No flag waiver

In her apparent bid to become the standard-bearer of the Trump legacy, former SC governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley has chosen a likely banner: the Confederate flag. In a widely-reported radio interview with Glenn Beck, she stood up for the flag as a symbol of "service, sacrifice, and heritage" that race murderer Dylann Roof had "hijacked." In the wake of backlash provoked by the interview, Haley wrote an op-ed column in the Washington Post to clarify her remarks, saying that they are consistent with what she has always said.

She is wrong. What she did not do in the Beck interview that she did do after the Charleston massacre was also to say that "for many others … the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past." This omission is a clear sign that she is staking her political future on the rose-colored-glasses view of the Confederate flag and leaving out the rest.

This view represents as much a hijacking as any. It willfully refuses to engage the subject of slavery. Rather, it trades in an incomplete rendering of history for the sake of a sentimental, modernist, anachronistic re-ordering of values: we prize the timeless battlefield valor of our Confederate ancestors, but must never discuss their beliefs regarding the enslavement of Africans.

The so-called "Confederate flag" is not alone in this. The star-spangled banner is not without its own problems that arise when reverence promotes ignorance. It should be the case in a country with "freedom of speech" encoded in its Constitution that an unvarnished, warts-and-all history is to be preferred to a perfectionist mythology that faints before cross-examination quicker than a Southern belle with the vapors. This is particularly true at a time when the future of the country depends on real -- not symbolic or superficial, but actual -- racial reconciliation.

It would be a step in the right direction if Southern "heritagists" stopped tiptoeing around the subject of race-based, African slavery and admitted that -- regardless of who was to blame for its beginnings and its spread, and regardless of the way in which its social and psychological impact continued to be felt after its abolition -- African slavery was the institution around which the Confederate States of America was formed.

By the national power invested in it, the assembly embodying the CSA endowed certain designs to be flown on flags in order to personify -- the word is not too strong -- the principles that bound the nation together and gave it meaning. The only way to understand the meaning of the Confederate flag is to understand the meaning of the Confederate States of America. 

The CSA was not about grits and biscuits or whatever passes for "Southern heritage" these days. It was about the enslavement of African-Americans. No slavery, no CSA. States' rights? The most ardent advocates of states' rights before the 1860 election were the Northern states complaining about the federal Fugitive Slave Law. Where were the Southern states' rightists then? Advocating for vigorous federal enforcement, that's where.

The core meaning of the CSA -- the thing that brought it to life -- was one thing and one thing only: the enslavement of people with African ancestry. Following the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the perceived need for governmental protection of the institution is what drove the first wave of secession in the deep South. Yes, Lincoln's post-secession call for volunteers to enforce union pushed the upper South (and people like Robert E. Lee) over the edge. However, by that time the CSA was already there. Those johnny-reb-come-latelies signed on to defend a purpose that already existed: a nation founded on slavery.

It is bracing to read the full-throated defenses of slavery that resounded throughout the South in those days, and that tend to get covered up by today's Confederate apologists. For example: I recently read The Pride of the Confederate Artillery: The Washington Artillery in the Army of Tennessee by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr., which I enjoyed for strictly private, genealogical reasons: one of the heroes of this battlefield history is my great-great grandfather's brother, Joseph A. Chalaron, who fought in every battle and campaign of the Confederate Army of Tennessee and who, though only a lieutenant, was its battlefield commander from Jonesboro until the end of the war. 

It is in every way an admirable book of military history, yet when it comes to assigning a reason why these men went to war, it stumbles. Leading up to the unit's departure from its home city of New Orleans, "war fever" and "southern patriotism" are the only descriptors to be found, until finally, the day before they are entrained northward (destination: Shiloh), the unit gathers in the First Presbyterian Church to hear Dr. Benjamin Palmer, "a strong antislavery spokesman but a passionate secessionist," exhort them to return their obligation to Tennessee, which had rescued New Orleans during the "last war," and assure them that their cause was just, as it was "purely defensive."

Cheairs's footnotes don't clarify where he came up with the idea that Benjamin Palmer was a "strong antislavery spokesman." One of the South's most prominent preachers during the Civil War, Palmer -- a proud native of South Carolina who never seems to have tired of telling people that -- was apparently a lifelong believer in slavery, as the most recent biographical treatment of Palmer makes abundantly clear.

Cheairs is correct, however, as to Palmer's passion as a secessionist. Such was his passion that Palmer -- on the Thanksgiving after the election of Lincoln, and departing from his habitual reluctance to mix politics with his pastoral duties -- delivered a sermon that, widely printed and circulated throughout the South, served to promote the cause of secession by justifying it as a necessary step.

What was that justification? Every nation -- every people -- has a character, Palmer says in the sermon, and along with that character has received a trust providentially committed to it. The South is such a people, and its "providential trust" is "to conserve and perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing." [Emphasis his, not mine; maybe this was a cue to thump the pulpit.] in the face of the advent to power of a Northern party whose abolitionist spirit is "undeniably atheistic" and whose platform of restricting slavery to the Southern states "is as big as the belly of the Trojan horse which laid the city of Priam in ruins," it is only "self-preservation" for the Southern people to form "a union of the South in defence of her chartered rights." Palmer delivers a ringing challenge to his listeners: "What say you to this, to whom this great providential trust of conserving slavery is assigned? … [T]his is the historic moment when the fate of this institution hangs suspended in the balance. Decide either way, it is the moment of our destiny. … If the South bows before this throne, she accepts the decree of restriction and ultimate extinction."

Slavery, Palmer says, is who the South is: not only is the labor of a "tropical race" required to till the soil under a "tropical sun," but "the system is interwoven with our entire social fabric … it has fashioned our modes of life, and determined all our habits of thought and feeling, and moulded the very type of our civilization." As we today would say, the South was a slave culture. As for the slaves themselves, Palmer says, "we know that every attribute of their character fits them for dependence and servitude. By nature the most affectionate and loyal of all races beneath the sun, they are also the most helpless; and no calamity can befall them greater than the loss of that protection they enjoy under this patriarchal system." Freedom is something "they know not how to enjoy." All of this "binds upon us the providential duty of preserving the relation that we may save him from a doom worse than death."

In this sermon Palmer has laid out nothing less than the "one nation under God" of the Confederacy. What prevents us from seeing it? Our Southern ancestors were bullish on slavery not only as a positive good but as a sacred cause; they believed it to the very core of their being; and they fought under flags that exhorted them no less strongly than Palmer's rhetoric to defend a homeland providentially entrusted with the institution of slavery.

Widely reprinted in newspapers from Virginia to Texas and in pamphlet from throughout the country, the sermon's influence was such that, in the words of one contemporary, "it was found, after the delivery of his sermon, that the secession mania spread like fire in a prairie." After the war, curious Northerners visited New Orleans to see and hear "the big villain of the piece" hold forth in the very church where the "Thanksgiving Sermon" had been delivered.

It is puzzling to me that Hughes has chosen not to include any of this in his book about my ancestor's unit. Granted, his information about Palmer amounts to little more than a thumbnail sketch, but not only is it off the mark, it indulges in the familiar trope of self-defense that deflects from the underlying reality by masking it. What can one say? To cast my ancestor's cause in any light other than the actual one strikes me as disingenuous.

My ancestor shines forth in this book as a remarkably brave, valiant man who after the war devoted his life to securing the memory of his comrades, not only his fellows in the 5th co. of the Washington Artillery, but also In the Confederate Army as a whole. I am certain that he, residing as he does in the land of truth, would prefer that we understand him and his cause -- including its flag -- with unflinching and unapologetic honesty. I feel sure that he, as the honorable and dutiful person he manifestly was, would advise you not to fly the Confederate flag unless you make its cause your cause -- and that means the belief in an African race suited only for slavery.

It's possible, of course, that he would have advised against its use altogether, thus sharing Robert E. Lee's stance on the subject of remembrance. Lee's post-bellum attitude clearly disfavored monuments that would stoke regional antipathies. While supportive of efforts to provide for the interment of Confederate dead, he refused invitations to participate personally in any activities related to the late war, whether it be identification of war dead or education of war orphans. In a response to one such invitation (a "Gettysburg Identification Meeting") he wrote that the "wisest" course was "to follow the example of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered."

His administration of what is now Washington & Lee University was a study in the avoidance of Confederate symbology. This particular "heritage" was ignored after his death, however, when replicas of Confederate battle flags were allowed to hang in the university's "Lee Chapel." A 2014 decision by then-university-president Kenneth Ruscio to remove the flags from the chapel proved (predictably?) controversial. Among those who supported Ruscio's decision was Robert E. Lee !V, who wrote to him that Lee himself would never have approved of their use in the first place: "His actions during his five years as president of Washington College made it clear that he had put that chapter of his life behind him. It is also clear that he tried to help others do the same." Lee IV further stated that Ruscio's "returning of the actual battle flags to the Lee Chapel Museum" was "the ideal way to care for and study these important artifacts."

Anyone who defies Lee's wishes and flies a replica of one of those flags doesn't get to decide what it means. That was taken care of in 1861. All his personal ambivalence on the subject of slavery and his late coming to the Confederate side underscore the desperate wrestling with conscience that lay behind his bitter but final decision to throw in his lot with the Confederate States of America, a nation explicitly and unequivocally conceived in African slavery.

My ancestor's artillery unit having been a musical one, it can be little doubted that among the songs they sang was God Save the South, the closest thing to a real national anthem for the CSA, although little known today. Its lyrics include a proud affiliation with the rebel status of George Washington, especially proud for a unit that bore his name. They also would have sung the verse that runs, "War to the hilt, theirs be the guilt/Who fetter the free man to ransom the slave."

That free white men keeping the African slave fettered was the God-ordained, providential mission of the CSA is no less true for being incomprehensible to so many of the descendants of its warriors.

Mythified: Review of "Searching for Black Confederates" by Kevin Levin

Sometimes before writing a book review I will check Goodreads for ones already written -- I don't want to repeat what somebody's already said. In the case of Kevin Levin's Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth, I found a good example of the kind of reality that Levin (and we) must contend with when it comes to discussing the Civil War in a factual manner.

It was a "one-star" review that ran,"I’d give it Zero [sic] stars. Kevin Levin is not worthy of publishing anything. His bias against the South and Black Confederates is we’ll [sic] known. He is a huge hypocrite. Black union soldiers doing the same jobs as Black Confederates are considered soldiers. Not so the Black Confederates, he dismisses them with the same old rhetoric. Don’t waste your money supporting this book of fiction!"

Were Yankees every bit as racist as Confederates? Yes! Did they abuse the good faith and loyalty of the blacks helping them by limiting them for the most part to servile roles? Yes! However, Levin's book addresses a critical difference that comes through even in the wording of this scathing review: "Black union soldiers doing the same jobs as Black Confederates are considered soldiers." Notice that the reviewer doesn't call the "Black Confederates" soldiers. Why is that? At the heart of Levin's narrative (and research) is a clear definition: a soldier serves the state in an official capacity; records attest to his service in an organized unit that is supplied, officered, drilled, and paid as part of the armed forces.

What is abundantly clear from Levin's book is that the Union had such organized, official units filled with African-Americans. The Confederacy did not -- with a clarifying exception. Read on!

Moreover, despite the neo-Confederate reviewer's pained insinuation that black union soldiers only did the same jobs as blacks working for the Confederates, Levin demonstrates another thing beyond doubt: the black Union solders also fought in battle as official members of organized units. My emphasis, because -- c'mon guys, is it really that hard? This is a conception of soldiery so fundamental that one wonders why the neo-Confederates of the Sons of Confederate Veterans can't acknowledge it. Yes, blacks attached to Confederate units as manservants, teamsters, cooks, or musicians sometimes picked up rifles and shot Yankees; they manhandled cannon; some wore gray; but they never advanced into battle as full-fledged, registered, acknowledged, official members of any unit operating on behalf of the state. Whereas that did happen in the Union army. There is a clear distinction to be made, and that is the point of Levin's book.

Ironically, another review grades down Levin's book for bothering to take on the "risible" notion of black Confederate soldiers, saying Levin scores easy, "gotcha" points when what's needed is a serious study of what blacks actually did in the Confederate army, because it's obvious as hell they weren't soldiers. This reviewer probably doesn't live in the South, where mythical "heritage" trumps all and where wounded pride clouds judgment to the extent that risible notions are repeated as gospel truths. It is to Levin's credit that much of his book is taken up with the sources of that risible notion, especially his discussion of the stark differences between the Lost Cause myth of the noble slave following his master through the war and the current, neo-Confederate notion of the loyal slave willingly joining his white brothers in a defense of the homeland.

To me the most fascinating story in the book -- the one alluded to above about black Confederate regiments, and the one that should put paid to the notion of black Confederate soldiery -- is the account of the effort towards the end of the war actually to raise black Confederate formations. Patrick Cleburne, an Irish-born, non-slaveholding Confederate general, proposed the idea in early 1864, but his superior Joe Johnston shut down any further discussion of the idea. Finally, in January, 1865, with the Confederacy facing the void, Robert E. Lee came out in favor of the idea of enlisting black soldiers -- to be granted freedom in exchange for service -- "without delay." The proposal was tweaked to allow for enlistment of free blacks only. Finally, in March, 1865 -- one month before Appomattox -- Richmond newspapers reported recruitment for a brigade. Some seventy men appear to have enlisted. They were in the process of learning the trained soldier's drill when Richmond fell and the effort -- along with the Confederacy -- subsequently collapsed.

Why should this not be the final word on the subject of black Confederate soldiers? What is it about the neo-Confederate psyche that cannot accept that a regime whose very cornerstone was African-American slavery refused until the bitter end even to contemplate African-American soldiery? That very refusal is eminently consistent with historical Confederate ideology. It flies in the face of reason not to accept it as reality.

If it makes neo-Confederates fell any better about things, Levin commits a howler of an error about the battle of Chickamauga. There, plain as day on page 37, he writes, "Union major general William Rosecrans and the Army of the Cumberland proved victorious over General Braxton Bragg's Army of the Tennessee." Say what? The Confederates routed the Union army at Chickamauga and then besieged it inside Chattanooga. Neo-Confederates get to keep their victories. Those realities can't be gainsaid. Why bother with gaudy and untrue embellishments?

Pyramid of hobbits: "The Secret of Our Success" by Joseph Henrich

"Slow down," I tell my imagination while reading this book when my mind takes off on a wild tear about the near-future genetic implications of current mind-bending cultural forces, like maybe political rule by tech-savvy children educated more by their online peers than by society. "Evolution," I tell myself, "takes a long time."

Only maybe not as long as we've thought. One of the arguments in this book is that the reinforcement of differential cultural adaptations through interactive learning in human societies can be so strong that one potential result is adaptive change at the physical level that comes faster than would be the case if the adaptation were left to the force its way up through chance mutations at the individual level.

"Survival of the fittest" for humans, then, in Henrich's formulation, becomes more a matter of social than individual adaptation, and -- significantly -- cultural responses to environmental challenges have replaced physical speciation as the basic evolutionary delineator among people. For example, ants "capture an equivalent biomass" as humans, but in doing so have split off into 14,000 species, whereas humans have only one hugely diversified and in some cases mutually unrecognizable species.

This is bad news for survivalists. Stock up on food and ammo and pimp your bunker all you want: you won't have a chance against a determined tribe of post-apocalyptic, acorn-eating sling shooters who teach their children well (whether or not they sing Neil Young).

The book will undoubtedly stimulate a fair amount of academic nit-picking -- as befits primates -- and parsing the arguments between "we were social because we evolved social skills" and "we evolved social skills because we were social" will necessarily provoke a clash of specialists. Suffice it to say for the sake of my own understanding that Henrich -- in the process of trying to determine at what point humans "crossed the Rubicon" and became a "new kind of animal" that passed down "toolkits" from generation to generation -- posits a "culture-gene co-evolutionary duet" between the discovery of tools and the ability to "reverse engineer" them through "causal models" that were then handed down. He concludes that, yes, humans are smart, but they aren't as smart alone in the wild as other species; rather, their smartness lies in the enduring, value-added smartness of their associativeness. Humans are smart "not because we stand on the shoulders of giants or are giants ourselves. We stand on the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits."

Knowing that past scientists have produced intellectual models of human differences that have proven to be enormously deleterious, I approached the book with caution, wondering how Henrich would come out on the subject of race. Thankfully he confronts the issue explicitly early on in the book with a subsection ("Genes and Races," pp. 94 - 96) in which he says that not only do the traditional racial distinctions tell us nothing about genetic differences, they tell us less than nothing, i.e. they "distort" the genetic facts: "Our understanding of human genetic variation,"he writes, "derived from studying actual genes, completely dismantles any remaining shreds of the old racial notions." As for race prejudice, Henrich counsels awareness by making it itself a subject for study: why do we have a tendency to think stereotypically? The section concludes with a resounding, familiar-sounding declaration: "These insights will continue to fuel the spread of a new social construct: the view that all people, and perhaps some other species as well, are endowed with certain inalienable rights -- we call these human rights [emphasis Henrich's]. No new facts about genes, biology, or culture can alienate a person from these rights."

Most of the fun of this book stems from its broad presentation of human responses to environmental challenges. Technology (the bow and arrow for example ) can be won and lost and won again, depending on the ability of groups to carry it forward: sudden, large losses of population due to environmental disasters or disease have had the capacity to remove skills previously acquired from the toolkit transmitted to survivors. (I  think here about the baroque recorder, the ability to play which was lost for generations and had to be re-learned. Surely this was not just so that elementary music teachers could experience truly unbearable noise? There has to be a better reason.) What people have done over the millennia to make foodstuffs more nutritious or even just edible -- adding burnt sea shells to maize; the evolved capacity to digest milk after infancy, which is still a "natural" capacity in a fraction of humans and the lack of which seems in some cases to be linked to the development of cheese, with its much lower level of lactose -- beggars the imagination.

Which, thus, easily imagines a society in which learning has been accelerated to the point that nimble-minded children engineer changes, both technical and social, that enable them to become  political rulers through the weaponized use of baroque recorders ("Please! Stop! Anything! OK! OK! No more electoral college!"). Surely that's not all that implausible, given the starting point of a large pyramid of hobbits. 

Ain't no crossroads in a rhododendron hell: The dilemma of Appalachian Studies

Can I be an indigene? Pretty pretty please? These days that's all I want to be: an indigene, rooted and tuted. I want to identify, and distant genealogical connections to various old countries have attenuated too badly in the American melting pot treatment for any of those affiliations to feel binding. Sure, I love to play the bagpipes and can claim a Scottish connection (by way of Nova Scotia), but only cultural sentiment elevates it over, let's say, the strain of Dutchness in me that goes all the way back to Pieter Stuyvesant. Then there's the Creole French and the Irish grandfather also clamoring for representation. That's enough hyphenation to make anybody hyperventilate.

Ah, to be an indigene! To have identification conferred as a birthright according to where you were born, and not according to your ancestry. It would make things so much easier: one is only born in one place. The result would be not so much birthright citizenship as birthright tribal status. Well, it turns out that I am an indigene. By virtue of the place of my birth I'm apparently a full-fledged member of the tribe of Appalachians.

At least that's what it says in the first chapter of Studying Appalachian Studies (University of Illinois Press, 2015), supplied by the book's editors Berry, Obermiller, and Scott: "Many key figures in the academic institutionalization of Appalachian studies were natives of the region. In this sense, Appalachian studies was 'indigenized' rather early in its development."

Praise Mt. Katahdin! I have for a long time hoped to qualify as an Appalachian, but it always felt presumptuous, because even though I play the lap dulcimer, have spent a lot of time following blazes on the Appalachian Trail, and played as a kid on top of the Cumberland escarpment a stone's throw away from Emma Bell Miles's farm, I also grew up in suburbia playing classical music instead of bluegrass, was destined to get a college education because the other damn Dutch side of my family had been doing that for at least four generations already, and as for religion, my raising wasn't so much "none" as "are you kidding?" Somehow those always seemed to be disqualifying factors, but, hey, not to worry: Berry Obermiller Scott say "the majority of 'native' Appalachianists are white and educated, and many come from middle- and upper-class backgrounds."

It seems too easy, somehow, like I've crashed a wedding and made off with the bride. Also, to be honest, it takes my breath away that Berry Obermiller Scott bestow the title of "indigenous Appalachian" to everyone born into the region because there's a certain, er, removal of the traditional distinguishing feature of the word that connotes native Americans, a group that the editors themselves and others in their fine collection say has been slighted by Appalachian studies. I myself wouldn't be prone to taking such a drastic step as they.

But on the other hand I'm not one to turn down a free pass to membership in a nouveau tribe. Not without a scrap, anyway. After all, I'm a mis-educated hillbilly born and phrased and re-phrased by "on the other hand" and all manner of shenanigasuistry. You have to prove the spirit. Skepticism is just a safer form of snake-handling.

And Eden is known for nothing if not snakes. This is obvious when, immediately after ushering the educated middle- and upper-class academic wannabes into Appalachia, Berry Obermiller Scott cough into their collective sleeve: "When Appalachianists do not conform to stereotypical constructions of Appalachians, they may be regarded as 'inauthentic' or 'outsiders' both by Appalachian natives and by those from outside the region."

So, trouble in the garden, I guess. Hell, the garden was made for trouble. Damn. Just when I thought I might get to wear that "indigene" merit badge, it gets snatched away from me all because of a little damn mis-education and a daddy with a desk job at TVA.

So, what's it going to be? Am I an indigene or not? Who's an  "authentic" Appalachian? And who gets to say?

Insofar as Studying Appalachian Studies can help answer those questions, it does so by presenting a history and critique of an academic discipline that purports to be one of many "area studies" like New West (US) and Pacific Islands studies.  (To be completely accurate, their definition of "area studies" also includes the non-geography-based areas Women's and African-American studies.) The practitioners are the "-ists" who devote their lives to the study of the culture, economy, history, etc., of the region. If anyone should be able to answer my questions, shouldn't it be the people who fill the pages of scholarly journals with regional studies and who wrote the encyclopedia of the region?

It might seem so, and yet a recurring refrain of this book is that the field in general -- much to the dismay of the contributors -- is stuck in a state of mind that effectively denies "authentic" status to entire groups of people who "do not conform to stereotypical constructions of Appalachians," primarily women, African-Americans, LGBT folk, and the people formerly known as, um, indigenes.

Importantly, the term used by several of the book's scholars is not  "state of mind," but "paradigm," so as to link the exercise to the ruling abstraction in understanding the formatting of knowledge, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, from which the concept comes, and from which also comes the corollary that said revolutions in structured thought occur when paradigms "shift." The Appalachianists in this volume concur that it is time for their field to experience such a shift.

If I were a revolutionary, I'd go with something stronger for my placard than "Paradigm Shift NOW!" The irony of the situation for Appalachian Studies is that its beginnings came in a much headier time than now, when actual revolution was more than just a whisper in the air conditioning of a conference room. I would give one of my Mize dulcimers for the chance to have been at the Big Bang of An Appalachian Studies That Almost Wasn't: the conference in 1970 at Clinch Valley College in Wise, VA, that pitted political activists against scholars and blew things up so bad -- and at the very outset -- that the Appalachian universe couldn't find gravitas until 1976, by which time mortgages seem to have cooled the activists into academicians. Thus does revolution become paradigm shift.

The paradigm that eventuated was this, according to Berry Obermiller Scott: Appalachian Studies "emerged … from an interdisciplinary/activist engagement with political and economic development strategies that sought to explain and intervene in regional economic development. At its birth in the 1970s, Appalachian studies was influenced by the world systems theory of global capitalist developments. Rather than emerging as a response to a single historical paradigm, Appalachian studies was the 'academic wing' of a broader regional reaction to hegemonic government- and corporate-sponsored economic development initiatives."

The "paradigm" in there is less than clear -- "reaction" is more the operative word -- so it isn't until the second chapter, "Representing Appalachia: The Impossible Necessity of Appalachian Studies," that Women's studies scholar Barbara Ellen Smith directly addresses and clarifies the nature of Appalachian Studies paradigm(s). Defining the paradigm within any field as that which "set[s] the terms of its scholarship," Smith describes the above-mentioned "birth" of Appalachian Studies -- "with its broadside attacks on the tradition of condescending and victim-blaming cultural explanations for regional dispossession" -- as an example of paradigm shift. She characterizes the resulting "dominant paradigms" as being the elevation of the "generic and seemingly self-evident categories" of "Appalachians" and "mountaineers" to a superior status that "overrides other forms of social identity," with the result that Appalachia became "an 'imagined community' of insiders, united by sameness."

It is now time, Smith says, for another paradigm shift, one that recognizes other aspects of identity. According to her, despite the fact that feminist, ethnic, and gender scholarship has peppered the paradigm for quite some time now with little effect, the primary reason for a shift has not so much to do with "our academic enterprise" as with "tectonic transformations in the region and the world." At a time when former adversaries have come together as "Friends of Coal," when the traditional bifurcation of male workplace and female household has been shattered, and when racism -- muted in the traditional mountain picture -- is now advanced as a political tool, it is time to replace "the unidimensional paradigm of mountaineer insiders pitted against venal 'outsiders.'"

Smith proceeds to elaborate her case that the dominant paradigms of Appalachian Studies all serve to "homogenize" the region, when what is needed is a regional representation that presents a more diverse tableau of the "human subjects of Appalachian studies." In so doing, she directly addresses a variant of my question about authenticity in a section titled "Whose Appalachia? Who is Appalachia?" What claim do out-migrants have to the identity? How about recent in-migrants from other regions of the U.S. or the world? How many residential generations back does it take to identify as an insider? Who adjudicates? She even asks, "What meaning does that term [Appalachian] possibly convey?"

In effect, Smith says, Appalachianists must confront "the ultimate impossibility of identifying fixed criteria, whether cultural traits, ancestry, or place attachment, that can separate the true Appalachian from everyone else." To say otherwise "presupposes not only that culture is static and lifeless but also that Appalachia is singular; that is, there is only one Appalachian culture (and, significantly, it tends to be deputed as rural and white). … In sum, paradigms that utilize cultural criteria to define the genuine Appalachian imagine a monolithic region; they tend to reduce its social complexity to a rural, white, place-attached mountaineer."

Within Appalachian Studies, the theory of Appalachia as an "internal colony" exacerbated this reductio, according to her, by compounding the notion of good insider vs. bad outsider. As Smith puts it, "Not all insiders to Appalachia are social equals, much less friends of social justice, nor are all outsider exploiters and reactionaries." She quotes fellow Appalachianist Dwight Billings: "The metaphor of Appalachia as a colony replaced that of Appalachia as a backward culture, but the mythical unity of the region and the homogeneity of its population remained largely unquestioned."

After decades of continued dominance, and still riding high, the original paradigm has produced an "essentialist" ideology that, according to Berry Obermiller Scott, "can result in overgeneralization, misattribution of causality, and the demonization of the 'other.' In that light, Appalachian studies needs to be careful to avoid the tendency to produce an identity politics based on exclusionary 'insider'/'outsider' dichotomies." In a separate chapter -- "Studying Appalachia: Critical Reflections" -- Obermiller and Scott carry this critique forward, citing Herbert Reid that insider/outsiderism is a "slag pile" polluting the scholastic landscape with a leachate that is "the tendency of some Appalachian studies scholars, artists, and activists to represent Appalachian communities in an ahistorical, idealized fashion that neglects political oppression and economy exploitation within the region's localities."

Well might these fine scholars rail against this downside, but after numerous scholastic cohorts since the 1970s, those "educated" in the insider/outsider dichotomy are now the dominant voices in what passes as Appalachian popular culture. One of the examples of how this has led to a blinkered, provincial, anti-intellectual attitude is the insistence on a "correct" pronunciation of Appalachia/Appalachian by prominent Appalachianists wielding great cultural and educational influence. I've written about this at length elsewhere (e.g. here here here and here) and don't want to belabor the point. Suffice it to say that dislodging this form of political correctness will, for such as Berry Obermiller Scott, be an uphill fight. But after all, we're talking about mountains.

Or are we? To me one of the things worth thinking about in connection with Appalachian Studies is its cavalier attitude to geography. It calls itself an "area study" focusing on a region defined by Berry Obermiller Scott as "the Allegheny, Blue Ridge, and Smoky Mountains and the Cumberland Plateau, as well as the roughly twenty-five million people who live amid these mountains and valleys. In addition, Appalachian studies also embraces the millions of people who have migrated from the region but whose heritage has deep roots in the region."

Interestingly -- taking out for now the question of out-migration -- this definition of the region is the same as the Appalachian Regional Commission's (ARC), the Federal agency formed to combat poverty in the 1960s. Even more interestingly: according to Obermiller Scott, this definition of the region is another one of Reid's "slag piles." To Reid (via Obermiller Scott) the "uncritical adoption" of the Federal definition is "an indication that Appalachian studies has not escaped the hegemonic forces of the corporate state."

There are some ironies here. The Federal definition essentially papered over the older, mountain-centric one by including metropolitan areas; it had to do this in order to effect a policy of modernization that in part advanced a strategy of getting people out of the mountains into those more accessible (read urbanized) areas where development would be promoted. Where the primordial versions of Appalachian studies -- e.g. John C. Campbell's -- explicitly fixed its focus on mountain residents, the modernized, established version masked the distinction with the Federal definition and in doing so ushered the urbanites into Appalachia.

But somehow -- presumably to the chagrin of Berry Obermiller Scott -- the mountaineers not only persist, but they rule. Either their ghosts infest the discipline by haunting the insider/outsider dichotomy, or they peek through the work of naysayers like palimpsest: their book's third chapter, "Writing Appalachia," by Chris Green and Erica Abrams Locklear, is chock full of usages that treat "the mountains" as an exact synonym for Appalachia, e.g. its concluding distinction that, within the larger genre of Southern literature, Appalachian literature is "from and about the mountains."

This kind of dissonance is typical of the discipline because of its unwillingness to come to grips with a dilemma: once shorn of determinative characteristics, "Appalachian" starts to look pretty sheepish as an academic discipline. Those attributes that, once upon a time, were determinative in some way -- the mountaineer, the poverty, the coal -- are in the eyes of the paradigm shifters a kind of residue that needs to be cleaned away. If perhaps the paradigm has shifted and the shifters have won the field, it has been a pyrrhic victory: the work of debunking has emptied the "area" of any uniqueness whatsoever.

It has become a struggle over a brand: on the one hand the heritage actors -- the mountaineers, overalled but not overawed, speaking Elizabethan Ainglish with moonshine breath while clogging to banjo music at the mouth of the mine shaft before gittin' to feudin' with their first-cousin inlaws over the distribution of good ol' gal county teacher jobs -- and on the other the pointillist forces of globalized identity "solidarity" looking to bust up the stills of honky patriarchy in their own private Idaho.

But presumably everyone's saying "Appalachia" "right," so hey things could be worse.

Brands work like billboards. The brand is a created identity; it is designed to promote a product by evoking a positive, emotional response that at some future time will become a commercial transaction. In this case the future of the brand is at the mercy of the administrators of regional academic institutions whose bottom line is students. It is really no contest: administrators will overwhelmingly prefer the heritage actors, who will bring in students who have already conditioned by the insider/outsider dichotomy put out there in the popular culture by … the heritage actors. It's practically a feedback loop. The paradigm will not shift as desired by the authors of Studying Appalachian Studies as long as university administrators and their marketing departments have anything to do with it.

The field will be littered with "hands-on" courses whose instructors will do little, if any, of the activity regarded as central to the field of scholarship: writing or publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. The "interdisciplinary" aspect of Appalachian Studies so heavily touted by the authors of this book, while it may work to the benefit of the brand, also works to weaken the disciplines themselves, e.g. when it is manifested in the form of "Appalachian Music"  and "storytelling" courses that take place out on the Appalachian limb, entirely apart from the traditional music or literature programs. Why is this? Because the avenue of the raw material for those courses is presumably oral, which apparently means that its practitioners need not subject themselves to the confines of literacy. And this will be fine with administrators. Even better if it can be accomplished with part-time adjuncts requiring no benefits. Played right, Appalachian Studies can be a coal, er, gold mine for administrators.

That is not to say that there are not admirable scholars teaching some of these courses. It would be better, however, if they taught those courses within the framework of the traditional disciplines, where they would be freer to parse influences and look at the larger context rather than continue to push the commercialized paradigm in which Appalachian Studies is 30 banjoists gathered around a single microphone, because, you know, that's how they did it in the good ol' days.

Interestingly, a similar but openly-commercial effort to brand the Tri-Cities, TN, area where I live as the "Appalachian Highlands" received less than a glowing response from local citizens. It turns out that the tourism marketers lab-tested the proposed name among people who live in other parts of the country ("outsiders," as it were), and they responded to "Appalachian Highlands" as having positive connotations that would predispose them to visiting the area. After the idea was rolled out in Kingsport, however, the City Council wanted nothing to do with it; the Council's opinion was largely echoed in the letters to the editor of the local paper. Some people wanted no association with the negative stereotypes that in their minds went with "Appalachian," but a substantial number objected to the geographical illiteracy of the concept: whatever Kingsport might be, it ain't "highlands."

Also interestingly, in the middle of this a Facebook group launched called "The Holston Region." The timing was suspicious: it almost seemed as if the (non-academic) local historians primarily involved in the Facebook group were aiming a not-so-subtle jab at the marketers. In effect the group was saying, "If you look to history, here is the name of our region." And it is true: the general designations used in the past to refer to what was popularly known as the "overmountain" region invoked the names not of mountains but of rivers, because it was in the river valleys that settlement generally occurred. Even as of not too long ago, but pre-Federal-Appalachia, the widely-used descriptors for the upper South were river-based ones: Tennessee Valley, Shenandoah Valley, New River Valley, etc.

Along these lines, another aspect of the Appalachian reality that bears considering is that the towns -- as centers of learning, law, and culture -- were always held to be apart from the mountains. Thus you can read in an account of the Depression-Era establishment of the state theatre of Virginia -- the Barter Theatre -- in (relatively) small Abingdon that many of the early attendees brought the farm produce accepted for admission (actors gotta eat) in from Appalachia. Meanwhile, down the road in Bristol (a non-highland Tri-City), pre-big-bang-of-country-music, there wasn't an opry; there was an "opera house."

Then the mountains became cool. They got above their raisin'. They followed the money. They pushed the watersheds and the towns out of the geocultural terminological picture and set up their wannabe empire in the halls of academe. Was it pretension or chutzpah that led East Tennessee State University in Johnson City (also a non-highland Tri-City) to name its university archives "The Archives of Appalachia"? Wouldn't Appalachian State over in NC -- a school bearing the "Appalachian" name  since 1903 and genuinely located in the highlands -- seem to have a better claim to the name? Perhaps ASU can rest comfortably in the self-assurance of its university motto, "Esse quam videri": "To be, rather than to seem."

Maybe this wannabe indigene could adopt it. Probably not. I'm still unconvinced that I deserve whatever distinction the term bestows. Similarly with the title "Appalachianist." While I am convinced that Berry Obermiller Scott, Smith, Green, Locklear and all the rest who contributed to this valuable book are bonafide scholars whose labors deserve commendation and publicity, I find myself reluctant to allow them -- or myself -- to use this particular word as a label. The blithe manner in which they throw it around ignores the levels of connotative complexity that the word possesses. This careless attitude mirrors the arbitrary stance of the marketer rather than the respectful stance of the scholar. While this apparent lack of concern about the label might be explained as the residue of emotional identity issues arising from the creation of the field, to cling to a name whose working definition is derived from bureaucratic realpolitik rather than examined reality seems an odd strategy for scholars to take.

It is telling, for example, that (as reported by Green and Locklear) Kentucky poet Wendell Berry refused inclusion of his writing in Voices of the HIlls -- "perhaps the most influential collection of Appalachian literature" -- because he "did not consider himself Appalachian." Why was he even considered? Of course he's not Appalachian! This kind of seemingly uninformed grasping at territory by hugely informed people is exasperating.

Smith's "impossible necessity" is rather a "necessary impossibility": both surrender the capacity to make geographical distinctions and at the same time accept a parochial identity. For all the talk of shifting paradigms, Appalachian Studies is trapped in a rhododendron hell of its own choosing: with "Appalachia" as its badge, its practitioners will despite their best efforts never escape the insider/outsider dichotomy that gets deeper and thicker with each passing year as quasi-intellectual pop culture and university marketers feed its mythological roots.

"The path is made by walking," says the Antonio Machado poem that inspired the subtitle of this book. If Appalachian Studies is stuck in a rhododendron hell, the way forward will require not so much walking as strenuous contortion.

Hillbiliad: an odyssey

I realized something one day when I was downtown busking. On the sidewalk in one of the downtowns. Around here they are all small downtowns and people are as nice as they are suspicious that I might be a migrant on welfare siphoning off their SoshSecurity. Or worse, an atheist because I'm not playing bluegrass or rawk or singersongrotter.

What I realized, playing for lunch money, is that strip malls are windows on America's soul -- full of hope and dope and failure. They are built to fail. They always do; they have to; American capitalism depends on it: a steady churn of failure -- worshipped by tech-addled magimetricians as "creative destruction" -- that fuels mass migrations from one form of slavery or a-reasonable-facsimile-thereof to another (those poor symphony musicians). Who was it said money was the root of all evil? Whoever that girl was, she might've known a thing or two.

I also realized that I needed one for me, personally: a stake in a strip mall, in one of those boxes of silver-framed plate glass looking as anonymous as ancestors in a picture album: all those mom-and-popped, family-farmed, self-maidens that picked up and moved away somewhere to a doomtown monoculture that might last long enough to raze a family with scrip and liquor and asbestos siding. Almost heaven, east-by-god Pennsylvania I mean Tennessee I mean Texas I mean Oregon I mean Tennessee. Again. Bullseye on a map is whatever you hit.

Which is me, I'll admit it. What I hit is a mostly-always matter of chance: luck. Even knowing this, though, I always try to parse the more successful instances of luck into form. Bad idea. It doesn't work. I take good luck and turn it into bad form. It is a skill; one that I'm not proud of. It's that kind of skill that starts with Buddhism and winds up with Hello Kitty.

When I busk in the downtowns, there is always someone to laugh at the tootly toy I play. I laugh back and tell them I am the Yo-Yo Ma of the recorder: I have memorized all of the  J. S. Bach recorder sweets (that's how I spell what I say it because if you spell it the other way it's some kinda music publishing bullshit), and I will melt them in the air anywhere, at the drop of a hat trick. They say "do some tricks, then, yo-yo man" and drop in a quarter with a pitying, uncomprehending -- because it's not bluegrass or rawk or singersongrotter -- smile. Unless there's a five already in there: nothing kills charity quicker than parity, like that girl said. In which case they tell me to go back to Oregon and play with the whales. My answer is pat: "You mean Denmark" which makes for an even more uncomprehending smile.

There's a method to my rottenness: all these small downtowns in the very particular region where I busk are in the middle of a marketing meltdown. First off, what they don't tell you: They want people to come here and start African slavery all over again. But this time everybody can be an African (all lives matter), just the way Civil War re-enactors can be fat. Also do it with volunteers this time because it's Tennessee (a right-to-work-for-nothing state); in other words some reasonable facsimile called "brand enhancement" (nothing says "slavery" quite like "brand.").

Second, what they do tell you is that the marketers (nothing says "slavery" quite like "market") have decided on a subconsciously Dada-inspired configuration of anything inconceivable that conceivably could be Appalachia in the minds of people who know nothing about the, um, is it really a place? Just please no washing machines on the front porch.

So my actual first thought -- busking on the recorder in one of these downtowns -- was that Appalachia is just the down-country cousin to Scandinavia.

Hear me out: Log cabins come from Sweden and fiddles come from nyckelharpa and banjos come from a strung-out skinhead from Oslo who floated a Hillbiliad dragonship to Africa a long long time ago and picked 5-string symbolist poetry before reverting to Normandy and then marching to Zion to liberate it for "The Girl Who Didn't Like Money" (A Mountain Ballad). Plus: they had recorders down in Brasstown, NC, at the Campbell Folk School because? Duh: Denmark, where the folk school was born, had recorders in their folk schools. And like your girl used to say: Quod Erat Denmarkrandom.

I mean, it's geometry. It's also sausage, which right away linked me with the apple butter of my eye: the strip mall where I'm determined to dip my oar into the Slough of Despond along with all the other pioneers who insisted on Pilgrim's Progress as the only book to read besides the Bible. Inspiration? Please, no. It's entire randomness, meaning luck, and I'm parsing it big-time, because the medium is the method, as I think some girl said.

All of that realizing, on that recorder Büsker Dü-date, came down to: A store. In a strip mall. Just off the interstate, the this-land-is-your-land ribbon of highway teeming with the modern-day equivalent of cash-flush bushwhackers looking for a place to flush their cash but never could because it was all outhouses. But this Appalachia gonna flush, to wit, yo: Buddhism:Hello Kitty :: Appalachia:Greta Thunberg dragonship figureheads.

What were you expecting? Microplastic quilts? Roundup biscuits? Artisanal typhoid from a backyard spring? MAGA limberjacks? Dagnabbit, dragonship figureheads is whittling, for singing-high-and-lonesome out loud! Look, I just raked dry crackling leaves in 94 degree heat in October. You think we don't have something coming? Or maybe you're one of them waiting on the next ice age to kick in. In what? 3,000 years? So, just enough time to walk back civilization, right?

Sombeody's got to do something, and my strip mall outlet selling small-batch Greta Thunberg dragonship figureheads -- carved out of sustainably-harvested, downed timber and cleverly devised so as to conceal a storage compartment for a slim cigaret of high-grade Goosepimple Junction Kush (extra: address the blind tiger) -- will provide nothing less than a 21st c. equivalent of the Isle of Lewis whalebone ivory chesspieces:  miniature monuments to an uncertain future full of hope and dope and failure.

Bullseye on a map is whatever you hit.

Good, bad, and ugly: The case of Michael Bellesiles' "Arming America"

Recently I eased my cogitative boat into an interview found via a new, online history publication called Contingent Magazine, recently begun and edited by some fine and approachable historians I follow on Twitter. The magazine describes its purpose as follows: "Contingent is a nonprofit magazine for everyone who asks questions about the past. Our contributors are largely historians outside the traditional professoriate -- adjuncts, museum workers, librarians, park rangers, grad students, high school teachers. They are all paid." Via Twitter I learned of the editors' efforts to establish a modest, monthly budget for paying contributors. I'm somebody who can't pass buskers on the street without chipping in something. Here was history busking outside the concert hall of academe. I chipped in.

But not until after I had listened to the interview, a production of The Age of Jackson Podcast sponsored by the Andrew Jackson Hermitage and hosted by Daniel Gullotta, a Ph.D. student in religious studies at Stanford University.

Rather than summarize the interview here (there'll be more downstream), at this point I'll just say that I found its subject matter irresistible, in the same way you would find it irresistible if you were out on the street and ran into an old acquaintance who -- clearly the worse for wear -- said, "Boy, do I have a story."

Back in 2000 I was blown away by Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, written by Michael Bellesiles, a history professor at Emory University. Among other things, it recounted and documented the failure of an important American experiment: a well-regulated militia of all military-age citizens (c. 18-50) whose self-armed constancy and patriotism would obviate the need for a standing army. And when I say "failure," I mean dismal, embarrassing, "what-the-fuck-were-we-thinking?" failure so that within just a couple-score years, three at the most, what was at the beginning (1787) bruited by Federalists and Anti-federalists alike as an institution essential to American republicanism had become a literal laughingstock.

This was my first encounter with this history, with the fact that it happened. I was less interested in Bellesiles' larger thesis about the Civil War being a watershed event that ushered into American society a "gun culture" that had previously not existed. I was just really, really impressed by how badly the Founding Fathers had screwed up on the militia thing.

What happened soon thereafter was that I in my capacity of public library director had to address a request that Arming America -- due to well-publicized flaws in some of its research having mostly to do with probate records -- be removed from the collection or given a warning label of some sort in the front of the book. Thanks to American Library Association stances on intellectual freedom, I was able to keep the book unlabeled on the shelf.

But in effect the book as a whole was discredited, even if only part of its research had been called into question, and none of that (as far as I knew at the time) had to do with the militia, my area of interest. This was altogether a disappointment to me, because the book had been broadly informative, quite well written, and had left me looking forward to great things from author Bellesiles. Instead, thanks to the controversy, he dropped from view.

Every now and then I wondered what happened to him. So when on Aug. 24 Contingent put up an interview with him, it very much was like running into that long-lost, beaten-up acquaintance on the street.

Interviewer Gullotta draws out a relatable Bellesiles on a wide range of topics (how to put a twist on an Old Fashioned; some refreshing home truths about what bullshitters -- my word -- Jefferson and Tocqueville were), but necessarily central is the book that took him to the heights of the history profession -- it won the prestigious Bancroft prize -- before the reverberations of its faults plunged him near to the nadir. Acknowledging that there are "a couple of specific errors in my research" and "a few pagination errors" in his footnotes, Bellesiles stands by his work: "I know of no research that undercuts the main findings of my book." Yes, the probate records contained "significant errors," but he points out that they relate to an insignificant portion of his book ("three paragraphs") and that he later worked to correct the information with a website and in a second edition of the book released necessarily with a different publisher -- Soft Skull Press -- because the initial publisher -- Knopf -- "rescinded" an offer to re-publish it.

Yet in Bellesiles' telling Knopf is partly (largely?) to blame for the tempest that seems to have caught him off guard. An academic publisher, he suggests, would've vetted it better, and its career would've been satisfactorily typical: offered as "the beginning of a discussion among historians," it would be read "almost entirely by scholars" and then subjected to the drip-drip-drip of academic, peer argumentation. Instead, it became red meat for a dogfight over gun rights, with gun control advocates on one side, ginned up by Knopf's dust cover polemical endorsements including one that calls Bellesiles "the NRA's worst nightmare;" and on the other the NRA and its minions, who according to Bellesiles "launched a coordinated paragraph-by-paragraph search for errors" -- turning up only seven in 1,300 footnotes" -- as well as an assault on Bellesiles' credibility using a weaponized Internet (at the time still developing into the monster it is today) that he characterizes as "swiftboating." All of this, he says, because the subject was firearms.

The interview -- which you should by all means listen to -- clearly reveals Bellesiles to have been shattered by the experience. My wondering about him was not just the musings of a provincial librarian, either. He dropped from view to the extent that Gullotta says he had to resort to some "crazy Google Foo" to find him. Bellesiles regrets publishing the book and pines for anonymity. He won't say which educational press he does editing for because he doesn't want the trolls to beleaguer them with hate mail. When Gullotta asks how a reader might approach the book should they come upon it, say, in a library, Bellesiles says, "Read it with an open mind, and without yet exploring the criticisms of it. Judge first for yourself, and then explore the criticisms. Try not to tell anyone you're reading it, because you may get some hostile responses. And hopefully do some research for yourself; look into the source materials, which are rich and full. And that's where life is, is in the source documents."

Contingent has made it easy to "explore the criticisms." Editor Bill Black appended to the interview the links to "additional resources" that include the principal documents generated by the controversy, mostly from 2002-3: a forum in the William and Mary Quarterly, an article in the Yale Law Journal entitled "Fall from Grace," the inquisitional-sounding Report of the Investigative Committee in the Matter of Professor Michael Bellesiles, and Bellesiles' own rebuttal pamphlet, Weighed in an Even Balance.

Grateful as I was to hear Bellesiles' side of things and to learn what has transpired since, I couldn't help but wonder, listening to the interview, why revisit this controversy? What about it has attracted the attention of younger scholars like Gullotta and Black? Is there, perhaps, some interest in rehabilitating Bellesiles and his book? 

With this interview -- preceded and "balanced" on the AofJ podcast by one with Joyce Lee Malcolm, a severe detractor who says Bellesiles, far from being taken aback at the furore, was at the forefront of the polemics from the outset -- Gullotta is generating original material that could be used for some kind of re-assessment. He hints at some credit for Bellesiles' introducing the idea of a "gun culture" in America; by and large, though, he appears mostly fascinated by the scandal in and of itself.

Black followed up on the Bellesiles interview with an article in TheWeek that examines the case in order to address the question of how "academic historians should function within the public sphere. At what point does relevancy [his emphasis] undermine rigor?" The forces of the history marketplace, Black says, dictate a turn away from "quote-unquote serious scholarship": with tenured positions requiring peer-reviewed publishing becoming thin on the ground, trained historians face financial pressure to "create a brand for themselves" through such extramural, Internet-centric devices as self-promotion on social media and articles lacking the filter of peer review. The moral of the Bellesiles case, post-interview, seems to be that his professional remorse (I wish I'd played it safe with an academic publisher) simply points to the fact that this nostalgic alternative dates from an idyllic past less and less available to trained historians. Say Black, "It doesn't make much sense to ask whether or how historians should come down from the ivory tower, when a growing number of them are never up there in the first place."

An irony here is that one of the central players in the Bellesiles controversy was an amateur historian: Clayton Cramer, a writer on gun history topics with a history MA but by profession a software engineer, figures as a more-rigorous-than-thou correcting laborer to the academic Bellesiles' sloppy citations, which provoked Bellesiles to respond on one occasion (in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 27, 2000) by calling Cramer a "non-historian." Rigor, perhaps, doesn't inhere to the ivory tower alone.

In fact, if there is anyone in the whole hooraw that can be said to be a harbinger for the current malaise in the employment of historians that Black says forces them out into the general job market and onto the Internet, it is Cramer, not Bellesiles. In a c. Jan. 2003 online article for History News Network (an organ of George Washington University) Cramer speaks to just these issues: Unable to support a family while pursuing a career in the academy, he became a software engineer; unable to attract serious, continuing attention from historians with his findings about Bellesiles' errors, he put up a web page in an effort to publicize them. From there -- early on, anyway -- it seems to have been controversy waged on the Internet -- with Bellesiles withdrawing, according to Gullotta's interviewee Joyce Malcolm in a Reason article, in which she also credits the nonacademic press (National Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe) for spreading the word about the problems with Arming America that the history academy at first ignored. Yes, once they got there they turned on Bellesiles with a vengeance, but the early days of the controversy seem to complicate Black's contention that historians did not stand behind Bellesiles. If they did not stand behind Bellesiles, they at least seem to have demonstrated a passive aggression against Cramer -- not a peer -- that drove him in frustration to pursue a more independent route to publicize his concern for "scholarly integrity" and "the credibility of the historical profession."

"Disingenuous" seems to be a word often used to describe Bellesiles, but along these lines it particularly seems to apply to a remark in the interview that, on any other subject than guns, he and Cramer would be able to "appear together at a conference," when it is much more likely that Cramer's lack of institutional bona fides would prevent his being invited in the first place. The "class" division that Contingent has undertaken to confront (bypass?) is real, and Cramer's experience in the Bellesiles matter elucidates its mystification (oh how I love that concept) to the extent that Cramer himself seems to blame the prejudice against him on lack of ideological diversity in the academy (too many liberals) rather than a much more basic, reluctantly-surrendered professional snobbery.

For what it's worth, Cramer makes a big deal of calling out Bellesiles on incorrectly quoting the text of the 1792 militia statute, the first to embody the organization under the Federal Constitution with its now-notorious 2nd Amendment. As Arming America was my first encounter with a detailed history of these laws, I did not catch it, but there it is on p. 230: the quote that says every citizen enrolled in the militia shall be provided with a musket, when in fact the statute says every enrolled citizen shall provide his own musket. Huge difference! However, in re-reading the book, I found clear evidence -- seemingly unnoticed by Cramer and uncited to my knowledge even by Bellesiles in his own defense -- that this was an unintentional error, an instance of his getting tangled in the tares of his own sloppiness: subsequently, on p. 262, Bellesiles writes, "In theory every member of the militia supplied his own gun, as the Militia Act of 1792 required."

There you have it -- in my mind anyway -- the problem with Arming America in a nutshell: not fraud, as some have alleged and continue so to do (in full fury: peruse the lynch mob that is the comments section on Bellesiles' revised, Soft Skull edition book website), but a display of a head-scratchingly high degree of reported discrepancy between text and citation.

Nothing can be taken at face value on either side in this bramble patch, as some of the gotchas turn out to be wrong, and the accusers show themselves in as bad a light as the person they accuse. Malcolm, for example -- a fully frocked academic as much as Bellesiles -- tries to score a point by truncating his statement that "[m]ost personal violence in early modern England occur not on lonely highways but at public festivals, often between competing teams of Morris dancers and such other representatives of community pride." [Arming America, p. 36] Malcolm's version of the quote ends at "dancers," which clearly changes the scope of Bellesiles' assertion; she then scoffs, "Bellesiles assertion that these charming, white-costumed folk dancers, sporting bells at their knees, were responsible for most of the era's violence struck one British historian as Monty Pythonesque."

Since the fighting Morris dancers seem particularly absurd to Malcolm -- indeed, she doubles down on the criticism in the interview with Gullotta, where she says she examined the sources and "not one of them said what he said" (AofJ Podcast 081 10:30-11:20), I decided to follow Bellesiles' footnote to the source: Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660, by David Underdown, p. 69. Well, p. 69 has nothing about Morris dancers, but a little experience with Bellesiles teaches you some basic gumshoe, and sure enough on p. 96 there's a description of a fight at a local revel involving leg-belled, "apparently innocent" Morris dancers that resulted in "a bloody affray." So Bellesiles got the fact right, included it in a qualified generalization that Malcolm distorted, but cited the wrong page. Faults all around!

Once again in this regard it is the "non-historian" Cramer who is most dependable and also the most damning, but even his claim to be able to find errors "on almost any page, picked at random" requires testing. I took this  "pick a page, any page" challenge for a short ride. Mostly using HathiTrust to check official sources, I did find a number of errors, most of them along the lines of the mis-cited morris dancer page, but accuracy prevailed over the handful of pages whose handful of citations I was able to check, given my limited, provincial library resources and the time constraints of interlibrary loan. My feeling is that Cramer might be overstating his case somewhat, but it has enough basis that I feel the need to scour same pages in the the second edition to see if Bellesiles did indeed revise or correct these mistakes as he claims to have done in the interview.

This being the case, the book remains strongly suggestive, although his laying out of a "lack of a gun culture" thesis is easy to nitpick (as Cramer does) due to lack of precision, e.g. "gun censuses" that report only military-grade firearms are necessarily incomplete. If nothing else it is a great bibliographic resource. However, it would seem impossible for the book to be used as a citation without first double-checking its sources. But after all -- to give Bellesiles the last word -- the "life" of history is with those source materials, "which are rich and full."

Which, for the most part, cannot be said about historians. Well, "full," maybe.  Keep some deserving ones that way by supporting Contingent!

Parodies Lost

"Boss, Luc just quit."

"Luc? Luc Fer? Our best parodist? Hell of a guy too. Why? Did he say?"

"Not a word. He packed up his stuff and walked out the door. Left this:"

************************************

Some people can just dial up Sympathy for the Devil in their minds: the "mad samba" percussion that introduces the song and ties it together; "Please allow me to introduce myself" over the percussion and block chords, then the busy bass part kicking in, doubled in the piano left hand, while the piano right hand anchors the harmonic rhythm, instead of -- as you would expect of the Stones -- electric guitar; all of it wrapped up in a relatively straightforward verse-chorus structure, no bridge, broken only by Keith Richards's electric guitar solo.

Conceptually, it couldn't be simpler: Simply replace "sympathy" with "Trumpathy." But as alien as those two concepts are one from the other, it would mean an overhaul of the original, even if functionally you have to leave enough elements to make it recognizable. Sorta like how there's "pathy" in both words haha.

Music-wise, the parodic idea was to keep the simple structure of the song, more or less, as well as the basic musical elements like tempo, but flesh it out as a different genre. The percussion would set the tone as in the original, but there couldn't be any suggestion of samba because the lyrics have Trump making fun of how the drums in the original are "way too Latino." The triadic harmonies of the original bass and piano become dissonant and jagged in the parody--think angry Melodica Men on shrooms. The most "faithful" element, musically, of the parody (besides the basic chord structure) is the guitar solo, which the parody "covers" with three overlapped synth sounds as a way of expressing the artificial "muzak pandemonium" that Trump says is his "heavenly music."

The vocals are spoken in the manner of Trump speechifying, but he winds up, quite unintentionally, sounding like a poor imitation of Obama rapping badly. Good work if you can get it.

The lyrics were written in early August, 2019, after the Trumpista fear of an "invasion" of mostly unarmed migrant families and children found murderous expression in the Aug. 3 mass shooting in El Paso, when a Trump-echoing white nationalist targeted Latins in a Walmart and killed 22.

The words "cheap pewter and crap zirconium" refer to an incident in which Trump gave supposedly "platinum diamond Harry Winston" cufflinks to actor Charlie Sheen, who had them appraised by a jeweler. In four seconds the jeweler assessed their actually worthless components.

I'll leave any other deep diving on the lyrics to you all, except to say that the chorus reverses the Jagger/Richards "name/game" and otherwise echoes the original J/R words with Trump's native language, insult: "hope" becomes "dope" and "puzzling" becomes "putz."

I'd almost written and wrapped everything by Aug. 19, when a story emerged that Trump was interested in buying Greenland. I thought this would be an example of Trump in his standup comedian persona (a much stronger aspect of his personality than people realize), but it turned out he was serious and canceled a visit to Denmark because the PM there dismissed the idea out of hand. And then Trump referred to himself as "the chosen on;" the parody song has him invoking a "second coming" that his supporters are trying to "crank."

Right then and there I knew I was done. When reality becomes parody, parody is done. I spent the afternoon painting over the loop of a video of Trump saying that if the economy failed and everything went down the tubes, there'd be no choice but to vote for him. The loop has a guy punctuating things with a thumbs-up. 

For what it's worth, here it is.

So I'm going back to Pandemonium in the hopes that the good lord gives me some other world to warp. Trump and Thumbs-Up Guy don't need my help.

Luc I. Fer

***********************************

Face it

[Re-posted from a book review on Goodreads]

If this review had a subtitle, it would be "The problem with subtitles." The problem is that subtitles try to squeeze all the meaning of an entire book into a few words. Functionally, it's stupid. Nobody goes around saying, "Have you read the latest subtitle?" But maybe they should. After all, it's essentially a headline, and how often do we know anything about anything beyond the headlines that parade before us on our "wall" or in our "feed"?

Feed. Good word, that, for us human informational bovines. Here is a book with a perfectly good title -- Anti-Social Media -- whose subtitle goes on to tell us what the title means -- How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy -- so that we can have something to add to the coffeehouse chatter: "Hey, did you know that Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy? Terrible, innit? Hey, look what just popped up on my feed: Ronaldo and Neymar, and they're not playing soccer, they're boxing! Hahaha!"

I think I prefer the quaint, old-timey way that publishers used to provide a seemingly alternative title: "Anti-Social Media -- Or How Facebook Primarily But Also Google, Not to Mention a Host of Others, Profits by Providing a 'Free' Service that Tickles Our Inner Compulsion to Use the Cotton Gin to Generate Profits and Other Glib Excuses for Enslaving Others."

In fact, this book doesn't mention the cotton gin. But if you will allow yourself to go beyond the subtitle and actually read the entire book, you'll learn that author Vaidhynathan is onto something much deeper than the manner in which the architecture of Facebook willy-nilly acts on the human spirit like a steady diet of Coca-Cola acts on a set of teeth.

(I said "spirit." I meant "brain." But I couldn't use that word, because it connotes "rational," which as Seth Godin says, no one is. And everybody knows that Seth Godin must be right because Seth Godin is a Marketer and we are all Brands and Brands don't use rationality because it isn't sticky and lacks the potential for virality, which autocorrect wants to change to "virility," but that was another time.)

So, anyway: spirit. Why do people drink so much Coke? There's 9.75 teaspoons of sugar in one 12 oz. can. Imagine putting that much sugar on a bowl of cereal. I mean, it's total junk, and it funds an EMPIRE. Full disclosure: part of the empire is a university I got a degree from, so totally worth it, right? Just like slavery, except rotten teeth and obesity! That's the spirit!

And then there's Facebook, and not only is it FREE, but it doesn't rot your teeth or make you fat, and it comes complete with an afterlife by keeping you friends with people after they (or you) die! Who wouldn't want it? So, it's completely neutral, right?

If you think that, you've never concerned yourself with advertising. Back in the graybeard days of advertising -- all of 15 years ago -- they used to say that 20% of your advertising budget worked, but you didn't know which 20%, so you had to go ahead and spend the other 80% on stuff that didn't work. Now, with Facebook sucking up all kinds of personal and browsing data that its users give up for FREE and fire-hosing it to advertisers, anybody with any kind of advertising budget can customize many messages to many audiences and gauge the responses. With that kind of feedback, no wonder the traditional "Waste 80% of Your Advertising Budget With Us" newspapers are struggling.

And guess who have massive advertising budgets to saturate an atomized market with targeted messages? Political marketers, with dictators like Vladimir Putin showing the way. Here's Vaidhyanathan: "By segmenting an electorate into distinct sets, candidates move resources toward efforts to pander to small issues with high emotional appeal instead of those that can affect broad swaths of the electorate and perhaps cross over presumed rifts among voters. It's not necessary -- and may be counterproductive -- for a campaign to issue a general vision of government or society or to articulate a unifying vision. It's still done, but it's not the essence of the game anymore. Voter targeting … encourages narrow-gauge interventions that can operate below the sight of journalists or regulators. A campaign like Trump's can issue small, cheap advertisements via platforms like Facebook and Instagram that disappear after a day or get locked forever in Facebook's servers." (p. 162)

"High emotional appeal": your brain on Coca-Cola. We love it, we can't get enough of it, and we are powerless to resist, and the first three letters of Seth Godin's last name are G-O-D. Sweet.

Even if Mark Zuckerberg has good intentions, and even if his company makes occasional interventions, they manifest the naiveté of the libertarian Silicon Valley mindset. His creation is a Frankenstein monster, out of his control: "Facebook is simply too large and the variety of human depravity too vast for the company to deploy enough people or computer code to anticipate and regulate the misbehavior of millions." (p. 204)

The broader value of the book -- beyond the narrowness of its title and subtitle -- is that Vaidhynathan transcends his own characterization that "Facebook is itself the problem" with the larger problem of people and how they respond to technological innovation: "[N]ot for the first time, market and political forces have turned products of the Enlightenment against enlightenment. … When we make a cult of technology and welcome its immediate rewards and conveniences into our lives without consideration of the long-term costs, we make fools of ourselves." (pp. 202-3)

As to what should be done, the author argues both for the application of more accountability and transparency to the lesser problem of Facebook, e.g. by extending Federal Election Commission oversight of political advertising to web-based platforms (presently not the case). As to the larger problem of the human response to technological innovation, at one level he says resistance is futile -- he himself is not leaving Facebook, and it would be a mere "blip" for readers of his book to do so -- but on the other he counsels that we "reinvest and strengthen institutions that generate deep, meaningful knowledge," (p. 215) e.g. universities, museums, libraries, science, responsible journalism. He also says that we must get political. The libertarian mindset of Silicon Valley has produced at the corporate level "the hubris of self-righteousness" that threatens the very notion of democratic self-government. "Only the threat and force of stern state regulation can push companies to straighten up," concludes Vaidhynathan. "That's both how it is and how it should be." (p. 219)

So uh who won the boxing match? Neymar or Ronaldo? Wait, wait, don't tell me, it no longer matters, cuz it looks like Scaramucci and Omarosa are gonna tangle, but mostly I can't wait til five years from now when they will be gone. Trump will be gone, the US will have a Green New Deal, Medicare for all, a well-regulated militia armed with flintlocks, Facebook and Google will be public utilities, and the EU will move its capital from Brussels to London. Also, people will have actually read this book, gone beyond its publisher's marketing crapshoot of a subtitle, and brought policy back into fashion. Because yes we can … think.

And I will have written a book called 9.75 Teaspoons and the Truth: Drink the Kool-Aid. No, no, no. Listen to my inner Seth Godin; pack it with virality; then go all virile and kick him to the curb: Think the Kool-Aid.

An Appalachial Estate of Mind

There are two Appalachias, which I'll call "Appalachia I" and "Appalachia II." They're pronounced differently because they refer to different things. Kind of like the different things referred to in "No ofFENSE, but recently the Vol OFFense has been more dog than hunt." So, even if it causes a row, allow me to put my ducks in a row and present my defense (however you pronounce it) of the idea that Appalachia means two different things depending on how it is pronounced.

First off, these aren't the Appalachia One (rich) and Appalachia Two (poor) that Cumberland crusader Harry Caudill wrote about. As will be shown, these Appalachias require Roman numerals.

As to pronunciation: the usual explanation for two of them in opposition is, essentially, a pissing contest across the Mason-Dixon line. One is Southern, the other is everywhere else. Each is intolerant of and excludes the other. One is right; the other is wrong. When in fact there's every reason to accept both pronunciations as referring to different conceptual entities.

By way of easing into the subject, let me relate an experience from my Knoxville days (back when the Vol OFFense showed enough inspiration to go 10-2). I went into a record store and scanned the back of an album: "Here is Bach as he heard it in his head" -- or something to that effect -- proclaimed the liner notes to a switched-on Moogish compilation of Bach fugues. A fan of the cantatas, I thought, "Ah, to hear Bach's music as it sounded inside his head, not timbred of his time, but timbred by his timeless imagination.

I was totally sucked in. By the stupid, self-satisfied, imperial presentism of a passing fad. I knew as soon as I dropped the needle that I'd been had. Some clever marketer had defrauded me just as sure as a card sharp on the street. What I heard was Bach -- Bach as I'd always heard it, Bach as he had always been, Bach as would always shine through whatever glitzy timbral rocketman bullshit anybody might slather it with.

It's this sort of thing -- though at a deeper, decidedly un-stupid level -- that bothers me about the current age of studies of Appalachia, all of them (seemingly, judging from their citations) conceptual shoots from one seminal big bang: Appalachia on Our Minds, by Henry Shapiro, published in 1976 -- a coon's age ago in academic time, not far off from when a half-timbred Bach was flatmate to a Vol OFFense that put up enough points to win lots of games.

Shapiro's "our minds" is a temporal community that stretches from the last quarter of the 19th century until, presumably, the publication of his book and -- through the thinking of all the scholars who continued to advance his idea -- up into the present. His title is an obvious play on the popular song "Georgia on My Mind." Less obvious is the fact that both place names -- Georgia and Appalachia -- are formed with the Latin honorific suffix -ia.

The -ia honorific is ubiquitous when you start seeing it, even only in America: Georgia, the realm of King George; Virginia, the realm of the Virgin Queen; Pennsylvania, the wooded realm of William Penn. Even the capital city sports one: Columbia, the gym of the ocean.

But Appalachia? What is the background of this honorific? The "duh" answer -- that it is an erosion from "Appalachian" --  is false. While it is true that, historically, the adjective appeared first and refers to the Apalaches, a Florida-coast indigenous tribe, its derivation from French/Spanish cognates and its various, non-standard endings (e.g. -en and -ean) clearly demonstrate that "Appalachian" evolved as a neutral attributive, not as an honorific.

On the other hand, "Appalachia" was born as an honorific. It is a coinage whose birth is clearly documented. In 1838 Washington Irving had an idea. Not satisfied with the generic sense of "America" in the "United States of America" (it could include Peru for all anyone knew), he proposed to replace it with a different A-word, something that could represent the grandeur of the nation with the example of a physical reality, namely, the eastern chain of mountains stretching from Canada well into the South. He had two suggestions: "Alleghania" and "Appalachia." For unstated reasons Irving preferred "Alleghania." 

In 1846, however, in an unsigned paragraph in Graham's Magazine, a self-professed admirer of Irving's, while approving the idea of a substitute for "America," offered reasons why "Appalachia" was in fact the better choice. Among the reasons, "by far the most truly important consideration of all" had to do with the "music of 'Appalachia' itself." The problem with "Alleghania" is that it was too "guttural." But "Appalachia"? In the mind of this writer, "nothing could be more sonorous, more liquid, or of fuller volume, while its length is just sufficient for dignity."

Here, then, was a word that from its very creation bespoke the "lay" of the land, not anything so curt and rude as throwing an apple atcha. And who was this anonymous writer in Graham's refusing to gag on Alleghania and extolling the sonorous liquidity of AppaLLLAYYYchia? None other than Edgar Allan Poe.

Irving's coinage paired with Poe's pronunciation seems to be unknown in the contemporary scholarship of Appalachia. Neither fact appears in Shapiro. In his effort to establish an "Appalachian otherness" as the meaning of "Appalachia," he buries a truncated history of the word in the academic's version of a balladeer's shallow grave -- in footnote #3 of chapter 3. And well might he, because the honorific Appalachia is not the one that he inserts parasitically into our minds. His "our" Appalachia is the cultural, "other" Appalachia that Shapiro's scholarship labors to establish, in but not of the United States. It is the "problem" Appalachia of mountaineer isolates: unshaven, unchurched, unschooled. Not us, for sure.

Alas, poor Appalachia, we knew him: its skull is Irving's coinage. But the corpse in Shapiro's shallow grave lacks it. In its place, topping a kind of etymological Frankenstein's monster, is an idea belonging to Berea College president William Goodell Frost, who Shapiro says "seems to have been the first to suggest that the southern mountains composed a region in the modern sense of a territory defined by its characteristics and its civilization as well as by its location."

The Modern Sense! Bach as he heard it in his head! Behold Appalachia! But wait! Look back in the grave! "Although Appalachia was the title of the journal published by the Appalachian Mountain Club of Boston, an 'outing' organization, from 1876, …"  Holy baroque organ harvesting! "Although"!? Here is the heart of Shapiro's Frankenstein. In order to animate an anachronistic, modern sense of the word, he kills off a different sense altogether that just happens to have been contemporaneous with the time period of his study. 

Because there was in fact an Appalachia on the minds of the 19th century educated class about which Shapiro writes. It was in direct line of descendence -- and transcendence -- from Irving's and Poe's: the mountain realm stretching from Maine to Georgia. By that time the Appalachia that was on their minds was more than symbolic. It was no less than the realized nirvana of the lapsed-Congregational, secular, scientific heirs of Transcendentalism. On the rocky slopes of Mt. Katahdin, Appalachia was where Henry David Thoreau had felt the cold breath of absolute, man-disdaining Nature and screamed his ecstasy: "CONTACT!"

And the Appalachian Mountain Club's journal, Appalachia, published from 1876? It is still being published today. Shapiro calls AMC an "outing" organization. Buried in a footnote, those quote marks work, rhetorically, like air quotes. They serve not only to discount the importance of the AMC but to render it irrelevant to Shapiro's thesis.

This is like being frozen out of the Northwest Passage. Here, in fact, is the way to understanding the sense of "Appalachia" contemporaneous with the historical period that concerns Shapiro. Admittedly, this is not  "our" sense of the word. But why should "our" sense be shipped by time-travel UPS into the minds of people who had a different understanding? More importantly, to follow Shapiro's lead is to lose utterly the lost sense of the word, which can inform our current understanding in profound ways.

In naming its journal, the AMC fell into the inspirational embrace of "Appalachia," applying Poe's music to evoke the patriotic grandeur of peaks in its New English heartland, many of them named for nation-builders: Washington, Adams, Madison. The AMC belongs in the same class as the Sierra Club or the Audubon Society. Moreover, it was formed before either of them.  It had the quasi-religious mission both to preserve and glorify the mountains -- as well as to make them more accessible, for reasons some of which had to do with national physical and mental health. It influenced the passage of legislation creating the national forest system; it spawned regional affiliates, including one way down in Asheville, NC; and it was one of the organizations responsible not only for the creation of the Appalachian Trail but also for the assurance of its future as a National Scenic Trail. To leave out this aspect of Appalachia is to fail to see the continuous intellectual chain that manifests the philosophy of Transcendentalism with the physical reality of the Appalachian Trail.

Similarly, Shapiro footnote 3/3 damns with faint praise writer Horace Kephart, the unexcelled interpreter of mountain life in the early 20th century Smoky Mountains. He is credited with causing "Appalachia" to catch on in the 1920s as a term for the "southern mountain region," but once again the detail that the book first appeared in Outing Magazine -- while factual -- consigns Kephart to the category of writer who, were he alive today, would be producing copy for Outdoor Life or Garden & Gun.

While this accurately captures an important aspect of Kephart's appeal, it slights the full nature of his influence, particularly as regards the word "Appalachia." Kephart was a star librarian (if there can be such a thing) before he left his job and family in St. Louis in 1903 and sequestered himself in the Smokies. He also took with him his lifelong experience as a camper and a hunter -- yes, an outdoorsman. But there can be little doubt that what drew him to the mountains was a Thoreau-like belief that the mountains were themselves the essence of nature; they were the "Back of Beyond" whose mercilessness would test his ability to belong there. There can also be little doubt that this former star-librarian-and-expert-outdoorsman knew of the AMC journal Appalachia. By incorporating the word into his own nomenclature, Kephart applied to the Southern mountains -- his touchstone -- the same honorific sense that the AMC had inherited from Irving and Poe. It is a glorious place, this Appalachia, Kephart says. And let us be clear about one thing: it is not the towns or the valleys. It is the mountains. It is only the mountains.

Once there, of course, he immediately discovered and engaged the uniqueness of his mountain neighbors. Eventually, they became the focus of his writing, but it was the mountain-shaped lives alone that interested Kephart; townies and valley dwellers need not apply. Also, as in the case of the AMC, Kephart became an advocate for the preservation of unspoiled mountain refuges apart from any settled humanity. He was instrumental in the creation of the Great Smokies National Park and helped lay out the path of the Appalachian Trail there and in Georgia, because he believed in the intrinsic value of the mountains as a source of human well-being.

Kephart certainly didn't refer to the mountains as "Appalachia" because the mountaineers did. He records that "the Carolina mountaineers" still referred to their homeland as "the Alleghanies" (a nice irony, remembering Irving's preference). In the mountain south, when the word was used, as Appalachian historian Ron Eller writes, it had a very, very specific connotation: "The word 'Appalachia' itself was seldom used by mountain residents, except in reference to the town of that name in southwest Virginia," [italics mine] a rail junction coal-mining boom town formed in the 1890s.

The observation as to the historical non-use of the word or its derivatives by the region's inhabitants as a term for the region -- mountain or human -- is confirmed over and over again. Read the interviews with such now-classic culture warriors as James Still and Harriette Arnow Simpson in Interviewing Appalachia, and they confirm what Appalachian poetry pioneer Jim Wayne Miller also says therein: when he studied literature at Berea in the early 1950s "there was no such thing as Appalachian studies at that time." And if ever there was an Ur-Appalachian college, it was Berea. Its President Frost (he of the Shapiro footnote) spoke all over the country -- even in Boston, the cradle of Appalachia I, where in 1898 his audience was the AMC -- to raise money to educate the mountain youth of the area he called Appalachia. The Berea president knew this word would strike his listeners with a grand, inspiring, unifying impression of a mountainous region. But back in Berea, among his students, there was no such organizing, cultural principle. 

Here, then, is the ultimate comeuppance to novelist Sharyn McCrumb's take-no-prisoners defense of the "Apple-atcha" pronunciation and her snide dismissal of any alternative. Her account of some hoary folkish usage of "Appalachia" is a fiction (which is, after all, her craft) employed for purely polemical reasons. There was no such thing -- other than the Virginia town -- except among furriners.

In Kephart we do see the cleft in Appalachia I that will completely break off in Appalachia II. Even if it was the mountains that drew him into the Smokies, he fell under the spell of his mountain neighbors from the get-go; and even if his first book was about how to live in the woods, his second book was entirely given over to the lives of his mountain neighbors. It wasn't man against mountains so much as man among mountaineers.

But by the 1950s -- when that second book got into the hands of Jim Wayne Miller, a young man in North Carolina attuned, like Poe, to the music of words (he became the poet laureate of Kentucky) and reared in a family with middle class on one side and hillbilly (his word) on the other -- an idea of Appalachia began to sprout in the minds of some of its natives. Miller is explicit as to Kephart's influence: "The first book I read which influenced me on the subject of Appalachia was, without a doubt, Horace Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders. It really set me off. … It was probably the most important single factor that put me in touch with my regional identity." Miller had found a life-forging identity. At high school's end, trying to decide what to do next -- business college in Asheville? Army, navy? Detroit? -- Miller chose Berea: "By that time, I had already read Horace Kephart. I figured I was a southern highlander, and here was a school … that existed for southern highlanders."

But by that time as well had long disappeared the highlanders' agrarian base, the subsistent forest "commons" that had flourished in the southern mountains between the time of the Indian Removal and the invasion of large-scale resource commodification, mostly timber and coal. Steven Stoll's 2017 Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia vividly describes this process, calling it no less an "enclosure" than the well-known example of commons clearances in the British Isles. The real irony for the word "Appalachia" is that, by the time its natives began to use it -- with its southern pronunciation -- to refer to their homeland, the economic culture whose characteristics had attracted the attention of those furriners described by Shapiro had been destroyed.

And many of those furriners had seen it coming. Miller would have read the words that end Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders:  "The great need of our mountaineers to-day is trained leaders of their own. The future of Appalachia lies mostly in the hands of those resolute native boys and girls who win the education fitting them for such leadership. Here is where the nation at large is summoned by a solemn duty. And it should act quickly, because commercialism exploits and debauches quickly. … It is an economic problem, fundamentally, that the mountaineer has to face."

So by the time the native boys and girls are educated and self-aware as to the existence of something they call Appalachia, the exploitation and debauchery of commercialism have run rampant two and three regimes over, and now beyond that to the point that whatever Appalachia has become, actual mountains are irrelevant. "Bluegrass," for example, is often described as the music of the southern mountains -- it is indeed popular there -- but anyone with even a glancing knowledge of Kentucky geography must know that the name of the music comes from the grand region of Kentucky distinguished as entirely distinct from the mountains. Radio music marketing had the further flattening effect of enabling "hillbilly" to apply as much to the Indiana lowlands as the Cumberland hollers. The hills are alive with the sounds of Nashville -- which isn't mountains by a ways. Keep going along that line awhile and next thing you know you wind up with an Ohioan-gone-to-California expat like J. D. Vance claiming to speak for hillbillies.

With the mountain economic regime a thing of the past, never to return, this new idea of Appalachia became "history and culture" in the mind and words of Miller, a German professor by day job (make that Geschichte und Kultur high and lonely). "Appalachia" resonated because it thumped like a washtub bass the class division found in his own hearth and home. Even in his "hamlet" of Leicester, there were "the better people" with their "mindset" like those who lived in towns -- his father's family, one of whom had been mayor of Asheville -- and, on the other side, the "hillbilly class" and their "country" ways like those of his mother's family -- particularly the maternal grandfather, a tenant farmer and fox hunter -- who attracted the "feelings and affections" of his grandson. In fights at school no less than his literary career, Miller's "stand" was always with his "friends from the country." Now is the time to throw that apple atcha.

Cultural Appalachia hollowed out mountain Appalachia into a repertoire of cultural characteristics exhibited like wooden bowls on sale to tourists. The mountains retreated into a backdrop, like a painted sheet for the annual Big Stone Gap community theater production of Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Whatever people did "down there" -- hauling moonshine in a coal truck to goose up a feud -- mountains had less primacy than a good set of tires. This is quite a change from Kephart. Miller's "regional consciousness" was a town-country divide transportable to any other modernized region in the world, like, say, Detroit, where it was in fact transported. Cultural manifestations lost their essential link with a well-defined topography. It wasn't long after this "Erwachen nach Appalachia" that the cultural manifestations of poverty -- promulgated by newly televised mass media -- became the essential marker calling forth the federal Appalachian Regional Commission, which with less than poetic justice entitled its journal Appalachia. 

And along came Shapiro (hey, there's a song in there) with his conceptual bulldozer, burying Appalachia I into a nonentity. But once you realize that there is not one but two mythical Appalachias -- one alive, vibrant, and symbolic of the highest the earth has to give; the other downtrodden, abused, and symbolic of utter dereliction -- and that Shapiro downplayed the former to the point of extinction, you can't read any of the subsequent scholarship about Appalachia without the noise of the synthetic, anachronistic fallacy ruining the mix.

Circa 2019, those who purport to explain Appalachia -- like Elizabeth Catte in What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia -- cannot even say what it is. They expressly relegate geography to the "unimportant" file. The remote, elevated wildness standing in for the power of nature has been replaced by a hodgepodge catch-all of internal combustion, Southern-ish cultural you-name-it. The bloat is due in large part to the Federal government's county-based system of defining Appalachia for the purposes of fighting poverty. Not surprisingly, perhaps, its "development" strategy favors those locations that are most, er, developable, which -- surprise! -- tend to be less than mountainous. Unsubtle bureaucratic cartography has had the staggering intellectual ripple effect of rendering Appalachia indistinct and undistinguishable.  We are now at such a pass that even the ultimate townie Thomas Wolfe is considered to represent Appalachia, simply because the home he couldn't go back to is in a county considered, according to the government's criteria for poverty, part of Appalachia. This is bunkum (literally: look it up). 

As a cultural construct, Appalachia II has had no choice but to follow along in the subjugation of the mountains by the forces of extraction and development. In its watershed TVA puts in a series of dams, and a lake culture all but replaces river and creek culture. Federal and state highways dilate the capillaries of the ox-drawn sledge into arteries for the almighty automobile. Radio, TV, and the Internet deliver a turbocharged stream of furriner. Beneath the quaint syndrome sold to tourists in Dollywood -- the cosplay feudin' and moonshinin' and log flumin' -- Appalachia has come into its commercial own as the branding iron of choice for any small business or community organization or university department hanging out a shingle in the upper South. What passes for tradition these days is ubiquitously symbolized by the Confederate battle flag, a complete inversion from the days of Appalachia I, when the mountaineers were lauded for their loyalty to the cause of the Union. Kilted bagpipe bands proclaim the Scots-Irish heritage of a region that never knew a bagpipe until recently. Call it "Appalachia" and fill it with anything. It's not so much Dystopia as Entropia.

This is the most American kind of decadence there is, the decadence that comes with following the money, the closest thing to an ideology that America has. In practice it is of course the opposite of anything as intellectual as ideology, because no set of beliefs can hold up to the moral and ethical perversions that come with mindlessly privileging profits over people. Example after example comes easily to hand from American history, from slavery to the election of Donald Trump as US President.

There's no reason to think that the southern Appalachians could have been spared. As mentioned above, the trampling of the southern mountains by commercialism was not unforeseen by those who regarded the mountains with a quasi-religious reverence, but what, after all, could they do against a juggernaut? In the wake, the prophets of Appalachia II rage impotently against the destruction visited by human upon human for something as empty and irreligious as wealth. But there is little to be done where exploitation is in fact the solution, because the formula is as baked into the American way as apple-atchas are into pie.

Meanwhile, Appalachia I still exists in the ridge-running preserves carved out by the AMC and such allies as the Appalachian Conservancy, in partnership with the US government, whose crumbs (see formula above) can only be bestowed so as not to threaten potential economic exploitation with something as trivial as scenery. But the champions of Appalachia I -- for all that they deserve pride in the accomplishments of long, steady effort for the public good -- seem to have abandoned any pretensions to the name, even if the AMC still uses it as the title of its journal.

For example, one need only look at the introduction to The Appalachian Trail Reader, an excellent compilation of everything from Thoreau's CONTACT on northern terminus Mt. Katahdin to ephemeral trail register comments on southern terminus Springer Mtn. (one of which asks, "Where's the water?" Reader, I've been there; oh, how I've been there). Editor David Emblidge, whom the dust jacket lists as a board member of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, writes, "It's only a quirk of place-naming that one part of the Appalachian chain -- the extreme southern and south-central end -- came to be called 'Appalachia.' And it's only an ironic, sad fact that this beautiful area with its stalwart people came to be a poor and undeveloped (though much exploited) socioeconomic territory. For our purposes in this book, we'll acknowledge the term 'Appalachia' as belonging to specific places and people, and we won't expropriate it for use elsewhere."

Poor guy. You can almost hear the resignation in this sighing passage, with its "quirk of place-naming" and the final, sad surrender of "we won't expropriate," despite the fact that the place where he lives -- Yankee Massachusetts -- is where the word first went to work. Better to stay away from Sharyn McCrumb and her apple launcher.

And poor Appalachia II. Its alienation is complete and comes -- contra Shapiro --  from being as fully, deeply, and exquisitely American as Illinois or Minnesota, just with fewer Democrats. Whence cometh its help? Can it look to the hills of Appalachia I? Can the preservation of a sliver of America's mountain patrimony for the public good be regarded as not only a vision but a seed for its future?

Remember that Appalachia I began as a symbolic link to a founding idealism that saw in the mountains a source of inspiration and pride. Consider that its yeomanry represented -- to those who believed in the mountains -- an independent stock that could be sustained only if it were allowed to employ the mountains and their resources in some kind of sustainable, ecological balance (which, of course, did not happen). But also consider the continuing thread -- from Kephart, who sounded the alarm; through Benton McKaye, whose visionary 1921 "Appalachian Project" succeeded in generating the Appalachian Trail, but also called for a much broader system of "camps" for community, food, and shelter; through Caudill in the 1960's, who called for a TVA-style "mountain authority;" through historian Eller, who questioned whether modern development must always be the answer; up to Stoll, who includes in Ramp Hollow a manifesto for an agrarian commons -- that looks for a solution in schemes that place first, foremost, and always the preservation of mountains and mountain-based living, independent of any capitalist, extractive, market-based factors unless they are kept within the bounds of sustainability. Thus might the two Appalachias become one.

I'm not much of an old book collector, but somehow or other I own an 1885 edition of The Land of the Sky, or, Adventures in Mountain By-Ways, by Christian Reid, the pen name of Frances Christine Fisher Tiernan, author of more than 50 novels who was born and died in Salisbury, NC. Originally published in 1876, the book's popularity was such that its title endures as the nickname for the mountain region of western North Carolina centered on the resort city of Asheville. The story is a straightforward, destination-by-destination travelogue -- with an itinerary that includes such enduring must-sees as Hot Springs, Mt. Mitchell, and Bridal Veil Falls -- overlain with the prattle of Victorian courtship. But the romance is quite incidental to the trekking, which is carried out in full dress regalia whether in a coach (this is before the railroad had made it so far as Asheville), on horseback, or on foot. As such it is a very accurate description of how a family of means would have taken an extended mountain vacation at the time. The intrepid voyagers swoon over sunset after sunset and mountain vista after mountain vista; an entire thesaurus of superlatives is emptied into the descriptions of scenery.

What makes it most interesting in connection with this discussion is the matter-of-fact way in which mountaineers are treated. There is little of the human local color -- either descriptive or linguistic -- central to the novels of such interest to Henry Shapiro. The mountaineers are pretty much just there, and largely they are there to provide lodging and food free for the asking, with no notification, to these strangers traveling through the mountains when for whatever reason they find themselves to far from hostelry or otherwise stranded by flooded fords. Air BnB has nothing on this system. (By the way, this hospitality confirms what is largely reported in the literature about the mountains up through Kephart.) The only downside -- for our travelers of means -- seems to have been the universality of the frying pan liberally supplied with lard.

Here, then, are no Shapirovian strange people -- unless hospitality makes them so. They are part of a mountain landscape that provides the reason for the travels. To some extent they make the traveling possible. The word Tiernan most commonly uses as the name for the area where the traveling occurs is Arcadia, the literary geographic honorific designating any rural, pastoral idyll. Coincidentally -- and importantly -- this word is also one frequently employed by Steven Stoll in Ramp Hollow. It is as if it provides a temporal bridge between the two books: one of them a description of travel in the heyday of an agrarian mountain commons (or before its breakdown), and the other an effort at least in part to prescribe the means by which it might be restored. We moderns think of Arcadia as necessarily mythological, and yet the globe is full of actual examples that are both well-inhabited and well-visited.

Might this not be at least a vision for a "back to the future" for an Appalachia re-united with the source of its inspiration? What kinds of answers might arise from a pursuit of restorative and sustainable solutions -- for people and for the mountains -- that held the natural beauty and fecundity of mountain Appalachia to be essential and elemental to the effort? 

As for those being qualities valued only by hikers and other furriners, it isn't so. We know from Kephart and others that the mountaineers of the agrarian commons loved the water and the open air where they lived, and that they felt stifled and poisoned in cities. We can let the testimony of a West Virginia man, Julian Martin, trying to save his homeland from strip mining, as reported by Stoll in Ramp Hollow, be conclusive:

"All my life I've watched the destruction of my native state. When I was a little boy 40 years ago, I used to walk up Bull Creek over on Coal River. Bull Creek's not there anymore. It's gone. My Uncle Ken used to work timber up in the head of that hollow with a mule, and he did the least amount of destruction you possibly could do. That place was beautiful. It's not there anymore. It's just simply gone. It's been destroyed by a strip mine … The first time I saw a strip mine it absolutely stunned me into silence. I was sad and I was sick. I couldn't believe what people could do with a bulldozer to land that used to be beautiful.

"Is it wrong to love beauty; is it wrong to love nature? Is it wrong to say that we have only one earth and it will never be reclaimed -- you can't reclaim a destroyed mountain -- you can put something back there but you can't put that topsoil back on -- just try it. You never, never can walk through that little glade where the ferns are growing. …

"And if you think strip mining is going to bring jobs, look where they've got strip mining in West Virginia and look where they've got the most unemployment. Mingo County. McDowell County. You go to the counties where they have strip mining -- that's where they have the worst of everything. They've got the worst roads; they've got the worst schools; they've got the highest unemployment rate. Everything is wrong with those counties. Is that what you want this beautiful place to become? My daddy was a coal miner, and I understand being out of work, okay? I've been down that road myself. And I know you've got to provide for your family. But I'm saying they're only giving us two options. They're saying, 'Either starve -- or destroy West Virginia.' And surely to God there must be another option."

Appalachia and Appalachia. Pronounce it both ways so it carries sense. The sociopolitical region in the South that's made molehills out of mountains gets to throw the apple atcha; the mountain empire gets the sonorous pronunciation that so appealed to Poe. No ofFENSE, Sharyn McCrumb. And go Vols. May you have enough OFFense to at least beat Vandy.