Connemara Farm

Visited the Carl Sandburg farm up in Flat Rock this weekend. I’d say that the Sandburg farm is the closest I’ve ever come to finding a perfect place to live. A big house but not ostentatious, comfortably mismatched furniture (currently in storage while a restoration project proceeds), tall wide windows, on a hilltop with terrific views, pleasantly and slightly overgrown natural landscaping (no manicured gardens or topiary or putting-green lawns, thank you), lots of open spaces. Probably the most striking thing about the house itself is that every wall in the place has bookshelves — a Sandburg renovation. At one point, the house contained 17,000 volumes.

View from Lillian's bedroom

The place is called “Connemara” after the name given it by its second owner, an Irish textile tycoon named Ellison Smyth. Smyth had acquired the 246 acres, house and outbuildings (including slave quarters) from Christopher Memminger, Secretary of the Confederate Treasury. Lilian Sandburg found the property while looking for a place to raise goats and a quiet spot where her husband could write and commune with nature. 

Some other old goats

Apparently the goats liked it just fine; the herd eventually grew to 250 animals and Connemara Farm Goat Milk was stocked on many North Carolina store shelves. Lilian made a name for herself in goat breeding and the farm was often visited by other farmers seeking to learn her methods. Descendants of the original herd still live at Connemara — the world’s most pampered tribe of goats.

The Sandburgs moved to the hills of Western Carolina in 1945. Carl was 67 years old. Over the following 22 years he went on to produce one-third of his total literary output. He was a socialist (at least for a time, in his 30s) and a defender of civil rights, becoming the first white man to win the NAACP’s Silver Plaque Award. In addition to poetry, he wrote the definitive work on Lincoln (in six volumes), an anthology of American folk music and a couple of children’s books. Sandburg won three Pulitzers, a Grammy (!), and the Robert Frost Medal. He appears to be the only poet ever to address a joint session of Congress.

In every room . . .

Of course, he was so much more than a paragraph describes, or even a full biography. His early days — he left school in the 8th grade, worked, bummed around, tried on this job and that — he did go back to college although he never earned a degree (but, 17,000 books) — his enlistment during the Spanish-American war — all of that served his ultimate accomplishment: Poet of the people. He got into the skin of servants and porters and bricklayers and steel men and secretaries. He understood the American Dream and the people it served and the people it failed. 

There have not been many men like him — maybe Twain, Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, a handful of others. Pete Seeger. Can’t think of any who are still alive today. I have a hunch that the great American folk artists/writers/poets of the 21st century are going to be women. But that's a topic for a different day (and probably for someone else).

Post-Mortem

To say I’m disappointed would be a vast understatement. But don’t be misled; I’m mainly disappointed in myself.

I got sucked in. Many of us did. We surrounded ourselves with like-minded souls and jabbered at one another like gibbons about how we were going to keep the White House and take over Congress and rainbows and cake and a new car in every garage.

Facebook. The New York Times. Stephen and Samantha and Trevor, oh my! We fed each other the poison of a false (or, at least, incomplete) narrative, repeating and sharing and reinforcing the fiction, back and forth at a feverish pace. We ignored all the signs — including the ones planted in every field and pasture we passed. We dismissed out of hand the long-standing hard basic truths of American politics. Everything and everyone who was a sure-fire predictor of reality was tarred with the same brush — this time it will be different. Only it wasn’t.

And now we have excuses galore for our failure, conspiracies and regrets and “what ifs?” This, despite the fact that the blueprints were drawn for anyone to see, the bulldozers were in place, and the landscape shifted exactly as could be expected from ’08 to ’12 to now. “This country,” my friend Kern calmly notes, “has always had a fascist streak.”

There’s this thing called the “Overton Window.” You should know what that is; your conservative neighbors certainly do. Look it up on Wikipedia. Various right-wing thinkers — Bill Buckley, Glenn Beck (“thinkers”) have written novels invoking the Overton Window. It explains how public opinion can be manipulated. It explains how someone endorsed by the KKK can wind up in the White House. It may be too little, too late, but look it up anyway.

So, what’s my point? Simply this: When it comes to politics, if you’re a reasonably smart person, it is probably better to be uniformed than misinformed. Or, put another way, you can only trust your own wisdom if it is uncluttered by opinions and half-truths masquerading as facts. Now, I’m not talking here about the lies the Alt-Right tossed to their junkyard dogs, or the rationalizations the Priests in their pulpits stage-whispered to the faithful to gin up sympathy for the devil. Those matters are topics for a different day.

I’m talking about the worse kind of deception — self-deception. Of all my failings great and small, this is the one that has caused me the most pain, year in and year out.

I have to move on, though, and so must you. Jim Wright — a fairly clear-eyed guy, kind of a sonofabitch but in a good way, retired military, you can find his stuff here — Jim Wright exhorts us to gear up and get ready for the battle. He may be right, but maybe not.

I’m probably not going to spend much time on Facebook anymore. I’m going to forego the hour every day I used to spend pouring over the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. I may go back to the Daily Show and Late Night and Full Frontal but not for a while. I’m going to try to use that time thinking as rationally as possible about the implications of what has happened in this moment in history, and how to respond. 

I may gear up. I’ve been wasting my time and talents these past few months. The criminal justice system is swirling in the tank and if at all possible we need to stop it from sliding into the sewer. Of course, that’s just a small part of what lies ahead.

I may leave. It’s probably going to get bad fast and I’m not sure I’m nimble enough anymore to stay out in front of the carnage. I’ve allowed my common sense to be clouded (obviously) and I worry that I may get sucked in again. The next time could be worse — much worse. We all have a similar decision to make. Which brings me back to my point: Don’t let me or anyone substitute our opinion for your own judgment. You have to think about this carefully and call your own play. Good luck.