Hi Joe,
I haven't been able to put your website down since my brother sent me there three days ago. You are my hero. You have been able to articulate what I have known since 1964 my first year of conscious contact with reality that we were doomed. I tried to do something about it for the next eight years, but gave up in 1972 when McGovern lost to Richard Nixon. Then, I headed for the hills and valleys and woods of Humboldt County in northern California.
So I know rural life. I am not a redneck. I am a hippie. But we all lost the class war, so it doesn't seem to amount to much what we did or didn't have in common. It seemed important back then and some of my best friends were rednecks. We all hung out together at the Ivanhoe.
I might have lived just up the road from you in Luray, Virginia if my genetic father had stayed in my life. Charlie Hite was his name. He is buried in Luray. So I resonate genetically with your home turf. I think my twenty-year love affair with corn whisky (Dickel and Daniels) and beer was a legacy from him as well.
Now I live in the San Fernando Valley, California, where the mallification of the world began back when I was in high school here in Woodland Hills. It is surreal to be back here, but it has reawakened my social conscience in a way I never felt living in the hills all those years. I spent interim years in other places -- San Jose, Redwood City, Chicago, Humboldt County, Walnut Creek, Calistoga, Humboldt again, but here I am.
I identify deeply with your struggle to channel the outrage and to find some good to do somewhere on the planet even if there is nothing that can be done here and I don't believe there is. Maybe I am wrong. I haven't thought it thru entirely yet.
Anyway thank you for being alive and funny in the world and now that I have found you I will always have your next essay to look forward to -- until we die that is.
Sincerely,
Nancy
San Fernando Valley, California
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Hi Nancy,
Well, a couple of things come to mind on this chilly fall morning in Virginia. One is that by coincidence I am on my way over to pick up my wife at an ancient cemetery where she is doing historical research (establishing the GPS position of every ancient grave here). It is the Hite cemetery and undoubtedly your ancestors rest there. I am sure those ancestors' dry bones rattle with joy in the knowledge that their moldering is alas noted in the memory bank of a distant silicone brain somewhere along the information grid..
Two is that the languor, joys and pathos of the malt is what it is. And one of the many things it is, is the measure of one's character, said chatracter residing not in whether he or she partakes heavily or otherwise in the juice of the yellow grain, but rather in what eddies of the spirit and soul are traveled in the experience. All roads lead to the grave and in the end it is only the road that we come to know through human sentience, not the nature of the destination and beyond -- a fact that utterly escapes most Americans and especially America's supposedly religious fundamentalists.
Mallification was always the destiny of America, a country founded by stock companies in Holland and England. And folly is nothing new on this earth. But there is release in walking amid it in one's own time with eyes wide open. As I am fond of pointing out: To have seen a specter is not everything. Still the spring winds come and the young girls walk by in their beautiful way. All is never lost. And in the face of eternity, what we consider all and everything is truly nothing.
In art and labor,
Joe
