serve.”
Orange Lutheran High School was one of the first major groups to start visiting Big Creek Missions after Rogers took over the school. The first trip Orange Lutheran took to Big Creek was on extremely short notice—Orange Lutheran had to cancel their plans to serve in Mexico over safety concerns. It found Big Creek Missions and gave Rogers a call. A few weeks later, 40 students and a handful of chaperones were on their way to Leslie County. Now, more than a decade on, Orange Lutheran brings about 170 individuals to Big Creek every fall.
Rogers and his small team of staff and volunteers have converted the old classrooms into dorm rooms, each lined with seven to eight handbuilt triple bunk beds. The old gymnasium is now a place for worship and assemblies. The kitchen and cafeteria are mostly left unchanged; the industrial-sized refrigerators and freezers hold meals for anyone in the community in need. The detached warehouse holds all the tools needed to maintain the campus and for Big Creek’s multitude of construction projects within a fifty-mile radius. In the parking lot, school buses have been replaced with Big Creek branded shuttles, flatbeds, and vans.
With a group of Orange Lutheran’s size, Rogers can dispatch teams of six to ten to work on nearly 20 different service projects, most of which fall into three buckets: construction, community, and caretaking.
The group of six students I chaperoned with one other adult were sent around 20 miles east to assist another area nonprofit, Hope in the Hills.
Jack is a short but sturdy man. His full, white head of hair and the hitch in his gait suggest he’s in his sixties. Arriving on site, where we’d be helping Jack repair and remodel the Hope in the Hills warehouse, Jack stuck out a thick, stubby hand. His handshake was firm and friendly, though his hands felt like sandpaper.
As we became acquainted, Jack explained that Hope in the Hills started as a small service group that would collect donations from his local church. Soon enough, Hope in the Hills was collecting more donations than the church could reasonably store. The group had to set out on their own, and Hope in the Hills was born.
Jack said things ran on a shoestring budget—everything, the donations and the man hours, “came from the good of people’s hearts.” Their regular giveaways, several times a month at local parks or other public meeting places, attracted beneficiaries from Leslie, Clay, Harlan, Perry, and beyond. Hope in the Hills’ donors also came from farther and farther away. Jack said they had to get a bigger truck to collect larger donations from the south and west. Hope in the Hills workers scour public marketplaces to haul back free furniture and other goods to give away, too.
Jack is partially retired now, but four decades or so ago, he started out working in the timber industry, which came to Appalachia’s virgin forests starting in the 1880s. The increased demand for timber and technological innovations for the industry made logging more profitable in places it wasn’t before, though loggers would have to use mule teams, rivers, or even splash dams to get logs out of the hollers.
The timber industry Jack started working in was nothing like the Appalachian timber industry of a hundred years prior. Working conditions, while still perilous, were safer and corporate interests had been beaten back relative to the near-feudal conditions that prevailed before.
By the time Jack found employment, the logging industry in Appalachia was dying. Advancements in sustainable practices for the industry meant once-depleted forests in other states were returning. An explosion of trade deals was making lumber easier and cheaper to import than previously. While the U.S. remains the largest producer of timber in the world, it’s the third largest timber importer in the world. Everyone has heard of Chinese steel’s effect on economic opportunity for working-class men; fewer know about Canadian timber’s impact on workers in Hazard, Kentucky.
Eventually, Jack changed career paths. He began working as a trucker, hauling products once made in the United States but now shipped in from overseas. Trucking was one of the few industries that did not necessarily create displacement. A trucker could still live in Leslie County, Kentucky, rather than move north to work in a factory, though he’d spend most of his time on the road and away from family. Compared to the alternatives in the area, trucking paid well and provided good benefits. There was also a fairly low barrier to entry. A commercial driver’s license takes about seven weeks of training to obtain. Trucking remains one of the top jobs in the United States, especially for working-class white men without college degrees.
Working as a truck driver has allowed Jack to enjoy his partial retirement in the hills of eastern Kentucky without ever having to relocate his family as millions of Appalachians have done since World War II. Beyond his work with Hope in the Hills, Jack tends to a small herd of cattle. He lives in a nice, small prefabricated home overlooking the local school and a creek. A detached warehouse, mostly made of reclaimed tin, is where Hope in the Hills keeps most of its donations.
Our task for the week was to repair and remodel the warehouse. The seasons slowly eat away at the wood and metal of Appalachian homes. Sometimes, they’re swallowed whole. A massive flood in July 2022 swept through 14 counties in eastern Kentucky. It claimed the lives of 45 and displaced thousands.
One of the underappreciated reasons Democratic Kentucky governor Andy Beshear was reelected in 2023 was his handling of the flood. Even those I met in deep red Kentucky admitted the governor did a pretty good job in the aftermath. The electoral map bears this out. In deep-red southeastern Kentucky, Beshear greatly overperformed, managing to capture about a third of the vote.
That said, the devastation is still easy to spot. On the drive to Jack’s place, we passed upside-down mobile homes that had been completely washed away. Others were simply twisted piles of metal. The land isn’t the only thing to carry the flood’s scars. Many of the families in Leslie still do, too. Thankfully, Jack’s property was spared, and the goods stored there have been used to help dozens of families in the community get back on their feet in the aftermath.
Nevertheless, some of the roof’s tin sheets had rusted out and the support beams rotted. New siding was also in order. Inside the warehouse, we were tasked with laying down a fresh coat of paint, building shelves, and reorganizing.
Despite his height, Jack was a confident and commanding figure. He was quick to show friendship and respect when extended to him. We became fast friends when I told him my occupation. “Now, I’ll be completely honest, I’m a Republican,” Jack said as we ventured into politics. For the next three days, our political chat was off and on. “I’ll tell you one thing, Bradley,” he said as we stood at the base of a ladder, “there wasn’t any of these terrible school shootin’s when they taught the Bible in schools.”
Jack had a general vision of what he wanted the finished product to look like, but he didn’t go into much detail. Only towards the end of our talk would Jack say, “If you need anything or any guidance, just ask my daughter Heather—she’s the brains of this whole operation.” Jack, even in retirement, had a boss.
Heather’s father wasn’t her only underling, either. As Hope in the Hills survived on donated time from volunteers, Jack had called in backup. These men were the most eclectic and wonderful group of hillbillies in all of Appalachia.
“Have you ever met a French hillbilly?” A voice like a rebel yell called out from the warehouse as I repaired the siding. I was certainly intrigued. I stopped what I was doing to meet this curiosity. As I entered, a man who seemed in his sixties looked upon a group of students, all frozen in position from their various tasks inside the warehouse. “The name is Bur-zhay,” he told the students in a faux French accent through his Appalachian drawl. As I circled around to this mysterious character’s front, I saw he sported a Ford motor company windbreaker over a neon yellow hoodie. Embroidery on the jacket atop the right side of his chest read, “Burgie.”
Over the three days we spent helping the folks at Hope in the Hills, I’m not sure Burgie handled a tool, lifted a paint brush, or shelved a can of soup. But Burgie is retired—he’s earned that right. What Burgie did was make a long day’s work fly by. With the radio out, Burgie’s stories became a neverending variety podcast with zero breaks or advertisements.
Burgie spent most of his career working at a Ford factory manufacturing parts, mostly transmissions. He got the nickname “Bur-zhay” while on a trip to France with Ford. “When I got there, all these French folk were telling me that I had been pronouncin’ my name wrong my whole life!” He laughed.
Burgie was one of the millions of Appalachians who participated in one of the largest internal migrations in American history. The road north became known as the Hillbilly Highway as job opportunities dried up in the coal mines and forests and Appalachians sought work in the industrial Midwest. In the three decades between 1940 and 1970, 3 million Appalachians took to the Hillbilly Highway. Dwight Yoakam’s 1985 tune “Readin’, Writin’, and Route 23” memorialized the migration in song.
The migration transformed Appalachia. The era of the yeoman farmer, which tapped into the region’s precolonial roots, was over. In the 1950s, forty counties in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia lost about 70 percent of their farm population. Harlan County lost 82 percent, Leslie County a mind-boggling 98 percent. Only 20 fulltime farming operations remained in Leslie by the end of the decade.
A bevy of factors led to the decline of manufacturing in Appalachia. Environmental struggles, increased regulatory burdens, mechanization, and some companies’ difficulties paying retirement benefits all played their part. But it all took place against the backdrop of an increasingly globalized market economy, governed by a ballooning number of “free” trade agreements that spanned thousands of pages, which made foreign goods, and more importantly foreign labor, more attractive than Appalachia. Between 1970 and 2001 in Appalachia, the number of apparel workers declined by 66 percent and textile workers by 30 percent. For those who remained, living off the government dole became a way to make ends meet.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, was the nail in the coffin for manufacturing and other Appalachian industries. Six years later, Clinton would deliver remarks from Tyner, Kentucky, to bring public attention to Appalchian poverty. “I’m here to make a simple point,” Clinton told the nation. “This is the time to bring more jobs and investment to parts of the country that have not participated in this time of prosperity. Any work that can be done by anybody in America can be done in Appalachia.” The problem for Clinton was that those jobs were no longer being done in America.
Burgie spent decades working in that Ford plant far from the hills of Appalachia he called home. He became involved in the plant’s United Auto Workers (UAW) chapter and eventually ascended to a number of leadership positions. As the years passed, Burgie became increasingly disenchanted with his involvement in the UAW. “I don’t want to get into detail about it,” Burgie told me, as we sat on a bench sipping Diet Cokes. “But the point is it stopped being about the workers and more about the politics, and I just didn’t like that so much.”
I asked him what he thought the future of union work might be. “The unions are wondering why people don’t want to be a part of ’em anymore,” Burgie said. “I’d tell ’em the same thing I tried to tell ’em when I was there: just focus on the workers. Folks have a hard time finding good jobs that can provide for a good retirement without the unions, and I think that’s still true. But there won’t be any unions to help people get these jobs, and no jobs to begin with, if they keep going down this path.”
Burgie admired what certain Republicans, Trump among them, were doing to reach out to union workers. Trump, Burgie told me, was the first politician in a long time to name and shame the macro forces making it hard for working class people to get good jobs—immigration and globalization. “Whatever you think of him,” Burgie added, “it was the right thing to say. That takes some guts. I respect that.”
Joe was also in his sixties but much more prepared to do construction work than Burgie. He wore flannel, a vest, and an old rope cap. Thick, wire-rimmed glasses covered a good portion of his short face and rested heavily on the broad bridge of his nose. Myself, Joe, and Matt, one of the other chaperones, and Johnny, another member of our curious band, spent most of the first day working on the roof and siding. Joe had spent his working years in the timber industry, though he was afraid of heights, as our work on the roof quickly made clear.
As Matt and I huddled to figure out how to remove a particularly stubborn piece of rusted tin, Joe made his way to the spot with a chainsaw, slowly inching his way across the gable roof—none of the rotted beams had been replaced yet. This plan definitely violated rule three and potentially four of Rogers’ Rules, but it was already in motion.
As Joe approached, you could clearly see him shaking. “I think it’ll work.” Johnny said. “Be careful,” he yelled at Joe. “He’s afraid of heights,” Johnny said, turning to Matt and I. As I looked back at Joe, he had made his way over the peak of the gable and was heading down the slope to the corner of the roof. Once there, according to Johnny’s plan, he would fire up the chainsaw and punch down through the metal roof. A few steps onto the downward sloping side, Joe surmised this plan wasn’t as good as it initially sounded. With chainsaw in hand, Joe gingerly made his way down the 14-foot drop to the ground.
New plan: We’d use a smaller, cordless metal saw and approach from the bottom. Two men would be on ladders—one sawman, one scrap collector—and the other two supporting the base of the ladders. Joe, who we now knew was afraid of heights, would remain with me on the ground.
“Was being afraid of heights difficult when you were logging?” I asked Joe. “No,” he said, his voice a whispering gruff. “Climbing trees is no problem when they’re on the ground.”
Matt and Johnny were hard at work near the roof while Joe and I got to know each other on the ground. I could tell Joe wasn’t much of a talker. He kept his eyes fixed on Johnny, who teetered at the top of the ladder to reach where he needed to cut. Joe answered my questions about the area and his work experience with a sentence or less.
After about 30 minutes, Joe warmed up. It really got rolling when I asked about the present problems Appalachians face. Joe, with his coughing drawl, spoke about the difficulties young people face in communities like Leslie County. By the government’s metrics, Appalachia is much less impoverished than it was when he was a young man. In 1965, 219 of the 420 counties that make up Appalachia were considered impoverished. Today, that number is 82.
While less of the region faces poverty, things seem much worse by Joe’s telling. Good-paying jobs are few and far between not just here but in the places Appalachians once fled to. It might be a Detroiter’s first time facing the reality of massive job displacement; for many Appalachians, it’s their second. Meanwhile, price increases for the most essential goods—housing, health care, education, groceries—have outpaced inflation at best and skyrocketed at worst.
To add insult to injury, the health care that workers in the area have received has mostly been in the form of prescription opiates. “The drugs have really done a number on this place,” Joe told me. “It’s devastated whole families.”
The opioid epidemic ravaged the American heartland. It almost appears to have been designed to do just that. Companies lied about the nature of the wonder drugs they created. Some extremely bad actors moved in to take advantage of the profits the drugs offered. Even good doctors wrote prescriptions that ruined lives. The influx of fentanyl from the southern border brought another wave of drug abuse. The pandemic ushered in a deadly round of relapses.
Opioids have sapped Appalachia, particularly Appalachian men, of their vitality when their distressed communities needed it most. When opioid addiction takes a life, that’s sad enough. Here, it crushes whole families, even whole communities. Hopelessness begets more hopelessness.
Eventually, our conversation got sidetracked when Joe asked, “Why do you speak with your lips so much?” I wasn’t sure what he meant at first, then I realized that the rhotic Appalachian drawl comes from the back of your throat. My southern California speech patterns are very tip of the tongue. “I’m not quite sure, but I guess you’re right, Joe,” I replied.
An old blue truck kicked dust up on the gravel road leading up to Jack’s property. A man dressed quite similarly to Joe got out and approached. “What’s going on, Joe,” he asked. Joe explained to the man, whose name was Ronnie, that Johnny and Matt were entering their second hour of wrestling with a rusted out tin roof. Johnny and Matt climbed down to greet Ronnie, and Johnny told Ronnie of the original plan for Joe to use a chainsaw. Ronnie, seeming to know Joe was afraid of heights, stared at Joe with a shocked expression on his face. He was a soft-spoken man, but suffice it to say Ronnie didn’t need to say anything to make clear his disapproval of the original plan.
“Ronnie worked in the mines,” Joe told me. Mining had been one of the topics we covered in our conversation at the base of the ladders. I asked Ronnie what that was like. “Dark,” Ronnie chuckled. Ronnie explained that his office was a crawl space hundreds of feet below ground. Ronnie gestured a rounded box around his chest to his thigh to show the size—a few feet by a few feet. Ronnie, also a retiree, was the most slender of the hillbillies assembled but also the tallest, which I assume must have been a disadvantage underground.
Appalachia once produced two-thirds of the nation’s coal. Coal fields cover 63,000 square miles in the region. In eastern Kentucky alone, there are 80 major seams. Most of the region’s mining is done how Ronnie once mined, deep underground, and a third is surface mining, a more controversial form because of its impact on the environment.
Even in the glory days of mining in Appalachia, it was a cycle of boom and bust. World War I brought a major spike in coal production, only to give way to the Great Depression. During World War II, the Office of War Mobilization encouraged coal production as a patriotic duty. Thousands of workers and small-scale operations took advantage of the government’s demand, but that revival was short-lived.
Mechanization arrived after the war as coal operators sought to cut down on labor costs. Inventions like the continuous miner, which integrated drilling, blasting, and loading into one process, “made it possible for ten men to produce three times the tonnage mined by eighty-six miners loading coal by hand,” Ronald Eller writes in Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945. “By 1960 fewer than half of the 475,000 miners in the region at the end of World War II still found work in the deep mines” Eller continues, “and by 1970 the number had declined to 107,000.” Today, coal mining employs just 2 percent of the Appalachian workforce.
Johnny Muncy is Leslie County royalty. He’s not one of the barons who made their fortunes from King Coal nor one of the titans that built holiday homes in the Appalachian hills like the Vanderbilts. He’s not wealthy by any means. But the Muncy name has been associated with the area that is now Leslie County since before its creation.
One of his ancestors, also John Muncy, came to the hills from Burke’s Garden, Virginia. When the Civil War began, John Muncy was too young to fight but convinced commanding officers to let him join the 47th Regiment of the Kentucky Volunteer Infantry. There, Muncy would be among the 77,000 troops that won the pivotal battle of Vicksburg, which secured Union control of the Mississippi river. He’d go on to become a corporal in Company C and serve in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
John Muncy had eleven children from two marriages. One of his sons, John M. Muncy, born 1868, would go on to establish Hyden’s first and only newspaper, named the Thousandsticks, and serve as a county judge and school superintendent. For the final five years of his life, before he passed in 1937, J.M. Muncy was chairman of the Leslie County Republican Party.
As we joked about Burgie’s frenchified nickname, Johnny Muncy said the best hillbilly nickname he’d ever heard belonged to his grandfather. “His name was William Muncy, but everybody always called him Powder Bill.”
William “Powder Bill” Muncy was a logger around the turn of the century. When a logflow jammed in the river, his grandfather was the only one crazy enough to head down to the jam with a stick of dynamite and clear it. “Whenever they had a jam, they always called for Powder Bill, and he always made sure the logs started flowin’ again. Nothin’ bad ever happened to him, though.”
I never tired of talking to any of my new hillbilly friends, but especially Johnny Muncy. Like Jack, Johnny became a trucker. For three decades, he crisscrossed the country hauling whatever needed transporting. “I spent a lot of time away from home, away from my family,” Johnny said. “Those years on the road take a toll. You miss a lot. I needed to be home.”
Later, Johnny and I got to talking politics. He wanted to know if I had any dirt on powerful people in D.C. I told him that, if I did, I would have already written it.
I asked Johnny what issues people here cared about. He didn’t hesitate: “The drugs.” All over the community, you can find people strung out, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, even grandparents. Babies live covered in their own excrement, their parents too high to care or too busy looking for the next score. Johnny and Jack knew of at least two drug-related deaths nearby in the last week. In many cases, addiction here starts with prescription pills—from surgery, a disability, or a relative’s medicine cabinet—then moves on to the hard stuff, much of which is now laced with fentanyl.
The epidemic has touched Johnny’s family: One of his sons has struggled with drug addiction. Though his methods were unconventional, Johnny made sure to get his son clean. “It came to a point where I had to physically lock him in a room to get the drugs out of his system,” Johnny said. “I had a six shooter and said, if you come out of there, I’m goin’ to shoot you, because if you keep goin’ down this path, you’re as good as dead anyways.”
“It was a rough few days,” Johnny said, “but he’s strong, and he pulled through.”
Before Johnny issued that ultimatum, he thought he had done all he could to keep his son on the straight and narrow. He bought him a rifle so they could go hunting together. Johnny’s son sold the rifle for drugs. Then Johnny bought him a new hunting bow. That, too, got sold for drugs. Johnny even bought his son a truck to get to and from work. “He stripped everything he could out of that truck. The radio, everything, even the seats, he stripped out of that car to sell for drugs.”
“Young people used to go to church, now their gods are sex and drugs,” Johnny said. “This rotten culture has corrupted their souls.” These days, on Sunday mornings, you can find Johnny’s son in a church pew. “Now he’s given that up, he’s going back to church,” Johnny said.
The right has only begun to grapple with the lives of men like Jack, Burgie, Joe, Ronnie, and Johnny. How to bring manufacturing jobs back, how to end the opioid crisis—these are topics of roundtable discussions across institutional Washington. There’s little agreement on an agenda, but we had to start somewhere.
The men I met in Appalachia have intuited that a realignment is happening. They’ve been waiting for it for a long time. If the right succeeds in bringing a revival to Appalachia, don’t expect these men to direct their thanks to the Republican Party. Their thanks will go to the men and women like Kevin Rogers who have done the Lord’s work and kept hope alive in the hills.
But don’t expect Rogers to take credit. “God gets the glory for what he has done through somebody as messed up as me,” he says. “I cannot stand up here and say, ‘Well, look at what I’ve done.’ Because I kept saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no to God.”
“I don’t know why people keep coming back to Big Creek, but they do. God brings them here. He gets the glory for it from the beginning to the end. Wherever you are, give Him the glory,” Rogers told students in closing. “Thank you all for being a part of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.”
The post Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood appeared first on The American Conservative.
Workers cleaning argeli bark in the Ilam district of eastern Nepal. Thousands of miles away, in Japan, the bark will be used to make yen notes.
A reflection on Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and All in the Family.
The recent death at the age of 101 of Norman Lear, creator of All in the Family and its improbable folk hero, Archie Bunker, set me to musing (always a dangerous thing) over Archie’s voting history and the dirty tricks that politics plays on us all.
I doubt if anyone under the age of 60 grasps the impact of All in the Family when it debuted on CBS in 1971. This wasn’t Punky Brewster or Manimal. Archie Bunker was a malaprop-tripping, outer-borough (Queens), blue-collar union-man paterfamilias given to bigoted asides and (thanks to actor Carroll O’Connor) perfectly timed double-takes. Whatever Lear’s satiric intentions, Archie became a beloved character during the show’s heyday, before it descended into stupid laugh-track moralizing.
Norman Lear was a thoughtful pro-free speech liberal Democrat, a species rarer than goldfish-swallowers on today’s campuses. Even as a left-sympathizing kid I scorned Archie’s liberal son-in-law and sparring partner, played by Rob Reiner, as a self-righteous ingrate, and my guess is that Lear wanted it that way.
Yet Lear cheated, too. The wistful line in the All in the Family theme song—“Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again”—warbled off-key by Archie and his long-suffering wife Edith, is dishonest even by sitcom standards. The archetypal Archie would have been a pedigreed FDR Democrat. His supposed Protestantism was also ridiculous: Archie—with a different forename—would’ve been Catholic.
Surely he cast his first votes for FDR in 1944 and Truman in 1948 over the prig (and Kitty Carlisle’s boytoy) Thomas E. Dewey, the little man on the wedding cake. Archie (without the Hollywood makeover) liked Ike but voted rotely for egghead Adlai Stevenson in ’52 and ’56. He was JFK all the way in 1960 before facing his first ballot-box temptation: jumping the fence for anti-Civil Rights Act Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. But…Social Security. Archie was no entitlement-reform wonk, so he pulled the lever, with misgivings, for LBJ.
In 1968 Archie could’ve gone any of three ways. (And here let me recommend Luke Nichter’s perceptive account of that race, The Year that Broke Politics.) George Wallace’s denunciation of “pointy-headed intellectuals” who can’t park their bicycles straight was the summit of Bunker’s hill, but his defense of segregation was its nadir. In any event, Wallace’s Southernness would’ve been too strange.
Hubert Humphrey’s full-throated endorsement of civil rights would’ve irritated Archie, but the Hump was for whatever the big unions were for—including the manufacture if not necessarily use of weapons of mass destruction—so after a moment’s hesitation in the voting booth Archie chose HHH against Nixon. The Minnesota motormouth would be his last Democrat.
(Thinking on this sent me back to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, a formative reading experience for the teenaged me. The Aspen assassin wrote, “Any political party that can’t cough up anything better than a treacherous brain-damaged old vulture like Hubert Humphrey deserves every beating it gets. They don’t hardly make ‘em like Hubert any more—but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.” It’d be pretty easy to update that passage for 2024.)
In 1972 Archie Bunker, over the Hump, flipped to the GOP for good, turned off by George McGovern—or, rather, the caricatured misrepresentation (abetted by the Democratic candidate’s obnoxious celebrity supporters) of the true patriot McGovern as an acid-dropping, welfare-dispensing commie.
Carroll O’Connor was no more Archie Bunker than Charlton Heston was Moses. In a 1972 Democratic primary race containing two genuine if mottled populists—Oklahoma senator Fred Harris on the “left” and George Wallace on the “right”—the actor stumped for the silk-stocking Republican turned Democrat John Lindsay, whose limousine liberalism would’ve reduced Archie to paroxysmal sputtering.
Long after the laughter has died, the last joke is on Archie—the real one, not the Hoover-voting Protestant. The Bunkeresque tough-talking white Democratic mayors of the 1950s and ‘60s collaborated in the destruction of their cities and the neighborhoods that gave them life via urban renewal and the Interstate Highway System. At the national level, the Trumans and Johnsons that Archie supported shipped working-class boys into the abattoirs of Korea and Vietnam while militarizing the economy.
Archie turned coat just as the Republicans were taking up the mantle of world policeman from Vietnam-spooked Democrats and as the GOP’s stolid but solid Main Street faction was being bulldozed by Wall Street.
If only the Archie Bunkers had voted for Herbert Hoover—who once said that what America needs is a great poem—and George McGovern, who requested, sensibly and sincerely, that America come home in the spirit of peace and community. I’ll bet Norman Lear would’ve loved that country.
The post Sitcom King Lear appeared first on The American Conservative.
The women who opposed their own enfranchisement in the Victorian era have little in common with the “Repeal the 19th” fringe of today.
Not long ago, a high-profile conservative woman of my acquaintance was cornered at the National Conservatism conference by a pimply young man who put to her that women should not vote. And, he declared furthermore, women should take no part in public life at all. What did she think?
She relayed this story to me with some amusement, but we both recognize that this young man’s views are not unique on the fringe Right. In the United States, this proposal propagates as “Repeal the 19th” and tends to base itself in arguments from physiological differences, which reportedly render women unfit for the vote, or else in perverse incentives. Examples are legion. Novelist Michael Walsh, for instance, explains that the typical female mind is characterized not by “calm thinking and reasoned judgment” but “inflamed emotions absent any rational thought.” Such views are not confined to men. The internet personality Pearl Davis argues that granting women the vote has resulted in a state welfare system that replaces husbands, “paying women to be single mothers.”
One of the frustrating aspects of such debates is how weak a grasp these people typically have of the history of the women’s movement. This is, to some extent, the fault of the winning suffragist side, whose narrative on feminism often situates Year Zero at the campaign for women’s suffrage. One casualty of this self-aggrandizing move is popular recollections of the 19th-century women’s movement.
We can sketch the outlines of this missing movement in the person of one of its most prominent anti-suffragists: the prolific and wildly successful novelist Mary Augusta Ward (1851–1920), better known by her married name, Mrs. Humphry Ward. A brief study of her life challenges both feminist and anti-feminist narratives. First, it reveals that much of the pre-suffrage women’s movement viewed the vote as a marginal issue. Secondly, it challenges my friend’s NatCon interlocutor with the fact that even high-profile opponents of woman suffrage were strongly in favor of women’s education and participation in public life. Lastly, it reveals the larger-scale social forces that eventually scotched opposition to woman suffrage, along with the ways these have subsequently changed again. The nature of this evolution suggests that those who seek to disenfranchise women today would, if they succeeded, find their victory a hollow one.
Born in Tasmania into a prominent literary family in 1851, Mary Augusta Arnold married the Oxford fellow Humphry Ward when she was 20. As an Oxford wife, she helped widen access to the university for women, including playing a central role in the foundation of Somerville Hall, Oxford University’s first women’s college, in 1879. She was also an active social reformer, setting up an adult education center in east London that is still in operation today. She involved herself vigorously in local and national politics and wrote prolifically, producing 26 novels, along with lectures, articles, and nonfiction books.
By the outbreak of the First World War, she was the best-known Englishwoman in America. She was also the founding president of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League in 1908.
Why would such a public and political figure oppose women’s enfranchisement? From a contemporary perspective, this seems quixotic in the extreme. But Mrs. Ward baffles today only because our world differs so sharply in its moral assumptions. From a modern perspective characterized by dogmatic egalitarianism, it has come to be seen as illegitimate by definition to map asymmetries of power, agency, or status onto givens such as sex or social class. Seeking to entrench such differences, meanwhile, is viewed today as deeply immoral. Whether or not we support this premise, it is not possible to understand Victorian England without grasping that there, the inverse generally obtained.
The Anglican hymn All Things Bright And Beautiful, written in 1848, is still popular today. The extent of the moral sea-change we have undergone in between is illustrated by how rare it is to find modern churches singing the second verse:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.
By contrast, the established social world Mrs. Ward bestrode so influentially viewed political access and agency as necessarily unegalitarian, because power was contextual and relationship-bound—not just for women, but for everyone. One’s social station was as given as one’s sex. The power relations implied by such a worldview are compellingly described in Mrs. Ward’s many novels. The Marriage of William Ashe (1905) depicts a glittering prewar politics whose terrain is not, or not only, Parliament, but also wider networks of association across great families, gilded Mayfair parties, and grand country houses. It is a world of parliamentary candidates chosen among friends and cousins, of landed-interest power bases, and deferential farmhands and servants. In this world, elite women exert all the influence they could desire, just obliquely: The plot of William Ashe turns on the hero’s disastrous marriage to a woman too emotionally erratic to play her allotted part as a charming political wife. Conversely, in the book, the notion that non-elite individuals of either sex should have much say in the country’s government is scarcely considered. In Delia Blanchflower (1913), meanwhile, the figure that most closely articulates Mrs. Ward’s own view of the issue muses at one point that feminists “attributed a wildly exaggerated importance to the vote, which, as it seemed to him, went a very short way in the case of men.”
In the view of influential antis such as Mrs. Ward, being denied the vote was no impediment to women making full use of their abilities. By her time, the women’s movement was in fact very well-developed. Industrialization disrupted families and settled social norms. As men and women grappled with how to live together in a world transformed, the result was a vigorous, culture-wide debate on sex roles and relations. A consensus gradually emerged from this on “true womanhood”; in its wake came an increasingly organized women’s movement that was both maternalist and often strongly religious.
If this movement is largely illegible from the liberal feminist vantage-point, this is because its core assumptions leaned into the very “sexist” distinctions that liberal feminism seeks to dismantle. Its vision was of women’s role as flowing from motherly values of kindness, selflessness, nurture, and moral uplift. Ideas spread via reading circles and public lectures. At scale, this coalesced into networks dedicated to public service and moral improvement. Organizations such as the Girls’ Friendly Society and the Mothers’ Union worked to propagate sexual “purity,” frugal living, and strong marriage across society, especially among the lower classes. Women linked domestic and public maternalism and drew parallels between all forms of caring work: The National Union of Women’s Workers, formed in 1895, explicitly framed all women’s domestic, voluntary and professional activities as “work,” whether paid or not, emphasizing the common element of public service.
In an age with very little state welfare, the maternalist women’s movement played a transformative role in areas such as poor relief, social work, education, and health care. After the 1869 electoral reform extended the local government franchise to rate-paying women, this extended to voting for and standing in local government and school board elections. But, by and large, this movement did not view suffrage as anything like a main priority. Instead, as Julia Bush shows in her book Women Against the Vote, within such organizations suffragists and antis often worked side-by-side. The NUWW leadership, in particular, fought to preserve the institution’s neutrality on the suffrage question, hoping to preserve a space where women could continue collaborating on the many common projects to which the franchise was a side issue.
This movement was the distaff side of Britain’s industrial and imperial ascendancy, and members often framed their labors explicitly in the context of this larger patriotic project. Though later decried as the tyrannically moralistic “Mrs. Grundy,” their philanthropic and reformist efforts helped soften the disruptive social costs of industrial urbanization. And anti-suffragists such as Mrs. Ward based their arguments against women’s enfranchisement on the fact—obvious to them, from the labors of Mrs. Grundy—that women were already involved in public life. Their domain was just distinct from those of men.
This reasoning is set out in an 1889 open letter against female suffrage, co-authored and organized by Mrs. Ward. It argues that women should be active in every area where they have equal skin in the game. They should pursue higher education, lead in “the State of social effort and social mechanism,” and aspire to “that higher State which rests on thought, conscience and moral influence.” As the government began to take on more of the social functions first innovated by reformist women, Mrs. Ward and other antis argued for a representative delegation of women to advise Parliament on policy in domains where women were prominent. But, they argued, it was not physiologically possible for women to play an equal part across the board, especially in areas of public life predicated on the capacity to exert physical force, such as heavy industry, shipping, imperial governance, and the military. There, women’s influence was already proportionate to their contribution.
What, if anything, can we learn from Mrs. Ward about the contemporary right-wing suffrage debate? Today, far fewer of her objections to woman suffrage apply. The Britain I live in is no longer the industrial, imperial, naval one of the 19th century. Industrial modernity prompted debate on the “woman question,” and its depredations also ended the settlement dubbed “true womanhood”: slowly, through the 19th century, then, with the World Wars, all at once. Ironically, one of Mrs. Ward’s last major works approvingly documented its end. England’s Effort: Letters To An American Friend (1915) was commissioned by England’s Propaganda Bureau with the aim of tilting American public opinion toward the English side of the war. In it, Mrs. Ward outlined England’s total wartime mobilization, an effort that mingled social classes, drew women into manufacturing, drove industrial innovations that weakened the bargaining power of labor, and legitimized the hitherto unimaginable intrusions of an emerging managerial state into previously private domains of English life.
She applauded all these initiatives in the name of the war effort. But they proved to be the final nail in the anti-suffrage coffin. Wartime social changes shattered the stiffly hierarchical prewar social order upon which Mrs. Ward’s view of womanly public service was premised. It lent moral force to the working-class claim to political participation and normalized the presence of women in the workplace. In its aftermath, the franchise was granted at least in part in recognition of the fact that working-class goodwill was now in the national interest. England needed its industrial workers, and those workers therefore had leverage with which to demand political access. This went for women, too. Their direct participation in national economic life had, by this point, been so impressed upon the public that withholding the franchise seemed perverse and cruel. Mrs. Ward lost her battle, two years before her death, in the 1918 Representation of the People Act.
In light of all this, a better question than “Should women be denied the franchise in 2024?” might be “Who, in 2024, actually has it?” Since deindustrialization, the franchise may be nominally universal but the electoral goodwill of the lower orders is not, as it was in 1918, needed. It should therefore surprise no one that, as Peter Turchin has noted, where popular opinion today diverges from the elite on a policy issue, it is never decided in favor of popular opinion. Politically speaking, the masses are now once again as peripheral to the business of decision-making as they were in Mrs. Ward’s day: a force not to be wholly disregarded but without any kind of decisive power.
The real counter to right-wing calls for the disenfranchisement of women is not outrage but: What difference would that make? Within this increasingly pseudo-democratic order, and especially across its mechanisms of consensus-formation and moral conditioning, something not dissimilar to the 19th-century “women’s movement” is once again in the ascendant. In the 19th century, reformist women dominated education, health, philanthropy, and moral reform; the same is true today, across education, the charity sector, and the guardians of contemporary moral conformity known as HR. The chief difference is that, whereas in Mrs. Ward’s time such institutions were run on a voluntaristic basis by women of independent means, motivated by Christian piety and noblesse oblige as well as the usual human quest for status, today these are run on a salaried basis by elite women with household bills to pay and ordered to a more post-Christian moral framework.
For those agitating to disenfranchise women, this invites a further question: Disenfranchise how? Which forms of political agency would the repealers remove? I defy anyone to compare the literary output of Mrs. Humphry Ward with (say) that of Michael Walsh and conclude that men are always and everywhere the intellectual superiors of women. Given this, we can reasonably assume that, whether directly enfranchised or not, clever women will continue to wield the influence they have always possessed. In the softer, less accountable, and now palpably post-democratic political order we inhabit, where at least as much of the Overton window is shaped by today’s equivalent of Mrs. Grundy, this influence would if anything be increased.
Even supposing a consensus could somehow be mustered for withdrawing the vote from women, I submit that male advocates of this policy would be surprised to find themselves as politically henpecked as ever. Whatever we choose to call our formal political settlements, the reality today is—as it was in Mrs. Ward’s time—that men and women must, once again, grapple with how best we can live together.
The post When Feminism Was ‘Sexist’—and Anti-Suffrage appeared first on The American Conservative.
On his 75th birthday, an acquaintance remembers the inimitable Hitch.
Impossible as it is to believe, Christopher Hitchens, the enfant terrible of Anglo-American politics and letters, would have turned 75 today, almost 13 years since his premature death from esophageal cancer in December 2011.
Yet in many ways Hitchens seems more alive than ever. His name routinely crops up in contemporary debates, notwithstanding how different the political landscape looks in the Age of Donald and Elon. In the years since his passing, he has acquired a new generation of fans in the millions. His coinages (“Islamofascism”) have entered the contemporary cultural lexicon. His debating ripostes are so widely cited that they have acquired names in their own right. (For example: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” Known as “Hitchens’s Razor,” it serves as a handy rhetorical implement for dismissing—“shaving off”—opponents’ empty arguments from Authority.)
“Hope you are thriving,” he used to sign off his messages to me and other correspondents.
The ghost of Christopher is thriving.
Composing His Thoughts: The Mozartian Method
I came to know Christopher—it was never “Chris,” an Americanism (so he claimed) that he loathed—during the last dozen years of his life. I first met him briefly in December 1999. We later met at conferences, at his Washington apartment, and at his Palo Alto residence near the campus of Stanford University (where his father-in-law, Edwin Blue, a retired physicist, lived next door). Between our occasional meetings, we emailed (“Hope you are thriving!”), and spoke every few months on the telephone. My first lengthy one-on-one encounter with Christopher was in Washington in April 2002, when he was well known but had not yet emerged as the leading controversialist of the day. We spent most of the day together, starting with a long lunch before a late-afternoon taping for an hour-long PBS special on George Orwell (“The Orwell Century”) in the runup to the Orwell centennial of 2003. Like me, Hitchens was finishing a book (Why Orwell Matters, 2003) about Orwell’s legacy.
Not long thereafter, I visited him in California. Christopher took me on a long, leisurely stroll through his Palo Alto neighborhood. Waving to neighbors, stopping to visit his father-in-law Edwin, and pausing to point out “Condi’s house” (Condoleezza Rice, then-Secretary of State and Stanford’s provost during the 1990s), Christopher was in an ebullient mood.
I steered the conversation to a remark of an editor for whom we had both written. I asked Christopher if his retentive memory was “photographic.”
“I’ve heard you have a ‘Mozartian’ method of composition,” I rattled on, telling him that a magazine editor of ours had recounted to me that “you don’t write down your work.” Hitchens, he had said, “composed” a lengthy essay in his head with no apparent need to write it down. (Mozart wrote his scores for the benefit of others; his tragic early death, claimed his wife, meant that several of what might have been his very greatest works died on his deathbed with him. Contra Amadeus, nobody had the presence of mind—or perhaps the coldness of heart? —to insist in businesslike fashion that he dictate them with his dying breaths.)
“Well, yes, I suppose that’s a fair analogy,” answered Christopher. “Since I was often abroad and on tight deadlines—this is long before the smart-phone era—I developed the habit of phoning up and dictating my essays or dispatches to a sub-editor who would take them down.”
Christopher went on, “If I had someone on the phone, then I knew the story would be filed with the magazine. Faxes and computers are unavailable or unreliable in a lot of remote places.”
“No notes either?” I said. “You’re kidding. You just…dictated it? Straight through? Off the cuff?”
“Don’t misunderstand. I turned over most serious articles for hours, even days before ringing up the office. I always worked hard. But I didn’t need to write it down. It was as if I was reading it on a screen inside my head. It was all quite clear.”
“You just read it off? I heard that you even knew the length as you went along.”
“That’s right. I’d be relaying a 5,000 word-piece to the office, and I’d get to a place and just check in with the sub-editor on the word count. ‘That’s about 4850, right?’ I’d say. He’d answer, ‘4873, to be exact.’ I’d say, ‘All right, let’s wrap up, here’s the last 120 or so.’ And I’d come in at right around the 5,000-word mark.”
The Symposiast as Showman
A visit to Palo Alto in May 2006 stands out in memory. On my arrival, Christopher apologized that he and his wife Carol Blue had just been invited to a small dinner party.
“Hope you won’t mind seeing Bob and Lindy and a few friends tonight. He asked about you.”
The dinner was at the home of the poet-historian Robert Conquest, whom I had also met a few years before. Author of path-breaking books on Stalinism and the Gulag, most notably The Great Terror (1968), he had been a close comrade since the 1960s of “the Hitch” (a term of endearment granted to the inner circle). Recently turned 90, Conquest too—like their mutual friends and mates in mischief, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis—was an ardent admirer of Orwell. (Christopher dedicated Why Orwell Matters to Conquest.)
It was my first experience of seeing Hitchens in a relaxed setting among friends. With no effort and no pretense, throughout an eight-hour supper that stretched until 3 a.m., he held court. That evening’s symposium outdid Plato’s banquet. Hitchens delivered all of the speeches ex tempore, punctuated merely by occasional interjections and exclamations and impromptu grace notes from the eight others of us around the table. I can only report, echoing the Athenian statesman-orator Alcibiades on hearing Socrates’ contribution, that Christopher seemed that night “unrivalled by any man, past or present.”
Unrivalled that night he was.
And unrivalled, I believe, he will remain.
A gift of that order occurs once in a generation—and Christopher Hitchens possessed it.
Yes, it was a command performance, from a self-summons that Christopher issued to himself to rise to an occasion for Bob and his friends. Though of course it all seemed to arise casually, spontaneously, indeed serendipitously—as if we had just glided into it.
Which indeed we had—especially so in my case. By some misty alchemy of midsummer romance, a Palo Alto dining room had become a theater in the round, whereupon our places at the table had materialized into front-row seats. Although Bob, sitting at its head, nominally functioned in that capacity and did serve as a gracious host throughout the evening, nobody could mistake the fact that he had delegated Christopher to assume head-of-table duties—or that Bob beamed with a father’s pride at the theatrics of his intellectual son. Not for a single moment did Bob feel “upstaged” that night. The very notion would have struck him—and the rest of us too—as preposterous. His Gulf Stream of constant chuckles and repeated, happy, old-boyish nods of agreement made clear his warm approval of the show—and of the showmanship of the showman. After all, Bob had invited Christopher—and he and Lindy certainly knew what they were getting. And delighted to get it, too: Christopher Hitchens, singing—or rather, soliloquizing—for his supper.
If you merely watch some short YouTube clips, or even if you listen to a series of hour-long presentations during one of Christopher’s countless debates on the Iraq War or religious faith, you cannot appreciate the magic and majesty of that marathon evening. And remember: YouTube had just come out a few months earlier and Facebook was still in its infancy; this was long before the era of viral videos and ubiquitous iPhones—and before Twitter and X, before Pinterest and Snapchat, fully a decade before Instagram and TikTok. None of us knew it, but that evening we were already in the last flickering twilight moments of intellectual vaudeville. No matter how high the tightrope, Christopher kept his balance as if it were a stroll in the park—and interspersed the walkabout with assorted magical stunts, ventriloquism acts, and other assorted forms of verbal acrobatics.
The discourse that night ranged from Churchill and Thatcher to Nixon and Reagan to Putin and John Paul II, from sectarian squabbles about the revisionist critiques of Old Bolshevik leaders such as Nikolai Bukharin to the current historiography on World War I and the Vietnam War, from the revelations about Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass’s SS background to the comparative merits between Atonement on film and the original novel by “Ian” (McEwan, another shared inner circle friend of Christopher and Bob). Through it all, Hitchens expounded and extemporized with sovereign grace and authority.
As cogent analyses of the above subjects proceeded—to which the rest of us periodically chipped in a token contribution—reason would give way to rhyme as Christopher suddenly took flight. Somehow it was understood that we had arrived at an appropriate juncture for another soliloquy.
The table would fall silent.
Spontaneously and with perfect relevance to the topic, Christopher would reel off a couple of stanzas of Milton’s Paradise Lost; two dozen lines from Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est,” a Shakespearean sonnet immediately followed by a Petrarchan counterpart, an Ogden Nash limerick along with a bawdy one by Bob himself, and more. It was lovely to see a guest or two—chiefly Bob and the Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash—call out a title, identifying with delighted recognition the quoted work—and hesitantly chant a few lines summoned from memory. (I was grateful.)
Occasionally, Carol would gently rap hubby on the knuckles.
“Christopher! That’s enough now! Stop showing off!”
To which the rest of us, like a mournful Greek chorus, would protest with guffaws:
“No, Carol! No! Let him show off!!”
As the evening concluded, Danuta Garton Ash—Tim’s Polish-born wife—threw her arms around Christopher and sobbed on his shoulder. Not tears of sadness, but of joy—and wonder. The Polish accent was strong and utterly charming.
“Christopher, Christopher! How? How? How?”
A dazed Hitchens said nothing, as her clasp tightened.
“How did you learn all this?! How does your head hold all these things?! How do you know so much?”
For once, Christopher was speechless. Released from her headlock, and dazed by both the late hour and the happy hours, he smiled and swayed and waved off her effusive display.
Danuta had spoken for us all. Her husband Tim nodded in agreement. He had already had several encounters with Hitchens before. No slouch himself—Tim is Britain’s leading scholar of modern European history, whose exciting dispatches from Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 captivated the West—he averred that the evening was amazing, yes, yet no great surprise to him.
The friends departed; I stood with Christopher as we looked up at the clear night sky. There was a twinkle in his eyes.
Home With the (and Without a) Hitch
It remains to mention how the wondrous symposium of that long evening’s journey into night concluded. As Christopher and I stood in the parking lot, after the Garton Ashes had driven off, I casually remarked that we should fetch Carol, who must still be inside the house. (I had also made a mental note to remonstrate with—or perhaps just reassure—her: Her husband was a matchless showman, yes, but he was no mere showoff.)
Not necessary to summon Carol, he assured me. A friend of hers came by an hour ago and she had slipped out.
Trying not to look too startled, because Christopher was quite under the weather, I offered to drive.
“No need at all,” he replied, ensconcing himself in the driver’s seat. “I can drive this route in my sleep.”
Although I had been repeatedly impressed with how fluent and coherent he had appeared after several drinks both this night and on previous occasions—including two interviews that I conducted with him (one on film, for an educational documentary on Orwell)—this was different. I was not about to get into a car with an inebriated Hitch at the wheel at 4 a.m.
Or so I had thought.
“Don’t make a scene,” he chastised me, as I stood outside and asked for the keys. “It’s only a couple of miles.”
Finally, exhausted, I relented.
Miraculously, we rode slowly through the night, without incident, without even a single headlight coming at us. The car rolled gently up his driveway, clicking to a neat halt just inches from his garage door. Christopher switched off the ignition, opened his door, and swung himself leftward to step out of the car.
He promptly tumbled onto his driveway, and I rushed to the driver’s side and helped him stagger to the front door.
Had we been protected by a medallion of St. Christopher—traditionally the patron saint of travelers (including Irish Catholic motorists, who used to keep “Christopher statues” on the dashboard)—squirreled away in the glove compartment?
I will never know.
No matter. Christopher, as you turn 75, I raise a glass to you!
Hope you are thriving!
The post The Symposiast: Remembering Christopher Hitchens appeared first on The American Conservative.
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Nobody liked what happened in a field in New Hampshire.
On Monday, the wife and I piled our kids into the Subaru and drove three hours to northern New Hampshire to see the eclipse at 100 percent totality. Aside from all the unwelcome visitors from Massachusetts and Rhode Island, it was a very pleasant trip. Passing beneath the White Mountains brought tears to my eyes, as it always does. Growing up in farm country, all I knew were fields and forests. Mountains I only knew from books—in particular my favorite book, Lost Horizon. I tried to imagine what they would look like (“hills, only four hundred stories tall”). Still, I knew that once I saw a real mountain all my fantasies would be put to shame. And so they were.
We’d planned on camping out somewhere in the town of Lancaster, which was directly in the eclipse’s pathway. But even before we met the highway, we saw that hundreds of our fellow looky-loos were simply pulling over on the highway and camping out there. Friends of ours had made reservations to stay in Lancaster the night before; they texted to warn us that traffic was gridlocked when they drove up on Sunday afternoon, a good twenty-four hours before the eclipse even began. A little patch of gravel next to the highway was probably the best we could hope for. So, we snagged the first spot we saw. This was about half an hour before the eclipse began.
We hiked up the road a bit and found a field where folks were setting up folding chairs, flying drones, and fidgeting with their ultra-stylish eclipse glasses. The mood was ebullient. There was a rumor that the Town of Lancaster would be setting off fireworks. Folks were playing music and toying around with drones. Children were playing tag in the field. It was like the tailgate at a Patriots game. Everyone was brought together in that field by a common purpose, and that gave us a sense of camaraderie.
Then, about twenty minutes before 100 percent totality, it became noticeably darker—and colder. I had expected both, but it was a bit like the mountains: Nothing in my imagination prepared me for the real thing.
For those who don’t know, the darkness of an eclipse is nothing like the darkness of nightfall. Partially it’s because it becomes so dark so quickly. But I think it’s also because the sun isn’t setting in the West. The shadows don’t lengthen. It doesn’t give off a few last warm, golden rays before dropping behind the horizon. It just… turns off.
What little light remained was gray, almost sickly. My wife said, “It’s like when you edit a photo and turn ‘saturation’ all the way down.” That’s exactly right. The rational part of my brain knew I wasn’t going blind, but I couldn’t quite drive away that fear. And it quickly became clear that the same fear was creeping over our 3-year-old, Beatrice. She started looking around and rubbing her eyes. A look came over her face, half-sad, half-panicked. She looked at me, silently pleading for me to comfort her, clearly hoping that if she didn’t say that she was scared, it would all go away quickly.
It didn’t—not for her, not for me, and not for anyone else. As the darkness grew, everyone in the field slowly went silent. Hundreds of strangers were gradually overcome by fear and awe. A group of girls to our right started talking about the Rapture. A man to our right whispered to his wife, “It’s the end of the world.”
Some folks had driven three or four hours to witness a 30-second event—and yet, as soon as it began, it was clear that everyone wanted it to be over. Nobody was having fun. All the children stood riveted to the earth in fright or burst into tears. The grown-ups looked around nervously. Obviously, we all half-expected something else to happen. What that something is (the Rapture or the Apocalypse or what) was almost beside the point. It felt like a portent, like it was pointing to something else.
Imagine you’re at a crowded beach reading in the sun or splashing in the waves, and suddenly you hear the blast of a huge trumpet come from somewhere across the sea. Everyone on the beach might have a different theory about what the trumpet means, but everyone would agree that it means something. The trumpet doesn’t want your attention: it wants you to be still and silent, attentive to whatever comes next. This horrible mood of anticipation was thick in the air on Monday at 3:30 p.m. in Lancaster, New Hampshire.
When the eclipse ended and the light returned, I found myself holding my prayer rope and whispering, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” There was a palpable sense of relief, bewilderment, and shame in our field. Everyone packed up, quietly and quickly, and hit the road. There were a few tear-stained cheeks and quite a lot of nervous smiles. Some folks tried to make small talk. I said to my wife, “No one liked it.”
Let me state for the record that I had no particular interest in the eclipse. For me, it was an excuse to take the day off and spend time with my family; I certainly wasn’t expecting article-fodder. My wife was quite excited, as was everyone else gathering on the side of the highway. And I really don’t think a single one of us left that field without a deep, nameless dread in our hearts. But how many of us would tell the local reporter hunting for a human-interest story? How many would post about it on Facebook or Instagram? How many would tell our families? How many would admit it to ourselves?
By the way, I don’t say that in judgment. I spend a lot of time thinking about religion and the “supernatural.” I’ve seen demons; I’ve witnessed miracles. But what I felt watching the eclipse was something else. It was as if Reality itself had cracked open, and we all saw something on the other side.
I’m a proud and Orthodox Christian; I could give my particular theory about the nature of that something. We all had our expectations, and we were all wrong. The question is, what do we do now? Do we bury that feeling and rewrite the memory to seem more cheerful? Or do we go looking for that something whose darkness outshone the sun?
This is one of those moments in life where the mundane world peels away like old wallpaper. We realize that our existence doesn’t work the way we thought it did. The first time you hold your firstborn is one example. The first time you watch someone die is another. I believe we’ll be judged on how we respond to such moments. It’s not so much about finding the right answers. It’s about having the courage to ask the right questions—the ones that are (literally) staring us in the face. Those who seek will find, but how many of us seek?
The post The Eclipse Was a Moment of Holy Dread appeared first on The American Conservative.
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