The Reincarnation of
Paul Revere's Horse

by Martyn Smith

When my wife and I walked around our neighborhood, Candler Park in Atlanta, it was hard to believe that our state was solidly in the Republican column. We saw many more Kerry signs than Bush signs. The campaign certainly brought out creativity in signage.. whether on the front yard, front porch, or a sticker on the back of a car, lots of people wanted to make a statement. I tried to document some of these statements.. drawn from a unique point in our national history—the election of 2004.

The connection of Halloween to election Tuesday had never struck me. The first Tuesday of November this time fell on the 2 nd, and so right after Halloween weekend, we were faced with the presidential election. Many tied their political statement to a Halloween theme. This seemed to work mostly against George Bush in my neighborhood, who got pilloried as the mindless scarecrow in one memorable yard display, along with a sign that read “Somewhere in Texas , a village is missing its idiot”, a phrase that showed up also as a bumper sticker. My favorite Halloween political display had a more homemade feel, consisting of a papier-mâché red devil with an identifying placard hung over the neck: “George W.” If the placard disappeared, one would be faced with a rather traditional Halloween scene, with the accompanying skeleton and jack-o-lantern.

With all this intense feeling one might guess that occasionally neighbor would come to blows with neighbor.. one a Republican and the other a Democrat. Just down the street from us I noticed a white minivan parked every morning adjacent to a red jeep. On back of the jeep there was a central “John Kerry 2004” bumper sticker, and the off-center license plate bore a logo for support of Georgia’s wildlife. The white minivan answered with a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker and a little yellow ribbon showing support for our troops in Iraq . The battle extended to the respective yards. In the front porch of the liberal jeep, I saw a prominent John Kerry “for a stronger America ” sign. In the Republican yard there was a bright display of patriotism with an American flag flying from a flagpole, as well as a sign with a flag that urged walkers and drivers (and neighbors) to “support our troops.”

I am curious whether such neighbors talked to one another about politics, perhaps even joked about their contrary signs, or politely and silently ignored the difference. It calls to mind Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address where he allows that men from both Union and Confederacy “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God.” In this case they occupy adjacent driveways, share the same neighborhood, and pay the same city taxes.. but are they able to take Lincoln ’s charitable stance, and bear malice toward none?

Obviously some cannot. One of the funniest signs of the season came from a corner house which had its pro-Bush signs stolen and wanted to protest in the face of such behavior. In a clever allusion to the liberal yard mantra “War is not the answer”, this conservative house proclaimed: “Stealing our signs is NOT the answer.” And in a second act of defiance: “You can steal our signs but not out Bush/Cheney votes.” That second one surely had its source in pique at the loss of signs. The lesson is that not everyone could remain neighborly in the face of contrary opinions.. not in this election.

The Kerry signs had no trouble staying up in our neighborhood.. although I did hear from a friend that on the night of the election someone had gone through her neighborhood and sprayed Kerry signs with a great big W. I saw nothing like that. Some people chose the “full house” approach and put up all the signs they could, for every race conceivable, while others tried to get creative with what they already had—such as the sign in which “War is not the answer!” got amended to “W is not the answer!”

The political battle played out on cars also. Again the statements tended to revolve around the iconic W, which lent itself to the simple negation of a W surrounded by a red circle and a line through it. Positive versions of this W also abounded. One of these bumper stickers made me angry: the popular one that on a black background asserted simply W, and beneath it in smaller letters: the president. It was true enough, of course, that George W. Bush was the current President, but its widespread appearance before the election subtly undermined the very point of elections: W has to earn that presidency. Instead of urging a particular vote, it depresses that spirit by asserting a kind of unflappable confidence: “do whatever you may, our man is and will be president.” To support a candidate is every person’s right, but to wrap a candidate in invincibility and inevitability weakens the premise of democracy.

The prominence of the “W” made us wonder whether people were voting for a political candidate or rooting for a sports team in the guise of a political candidate. College sports is a particularly intense affair here, and during a football game at the University of Georgia in Athens , earlier in the fall, we had noticed a booth vending Bush t-shirts and signs. Why do you root for, say, the Georgia Bulldogs? Surely because it happens to be your school, your team.. that’s it. For a large number of people W represents their team.. that’s it. The question of how to get more Democratic voters in the South is analogous to asking how to get Bulldog fans to switch allegiance.

Traveling out to Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta , punctured the misleading impression that George Bush was in trouble. The percentage of signs pro-Kerry and pro-Bush did an abrupt reversal. My informal count during a drive in Snellville came out 25 to 2.. in favor of Bush. As my wife had predicted, the actual number of signs for either presidential candidate went way down, and one was more likely to see signs for candidates running for state or local office. The Bush vote became much more a given, and instead the visible support settled upon the race for senator or for state offices.

The landscape in Gwinnett is suburban. One photo portrays an imposing house sitting gangly upon a small un-treed piece of property. The large yellow W leaning against a trimmed hedge betrays the political sympathies of the house. The sign in support of Don Balfour, Republican senate candidate, took a page from presidential signage, asserting “Our Senator” instead of actually asking for a vote. The picture also causes us to consider the extent to which political sides are determined by lifestyle choices. The values and consumption that underlay the suburban lifestyle is well understood by Republicans, and their policies support it. Until more people come to view this picture as sterile rather than the essence of the American dream, it will be impossible to convince people to vote differently. The battle has never been just about policies, but about how we want to—how we should—live in this world. It is about our dreams and our mental images of the good life.

As election Tuesday approached, the political signs occasionally acquired human bearers. The Saturday before the election our neighborhood had its annual 5k race, and someone was there passing out stickers reading “Run against Bush”, theoretically bestowing a grand purpose to the short run.

On the same day young people turned up on one of the busy corners in the area, waving the standard Kerry-Edwards campaign signs, along with homemade signs urging drivers to honk if they support Kerry. There were lots of people energized for the election, and if one lived like us in the liberal zip code 30307 (“not just a zip code… it’s a lifestyle” says one locally popular tag) there was a feeling of hope that the impending Tuesday could bring change. We all lined up at the United Methodist Church . Many, like us, waited for an hour and a half to vote for change. There must have been some Republicans somewhere in that line, but they were hard to spot, and certainly most overheard comments reflected an intention to vote Kerry-Edwards.

Those hopes were disappointed, of course. The 30307 lifestyle was solidly defeated, being no match for the occupants of brick houses in the suburbs, along with a coalition of those who aspired to such a residence. The support for Bush was solid as a black SUV with reflective windows and there was no getting past W the president.

The neighborhood was oddly silent on the morning after the election. Signs were uprooted and appeared atop the piles of garbage, although a few became permanent fixtures in front yards. It was hard not to be glum if one identified at all with the losing Senator from Massachusetts and the “L” word. So here I am, an American, in opposition to the national drift, not only in politics but over a range of issues.. care for our land, the dominance of Wal-Marts on our landscape, health care.. each interconnected, really. Victorious was a conservatism that attacks the New Deal goals, aiming to replace government meddling in ordinary life with corporate meddling—surely not classical conservatism!

So what does it mean now to be an American and a liberal?

It happened that the weekend after the election my wife and I headed north to Pittsburgh for a Bob Dylan concert, knowing both the road and Dylan to be important loci for American identity.

The earth expanding right hand and left hand,
The picture alive, every part in its best light,
The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not wanted,
The cheerful voice of the public road, the gay fresh sentiment of the road.

That was part of Whitman’s apostrophe to the open road, and our modern highways are the heirs to this invested sentiment. The music falling among us in the course of this trip was Dylan, in particular his Basement Tapes, which represent his own late 60’s excavation of American identity. Following his motorcycle accident in 1967 he and the members of what would soon become The Band holed up in a house and unsystematically systematically toured American music, breaking from his immediate past. It was only one example of withdrawal into the world of American music, one of many in the course of his career. In his recent memoir Chronicles Dylan described this imagined America: “A culture with outlaw women, super thugs, demon lovers and gospel truths... streets and valleys, rich peaty swamps, with landowners and oilmen, Stagger Lees and Pretty Pollys and John Henrys—an invisible world that towered overhead with walls of gleaming corridors. It was all there and it was clear—ideal and God-fearing—but you had to go find it.” To our surprise it was as if Dylan was on the same trip: “I come into Pittsburgh / At six-thirty flat/ I found myself a vacant seat/ An’ I put down my hat.” Not just in his physical destination, but in his casting about for a personal place in this America.

The magnificent land presented itself to us during the trip—the very land that Hart Crane warned about through the guise of Columbus : “Rush down the plenitude, and you shall see/ Isaiah counting famine on this lee!” Fall was in full bloom in Atlanta , but a soft yellow hue still lay settled upon the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia . The tree-lined blind flat highways gradually gave way to gentle rolling hills and then to outright mountain obstacles. Then the feats of human engineering began to stand out against an increasingly fractured landscape. Two long tunnels through the heart of a mountain welcomed us into West Virginia, and a beautiful immense bridge spanned a deep valley, allowing for a straight and relatively fast drive through an otherwise isolated and difficult terrain.

There was plenty in this landscape to be disquieted by as well, evidence that a narrow vision of America was spreading, using the highways themselves as conduits for its constricting presence. Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores were present along much of our trip, with its large heralding billboards always preceding the actual store by a few miles, letting the attentive driver know which exit to use. Those large billboards always carry some welcoming phrase, and one read: “tradition, served daily.” Even the words in the corporate name seemed to bespeak tradition: Old Country Store.. all loaded words. It calls up a picture of old America. Yet it is funny that for such a tradition-based outfit, these restaurants exist only off major highways. Drive a thousand miles on the small roads cutting through America, the innumerable state roads crisscrossing the interstate freeways, and you will never run into a Cracker Barrel Old Time Country Store. Apparently tradition does not sell at the mythical source of the tradition. But this is no tradition, despite its obvious strength among a large number of Americans. It is part pop culture hokum and part political declaration. Served daily they build up an imaginative old time world, matching our own inchoate desire for a noble past.

We come into New Stanton at nine-thirty flat. Not Pittsburgh, but about an hour to the southeast. It’s where I was born, and my family has some old friends we could stay with. It would give my wife a chance to see the place where I was from, the small house that my parents brought me back to when I was born in the winter of 1973. It was a sort of homecoming, and it could have been even sweeter since we were leaving behind the block of red Republican states and entering the deep blue of Democratic strongholds. But this part of Pennsylvania was no bluer than our neighborhood in Atlanta was red. Getting up the next morning we noticed prominently on the old fashioned cotton-lace tablecloth a copy of World Magazine, a popular magazine whose mission statement is “To report, interpret, and illustrate the news in a timely, accurate, enjoyable, and arresting fashion from a perspective committed to the Bible as the inerrant Word of God.” The magazine was no shock, and certainly no revelation, since the same magazine sits on the coffee table of my parents back in California. Whatever anger I had about the direction of our country must also be anger toward parents, uncles and aunts, and even old friends from the place where I was born, waiting to welcome me back.

The next morning my wife got up early, as usual, to take her hour-long run. With the daylight our beautiful surroundings became clear. The trees had lost their leaves; the rolling hills and fields made deep green the dominant color. No grid-like city street patterns, but twisting country roads with small houses, stores, and churches strung out along them. It was beautiful, but unfortunately difficult for my wife to navigate on her run. Somewhere along the way back she missed a turn and wound up lost. The houses started to look the same and quaint yard fixtures such as a “penguin crossing” sign just added to her confusion.

She did not know the phone number or address of the house we were staying at. Since we had arrived in the evening of the previous night, she had no visual sense of the layout of the interconnected county neighborhoods. She did know the last name of the people we were staying with, and that a burnished wooden sign with their name hung from the porch. A name and a porch was slim information to go on. Circling and circling she finally came round to a Christian and Missionary Alliance church.. which she recognized as being the same denomination of my own family, and thus a likely place to meet members of the family with which we were staying. After standing around outside the church for a few minutes, getting up courage, she walked into the church holding back tears and a little panic, her running outfit drenched with sweat, and started asking for the only family she knew.

It was the wrong church. We have laughed ever since about the figure she must have cut as she walked into this small country church and started quietly to use the one name that she hoped someone would recognize. But the community was small enough that people knew this family—which happened to be an extended family. The next questions were to narrow down which member of this family we could be staying with, and she had only the most basic physical information to help them narrow down the choices. But eventually she was dispatched with an old man who could take her back to the house where two hours earlier she had started her run. I had been out in the car looking for my lost wife, and I pulled in just as she was getting let out of the helping car.

I have my own companion piece to my wife’s embarrassing story. Several years ago driving through rural Kentucky I spotted an interesting country scene with the sun providing a back light that made the colors particularly vibrant. As I often do, I pulled over to take a picture. My error being that as I stepped out of the car for a moment, leaving the motor running, I instinctively locked the door and let it shut. So there I was face to face with a back-lit cow and a green field, locked out of my car. I had to swallow hard and walk a little ways to a house where a woman gardened as her neighbor stood nearby and chatted. They proved more than willing to help and called a police officer to come help me get into my car. There was an awkward twenty minutes in which we made small talk as we waited for help to come, but finally the policeman came. He stepped up to the car as I told him my story of stopping for a picture. He asked what I was taking a picture of, and I could only motion at the grazing cow and green field. I could hardly mention the brilliant colors. He looked at the scene, and then turned silently back to the car, not impressed. He got the door open, and I was on my way, knowing that I had provided an entertaining story: the city boy who wanted to take a picture of a cow.

Let me state the obvious. If you had to pick a place to get lost on a morning run or to lock car keys inside your idling car, wouldn’t you prefer it happen in a red county? A county that voted Republican? Simply in terms of kindness and helpfulness, I know I would choose rural Pennsylvania over Atlanta. In the aftermath of the election I heard the joke, which you may also have heard in some form, about why they call it the heartland? —because it doesn’t have a head. All such jokes strike me as simply rhetorical maneuvers to get around the fact that we like these people and this part of our country. It is hard to demonize the people in rural America—at least if you have any experience in such places.

Later in the day I examined the pictures in the house. Numerous frames with the odd shaped cut-outs to accommodate multiple snap-shots hung on the wall. One of them had pictures of myself and my sister taken during a visit to see my family after we had moved to California. There I was with my 49ers jacket and my sister with Fisherman’s Wharf in the background. Another similar frame had a tiny picture of a float from a parade—celebrating the bicentennial of our nation judging by the number of American flags in the background and the reference to 1776 and 1976. The float, pulled by a red tractor, celebrated “Prayer, America’s Greatest Power.” On the float were a white horse and a white wigged man kneeling in prayer nearby. The evident message being that the founders used the power of prayer and we should do the same. Along the side of the float read the familiar phrase from our pledge of allegiance: “One Nation under God.” On the back comes: “God Bless America.”

The fading of the snap-shot lent a sense of age to the picture, but the sentiment is thoroughly up-to-date. Its phrases, repeated or sung so many times, seem likewise to acquire an unnatural age. Hard to remember that these are phrases whose currency falls within the lifetime of many still living. The “under God” was added to the pledge in 1954, in the midst of the Cold War against officially atheist Soviet empire. The song “God Bless America” was an Irving Berlin composition from 1938. The central image of the patriot praying also requires some scrutiny. It is a form of spirituality that I could find no traces of in the Library of America’s recent compilation of testimonies and letters from the Revolutionary War. It is an evangelicalism that seems natural now but would have been mystifying to the actual patriots of our nation. That red tractor is pulling a mirage, a world that never existed except in the imagination. For a mirage it has an impressive durability, forming the template for so many contemporary political engagements.

The picture brought to mind the early lines of Dylan (we were going to his concert that night, remember): “The city fathers they’re trying to endorse/ The reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse.” That float in the parade was also a city-father endorsed attempt to reincarnate a horse.. a symbolic white horse from the patriot past.

To continue with Dylan:

I think I’ll call it America”
I said as we hit land
I took a deep breath
I fell down, I could not stand
Captain Arab he started
Writing up some deeds
He said, “Let’s set up a fort
And start buying the place with beads

It is from his “115th Dream”, a spoof combining and tweaking versions of the past. It could be Columbus or it could be the Puritans landing in the new world—both came with a religious ideal. “I took a deep breath/ I fell down I could not stand”—I imagine him looking something like the patriot beside the horse on the float. He is weighted down on the ground, perhaps praying, as this refashioned mercantile Ahab goes about buying the land with worthless trinkets. The dream patriot and the modern evangelical are likewise helplessly kneeling as the bounty of the land is transformed into cheap roadside stops, chain restaurants and Wal-Marts. It so happens that many of those corporations are busy trafficking in images of an old time country America, hazy pictures of the past that somehow keep many frozen on the ground.

It was easy to tell the political sympathies of the family we stayed with, but difficult to tell if they counted the loss. Upon my wife’s mention of her enjoyment of knitting, the elder woman took my wife under her wing, explaining how feminists have ruined everything for women and their creative crafts. In her basement there was a room devoted entirely to crafts, lined with creations and collections. Oddly though, when my wife asked where she could get yarn for her knitting, she was told to try Wal-Mart or Michaels—two chains whose stock undoubtedly mirrored exactly the stock we knew from Atlanta. That commercial world must eventually, inexorably, undermine the very notions of creativity and uniqueness that are the hallmark of that woman’s worldview. Meanwhile my wife was left puzzled how enjoyment of creative work like knitting became antithetical to feminism as popularly understood.

No two Dylan concerts are alike, and fans go to the concert crossing their fingers for oddball songs that show up only occasionally. On the night of the election he played both “Masters of War” and “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Not an unheard of combination, but suspiciously forthright on such an eventful night. That following weekend when we heard him “It’s Alright Ma” came up yet again. It was in high rotation after the election. “Even the president of the United States/ Sometimes must have to stand naked”—the words that always bring a cheer. He said nothing definite.. he never does. His spoken words were limited to the introductions at the end—a note that his drummer had been to the Steelers game before the concert. Someone stepped on his toe.. they had to call a tow truck.. And he quickly began his closing “All Along the Watchtower.”

But let us not talk falsely. A renewed sense—a passion for—liberalism is essential. Maybe Dylan had been onto something all along and American music is not a crazy place to start looking for an identity. With that in mind we gave a particularly close listen to our CD of a 1967 tribute concert for Woody Guthrie, featuring of course Dylan, but also many other singers and bands. Guthrie, with his dust-bowl sensibility, stands out as a spokesperson for liberalism.

I distilled five points from Guthrie on the topic of a durable liberalism:

1) It is based upon the land. Listen again to “This Land is Your Land”—a song whose title is almost as hallowed as those phrases on the bicentennial float. The opening stanza encompasses the whole United States:

This Land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island,
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream water,
This land was made for you and me.

Nothing like those ribbons of highway to reinvigorate the sense of what it means to be an American. It is not a shared love of Disney animated features, nor a shared shopping experience at Wal-Mart, but a common home—this land that reaches to the horizon as the highway unfolds.

2) It is based upon moral values, but with a keen sense of the way economic well-being allows people to live the kind of moral life they want. The depression-era wisdom shines out in the song “Ramblin’ Round”, sung on this CD by Odetta:

I wish that I could marry,
So I could settle down,
But I caint save a penny
As I go a ramblin' 'round boys,
As I go a ramblin' 'round.

Liberalism should be an enabler of moral values, and not a prescriber of ideal moral values.

3) It takes pride in American accomplishment. With so much disaffection among liberals it is strange to listen to a singer whose liberal credentials hardly need defending, but who cries his love for America from the mountaintops—although never to the point of adopting a reincarnated horse of Paul Revere as his image of the past.

There was a man across the ocean, I guess you know him well
His name was Adolph Hitler, God damn his soul to hell
We kicked him in the panzers and put him on the run
And that's about the biggest thing that Man has ever done.

4) It finds its hero in Franklin Roosevelt. With our president threatening to overhaul social security, one of the hallmarks of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the thirties suddenly seems to be the point of conflict, the liberal decade that must be overturned. That is not bad ground on which to take a stand. Someday.. maybe someday.. we will have a singer as challenging and liberal as Guthrie who could unabashedly align himself with the president of this country. To “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt” Guthrie sang:

He helped to build my union hall, he learned me how to talk;
I could see he was a cripple but he learned my soul to walk;
This world was lucky to see him born.

5) It does not forget Jesus Christ or any other cultural touchstone. No one holds copyright on the stories and incidents of the Bible, and liberals can find there a surprising world, hardly tapped. Guthrie presented a liberal Jesus Christ:

He went to the preacher, He went to the sheriff
He told them all the same
"Sell all of your jewelry and give it to the poor,"
And they laid Jesus Christ in His grave.

And what to do when all the preachers and moralists come knocking and telling us that Jesus cannot be presented like this, supporting these values? Maybe quote the final lines:

If Jesus was to preach what He preached in Galilee,
They would lay poor Jesus in His grave.

And that reminds me. Just yesterday I saw a great bumper sticker on a car: “Who Would Jesus Bomb?”