a tour of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School painter Frederic Church’s Persian-style redoubt Olana, I had noticed—how could I not?—that one member of our group was clad in leather and chains. He was strolling the grounds with his wife and his parents. His mom proudly wore a hoodie bearing his name and image: it was Tommy Stinson, another Replacement. When an old lady asked Mrs. Stinson about the silhouette on her sweatshirt, she beamed. “That’s my son. He’s a musician.” Aren’t proud moms great?)
Glen’s voice was rough, and despite a stage ringed with monitors he fumbled lyrics. But his fingers remembered the chords, and the filial cast of his band, which included two sons and a daughter (all from his fourth wife), seemed a real comfort to a man who in his most lucid moments must see premonitions of blackness and blankness. When his daughter good-naturedly interrupted Campbell as he started to play a song he’d finished playing a minute earlier, he grinned and said, “That’s why I brought my kids up good.”
After barely more than an hour, Campbell closed the concert with “A Better Place,” a simple and lovely song he wrote for his final album. Backed by his children, he sang:
Some days I’m so confused, Lord
My past gets in my way
I need the ones I love, Lord
More and more each day
Glen Campbell ended his last song with a promise that “A better place awaits/You’ll see.” Then his daughter took him by the hand and led him from the stage, into the darkness.
Summer Reading List
Counterpunch, 2003
Burr and Lincoln by Gore Vidal—America, by a true patriot and our greatest living man of letters.
The Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey—An anarchist Western. In the film version (Lonely are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas’s jaw), screenwriter Dalton Trumbo shamefully changed the hero’s crime from rescuing a draft-resister to harboring a family of adorable illegal immigrants. Abbey: Brave. Trumbo: Coward!
The Octopus by Frank Norris, Giants in the Earth by Ole Rølvaag, and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck—The great American novel: take your pick.
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis—A regionalist dystopia by a Minnesota Firster. George Babbitt is a fool not because he is provincial but because he has bought into the lie of mass culture. If you drink at Starbucks and watch Sex and the City, you’re Babbitt.
The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington—You’ve seen Welles’s butchered movie; now read the superior novel.
Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry—The finest book ever written about a barber. Berry is the exemplary American agrarian.
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury—Just lovely. My daughter and I read the opening pages (about the first day of summer) every summer solstice. Yeah, I know, dandelions yellow the yard in May, not June, but maybe things were different in Ray’s Waukegan.
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe and On the Road by Jack Kerouac—I loved these books when I was twenty-three, and I apologize for nothing!
The Adventures of Wesley Jackson by William Saroyan—An Armenian-American pacifist confronts The Good War and loses his career. Saroyan was a soldier when he wrote this charming story of a nineteen-year-old draftee who discovers that “our own army was the enemy.” Office of War Information commissar Herbert Agar—a turncoat bastard who had been a Kentucky distributist before going proto-Ashcroft—threatened him with a court martial and tried to kill the book. Saroyan nailed the chickenhawks but good: “when everybody else got shipped overseas they were still writing scenarios for films encouraging everybody else to face death like a scenario writer.”
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson—Inspired an aptly bleak album by one of my all-time favorite bands, Green on Red.
Raintree County by Ross Lockridge, Jr.—Indiana golden boy writes 1,000-page Whitmanesque novel, then kills self. No one has read this book for fifty years, but I love it.
Crazy Legs McBain by Joe Archibald—Hey, it’s my list. Every fall I read this 1961 boys book about an unlikely college football star, a gawky kid who runs punts back ninety yards, makes one-handed catches, and piledrives the pretty boy-rich kid quarterback’s face into the turf. Go Bobcats!
American Institutions and Holidays
“When a nation’s Holy-days are treated with indifference and neglect, it should be considered a sign of national degeneracy and decay.”
—Walt Whitman
The West Point Story
The American Enterprise, 1999
“This is a very sentimental place,” says Colonel Charles F. Brower IV (Class of 1969), professor and head of the Behavioral Sciences and Leadership Department at West Point. “It’s hard to figure that out, but things have profound meaning when they’re built upon so much experience and tradition.”
Over six months I asked dozens of West Pointers, “What is your favorite spot?” on these 16,000 acres, and no one who answered “the cemetery” did so without a halt, a swallow, a dab at moistening eyes. No matter if our chat had been starchy or informal, acronym-clotted or fluid: mere mention of the West Point Cemetery carried an emotional charge like a bolt off nearby (and ominously named) Storm King Mountain.
The dead (7,000) outnumber the cadets (4,000) at West Point. Pennies and pebbles rest on the grave markers: tokens of remembrance, many left by strangers, for the families of the departed are often far away. As if sent by central casting, deer lope past the white headstones at dusk. Some of the inhumed died in war (George Armstrong Custer, tourist favorite), others in peace (Army coach Red Blaik, whose football-shaped stone bears the legend, “On Brave Old Army Team”), one on the launching pad (Ed White, who was incinerated aboard Apollo 1). But in the end, their loyalties lie with West Point, as they lie under West Point.
What is it about the U.S. Military Academy that inspires fealty unto the grave? Its business, after all, is death. It can be “a place of bleak emotions, a great orphanage, chill in its appearance, rigid in its demands. There was occasional kindness but little love,” as writer James Salter (1945) recalls. Yet he adds, “In its place was comradeship and a standard that seemed as high as anyone could know. It included self-reliance and death if need be. West Point did not make character, it extolled it. It taught one to believe in difficulty, the hard way, and to sleep, as it were, on bare ground.”
I came to West Point not with starry eyes but with a suspicious mind, as the song goes. I expected a grey, unrelievedly martial world. That is not what I found. (Indeed, at my first stop, the West Point Club restaurant, I was serenaded in the men’s room by the piped-in sounds not of Wagner or Sousa but of Michael Bolton and James Taylor—which made me, at least, want to kill kill kill.)
There is, inevitably, a Potemkin-village quality to any tour of what is, after all, a military installation and government operation. The Public Affairs Office was exceptionally cooperative over the many months of this story’s gestation, but even our heroically indefatigable guide, Deb DeGraw, could not comply with a request to meet with “disgruntled cadets.” We saw, for the most part, the best West Point has to offer—and one need not be a worshiper at the Church of the Pentagon to appreciate the Academy’s virtues, notably an honor code that demands truthfulness in
