January 2011

THE PUBLICATION OF U. S. A. NEARLY 60 YEARS AGO secured John Dos Passos’s place in American literary history. Thereafter his reputation gradually faded, and his rowdy, acrid masterpiece petrified into a “classic.” When he died in 1970, the obituaries dutifully mentioned his more than thirty books and harped on his political turnabout from radical leftist to right-wing conservative. One would hardly have gathered from these coroners’ reports and later summings-up that the dead writer had once dazzled his literary generation and left his mark on the work of the next—Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, for example, and E. L. Doctorow’s playful historical fictions—or that no other novelist of his times had so ingeniously evoked the scope and variety of the United States.

JUST ABOUT THIS TIME LAST YEAR, I CAME ACROSS a scene that chimed with the season, and that stayed with me. It was in a book called Heart of Oak, by Tristan Jones, a Welsh adventurer who died last year after a life that began on his father’s tramp steamer in 1924 and took him across nearly half a million miles of ocean. He first signed on as a deck hand aboard a cargo ship at 14, joined the Royal Navy two years later, and after the war went sailing on his own, crossing the Atlantic twenty times and circling the globe nearly four. The New York Times obituary said of him, “He moved from place to place as if the world had invited him in.” At the time of his death, he was living in Phuket, Thailand, teaching disabled children how to sail.

MICKI’S CAFE IS, IN ITS MODEST WAY, a bulwark against the encroachment of modern history and a symbol, amid the declining fortunes of prairie America, of the kind of gritty (and perhaps foolhardy) determination that in more self-confident times used to be called the frontier spirit. To Micki Hutchinson, the problem in the winter of 1991 seemed as plain as the grid of streets that white homesteaders had optimistically laid out in 1910, on the naked South Dakota prairie, to create the town of Isabel in the middle of what they were told was no longer the reservation of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. It was not difficult for Hutchinson to decide what to do when the leaders of the tribal government ordered her to purchase a $250 tribal liquor license: She ignored them.

In the summer of 1948 I was a seventeen-year-old high school student from Kentucky visiting my older sister in the nation’s capital. After making the rounds of the usual tourist attractions, I found my attention drawn to Congressman J. Parnell Thomas’s House Committee on Un-American Activities, then conducting what came to be known as the Hiss-Chambers hearings.

My brother-in-law pointed out that the hearings were open to the public and urged me to attend. They were held in some high-ceilinged government building that reminded me vaguely of the Federal Building back home in Louisville. The halls outside the room were jammed with noisy protesting demonstrators.

I listened raptly for several days as men questioned witnesses and unraveled secrets about Communist party cells in Washington back in the thirties.

April 16,1947, in Texas City, Texas, started out as a beautiful spring day. I was in my last year of high school, practicing for the senior play, making plans for the prom, and looking forward to going to college in the fall. I was having a lot of fun and felt good about the future.

My second class that morning was Physical Education. After dressing and leaving the gym, I started walking to the main building and immediately noticed a large cloud of orange smoke billowing up from the city’s dock area. A couple of my friends decided to play hooky and walk down to the docks to get a closer look. I almost accompanied them but went instead to my typing class.

If you ever want to get your heart pounding, take a helicopter ride over the rugged peaks in Glacier National Park. When I did last summer, it started out calmly enough. After lifting off near the park’s west entrance, we gently bobbed up over the silvery middle fork of the Flathead River and dense forests, steadily gaining altitude as the pilot pointed out occasional landmarks. I was comfortably admiring the view, when I looked down and suddenly realized that the valley had squeezed into a jagged, vertiginous gorge far below us and we were now five thousand feet from the lowest ground. We continued to climb, hovering over rockier and rockier peaks where there were no hikers or trails, no signs of animals or even vegetation. There was only snow and ancient granite formations as we bounced over the summits above the tree line, out of the sight of the dark green valley where we started.

In 1 Timothy, Paul advises his young disciple: “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and for thine often [i.e., common] infirmities.” It might amuse Paul to learn that, after nearly 2000 years, the United States government finally agrees with him. In its most recently issued guidelines for nutrition, the federal government acknowledged that a modest intake of alcohol is not harmful and might even have benefits for the heart.

This is an astonishing development. After all, if there has been one consistency in dietary advice through the years, it has been —to use the title of an amusing book on food fads—"If you like it, don’t eat it.” Virtually everything that people regard as delicious or pleasurable, from cream to gin, has been regularly denounced by diet “experts,” beginning at least as far back as Pythagoras—a vegetarian as well as a mathematician —in the sixth century B.C.

In the autumn of last year, France’s Prime Minister Jacques Chirac ordered a series of test explosions of French nuclear weapons at the center that his government maintains for this purpose on Fangataufa and Mururoa atolls in French Polynesia. He thereby set off a chain reaction (so to speak) of political protests from world capitals, especially those of Pacific nations. These did not prevent the tests from proceeding to their end last January, but they testified powerfully to how little the human race likes to be reminded of the terrible threat to its existence that its own ingenuity created in giving birth to atomic and hydrogen bombs. What strikes me hardest in the story is the coincidence of time and place that puts these latest controlled nuclear explosions not far, as Pacific distances go (some 4500 miles), from another atoll where the United States conducted the world’s first public A-bomb tests just fifty years ago, on the first and twenty-fifth of July 1946. That anniversary may not provoke the controversy that flared last year over commemorating the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, but it is in some ways an even more significant one.