Among the Believers

Home from work, I sort through the mail and latch on to the latest issue of The New York Review of Books (August 12, 2004). Even in these days, when the proportion of agitprop is lamentably high, there’s still plenty to choose from: Pankaj Mishra on the recent elections in India, Alma Guillermoprieto on Mexican scandals, James McPherson on Lincoln, Gabriele Annan on a Gert Hofmann novel which I read and liked, James Fenton on an Enlightenment exhibition, and a good deal more of interest. I’ll skip Garry Wills on Clinton’s autobiography (I’ve had more than enough of both of them for the time being) and Russell Baker on Robert Byrd’s Losing America (the dial on the agitprop meter is way into the red zone) and a piece on John le Carré by a writer I don’t know (ditto on the meter). And I’ll skip Dworkin’s latest on the Supreme Court. But to read first—to read right now, stretched out on the couch with a tall glass of iced coffee, before I do anything else—I’m torn between Geoffrey O’Brien on Fahrenheit 9/11, Edward Mendelsohn on Auden’s anthology of light verse, and Charles Simic on the American South. All three are writers I enjoy, whatever our differences. I end up choosing Simic’s essay, “Down There on a Visit,” because I’m curious: the subject is outside his usual territory.

Simic is a poet who was born in Yugoslavia and came to the United States in the Fifties, in his mid-teens. He’s written a lot—if you read the poetry mags, you are bound to encounter him—and translated (Vasko Popa, for one), and he’s a regular in the NYRB. No one poem can capture his variousness, but “Breasts” is a good place to start. (The poem is readily findable on the web; some of the postings, be warned, are likely to include visual aids.) This is the source of the memorable lines, “I spit on fools who fail to include / Breasts in their metaphysics,” a poem slightly marred by some huffing and puffing but wonderful nonetheless.

So here is Simic, “driving around Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia” just a couple of months ago, in June. He finds nearly deserted town centers, country churches boarded up, evidence of profound dislocation. Some places are still thriving, like Oxford, Mississippi, with its “pretty courthouse square, a bookstore that could match any in New York City or Boston, fine cafés and restaurants” where people sit for hours. “One could live here—one thinks—in a kind of timeless present.”

But then Simic is rudely jerked back to reality by a letter in The Clarksdale Press Register. He quotes the entire letter, which speaks of God’s certain wrath if America doesn’t soon return to the path of righteousness, concluding thus: “Get these liberals out of government, and get conservative Christian leadership in government.”

There are more shocks more to come:

During my trip, I was asked several times point-blank whether I was a Christian. The first time it happened, I was so surprised I didn’t know what to reply. Finally, I mumbled that I was brought up in the Eastern Orthodox Church and to further buttress my credentials, I mentioned that I had priests in my family going back a couple of centuries. As far as I could tell, that didn’t seem to make much impression. What they wanted to know was whether I had accepted Jesus as my Savior.

Yes, Simic reports to readers of the NYRB, this is what it’s really like Down There, among the believers. “They enjoy hearing about the torments of the damned,” as might be expected, and they don’t hold much with book-learning or any such atheistical foolishness:

Skepticism, empirical evidence, and book learning are in low esteem among the Protestant evangelicals. To ask about the laws of cause and effect would be a sin. They reject modern science and dream of a theocratic state where such blasphemous subject matter would be left out from the school curriculum. Their ideal, as a shrewd young fellow told me in Tuscaloosa, is unquestioning obedience and complete conformity in matters of religion and politics. … If evangelicals haven’t gone around smashing TV sets and computers, it is because they recognize their power to spread their message. Aside from that, they would like to secede intellectually from the rest of the world.

This report is immediately followed by a curious paragraph in which Simic speaks of the danger of “such sweeping statements” as he has just made—after all, consider the exhibition of Baroque art he attended at the Mississippi Arts Pavilion—but with no follow-up, no indication where his summary judgment might be in error, and indeed he concludes the essay by once again summoning the specter of those joyless “protectors of virtue” whose theocratic ambitions he has already laid bare.

I don’t know if I should let Simic and his NYRB readers in on our secret. You know what I mean—that the situation for them is far worse than they imagine. After all, those hellfire Christians he encountered in the South are pretty easy to identify as the enemy. But we Protestant evangelicals are wise as serpents. Some of us are double agents. We learn to speak the language of culture, to penetrate the networks of the soon-to-be-damned. Simic might bump into us at a concert or a poetry reading, where we sip Starbucks and speak easily of Neruda and pretend that we believe in cause and effect. All the while, of course, we’re thinking to ourselves who will be the first to go when the theocratic revolution finally comes.

Be afraid, Charles Simic. Be very afraid.