Sometime in the early 1990’s, while attending an event called a “song swap” in Athens, Georgia, I met an extraordinarily gifted songwriter named Patterson Hood. The swap itself was essentially a weekly gathering of aspiring tunesmiths sharing their latest creations; we would sit in a circle and each play our songs, the other musicians joining in if they had the chops or the inclination. Everything was going fine—just another evening of pleasant mediocrity—until the slightly pudgy guy with a five-o’clock shadow and food stains down his shirt had his turn. Stomping his foot on the wooden floor in time with the music, he strummed his battered acoustic guitar and sang:

My roommate’s gun got nine bullets in it
Gonna find a use for every last one
One for the girl who chose to betray me
Better aim that sucker true
One for the guy that she betrayed with
A nice enough fella, she’ll betray him too

At that point, we all should have just got up and gone home, but we continued on, the rest of us noticeably subdued and slightly ashamed when it came time for our offerings. Then it was back to Patterson. “Mama ran off with a trucker!” he shrieked, playing a beefy, Stonesy guitar riff. “They got married . . . in Dollywood! / By a Porter Wagoner lookalike.”

Murder ballads and backwoods love—delivered with conviction and humor. Patterson’s music was all the more stunning because, at that time, the Athens music scene was in the throes of a rather odd psychedelic rock revival. A loose patchwork of bands calling themselves the Elephant 6 Collective ambled about town in garish clothes and—in their various hovels and broken-down rented duplexes—banged out a Dadaist racket with all the sweet earnestness of kids who had just discovered their parents’ dusty Beatles LP collections. The scene had attracted the attention of Rolling Stone, and it seemed as if every musician in Athens was busting his britches to be associated with Elephant 6. Not so Patterson. While he was friendly with all of these people, he steadfastly continued to follow his own Deep South muse. Out of this determination, he and childhood friend Mike Cooley formed the Drive-By Truckers.

[amazonify]B000068FUS[/amazonify]Considering the talent that had already been on display at the song swap, it was no surprise that the Truckers picked up a loyal audience virtually overnight and began touring and cutting albums, eventually landing a deal with the prestigious Austin, Texas, record label New West. Along the way, Patterson and Cooley began stringing together increasingly elaborate “song suites”—sequences of two or more songs exploring a single theme from various perspectives. As a lyricist, Patterson had moved beyond his rogues’ gallery of Flannery O’Connor outcasts and was beginning to grapple with the meaning and identity of the South itself, a quest that culminated in a double album entitled Southern Rock Opera. It is safe to say that there has never been anything quite like it in the annals of either rock or country music—a “musical novel” that, among other things, infuses the rise and fall of Lynyrd Skynyrd with the gravitas of a Shakespearean tragedy.

A little over a decade earlier, the band R.E.M. had come out of Athens and had been very closely identified with the South. They certainly did not sound like country or bluegrass or anything demonstrably Southern, but Michael Stipe’s barely discernible lyrics contained just enough folksy turns of phrase and references to colorful local characters (such as artist/preacher Howard Finster) to inspire a number of critics to anoint the quartet the Voice of the New South—a South which, in the hands of that particular post-punk band, came off as a fuzzy and nonthreatening “progressive” place with just enough eccentricity to make it interesting.

By contrast, some mused, the Drive-By Truckers represented the Old South and were a sort of rejoinder to R.E.M. But the label is not entirely appropriate, at least not in the way Old South is generally understood, for there is little antebellum splendor in the band’s lyrics. Rather, most of the Truckers’ songs focus on the farmers and hardworking country folk who got left behind when Henry Grady’s New South really began to take hold—when the smokestacks and factory farms pushed those who had once lived off the land into lives of desperation. Hood, Cooley, and post-Southern Rock Opera addition Jason Isbell present these people as dynamic human beings with strengths and foibles, not as the ignorant hicks they are so often portrayed to be in movies and TV. And yet the songwriters are not afraid to look at the dark side of things. On Southern Rock Opera, Hood tempers his regional pride with an honest appraisal of the South’s shortcomings. The track “Ronnie and Neil” serves as a sort of manifesto, in which he uses the Neil Young/Lynyrd Skynyrd feud as a metaphor for the distorted prism through which many non-Southerners view the South:

And out in California, a rock star from Canada writes a couple of great songs
About the bad sh-t that went down
“Southern Man” and “Alabama” certainly told some truth
But there were a lot of good folks down here
And Neil Young wasn’t around

His view of George Wallace is similarly multifaceted. In an extended spoken-word piece titled “The Three Great Alabama Icons,” he muses:

[Wallace’s] track record as a judge and his late-life quest for redemption make a good argument for his being at worst no worse than most white men of his generation, North or South.

And yet he rues the long-term effect of Wallace’s 1960’s legacy:

You know, racism is a worldwide problem, and it’s been since the beginning of recorded history, and it ain’t just white and black. But thanks to George Wallace, it’s always a little more convenient to play it with a Southern accent.

[amazonify]B0002E5OIW[/amazonify]Certainly, there are aspects of Southern Rock Opera and the equally adventurous follow-up, The Dirty South, that some Southerners may take issue with (the notion that George Wallace is now drinking sweet tea in Hell being just one), but no one can deny Hood the authority to explore these topics: He and his band mates are native sons of Alabama. In assessing Wallace, Patterson is simply sizing up the man who governed his state (both directly and through the proxy governorship of wife Lurleen) for most of his life. Hood is no “rock star from Canada” passing judgment on a region in which he has never set foot.

On the whole, what is most striking about Patterson’s ruminations is that they are almost entirely without precedent in popular music. While novelists have long explored the nuances of the South—many to great acclaim—songwriters have tended to render the region in black and white, offering up hackneyed clichés in an attempt to explain it. Even Bob Dylan could not resist penning the screed “Oxford Town,” in which his usually stately lyricism gives way to a sort of “See Spot Run” banality:

He went down to Oxford Town
Guns and clubs followed him down
All because his face was brown
Better get away from Oxford Town

The South has certainly seen its share of great pop songwriters—Johnny Mercer, Ray Charles, and Johnny Cash spring immediately to mind—but they often tend to write either in universal terms (Mercer’s songs were rarely region-specific) or about individual characters. And although Hood’s beloved Lynyrd Skynyrd gave us “Sweet Home Alabama”—a fine effort, to be sure—the Truckers, in articulating and defending the legacy of that earlier band, have done them one better; in presenting Skynyrd, Bear Bryant, and George Wallace as a sort of regional holy trinity, they have tied together the disparate threads of “the Southern thang” in a way that is unique.

The Truckers have released three albums since Southern Rock Opera, the best of which is The Dirty South. What really strikes me is the ascendancy of both Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell as songwriters par excellence. Indeed, “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac”—Cooley’s paean to the 1950’s Memphis label Sun Records—contains more quotable phrases than any other song in recent memory. Like Hood, he is obsessed with the South—the myth, the reality, and what it means to be Southern. The Dirty South finds these two songwriters (along with Isbell, who would subsequently leave the band to embark on a successful solo career) working closely together to take the concepts of Southern Rock Opera even further. By the final ringing guitar note, the manifesto is complete.

After The Dirty South, there was nowhere to turn but left, and so the next album, A Blessing and a Curse, consisted of stripped-down, melodic songs with decidedly less twang. Some fans have not been happy with this new direction, but the band is simply doing what good bands are supposed to do: stretch, explore, evolve. Perhaps the title of the album reflects the complexity of the Drive-By Truckers’ own reputation.

After all, once you have been anointed the Voice of the New Old South, it is hard to set that aside and just rock. At any rate, over the course of several challenging and rewarding records, Patterson & Co. have given us all a lot to think about regarding region, history, personal identity, and outside perceptions of such.

After that first meeting at the song swap, Patterson and I sent letters and tapes back and forth for a time, keeping each other updated on what we were up to. I am sure he had many such pen pals back in those days, as he liked to carry around boxes of demo tapes and hand them out to whomever would accept them. And I will bet that anyone who listened to those tapes immediately dashed off a note to the P.O. box listed inside the case, requesting more. As for me, I drifted off into that psychedelia I mentioned earlier; consequently, it took me a while to appreciate the simplicity and elegance of the Truckers’ music. In fact, it really did not click until I left the South, at which point they became a lifeline.

[amazonify]B000ZKRFDA[/amazonify]No one talks about the Elephant 6 Collective anymore. But I have a hunch that, many years from now, people will still be listening to Southern Rock Opera and The Dirty South. Maybe those albums will inspire folks to read up on such colorful characters as George Wallace, Bear Bryant, Ronnie Van Zant, Buford Pusser, Sam Phillips, and Carl Perkins, or to research Patterson Hood himself. The music is loud, lewd, relentless—the songs, giant shards of electrified Southern rock only rarely giving way to the occasional bluegrass-tinged ballad—and the sustained sonic assault can be tiring at times. Yet amongst all that sound and fury is soaring poetry and an unerring portrait of a distinct time, place, and people.

The Drive-By Truckers’ latest album, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, is available at the iTunes Music Store. Robert Lurie is the author of No Certainty Attached (forthcoming from Verse Chorus Press).

This article first appeared in the June 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The United States has three large economic problems. The overarching one is that the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency is wearing out from continuous and large trade deficits and from government budget deficits that have to be financed by foreigners because the U.S. savings rate is approximately zero. Judging by the dollar’s loss of value in relation to gold and to currencies such as the euro, Swiss franc, and Japanese yen, the U.S. dollar is losing its attractiveness as a currency in which to hold assets.

A second problem is the solvency of our financial institutions because of the crisis of subprime-mortgage derivatives and other ill-conceived leveraged derivatives. The extent of this crisis is not known. Financial-industry balance sheets and capital structures are impaired. If the troubled derivatives are in trillions of dollars, as news reports claim, the Federal Reserve bailout of one investment bank, Bear Sterns, is unlikely to have stopped the bleeding.

A third is that the U.S. economy has entered into recession. Normally, the Federal Reserve responds to recession by expanding credit through the banking system, relying on the growing supply of money to fuel consumer and investment demand. However, with the banking system impaired and with American consumers overloaded with credit-card and mortgage debt, that course of action alone might not be effective. Consequently, the Bush administration and Congress are handing out $600 “tax rebate” checks—which will likely be used to pay down existing credit-card debt.

Together, these three create a fourth problem. With the dollar declining in value against other currencies and with U.S. domestic inflation rising, U.S. government debt at low interest rates is not an attractive investment. Traditionally, financial panics result in a flight to Treasury bonds and bills, and this traditional response can sustain the Treasury market for a while. However, sooner or later, investors must realize that a low-interest, dollar-denominated security is not a good investment.

Can these problems be solved?

Perhaps the Federal Reserve can create the liquidity to stabilize the financial system or, in effect, purchase the troubled financial instruments. However, monetizing debt is inflationary.

Getting the U.S. economy going again might be more difficult; in the 21st century, it has been driven by the expansion of consumer debt, not by growth in real incomes, and most consumers lack the capacity to take on more debt in order to purchase more goods and services. Credit-card debt is high, and many Americans responded to the housing boom by refinancing their home mortgages and spending the equity that they had in their homes. This boost to consumer demand is no longer possible.

The dollar problem seems even less correctable. There appears to be no way that the United States can close her trade deficit. According to the February 28 issue of Manufacturing & Technology News, our imports exceed our industrial production. Even if we sold abroad every item manufactured on our soil, we would still have a trade deficit.

Globalism is often touted as the savior of the U.S. economy. This positive spin ignores the fundamental problems globalism poses. For example, globalism reduces GDP growth and drives down average wages.

A significant percentage of U.S. imports, especially those from China, is the offshored production that U.S. corporations sell to us at home. When a corporation closes facilities located here and moves them to China in order to benefit from lower labor costs, our GDP goes down, and China’s goes up. When the products manufactured offshore are brought back into America, imports rise by that amount. By offshoring their production for U.S. markets, American corporations have simultaneously increased U.S. imports and reduced U.S. goods available for export.

Offshoring has reduced the availability of good-paying jobs for middle-class Americans. It is not only manufacturing jobs that are being moved abroad, but software-engineering jobs, IT jobs, and a wide range of other professional occupations. Consequently, the ladders of upward mobility are being dismantled. Many of the professional jobs that remain are being filled with foreigners, especially engineers and IT professionals from India, who are brought in on work visas and paid less by U.S. employers, who falsely claim worker shortages. Many thousands of U.S. employees are discharged after being forced to train their foreign replacements. The pursuit of lower-cost foreign labor is eroding consumer purchasing power in the United States.

In the 21st century, all net new U.S. jobs have been in non-tradable domestic services, such as waitresses and bartenders, healthcare and social assistance, and wholesale and retail trade. The U.S. labor force is taking on the characteristics of a Third World economy. In 2007, we lost 374,000 jobs in goods-producing industries. Job growth was confined to domestic services. Waitresses and bartenders accounted for 29 percent of the 1,054,000 net new private-sector jobs in 2007. Healthcare and social assistance accounted for 45 percent of them. Wholesale and retail trade, together with transportation and utilities, accounted for 17 percent.

The Bush administration’s estimate of a $410 billion federal-budget deficit for the current fiscal year is based on an assumption of 2.7-percent economic growth; that estimate is unrealistic, however, since the economy has entered into recession. With consumers pressed and jobs declining, Americans do not have enough discretionary income to afford a tax increase. And the Republicans are determined to keep their wars going. Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, estimates that the full cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is now a staggering three trillion dollars.

Foreigners have been financing our trade deficit by using export earnings to purchase existing U.S. assets, acquiring ownership over a larger percentage of U.S. equities, companies, bonds, and real estate. They have even acquired long-term leases (99 years) on the revenues from several state toll roads. The Chinese have purchased U.S. iron deposits. With each passing year, the United States owns less of herself. By acquiring our assets, foreigners also acquire the income streams generated by them—profits, capital gains, rents, dividends, tolls, and interest. These diverted income streams, in turn, increase the U.S. current-account deficit.

The idea that the United States is a “superpower,” when she is dependent on China and Japan to finance her wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is nonsensical. The United States is too dependent on foreign finance to retain her role as holder of the world’s reserve currency, an important source of U.S. power.

Libertarians and free-market economists mistake offshoring for free trade and, therefore, assume that offshoring is beneficial. Offshoring is not trade at all; it is international labor arbitrage. Trade takes place when, for example, U.S. industries compete against Chinese industries in domestic and foreign markets. Free trade is based on different countries specializing in areas in which they have comparative advantage.

Offshoring is based on the desire for absolute advantage by achieving lowest factor cost. U.S. corporations move their production to China in order to maximize profits by minimizing labor and compliance costs.

Offshoring was not possible on a significant scale until the collapse of world socialism and the advent of high-speed internet access, which opened large excess supplies of Chinese and Indian labor to First World corporations. Today, many American brand-name manufactured goods are made abroad in whole or in part for U.S. markets, and a wide range of professional services can be supplied to U.S. offices from foreigners via the internet and H1B, L1, and other work visas. Young people from Russia, Ukraine, Rumania, Thailand, and elsewhere are brought in on short-term J9 and J4 visas and supplied as contract labor to supermarkets, resort-area cleaning services, and restaurants. It is becoming increasingly difficult for Americans of all ages to find a job of any kind.

Offshoring, the internet, and work visas have forced American labor into direct competition with foreign labor. This is different from trade competition in which U.S. labor competes with foreign labor in manufactured product markets. In foreign trade, U.S. labor, working with better technology and business know-how, was more productive than foreign labor and remained competitive despite higher U.S. wage rates. Today, offshoring provides Chinese or other foreign labor with the same technology and business acumen. This gives the advantage to the lower-wage countries and has halted growth in U.S. real wages despite productivity growth.

In pursuit of higher profits, Wall Street pressures corporations to move facilities offshore, and in pursuit of price advantages, large retailers, such as Wal-Mart, pressure their U.S. suppliers to go offshore. Some economists tout Wal-Mart’s lower prices as the payoff to Americans for their lost jobs. However, when the lower prices are offset by lower incomes and the dollar’s decline, the overall effect of offshoring is adverse. Wal-Mart’s “always low prices” can only last so long as China keeps her currency pegged to the U.S. dollar. Sooner or later, if the dollar continues to decline, China may abandon the currency peg (Beijing has recently adopted a moving peg and is allowing its currency to appreciate gradually against the dollar), and the United States will find herself dependent on expensive foreign-manufactured goods she cannot afford.

John Williams, proprietor of Shadow Government Statistics, has been following U.S. economic indicators for decades. He notes that each administration has tinkered with the official statistics in order to make itself look a bit better; the cumulative effect over the decades is that the statistics greatly understate the problems. Williams finds that the real rates of inflation and unemployment are about twice the reported rates.

[amazonify]0307396061[/amazonify]Before his resignation in March, David M. Walker, head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, revealed that the unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government total $53 trillion. Our declining economy has no possibility of paying such an enormous sum. Hubris has blinded Washington to the severity of our economic problems. In truth, it owes the world.

Paul Craig Roberts was assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Reagan administration and an associate editor at the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

This article first appeared in the June 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Not so the American people—most of them, anyway. After the initial shock of the day gave way to weeks of “special reports” and celebrity tributes to the victims and heroes of September 11, most Americans lived their lives post-September 11 as they did, in the words of the President, “pre-September 10.” There were some added inconveniences whenever they had to travel; their 401(k)’s, already battered by the bust of the dot-com boom, sank to new lows; and Washington began racking up debts that their children and grandchildren will never be able to pay, but all in all, everyday life was little changed.

For “Abdul,” however, September 11, 2001, was a true turning point. In November 2001, the Chicago Tribune ran a story about how life had changed for Muslims at the Rockford Iqra School and mosque, and when Aaron Wolf and I visited the school in February 2002, Magdy Kandil, one of the founders of the Muslim Community Foundation of Rockford, had told us that Muslims, who had only recently begun to see themselves as full participants in American political life, now were “a little bit confused about the new laws” and reluctant to speak out publicly.

Abdul’s situation was even more complex. After all, he was not born into Islam. Educated in a Catholic school, he had converted to Islam from his family’s Lutheranism. Moreover, while he dressed in traditional Muslim garb and had grown a beard, he otherwise did not look the part. You can take an eighth-generation German-American out of his ancestral religion, but you cannot change his genes.

Nor, for that matter, can you change his history. While he had adopted a new religion, Abdul was still intensely proud of his family’s history, his ethnic group, and his country. He had spent years researching his own genealogy and the history of German settlers in Winnebago County. In dozens of binders, he had amassed birth certificates, death notices, and burial information on thousands of German-Americans in Northern Illinois. He was, in the strictest sense of the word, a patriot—someone who loved a particular people in a particular place.

Abdul had collected scores of old photographs of his ancestors, many of them in military uniform. His father had been a Marine in the Vietnam War; his great-grandfather, who had brought him up, had fought in World War II. While at West High School in Rockford (before it was closed, triggering the 13-year-long Rockford desegregation lawsuit), he had joined ROTC. He had hoped to follow in his ancestors’ footsteps, but his later run-ins with the law, including a felony conviction for attempted robbery, would keep him out of the service.

After September 11, however, Abdul hoped that the situation might have changed. He was fluent in Arabic and had studied fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) in Egypt and in Yemen. Having begun his studies under an adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimin), an organization that practically defines radical Islam, before renouncing a radicalism that he had never found comfortable and completing his studies under a Salafi scholar, Abdul believed that he had skills to offer beyond simple physical ability. He went down to the local Army recruitment office in Rockford and tried to enlist.

The recruiter administered the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), a multiple-choice test used to determine the suitability of potential enlistees. The ASVAB returns a percentile ranking, comparing the test-taker to all others who have taken the test. The minimum ranking in order to enter each branch of the Armed Services varies from 31 (Army and Army National Guard) to 36 (Coast Guard, Air Force, and Air National Guard). Abdul scored a 92, placing him at the very top of the second-highest category of aspiring recruits.

While the recruiter was impressed by the score and by Abdul’s desire to serve his country, September 11 had not changed the fact of Abdul’s felony conviction. The Army could not accept him, but, the recruiter told him, his skills might be useful elsewhere. Had he thought about volunteering for something related to homeland security? The recruiter suggested that Abdul contact the FBI.

Others might have picked up the phone or sent a letter of inquiry; Abdul walked into a local FBI office clothed in traditional Islamic garb. His appearance, he recalls, was greeted with astonishment; even after he explained the purpose of his visit, security guards made him walk through a metal detector three times, though he had not set it off the first or the second time.

The FBI’s initial skepticism was quickly dispelled as the field agents he talked to became convinced of his sincerity. In addition to his language skills, Abdul had other things to offer. His own troubled background and history with a Chicago-based gang that had been something of a recruiting ground for Islam gave him a certain street credibility, while radical Muslims—particularly those associated with U.S. affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood—viewed (quite correctly) both black and Caucasian converts to Islam as more easily radicalized. At a time when it was reasonable to expect that the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies would be attempting to infiltrate Islamic organizations that might be recruiting potential terrorists, Muslim stereotyping of converts to their own religion caused them to lower their suspicions.

By early 2002, Abdul had begun working for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in Chicago, and his activities were confined to Chicago and the near suburbs. With a significant and growing Muslim population and the headquarters or important chapters of several major Muslim organizations loosely connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, Chicago proved fertile ground. His earliest efforts were aimed entirely at gathering intelligence—making contacts in mosques and Muslim organizations and listening carefully for anything out of the ordinary.

It did not take long before Abdul came into contact with a Pakistani Muslim, living in Chicago, who was making frequent trips outside the United States. When it became clear that the Pakistani had been visiting a terrorist training camp near Johannesburg, South Africa, the JTTF acted quickly, and the man was arrested at O’Hare International Airport, as he was preparing to board a plane.

It was the first arrest that Abdul had a hand in, but it would be far from the last. Over the next several years, his work for the FBI would result in somewhere between 15 and 20 arrests. Abdul is not sure of the exact number because many of them, like the arrest at O’Hare, were carried out quietly and kept out of the news, and Abdul was usually removed from contact with the suspects at least a few weeks before the arrest. While JTTF officials have not given him a precise count, they have told him that they “have never seen work” like his.

By 2003, the FBI was sufficiently impressed with his work that they asked Abdul if he would be willing to take on assignments outside of the Chicago area. He agreed, and over the next four years, he spent extended periods away from Rockford and Chicago, in more than a half-dozen locations in the Eastern United States. Each situation was different, but the process was the same: Move into an area; get to know members of a mosque or other Islamic organization; listen carefully; try to befriend anyone who seemed suspicious or potentially dangerous; and, all the while, keep the FBI handlers up to date on any developments. In some cases, Abdul’s work resulted in arrests, including two high-profile cases that Abdul can only discuss off the record because his cover was never compromised. In others, he gathered intelligence that has helped the FBI determine that entire mosques require further scrutiny and surveillance.
The assignments became lengthier and more nerve-wracking, and they began to take a toll on his health.

After he had started working with the FBI, Abdul married two other Muslim women (one, an Oxford-educated economist), and his family grew to more than a half-dozen children. By early 2006, he decided that he wanted out. He returned to Rockford and began planning for a quiet future. He became more active again in the local mosque, and his children were still attending the Rockford Iqra School. Life was returning to normal.

Abdul still kept in touch with the FBI, of course, and in August 2006, a field agent with whom he had worked contacted him to ask a favor. The JTTF had their eye on an African-American convert to Islam who attended the mosque in DeKalb, Illinois, and lived with his mother in Genoa. He had a job in Rockford. They could not offer any further details, other than his name, his place of employment, and his work schedule. Would Abdul be willing to seek him out, get to know him a little bit, and offer his assessment?

* * *

The assignment seems simple enough. Further work had not really been in his plans, but this job will not require him to be away from his family. A few days, maybe a week, and he can make a full report to the field agent. Abdul agrees.

And so, in late August, Abdul drives out into the Wasteland of East State Street, Rockford’s version of the several-mile-long strip of big-box stores and chain restaurants, anchored on the far end by a Wal-Mart, that plagues most Midwestern cities. Leaving his car in the massive parking lot that sprawls in front of Target and several smaller chain stores, he walks toward EB Games, a video-game retailer and rental shop that occupies the small storefront on the east end of the strip mall.

According to the schedule provided by the FBI field agent, Derrick Shareef should be at work right now.

Scott P. Richert is the executive editor of Chronicles.

This article first appeared in the June 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

I had continued writing it in the aftermath of the Spring of ’24, increasingly in the tone of friendly advice rather than acidic warning. Being mild in tenor and approving in sentiment is not conducive to interesting ideas, however, and it is gratifying to admit that neither advice nor warning from us old-timers is much needed in today’s “foreign-policy community” in Washington. Its dwindling crew is composed of solidly educated civil servants rather than ideologues or foreign agents, and the ship of state is in capable and trustworthy hands for the first time since Calvin Coolidge, a century ago.

Another reason it is time to bid farewell to the American Interest is editorial. With the print run nearing half a million, it is time for Chronicles to refocus on “American culture” in the proper sense of die Kultur, the sum of the life of a community and its mores. I hope the Young Turks in the Fleming Tower will see that necessity and act accordingly, but I am not certain of their ability to resist the temptation of establishmentarianism. They are human and therefore subject to Lord Acton’s dictum. All those Veuve Clicquot empties in the bins of top-floor offices are not a good sign.

Friday, June 2—Flew to Boston for the third Samuel Francis Memorial Lecture at Harvard.

Our youthful Director of Homeland Security chose an apt title, “The Lonely Prophet,” for his address. It was all rather grand, but Sam would have deemed the speaker’s adulatory tone worthy of a barbed quip. The focus was on the supposed harmony between some of Sam’s ideas and the vision behind this administration’s security policies, such as the completion of the “Friendship Fence” along the southern border, the “phased” repatriation of illegal immigrants (as well as Islamic activists regardless of status), the “permanent moratorium” on immigration from “culturally unaffiliated countries or communities,” and the “active discouragement of deviants” from joining the military and security services. The speaker concluded by saying that “Dr. Francis and his fellow turn-of-the-millennium patriots clearly did not expect that America would return to a properly limited federal government in their lifetime,” but they nevertheless provided the ideas that nurtured the Second Revolution:

Thanks to such great Americans as Sam Francis, this country’s public servants no longer seek to reconfigure the United States in accordance with the multiculturalist ideology, but consciously strive for the neutrality of the state apparatus within the patriotic paradigm while defending this country’s core national, state, and security interests, and doing so resolutely and humanely.

Last year’s lecture by the Vice President, “The Movement That Moved,” had a different tenor, with its impassioned plea for the return to the legacy of our forebears and the culture they created. The new regime is increasingly self-confident, however, and I am certain Sam would approve of its policies while remaining skeptical of its rhetoric.

Saturday, June 3—Started the day with a long espresso and an excellent NPR commentary, by a soft-spoken cleric with a Slavic name, on the evils of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Treating the French Revolution as a major catastrophe in the history of mankind is long overdue. The good father concludes by saying that “knowing the past enables us to discern meaning in the present and trust God with our future.” It does indeed, but such reminders are becoming a tad too frequent on this reformed institution’s airwaves. I suspect that some of its pre-2024 editors still on the payroll are trying a little too hard to prove their ideological bona fides under the new regime.

Lunched with a journalist just back from Paris. It seems that the evacuation of Muslims from France did not go quite as smoothly as reported. In some areas—Toulon and Marseilles, in particular—it was an ugly business, and some details are not for the faint of heart. The underlying pattern is clear, however: When Europeans feel sufficiently threatened, they do not just react—they overreact with stunning ferocity. In retrospect, he says, we can look upon 2008, with the anti-hijab legislation and the release of Geert Wilders’ film Fitna, as the beginning of Europe’s recovery. He nevertheless concedes that nativist movements would not have prevailed were it not for the financial meltdown of 2023-24 that made the Second Revolution possible here at home.

It is also noteworthy, he says, that most of the ruling parties in Europe—the BNP, Vlaams Belang, Front National, the Freedom Party—are resolutely dismantling the social and political framework of the European Union, while preserving its “functional core.” This trend is reflected in the British proposal to revive the name of the European Economic Community. Of course, the monster needs to be destroyed, not reformed. Agreements on free trade, customs, etc., are useful, and they can be bilateral or multi-lateral, but the Leviathan in Brussels should never be allowed to raise its ugly head again.

Sunday, June 4—The morning chat shows are still focused on the historic importance of the Russo-Chinese lightning occupation of Mecca and Medina. The televised demolition of the Kaaba, along with the bird’s-eye view of the Black Stone being pounded to a powder and cast into the Red Sea, has had a tonic effect worldwide. The joint announcement by Presidents Belov and Chang that the cult of “Submission” was thereby abolished yielded surprisingly little violent response from its stunned devotees.

Long predicated on the idea that the sine qua non of Islam was Allah’s victory in this world, not in that to come, the definitive demonstration to the contrary was more convincing than anyone would have thought. There is no mystery, however: The problem of the Muslim world has never been one of inadequate natural resources or dysfunctional political systems. Ernest Renan, who started his study of Islam by praising its ability to manifest “what was divine in human nature,” ended it by concluding that “Muslims are the first victims of Islam” and that, therefore, “to liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him.” That such service is being rendered by the Russians is OK with me, so long as it is being done.

In the short interval since the delivery of the coup de grâce in Saudi Arabia, evangelistic websites and organizations working in the Arab, Turkish, Urdu, Farsi, and other Middle Eastern and Central Asian languages have been inundated with inquiries by former Muslims desperate to learn about Isa al-Masih. This is great and glorious news. The task of helping our fellow men who had been trapped in Islam can now proceed hand-in-hand with helping our fellow Christians, here at home, to become aware of who they are and to become proud, once again, of their civilizational and spiritual legacy.

Monday, June 5—Pat Buchanan’s latest book, Annihilation Averted, is finally out. He will turn 90 in November, but his prose is as crisp today as it was in State of Emergency two decades ago. His argument is that America could not have been completely de-Americanized between 1965 and 2024, because her long-suffering silent majority had never given up on the vision of itself as a real nation, a distinct people with shared civilizational and religious roots. The Second Revolution was made possible by the fact that, even after decades of indoctrination, most Americans still preferred the notion of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none” to the propositional orthodoxy of the treasonous elite. Their instinctive distrust of the Duopoly’s claim to America’s “exceptionalism” has saved the day. The moral absolutism that the hegemonists substituted for rational argument could be challenged only once the economic collapse was under way, however; and it was challenged, although a lot of blood was shed, and a lot of treasure was squandered in the meantime.

Tuesday, June 6—The fact that the National Endowment for Democracy is still in existence troubles me deeply. According to a long feature in today’s New York Times, the NED is “helping democracy and promoting American values” by supporting, inter alia, China’s anti-abortionists, South Africa’s dwindling Boers, and Christian missionaries all over the Muslim world. Now that America has recovered her sanity, all such experiments in “exporting democracy” should cease, or else be limited to non-taxpayer-funded endeavors. The objective of our government is to maintain the security and freedom of this country and to uphold her traditions and values. It is not to promote them by funding overseas groups and entities, however worthy and vulnerable they may be. Doing so reminds me of the bad old days of a regime of global social work. Old habits seem to die hard, including the desire to remake the world in one’s own image.
America’s national-interest-based foreign policy should refrain from meddling in the affairs of foreign countries. We must never again succumb to George W. Bush’s arrogant belief that “history has called America and our allies to action,” or to Madeleine Albright’s hubristic assertion, “We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” Such millenarian kitsch is as tasteless as it is dangerous. The notion that “we” are “indispensable” or “on the right side of history” prompted megalomaniacal strategies that were inimical to the political and constitutional tradition of the United States. The notion that “history” is an entity on a linear march is a gnostic myth worthy of jihadists, Nazis, and communists, but not of a democratic republic.

Wednesday, June 7—The news that the Border Patrol is not recruiting new officers for the fist time in years reflects the success of the 2,000-mile, double-line Friendship Fence, a technological marvel that has reduced illegal immigration almost to zero. Had it not been erected, every major U.S. city would have looked like Los Angeles by now—and Los Angeles would look like Mexico City. As it happens, America will not become a Third World country after all. Federal legislation to end all social-welfare benefits for illegal aliens and a crackdown on major businesses that chronically hire illegal aliens have helped resolve the problem, but the long-term solution came only with the 2026 Repatriation Act. It is not the prettiest piece of legislation, but it is certainly among the more useful ones.

Srdja Trifkovic is Chronicles' foreign-affairs editor.

This article first appeared in the June 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Recently, a sentence in the Spectator caught my attention. Explaining why a certain subversive initiative of the European Commission was a new trap for Britain, the author of the article invoked “a document that seems to have been designed to deceive” the British electorate. Nothing strange here, one is tempted to say. Why else would anybody bother coming up with a treaty, unless he wanted to get the better of someone else? It is the rest of the sentence, however, that struck me as significant. The authors of the treaty, wrote Fraser Nelson, would seem “to take the British people for fools.”

Let me back myself into yet another china-shop display. The central existential question of all time, and hence the main thrust of all our anxiety, is “What happens in our absence? What is, when our back is turned? What was or will be, if we neither were nor will be able to see it?” In theology, such speculation has produced the ontological proofs of the existence of God; in philosophy, Idealist thinking; in politics, the concept of trust in Democracy. But the locus classicus and the corporeal location of the itch is our individual experience of love and betrayal.

My observation of human nature leads me to conclude that, in all but the most unusual relationships between men and women, it is not the prospect of loss that aggrieves one or both of the parties, but the suspicion that one’s lover, and hence oneself, is being made a fool of by a person or persons all too well known, or at any rate known enough to any save the myopic object of the dastardly deception. That Miss X has had her face done so many times that the surgeon now no longer returns her telephone calls is a fact salient in the mind of the woman whose husband has run off with the monster; his incurious passivity with respect to it, rather than his closely held view that Miss X is better at choosing intimate dessous than his natural wife, is the crux of the controversy; and it is probable that, were he to make a clean breast of it, confessing that the feminine art was to him, as to Octave Uzanne, everything, while natural physiognomy was nothing, his wife would at last find peace.

Similarly, when Miss Y has gone off with a Hollywood film producer, it is the expensive research by Kroll Associates, showing that the Italian-American in question has for much of his life been a failure in his attempts to live off immoral earnings in Atlantic City, that inflames the lover’s jealousy. “Frailty, thy name is woman,” he whispers from Hamlet, meaning that the young lady in question is too stupid to understand that even a real king’s favors aren’t worth eternal perdition, to say nothing of a usurper’s or an impostor’s. Were Miss Y to admit plainly that she’s so sick and tired of hearing about her lover’s father’s plans to stand for European Parliament as an independent Green that it makes no difference to her that her new paramour is a fraud, he might calm down and start looking for a nice girl in his father’s prospective constituency; as it is, Miss Y’s deception by the rogue, his own betrayal by Miss Y, and the epochal gulling of himself by ubiquitous, aeonian, elemental falsehood are so inextricably intertwined in his brain that the story is likely to end in a double murder.

On the face of it, elementary curiosity might bridge any one of these abysses. Had the wife been more eager to learn why her husband collects vintage magazines with names like Paris-Hollywood—to say nothing of the girlfriend, who might have used a few hours of her manicure time to inform herself on the prospect of personal enrichment from the European Union feeding trough—none of this would have happened. Thus, James Stewart, in Hitchcock’s sagacious Vertigo, is impassive when, in the film’s opening sequence, his childhood friend demonstrates to him a brassiere designed, Barbara Bel Geddes explains, on the lines of the cantilever bridge. Had man the curiosity to learn something about women, Hitchcock suggests, it would save him the trouble of watching them vanish and going mad for their sake later.

A similar impassivity is in evidence in democratic politics, represented since Plato’s day as a macrocosm of the individual self. First, Western electorates lacked the curiosity to learn about Stalin; then about Hitler; then about why Stalin was a friend of Hitler; then why Hitler was at war with Stalin; then why Stalin was an ally of Roosevelt; then why Stalin was nobody’s friend, not even Mao’s or Tito’s.

“He just doesn’t want to know.” “The wife is always the last to find out.” These apparently banal statements from the byways of everyday life are consummately political pivots upon which democratic polities have turned since time immemorial. The powerful historic kinship between seduction and sedition is a classic illustration, and I have heard it argued that the universal popularity of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa was a key factor in helping the British, including Burke in his Reflections, to see the French Revolution for what it was, rather than for what their textbooks would later tell them it was. Equally, it can be argued that the numberless misconstructions and simplifications of Richardson’s complex and ambiguous novel, such as Laclos’ Liasons Dangereuses, have contributed to the growth of “revolutionary,” that is to say seditious or subversive, sentiment in Europe. The tradition of vulgarizing Clarissa’s seduction is alive to this day, as witness just about any women’s magazine that counsels its readers to be free, to cast off the shackles of male dominance, and to follow Lovelace wherever its editor’s particular species of lovelessness takes them.

The libertine, in this frame of reference, is no more a suitable lover than he is a lover of liberty. Like Robespierre, or Lenin, or the schemers of Brussels whose rhetoric vexes Mr. Nelson in the Spectator, he is first and foremost a demagogue. “Happy Days Round the Corner!” screams the cover of a children’s fashion supplement to the Russian Vogue (“Let us imitate Hollywood stars,” runs a sample mendacity, “who share their joys and fortunes with their foster kids”), and in the curious person’s mind, there is little doubt that he or she is being led by the proverbial Barbara’s nose, that if Pol Pot, rather than “Madonna with son David” or “Gwen Stefani with son Kingston,” had been more useful in selling cashmere jumpers from Il Gufo and ankle socks from Bon Point, it would be a pyramid of skulls, not the smiling faces of Natalia Vodianova and her adorable children, that would have made the Vogue cover. Ever the demagogue, the libertine is revealed as a user and an exploiter.

“Khmer Rouge Round the Corner!” It is hardly surprising that the curious person—reader, thinker, voter, lover, husband, friend—responds to demagoguery by identifying himself as a conservative, while mistakenly labeling the libertine, with his hollow promises of love or liberty, a liberal. The conservative husband wants to keep his wife, for instance, though the more he loves her, the more likely he is to give her up to another contender without a murmur of protest, provided he is convinced that the cause is just, that she is undeceived in her frailty, and that the object of her affections is not a bounder. Thus, the conservative voter wants to keep his money but will part with it willingly, so long as he is convinced that the wars financed with the taxes he’s been paying are just, and that the roads for the paving of which he’s been saving do not all lead to Brussels. So the conservative friend, who does not mind if one of his poker buddies quits the table for the love of a good woman, but may be expected to raise hell if daily sessions with a Manhattan psychoanalyst at $500 per yarn are the reason for the man’s defection.

Envy is not far behind. Inasmuch as jealousy is a conservative sentiment, envy is brashly liberal-minded. I have mentioned the Khmer Rouge, and a spot of light reading confirms that Pol Pot was indeed from what in the West would be called an upper-middle-class family, the sort of family that nowadays dresses its children in Il Gufo and Bon Point. His sister was a concubine in the Great Palace of King Sisowath Monivong, where the future revolutionary often visited her amid the splendor that, even in the enfeebled West, still tends to amalgamate itself with monarchic power. Thus acquainted with King Norodom Sihanouk from an early age, he went on to attend the Lycée Sisowath, the Eton of French Cambodia, and then moved to Paris, a city that to this day remains a kind of triumphal arch through which the congenitally envious pass on their way to the killing fields.

“He was ridiculously proud of having married a bit of posh,” writes Karl Marx’s biographer. The scourge of the world bourgeoisie personally designed visiting cards for “Mme Jenny Marx, née Baronesse de Westphalen,” which, adds Francis Wheen, he would flourish “in the hope of impressing tradesmen and Tories.” Once, when he tried to pawn some family silver belonging to his wife, Marx got himself arrested, as the police in London refused to believe that “a scruffy German refugee” had “acquired these ducal heirlooms legitimately.” Imagine the envy and the gnawing frustration. O London! It is a wonder that Das Kapital is only as long as it is.

The eventual Chairman Mao, whose fledgling ambitions have been nursed to maturity in the Yale-in-China incubator; the erstwhile schoolboy Ulyanov-Lenin, a goody-gumdrops with a B- in logic and an A+ in religious studies; the prince of genocide Pol Pot, agog in the Champs Elysees; the nutty Professor Marx of 28 Dean Street, Soho, roaming flint-hearted Mayfair; the traitor Kim Philby, with Eton and the Cambridge Apostles under his nose; wherever you look, it’s the same old tale. It is the tale of regarding a great eminence from a position elevated enough to enable one to appreciate it in all its unattainable glory; of being bodily present at a magnificent concert yet unable to identify or to comprehend what the orchestra is playing; of peering through softly illuminated windows to discern a gay evening party that one was never asked to join. It’s a tale of envy all right.

Before we can understand politics, we must understand ourselves. The vast social macrocosm out there is not as readily permeable to the intellect as the microcosm of the individual self, and the social forces that shape civilization—of which jealousy and envy are among the most powerful—are more easily visible in the laboratory slides of our own motives and perceptions, our confessions and tergiversations. If we want to find out how the world really works, like poor Barbara we must risk our noses.

Andrei Navrozov is Chronicles' European editor.

This article first appeared in the June 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

These are bad times to be an eater in America, as anyone who has suffered sticker shock at the supermarket can tell you. The cost of necessities such as bread, milk, and eggs has risen steadily in the last two years—by as much as 30 percent in some parts of the country. Vegetables, fruits, meats, cheeses—all are climbing. Even that most sacred of goods, beer, is skyrocketing in cost.

In part, the rise in food prices is a function of the cost of gasoline. Food travels a long way—1,200 miles, on average—to reach American stomachs. It does so because American manufacturers, giddy at the bounty wrought by the Green Revolution and the advent of jets and container ships, long ago taught American consumers to abandon the idea of seasonality. We have come to expect bananas, oranges, tomatoes, corn, and the like to be available year-round, requiring the transportation of strawberries from Chile, citrus from South Africa, tomatoes from Ecuador, hothouse lettuces from France.

Our farmers return the favor. Near my home in the Arizona desert stands a vast complex of greenhouses. Its name, EuroFresh, tells the story, for those greenhouses, 164 acres devoted to tomatoes alone, provide much of the produce consumed on the continent in wintertime.

Why European greenhouses do not grow food for Europe, and American greenhouses for America, is a complex matter of international trade, treaties, and government subsidies, too complex to do more than wonder at here. Suffice it to say that for many reasons it is good to be a farmer these days—not the small farmer of the kind celebrated in Jeffersonian ideals of democracy, but the farmer as agribusinessman, with millions of dollars of expensive machinery and miles-long rows of monoculture crops.

Those industrial farmers have long enjoyed federal largesse unavailable to their Jeffersonian counterparts in the form of massive subsidies, some in payment for not growing crops that are too abundant on the market, some simply handouts to the already wealthy. A landowner is allowed to earn up to $2.5 million per year in adjusted gross income and still be entitled to a broad portfolio of subsidies. In a rare fit of fiscal restraint, the White House recently proposed to trim this to $500,000—but not to close the many loopholes in the tax code that would make even this figure attainable to anyone with the slightest talent for creative bookkeeping.

Couple all that with other incentives, totaling $2.4 billion, that take such forms as optional self-employment tax, full write-offs for racehorses, and generous allowances to reduce personal income taxes with farm losses, and it seems curious that farming should not be the career choice of the best and brightest of our current crop of college graduates.

Nonetheless, many farmers are now shunning subsidies altogether and uncoupling themselves from federal price controls, for, as if to honor Marx’s dictum that capital has no country, there is gold to be made by growing crops that are too abundant here but in terrific demand elsewhere. Corn is one such crop, shipped as ethanol and syrup, the twin fuels of the modern world—for ethanol is an ever-more-important ingredient in gasoline blends, and corn syrup underlies the First World diet of processed food and soft drinks.

The energy-hungry European Union has been buying great quantities of American ethanol of late, though E.U. ministers are increasingly skeptical about the environmental value of the stuff, which uses more energy to produce than it yields. For its part, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recently opined that food crops should be used for food—particularly in countries not so thoroughly subsidized as ours, countries in which, on average, food costs have risen 83 percent in the last three years.

Meanwhile, food riots are breaking out across the world, in Haiti, Cameroon, Egypt, even normally tranquil Thailand—which, though a major rice producer, now limits how much rice an individual can buy, the better to sell the crop to an insatiable China.

[amazonify]0803216327[/amazonify]There are no easy solutions, and all the signs point to hard times for eaters for years to come. But I have a few modest proposals for producers and consumers alike. Producers, remember what land your land is in; common decency would suggest that you repay the taxpayers’ generosity by marketing your wares close to home. If compulsion is required, then we might insist that any farmer who has ever been issued a subsidy turn over a proportionate share of the current harvest to stock food banks, feed pensioners, and serve other such worthy purposes.

And to eaters, I say, now is the time to learn to grow your own food, to return to local agriculture. Eat a little lower on the food chain. Do without bananas and tomatoes in February. Know where your food is coming from. Buy from local Jeffersonian-scale farmers. Plant a victory garden, and declare righteous victory over foreign powers and our own strange government. All these things are your patriotic duty, and your stomach and pocketbook will thank you for doing it.

Gregory McNamee writes from Tuscon, Arizona. He is the author, most recently, of Moveable Feasts: The History, Science, and Lore of Food (Praeger).

This article first appeared in the June 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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VITAL SIGNS
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COLUMNS
Sins of Omission
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Breaking Glass
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The Rockford Files
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POETRY
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ON THE COVER
Cover photo by Dorthea Lange.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.