Lyndon Johnson's father was a being. Texas isn't so clear a past as the present would dictate. Paraphrases of another's lifework, be damned-- liquor takes me. Texas as the histories play, was a place to flee when opportunity ran dry. Endless northern plains, of thick grass and cattle speculation. Where mortal money could raise herds that, when driven north to Chicago or rail-line way stations, purchased fortunes from the market.
But grass and cattle are seasonal breeds, mens' ambitions have slight more longevity. One year's profit became the next year's beginning, most bet the past onto the promise of an equally prosperous future. Unluckily, inches of Texas topsoil lay atop bare limestone. Overgrazing cut the vegetable grass and the plain winds blew the rich loam dirt into air. Through mere years, grazing became bedrock and desperate-fortunes of cow starved over it.
More of Texas and Johnsons. History's tendency is to make the present seem inevitable. But Texas as today was not the same yesterday. A strong arm of its yesterday was made of the unfortunate poor hands left owning only limestone farms. Years of grazed profit evaporated and these gambling souls turned unto one another for support and formed-- as I liquoredly remember it-- the Farmer's Alliance.
In this mutual, though often contentious, bond they shared machinery and profit and hardship, for survival's sake. A liberality of the most necessary circumstances, but a liberality as deeply pure as granite hard. It was at this time juncture that Lyndon Johnson's father, then a younger man, entered into Texas state politic. He, a freshly made cattle rancher as his brothers, represented poor stone towns left impoverished by their bets against tomorrow.
This man, young father of a growing family, entered at that crucial early 20th century juncture. After World War 1 petered out, this man represented veteran farmers of the meagerest sort-- denied their war benefits, and starved through nature by their land. This Older Johnson, for all his faults, believed in prayers higher than interested-profit. He stood strong before two critical cross-battles-- defending the doomed Farmer's Alliance against the wheel mechanics of bare starvation capitalist, and then defending and winning the Texas World War veterans' their promised dollar.
It is only one America, we cynically promise ourselves. And elsewhere is no different than here, one time is only a variation upon today. We promise ourselves. Lyndon Johnson had an estranged relationship with his Older Johnson (especially as he turned more heavily drunkard), but kissed the old man on the lips when leaving for his junior year as beginning statesman. Kissed his father's lips, for the last time, whilst boarding his power-bound train.
Older Johnson's health failed. But he presented one wish--
To live where his neighbors knew his name, and to die where his neighbors gave a damn.
And that he did. Decades after his long stint as statesman were passed, Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr's funeral procession was lined by the veterans whose survival he battled for, lined by those farmers whose banner he waved in loyal and principled defeat. Coarse and hoary people, independent and disinclined to show affection-- these citizens gathered in their only honest tribute to a man.
No one is sinless, but Senate, sometimes men are dutifully remembered for a few good deeds by a few good people.
James Mossman interview with Vladimir Nabokov.
ReplyDelete1969 BBC
-JM: You said "Looking out from my present ridge of remote isolated almost uninhabited time." Why uninhabited?
-VN: For the same reason that a desert island is a more a deserving island then one with a footprint initialing it's beach. More over, uninhabited makes more sense here because more of my former contemporaries are gone.
-JM: As you recall a patch of time, it's shapes sizes sounds colors and occupants, does this image help you combat time or clues to it's mysteries or is it an image that pleases you?
-VN: Let me quote a paragraph from memory in my book Ada (1959) "Physiologically the sense of time is a sense of continuous becoming. Philosophically, on the other hand, time is but memory in the making. In every individual life there goes out from them a cradle to death bate. The gradually shaping and strengthening of the back-bone of consciousness, which is the time of the strong." This is Van speaking, I have not decided yet if I agree with him on all his views on the texture of time, in-fact I am sure I don't.
-JM: Have you ever experienced hallucinations or heard voices or had visions, and if so, have they been illuminating?
-VN: When about to fall asleep after a good deal of writing or reading, I often enjoy, if that is the right word, what some drug addicts experience, a continuous series of extraordinary bright, fluidly changing pictures. Their type is different nightly, but on a given night it remains the same: one night it may be a banal kaleidoscope of endlessly recombined and reshaped stained-window designs; next time comes a subhuman or superhuman face with a formidably growing blue eye; or — and this is the most striking type — I see in realistic detail a long-dead friend turning toward me and melting into another remembered figure against the black velvet of my eyelids’ inner side. As to voices, I have described in Speak, Memory the snatches of telephone talk which now and then vibrate in my pillowed ear. Reports on those enigmatic phenomena can be found in the case histories collected by psychiatrists but no satisfying interpretation has come my way. Freudians, keep out, please!
"But he presented one wish--
ReplyDeleteTo live where his neighbors knew his name, and to die where his neighbors gave a damn."
the senate turns biographical.
senator, given the recent trend of communication betwixt nero and thyself, i am surprised he did not read this as a camouflaged suicide note.
but do we have the love of our neighbors? the kinship of strangers is hard to come by in a divided country such as ours.
it is no new argument that the digital age has cooled "real" human interaction. the big city is small when it comes to connections between strangers, yet how often do these connections go unknown? how many of us can say we know our neighbors?
mine own hardly speak english, and at times i smile and say hello to the woman below me, but the man below her? i dont even know his name. we get misplaced mail in our mailboxes and i take a look at the names and wonder: wait, does that person live here? is this someone who forgot to change their address when they moved out some time ago? no matter, i'll just put it in the mail box that isn't mine and go inside.
does a farmer's alliance pay in jam?