Joy

How many future historians, a hundred, two hundred years from now, will make careers out of studying President Barack Obama? I wonder if he might not turn out to be the most discussed and analyzed person in American history -- or will he, by contrast, be quickly slotted into his proper place? -- a very little man, a freak of collapsing early 21st-century American academia, pet of a whole superclass of citizens, the media, who propelled him into power by ignoring everything he was? Not that the voting public, alas, weren't dreadfully to blame.

This latest episode in his life provides us with the most delicious piece of irony and poetic justice it is possible to conceive. So he authorizes the killing of Osama bin Laden, the archfiend. Good. Congratulations. Yet the Greek-tragedy-and-hubris perfection of it seems beyond human arrangement. Of all things, what should Mr. Obama now be known for, what albatross now hangs around his neck? He who delights in his Muslim background but lacks the gravitas to really espouse any faith except the America-bashing one of his former Chicago church, he who wanted to, say, redesign NASA as a vehicle of outreach to the Muslim world and apologized for Americanness at Cairo and anyplace else that would host him, he who comes from a college world where the United States, the military and the masculine are about equally loathed, he who supported the Ground Zero mosque and wanted to try the 9/11 mastermind as a citizen with full Constitutional rights in a Manhattan courtroom -- and so on, all these noble views of course contingent upon polling data and re-election prospects -- he now has used America's most extraordinary soldiers to kill the most famous America-hating Muslim in the world. It seems he had to do it, literally. His re-election prospects could never have survived any leaked word that he had a chance to do it and passed it by. (Couldn't they?) And when it was over he had to go out and announce it to the world from the White House late on a Sunday night, just as if he were President.

I wonder if it wasn't one of the bitterest moments of his life. No, not because he "killed a fellow Muslim." I repeat, I doubt he has a real faith to speak of. But being impelled to do something because the position of the presidency is larger than himself must have been infuriating. The reason he won't get a "bump" in approval from this is not only because it's still the economy stupid, but because everyone, right or left, knows this one dramatic act is totally out of character for him. The path to it was laid down by other men in other years. Heroism, action, decision making, is the last thing he wants to be around. The order that bin Laden's body must be correctly treated according to Islamic law after being shot up -- now that is in character. And not because by it he was "burying a fellow Muslim." Rather because such a picayune, theatrical command is totally in keeping with our president's emotional background: the provincial professor accustomed to trotting out his special subject, the play-President who likes the job's little powers, the wildly inexperienced adult who wants ownership of a group project but lacks an adult sense of the grotesque. Lacks taste, simply put.

So, yes, congratulations.Good luck living it down among your friends.

Field trip! more Springfield

Springfield, Illinois must boast the worst mishmash of architectural styles of any state capital in the nation -- I would say, of any community on the planet, but I could be wrong about that. Every visitor to the city comes, of course, to see this:

This is Abraham Lincoln's home, restored, but not with too heavy a hand, the National Park Service men told us. Eighty percent of the interior is original, as is sixty percent of the exterior. It sits in a neighborhood that looks reassuringly familiar -- spacious, calm, manicured and even up-to-date. The little four-block area might be a corner of any comfortable midwestern town even today, except for the gravel "streets" and the wooden "sidewalks." I use quotation marks because all of it except for Lincoln's house, right down to those streets and sidewalks, is reconstructed. Even if you weren't told so you would probably guess it. The beautiful houses have an eerie, perfect, plastic look, and if you venture inside those that have been rendered museums, you find the rooms are all painted a dull, clean, sensible museum-gray. Tap on the marble-look mantelpieces. Fake. They ring like metal.

Above, for instance, is a house painstakingly recreated to suggest one that belonged to a Lincoln neighbor. (His is behind you and across the street to your right when you stand here.) I couldn't resist snapping a photo of the view that neither Lincoln nor the neighbor ever saw: some modern municipal buildings, and the Hilton hotel towering over the city. This is what I mean by mishmash. Had I also troubled to photograph the new Abraham Lincoln Museum and its companion Library, both great tiered circles of shining wheat-blond stone and glass amid the gray concrete parking garages and the plain brown office piles and the circa 1890s brick and multicolored storefronts downtown, not far from the weathered Greek columns of the Old State Capitol, well -- you would have seen mishmash with a vengeance.

If only it all looked as turn-of-the-twentieth-century-dignified as this.

On the right of this photo, the Greek-columned Old State Capitol, again. Site of the famed "house divided" speech, 1858.

There was one more very interesting house in Lincoln's neighborhood, this time a real one, falling to pieces with age but more alive than all the others for all that. I wonder if this is what an architectural historian might call a piece of Victorian gingerbread.

I wonder, too, if the colors of pale salmon and slate blue were the height of chic at the time. When I look at it somehow I imagine the daughter of the family, a hundred or more years ago, dressing and primping excitedly for her first grown-up party. Fond father, town brahmin complete with watch chain, mutton chop whiskers, and monocle, looking on, etc. The house has a femininity about it, right down to the violets and grasses still struggling to grow in the yard, and the ivies trailing into the deep sunken brick-lined bowl which I suppose was once a fish pond, or the basin to Mother's precious fountain. In the photo below, you are standing with the house at your back, at the bottom of "Old Aristocracy Hill" -- the sign says so -- and looking up Eighth Street toward the Lincolns' place in the distance.

The salmon-and-blue affair is surely within a hair's breadth of being condemned and torn down; bright warning official stickers on the boarded windows are already almost too weathered for passersby to be able to read "Dangerous Structure" on them. This is what happened I feel sure, one by one, to the real houses near Lincoln's corner, and this is why all the reconstructed homes around his are such perfect but eerie ghosts. They all just weathered and crumbled. This house is for sale, but would cost a fortune to revive. It lies outside the sacred precincts which the National Park Service now owns and keeps frozen in 1860, so I imagine if it were not perfectly revived -- if you bought it and did what you liked with it -- if it were simply made safe, pretty, and livable, that would be all right.

In fact I almost wish all the others up the street had not been so perfectly revived themselves. Though the window back into time which they provide is interesting, I wish living families with children were still in these homes, even at the price of historically inaccurate doorknobs or windows glowing blue with television, rather than that Lincoln's part of the town should be the so pristine, still and dead. Our park service guides lamented to us that, before the government began buying up the four block area with preservation in mind, there had been not only real people's, non-1860 homes all around but also "a Piggly-Wiggly" (tacky grocery store chain) cheek by jowl with the Lincoln shrine. Well, what if there was?  People need groceries, and Lincoln, ex-store clerk, was nothing if not sympathetic to the human comedy. By this lofty argument, however, I should not complain about the mishmash effect of Springfield's architecture taken altogether. People need parking garages, and hotels.

A final thought, prompted by the scenery on a warm spring day. Springfield gives the strange impression that it would never have remained the state capitol were it not for Abraham Lincoln's presence here. The seat of Illinois government, already four or five times removed from more rural locales before arriving here in the 1840s, would have naturally moved on again. The mishmash, the isolation and the ghostliness are un-capital-like. And then, the rolling up of sidewalks on Saturday night is another matter. 

Field trip -- the drive to Springfield

Illinois does go on for miles and miles, hours and hours. Photographs of a farm beside the highway, and another farm past it in the distance, and a third and fourth in yet further distances, still don't convey the endless expanse of land and sky. Imagine walking through here beside a creaking, slow- moving covered wagon, when all the land was prairie cut through with meandering small creeks burbling down in the grasses. They named them "Vermilion" or "Money." I think scenery like this is the reason why, the few times in my life that I've seen mountains, I have found them weirdly disturbing and almost confining. Beautiful of course, but still. Imagine never being able to see the horizon.

Then again, imagine reaching a certain point -- right here -- and deciding, this is a good place to stop. We'll live here. Or, imagine deciding, no, let's go on walking for two or three more months and settle in Nebraska ... or Utah ... or Oregon.Who knows? Maybe some people in the wagon trains were thinking, I'd like to live near mountains. Or the sea.

The change in the look of growing things was noticeable once we reached a certain point south. The spring day was unusually warm everywhere, but beyond a certain point, the meager springtime colors of our northern part of the state changed, from the grays and browns of bare trees and plowed fields, the bright tans of last year's grasses and the deep reds of the almost budding trees, to a more uniform stippling of the palest green along the treetops and in the underbrush in the woods zooming by. Had we passed, in our drive, from what the gardener knows as USDA Zone 5 to Zone 6? In Springfield -- yes! the excitements of the capital were our destination -- things had gone even further. A few flowering crabapples were in full bloom, and a magnolia across the street from Abraham Lincoln's house had already dropped most of its petals. Then there was this odd thing.

This tree graces the site of Lincoln's first law offices in downtown Springfield. On the building next to it, in the picture below, happens to be a reproduction of a flowery painting by Vachel Lindsay, who struggles to be the second-most significant figure ever to come from the town. Poor fellow, it's not his fault. What can one do, when one is a forgotten poet-artist who happens to share a bit of biographical coincidence with an incomprehensibly epochal figure? By way of thought experiment: who, for example, counts as the second most important man from Stratford-on-Avon? Answer comes there none.

American photographs

One thing is certain: it's a boy.When did dresses for little boys go out of fashion? They used to wear them, at least for formal photographs, until the age of four or five, and they didn't get their baby curls cut until that age, too.

It seems this little man's parents had compromised, or fashions were in flux by then. Haircut yes, dress, still yes.

Again with the commonplace book

It's incredible, and heartening, to see and read the wisdom that shows up among anonymous people thinking and commenting anywhere the freedom of the internet allows them to do so. It's not all blathering, ALL CAPS SHOUTING and "trolls." This is from a post at Pajamas Media called "The Slow Suicide of the West." And it's better than the base article. The commenter calls himself only "Kipling."

"The faith of the author in classical civilization is laudable but largely misplaced. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans were eventually able to hold their civilizations together. The Greeks had their own intercene [sic] wars that eventually gutted their civilizations. The Romans pursued a vicious policy of conquest to fund their imperial coffers. For every Cicero there were countless Neros and for every Cincannatus [sic] a legion of Sullas.

"The strength of western civilization is built upon Biblical Christianity and its revelation to the world of universe of ordered liberty. The Nazis and Marxists did not just happen on the scene in the 20th century. They were the product of the philosophical quest for answers in the rejection of God that ended in the bloodbath of Nietzschean nihilism. Nietzche [sic -- he forgot the 's'] and nihilism marked the death of philosophy as he concluded that we are simply bubbles of emptiness on a sea of nothingness. With truth out the windows, the disciples of Nietzche [ditto] embraced the will to power and spread darkness across the land. No philosophy has risen to take its place and we live in a post-modern world where the individual determines truth.

"Western civilization can only restore itself when it reforms upon the foundations that made it great. These foundations include our classical ancestors but they also include the giants of Christiandom [sic -- Christendom] who developed the concepts of ordered societies that influenced our founders. Christianity gave us the dignity of man, the value of work and honest labor, and the drive to suffer and yearn as a means of spiritual growth. It gave us a belief in something larger than ourselves that was worth sacrificing and building for on a daily basis. It gave us strong homes, strong churches, and informed citizens. It gave us a sense of community and purpose that far surpassed the ancient world. It can do so again but we must go back to the ancient paths."

Is he right? Despite the [sic]s, he's thinking. Heartening. 

Safety

Snow. With a vengeance. Howling winds. Darkness. "White-out conditions." "We are encouraging everyone to stay off the roads after 6 pm."

Four of the family are safely home, but not the fifth. It's 5:30 in the afternoon, it's 5:33, it's 6:00. There were rumors that the store would close early for the night. "Sixty percent of what you fear doesn't happen." Images: the long drive home through the woods. Fishtailing trucks, lonely roads, looming headlights, taillights; the flickering, pale orange sparkling lights of a plow far, far away. You cook a very plain meal and do the dishes because it seems better to do that than to look casually out the windows.

Images, states of mind: the eerie in-between feeling of anticipating what it will be like when everything is all right of course, when it's not all right yet. An hour from now perhaps, or an hour and a half. Or twenty minutes? You can anticipate the slam of a car door, the usual footsteps on the porch. But they haven't happened. It snows. The windows rattle, the snow against them sounding like whipping, rustling cloth. 

After dishes, then what? There's a difficult feeling in the stomach. You have no desire to do anything giving any pleasure or relaxation. That's like another country, which you haven't reached or even embarked for. It's 6:04, it's 6:17. Phone calls. "Just checking to see if everyone's home safe." 

The cat, from out of nowhere, spreads herself lazily on the floor at your feet, near the back door. That might be the sound of an engine outside, but looking won't make it so. And what if it isn't?

But there are stories of cats knowing when their people are home, or even on their way home. You part the blinds. There is the car, halfway in the driveway, but stuck, and the snow streaming wildly in its yellow headlights.

Well of course. Naturally nothing would have happened. A great breath of normalcy. "She's home, she just can't get in the driveway. I'll help shovel her out." Actions: throwing on boots and coat, hat and gloves. Stomping out to the wind and the darkness that isn't real darkness but a geometry of weird, orange-gray wedges. Stomping out into shadows and angles of light from the big streetlight and the shape of the house, stomping out into the fine lashing snow. It billows and rolls off the neighbors' roofs. The temperature really isn't that bad. It's even enjoyable, to be out in the elements like this.

We shovel. The wind pushes at our backs, tearing at the snow and throwing it from our shovels. She complains that her first serious problem on the drive home "had to happen right in front of the house!" I said, better here than in the woods.

We finish freeing the car and clearing out a parking space for it. She pulls in. Inside, there is much thudding of boots and tossing of wet clothes over the shower curtain bar to dry. There are phone calls returned -- "oh, good" -- pajamas, a late dinner, a movie. Pleasure and relaxation. Everyone has the day off tomorrow, while outside, the worst of the night blizzard is said to be only just beginning. Hours and hours of it. Safety.

Across the street the neighbor's dog bounds out, leashed to the silhouette of her owner in their yard's geometry -- in the glare of the porch light, the angle and shadows of their steps, the overhanging gutter, the roof and the vague square of the house behind. She relieves herself, bounds about as if wanting to chase squirrels or the snow, and hunches over again beneath the tall, bare, straight-swaying trees while billows of snow and wind pour around them. Then her leash tightens as she bounds back to safety, dragging Master. A mile away, the deer we'll see in spring must huddle in the black woods.

Undercover

We happened to stop and rest in a small shadowed plaza, where park benches lay scattered about and weird modern sculptures splayed against the sky and fountains -- so much prettier -- splashed. The tall buildings loomed about us. It was a hot day.

While we sat among the crowds, five or six young black kids all dressed in jeans and plain white t-shirts came racing around a corner and sprinted down a corridor which led like a small canyon off the plaza. They disappeared up some wide steps.

All this time, a street performer had been setting up on the curb nearby. He was a black man wearing sweat pants and a shirt. We watched him put out a big boom box and a drum.

He took off his sweats. Underneath he wore a skin-tight, multicolored spandex bodysuit. He leaned over, switched on the boom box, and stood up on the drum as if it were a stage. His music blared, raspy, something funky and nondescript.

A uniformed cop on a bicycle rode slowly past him, up on the sidewalk. The performer said nothing but pointed gracefully in the direction the boys had run. The cop rode that way, and the performer began. He contorted himself, pulled a narrow plastic hoop over his body, balanced remarkably. I noticed there was a clear plexiglass box on the ground beside him, the kind contortionists fold themselves into on t.v.

While he stood on his drum, acting, playing to the crowd, he also watched where the cop had gone and where the boys had gone. He stood handstands while watching. Then one of the boys came back, the youngest and smallest. He settled in quietly among the crowd. The performer did not take his eyes off him.

I hissed in Aunt Laurie's ear that I thought the street dancer was an undercover cop. She gave me that arched-eyebrow glare, which usually means “Really? How interesting, you’re so wrong.” After a few minutes more, she was ready to move on.

We left. The man was still balancing and contorting and his music still pumped and thundered as we made to cross the street beside him. I was tempted to compliment him quietly on the fine job, but I thought this might blow his cover. On the other hand, I don’t see how the young kid who came back -- was sent back -- could not have known full well what he was.