Read The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Online
Authors: Rebecca Solnit
After the Panic of 1893, Detroit’s left-wing Republican mayor encouraged his hungry citizens to plant vegetables in the city’s vacant lots and went down in history as Potato Patch Pingree. Something similar happened in Cuba when the Soviet Union collapsed and the island lost its subsidized oil and thereby its mechanized agriculture; through garden-scale semi-organic agriculture, Cubans clawed their way back to food security and got better food in the bargain. Nobody wants to live through a depression, and
it is unfair, or at least deeply ironic, that black people in Detroit are being forced to undertake an experiment in utopian post-urbanism that appears to be uncomfortably similar to the sharecropping past their parents and grandparents sought to escape. There is no moral reason why they should do and be better than the rest of us—but there is a practical one. They have to. Detroit is where change is most urgent and therefore most viable. The rest of us will get there later, when necessity drives us too, and by that time Detroit may be the shining example we can look to, the post-industrial green city that was once the steel-gray capital of Fordist manufacturing.
Detroit is still beautiful, both in its stately decay and in its growing natural abundance. Indeed, one of the finest sights I saw on my walks around the city combined the two. It was a sudden flash on an already bright autumn day—a pair of wild pheasants, bursting from a lush row of vegetables and flying over a cyclone fence toward a burned-out building across the street. It was an improbable flight in many ways. Those pheasants, after all, were no more native to Detroit than are the trees of heaven growing in the skyscrapers downtown. And yet it is here, where European settlement began in the region, that we may be seeing the first signs of an unsettling of the very premises of colonial expansion, an unsettling that may bring a complex new human and natural ecology into being.
This is the most extreme and long-term hope Detroit offers us: the hope that we can reclaim what we paved over and poisoned, that nature will not punish us, that it will welcome us home—not with the landscape that was here when we arrived, perhaps, but with land that is alive, lush, and varied all the same. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” was Shelley’s pivotal command in his portrait of magnificent ruins, but Detroit is far from a “shattered visage.” It is a harsh place of poverty, deprivation, and a fair amount of crime, but it is also a stronghold of possibility.
That Rivera mural, for instance. In 1932 the soil, the country, the wilderness, and agriculture represented the past; they should have appeared, if at all, below or behind the symbols of industry and urbanism, a prehistory from which the gleaming machine future emerged. But the big panels of workers inside the gray chasms of the River Rouge plant have above them huge nude figures—black, white, red, yellow, lounging on the bare earth. Rivera meant
these figures to be emblematic of the North American races and meant their fistfuls of coal, sand, iron ore, and limestone to be the raw stuff of industrialism. To my eye, though, they look like deities waiting to reclaim the world, insistent on sensual contact with the land and confident of their triumph over and after the factory that lies below them like an inferno.
2007
The biggest wilderness I’ve ever been in—a roadless area roughly the size of Portugal with about fifty contiguous watersheds and the whole panoply of charismatic macrofauna doing their thing undisturbed—is another story. This one is about what happened afterward, when I and the Canadian environmentalists I’d been traveling with arrived at the nearest settlement, a logging town in the far northeast corner of British Columbia consisting of a raw row of buildings on either side of the highway to Alaska.
We were celebrating two weeks of rafting down the central river in that ungulate- and predator-rich paradise at the outpost’s big honky-tonkish nightclub, where the DJ kept playing country songs, to which all the locals would loop around gracefully, clasped together. But my compadres kept making faces of disgust at the music and asking the DJ to put on something else. He’d oblige with reggae, mostly, and we’d wave our limbs vaguely, dancing solo and free-form as white people have danced to rock-and-roll since the mid-1960s. Everyone else would sit down to wait this other music out. It was not a great movement-building exercise. How far were you going to get with a community when you couldn’t stand their music or even be diplomatic about it? I’ve been through dozens of versions of that scene over the years and got reminded of it last year by a letter I received from Dick.
He really was named Dick. From a return address in the exorbitantly expensive near–San Francisco countryside, he sent me a typewritten note about a section in a recent book of mine. He declared, “The country music parts of the U.S. you love so much are also home of the most racist, reactionary, religiously authoritarian (i.e., Dominionist) people in the country. You don’t have to go far: just look at voting patterns among rednecks (descendants
of the white yeomanry, if you wish to be polite) in the Central Valley. They love Bush and are very backward people by the standards of the Enlightenment. The Q might be, what is the correlation between country music and political backwardness, if any?”
My first question for Dick might be: which country music? You could cite Johnny Cash’s long-term commitment to Native American rights and stance against the Vietnam War (he called himself “a dove with claws”) or the song about interracial love that Merle Haggard wrote (but his record company refused to release at the time, though the minor country star Tony Booth had a hit with “Irma Jackson” in 1970) or “I Believe the South Is Gonna Rise Again,” boldly sung by Tanya Tucker in 1974:
Our neighbors in the big house called us redneck
’Cause we lived in a poor share-croppers shack
The Jacksons down the road were poor like we were
But our skin was white and theirs was black
But I believe the South is gonna rise again
But not the way we thought it would back then
Or you could just mention medium-sized country star Charley Pride (thirty-six
Billboard
number-one country hits), who also doesn’t fit Dick’s redneck designation because he is African American.
In terms of political orientation, you could cite the Texas-based Dixie Chicks, who refused to back down from criticizing Bush on the brink of the current war. They were, as their later hit had it, “Not Ready to Make Nice.” Though corporate country stars like Toby Keith stampeded to support the so-called war on terror, alt-country musicians like Steve Earle charged just as hard in the opposite direction. Country music is a complex beast, sometimes in resistance to or mockery of the mainstream and the rural South, sometimes a mirror of or hymn to it, the product of many voices over many eras, arisen from a culture that was never pure anything, including white. (And its current listening territory includes much of the English-speaking world.)
Another set of questions might be why Dick despises the people and places that spawned the music, and what larger rifts his attitude reveals.
Answering them requires digging into the deep history of American music and American race and class wars, and into the broad crises of environmentalism in recent years.
Those wars about race and class are peculiarly evident in the stories we tell about Elvis. I was raised on the tale that Elvis stole his music from black people. The story told one way makes Elvis Presley a thief rather than someone who bridged great divides by hybridizing musical traditions and brought the lush energetic force of African-American music into white ears and hearts and loins. It ignores his many white influences, from bluesy Hank Williams to schmaltzy Perry Como, his genius in synthesizing multiple American traditions into something unprecedented, and the raw power of his own voice and vocal style. It ignores, too, the lack of an apartheid regime in American roots music. White country blues and white gospel were part of the rich river of sound that came out of the South long before Presley. Despite segregation, black and white musicians learned from each other and influenced each other. (Another view of Elvis, from
Billboard
magazine in 1958, stated, “In one aspect of America’s cultural life, integration has already taken place.”)
The particular song Elvis was supposed to have stolen from R&B singer Big Mama Thornton, “Hound Dog,” was written by two New York Jews, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Elvis’s first single featured a cover of the song “That’s All Right Mama” by Delta blues singer Arthur Crudup, but the B-side was a cover of bluegrass star Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” as perfect a mix of southern musical traditions as you can find. Elvis was repeatedly charged with being a racist—most famously in rapper Chuck D’s 1990 song—on the basis of a comment he never actually made. James Brown and Muhammad Ali thought otherwise, and some Native Americans claim the reputedly part-Cherokee Elvis as their own.
The story that Elvis stole his music from African Americans as told by, for example, my now-deceased, über-leftie, America-hating, and otherwise wonderful aunt painted rock-and-roll as a mostly white child miraculously born to a purely black family. It was a way of saying that cool and correct white people could love rock-and-roll—white music with roots in the South—but dodge the sense that they had any affinities with white
southerners; they could imagine them as wholly other and hate them with ease, with a fervor and disdain that spilled over pretty easily to all blue-collar rural people, to the white American peasantry, basically. That hate had and has wide currency. Ask Dick.
The story that racism belongs to poor people in the South is a little too easy, though. Just as not everybody up here, geographically and economically, is on the right side of the line, so not everyone down there is on the wrong side. But the story allows middle-class people to hate poor people while claiming to be on the side of truth, justice, and everything else good.
I grew up surrounded by liberals and leftists who liked to play the idiot in fake southern accents, make jokes about white trash and trailer trash, and, like the Canadian enviros, made gagging noises whenever they heard Dolly Parton or anything like her. If Okies from Muskogee thought they were being mocked, they were right, in part. This mockery was particularly common during the 1970s and 1980s, but it has yet to evaporate altogether—after all, Dick, who judging by his typewriter was around then, wrote me in this era, not some other.
My own conversion to country music came all of a sudden in 1990, around another campfire, also in Nevada. The great Western Shoshone antinuclear and land-rights activist Bill Rosse, a decorated World War II vet and former farm manager, unpacked his guitar and sang Hank Williams and traditional songs for hours. I was enchanted as much by the irreverent rancor of some of the songs as by the pure blue yearning of others. I’d had no idea such coolness, wit, and poetry was lurking in this stuff I was taught to scorn before I’d met it.
Hating white southerners, particularly poor white southerners, and often, by extension, any poor rustic whites, seems to be a legacy of the civil rights movement. So far as I can tell (I came later), well-meaning people outside the South were horrified by the culture of Jim Crow, with its segregation, discrimination, and violence—and rightly so. Over the past couple of years, I’ve spent time in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast, and I myself was horrified by the racial violence that transpired during the chaos of Katrina and some of the everyday apartheid and racist vileness that persists in the region. But I also recently ran into raging white racists
on the periphery of Detroit, Michigan, right across the river from Canada. And the last ostentatious racists I met were the middle-aged heir of a fabulously wealthy family—whose hallowed name is smeared all over the Northeast—and his yachting buddy, right here in left-coast ultra-urban San Francisco. Racism is pervasive. The pretense that it belongs solely to poor people who talk slow lets the rest of us off the hook.
So on the one hand, we have white people who hate black people. On the other hand, we have white people who hate other white people on the grounds that they hate black people. But that latter hatred accuses many wrongfully, and it serves as a convenient cover-up for the racism that is all around us. The reason it matters is that middle-class people despising poor people becomes your basic class war, and the ongoing insults seem to have been at least part of what has weakened the environmental movement in particular and progressive politics in general.
Right-wing politicians may serve the super-rich with tax cuts and deregulation and privatization galore, but they also dress up expertly in a heartland all-Americanism that has, at least until Bush’s plummeting popularity, allowed a lot of rural Americans to see them as allies rather than opponents. The right has also done a superb job of portraying the left as elite and hostile to working-class interests, and the class war going on inside and outside leftist and environmentalist circles did this propaganda battle a great service. The result of all this has been a marginalized environmental movement—more specifically, an environmental movement that has alienated the people who often live closest to “the environment.”
Of course dreadlocks and ragged clothes weren’t exactly diplomatic outreach tools either. I spent some of the 1990s with and around activists in the national forests of the West, and a lot of the supposedly most radical had a remarkable knack for going into rural communities and insulting practically everyone with whom they came into contact. It became clear to me that in their eyes the worst crimes of the locals did not involve chain-saws and voting choices but culture and what gets called lifestyle. It was a culture war that got pretty far from who was actually doing what to the earth and how anyone might stop it.