Continuation of "Whom Do You Tolerate"

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But what does it mean to paint all these incidents as expressions of “intolerance”? And by extension to call for “tolerance” of and by all members of the University community?  Better for the most part to be tolerant than not, to be sure, though is it really, always, better to be tolerated? If this is the way the University is seeking to manage its diversity--for that’s what tolerance is really, a managerial modality--we may be in deeper trouble than we perhaps realize.

To say that the racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic incidents at UCSD, at Davis and UCSC are cases of intolerance is to imply that that those engaged in these expressions are saying awful things to and about people they reject.  To call for tolerance is to address only the awful things they are saying, not the underlying and implicit rejection. It addresses the symptom, not the underlying condition of which the individual utterances are merely the manifestation. We should not say such things, it implies, even about people we find or whose behavior or culture we find unacceptable.

We may not want certain folks around, for whatever reason, but we should put up with them, or at least not express our dislike or distaste for their presence. That’s what it means to tolerate.  To be intolerant is to violate the injunction to accept about one people with whom one disagrees, to prevent them from expressing themselves, to exclude those one finds abhorrent for whatever reason, or ridiculous, or unacceptable. That’s what the language of tolerance amounts to. It leaves in place the lack of understanding, the insensitivities, the set stereotypes and prejudices, the total lack of understanding or worse yet the couldn’t-care-less attitude about others. I don’t have to, I don’t want to know you. Or I know you all too well. But I am willing to have you around because tolerance suggests we’d be better for it, better that is more for having the largesse than any actual benefits from your actually being around. Tolerance, then, is more about me, the one tolerating, than about you, the tolerated. Tolerance, in short, is self-centrist more than it is openness to others because one is curious about them or genuinely committed to the virtues of heterogeneity.

But there is another context to which we must remain attentive. Tolerance, the attitude and indeed culture that the administration seems to be calling for, is one expressed always from a position of relative power. I don’t like you, I don’t like your culture, but I’ll put up with you because I’m in a position to do so. You can come in here, to what is presumptively my place but not yours, because I am big enough to have you around. Just don’t get too comfortable because you are here at our (or at least my) largesse. 

Too strong?  Well ask the tolerated—those repeatedly reminded that they are “minorities,” in power as much as in brute numbers—if they are cool with “being tolerated”. Please tolerate me, even while you think I don’t belong here? As opposed to what? Having equal standing? Being taken seriously for what one is, stands for, has been through? Having an unquestioned equal place, having one’s views as accepted or as critically assessed as anyone else’s on their own terms, not on the basis of who the majority may think is expressing them? Curious, isn’t it, revealing that the only ones calling for tolerance in such circumstances are those who are in power in any case. Those excluded, those lacking power or standing never ask for tolerance; they demand rights, recognition, equality, empowerment.

Considered against this background, we can question also the all too quick insistence on the part of President Yudof and other University administrators that the case of the Irvine 11 belongs in the same category as the racist expressions on the San Diego, Davis, Santa Cruz and UCLA campuses. Here, the dominant view would have it, the Irvine 11 were intolerant of the Israeli ambassador when he spoke on campus, refusing to allow him to speak unhindered.  If speech is sacrosanct—well, clearly not all speech but speech properly expressed at a time, in a place and in a manner appropriate—then disrupting such speech is intolerant. And, paradoxically, we should be intolerant of this intolerance.

Surely, however, there are deeply relevant distinctions to be drawn between the  expressions of the Irvine 11, on the one hand, and the racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic expressions of students on the other campuses, by contrast.  In the latter case, judgment was being passed on having the objects of the expression around. We don’t want you here, the racists et al are saying; you don’t belong here, you are not welcome. And you are not welcome for who we take you by nature to be, because you are not one of, not like “us”.  The Irvine 11, by contrast, were not making any claim about the nature of people, they expressed no view about all Jews, say, or even about Israelis. They were trying to call attention to the deadly practices of the Israeli state for which the speaker of the day, Ambassador Oren, stands and speaks. The attempt may have been bungling; in the end, it has been profoundly ineffective, making the “appropriateness” of their intervention the focus rather than the  practices of the Israeli state to which they were wanting to call attention.  But they were precisely not expressing a judgment about a group on the basis of its supposed nature; they were admonishing a state for practices of indiscriminate killing of people, including relatives of some of those protesting. They were not, in short, being intolerant; they were being political.

The indiscriminate charges of “intolerance” obscure these pressing distinctions. Moreover they obscure, with deeply unfortunate effect, the state, social, and institutional relations of power that abject the most vulnerable groups. Thus, to date, only the Irvine 11 have been arrested and likely charged, ironically for disturbing the peace (how intolerant can you get?), while protesting Israeli violations of human rights and international law. While the history of discrimination against Muslim students and those subject to discriminatory attack on the San Diego, Davis, and Santa Cruz campuses warrant their institutional protection, University administrators seem incapable of extending the very tolerance for which they call generously to the students they find least tolerable. It turns out that the power to tolerate is also the power not to.

Though UCSD’s Chancellor Fox may have been slow and far too cautious in initially responding to the racist expressions on her campus, perhaps those UC  administrators less generous towards the Irvine 11 would do well to take their lead  from her in calling not for tolerance but for a commitment to “mutual respect”. Respect predicates itself  on a presumption of equality, of recognizing the standing of others.  If we start from that premise rather than from one of tolerance, what follows is the figuring out of what sort of knowledge about others, about other histories and cultures, ways of being and struggles is needed for full respect to be recognized. That would entail a significant set of changes across the entire curriculum, profound shifts in pedagogical practice and content, as the multiracial coalition of UCSD students, staff, and faculty courageously committed to transforming the climate have so insightfully insisted. It entails reversing the drumbeat march to a technocratic professionalism and a much more centralized role for the social sciences, humanities, and arts in addressing civic literacies for all students than has been the recent trend. Not ethics by the numbers or mandatory tolerance training by some silly time-wasting online program one can click through just to satisfy state mandates. The coalitional challenge is a very different register than the power, and the powerlessness, of tolerance. It’s one we’d do well  to take up across the entire University system.

Irvine, California

March 15, 2010
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Continuation of "A Very White Day at the University of California"

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The Berkeley protests against fee increases and budget cuts were met fairly early on by police action.  The police intervention preceded the widely reported and ill-conceived damage of property late at night to the Chancellor’s home.  That damage followed police breaking up the sleep-in under contested conditions after campus negotiations broke down, with little police notice and perhaps some rhetorical student provocation in the very early hours of a morning at Wheeler Hall after assurances had been given to the students--who were largely peaceful even while engaged in the protesting sleep-in—that they would be allowed to stay.

The UCI MSU protests have been widely reported, including a well-circulated YouTube video.  Student after student disrupted the Ambassador’s speech even after being warned they would be arrested.  Each stood up at some minutes’ interval, yelled out, and then peacefully left the hall under police escort, handcuffed and booked on charges of “disturbing the peace”.  The University has argued repeatedly that their actions were not protected by the First Amendment, that they embarrassed the University, would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law but that it was up to the District Attorney to decide whether to press charges. A number of faculty has protested this unfortunate strategy and the lack of thoughtful intervention in letters and emails to the administration, to no avail thus far. Senior administrators seem to be responding, perhaps understandably, to a concern that the University may lose private contributions if it did not take a hard line.  While there has been an occasional threat by individual donors to end an individual donation as a result of the Oren disruptions, most donors concerned with these issues have in fact written that they are open to helping out in whatever way would be deemed most useful, an offer that seems to hint more at seeking thoughtful dialogue than prosecution.

On the La Jolla campus, the University response has been all over the map.  The fraternity members hosting the racist theme party seem to have evaded direct action on grounds that they do not fall under the direct jurisdiction of the campus administration.  So free expression reigns for racist actions by students of the University so long as not doing it directly in the University name or on their dime or directly on University property. The student radio station seeking to justify the racist expression of the student party led to the suspension by the University of all 33 student based media outlets on campus while policies are reviewed.  So effectively reputable and responsible student groups with absolutely no connection to these expressions are paying a price equal to the violating radio outlet itself. And this as the President of the University, Mark Yudof, calls explicitly and volubly for upholding free speech as the central core of a university even as he equally strenuously supports the UCI administration’s determination that the Muslim Students Union disruptive speech is unprotected by the First Amendment.  At the same time, UCSD has suspended the senior who admitted hanging the library noose, but not her two accomplices as “investigation continues,” and it has pointedly refrained from prosecuting anyone for “disrupting the peace,” let alone threatening it or with the intent to terrorize, which California law characterizes as a misdemeanor.

The UCSD administration response to the concerns expressed about the history of racism on campus and the dismal record of the University in attracting and retaining African descended and Latino students and faculty has been to hold a town hall meeting for the campus, to sponsor a teach-in on racism, to condemn racist expression, and to leave undisrupted campus sit-ins this last Friday of the University administration offices. They have yet to respond to student and faculty demands. Due to continue on Monday it remains to be seen how long the Administration occupation will be left to linger unhindered.

What, then, can be drawn from this admittedly partial set of descriptions?  First, distinctions matter. Others have pointed out that the UCI case is about free speech and its disruptions. The Berkeley events are part of a longstanding tradition at universities generally, and across UC in particular, of protesting diminishing support for higher education.  The UCSD events are all about racisms, their long lingering ground conditions in the academy and across UC as well as the incapacity of the University to have the comprehension or the courage to address the simmering concerns. The fact that a senior a quarter away from graduating can go through almost four years of college and be able to claim that she failed to realize the symbolic and material implications of a hanging noose in this country says as much about the failure of university education—our collective malaise on racial matters—as it does about the young students’ lack of character.  That the UCSD administration seems so readily to have swallowed her excuse says something about their naïveté  too; after all, if she didn’t know what she was doing—if she didn’t intend to harm, as the usual defense would go—why on earth did she hang the damned thing, and in a library no less.

The University generally wants to uphold its commitment to academic freedom and free speech. “A university is a special place for the exchange of views and ideas,” Mark Yudof has stated in response to recent events. And UCSD’s Chancellor Fox adds, “The remedy for dangerous, offensive, or extreme speech is more speech, not less.” Except when it isn’t, when the speech isn’t quite the right kind or expressed by quite the right folks, or expressing quite the right views.  Witness Irvine. Or Berkeley. It doesn’t help to  hide behind the First Amendment constraints because of course the law need only be invoked to curtail or prosecute or protect or promote one side or set of views over another, as convenience and commitment prevail.  

As a private university Yale is considerably less bound by First Amendment considerations to protect free speech than the University of California. And yet at a recent talk by Richard Goldstone at Yale he was hounded by Israeli supporters throughout his speech, in the question period after, even pursued and shouted at on his way to and at the reception following his talk.  Yale officials did not apologize (at least publicly), did nothing to curtail the offensive and disruptive interventions by his critics and opponents, and no outcry about civility or protecting balanced exchange has been heard (for the record, while his report of the Gaza invasion has been scathing of Israel, Justice Goldstone is hardly one who has not expressed support for the country over the years). (Thanks to Paul Amar, UCSB, for the reference.)  Edward Said, I am told, suffered a similar fate in the final talk he gave at UCLA not long before his passing with no expression of concern from the University of any sort. If the University is going to be bothered by incivility it would at the very least be more believable if it showed a modicum of evenhandedness and consistency across place, time and people rather than condemning some outbursts or protests while turning a blind eye to others depending on the viewpoint expressed.

Second, it seems that the University generally responds to expressions of concern or protests about issues of passionate and justifiable concern and conviction with a degree of impatience that is more often than not breathtaking.  This has a long history. Expressions to the contrary notwithstanding, the University has a long history of intolerance of disruption and protest it finds uncomfortable.  The breaking of the Berkeley promise about the sleep-in is far from the first time violent police response has been the default. Think of the Free Speech movement.  The student in the UCLA library last year didn’t have to be tasered, the UCSC student, African American as it happens, protesting budget cuts a couple of years ago didn’t have to be suspended for a year or more,  the Irvine 11 don’t have to be prosecuted and indeed didn’t have to be arrested to begin with.

I went to college in South Africa in the mid-1970s.  There was an agreement between the university establishment and the state that the police would not be allowed on campus unless called for by university administrators. I fully understand the conditions that made such an arrangement possible at that time, and the differences—not complete, of course—between then and there and here and now. Occasionally viciously violated by the police at the time to dampen protest and arrest anti-apartheid organizers, nevertheless a campus like the University of Cape Town was generally patient, tolerant, even supportive of student sit-ins, loud protests, a university-wide disruption and a closing down or two. Such events became part of the campus landscape , of the learning ecology and experience.  We might take a leaf out of that book.

We are an educational institution, not a criminal justice one.  Our commitment is—should be—to educate first and last, not to prosecute where really unnecessary, to inform in the sense both of providing information and forming dispositions to make wise judgments in the face of every sort of challenge.  Where we don’t we have failed, our mission, ourselves. Where our default is the impatience of discipline and prosecution we are no longer an educational institution but a correctional one.  No wonder Governor Schwarzenegger is finally so at ease switching prison dollars for higher education ones. While we may welcome it,  I am suggesting this might give us some pause. Interestingly, the five principal Jewish student groups on the Irvine campus get what the campus administration has failed to comprehend;  they have called, in the name of committing to education, for more dialogue with MSU members rather than their prosecution. Sometimes, the University administration should listen to and learn from  our students.

This would be the case also with regards to the long history of racism, the exclusions, intimidations, hostilities and inhospitality towards many student, staff and faculty of color across the University. The UCSD events did not happen in a vacuum, they were not the anomaly of a misguided few.  The events are deeply undergirded by stereotypes of incapacity, of failure to comprehend or insist upon what it would take to turn these conditions around, commission after commission, study after study, recommendation after recommendation  notwithstanding.  At most every campus across the system. At the University of the Orange Free State in South Africa, a major bastion of segregated education and social conditions and the ideas underpinning them during the apartheid years,  about a year or so ago white students horrified much of the country by urinating in the food of black women cleaning staff and  then forcing the women to eat it.  Jonathan Jansen, the new  and first black Rector at the University, assuming the position after the event, took considerable risk (not to mention heat) by refusing to pursue the prosecution of the young men. Instead, he consigned them to cleaning the university bathrooms for a considerable period, so they might learn “the dignity of labor.” At the same time he raised considerable funding to promote racial diversification of the faculty at the highest levels of the professoriate.  That takes courage, in the circumstances, and exhibits the sort of leadership we could do with here.

Expressing horror at the event, UCSD Chancellor Fox called the noose incident “truly a dark day in the history of this university”  No, Chancellor Fox, given this history, given the repetition of like incidents, it is not a very dark day, even as one understands the recourse to cliché here. It is, alas, an all too white day. A day even the response to which surfaces and reproduces the easy continuation of the structural conditions of presumptive white privilege. (To say this emphatically is not to condemn whites, all or even any particular individual, as is too often assumed. Rather, it is to call into question the prevailing structures of power and privilege that reproduce these conditions and events. Whiteness, like blackness, on this understanding, is a structural positioning historically linked but not reducible to phenotype.) It is a day that in the absence of commitment and conviction, institutional courage and address, again and again, happens all too often. And no doubt will happen again, with similar handwringing,  inconsistency, and embarrassment. We can surely do better, for our students, for ourselves, this time and next.

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Explaining the South

Down There on a Visit

By Charles Simic
New York Review of Books - Volume 51, Number 13 · August 12, 2004

For years now I've been looking at a photograph Walker Evans took in the summer of 1936 in the South. I thought of it again while getting ready to travel to the South a few weeks ago. At the intersection of two dusty, unpaved roads stands a dilapidated building with a small porch and a single gas pump. There's no human being in sight. The intense heat and the bright sunlight must have made the locals, a few of whom can be seen standing on the very same porch on another occasion, seek shade. The shutters of the two upstairs windows are closed except for small openings where the slats are broken or have been removed. The postmaster and his wife, who run the pump and the store, are most likely napping, their heads covered with newspapers to protect them against the flies.

Downstairs, in the small side room with a scale and rows of bins for the mail, there are a few letters whose recipients live too far or receive mail too rarely to bother making the trip. With so little to see and so much to imagine, a photograph like this is an invitation to endless conjecture. There's nothing more ordinary, nothing more American than what it depicts: a small town one passes with barely a glance on the way to someplace else.

This June, driving around Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, I decided to pay a visit to Sprott and Hale County, where Walker Evans and James Agee collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, their photographic and verbal record of the lives of three dirt-poor tenant farmer families in the region. I wanted to, as it were, poke around the photograph on my wall. I drove from Mobile past a series of tiny little towns with names like Sunflower, Wagarville, Sunny South, Catherine, and Marion. It was early Sunday morning so my daughter and I were a bit dressed up, hoping to find a church along the way and attend a service. We saw plenty of houses of worship, but oddly, not much activity around them yet. Driving through one of the bigger towns, we were surprised to find a huge Wal-Mart open at 9:20 with dozens of cars parked outside.

The other puzzle was a number of abandoned churches both in towns and in the countryside. I recall a small, unobtrusive, white wooden church sunk in the earth, the grass and weeds grown tall around it. It had a thick, squat steeple, a single door, two windows on each side covered up with boards. The sky over it was cloudless, the quiet so deep we could hear the crows flap their wings as they flew over our heads in alarm. The people who came to pray there must have died or moved away years ago, but the spirit they sought after lingered on. I wondered if there was anything left inside the church, a hard bench, a hymnal, a suspended oil lamp, a skeleton of a dead bird.

The landscape of central Alabama alternates between patches of woods and rolling fields of cultivated land that open onto long vistas before closing up again. We found the crossroads Evans photographed and a small shut-down country store where the old one most probably stood. It did not appear that much had changed in sixty-eight years. There was a large sign announcing a rodeo in nearby Marion, two half-collapsed barns across the road, and a cat that came out of the bushes hungry and lonely, but ran away every time my daughter tried to make friends with it. The population of Sprott today is reputed to be ten people and that sounds about right. Hale County has 17,185 inhabitants and the county seat, Greensboro, only 2,731. I have no idea how many people lived there in the 1930s, when the cotton plantations were in full operation, but there must have been more. The impression one gets is that there's not much work to be had on the farms that remain. Most of these are large and require a small number of people to work the machinery. Whoever can pick up and leave the county does so, or if they decide to stay, they commute great distances to their jobs. On weekdays, the traffic to Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, and Montgomery tends to be heavy. Most of these commuters are heading to low-paying retail and service jobs in numerous shopping malls at the outskirts of these cities.

We headed south to Selma. What we found there surprised us. Its spacious downtown, where some 30,000 people once gathered with Martin Luther King to make a march to Montgomery, is badly rundown. It's a shell of the town it once was. Many of its beauti-ful turn-of-the-century buildings and storefronts appear in part vacated while others are completely closed. This I found almost everywhere to be the case. The heart of Montgomery has broad avenues, a restored Greek Revival state capitol atop a hill where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office on February 18, 1861, as the president of the Confederate States, and the famous civil rights landmarks, like the Baptist church where the bus boycott was organized in 1956, but there are few people there even on a Monday morning.

The capital of Mississippi, Jackson, is deserted on Friday afternoon. No one walks its streets. There are no restaurants or bars and no hint of where people who work in its many offices get fed. Old photographs of all these places show streets teeming with pedestrians, stores big and small, signs and marquees advertising cafés, drug stores, tobacco shops, and five-and-dime emporiums. The centers of many of the most interesting Southern cities, the neighborhoods that make them most distinct and attractive, have been forsaken for fast-food places, gas stations, and shopping centers at the outskirts, which resemble any other place in the United States.

The middle classes and the rich reside in well-maintained old and new suburbs and vote Republican, while their impoverished neighbors, who tend to be mostly African-American and who outnumber them in many counties, live in rural slums. While there's no official segregation between the races, there is a caste system with clear class distinctions and accompanying inequality that is apparent wherever one goes. There are towns like Jonestown, Mississippi, that in their shocking poverty make one gasp. Weathered, sagging, and unpainted houses, boarded-up windows, others covered with plastic, yards full of dismantled rusty cars, their parts scattered about amid all kinds of other junk and trash, are everywhere. Idle people of all ages lounge on collapsing porches or stand on street corners waiting for something to do. In the countryside with its fertile dark soil, soybeans have become the chief crop, poultry farms are a major business, and there are nine gambling casinos in the next county. All that has increased per capita income in the region, but there was no evidence of it among the blacks I saw.

In Clarksdale, the former capital of the cotton kingdom, which President Clinton visited during his 1999 tour focusing on the nation's poorest communities, I saw in a parking lot of a closed supermarket two ancient cars parked side by side with their four doors wide open. Over their hoods, roofs, and doors, spread out and draped, someone's once-pretty dresses and worn children's clothes were covering every available space. Two black women sat on low stools, one on each side, waiting for a customer. This is the town, they say, where the blues began. One of its legends, Robert Johnson, was reputed to have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads nearby. There's a blues museum in town and an excel-lent restaurant and juke joint called Ground Zero owned in part by the actor Morgan Freeman, a part-time local resident. The downtown buildings of what was once clearly a flourishing city reminded me of towns in the Midwest and New England after their industries went broke in the late 1960s and their factories were shut down. Clarksdale has the despoiled look of a conquered and sacked city. Ranking conditions of poverty is a risky business, but what I encountered in Mississippi surpasses anything I've seen in a long time in this country. That the people here vote Democratic and have a liberal black Democratic congressman has not been of visible help to them.

When one enters the small store that also serves as a post office in nearby Belen, one first comes upon shelves cluttered with ancient TV parts. On one side, in the half-dark, an old black man sits poking his screwdriver into the back of a black-and-white set that must be at least forty years old. Beyond the TV repair section, there's a grocery store selling a few absolute necessities like canned beans and white bread, and finally in the back, the post office itself with its single oval and barred window where one can purchase a stamp. The old white storekeeper who shows me and my friend around could have walked out of one of Eudora Welty's Depression-era photographs. He is so pale; he probably rarely leaves the premises. In the meantime, he is happy to chat. It's not a cliché that people are courteous in the South. Many of them tell memorable stories, love words, and can make something unexpected out of the simplest verbal ingredients. No wonder so many great writers have come from Mississippi.

My first acquaintance with the South was in 1961, when I spent four months at Fort Gordon, Georgia, being trained by the US Army to be a military policeman. On my weekly passes, I went into Augusta, where there was little to do beyond getting drunk in dives frequented by soldiers. With the news of men and women who protested segregation being beaten and occasionally murdered all over the South, it was not the most comfortable place for a Northerner to be. Without even trying, one inevitably got into arguments with the locals. The place seethed with hatred, I thought then. All that changed, of course, over the years, and so did my own understanding of the complexities. There were plenty of racists to be sure, but there were also people of conscience who did their best to alleviate the wrongs in their midst.

Fifty miles from Jonestown, Mississippi, is William Faulkner's Oxford. It has a pretty courthouse square, a bookstore that could match any in New York City or Boston, fine cafés and restaurants, most of which have second-story porches with tables and chairs overlooking the square. People laze there for hours sipping a drink and gabbing. One could live here— one thinks—in a kind of timeless present. Bank, church, a few elegant stores, a barbershop, and a hotel—what more does one need? In the afternoons, when the shadows lengthen and the heat subsides a bit, one has the overwhelming sense of well-being as if everything were just dandy everywhere and one really had no cause to make oneself a nuisance to strangers with whom one happened to strike a casual conversation.

Unfortunately, the local newspapers brought me out of my reverie. The Clarksdale Press Register, which I'd bought earlier that day, had the following letter:

Dear Editor:

I am a Jesus freak.

Jesus said that you can't serve two fathers. Either you serve God the Heavenly Father or you are damned and serve Satan. All true conservatives will be against homosexuality. It's not acceptable in God's house. I believe they can be saved and change this lifestyle. Anyone that says it is OK to kill babies is damned. God made human life in His own likeness. We as Christians expect Americans to be against us. They were against Jesus. God has blessed us, but for how long? For America's weakness is turning its back on God. We better not think that God won't put his wrath on America soon. America better thank God for Christians who are praying for this country. The rest of the people are not getting what they can get in riches. May God heal the churches and people. It's time Christians take a stand in voices and elections. Get these liberals out of government, and get conservative Christian leadership in government.[1]

During my trip, I was asked several times point-blank whether I was a Christian. The first time it happened, I was so surprised I didn't know what to reply. Finally, I mumbled that I was brought up in the Eastern Orthodox Church and to further buttress my credentials, I mentioned that I had priests in my family going back a couple of centuries. As far as I could tell, that didn't seem to make much impression. What people were eager to find out was whether I had accepted Jesus as my Savior. For the writer of this letter, and for others I met, Christians are to be distinguished from the rest of Americans, who are something else— liberals, secular humanists, Catholics, atheists, abortionists, etc. They all share one thing in common, however: they are all going to hell.

The absolute certainty of that outcome, I found, is a source of deep satisfaction to the believers. They enjoy hearing about the torments that await the damned. That must be the explanation for the great success of Glorious Appearing by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the twelfth and final book in a series that recounts the story of those left behind when the Apocalypse arrives and the Rapture gathers the elect into heaven. The first eleven novels have sold 40 million copies and the new one is also a best seller.[2] The blood and gore of the final battle of the ages between Jesus and the legions of the Antichrist are described at great length and in loving detail:

Tens of thousands of foot soldiers dropped their weapons, grabbed their heads or their chests, fell to their knees, and writhed as they were invisibly sliced asunder. Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.

"For My sword shall be bathed in heaven; indeed it shall come down on Edom, and on the people of My curse, for judgment.

"The sword of the Lord is filled with blood. It is made overflowing with fatness. For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Edom.

"Their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust saturated with fatness."[3]

It was reported that President Bush tried to enlist the Vatican for help in his reelection when he paid a visit to the Pope last month. He has no need to make a similar appeal to the churches in the South. During the many hours of listening to Christian radio, I was assured again and again that the Bible is the best source of information on contemporary events and the only guide anybody needs on how to vote. When I watched religious talk shows on TV at night, I heard that the many wars that the President has promised us have happily been foretold in the Bible. "Let us restore to God the thunder," the poet John Crowe Ransom wrote in 1930,[4] and the people who called in would have readily agreed. Peace on earth went unmentioned. What excited the people I heard was the force of deadly weapons. I got the impression that it was a greater offense to believe in evolution than to bomb a city into rubble. As a letter to the Mobile Register signed "Addison DeBoi" put it,

What the left has not come to realize is that most of today's suffering is the result of the left's continued efforts to remove horror and pain from war.... The point is, war is hell, and it should be. The more respectable we make war, the more we make it less horrific, the more we seek to not harm civilians, then the greater the risk and frequency of war.[5]

Skepticism, empirical evidence, and book learning are in low esteem among the Protestant evangelicals. To ask about the laws of cause and effect would be a sin. They reject modern science and dream of a theocratic state where such blasphemous subject matter would be left out from the school curriculum. Their ideal, as a shrewd young fellow told me in Tuscaloosa, is unquestioning obedience and complete conformity in matters of religion and politics. The complaint about so-called secular humanism is that it permits teachers and students too much freedom of thought and opinion. If evangelicals haven't gone around smashing TV sets and computers, it is because they recognize their power to spread their message. Aside from that, they would like to secede intellectually from the rest of the world.

As if to alert me of the danger of such sweeping statements, I stumbled on a magnificent exhibition of Baroque art at the Mississippi Arts Pavilion in Jackson. It came from the State Arts Collections in Dresden and included porcelain, costumes, sculpture, armor, and paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Mantegna, Velázquez, Van Dyck, Lucas Cranach, Vermeer, and a few other Old Masters. It was fairly well attended. There were even families with kids. I've no idea what they thought of the sensual teenage Madonna holding a mischievous-looking two-year-old. The museum guides and attendants appeared to be volunteers. They stood at various points of the huge exhibition and kept asking each visitor if he or she were enjoying the show and were exceedingly pleased to hear that we did. It sounded as if there had been complaints and that they needed confirmation that they were, indeed, taking part in something worthy.

At the Mississippi Museum of Art there was another imported show— "Paris Moderne," art deco works from the 1920s and 1930s. Almost next door, Confederate flags were flying over the state buildings, often in close proximity to landmarks commemorating the civil rights struggle. A few well-known participants in the most gruesome events of its bloody history are still alive in nearby towns and remain unconvicted, as columns in newspapers on the anniversary of their crimes reminded their readers.

On another cloudless day, I drove south toward Hattiesburg and Mobile. The roadside fruit stands were overflowing with baskets of ripe peaches, tomatoes, and watermelons. There was also something called "boiled peanuts" which I was wary to try. On the radio, the burning issue was the new policy just passed by the Mississippi legislature that will drop from Medicaid eligibility 65,000 of its neediest elderly citizens and chronically ill patients with severe disabilities, leaving them to rely solely on the federally funded Medicare for their drugs. The governor, Haley Barbour, the brains behind the rollback, is the former chairman of the national Republican Party. In his view, taxpayers ought not to have to pay for free health care for people who can work and take care of themselves and just choose not to.

Most callers to the show sounded scared. The host of the program maintained that their fears were exaggerated, that Medicare would help out; but they were not buying it. They griped about the difficulties they already had signing up for the federal government's new prescription drug discount cards. The host of the show blamed the fiscal crises in the state on a teachers' pay raise and so did some of the other callers. He was willing to admit that there may be some inconvenience to the elderly, but he wanted them to realize that in the end nothing could be done. What came through were the inability and the reluctance of more than a few people to grasp the kind of hardship that faced their fellow citizens. The familiar Republican Party line—less government, no new taxes —eventually silenced the most stubborn of the complaining voices.

The lack of compassion for the less fortunate is also to be found in New Hampshire, where I live. Our politicians are as heartless as the ones in Mississippi and see themselves, despite their assurances otherwise, as being elected primarily to serve the well-to-do. Let the fittest survive is their attitude. However, they don't invoke God as they go about ensuring that the poor stay poor. As for the losers, both in the South and in the North, their outrage is not directed against the politicians. This is one of the great puzzles of recent American politics: voters who enthusiastically cast their vote against their self-interest, who care more about "family values," school prayer, guns, abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution than about having decent health care insurance and being paid a living wage. They squabble, as they did in Alabama recently, over whether the Ten Commandments ought to be posted in a courthouse while the education of their children continues to be underfunded and their overcrowded public schools are violent and dangerous places.

The result of these dogmatic inconsistencies of belief—which I found wherever I went—is fragmentation: "the growing social, physical, economic, and cultural separation of Americans from each other," as Sheldon Hackney points out in a fine new collection of essays by thirteen different authors, Where We Stand, Voices of the Southern Dissent.[6] Even Pentecostals don't see eye to eye when it comes to theology. A town with no more than five hundred inhabitants has a dozen churches lining the highway. They stand barely fifty yards apart, all belonging to different schisms and factions. One of them is just a large trailer with a hand-painted name of the church tacked to its side. The door is open. Three old-model cars are parked in front.

A dozen miles down the highway is Mobile with its modern skyscrapers, and not too far beyond, the pretty little town of Fairhope on the eastern shore of the bay with its elegant boutiques, art galleries, and good restaurants. Fairhope was founded in 1884 as a model community inspired by a belief in land as common inheritance and as a cooperative commonwealth free from all forms of private monopoly and opportunities to prey upon one another. In his bittersweet reminiscence of growing up in Fairhope, included in Where We Stand, Paul M. Gaston, whose grandfather was one of the founders and guiding forces of the community, laments its transformation into what it is today, an upscale resort town where one of the shops for the well-heeled women is called Utopia without any irony. He writes of the morally benumbed citizenry unconcerned about disparities of wealth and the social apartheid such towns as Fairhope seem to serve.

It's easy to put all that out of one's mind as one cruises past the sandy beaches of Mobile Bay. The end of a long pier with a gazebo at Point Clear seems a good place for an afternoon siesta on a bench with the blue sky and sea birds for company. It's hot, but there's a breeze from the water. After a while, I hear the sound of chamber music. It's live, coming from the spacious lawn of the resort hotel next door where a wedding, it appears, is about to take place. There are some fifty chairs lined up in rows with a pulpit in front but no guests yet, only a string quartet playing Mozart. Eventually, as the guests begin to emerge from the hotel, I draw closer. They are a distinguished bunch, the men in tuxedos and the women in stylish, well-cut summer dresses. They come alone or in pairs strolling across the rich lawn to take their seats. With the quartet playing a lovely minuet the four bridesmaids, all wearing dark red dresses, come out one by one trailed by the groom and his parents. The bride, on the arm of her father, is the last to appear. She's a very pretty blonde.

I'm too far away to hear the minister, but I can see them exchange rings. On a platform by the edge of the water, I see people setting up tables, decorating them with flowers for what I assume will be the wedding feast. It's all very proper, very charming, and very inviting. The servers are mostly black and I realize that they are the first people of color I've seen since I drove into the Fairhope region. By now the wedding is over, the sun is setting over Mobile Bay, and the photographer is in a hurry to have the newlyweds pose against it. He wants them smooching and they oblige again and again, each kiss more lusty than the last one, to the joy of the younger members of the wedding party and the disapproving glances of the old. After that's over, they all file by me on the way to dinner, smiling and nodding in a most friendly way.

Yes, people told me on my trip, the American dream has been going wrong somewhere. I saw TV evangelists bring thousands of ecstatic believers to their feet. These programs were a mixture of old camp meetings, revivalist tents, rock concerts, and sales pitches on how to make millions in real estate "without spending a dime of your own money." The huge crowds were made up of well-dressed, middle- class people of all ages and races. Their piety was touching. Their eyes grew moist when Jesus was mentioned. God frets about them individually and they count on his guidance in practical matters. So many of the sermons I heard were about turning around one's life, overcoming financial worries, achieving worldly success. The men doing the preaching had made millions saving souls and had no qualms offering themselves as a model to emulate. Their lack of humility was astonishing. I'm flying high, the faces said, because God has time for me.

"There is going to be trouble in this country," a lawyer warned me. He wouldn't tell me from what direction. Like others I had met in the South, he kept a gun in his car; he had, he said, several more at home and worried that the government may take away his arsenal. What are they for? In one of his books, the Mississippi novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah suggests an answer:

The gun lobby, oh my peaceful friends, you may hate, but first you had better understand that it is a religion, only secondarily connected to the Bill of Rights. The thick-headed, sometimes even close to tearful, gaze you get when chatting with one of its partisans emanates from the view that they're holding a piece of God. There is no persuading them otherwise, even by a genius, because a life without guns implies the end of the known world to them. Any connection they make to our "pioneer past" is also a fraud, a wistful apology. Folks love a gun for what it can do. A murderer always thinks it was an accident, he says, as if a religious episode had passed over him.[7]

There are fireworks for sale in almost every town in Alabama. Small rockets wrapped in red, white, and blue paper. People are all set, I was told, to celebrate George W. Bush's reelection in November. He is liked a lot in the South, especially when he speaks about American moral supremacy and our right to kick someone else's ass in the world. I did not encounter many people able to entertain the thought that we could ever be at fault as a nation or that our president could be a fool leading us into a mess. When I asked what Kerry's chances were, even friends looked at me as if I had three heads. Near Flatwood, Alabama, I almost ran off the road after seeing a small "Elect Kerry" sign. It's the only one I came across. In fact, I didn't see any Bush signs either—there's no need for them since he's following God's plan, as everybody there knows. We have always had professional true believers, but in the past their apocalyptic views were marginal and never had such strong support in Congress and the White House, where they are now regularly invited and consulted on matters of national interest. Nor did they ever before have fans even among Catholic and Jewish intellectuals on the right, who find them to be model citizens even with their fanaticism and their love of violence.

"The grungier the town, the better the music and the ribs are liable to be." So I heard. Unfortunately, as I discovered, this is not really true. Most poor people eat mostly poorly prepared food and the better musicians tend to gravitate to cities where customers have cash to spend. The best ribs I had on my trip were not in any of the smaller towns, but in Atlanta. Fat Matt's Rib Joint is a small, unassuming place that promises little from the outside. It serves slabs of pork ribs on paper plates with slices of white bread. There are also bags of potato chips, bowls of rum-soaked beans, and plenty of paper napkins to wipe one's fingers and lips. The crowd is socially and racially mixed. Sitting side by side at long communal tables, eating and drinking pitchers of beer, are well-dressed men and women who could be doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, gas station attendants, and undertakers. The ribs are delicious and cheap, and there's live music. A terrific band is playing a little blues, a little country.

The four white musicians look as if they have day jobs. Three of them are grizzled men in their early sixties who could have come out of an R. Crumb drawing and all of whom one would guess have had plenty of ups and downs in their lives. The songs they play are bawdy, funny, and have a tough realism about them that any serious writer would envy. "A woman gets tired of one man all the time," an old blues song says. Cheating wives and husbands, bad luck, and trouble are the themes. The musicians are enjoying themselves and so is everybody else. That's what our protectors of virtue find so scandalous about the cities. The way diverse classes of people and races get together, drink beer, dance, and make whoopee. But as one of my tablemates, a woman from south Georgia, told me, "Atlanta is not the South."

Notes

[1] The Clarksdale Press Register, June 3, 2004.

[2] See Joan Didion's essay on the Left Behind series in these pages, "Mr. Bush & the Divine," November 6, 2003.

[3] Glorious Appearing: The End of Days (Tyndale House, 2004), p. 226.

[4] Religion in the American South (University of Carolina Press, 2004), p. 167.

[5] From the Mobile Register, Sunday, June 6, 2004.

[6] NewSouth Books, 2004, p. 189. The title recalls that of I'll Take My Stand, the collection issued in 1930 by the Southern Agrarian writers, including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Randall Jarrell.

[7] Bats out of Hell (Houghton Mifflin, 1993), p. 83.