Give Me A Home Where The Buffalo Roam - Roots In The West But The Allure Of Royalty, The American Dream

Clyde Banning had been born and raised on a fruit ranch in Eastern Washington, not the Wild West of cowboys, Indians, and buffalo, but the West nonetheless. Tractor parts and old ice boxes on the front porch, Yakima Indians fishing for salmon on the Columbia River, horseback half the time, especially to the back forty, a patch of former Yakima land rented in exchange for fishing rights. 

The land was not ideal for fruit farming, but since the Columbia on the property was fast and deep and abundant when the salmon made their trips up and downstream and the Banning family did not fish, the agreement was mutually satisfactory.  As an additional benefit to both parties, the Indians agreed to work picking fruit during peak harvest season. 

Clyde was a Westerner - it was as much in his blood as any Texas rancher.  He had the same fierce independence, distrust of government, defining sense of practicality and ethos of hard work and expectation of just rewards.  When he went East to university and stayed on after a tour of duty in France, he never lost that particular and peculiar animation - that spirit that Europeans have always admired and suspected - and became a successful small businessman, starting from scratch, applying his sense of nuts, bolts and spare parts, army discipline, and an undiminished energy and making a million before he was forty. 

Most of those born and raised in the West take it all for granted - the hard work it takes to run a ranch, mend fences, ride herd, and keep a family - but Clyde knew the difference between West and East. Rudyard Kipling's  'East is East and West is West, but never the twain shall meet' described his world East of Suez, but he could have been talking about America. 

It was from the West that America acquired its frontier spirit.  When Thomas Jefferson contracted Lewis and Clark to explore, map, and plata the land recently acquired from the French through the Louisiana Purchase, he had grand visions in mind.  America would be one country, one nation from sea to sea. 

The journals of the two explorers were rustic versions of the the annals of T.H. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a detailed ethnographic study of the tribes of Arabia, or those or Sir Richard Francis Burton who, disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, penetrated Islam's Holy of Holies, the Kabbah in Mecca and opened to the world the long- and tightly-held secret of the religion's inner sanctum. 

The journals of Lewis and Clark are filled with observations about the natural beauty of the American West, its flora and fauna, and their interactions with Indian tribes. The journals not only captured a spirit of adventure but also the first iconic vision of a new world, one as different from colonial America and its European antecedents as could be imagined. 

'The wide open spaces' of the West were not just broad, but immense, so wide in fact that the first observers could hardly take their measure.  The Rockies had nothing in common with the gentle peaks and verdant slopes of the European Alps, the vast deserts were unimaginable; and yet American adventurers, entrepreneurs, and investors had no hesitation moving westward for open, fertile, spacious lands of their own, beyond the confines of the cities of the East, removed from class, indentured labor, urban poverty, and bad health. 

The Wild West, the iconic image of America, is not so far-fetched from reality.  The Southwest was the home of vast cattle drives, rustlers, burgeoning wealth and perennial conflict - cattle ranchers and farmers, cowboys and Indians, thieves and prairie law.  

It was a wild, untamed, lawless place, but because settlers had to fend for themselves, defend their property and lives against marauding Indian tribes, land-grabbing plutocrats, con men and hustlers, an ethos of hard rock individualism grew up.  Whatever wealth, privilege, status, or well-being the Westerner got, it was because of his intelligence, enterprise, and courage. 

Clyde's family - his grandfather and his brothers - had moved to Washington from the western Oklahoma territory, made the trip like many of the Dust Bowl Okies had many years later.  Life on the range was hard and difficult to manage.  Tales of thousands of acres of well-watered, fertile land in a temper ate climate were irresistible.  They began their fifteen hundred mile move and in late 1887 settleddown and planted their first fruit trees. 

They were cut from the same cloth as the first wagon train pioneers to cross the Great Plains, the plantation owners who travelled through cypress groves, swamps, and alligator-infested bayous to farm cotton on the fertile Mississippi Delta. 

Before one stem of cotton could be planted, tens of thousands of acres of tangled cypress swaps had to be cleared and drained and the land tilled and made ready.  These adventurers left the depleted tobacco lands of Virginia and North Carolina and made their way west without looking back. The Manifest Destiny of decades before was still alive and well. 

The East was a different place, a more complicated, complex place. Highly industrialized and now the financial, industrial, and commercial center of the nation, the East Coast was multi-layered.  There might be no class system in America, but no society is without its hierarchy; and Clyde was amazed at the labyrinthian maze of social distinctions in the East.  Making money in New York took much of the same Western confidence and aggressive individualism, but had to be channeled through more social, legal, and financial filters imaginable. 

One was always on one's guard in New York - not armed and ready for a frontal attack by the Apache, but for the knife in the back, the subterfuge, the devious.  To make it here required far more astuteness than anywhere in the West. 

Yet and still, Wall Street was no less than the OK Corral, standoffs and virtual gunfights with only one man left standing.  Before the reforms of Teddy Roosevelt and the innovations of Henry Ford, the era of the Robber Barons - the great industrialists and financiers Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan - was as wild as the West had ever been.  It was an expression of what had become an American ethos, not just a Western one. 

At the same time, ambitious Americans were ironically turning to the Old Europe for culture, meaning, and inspiration.  Sinclair Lewis and Edith Wharton especially wrote of this longing for the wealth, privilege, and high culture of aristocracy.  Fran Dodsworth, wife of a successful industrialist from the Midwest sees only boring, uninspired, pedestrian minds in Zenith; and cajoles her husband to leave his work and be free to drink in the sybaritic high-culture of Europe. 

She is a fraud, a vixenish, aggressively ambitious woman who courts the penurious aristocrats of England and France, misunderstanding their financial intentions for sexual interest.  For her these men represent the best of civilization. 

Carrie Kennicott, the heroine of Lewis' Main Street has none of Fran Dodsworth absurd pretentions but finds the life or her simple country doctor husband and the people of the small town where he practices simple-minded, intellectually sedentary, and defiantly insular.  She tries to introduce culture in the town, fails, and finally leaves her husband to live in the more cultured East. 

Both women have their comeuppance, the dignity of Sam Dodsworth and Dr. Kennicott is restored, but the tales are illustrative of that very American aspiration - reaching the highest rung on the ladder. 

Victorian England has always had a hold on America.  Empire, Churchillian values, confidence, reverence for God, King, and Country, the discipline of Eton and Harrow that made leaders of men; and above all, pomp and ceremony. 

In all Edwardian soap operas like Upstairs, Downstairs, American audiences might root for the scullery maid or the footman, enjoyed the camaraderie and earthy enjoyment of the staff, but care only for the toffs.

Victorian and Edwardian England seems remote, but the images of an even earlier England, that of the imperial King George who ruled us in the 1700s, are American emblems.  Our Founding Fathers looked like Englishmen, dressed like them, behaved as aristocratically as their forefathers, built English-style homes as graceful and elegant as the country manors of England.



Eastern city neighborhoods are English. Georgetown, Beacon Hill, and Rittenhouse Square are like South Kensington or Holland Park

Aristocratic England is all the more appealing because it is remote and impossibly unattainable. Americans would fumble and drop their forks at Downton Abbey or trip over the Persian carpet at Montpelier.  English Lords and their estates, fox hunting, understatement, and chauffeurs are way beyond the American experience buy not the American dream. 

America is, after all, a country without royalty or a regal past.  No kings, queens, emperors, courtiers, or palaces, left to sink or swim after the departure of the British in 1776, a new republic without cultural moorings - all the better to forge a completely new Western civilization - but without ties to thousands of years of cultural history. 

The recent No Kings rallies across the United States are particularly ironic given this royal idolatry.  There is no way that any President of the Unites States, let alone uber-bourgeois Donald Trump, could ever assume a mantle of kingship.  Would that we had a king, say many upset by the chaotic mess that passes for popular democracy in America today.  Kingship confers cultural legitimacy. 

Clyde Banning was never truly at home in the East.  He loved to clear brush, make way for fruit and vegetables, fix every clanking, but serviceable appliance in his home, leave cannibalized backhoes on the front lawn, save every nut, bolt, and screw that had ever fastened anything on his property, and remain as true as anyone to the West. 

There was not an ounce of fantasy in the man, not a drop of envy, jealousy, or cultural dissatisfaction.  That was another thing about Westerners. 

Sex And The Stay At Home Mom - A Brilliant Mathematician Goes Rogue, The Madame Of Short Hills

Felicia Andrews had gone to a college whose graduates were all expected to go to work.  Law and medical schools were still not admitting women, so the choices of a graduate career were limited.  Felicia, however, a whiz at math, graduated on the cusp of the computer age and was recruited by IBM to promote the electronic  data processor.  She would be part of a team assembled for their logic, for that was what this new profession demanded.  She would be applying her skills in advanced calculus and number theory less than her rigorous analytical ability.   

 

She was paid well by IBM, well below that of men, but this differential was accepted as part of the cultural dimensions of the times.  When she proved her worth, she might well accede to the higher levels of pay and benefits enjoyed by her male colleagues. That wasn't the point.  While most girls of her graduating class drifted into marriage and a predictable suburban life, she would use her God-given talents. 

Life on the Upper East Side of New York, 'girl ghetto', was an enclave of the tweeners, girls who did not have specialized skills but thanks to their premier education were well suited to work in publishing and advertising.  These young women were between college and marriage, and New York was the place to meet eligible men.  While some girls took their work seriously - as seriously as one could take secretarial work - most spent their hours planning their future, and finding Mr. Right. 

Felicia thought this rather low-brow, trolling for men up and down the watering holes of Second Avenue, vetting this one from that according to some predetermined scoresheet.  It was looks in those days which was a girl's calling card, so salaries went to Saks, Bendel, and Estee Lauder rather than portfolios.  In any case Mr. Right would sweep them off their feet, take care of them, and before long they would be matrons of Fifth Avenue penthouses and Southampton estates. 

There is point in behavioral studies where psychology and sociology overlap, and such was the case in girl ghetto.  The ethos of that enclave - finding a suitable mate - was so predominant and universal, that even the most disciplined and individualistic women fell prey to it.  Although Felicia was making a name for herself in the new world of computing, she resented the extra hours she had to spend at her desk.  The logarithmic tables were upsetting, the Venn diagrams, and the math to define and run the complex circuitry which were once sources of challenge and intellectual interest became tethers.  She wanted to be out in the world, admired, sought after, prized not by scientists but men. 

Before she knew it IBM, logarithms, and circuitry were left far behind, but she was just as involved in her new life - wife, mother, volunteer, and hostess -  and soon her home was the most sought-after in Short Hills.  There were formal dinners, casual get-togethers, tea parties, and special events, all organized and presented with taste and care. 

All well and good - not exactly the life she had planned when she received honors for her paper, XY Parameters In String Theory, which, her advisors thought, was the first step towards the much sought after Fields Prize, the Nobel Prize of mathematics, but a good life nevertheless. 

She loved her husband, more or less - her vetting had missed a surprisingly timid sexual nature.  She was as expressive of as much love as she could muster for her two children, and was proud, in a kind of backdoor way, of her skills at entertaining.  This didn't add up to much when she watched IBM stock go through the roof and saw how computing was changing all human interface; but too much time had gone by for her to pick up the reins again; and besides, her awe at the coming cybernetic generation did not translate into hours of sharpened pencils and algebraic formulas. 

And so it was that she took a lover - one the frequent guests at her home, also married to a former Broadway stage actress known for her stunning looks and desperate falls into scourging, penitential depressions.  Felicia didn't exactly seek out his attentions but welcomed them, a tribute as they were to her attractiveness and desirability - traits which she knew she always had but in the competitive world of computing and in the devilishly demanding one of entertaining and mothering, she had forgotten about. 

There is something about high intelligence that circumvents the ordinary, and those so endowed understand that the world is different for them.  They understand the calculus of risk and reward, cost-benefit, and the breaches in rectitude which are entry points into the morally off-guard. 

It was simply a matter of exertion of will for her to change the calculus of her life. Although she was never so presumptuous to assume that she was a Hedda Gabler, Connie Chatterley, or Emma Bovary, she was enough aware of her sexual savvy, the weakness of men, and the gift of seductive charm that she would never stay put. 

She quickly tired of Mr. X who thought too much of himself to be taken seriously, not unlike the string of suitors seeking Portia's hand in The Merchant of Venice, overbearing clods without a clue; and so she decided to be more aggressive in her pursuits. Waiting for a sexual overture was a waste of time and before long she had weaned the most desirable men of Short Hills from their uxorious lives.

Now, every society needs a guru, a hoca, a teacher to open the doors of consciousness; someone with insight, experience, and know-how to guide the uninitiated into new realms of experience. The women of Short Hills were no different and as needy.  They like Felicia had been manipulated into a sedentary, unprosperous world of events, mile markers, and prizes; but wanted much more. 

Women, despite feminism, the breaking of the glass ceiling, the revolutionary changes in society to favor women's rights and opportunities, still wanted to be loved.  As treacly and romance-novel worthy as that might sound, it was predictable. 

Most of the women in Short Hills had the same pedigree as Felicia - good family, good breeding, good education, and limitless promise - but had settled only for the trappings of success and were all unhappy. 

There was nothing like an affair to get rid of the cobwebs, to pull back the curtains and let in the light of day. Felicia's role at first was one of encouragement, a needed jumpstart for women who assumed that their lives were fixed and immutable.  'Why not?', she said to hesitant women who were at first flustered by the suggestion but then excited by the possibility.  Felicia took them through and past the easily avoided obstacles of duty, fidelity, and morality.  'What is a woman' she asked, 'if not a superiorly endowed being of unlimited resources?'

Encouragement was followed by introductions and before long the prim, sedate, very upper class community of Short Hills had become a virtual harem, an Arabian Nights for women. 

Everyone was happy except the husbands who had been cuckolded under their very eyes, tricked, used, and bartered; but neither Felicia nor their liberated wives felt any regret or remorse.  These fools had it coming, not unlike the fumbling men of Shakespeare's Comedies, around all of whom the women - Rosalind, Viola, Portia - ran rings.  These hapless suitors deserved nothing less than a good go-round; but unfortunately Elizabethan mores favored even the dolts, and the women had to marry for money, position, and status. 

Not so in Short Hills.  All women there had their own private incomes, secure in offshore accounts and available at the click of a mouse. No, divorce would be only a temporary disruption, a sticky hiatus, easily worked around and settled in their favor. 

'The Madame of Short Hills' was Felicia's unofficial title, and she found it fitting.  At play in the fields of the Lord would have been the epigram beneath her portrait if there had been one.  Life was not one of rectitude, propriety, and predictability - at least not for the likes of Felicia Andrews for whom Fermat's Theorem was child's play compared to the sexual conundrums of the suburbs. 

God's Rasputin - Spiritual Charlatans In The White House

Billy Graham, evangelist and spiritual groupie was seen in every White House for decades.  Presidents, regardless of their religious beliefs used the ambitious Graham as a prop.  He was God's advisor to the powerful, keeping American leaders on an even spiritual keel. 'On your knees, Mr. President', Graham had said to Richard Nixon, 'and ask God for strength and sustenance in your time of need'. 

The President, in tears as he looked into Graham's eyes and saw the truth revealed, knelt with him, joined hands in prayer, and asked the Almighty for strength and resolve. Graham hinted at 'forgiveness', hoping to exact a solemn confession from the President for Watergate - confession being the first and final step to spiritual renewal - but he was hesitant to overstep the bounds of the advisor-executive relationship.  It was enough to get the President prostrate before the Lord and let his majesty bring the him to spiritual renewal.  

'A moment of weakness', Nixon admitted in his memoirs. 'Getting down on my knees with that carny barker was wallowing in self-pity, and Nixon doesn't do self-pity'; but Graham couldn't keep his big mouth shut and the next day, he stood before a bank of microphones, beaming with pride and sanctimonious satisfaction, telling the people how he had saved the President, and that no matter what the outcome of Watergate, the country was now in the hands of a man of God. 

There was no more shameless, self-righteous, old fool of a windbag than Billy Graham.  The knees on his serge suit were worn thin thanks to his piety, dropping down as he did at every opportune moment - with the Speaker of the House in an unguarded moment, the Senate Majority Leader, and a trail of lesser Washington officialdom. 

'Here he comes again', said one Senator who had been pursued by Graham to 'see the light of the Gospel' and 'bend to his will'.  A royal pain in the ass, the Senator said to those in the cloakroom waiting for a vote on the floor, a buggering fool; but he like just about everyone else in the room deferred to Graham's popularity and very public rectitude. 

All except one Jewish member of the House who said that Graham was full of shit, the biggest charlatan since Brady McCormick, snake oil salesman who had bilked thousands out of credulous Iowans, kept one step ahead of the law and went on to Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois before he was caught.  He tried to bribe his way out of arrest, pulling hundreds of dollars out of his crocheted satchel and stuffing the bills in the pockets of the revenuers; but he had to spend a night in a Kalamazoo jail before being released on nominal bail by a judge who said his gout had been cured by McCormick's elixir of branch water.   

So, the Jewish member was on to Graham like everybody else, but he was the only one with the chutzpah to say it publicly.  Graham was an offensive bully, a tarted up fool, a complete shell game conman, a spiritual quack. 

He was a charlatan, one more publicity-seeking, Bible-thumping huckster in the long tradition of American revivalists, snake-oil salesman, and get-rich-quick carny con men. Burt Lancaster played a perfect Billy Graham in Elmer Gantry, the Sinclair Lewis itinerant preacher out to make a buck, get in Sister Ruth’s pants, and take every rural rube in the country for a ride. Lancaster could have been portraying Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, or a hundred other evangelists who have barnstormed the country since the wagons went west. 

There was no escaping Billy Graham for almost fifty years. He was everywhere and with everyone. He was America’s go-to good person. Being seen with Billy Graham had no downside whatsoever. 

Those few who thought him a sanctimonious publicity hound were too few to matter. Politicians and political wannabees trotted him out even when he was doddering and never sure who had invited him.

It was a win-win game.  Politicos used Graham to pander to their fundamentalist voters, to show the Christian flag, and to stand publicly for morality and righteousness.  And Graham basked in the reflected glory of public figures.  He didn’t seem to care who they were or what they stood for.  He was uninterested in the straightness of their moral spine, the cut of their ethical jib, or the purpose in their hearts.  He would stand, kneel, and sing with anybody.

Billy Graham hobbled to the Oval Office to the very end and his passing signaled the last days of presidential spiritual guidance.  Progressives, while acknowledging the role of religion in American life, found it a bother, a troublesome bit of quackery that slowed the wheels of social reform. Southern evangelists, those of Biblical originalism, creationism, and charismatic faith were the worst - credulous, epiphanic dupes who whooped and hollered for Jesus and let everything ride on his miraculous robes.  

The kneeling together, holding of hands, bowing of heads, and tearful appeals of the likes of Billy Graham are sheer nonsense, charlatan fol-de-rol, and self-serving fakery. 

'Thank God the old fool is dead', said President Trump who never in his life had gotten down on his knees for anyone or with anyone. 'He was a fucking pain in the ass'.  Trump wanted nothing to do with the smarmy evangelical Protestantism so prevalent in America.  His return to the secular fundamentalism of Jefferson and Adams, itself inspired by the religious sentiments of the Enlightenment, was more than enough to convince voters that he was a man of principle, a believer who never once embraced the hoopla and circus antics of clowns like Graham. 

Graham was not the only Presidential spiritual groupie. The Dalai Lama has been no slouch.  He is as sanctimonious, hungry for the spotlight, and as self-serving and ambitious as the old Bible-thumper himself.  There isn’t a politician in America who doesn’t want a photo op with him.

He has been photographed with rock stars, NBA players, with the well-to-do on Martha's Vineyard golf courses - a shamelessly ambitious man whose every staged photo-op is a ridiculous send up of his supposed Buddhist principles.  The man is a co-opted, television sitcom, Bollywood jester. 

To be sure Trump has been approached by both the Dalai Lama and Graham's son Franklin, a chip off the old block, a sanctimonious windbag like his father but without the political savvy or charisma for the credulous like the old man.  Trump has refused.  He hates to share the limelight and the last thing he would do would be to show up on stage with two of the world's biggest hucksters. 

Joe Biden demurred, and courteously declined requests from the younger Graham.  Progressives were on record saying that Christian evangelism and Biblical truisms were impediments to secular progress so no revival tent preacher would ever show up at the White House. 

Besides that, the progressive canon was all about inclusivity, and although religion might be an obstacle to social reform, America was a diverse country with Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and all the rest; so that the President of a rainbow nation could never be seen favoring one religion. 

So the era of presidential spiritual advisors seems to be over, although both Rubio and Vance are devout Catholics, and if they are elected to the presidency after Trump, spiritual counsel might be in the wings. Anti-papist critics warn that the Oval Office would become a tacky shrine of grottos and statues of the Virgin Mary, but that is just old-fashioned nastiness. 

America is a land of hucksters, charlatans, con men, Ponzi schemes, shell games, and televangelists; and the presence of Billy Graham with just about every President in recent memory only gives credence to the notion.  Graham came out of a long tradition of spiritual tomfoolery.  Revival tents were seen everywhere on the prairie in the old day, and bald-faced tricksters promised salvation for only a pittance; so no one should be surprised by the likes of Billy Graham or his feckless son showing up at official gatherings. 'Hit one for the Lord!', says Elmer Gantry.