A Return to America’s Home Town

An article in the New York Times magazine, a book looking back at his Missouri hometown by a Middlebury author, a symposium on creating a second Vermont republic featuring four Charlotters – all pushed me to reflect on what they held in common and why they struck responsive chords in the current state of my psyche.
The Times’ article, entitled “Battle Company is Out There” by Elizabeth Rubin, appeared in the February 24 Sunday magazine. It is riveting. When put in the context of what is occurring in the Middle East and the impact of the conflict on young soldiers fighting an unrecognizable enemy--being asked to make decisions about life and death, some dying in the process, others being forced to live through another night afterward, and on officers not much older than their charges trying to bring sense to a senseless situation--it portrays the truth of war as survival before heroism. The fact that it was written by a woman traveling with soldiers in a Muslim land, to me, lends it further credence. It laid politics aside – the endless discussions I’ve tired of from members of groups, governments, think tanks and the like about what policies should entail in order to win, lose or placate similar groups.
Rubin describes a conversation she had with a soldier named Giunta who had witnessed a friend’s death. She called Specialist Giunta a ”quiet Iowan lofted into a heroism he didn’t want.” He told her, “The richest, most trained army got beat by dudes in manjammies and AKs.” She painted their conversation vividly: “His voice cracked. He was not just hurting, he was in a rage. And there was nothing for him to do with it but hold back his tears, and bark – at the Afghans for betraying them, at the Army for betraying them. He didn’t run to the front because he was a hero. He ran up to get Brennan, his friend.” He helped recover him from the enemy, order a medevac and watch him proceed to his death.
In this war, as in others, the human toll is the telling one. And, as I’ve said before, the thing I find most repulsive about our current president and many of his cronies is their moral laxity at thinking there is nothing wrong with dodging an earlier draft themselves, yet turning around and sending others to die for their causes. Whether you agree or disagree with the reasons for the current war, integrity and moral fortitude should have caused these successful Vietnam dodgers to step aside from the Islamic conflict long ago.
But what does it all point to in terms of country-hood? We’ve heard a lot about change from various candidates.
Ron Powers, a former newspaper reporter, now author harbored in Middlebury, wrote a fascinating tale entitled Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore: Childhood and Murder in the Heart of America in which he tried to dissect changes in a community over time. It details his attempt to unravel what had happened to his and Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, that contributed to a couple of killings there in the late 20th century committed by pairs of young people. Powers travels home to see what may have changed since he left in the 1970s, as well as to compare it now to the place Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn knew in the 19th century.
I found myself waking at night, contemplating his analysis of growing up in America’s heartland. His story and mine are similar in many respects, full of give and take between individual and environment. He describes the communal influence of the school Patrol Boys. I was one, too, a lofty responsibility for a ten-year-old, with flag in hand, white belt draped diagonally across the chest, silver medallion of authority stuck squarely in the middle of the belt so no on-looker could miss it. My job was guarding younger students as they crossed the street to Edison Grade School. Most kids walked. The Patrol Boys symbolized the transition from home to school. A body could shuck and jive only up to the point of flagging. From there, Patrol Boys ruled. Grades K through 5 were at our mercy. I, like Powers, built in a heady grandeur to the task, giving it the imprimatur of impending adulthood. The small community culture of the Midwest was rich in such symbolism and commanded strict adherence to its elements.
After contrasting today’s Hannibal to his own, Powers says that he had wanted to fit the acts of murder, “acts of befouled childhood into a context beyond the borders of my own sacred ground.” He wanted to “de-Hannibalize” the atrocities by demonstrating that the town had been “subsumed into the placelessness of a nation washed blank by its own conquests, by all the effortless intrusions of its economic markets and state bureaucracies into family and community, by the insouciant abolition of local, intimate cycles of work and ritual and reward, and their replacement by compulsive consumerism and empty predatory wealth.”
Thomas Naylor and his friends championing the return of an independent Vermont republic would likely agree. In a UVM-hosted symposium, he, Susan and Hans O’Hanian, and Ron Miller argued forcefully for a local movement to secede from the union. Naylor said economic concerns were not a deterrent, that nearly 50 of the 200 countries in the world currently have populations smaller than Vermont’s and that four of the ten richest countries are in that group. He is fearful of the current state of our nation and believes that, while others may share that sense, they “aren’t yet feeling enough pain” to act on it. He, however, is calling for action. He “is in the secession business, not in the business of creating an ideal state before seceding.” Realistically, he argues, the movement for independence will be brought about by a “crash in the empire” not by the force of Second Vermont Republic.
Miller and Susan O’Hanian say that a change in education is needed so that it assumes a quality that makes it “essentially a mentoring relationship between a community and its youth.”I don’t know where all this is leading us, but I can’t recall ever having felt quite so disassociated from my national government. And, ironically, despite the anger it generates in me, it may be providing a healthy impetus to become more involved, we’ve been living in a “been-down-so-long-it-looks-like-up-to-me” universe. One only hopes time favors us, that the potential for rebirth hasn’t passed us by, that we haven’t yet reached Arthur C. Clarke’s prediction in his book, Childhood’s End.