Editor’s Note: In view of the several issues bubbling merrily on the global stage, it is appropriate to remember the past to put it all in context. One of the unmentioned struggles being played out is one that Old Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about when he came from his post-Revolutionary homeland to tour the new America. I recall being directed to read his account in college. What is extraordinary about it is that his issues of “then” and “now” have oddly congruent echoes with our own version of “now.”
The national outrage over the police and policing practice is just one of them. If you have not heard it yet, the logical “solution” to the “problem” is of course establishment of a national police institution to exercise uniform and fair control of civic virtue. Comte de Tocqueville had some observations about how that central control worked out back in his home, and why the Framers of America insisted on decentralized control.
We are in the midst of a struggle about that again. There is more coming, of course. Some of the numbers associated with it are so big as to defy even a modern imagination. For reference, you can count your share of it in a variety of ways. According to the Treasury Department, as of April Fool’s Day last month, for each of the 320-million of us (plus or minus 30 million undocumented residents) is about $85,000.00 a head. Since that is not how we are organized, it amounts to around $220.000.00 per family unit. I doubt anyone except the 1% they keep talking about could pay their “fair share,” so the answer is a shrug. More on that, of course, as it happens.
But Marlow is doing his own Tocqueville from his Coastal Empire. He has more in the queue, including titles like “Savannah Spirtuals, Spirits of Savannah, Snowfalling Spiritual, Inmate and Cold Calls from Chatham County Lockdown.”
He says they require beaucoup reflection. While we have time, that could be entertaining.
– Vic
Author’s Note: After Friday’s Cuatro X piece, I had hoped to make this 777 words long, but self-discipline is not my forte. It continues my ruminative spiritual Going Native journey.
– Marlow
Streaming Savannah
Stream of Consciousness Riffing on Savannah
Savannah — undisciplined; unpunctual; publicly untidy from time to time; modern music and jazz knowledgeable; self-styled expert but imperfectly so of new cinema; always interesting — there’s no doubt about it; tolerant of eccentrics and loud talkers; recognized for its funny sense of fun and authorized louche-ness during scheduled and taxpayer subsidized public ceremonies of its heritage; possessed of an unofficial motto “No Prisoners! No Prisoners!”; barbarous only when harshly provoked; not particular about barroom attire but quite strict about rules for sideshows; half-mad but in rare times wholly unscrupulous; scorpion quick witted; initially uncertain why it needed Yankees and parvenus to be great once again.
But upon seeing its miraculous rise we jumped in with both feet. Imports find being a Savannahian thornier than they thought; natives feel any time spent in Charleston is time wasted — as if that city to the north is full of sheep stealers and livestock violators; sometimes it’s like riding the whirlwind full of tribesmen and gods.
There are lots of troubles but no vales of them; a full ration of common humanity; with no fiddling around made a great state from its small city beginnings; its Artillery Punch made Sherman’s Army invaders peaceable. The gardens are big and small, hidden and out in the open. Most are good and very few are evil. The time thieves are honorable; always looking for a new way to announce themselves; a benevolent God is very patient with its people and their ways; a thousand of its natives means many thousands of cocktails, served anywhere day or night with a thousand stories of high explosiveness and a thousand hilarious sneaky wisecracks that smash you funny bone silly while also being somewhere down deep decently insulting.
These thousand folks only require fifteen minutes together before descending into beloved chaos. It is a natural state, which some judge insubordinate and half-witted but is really only their manner. It says a lot without much, if any, talking; prizes taking initiative; never minds when somethings hurt; its residents are dangerous dreamers of the day, not of the night, for they may act their dreams with open eyes to make them possible; they are made to last — blind worms wither trying to feast on their substance; they seek as years pass “old and wise,” never settling for “tired and disappointed.”
They never wonder what they are doing. Their days dawn, suns shine, evenings follow, and then they sleep, not puzzling or bewildering themselves. They know things but do not judge them. In many cases the effort to live in the ways of Savannah, and to imitate its emotional foundations has made us immigrants quit of our former selves, and let us look at the nation and its conventions with new eyes.
They destroyed it all for me. We came to Savannah as infidels, but conversion to another faith requires time and suffering to make it stick; such detachment from one’s roots came at times to those exhausted by prolonged plodding along mechanically — sometimes we Savannah novitiates would converse with each other in a void with madness quite near; this proximity to insanity’s edge comes to those who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments; the meaning of honor and innocence are very different here; people here may seem unruly, but we mistake it as such since it is their ardor and fertility of belief in themselves and life we are observing.
They’ve been a people of starts and restarts across many worlds and times unstable as water, and like its life-giving river’s waters they have finally prevailed; they conquered and reconquered again and again this place and achieved freedom not by merit, class, or regulation as these are no qualifications for liberty — they earned it since they were so well armed and so turbulent to inhabit a countryside so thorny, salty and inhospitable that the expense and suffering of their opponent’s occupying it was greater than any conceivable profit or gain.
They were and remain lion tamers; they get that they can’t turn back the days that have gone or life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young — we embrace our life’s flash of fire in mind, heart, and soul with a meat sack worth a buck ninety eight in lime and iron — which we can never get back; it becomes buried in our flesh, throbs in the beat of our pulses, becomes the wine in our blood, music in our hearts; here fiction is fact selected and understood, which we arrange and charge with purpose since this insensate land is not a happy one with hunger or its emotional dwarf cousin – appetite — always present; so, we its denizens always wonder is it Happy Hour yet?
We Savannahians are dark romantics — unlimited and inexplicable. Accused no more of living under the distorted aura when people were said to live in “mansions,” and slavery was a benevolent institution, conducted to a constant banjo-strumming, the strewn largesse of grey-haired colonels, and the shuffle-dance of their happy dependents, where all women were pure, gentle, and beautiful, all men chivalrous and brave, and the Rebel horde a company of swagger, death-mocking cavaliers. No more.
Now we all — Southerners and Northerners — are either derided as the privileged or are being rescued from underneath the hobnailed boots worn by systemically racist overlords. How un-charmingly quaint we’ve become. Aesop’s Fables characters one and all.
Whatever it was, a formerly discarded barren spiritual wilderness animates current naysayers’ cheap Marxist mythologizing of America’s evil. It makes Savannah’s current residents antagonistic and ever more devoted to one another. Whether this counter-reaction is out of necessity, kinship, or desire remains shrouded from my discovery.
Nothing of the America we knew will be heard from here on. It’s a poor stuffed crow, with its pathetic failures, it’s neat-o apps, but nothing of its glories left behind to ponder. All that is there are the tailored videos of the media elites (Advance WARNING: some of the images you will see in this tale are disturbing), who now stand by, watchfully, hungry for our praise of their righteousness.
Stand by citizens, for tomorrow will bring forth a flood of new 60-second news pieces, where our interlocutors swiftly sketch upon the dead gray cheeks a ghastly rose-hued mockery of American life and health.
“Why, it’s artistry and magic” we’ll squeal as we proclaim joyously, “Oscar, Emmy, and Pulitzer worthy!”
Outside, the city’s spring air is chilled by a surprise blustery cold front, while we’re still figuring how to continue. Soon it’ll be getting dark. These are long lonely preludes to winter in Georgia’s splendid pines as a whistling wind bends the Savannah River’s long grasses.
And suddenly, we’ll watch the town’s lights wink on, their warm message of the hived life of men will call us out to cure our numb hunger for all its words, faces, and laughter.
Our minds will gather out of the wreckage of day’s little things. Life’s Spring is here, and its withered leaves of October are being pushed aside.
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