The United States of Dixieland

Modern corporatism, Jesus, and the Death Genes have the country in a bony death grip

by Phil Rockstroh

In a small, prefab house on the coastal Carolina lowlands, an old man, the son of a son of a tobacco sharecropper, my wife’s father, lay dying. Even though the King James Bible had been placed at his bedside, Fox News served as his crutch, conducting him up from this fallen world towards the flawless spires of the Beulah Land.

Across a blacktop highway, there is a billboard that proclaims “One Nation under God—Bush/Cheney 2004.” “Crack makes me feel like Jesus ought to,” the billboard should have proclaimed; perhaps then an impassioned chorus of hosannas would have arisen from the country crackies congregated there.

Upon the perch of a mustard-yellow vinyl sofa cast out into the abandoned field amid the scrawny pine saplings and rusted-out farm tools, the grandson of my wife’s father brought his bony knees to his chin and began rocking upon his meatless haunches, then he raised his crack pipe Eucharist to his parched, quivering lips, inhaled, and gave his life over to the Lord God of Dopamine.

Across the Low Country, the family farms are gone. Tired trucks fulminate on the broken blacktop highways. The swamps are being drained; the lumber plundered. As doomed as the drought-desiccated cornstalks, the lives of the sons and daughters of moonshine-makers are now decimated by crystal meth and crack cocaine. As the swamp recedes, bear and bobcat are gone and convenience stores, Wal-Mart superstores, strip malls and fast food joints choke the landscape where tenant farmers once struggled to survive.

Fat people, clad in stretch clothing, are everywhere, while others are morbidly thin, having only an appetite that craves crack cocaine highs and crystal meth tweaking. Their hardscrabble survival instincts are gone, yet the relentless appetite remains. It’s terrifying the way the urge towards life, when thwarted, can go over to its opposite, with equal vigor, revealing the death skull beneath the skin.

This is what Walker Percy wrote of that internal landscape: “Death in the form of death genes shall not prevail over me, for death genes are one thing but it is something else to name the death genes and know them and stand over against them and dare them. I am different from my death genes and therefore not subject to them. My father had the same death genes but he feared them and did not name them and thought he could roar out old Route 66 and stay ahead of them or grab me and be pals or play Brahms and keep them, the death genes, happy, so he fell prey to them.”

Yet this variety of tragic consanguinity is not limited to the doomed hinterlands, for it rules the order of the present day as well. The Death Genes lord over the American empire. Accordingly, an empire destroys nearly everything it touches, because, after a time, it begins to exist for no other reason other than to perpetuate its own existence. Within it, its subjects’ lives lose meaning and purpose: meaningless work, petty ambition, and endless appetite define the days, resulting in a decimated (internal as well as external) landscape. Hollowed-out lives and the concomitant death cult convergence of religious fundamentalism and habitual consumerism follows.

The corporate empire has imprinted the Death Genes within us and it is made manifest before us in the world we have created. It is as visible as the noxious vapors of pollutants veiling the horizon line at sunset. It shimmers like heat spires above our traffic-stalled interstates. It reeks like the endless archipelagos of overflowing landfills spanning the length of the land. The Death Genes hold us as we hold a TV remote in our hands, and when the news turns tragic, it moves us to tremble with excitement and barely concealed glee.

Fox News, like the jackal-headed, carrion-eating god Anubus, leads the old man through the land of the dead: Through the now dried-up swamplands of his youth through the limbo of suburbs and exurbs that displaced it. The old man is led past rural crystal meth labs and pharmaceutical plants and Starbucks Coffee cafés where pale faces receive the libations needed to provisionally pass for the living. The guide and his charge linger in pawn shops, gun stores (so many gun stores) and firing ranges, all temples devoted to the true higher power of the American empire: The God of Death. These are all locations where this grim God gathers sustenance and strength, drawing energy from the nation’s emanations of hatred, fear, and aggression like a reptile luxuriating on a sun-heated rock. And finally, they arrive at a small mortuary where they listen to a self-satisfied Baptist minister delivering the old man's eulogy, a sermon devoted to the love and worship of the God of Death as all the while, the preacher takes measure of the old man’s shrunken corpse, laid out in his open casket, like a used car salesman accessing the resale value of a Ford Pinto with a cracked engine block.

The ground now begins the process of decomposing the remains of the old man’s body in tragic symmetry to the manner in which the neo-plantation system of tenant farming held his youth and composed the contradictions of his gentle/angry, generous/spiteful, humble/racist mind.

Yet these confounding and contradictory attributes of the southern psyche will not be dissolved into dirt: Traits of habitual submission to authority, of hostile defiance against any hint of outside interference in their lives, of fierce loyalty to one’s kin and unquestioning devotion to the place of one’s birth, of reflexive racial hatred and resistance to change, of moonshine revelry and anguished come-to-Jesus recantations of sin, will live on through the old man's progeny.

Those characteristics worked to the benefit of the ruling elite of the post-plantation south and now provide the same service for the lords of the corporate empire: At present, given that our lives must be surrendered to long hours of exploitive labor and that we're offered little hope of ever removing the overseer’s boot from our throats, we have come to share an affinity of exploitation with the laboring class rabble of the old south. From the cotton and tobacco fields of the (allegedly) bygone feudalist order, up to the present-day low pay, no benefits jobs of the so-called “service sector economy” (where vast numbers of us can only keep a roof over our heads, inexpensive junk food in our bellies, and WalMart quality clothes on our backs by assuming crushing debt), those hope-decimating labor practices and company town credit schemes are still with us.

Also mirroring the values of Old Dixie, so many of us Americans, regardless of region, share an unquestioning loyalty to military tradition and a pernicious, collective pathology that glorifies the squandering of one’s life in wars that serve to profit the narrow interests of a small, self-serving, aristocratic class. Ergo, from the so-called “War of Northern Aggression” right up to the equally absurdly titled “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the mistaking of blind faith for heroic sacrifice persists.

Moreover, as was the case with so many poverty-stricken whites in the Deep South, the inequities of the present order have endowed many contemporary Americans with a sense of nebulous rage and nettling resentment begot by having one’s spirit repeatedly crushed by the inhuman demands of an implacable system. Then as now, these anguished sentiments rise as fear, resentment, and hatred of minorities, homosexuals, reformers, and outsiders. From the Klan meetings, the Jim Crow laws and the lynching of the bad-old-days of Dixieland, right up to the right wing hate-speak of talk radio, the de facto segregation of gated, suburban subdivisions, and the Christo-fascistic queer bashing of these bad-new days, the hateful legacies linger.

****