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A letter to a friend on Thanksgiving.
Hi John,
Best of luck in your new adventure - "getting out of Dodge" as you put it. I hope that you get safely across the border and that your new life is good for you and your family. Breathe some of that sweet air of freedom for me, and perhaps we will meet again over a Cappuccino in Toronto or in a cafe on the Mediterranean.
Thanks for the update on the declining dollar and impending economic trouble. There are certain things that I am finding myself simply avoiding - I don't want to think about them. What is happening in Iraq is one, and the collapse of the dollar is another.
Our country has died, my friend. That is how I see it now. Looking back, I think I have been clinging to a hope for a long time that it wasn't, despite all of the evidence piling up over the years.
People have told me my whole life that I was always devoted to lost causes. Now I see those lost causes as variants, and early warning signs, of a total collapse of the country we know and love. People told me that I was holding on to the old and the obsolete - which implies that new and better things were coming - and I saw it that way somewhat myself until just recently.
As a kid I had a mad love affair with railroads. I grew up near the Grand Trunk Western tracks, and I can still remember hearing that lonesome steam whistle at night. I spent a lot of my boyhood track side. I knew all of the crews and hitched rides in the caboose and in the locomotives starting when I was about 12. I had a prized dog-eared copy of the Official Guide to the Railroads, which was a 4 inch thick book back then packed with schedules and fares. Thousands of trains still went all over the country, and I would leaf though the guide and plan imaginary trips around the country while I listened to Sam Cooke on a little Japanese transistor radio. There wasn't anywhere you couldn't go. When I got a little older - 14 or so I guess, I would take the bus over to Windsor so I could ride on trains on the CN that were still pulled by steam locomotives.
By the time I was 14 I had accumulated 25,000 miles on the rails - a number that you remember at that age - once around the world! I had the opportunity to ride a lot of the famous name trains - The Super Chief, The 20th Century Limited, The Golden State, The California Zephyr. All through college I rode the train home to Detroit from western Illinois. It dropped me walking distance from my parents' home in Detroit and walking distance at the other end from my dorm in Illinois. $4 I think it cost.
Then the trains started to disappear. All of the old stations were abandoned and now most of them are gone, and then they started even pulling up the rails. For years I thought that it was just a temporary setback and that people would come to their senses eventually and restore the railroads. I would drive all over the place to get a last look at an old friend - a depot, or a coaling tower or even a water plug. Now I see that they are never coming back - and I didn't even realize that I was hanging on to the hope they would until recently. They were as good as dead in 1970, it just took a while for them to completely collapse and for people to forget about them.
Amtrak came, and 90,000 porters, waiters and cooks were thrown out of work, and thrown out of a life of freedom and independence, as well. The railroads were segregated, with the train crew jobs - conductor, brakeman, fireman and engineer - being closed to African Americans. That left the dining car and sleeping car work, which didn't pay as well, but they were good union jobs and the life on the rails was always something of an adventure. So when Amtrak came, it was the African American employees who got the axe. I remember many late nights after the diner had closed, chatting and smoking with the crew, listening to stories of the small towns in the South that they had left many years before to ride the rails, or about the time the train derailed one night during a flood in Iowa and the passengers had to be evacuated by boat.
Another interest was the old rural country music. For hundreds of years it had been passed down generation to generation. How could it ever disappear? It didn't seem possible. But over the years the old timers passed away, and I remember the time after a performance when someone said "well, Mike, I guess you are the oldest player still living now from the old gang." There was a big gap - people weren't learning the old music who were my parents' age, people born after 1915 or so. No one learned the music then again until the 60's. Then a handful of people my age started picking it back up from the grandparents, so when I was 18 the next youngest player was over 50, and many were in their 70's and 80's.
Back 30 years ago we had a little trio - fiddle, dulcimer and bass and we traveled around from Grange hall to Grange hall playing for community square dances. Sometimes we would play in a barn or a church basement. We had a repertory of 700 regional tunes - Michigan style, which was a transplanted New England style that had a little German, Polish and Finnish influence as well. Jigs, shottisches, hornpipes, reels, waltzes, and polkas. We would hire a caller, usually a local farmer. Imagine, 35 years ago, and we worked all of the time and pulled down $100 a man in little rural communities with no effort and no hassles. When the music died, a whole way of life died along with it.
The loss of the traditional music is such a tragedy, and not only is it gone, but there are fewer and fewer people who even know what you are talking about anymore. Other than a few musicians who could be commercialized, like Bill Monroe, the music just didn't lend itself to making big bucks and so was of no interest to the corporate music industry. It was nuanced and subtle, and set in a social and community context. Now, there is a commercialized parody of it that people are "into" and there are clubs full of suburbanites all playing the same 12 tunes that so and so made a recording of or some such. Then they go to workshops at colleges to learn square dancing. Huh? I think they are missing something pretty fundamental about the concept there. And, of course, in the ultimate idiocy and irony, I can't get certified to teach any of this. My actual extensive first-hand reality-based experience disagrees with the academics' opinions as to what things used to be like. I couldn't make them understand that I was what things used to be like.
Recently I have been working with fruit farming families, as you know, and the family farm is now dying, as well. Thousands of years of horticulture have been passed down going back to the ancient Greeks. No one could fully learn about the art of fruit growing in a lifetime. How can we afford to lose this? How can life be sustained without it? It is such a radical and risky experiment to move food production to corporate factory farms and to reduce the number of varieties down to the 10 that have the best commercial appeal. One virus - or one crop failure - and instead of being a localized and insignificant event, it could be catastrophic. Not to mention the death of our rural communities and the death of the independence and freedom that we had when thousands and thousands of our neighbors were involved in growing our food and managing their own farms. The choices and the diversity were more than just a curiosity, there was a strength there as well, and there was a more interesting quality to life.
I think now that those were just early symptoms of a total collapse and death of the country. 1955-2005 will seem like an eye blink to historians looking back, but for those of us living now it has been a long and painful experience to watch things collapse.
I feel a lot of calm and a lot of freedom now, though - more than I have in years and years. If it is over, it is over, and there is no longer a need to struggle with it, to argue about it, to doubt and wonder and worry with anticipation and dread. There was a lot of stress in being out of step with people around me on so many things for so long. Now I can let go of that and accept things more easily.
When I saw the exit poll comparison data from Dr. Freeman after the election, I instantly knew that the election had been stolen for certain, and that people would not get it when you tried to explain it to them. People don't have a framework for understanding things as simple as a statistical analysis anymore, and I might as well try to persuade the dog about it then to try to talk to most people.
Many somehow can't put the stolen election into the larger context, either. For me, it was as the last page of a long and sad book, and I know how the book turns out now. People who try to start with that last page, or try to generalize and make pronouncements from having only read the last page - and not comprehending it, and not realizing that they don't comprehend it! - or won't even LOOK at the book, will never understand anything that you say to them about it.
I suppose that it is fitting that democracy itself should be the last thing to die. It was the strength and the foundation for everything else we were blessed with as Americans. America - beacon of freedom to generations of oppressed people all over the world; a dream never quite realized, a promise and an ideal to lead us forward. It lives on now in our hearts and minds, which is the only place that it ever really fully existed. There are fewer of us dreaming now, but the dream is as beautiful as it ever was to me.
America is dead. Long live America!
Your friend,
Mike
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