Long Time Leaving (56 page)

I
n the Louisiana bayous recently, a friend of mine
^*
was discussing the state of the nation with a wiry local man in the snake and alligator business. The man belonged to a football pool, to an old, widespread, if not strictly speaking prominent family down around in there, and that was about all. “Uncle Sam,” he boasted, “doesn't know I exist.”

No Social Security number to pull this old boy into the FICA Bubble, no vote for him to regret throwing away on palpable misrepresentation, no satanic tax obligation, and no reason to worry about interest rates because his standing was good in the underground economy. A buddy of his had unofficially connected his dish to the satellite in return for certain hands-on considerations, including a bluetick puppy, so many gator-tail filets a month, and an unregistered fully automatic weapon.

The wholly unfederal life. The nineties American dream.

What other dream is feasible in America today? Certainly no self-respecting fin-de-siècle American aspires to be president anymore. There's no more territory to light out to (you need generational roots to make it in the swamp). Even if you caught the eighties high-roller greed surge, where are you going to ride it? The dollar doesn't hold up abroad, if you ever get good and footloose, you'll never catch up when you get back, and if your Porsche hasn't been carjacked it's in the shop. It's hard to say what the seventies dream was, because nobody wants to admit having been even around in the seventies. The Age of Aquarius (and of integration) is in its dotage. And if there is any dad or mom living in a cozy fifties
Leave-It-to-Beaver
house in the suburbs today, both of them are fighting a two-hour commute while Beaver is downloading spread beavers from the Web.

So I guess the only way to feel free and empowered is to manage a kind of Kato Kaelin Americanism—living in a nice place without being implicated in the big picture.

Sooner or later, however, you're going to hear loud thumps on your bedroom wall, and the next thing you know you've become a world-renowned dipshit: you're lying in court on national television, and the only way you can pay your lawyer is either to costar with John Wayne Bobbitt in a dirty movie or to author a book in which the fool publisher wants you to tell all.

Or else you'll succumb to the urge to start stockpiling chemical fertilizer. You've become a projectional survivalist. You have met the enemy-got to get him before he gets you—and he is Uncle Sam.

Which strikes me as a shame. Sixties rebels mocked “Amerika,” but you always felt that Abbie Hoffman, for instance, wanted to
be
Uncle Sam. Wanted to bring him up to hip. A misreading of the American grain that no one but the prolongedly adolescent and the media (temporarily) bought into, but at least it was an earnest effort to advance Yankee Doodlism.

Then the Oval Office Ogres, Johnson and Nixon, gave way to Jimmy Carter. Today Carter may be the last true believer in Uncle Sam, at least as defender of freedom. But Jimmy didn't make all that great a case for American power when he was
in
power. And then Ronald Reagan assumed the mantle of head of the federal government, more or less in the spirit of a man wearing a woman's hat, to make the hat look silly.

Then, the Bush era. Well. Tie a yellow ribbon.

And now there's Clinton. In theory, an Arkansas peacenik might pull
a lot of things together. A postsegregation Fulbright. Or …Bear Bryant was from Arkansas—what if Clinton's Arkansas element were more visionary and his sixties element rawer-boned? But I am trying to imagine a hybrid whose sire and dam are too far apart, each from the other and both from the present. You, the reader, are probably too young to have heard of Fulbright and Bryant. They probably took no notice of Abbie. None of the three ever heard of you.

Today we have what people call a caretaker president (taking care of what, is not clear) and a federal government dominated by a Congress that is capitalizing (to what end remains to be seen) on anti-federal government chic.

When it comes to restaurants and bookstores, I go for local. Otherwise, hey: I have a soft spot for the national level. The international level is largely beyond me—depends on who's translating. But surely the state level is the least enlightened of all. I got away from the state level (and not just because my state happened to be Georgia) as quick as I could. Republicans now are harping on the notion that government ought to be close to the people, but the further away the government is from me, the better. To whom, specifically, are state and local levels of government close to? The wheelers who make deals with the guys who hold the purse strings at those levels. Maybe I was overinfluenced in my youth by all those old cowboy movies—the town sheriff is in the crooked saloon boss's pocket and the U.S. marshal has to come in and righteously kick ass and take names. The civil rights movement, the most inspiring chapter of American history in my lifetime, was a matter of nongovernmental people reaching beyond state and local levels to the national. To be sure, the national level is disproportionally influenced by Manhattan and L.A., but who would rather live on a level dominated by Albany or Sacramento?

I acknowledge that people who prefer to operate at state and local levels are not only entitled but essential—somebody's got to do it. And the personal level is my personal favorite. But we do
need
a national level. Call me a sentimentalist, but I want G-men, GIs, the National Guard, the national media, the first lady, the Supreme Court, mail carriers, and, yes, even regulators to be at least conceivably good guys again. Let's rehab Uncle Sam!

Not just give him a more contemporary hat and lose the goatee. That's cosmetic. We need to restore the federal government's human face. We envision Uncle Sam as a snoop (when he is way behind business interests in that regard) because we begin to see our national confusion
exposed, and we envision him as a tyrant because we feel trapped, don't want to move on ahead into accepting that a believable figurehead for us wouldn't be red-white-and-blue, it would be red-white-black-brown-yellow-pink, and just as much aunt as uncle, sensitive to, say, Islam, within reason—keeping at least one foot in the Enlightenment. It's a hard image to bring into focus.

The obvious thing would be to call on Tom Hanks. Say what you will for Newt Gingrich or your militia commander, Tom Hanks is the closest thing we have to a national touchstone figure, nowadays. What he has done for sodomites, morons, and even astronauts, in
Philadelphia, Forrest Gump,
and
Apollo 13—
why can't he do the same for that other despised type, the federal bureaucrat?

Call the movie
Washington,
maybe. Or
Forrest for the Trees—a
saga of environmental wonkism. Or …let's call the movie
OSHA 13-1313-b.—
capturing the drama inherent in a government regulation.

We open on the character played by Tom, a deviant simple-minded desk-jockey at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. His name is …R. S. Bump. He is at his desk, studying someone's file, and he's in a quandary.

Nope. It's not going to work. I suppose we might shift from Uncle Sam to Uncle Sham, a national figure that everybody could agree to mock and revile. We already seem to be heading that way with regard to the presidency.

I think we've got a problem here. It's one thing when somebody can boast that Uncle Sam doesn't know him. It's another thing when nobody knows Uncle Sam.