The first American Revolution was fought over socialism, in 1609. This is never mentioned. Even before slavery and the Indian genocides, it's a founding schism.
In that year, a ship called the Sea Venture wrecked off the coast of Bermuda. She'd been on her way to relieve the struggling infant Jamestown colony in Virginia. So the ship hadn't even reached here yet—that's how early this was.
Among the passengers were several of separatist tendencies, the Brownists and Familists, whose ideas about society and Christianity had been shaped by the radical sectarian movements that rose up before the English Civil War. These were the parents, then, of the Levelers, Diggers, and Quakers (the people you read about in Christopher Hill's 1972 classic, The World Turned Upside Down). Most of those movements contained at least some communitarian element.
The passengers made it ashore and right away set to work building another ship.
Some of them did. The others said, What are we doing? Why are we killing ourselves to get to Jamestown, where they'll put us to work as colonial drones until we starve or get eaten by heathens, when we have everything we need on this island? Fresh fruit, seafood, plenty of space. Let us live here in common, worshipping God and sharing the bounty of the earth, and no man shall be master to any other.
Nor was there was any indigenous population in Bermuda. It was terra pura, pure soil.
What happened? The ones who intended to go to Jamestown tried to imprison, banish, and ecute the ones who wanted to stay. The latter ran off into the forest.
The governor killed one of their leaders, a man named Henry Paine, to set an example. He wanted to hang him, but Paine begged to be shot, as more befitting a gentleman. His last recorded words were "The governor can kiss my arse." That's literally what he said.
In the end, almost everyone went to Jamestown and perished.
Today is September 12, 2009. We are marching.
Actually, at this moment we are massing around a parade float that will guide us from Freedom Plaza to the steps of the Capitol building.
You rarely see a lone parade float, one that's not in a line with others. It gives this thing the look of a ship on a sea of people. The sea is us. (In a different mood it might look like a hayride wagon gone wrong and run into a mob.)
A woman calls to us from the wagon-ship. She's about 60; we don't see her well. She has a microphone, but the sound system it's connected to can't compete with this level of crowd noise, so we don't hear much. Another day, this would be annoying. Today it's thrilling. We're too many even for ourselves, and more are coming. As many of the signs say, silent majority no more.
The woman introduces someone; she says we may have seen him on the Internet. In the past week or so, he's become a YouTube sensation. He recorded himself at home with his Webcam, just talking, speaking from his heart about what he feels is happening to his nation, the trouble it's headed toward if good people don't make a stand. He's a brown-haired man in his thirties. In the video, he said something, used a phrase that resonated. If you've seen it, you know the phrase; some of us haven't seen it and can't hear well enough to catch the phrase today, but we feel the tone. Something like: "I want my America back." Or, "What happened to my America?" Another person sings an original folk song over the crackling speaker.
A guy behind me is holding an ingenious sign he's made. He's cut out the mouth from a giant cardboard poster of Nancy Pelosi's face, creating a hole, a gaping maw, and attached a bag to the back of it, like a corn hole at the fair. He's handing out Lipton tea bags to people and urging them to "tea-bag Nancy Pelosi." People are doing it and laughing, even ladies. Pelosi, with her giant crazy eyes, gulps the tea bags eagerly.
It's only fair. Liberals made fun of us because, at first, some of us didn't know what "tea-bagging" meant—that it meant dipping your testicles into a woman's or, if you lean that way, another fella's open mouth—and a few of us, the older ones, may have referred to ourselves for a brief span as "tea-baggers," in ignorance and in innocence. Now we're turning the joke back on them. No one who has any sense of humor gets hurt.
Standing on a garbage can and commanding a lot of attention is a strange figure. A small man or woman—you can't see enough of its body to tell—holds a handmade sign that reads YES I AM. The creature wears an Obama mask. When people holler "Obama!" it looks in their direction and does a little shuffle. Atop the Obama mask sits a fake gold crown. Obama thinks he's a king! (Is that what YES I AM means? Yes, I am a king?) The king has on a bright purple pimp's coat with faux-leopard-skin trim. An African king? It looks like something you'd see and turn away from in a southern antiques shop. We do turn away, after taking a pic.
You can't move sideways as easily as you could a minute ago. The march is moving. To the Capitol!
The date of this march has been carefully chosen. Indeed, the date is the name of the march. This is the 9/12 March. "9/12" refers to a movement begun by Glenn Beck, of Fox News, who's monitoring the events from the studio. Glenn calls on us to return as a nation to the way we were on the day after September 11, when there were no red and blue, no left and right, just Americans, unified, ready. People in New York City had clapped in the streets for Bush, people who hadn't voted for him and wouldn't in 2004 either. He was the president.
Is it strange to feel nostalgia for that day? That was the first day of some kind of war. People's remains still lay smoldering in the wreckage of those buildings. A time of deep psychic trauma for untold numbers of people, it seems a day that only someone with the most distant and abstract connection to it would want to revisit, much less re-create, and that nothing short of a near galactic narcissism could bring a person to suggest enshrining it as a state of being. But we didn't name the march. Beck named it, although he disavows ownership and is absent today. On TV, in describing his role, he puts it like this: "If you build it, they will come."
Glenn is an entertainer. We love him, but he goes over the top.
How many of us are here? As is typical with political-crowd estimates, the question will become charged in the coming weeks, with wildly high guesses (between 1.5 and 2 million, the figure getting passed around today at the march) down to some probably slightly grouchy ones offered later by city employees, who put the number at roughly 60,000. Perhaps the fairest count would place it at about 75,000. What matters at a march is that it feel large, and we feel like an army.
Every so often someone shouts, "Can you hear us now?" (It's a phrase of the day, like "I want my America back.") The response to these calls is most often a smile and chuckle from people in hearing range. You know how, when you're at a concert and someone shouts something funny from the crowd, there's a tight smile people do while scanning for the one who did it—that's what we do when someone yells, "Can you hear us now?"
This tickled reaction reminds you of something, which is that our march is in part—we could even say mostly—an act of mass irony. Conservatives do not march. We shake our heads and hold signs while lefties march. But today we are marching. We are "marching." (We can march, too.)
That explains why so many of us believe there could be 2 million people here, many more even than came to the Obama inauguration, which paralyzed the city (whereas we have not even impeded traffic). It isn't stupidity. It's that none of us have ever been in a march before. It doesn't take many people to seem like a boatload of people.
For the first time in our history, a black man lives in the White House, and today's is the first massive protest against his administration, and 99.9999 percent of us are white and fan-followers of race-baiting pundits—and mind you, this is in America, where you can't walk into a convenience store without having or witnessing at least three intense, awkward, occasionally inspiring moments of racial tension—but despite all of that, today has "nothing to do with race." This phenomenon will be known to future Americans as "the Race Miracle of 9/12."
As evidence, when you approach the Capitol—surely America's most stirring man-made view, where you stare into the gray shadows behind those columns and realize you're witnessing the stone projection of a psychic landscape, a landscape that is not this country but the idea of this country, the very heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers—an unexpected sight awaits you there: a dark black man, wearing dark glasses, on a video screen. He's here with us in person, but you can't see him because of the crowd. On the screen he turns and speaks directly to the other black man, the one in the White House.
He's the Reverend C. L. Bryant, a conservative preacher from Louisiana. This is his moment.
"Politicians have built walls," he says. "Walls of misunderstanding" (we roar approval), "walls of racism" (louder), "walls of classism" (louder still).
"And to quote Ronald Reagan, when he spoke to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Berlin Wall," Bryant says, his preacher voice intensifying, our own volume trebling, "Mr. Obama, tear down these walls!"
God knows what this means, but he's on our side.
There is definitely overt racism here. Later you'll hear there wasn't, but it's just strangely coded. Perhaps owing to the advanced age of many of us—the same factor, in other words, that caused the tea-bagging embarrassment—we still revert to seventies soul-brother jive talk when we want to be racist. The YES I AM pimp king is one example, but there are plenty of others. A sign shows Obama digging a grave for the Constitution, with the caption I DON'T DIG BARACK. That's too subtle to serve as a convincing example, maybe, but another man holds a sign that reads HEY, BRO, HANDS OFF MY WALLET, next to a picture of a monkey's face. You start to see.
A father and a little boy standing by a tree. Father's sign reads WE KNOW HE SNEAKS CIGARETTES BUT SERIOUSLY IS THE PRESIDENT STILL SMOKING CRACK?
There's music again. A conservative folksinger has taken Reverend Bryant's place, with a song called "We Gotta Get Back" (meaning to our 9/12 ways).
Ronnie Reagan is everywhere. One sign says DIG HIM UP FOR 2012.
I ask the young man holding it—Franklin McGuire, a polite, sharp-looking kid from South Carolina who's living in D.C. for the fall semester and interning at a conservative leadership institute—which issue he's here representing, and he says, "Personal responsibility." He's young, but already he feels he's been able to witness his country's decline.
At smaller Tea Party rallies throughout the states, while we wait for speakers like Joe the Plumber to arrive, we play old Reagan speeches from iTunes over PAs and listen to them, standing in fields and parks. We want to remove ourselves from history.
You spot only one counterprotester, if that's what he is. He wears a suit, and his sign reads TAX THE RICH. He stands in the middle of the outgoing flow, so you can't avoid him. His sign puzzles people. One Tea Party patriot in jeans, sneakers, and cap approaches him, demanding to know "What's wrong with rich people? Aren't rich people good?"
"Some of 'em," the man in the suit answers and sort of shrugs, as if he's paid to be here. The back of his sign has Christian stuff on it.
The patriot squints at him, preparing to launch into a stream of abuse, but waves his hand with ah-phooey disgust and stalks off.
Later that evening, in a paid-for suite at the Mandarin Oriental, a tall blond "government-affairs ecutive at a well-connected industry-trade group" (i.e., a lobbyist at one of the top policy "shops" here in the demimonde where private insurance and D.C. politics mingle) was reaching far into the minibar.
He is my first cousin, with whom I grew up and am still close. In the 1940s, our grandfather and two of his childhood friends inherited an insurance company in Kentucky that had been operating since the 1850s. They spent their lives making it into what today is the oldest and, in many years, most successful small firm in the state. My twin uncles run it now. Their sons are being groomed for takeover as we speak. My grandfather drove Buicks; my uncles fly on private jets. My grandfather promised people his vote; my uncles help people get elected. It's the American story. It's an American story. I grew up at the margins of it, dead-middle-class, enjoying the company's benefits at someone's generosity, charging unlimited Cokes at the country club under one of my cousins' names, aware that the whole mechanism of wealth perpetuation would take care of me in a pinch but then settle me back at arm's length. My family never made me or my siblings feel any of this; they're kind, humor-possessing people, conscientious to a fault, the kind who stress you out trying to feed you, give you spending money, make you stay at their houses instead of hotels, a few of the reasons they've done well—but they never had to make us feel anything. It was southern class, and we had functioning IQs. In the twilight, from the balcony, it was possible to see my lovable wide-smiled cousin, whose tooth I had once helped pull, as the next logical evolutionary phase, a kind of probe put forward by our provincial-family genome into the D.C. atmosphere to examine possibilities there. Politics, my boy. He was liking it.
We talked about the 9/12 March, some of which we had watched together. I was accusing him and his colleagues of essentially having created it. Didn't the crap those people were spewing originate in the e-mail accounts of lobbyists and "former CEOs" and other cynically interested types? Why else would these citizens purport to fear "socialized medicine" so intensely? An elevated number of them had "marched" in wheelchairs or while manifesting obvious signs of chronic health trouble and obesity, not to mention age—surely Medicare and VA benefits were covering a whopping percentage of all that. These tea-partiers owed their very lives to socialized medicine. You and your dad, I said, are the only people who have any reason to fear it.
My cousin denied any connection. He said he and his colleagues viewed the marchers as at most "a welcome distraction," which I took to mean, they lend a helpful populist sheen to what remains a disagreement among powerful interests over how things will be settled.
"That was Palin Nation," my cousin said.
"Yeah," I said, "that was Old People Discover the Internet."
He said a bunch of them had been in his office earlier that day.
"So," I said, "the attitude is, if they want to go on TV shouting against a public option…"
"Great!"
I still had the feeling of being down on the street with them in my nerves. The way my cousin talked, this wasn't how they'd seen themselves, not hardly. They were taking back power, seizing a destiny. But even the African pimp-king was some kind of pawn, as Bob Dylan might have put it in an eleven-minute impressionistic story song.
We were watching footage of the march on TV, flipping back and forth between that and a sports thing my cousin wanted to see. The distance between up here and down there began to deepen. Had we been marching to keep my relatives rich? Standing up for the rich people, like that guy who'd accosted the counterprotester? What a bizarre turn in American politics. The 9/12 March for Aetna!
My cousin told me a casual story about a breakfast three months earlier with a leading Republican senator, by the end of which this senator had vowed to "make the public option radioactive."
Suppressing screams, I said something about recognizing people from home on TV, and we laughed.
In how many families has this scene become a motif since the ramified political polarization that came with the Bush years, socially speaking? Here we were on yet another couch, ideologically horrified by each other but humanly unable to repress old affections. Not just unable but unwilling, feeling deep down that to do so would represent the final triumph of something not good, abstraction before love. Isn't that what leads to fascism?
I grew up watching my beatnik father and Reaganite soon-to-be-ultraloaded uncles drink cheap beer together and act like brothers, which lasted almost until he died. Maybe that was a shallow cultural interstice between Vietnam and now. The two sides have definitely gotten uglier to each other. That's why it feels good, if slightly cowardly sometimes, to sit here with my cousin and find pleasure in his conversation and force myself to take seriously his perspective, him knowing I think he's on some level evil, me knowing he thinks I'm on some level insane. Because we're all evil and insane, and you only get one family. We both loved my grandfather, who was the type that comes to your house with blankets and thermoses when it burns down in the middle of the night, to get your paperwork started. My hate reflex isn't nearly as active when the phrase "private insurance" appears. My cousin thinks he's fighting for people like our grandfather. Doubtless in plenty of cases he is.
On TV they showed a man with a sign that read OBAMA'S A CLUNKER (playing on the president's controversial Cash for Clunkers initiative). My cousin liked that.
I was souring, noticing the conventional unattractiveness of the crowd. It hinted at undiluted Germanic stock. It had been wrong to think people like this don't march; they just do it with torches.
Some text made my cousin have to run. "Good luck with the story," he said. We man-hugged.
A sign read THIS TIME WE COME PEACEFULLY AND UNARMED. THIS TIME. But the man holding it was smiling the same way they do outside the Today show studios.
I arrived at the town-hall meeting in Virginia on time, but the doors were locked. Too many people inside already; the fire department had made the call. A bunch of us stood outside, going through the ritual bonding gesture of greeting each new person who came up to try the door. "It's locked," we mutter in friendly warning. Really? (Trying anyway.) What the hell? "We know! What the hell!"
I asked a willowy redheaded woman who looked about 40 why she was there.
"Because I'm afraid," she said. "I'm really afraid of this president. I mean, they're starting to talk about limits on family size, how many children you can have. In our America."
A guy came up and pulled on the door. "Figures," he said. "He's a liberal" (meaning the Democratic congressman hosting this town hall).
People around me snort and harrumph, but there are some guys here from a union.
"Oh, some of us are pretty smart," a white-bearded one of them says.
"Oh yeah?" the guy says.
"Yeah," the labor guy says. "Some of us even have master's degrees and Ph.D.'s."
Pretty tame, as political combat goes, but still you could tell it made the people in our little group edgy. (A couple of days later, someone bit somebody's finger off at a MoveOn event. We were ready.)
Three people exited, the fireman let in three, that's how it worked. It took me over an hour to sausage-press my way through this process into the hall itself, where Representative Tom Perriello (D-Va.) was facing questions from a constantly self-refreshing queue of disgruntled Republican constituents. It turned out I needn't have worried about missing anything; this meeting would go for hours. It seemed every person who'd come intended to speak.
As we shuffled up the hallway toward the room with the microphones, distinct words began to emerge from the doors. The one we heard clearest and loudest, and that generated the biggest response by a huge measure, was "socialism."
A man you couldn't see from where I was standing got up and said to Perriello—he didn't so much say as intone—"From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs." He paused. "Karl Marx said that was the credo of Communism. Now, I want you to tell me the difference between that…and what we're headed for."
It was the one time all day the place actually shook.
"But that's from the Bible," I muttered. "From the New Testament." (I couldn't help it, I used to be a hard-core Christian. Acts 2 and 4: The believers "had all things common…as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.")
The lady next to me reeled and looked at me like she'd just caught me sniffing my finger.
"It is!" I said.
The next man up to the mike was very somber, soft-spoken, bearded; a study in browns and khakis; he walked slowly. He had been waiting for this moment. "I have one question," he said to Perriello. "Where in the Constitution does it state that we are required to provide health care for everybody?"
Perriello had given a defense already of the conventional liberal view on this question (that, I imagine, the Constitution is a system for perfecting the never-ending American project, not a chain to keep us fid in history). The congressman referred to his statement. "We've covered that," he said.
"Thank you," said the man, "you have answered my question." Much cheering.
I liked the man's question. His attitude was belligerent to a level of about 600 percent past what the moment called for, but he embodied something beautiful about the health-care-reform debate as it has evolved this year. Unlike with most questions of national import, even the wars, you can't get into this one without talking about the whole point of America. For the first time in the century or so that it's been an articulated goal of the left (beginning with Catholics, moving through labor, into the civil rights and consumer-advocacy struggles), we possess the means, and in some quarters the will, to enact a truly universal "care of the public health," what Disraeli said "ought to be, if not the first, at any rate one of the first considerations of a statesman." A majority of the people—not huge but consistent—claims to want it, and we're either going to do it or not. At moments like this one, we remember that we exist inside the matrix of an eighteenth-century experiment in Enlightenment political thought—we are in a sense the subjects of that experiment—and we interrogate the nature of it. What Would the Founding Fathers Do? becomes not an academic question but in some ways the only applicable one.
Ben Franklin, the ber—Founding Father for instance, actually got mid up in health care reform and the whole public/private—funding debate at one point—in 1751, around the time his first papers on electricity appeared. A friend, a surgeon named Thomas Bond, approached him with a suggestion, that they lobby the Pennsylvania Assembly to create in Philadelphia a hospital for "the sick-poor," one modeled on more advanced practices Bond had observed in England and at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris.
Bond understood that Franklin, perpetually hounded by schemers, would still get behind something new if he thought it made sense. The doctor focused his arguments on the good such an institution could do for the whole province. Treat the sick-poor and you have, for one thing, fewer poor, since prolonged sickness can make and keep us impoverished. Also, epidemics like to begin among the poor or distressed: You suppress those faster. The hard-tested surgeons produced by urban hospitals train others, who export their art to the countryside. All reasons to spur Franklin.
In a periodical he'd founded, The Pennsylvania Gazette, and in addresses before the Assembly, Franklin built a case over weeks. To begin with, he told them, there's no such thing as "the poor." Poor is a way station people pass through, even gentlemen and gentlewomen. "We are in this world mutual hosts to each other," he said, and pointed to the explosive social dynamism of that eighteenth-century Atlantic world outside the window, so familiar to us now, where "the circumstances and fortunes of men and families are continually changing; in the course of a few years we have seen…the children of the wealthy languishing in want and misery, and those of their servants lifted into estates."
Franklin proposed an institution that would provide—"free of charge"—the finest health care ("diet, attendance, advice, and medicines") to everybody, "whether inhabitants of the province or strangers," even to the "poor diseased foreigners" whose growing numbers in the colony and "dissonant manners" worried many (including Franklin, who wrote that soon everyone would have to learn German).
Franklin had a list of reasons—he cherished lists—but it boiled down to something primal, a sense that it was beyond the pale ever to let human beings suffer because they couldn't pay when means existed to help. This "seems essential to the true spirit of Christianity," Franklin wrote, "and should be extended to all in general, whether deserving or undeserving, as far as our power reaches."
Franklin said to the Assembly, You have to build it.
The Assembly said, No, you must do it with private donations. You can't tax people in the country to pay for a city hospital.
Franklin said, That won't work, it will never be enough, good health care costs a lot of money, remembering "the distant parts of this province" in which "assistance cannot be procured, but at an expense that neither [the sick-poor] nor their townships can afford."
And besides, Franklin wrote, "the good [that] particular men may do separately, in relieving the sick, is small, compared with what they may do collectively."
The Assembly said, The people will never support it.
Franklin knew the majority of them already did. He knew the people.
He said to the Assembly, Here's the idea. If I and my associates can raise such-and-such an amount of money (an enormous sum for the time), you will match it, and the project moves forward.
The Assembly said, Sure! They knew Franklin could never get the funds. This way they looked generous, at no expense.
Franklin went out and quickly raised a good deal more even than the sum he'd named. He used the slightly competitive nature of the matching-funds plan to ratchet up giving. The people had been ready. The Assembly, to which he would soon be elected, and its powerful landed interests had been screwed. Franklin later said he never felt less guilty about an act of deception in his life.
That's how we got: the Pennsylvania Hospital. Whence came: American surgery. Whence came: American psychiatry.
The next year, 1752, Franklin had a visit from yet another friend with yet another sane-sounding idea: modern private insurance.
There was a woman at the town-hall meeting carrying a sign that read no socialized medicare.
I saw my cousin again at our other cousin's wedding. She was "both our cousin." Six hundred people, black tie, reception at the old club, a soul band that had somehow been teleported in from 1967. It was magnificent.
I have a black-and-white cat with a trick bladder, and she had urinated on my bow tie, so I was wearing an actual black necktie with my tudo. One of my uncles grabbed it and caught another's eye. "Hey, look," he shouted, acting like he was impressed, "almost there!"
I'd walked away from the town hall and the March and the Tea Party rallies feeling that despite all the crypto-racism and jokes about guns and whatnot, there wasn't anything to fear, or any more to fear than ever, at any rate not an impending Civil War II. These people reminded you of the ancient Russians who came out with pro-Soviet signs every winter. They were capitalism's bizarro reflection of that Cold War nostalgia, victorious version. Mainly they were ercising boredom and frustration. It's not like you couldn't sympathize with half of what they were saying. Most people who are against government probably have a point. It even seemed sane to hope that some good could come from the sheer event of so many Americans educating themselves about policy decisions, getting interested in creating coherence between those decisions and our ultimate hopes for the country.
You did see ominous things like news in The Boston Globe that the Secret Service found itself straining to handle the exponential rise in assassination threats since Obama had taken office. And people like Sean Hannity, people with big careers to protect and who are, one assumes, invested in not getting too far-out, they were starting to say fairly reckless stuff on the radio, talking openly about the Obama administration as a proto-totalitarian goon squad that would soon be in your living room (the same administration, mind you, that hasn't been able to attempt passage of an ultra-lite, Euro-style, health care public option without occasioning a national crack-up). At times it seemed possible to wonder if the old American Caliban was coming out, that dark thing in us that knows what's right but would sort of rather watch a fight.
Then, on September 23, a small article appeared in the AP, saying that on the day of the 9/12 March, even as we'd been approaching the Capitol steps, the body of a census worker from London, Kentucky, had been found by horrified tourists in the southeastern part of the state. I was headed there.
"You're going to London?" my cousin said. Then we both instinctively went, "Why does anyone leave Kentucky, when you can go to Paris, Athens, London…" (The end of an old joke.)
I'd never been to London, at least not the one in Kentucky. I knew we had distant roots in that part of the state. I kept seeing my mother's maiden name on billboards driving in. No doubt the spirit of the place would sense the completion of an ancient circle and welcome a native. Sadly, the captain at the police station seemed intensely displeased, I would even say nauseated, to see me.
"Why are you here?" she asked, leaning against the wall with arms crossed.
I thought she was joking, since there'd been more reporters through London in the past month than in the preceding ten years, and all for the same reason. "Right!" I said gamely. "I guess you know why I'm here!"
"No," she said more coldly. "Why are you here?"
She looked a little like Nancy Grace in a state trooper's uniform. Her hair may have lacked the Magneto-helmet power of that famous crime-show hostess's—whose producers must lower her hair onto her head before each taping, in a dark chamber where she sits motionless, preparing—but the captain's silhouette was the same, and so was her sneer, full of dismissal.
"That's interesting," I said (implying, I hoped, And a fine day to you, too, sister-protector of our beloved commonwealth!). "You don't think there's a story here?"
The census worker, Bill Sparkman, had been found in a mostly forested county adjacent to this one, naked and tied to a tree. Someone had written the word fed on his chest with a felt-tip marker and stuck his ID badge to his neck, possibly in mocking imitation of a deer tagging. This happened not long after a right-wing U.S. congresswoman from Minnesota had gone on TV encouraging Americans to resist the census, reminding them it was used to round up Japanese-Americans for the World War II internment camps. The fact that they found Sparkman on the day of that rally in D.C.… Was this an antigovernment lynching, a first shot fired by the radical right?
The FBI got involved, but the state police out of London controlled the investigation, and after six weeks they hadn't so much as declared the case a homicide. Now the captain was telling me—one of the few things she would tell me—that the police actively "wanted to squash" that lynching narrative. The census worker's body had been cremated. She claimed to be still awaiting the results of forensic tests.
I don't know about yours, but my onboard story sensor flashed green!
She gave me her card. Actually, by the end of the interview, she was fairly nice. I saw how it would wear on a person, if you were from around here—as she was—and if you loved the place, to have obnoxious entitled outsiders bursting in the doors, people who remember that your state exists only on Derby Day and when something fantastically horrible happens, and they're demanding (as occurred in nearby Manchester) to be taken to the crazed hayseeds who killed the government man. The captain knew how people around the country perceived her and her colleagues. At the same time, she knew she was good at her job. The combination can piss a person off.
Her subordinate, a male officer who stood silent through most of the interview, did say one memorable thing—that he believed, however this case ended up, or if it did, people were going to talk about it for a long time.
They wished me luck.
The hillside cemetery where Bill Sparkman died was visually exquisite in the way that southeastern Kentucky—which has a topographically secretive cove-and-cave-riven landscape—can be abruptly and gasp-inducingly pretty when a small road opens onto a clearing. If Sparkman hung or garroted himself there, as some believe, it was a dramatic choice of setting. The travelers from Ohio who found his body while visiting family graves, and came away feeling strongly that Sparkman had not committed suicide but had been cruelly murdered, told reporters he seemed to have been left on display.
The graveyard rests like an eroded rock stairway against the rim of a natural amphitheater, in the deepest fastnesses of the Daniel Boone National Forest. Without the GPS in the rental, I doubt I'd have gotten within ten miles (although the spot turned out to be not far from a cabin that belonged to my ancestors and which I saw as a kid—we drove through a streambed in someone's truck, and my brother found an old snake-oil bottle stashed in the kitchen wall).
You could hardly imagine how they had physically buried people on this hill, it was that steep. The plots were by necessity almost terraced, with little wooden chairs and benches, since you couldn't stand. The graves went up and up. It took me fifteen minutes to climb to the ridge above. As you ascended, you rose backward through unknown generations of the Hoskins family, from modern tombstones with laminated photographs of guys playing electric guitar, through older concrete slabs with crude lettering and misspellings, back to flat-lying creek rocks with no-longer-legible initials hacked into them, the ur-Hoskinses. Going higher, beyond the graves, you walked on a massive carpet of mosses and lichens, species growing out of other species—the reason the hill had looked oddly green from below, for November.
The death tree itself was glorious, massive. Its leaves incessantly clashed in the wind of a blustery day, like the branches were covered in thin copper coins. The tree had been here before the first Hoskins.
They found Bill Sparkman strung up to one of its limbs, but not hanging. This last fact had been important (I thought unduly so) to the captain, that the body lay partly in contact with the ground when found. Not suspended there, in other words, the way you see in pictures of lynchings. His hands were bound with duct tape, his mouth stuffed with a red gag. He wore only socks. Apart from the ominous word on his chest, there was the calling attention to his badge. Otherwise, no defensive wounds. He'd died right there, of asphyxiation.
Homicide, suicide, accident—the captain confirmed, incredibly, that none of the three had been ruled out. It was hard to get your mind around. Auto-lynching.
A few days before I'd arrived, a law-enforcement source in another town had speculated to a newspaper reporter that if people wished to understand what had happened to Bill Sparkman, they needed to look into the David Carradine death. Carradine, you'll recall, was found strung up in the closet of his Bangkok hotel room in what appeared to be an autoerotic episode gone wrong.
Or had this source, in mentioning Carradine, been referring to the actor's family, some of whom continue to insist that his death was a murder made to look like autoerotic asphyxiation?
I lay down on the moss. It was perfectly soft; it had the softness of a mattress that a billionaire with a bad back would pay to have made for himself. Not the tiniest bit wet or muddy.
If homicide—intentional or accidental—had it been a gay thing? Not the most enlightened question, but it came. You could certainly make Sparkman's biography match up in a wink-wink way, if you wanted. Middle-aged bachelor, former altar boy, raised an adopted son alone, lifelong affiliation with the Boy Scouts, a grade-school substitute teacher, an effeminate voice. I knew the last detail from having heard a speech Sparkman gave, on the Internet, from last year. He was receiving his diploma from an online university. They asked him to serve as class speaker because his story inspired them. While working toward his degree, he'd been battling cancer—non-Hodgkin's lymphoma—and seemingly winning. A man with a round, pasty, friendly, bespectacled face and a crop of light reddish hair. In probably the most commonly reproduced photograph of him, he's wearing a toboggan to cover his chemo baldness and reaching down past a young male student's chest to point at something on a piece of paper.
As I lay there, the spheres—pundo, talk radio, and blogo—crackled with talk of what had happened or not happened on this mossy hill. Had Sparkman run into some psychopathic meth cookers on his rounds, asked them how many people lived in their trailer and what they did for a living, and got himself choked to death?
Those leaning left sensed a sweeping under the rug: Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck had Sparkman's blood on their hands. The right seized on every shadowy hint that his death may not even have been homicide, much less a political assassination. See how quick you liberals are to demonize us! The two sides hissed at each other.
Late orange butterflies moved over the moss bed. On the way here I'd passed road signs straight from the family Bible. Brightshade, Barbourville. In Barbourville my great-somethingth-grandmother Kate Adams presented a Union flag to the Home Guard during a ceremony. The college there still displays it. My people were those strange southerners you don't often read about in histories of the Civil War: white landowners who also owned slaves but fought for the North on Republican principles. Kentucky cracked down the middle this way. That's why you hear them say "brother against brother" about us. My ancestors freed their slaves with a kind of "Fine, run off, then" attitude—seeing no other course, maybe in the noblest cases relieved to be doing the right thing at last, to be on the side of furthering the great experiment, not holding it back.
I heard a vehicle come down the road and waited for it to pass. It didn't pass. That was nerve-racking. They'd seen my car. It's hard to overstate how far back into the park this place is—less than a mile on, the road ends. If you dead-end in the Daniel Boone park, you're pretty far into one of the largest contiguous green blobs of wooded mountainous land left in the United States. It can be seen from space. Coming in along the winding, dipping roads, I'd seen canebrakes in the river bottoms. Very few of those left. It was time travel, Kentucky-wise. Not wanting to be paranoid, wanting less to be stupid, I waited. Whoever it was drove out of earshot.
When I pulled away, I saw he hadn't moved far. It was a sheriff's deputy, parked in the middle of the road. His finding me here in all of Clay County, unless he'd been watching the graveyard day and night, seemed Stephen Hawking—size, oddswise. Was I supposed to stop and get out? I sat behind him with the engine on awkwardly.
I decided to pass him. As I went by, we waved. A smiling gray-mustached man with glasses. "Come on back," he said, and just let me go by.
For the next few miles, I was edgy. "Come on back." Had that been creepy? A leeringly cynical mockery of the cherished "Come back, now, y'hear!"? Casually threatening?
Ironic. Paying attention to strangers who'd gone miles out of their way to visit fresh local crime scenes was solidly under the deputy's aegis. Someone had called him about me. Hadn't I become lost briefly and driven by a junkyard and made the dogs bark? That guy called. The deputy was probably amused by all of us lost-looking rubberneckers showing up with our GPSs, wanting to see the tree where Bill Sparkman died. When the deputy had said, "Come on back," he'd meant, "I know you never will." When he meant, "I know you never will," he simultaneously implied, "And I'm glad, because you're almost certainly an opportunistic reverse-provincial clown who'll go back to the office and try to make me look as stupid and scary as possible in what you write, despite the fact that we've been here since Boone in this forest, surviving, whereas you spend your life hopping around like a flea, chasing money."
He may not have articulated these things when he said, "Come on back," but they were present. Among male Kentuckians, much is exchanged with the volume and tone of grumbled stock phrases. The deputy and I had achieved perfect social transparency in the fleeting eye contact of that drive-by.
None of which means I didn't take a different, carefully eccentric route back to London, full of circle backs and stops at country markets, to establish my presence for any future time line of disappearance. In a gas station I heard a conversation about religion. I almost hesitate to reproduce it, because it sounds made up. The woman behind the counter and a bearded, even cartoonishly hillbilly-looking man who'd just bought a pack of generic cigarettes were talking. The man remarked that there were all sorts of religions right there in that part of Kentucky.
"Did you ever see snakes?" the woman said. She meant snake handlers.
"No," said the man. "Did you?"
"Not right out in the open," the woman said. "But I knew people that had 'em in the back room."
While I paid, they exchanged some pieties on how everyone has his own beliefs. Then the woman said, "It's just like, ten people see a car accident, every single one is gonna tell the police something different" (a vivid way, I thought, of localizing the story about the blind men feeling an elephant).
"Tell me which one of 'em gets out to help," the man said, "that's the one whose religion I'll listen to."
The woman and I both stood there. I think we each understood in our own way that Snuffy Smith here had just dropped some Spinoza-level wisdom on us through a parting in his tobacco-browned beard-nest. I went to the car and scribbled it down.
There are people who will ask you why you love Kentucky.
At my hotel, I called Sparkman's son, Josh, on the phone. I had met him earlier in the driveway of their house, where a sofa laden with heavy junk had been pushed up against the front door like a barricade and a large dog barked in a way that said he would bark until you left. I'd been leaving a note when Josh pulled in. A bearded kid with dark hair and worried eyes, formally polite but talkative, he'd stopped by just to drop some stuff off. We could connect later.
Josh was adamant that his father hadn't killed himself. He repeated to me what he'd said to others: A man who fights cancer like that does not commit suicide. Bill Sparkman showed every day how badly he wanted to live. It irked Josh that the cops wouldn't come out and at least give his father the dignity of victimhood. A cloud of tawdriness had begun to settle over the whole thing. Two of my formerly cooperative interviewees stood me up on my last day in London. People weren't sure they wanted anything to do with this case anymore.
But Josh said his concerns about the delayed determination of death were practical, too. He wanted to hold on to his father's modest London ranch house, intended to be his inheritance. Bill Sparkman had worked for sixteen years to keep the house so that he could leave it to Josh. Without the payout from his father's life-insurance policy, Josh would lose his home.
He told me that even before people started trying to make it look like suicide, the insurance company had been giving him problems, saying his father had missed a payment. Possibly the policy was void before he died. Josh wanted to know if I knew any lawyers.
He and his father had gone through a troubled phase the previous year—while Bill fought cancer, Josh was busted for receiving stolen property and ended up working at a Church's Chicken in Tennessee—but they'd patched things up since then and saw each other not long before Bill died.
The whole thing was sad as hell, if not worse. That was the real question. Was it worse? Did it concern anyone but a few people here? The captain had cut straight to it: "Why are you here?"
The answer was health care, but not in a way you'd have ever expected. Sparkman had been financially ruined fighting lymphoma without good insurance. When his first test came back from the local medical center after a month and a half, it showed stage-three cancer. Deep in debt, working multiple low-paying jobs to make his mortgage while trying to earn a slightly more lucrative degree, he took the census work as most people take it, out of necessity.
Almost like a punch line, when I got home and checked my messages, the first thing that came up was a Google Alert on Sparkman's name, the latest working theory leaked by two "law-enforcement officials." It must have come out while I was on the plane. "Census Worker's Death a Life Insurance Scam?" They were looking into the possibility that Spark-man had intentionally manipulated his own death scene to make it seem like a lynching so Josh could collect on the policy. The report described no evidence to go along with the theory, other than that Josh had found a life-insurance policy among his father's papers. Eventually it emerged that Sparkman believed his cancer had returned. Could he simply not face it—even more chemo, even more debt?
The one person I found willing to tell me more than he was supposed to said, "We may never know what happened in this case." Asked to elaborate, he added only that it was one of the most unusual cases he'd seen.
"Put that down in your little book," he said. "We may never know for certain what happened to Mr. Sparkman."
I saw my cousin again, at a party in the little lakeside village in northern Michigan where the family has spent every summer since the nineteenth century. It's a kind of Victorian-cottage utopia, frozen like Brigadoon; I don't know quite how to explain it. WASP heaven. My family was having a party for another of my cousins, the lobbyist's brother, just back from serving as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan, "taking it to 'em," he said. He'd been over there during the deadliest months since the invasion. I could sense an air of physical relief and lightness in my blond aunt, his mother.
The lobbyist cousin said it was getting rough back in D.C. The public option had gained momentum coming out of the House. The last thing his boss said to him, that very morning, was, "We may be f—ked."
From one porch, we could see a deep green field where we had raced as kids; from the other, the postcard loveliness of the small harbor, where the white sails of the sportsmen's boats hung motionless in the afternoon, like moths on a pale blue wall. We had grown up here—his parents as owners, mine as guests—in what for children regardless was a kind of paradise, all courtesy of private insurance. Now my own daughter was running by, chasing a dog. How could anyone wish it away?
I asked my cousin if he could stay for a few more days or if he had to get back to D.C.
"I have to get back," he said. "This is headed for a showdown on the floor next month. Now's when we go to work." Lots of breakfasts, lots of office sweep-throughs. A senator was predicting "holy war."
"The circumstances and fortunes of men and families," said Franklin, "are continually changing."
I hoped that my cousin would fail, and I wished him luck.
JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN is a GQ correspondent.