Since I have nothing eloquent enough to share as of yet on this topic, just many ideas swilling around in my head and heart, I thought I'd quote this section of Joan Didion's "Where I Was From," where she is in fact, quoting Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno. His children are the sixth consecutive generation to live in the same house on the same San Juaquin Valley land where he was raised.
Didion writes:
"Hanson lives on the family farm, but no longer actually farms it. "When we all went to the universities, when we abandoned what made us good and embraced what made us comfortable and secure, we lost something essential, knew we lost it and yet chose to lose," he writes. "Material bounty and freedom are so much stronger incentives than sacrifice and character." What was lost by the "we" of this passage, and in Hanson's view, by America itself, was the pure hardship of the agrarian life, the yeoman ideal that constituted the country's "last ling with the founding fathers of our political and spiritual past," its last line of defense against "market capitalism and entitlement democracy the final stage of Western culture that is beyond good and evil."
As I try to decipher my own story, gnaw at the bones of the stories of others, a thread is emerging.
I'm working out some relationships and trying to figure out how I am a child of all of these things and how both Louis and I ended up teaching in Baltimore City.
Key Players:
Mike Davis' "City of Quartz" about Los Angeles
"Crips and Bloods: Made in America" about the long lasting Los Angeles gang wars and their histories wrapped up in CA's history and the history of America
Joan Didion's new journalism about California
Hanson's "The Land Was Everything"
Willa Cather's "My Antonia"
My observations at the Maryland State Fair and the 4-H subculture
The Republican Party and the Conservative's reaction to our president and America's future as an increasingly multi-racial society.
