The "Dixie" Conundrum

When, still in the heat of the progressive political upsurge of the 60s, The Band recorded "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," I can't remember anyone complaining.  It was, of course, The Band – the group that had brought groundedness back to the psychedelic soaring of later 60s rock, the group that posed with its family members for the inner cover of its first album.  I remember one deeply sensitive, thoughtful poet saying to me, “I’m glad they wrote that.”  I agreed.

Why?  For lots of reasons.  It was a bridge, many of us thought:  a hand extended across the gulf that (still) divided North and South, an attempt to “make their pain our pain,” to use the vernacular of a later time.  But there was more.  Anyone who’s lived in the South knows that, particularly among the poor, the farmers and the laborers – white, I’m talking about here – there can be a decency, a personal intimacy that is utterly foreign to the urban, then-industrial life led in New York, Chicago or L.A of the 60s.  And anyone who’d reflected on it at all knew that the people who’d thought they were fighting for that decency – under the banner of “way of life” – had suffered a spiritual defeat at Appomattox, and that nothing represented that decency, nor its dignity in defeat, than the figure of Lee.

But, of course, that was “family history” – even for those of us who demanded civil rights, an end to war, and a humane social order.  We saw the Civil War as “our” [American] story, whichever side we were on, and we felt permitted to build a bridge, extend a hand, to those across the gulf of defeat.  Later, we became wiser.  For we learned that the Civil War had been part of a global 19^th century in which America had come late to the abolition of slavery; and we saw that it had solved nothing except the notion that one human being could own another – something that should have been an utterly unthinkable notion in a democratic society.  But, in no small part because it lacked a guiding hand of the kind that got it through the war, there was no follow-through to the defeat of the South – none.  The South was punished, but the “freedmen” were left to languish in American apartheid for another century – about the time that passed between Appomattox and MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  And even after the African American Spring began, even after it seemed to produce its ultimate product with a black president, we learned – nightmarishly – that the succubus of racism had lived on through what seemed to be times of progress, to emerge with a vengeance in a time when many of us had thought it had been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Though I was born in Ft. Lee, Virginia, a few hundred yards from The Crater produced when Union troops tried (unsuccessfully) to tunnel under Confederate lines and plant explosives that would end the brutal, 10-month long siege of Petersburg, I have no attachment to the South.  But I do know what those who love the South mean when they say that it offers a more “personal” and “intimate” experience. (Even one of my black friends in college, a veteran of the voter registration drives in Alabama, once said he’d rather face the honest venom of a white Southerner than the sterile invisibility cast over him by Northerners.)  And I wonder what to do about those very personal, human Virgil Caines who’ve worked the land, chopped wood when “the money’s no good”, and lived to see “the best” taken from them.

This is a murderously difficult question.  But, if America is ever to recover from the tailspin into which it has stumbled in the last four or more decades, it must be dealt with.  And I suggest we start here:  the bulk of the soldiers in the Confederate army did not own slaves, or owned less than five; mass slavery – what we might call “assembly line” slavery, was a privilege granted (by virtue of income) primarily to those we might call “the 1%”. (Actually the 15-20%, but it’s the same difference.)[1]  Those mass-owners stood to lose the most from abolition, not only by virtue of what they stood to lose in the present, but by virtue of what they stood to lose in the future:  the plans of the owners of vast numbers of slaves envisioned slavery expanding, not only into the US territories slated to become states, but the countries of the Caribbean basin, into which they hoped to expand.  They were the ones who pushed the “way of life” justification with the poor white farmers in rallying them to war. (That’s not to say the poor whites weren’t racist:  but the clarion call of the rich slave owners to defend their honor was what helped make democratic reconstruction and reconciliation after the war impossible.)

So let’s start by recognizing that the Civil War was the product of an avaricious, immoral and racist elite determined to protect its horrifically predatory way of life and not averse to using white supremacy to feed the flames of the war it hoped would give it license to behave in the most primitive way imaginable:  the ownership and breeding of other humans for its own profit.  Let’s try to find ways to understand those who thought they’d lost everything, even though they may have had little or nothing to lose by comparison with those who rallied them to war.  And let’s find a way to allow them to memorialize both their loss and the way they were manipulated.  Virgil Caine’s descendants might well have been among those who recognized the need for change when the Civil Rights movement began; or they might have once again been duped in our own time by the avaricious demagogues who wish to cover up how ruthlessly they’ve devoured the wherewithal of the dying middle class of our own time.  Whichever, or whatever, we need to find a way to acknowledge their story without dismissing the gravity of the mistakes that were made as it unfolded.  “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” isn’t perfect.  But it’s a start.

---

[1] This is a figure of much contention.  But if we appraise those who stood to lose fortunes if abolition were enacted, as opposed to those who might lose – or have to hire as wage laborers – a hand or two on the hard-scrabble family farm, the former were clearly the elite majority and the power brokers who pushed for succession and war.

The Roman Conundrum

I've remarked before (a time too many for some, no doubt) about the preoccupation I've had since age 8 or so about parallels between the Roman Empire and America.  At 8, it was just the sudden realization, after a moment of basking in the light of what came to be called The American Century, that empires had always fallen:  why wouldn't ours?

As I got older and a bit more historically sophisticated, I discovered I wasn't alone in making the comparison (Spengler's The Decline of the West takes the prize in that department), but I tried to see how much water the parallel could hold.  It held a lot.  From the "invasion of the barbarians" (a false characterization of populations outside an empire migrating in - often invited to do so), to the decline of traditional religions and the increasing attraction of exotic ones, there were a multitude of ways in which the Roman and the American stories bore comparisons.  But there was always a lacuna in my logic:  Rome "fell" ("declined" is a better word) over centuries; America has only had empiric dimensions for a handful of decades.  If America were already in decline, the timeline would have to be compressed, stages of decline speeded up - not a far-fetched idea, given the way in which modern technological change has . . . well, speeded everything up.

But then, a few weeks back, I read Mary Beard's new SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.  I hadn't read a good history of Rome in quite a while, and Beard made me spot the flaw in my model.  There were really two Romes:  one, the empire we know from Ben Hur  - with its conquering legions and emperors of all different stripes; and the other - the Roman Republic - which was actually much less monolithic than its successor, even democratic within the limitations of the ancient world.  The Republic worked well as a limited democracy, but in time it grew to such size and complexity that it became militaristic - a simple way to handle both.  And it was only a hop and a skip to the next (over)simplification:  dictatorship.  Thus Caesar crossing the Rubicon and, in short order, the establishment of the Empire under his anointed successor, Augustus.  And thus the replacement of the democratic traditions of the Republic by autocratic traditions enforced by the power elite.

And so now I no longer think of America as an empire in decline.  But I do find worrying the shift away from its traditions of democracy and equality - most especially in regard to distribution of wealth and the growing domination of the rich and powerful.  And I find chilling the fact that it has now put an imperious, dictatorial personality within a single step of taking over the democracy.  What we may well be witnessing is the tipping point that would lead inevitably into decline.  History may, indeed, be repeating itself:  democratic traditions exchanged for autocratic ones,  promises of bread and provision of spectacle used to veil the downward spiral into demagoguery and decay.  Not today, or tomorrow.  But inevitably . . .

The Pub That Survived Socialism

North Dakota Quarterly. Vol. 59, No. 1

 

 

The Pub That Survived Socialism

Dan Shanahan

 

         In the rolling hills and forests of southern Bohemia, Christmas still revolves around traditions. At the end of the third week in December, huge metal tubs the size of wine casks appear outside butcher shops. In each tub, half a dozen live carp swim idly.

 

         Customers point to the carp they want, the butcher nets it, kills it and cleans it on a table next to the tub, and the customer takes it home to begin preparations for the variety of meals eaten on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. For yards in any direction from the butcher shops the gutters glitter with scales until New Year's Day.

 

         The cutting of the mistletoe is another tradition. One sunny and unseasonably warm afternoon two days before Christmas, my wife and I accompanied her brother Pavel and two of his friends on a mistletoe-cutting expedition.        

 

We met them at a small pub near the edge of town: my brother-in-law, a doctor; Petr, a friend who worked for the local phone company and who had brought his seven-year old daughter, Sharka; and Ladya, described to me as a "woodsman" and "worker at odd jobs." It was Ladya who would do the climbing.

        

The three had gone to high school together fifteen years before, and though Ladya was the least educated, he was clearly the most knowledgeable when it came to plant and animal life. As we walked up the street that led out of town and into the forest, he began to engage me curiously in a conversation about the varieties of trees found in California, searching for the few words in English he knew and inevitably returning to Latin names when his English failed him.

        

 

"You have the valley oak," he said through my wife, who did most of the translating. "I have seen its picture, but we have no valley oak in Bohemia."        

 

I explained that I was allergic to the valley oak in the spring.

 

         "But this is winter," he replied with a grin, "—sort of." He looked around at the bare ground and the blue sky. "Not much like winter at all when you think about it. I think all this business in Prague has changed the climate." He shot me another grin and a wink.

 

         Indeed, the temperature was nearly into the fifties—more like early spring than early winter. We walked for three miles over sun-bathed, misty rolling countryside, half of it pastureland, half forest, until we came abreast of a tiny village: a dozen old farmhouses, some of them rambling and bent with age, chickens and sheep wandering in the yards. A fork in the road led down to the village, but we stayed to the left and skirted the edge of the forest. The road quickly became a path, then it plunged into the trees.

 

         Half a mile later, Ladya pointed to the top of a white-barked pine some forty feet high and asked through my wife if we had any trees like it in California. I told him that it didn't look familiar, and he winked back. "This is the tree with the best mistletoe." Unfortunately, he went on, it was disappearing. These trees were very sensitive and pollution was killing them off. "Very rare," he nodded affirmatively, parroting my wife's last words as she translated.

 

         As Petr and his daughter walked up a small hill to inspect a beekeeper's hives, Ladya threw off the backpack he had been wearing and pulled out his blue worker's coveralls and the ankle-brace spikes he would use to scale the pine.

 

         My wife asked if he needed a permit to pick mistletoe; "Zitra," he replied with a wave of his hand. Tomorrow.

 

         Grabbing the tree's trunk with both hands, he sunk the spikes into the bark and started up. Twenty feet above us, he disappeared into the foliage. We heard the snapping of twigs, and then large boughs of mistletoe began floating to the ground. In five minutes we had gathered a large pile of fallen mistletoe at the base of the tree, and Ladya called down that he wanted to leave some for the birds. We all exchanged smiles as he gave the names of three species that fed on the mistletoe's small white berries.

 

         Moments later, Ladya scrambled back to the ground, out of breath, but ruddy-cheeked with the exhilaration of the climb. Petr, back from the bee expedition with his daughter, asked me through my wife if we had mistletoe in California.

 

         Ladya interrupted with a scornful wave of the hand as he removed the spikes from one ankle. "Jasne," he said. Of course.

 

         "They have Phoradendron; the Phoradendron loves the oak," he said, tipping his head to one side like a school teacher making a connection between two points. "They have all kind of trees in California: sequoia," he said wagging one finger in the air, "—now that would be a climb."

 

         Pavel and Petr took off their belts and threaded the mistletoe on them in two big bunches, then hung the belts on large sticks. Pavel slung one over his shoulder, Petr the other, and less than a half hour after having entered the forest, we reemerged to see a golden sun dropping toward the horizon across green pasturelands. Below us lay the tiny village, and in single file behind Ladya we trooped down toward it.        

 

As we crossed a small bridge that led us between two wide yards littered with sheep and chickens, Pavel pointed to a long house directly ahead with a battered tin sign above the door: "Hostinec."

 

         "This is the pub that survived socialism," he said with a smile.

 

         For forty years in Czechoslovakia, virtually every enterprise, large or small, has been state-owned. But here and there, especially in the outlying regions, small private establishments occasionally survived, largely through oversight or official apathy. This was one.

 

         We entered a long room with bare, foot-thick plaster walls and hand-hewn tables and benches running the length of the room end to end in two rows, barely enough room for someone to walk between them. Warmth radiated out of a wood stove next to the door. At most, the pub would have seated thirty-five, but this afternoon there were only three men at one of the tables: grizzled old workers who moved only their eyes to greet us when we walked in. They sat with the owner's wife, a chubby farm woman in her fifties who smiled approvingly as we came in.

 

         There was no ordering. After a few minutes the woman appeared with half-quart sized glasses of freshly drawn pilsner for each of us and asked if Petr's daughter would like tea.Sharka was cradling a kitten she had encountered at the door, and nodded disinterestedly when her father asked about the tea.

 

 It arrived a few minutes later—a bag with no string in a glass cup with no handle—and sat untouched as we drank our beers and the light through the window changed from gold to blue to grey.

 

Pavel asked Ladya if he could inspect one of the ankle spikes, and as he did one of the workmen at the other table turned interestedly in our direction.

 

         "You're the tree climber," he said after a minute.

 

         Ladya smiled. "That's me," he replied, adding "—on alternate Tuesdays."        

 

"They're looking for a tree-climber over in Ceske Budejovice," the man went on. "They need some red stars taken down from the factory."

 

"Now there's a job I'd do for free!" Ladya said heartily, hoisting his beer in the man's direction.

 

The old worker cracked a wry smile and turned back to his friends.

 

Petr joked that soon Ladya could work his way down into Romania.  Then the conversation turned to trees again.

 

         Ladya began to explain that the species of pine he had climbed had been disappearing for some time—"Even before the communists came," he winked. He had a theory that it wasn't just industrial pollution that was causing the trees to disappear; it was the natural disappearance of the species.

        

"Some things are like that," he explained. "It's in their genes. They just die out because their time has come."

 

         The conversation jumped from topic to topic. Petr wanted to know if Americans went mushroom hunting. I explained that we were so over-conscious of the dangers of eating poisonous mushrooms that it had largely become a lost art.

 

         "The same thing is happening in Czechoslovakia," Petr said. "But that's just as well: all the good spots for picking have become like sports stadiums on Sunday afternoon. You can't find any peace in the forest anymore."

 

         Ladya finished his first beer and without invitation the owner's wife replaced it, putting two marks with a broken pencil on his cardboard

coaster.

 

         I asked what was the most typical Czech drink. They answered that it was Becherovka—an herb liqueur made in Karlovy Vary, a mountain resort best known by its German name, Karlsbad.

 

Everyone drank Becherovka. There had been a crisis in the country two years before when a member of the family that still kept the centuries-old distilling secret locked in a vault defected to the West and sold the recipe to the Germans.

 

         "Our government took it to the World Court," Ladya said, "and they forced everyone to stop making it until the dispute was settled. There was no Becherovka for months! Until now, that's the nearest we ever came to revolution."

 

Chortles went all around.

 

         The kitten in Sharka's arms jumped free and headed for the door as it opened, and Sharka ran after it.

 

         A man in his sixties, somewhat shabbily dressed but wearing a tie, came in and was greeted by the three workers. He wore a piece of red, white, and blue ribbon on his jacket—the Czech colors which had appeared on lapels all over the country when demonstrations against the communist regime had begun in late November.

 

         "Pour me a beer," he said, taking off his overcoat, "Ceausescu has been arrested."

 

         "No Christmas for communists this year," one of them remarked with a hoist of his glass as the man with the tie sat down.

 

         As it grew nearer to six, people began to drift into the pub, and by seven it was full. Most of the thirty or so patrons seemed to know each other. Two were doctors from Pavel's hospital; others were friends from university days—two architects and a local teacher—or from high school—two truck drivers and a local factory foreman. As the numbers grew, the owner joined his wife and moved inconspicuously to change empty glasses for full ones when the time came.

 

         Pepik, one of the architects, arrived an hour after dark and sat across from us. He wore a "Havel for President" button—in English— on the lapel of his overcoat. When he took the coat off, there was an "Obcanske Forum"—Civic Forum—button on his sweater.        

 

He lit up a cigarette and began waving it in the air and rolling his eyes demostratively as he explained something to Pavel and my wife.

 

"Pepik is a very religious man," Pavel told me in English when Pepik had finished. "Normally he enjoys Christmas. But he says that this year he can't enjoy it because over twelve hours have gone by without any news programs."        

 

Pepik shrugged his shoulders and made a comic grimace when he saw that Pavel had finished. But when I asked him what he thought of the five-minute speech Dubcek had made on television the night before, Pepik became serious and spoke intently, waving his cigarette hand again.

 

         "It's over for Dubcek with that speech," he replied. "It was his chance to come out and support Havel, to be strong—the way he never was after '68. Remember, he never signed the Charter."

 

         "He is a good man, Dubcek," Pavel added thoughtfully. "But he is too old; too tired. He had nothing new to say. We need stronger leadership."

 

         He repeated his remarks in Czech to Pepik, who nodded his agreement deferentially. 

 

"It's amazing to me," Pavel went on, "how much I have changed in a few weeks. Two months ago Dubcek was like a medieval knight I had only heard about. Now I see he is a man, like any other. Today, if I pick up a newspaper, I expect to read the truth. A month ago this would have been impossible."

 

         He made his remarks in Czech to Pepik, who nodded enthusiastically and added, "And what is really amazing is the difference Havel has made in the language. Jakes was an electrician: he sounded like he had never even been to school. But now, with a playwright in charge, everyone has suddenly become much more conscious of how they say things. Once we watched how we spoke because the police might be listening. Now we do it because we hear ourselves."        

 

At the end of the table, one of the truck drivers called out to Pavel for a song. After some ceremonial coaxing, he and Martin, the other architect, brought out a guitar and a mandolin and began to tune up.

 

The din of conversation that had built as the pub filled with people began to die down with Pavel's first few strums on the guitar, a gentle, lilting song by a group which had been blacklisted after the Soviet invasion. By the end of the first verse, virtually everyone in the room was singing along—even the owner, his wife, and the four men who sat at the other table with them.        

 

At the end of the song there was a brief interlude as more cigarettes were lit and the owner's wife brought Pavel and Martin complimentary glasses of Becherovka. Then another song began and once more the room filled with voices.        

 

Another interlude followed, then another song. Some were hearty and loud, others soft and laced with Slavic melancholy. But inevitably the first few chords were enough to jog memories, and everyone sang along.

 

During one interlude, Pavel leaned over to me. "Most of these songs are from '68," he said. "We haven't been able to hear them on the radio, but we come here to the pub to sing them whenever we can." Then he laughed. "I guess even democracy won't change that."

 

         The singing went on until after midnight, then gradually the crowd began to thin out. Petr and Sharka had left long before, and in ones and twos people said their good-byes and made their way out into the night. Pavel finally said that it was time for us to go too, and Ladya agreed, saying, "I'm ready to lose my fifth gallon."

 

         We bundled up and headed out into the darkness where the bundles of mistletoe hung from their sticks against a bench. Pavel hoisted one, Ladya hoisted the other—still with Petr's belt as the sling. The air was crisp and thick with our breaths as we stood in the yard: "Not freezing yet," Pavel remarked.        

 

"A California winter!" Ladya chimed out heartily in English as we walked up the muddy street. Then in Czech he added: "See what democracy brings!"        

 

We came to the fork we had taken toward the forest earlier in the day. Ladya, Pavel, and I needed to empty our swollen bladders, and when we began to excuse ourselves, my wife laughed and said something in Czech to the other men. They laughed in response.        

 

She grabbed my arm apologetically. "I was trying to find a way of translating the phrase for this, but I couldn't," she said. "It was what Ladya said in the pub: 'You always lose more than you drink'— or something like that."

 

"Drink a liter, lose a gallon?" I suggested.        

 

Ladya roared with laughter. "Tak, tak!" he said, pointing at me in the dim starlight. "I know, 'a gallon'!"        

 

We walked off to the edge of the forest, and as we stood in a row looking up at the stars, Pavel started to explain that as a child he had been fascinated by star charts. "So now I know all the—how do you say—konstelace?''

 

         "Constellations," I replied.        

 

"Constellations," Ladya boomed to the forest with a laugh.         Pavel pointed out Cassiopeia, the Pleiades, Orion, and several others to us as we stood there. Then we fell silent and watched them twinkle through the cold mist. As we finished, Ladya muttered something, half to the sky, half to himself. Then there was more silence.

 

         As we walked back to the road, I asked Pavel what Ladya had said. I couldn't see Pavel's face, but I heard a faint snort of laughter as he spoke.

 

         "Ladya says, 'Leave the stars in the sky where they belong.' "

 

* * * *