Show Highlights:

• Dr Jim returns from Italy and shares some of his experiences
• A new Music Found in Used Cars
• A shout out to Garrison Keillor as he steps down from A Prairie Home Companion (see re-printed article from Newsweek dated July 4, 1988 below – highly recommended read)
• Our Boneheads of the Week
• Thoughts on Globalization vs a strong America
• Remember Byron MacGregor’s  “The Americans”?

 

Show notes:

• Background music segment 1:  Theme From Endless Summer by the Sandals
• Opening lead in Song: “I Live for the Sun”  By Jeffery Foskett (Foskett is the primary musician in Brian Wilson’s live performing band).  The song was originally recorded by the Sunrays, a group that Murray Wilson, the Wilson Brothers’ father, produced after the Beach Boys fired him as their manager

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Lying on our backs, looking up at the stars
by Garrison Keillor, 1988

We catched and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed, only a little kind of low chuckle. We had mighty good weather, as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.

—MARK TWAIN, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

It always made me proud as a kid to think that my great‑great-great‑great‑great‑grandfather Elder John Crandall, who left England in 1634 and settled in Rhode Island on land he bought from the Misquamicut Indians, was a considerable man in Colonial history, who, according to family history, accompanied Roger Williams to London in 1663 to obtain a charter from King Charles II guaranteeing the inhabitants of Rhode Island Colony political and religious freedom, and I felt his luster reflected on us, his descendants in the little white house on a hot July day in the potato fields along the Mississippi north of Minneapolis. Our family didn’t have any money, and none of us had been to college, so he was our main claim to fame. He didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but he knew people who did. If he only had bought up more land in the right places, he’d have been richer than Vanderbilt and we’d all be sitting in Newport sipping lemonade on a cool veranda instead of hoeing rows of potatoes in the sun and getting dust in our mouths. We’d go to Crandall University. The problem was that our ancestors had left America. When the Revolution came along, our family was loyal to the King and left their land behind and shipped out to Nova Scotia before the shooting began. A hard fact to face, that your ancestors were on the side that hung Nathan Hale, and if they’d been in attendance at the gallows and heard his immortal last words, they’d have hung him just the same probably and maybe hung him harder. Perhaps that was why we went all out at the Fourth of July. We celebrated by grilling hamburgers and picking the first of the sweet corn and blowing off fireworks that my dad got from someone who smuggled them in from South Dakota, fireworks being illegal in our state. Sensible Minnesota Scandinavians had passed a reasonable and good law to protect us which all of us disobeyed in the spirit of the great national holiday. We set off cherry bombs in culverts and lit strings of firecrackers between houses for maximum reverberation, and after dark we set off rockets. The sight of one made my mother’s heart flutter and she had to close her eyes. “You be careful you don’t blow your hand off!” she called from the porch, afraid to look, but personal safety was not the point of the Fourth. We stuck the rockets in the grass and lit them one by one. The fuses sizzled and up they went screaming into the night and hung in silence at the apogee and drifted down and then suddenly lit up the sky with a burst of red white and blue sparks and a blast that rattled the birch trees, a ka-boom loud enough to wake up every law-abiding citizen for a mile around, and then, satisfied that we had made our country freer, we went to bed.

All that thunder and lightning plus a patriotic picnic and a ball game between married men and single men, and what better day for it? What day could be more deserving of racket and good cooking than July 4, the anniversary of the day in 1776 when the Second Continental Congress adopted Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence? As the delegates talked in Philadelphia, the Revolution was more than a year old. Paul Revere had galloped through Middlesex, and Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys had captured Fort Ticonderoga, and the Battle of Bunker Hill (“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!”) had been fought, but the revolutionaries had not yet agreed that a revolution was what they wanted. There were plenty of people like my ancestors who felt the quarrel with the mother country could be patched up if patient men would negotiate reasonably, as Englishmen, and avoid further bloodshed. After all, they were no revolutionaries, those Crandalls—they were English, and how can you change what you are? (By a revolution, of course.)

The Declaration set out to justify the uprising and the violence by accusing the King of “repeated injuries and usurpations all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States”—of sending “swarms of Officers to harass our People and eat out their substance,” of “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent” and “altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments”—meanwhile, “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” But the genius of the document lies in two sentences, a pure and passionate statement of natural rights:

We hold these truths to be self‑evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

Like anyone who gets in a fight, the early politicians claimed the noblest purpose for themselves and nailed their flag to the highest tree in the woods, and they connected the American enterprise to the greater cause of human rights so that nobody could be in doubt about it. Nobody has ever been in doubt about it. They wrote their propaganda so well that it became our shining ideal. The Declaration set the country on a course that neither ignorance nor cruelty could distract us from for very long—a journey toward a day when we all look at each other with love and respect, black and white, men and women, religious and irreligious and anti-religious, immigrants from every point on the globe—when we look at each other as God looks at us, as free and equal and dignified and good-looking people.

All of the wahoos and bigots and snake-oil salesmen who ever wrapped themselves and their dismal causes in the flag and tried to sell hatred as Americanism could not last long because this Declaration said so clearly what the flag and the nation stand for. Freedom and equality. Once people gain a measure of it, they will not give it up, no matter how hard the struggle, as Walt Whitman wrote in 1855:

The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat. . . the enemy triumphs. . . the cause is asleep. . . and is liberty gone out of that place? No never. When liberty goes . . . it waits for all the rest to go. . . It is the last. When the memories of the old martyrs are faded utterly away. . . when the large names of patriots are laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators. . . when the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people. . . when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart … or rather when all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth—then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged

Prosperous Anglo-Saxon men, many of them slaveholders, wrote equality and natural rights into the political language, which cracked open the society they knew and began the revolution that began after the Revolution ended and took us in the direction of a dream down the long winding road that leads from those elegant fellows in knee-breeches to the folks who live in my neighborhood in New York, black families, women, white gentry, black welfare mothers, gay people, German Lutherans, Russian Jews, Greeks, Koreans, homeless people, exiled Midwesterners, New Yorkers all, and all of them having ridden the Eighth Avenue subway at rush hour, claim unalienable dignity as individuals.

Heroes, all of them—at least they’re my heroes, especially the new immigrants, especially the refugees. Everyone makes fun of New York cabdrivers who can’t speak English: they’re heroes. To give up your country is the hardest thing a person can do: to leave the old familiar places and ship out over the edge of the world to America and learn everything over again different that you learned as a child, learn the new language that you will never be so smart or funny in as in your true language. It takes years to start to feel semi‑normal. And yet people still come—from Russia, Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, Ethiopia, Iran, Haiti, Korea, Cuba, Chile, and they come on behalf of their children, and they come for freedom. Not for our land (Russia is as beautiful) not for our culture (they have their own, thank you), not for our standard of living (it frankly ain’t that great), not for our system of government (they don’t know about it, may not even agree with it), but for freedom. They are heroes who make an adventure on our behalf showing us by their struggle how precious beyond words freedom is, and if we knew their stories, we could not keep back the tears.

In 1970, in search of freedom and dignity and cheap rent, I moved out to a farmhouse on the rolling prairie in central Minnesota, near Freeport, where I planted a garden and wrote stories to support my wife and year-old son. Rent was $80 a month. It got us a big square brick house with a porch that looked out on a peaceful barnyard, a granary and machine sheds and corncribs and silo, and the barn and feedlot where Norbert, the farmer who I rented from, kept his beef cattle. Beyond the windbreak of red oak and spruce to the west and north lay a hundred sixty acres of his corn and oats. (I believed it was oats, but on the odd chance it might be wheat or barley, I didn’t mention anything to Norbert about it being oats.) Our long two‑rut driveway ran due north through the woods to where the gravel road made an L, where our mailbox stood, where you could stand and see for a couple miles in all directions, the green fields and the thick groves around the farmsites.

My pals in Minnesota considered this a real paradise (so did we) and they often drove up and enjoyed a weekend of contemplating corn and associating with large animals. On the Fourth of July, 1971, we had twenty people come for a picnic in the yard, an Olympic egg toss and gunnysack race, a softball game with the side of the barn for a right‑field fence, and that night we sat around the kitchen and made pizza and talked about the dismal future.

America was trapped in Vietnam, our good country bleeding for its awful mistakes and unable to withdraw, and how could the tragedy end, if not in nuclear disaster or revolution? We were pessimists; we needed fear to make us feel truly alive. We talked about death. We put on “A Hard Day’s Night,” loud, and made lavish pizzas with fresh mushrooms and onions, zucchini, eggplant, garlic, green pepper, and drank beer and talked about the end of life on earth with a morbid piety that made a person sick.

“I don’t see how a person can have children right now,” said a pal, his mouth full. My little boy sat on my lap, surveying the three pizzas: three domes of melted cheese on three hills of hot fresh greens on three beds of fresh bread crust, executive and judicial and legislative pizzas.

“I mean it’s fine if you do,” he said, “but I couldn’t. What right do we have to bring a kid into the world, knowing there very likely might not even be a world ten years from now? Ten years—hell, five. Three.”

There was much more: about racial hatred, pesticides, radiation, television, the invincible stupidity of the government and whether Vietnam was the result of strategic mistakes or a reflection of evil in American culture—it was a conversation with concrete shoes, and while I can be as grim and pretentious as the next person, when I hear the word “culture” I reach for the doorknob. I snuck out to the screen porch with my son and sat and listened to crickets, and my friend Greg sat with us and I recall that two others joined us, all of us tired of apocalyptic politics and talk, and we walked along the driveway out of the yardlight and through the dark trees and sat down in a strip of alfalfa between the woods and the oats. (“What’s that?” they said. “Oats,” I replied.) And then we lay down on our backs and looked up at the sky full of stars.

The sky was clear. Lying there, looking up at the hemisphere of billions of dazzling single brilliances, made us feel we had gone away and left the farm far behind.

As we usually see the sky, it is a backdrop, the sky over our house, the sky beyond the clotheslines, but lying down eliminates the horizon and rids us of that strange realistic perspective of the sky as a canopy centered over our heads, and we see the sky as what it is: everything known and unknown, the universe, the whole beach other than the grain of sand we live on. The sight of the sky was so stunning it made us drunk. I felt as if I could put one foot forward and walk away from the wall of ground at my back and hike out toward Andromeda. I didn’t feel particularly American. Out there in the Milky Way and the world without end Amen, America was a tiny speck of a country, a nickel tossed into the Grand Canyon, and American culture the amount of the Pacific Ocean you bring home in your swimsuit. The president wasn’t the president out there, the Constitution was only a paper, and what newspapers wrote about was sawdust and coffee grounds. The light I saw was from fires burning before America existed, when the Crandalls lived in Rhode Island. Looking out there, my son lying on my chest, I could imagine my grandchildren and they were more real to me than Congress.

I imagined them strong and free, curious, sensuous, indelibly cheerful and affectionate, openhanded—sympathetic to pain and misery and quick in charity, proud when insulted and modest if praised, fiercely loyal to friends, loving God and the beautiful world including our land from the California coast to the North Dakota prairie to faraway Manhattan, loving music and our American language—when you look at the stars you don’t think small. You don’t hope your descendants will enjoy your mutual fund portfolio, you imagine them as giants on the earth.

Between the tree line and my left elbow, a billion stars in the sky, each representing a billion we couldn’t see. We lay in the grass, thinking about America and also slightly about snakes and about spiders clambering from blade to blade who might rappel down into our mouths, and looked open-mouthed up at the heavens and everything we said out loud seemed hilarious to us. Tiny us gazing up at The South Wall of The Unimaginable Everything and feeling an obligation to comment, and our most profound comments sounded like peas dropped in a big empty bucket. “It makes you feel small, doesn’t it.” Plink. “I used to know the names of those.” Plunk. One more peabrain having to share the effect that the world is having on him. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it … I remember when I was a kid—” someone said and we laughed ourselves limp—shut up, we said, laughing, we’re sick of sensitive people, everything you see just reminds you of yourself! So stick it in your ear.

The Revolution was launched in frustration and anger at the mess that greed and arrogance make in the world (and most of the Declaration is as angry as what was said around the kitchen table), but the Revolution was harnessed to a great idea thought by men who lay on the ground and looked up at the stars. Or so I thought, lying there in the alfalfa. Perhaps in 1776 they too were rattled by current events and the perfect logic of despair and had to go out and lie in the weeds for a while. Indoors all the news is secondhand, mostly bad, and even good people are drawn into a dreadful fascination with doom and demise; their faith in extinction gets stronger; they sit and tell stories that begin with The End. But one look at heaven can restore our spirits to their natural immensity and blessedness, and we feel free, and the idea of liberty becomes larger. The sentence about equal rights does not sound small or ridiculous when you recite it while looking at the stars:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The stars in the sky, my friends in the grass, my son asleep on my chest, and a fly flew in my mouth, and went deep, forcing me to swallow, inducing a major life change for him, from fly to simple protein, and so shall we all be changed someday, but meanwhile: Life! Liberty! and (huff huff pant pant huff huff) Happiness!

The boy is nineteen now. Almost all my friends’ children are suddenly grown up, including kids of girls who I looked at the stars with while listening to Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers and guys I ran around with including one who owned a pink ’57 Oldsmobile with yards of glittering chrome and a custom airhorn that when you pulled a wire under the dash it made a long moo, like a singing Holstein. He and I never thought about being dads but it didn’t surprise us either. Our parents told us that listening to rock ‘n’ roll would lead to having babies, and they were right, and you kids are them.

The day you were born, our nostalgia for our own youth flickered and dimmed, the book snapped shut on our grudges against our elders who brought us up miserably and taught us the wrong things and so badly, and we began to look forward to your life.

We lived in dread of various unnameable calamities—waking up at night in fear and getting up to make sure your little rear end was rising and falling in the crib, leaping out of chairs at the sound of a crash, panicking sometimes at the sound of silence or a small sound such as crunching, e.g., the time my little boy came into view chewing a morsel that sounded funny and turned out to be half of the carcass of a mouse dead from rat poison and we flew to the car with him and for some reason didn’t drive the car straight into a tree en route to the doctor’s and all die instantly—but mostly we have been hopeful and progressive, forward looking, anticipating your first steps, your first words, and eventually your winning your freedom from us and going bravely through the door to pursue your happiness in this free country.

And we are hopeful about the progress of liberty and believe that the idea of equal rights that Americans have struggled with for two hundred and twelve years will be more perfectly realized and understood by our children and grandchildren.

You will grow up less weighted down by fears and shame and all the rocks we carried in our pockets. You being easier about who you are will be less troubled by people who are different from you, whose names are strange, who are another color, who speak another language, pray to a different God or don’t pray at all, whose feelings and opinions seem odd and even wrong, who put pickles on their hot dogs instead of onions and mustard: you will take them in stride, as people. You will live in an America where women and men, black and white, have something like an equal chance to learn, to work, to create, and to enjoy the good things in life. You will meet each other on simple equal terms and not be afraid or ashamed, seeing that the other is as good as yourself, whether they know it or not, and as capable of comedy or grief.

What we celebrate isn’t loyalty to a culture, or love of the land, or dedication to institutions of government, but love of the idea: Liberty—Equality—one and inseparable. We have turned our faces toward this sun since 1776 and will not turn away from it. Whitman said: “Liberty relies upon itself, invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no discouragement.”

Courage. God bless the idea of America and hats off to the writers who produced this fine Declaration. I’m sorry that my family wasn’t around to sign it or cheer for it, but if you pass me a rocket, I’d be happy to light it for them.

G.K. 1988