Thanksgiving During a Revolution

How's it going to end?

Sure there’s Middle East turmoil, nuclear silo rattling, the spectre of AI singularity, a new virulent outbreak monthly, and the election shook the timeline so hard that the YMCA song was never gay, but what are we supposed to do about it? I, for one, needed some perspective, so I went home to Grandaddy’s house, where I lived during high school back when everything was normal.

It’s delightful rolling into my folks’ yard in coastal Carolina on the eve of Thanksgiving. The air is damp, salty, and spiced with smoke. Grandaddy built the big ivied brick house on the highest and widest lot around, sheltered by live oaks and hickories, looking over the sparkling water at the outer banks. Inside I sit at the thick pine table under incandescent glow with Mom and Dad, and laugh over all the latest stories and a bowl of soup. The next day there’s more family, at the bigger table in the formal dining room: turkey, collard greens, stuffing, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, the same for as long as I can remember. Daddy prays and we eat and eventually share what we are thankful for. Through the weekend we play football in the yard, snack on leftovers, work on crossword puzzles, play music. “For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking,” Christ said of the apocalypse.

Two months ago I was in Wyoming, at the Wagon Box with James Pogue. He was working on his Vanity Fair article about the slow motion collapse of the Global American Empire, or Liberalism, or the post war political/economic arrangement, or “this whole thing,” as he often calls it, gesturing with his hand in a way that somehow helps convey what he means. The two of us had just helped host a Doomer Optimist event that was postured against “The Machine.” For the most part, the Machine is “this whole thing,” or they work together anyway.

James is on the trail of figuring out who the key players are, not so much in the fight against the Machine, but maybe in the world that presumes its demise. Who is abandoning the old playbook and trying to write or decode a new one. Hence his profiles of Massie and Murphy and JD Vance (before most people knew who he was). In the afternoon we sit in front of his wall tent with his dog, Banjo, while he ties flies, and in the evenings, after hours, at the bar, and we try to sort it out over mugs of Speed Goat. Do we want collapse? What might fill the wake? Neither of us wants to live in a world dominated by the CCP. We want to be free, but we sense that “this whole thing” ain’t it, despite the Freedom^TM on the label.

Labatt is the label I associate with freedom. The Canadian government is a parody of rule by idiot hall monitors, but the long dirt road to the village where I grew up, littered with the signature blue cans, is beyond those halls. Shredding the gravel on curves at full speed through the brilliant October foliage in a rental car has a way of lightening one’s mood. I’d closed down the Wagon Box restaurant for the season and was hungry for solace. That road is new to me, when I lived there we got in and out by train. Things are different. But deeper in the woods yet, along my old hunting trails, it’s the same. Grandaddy used to come up in the fall to hunt moose. He tried to teach me the hardest thing when you’re nine—sitting still. I spent the afternoon hunting grouse, killed two with my slingshot, then I built a small fire in a clearing. I made a bed in the deep moss, and stared up at the silent starry sky hemmed in by a jagged outline of spruce, and thought of all that I missed.

“It’s going to collapse, that’s for sure,” said Paul Kingsnorth, as we were driving through New York City a week later. He was at the Wagon Box last year for the first Doomer Optimist gathering, but this year he’s giving a lecture for First Things magazine entitled “Against Christian Civilization.” Kingsnorth has been writing against the Machine for years, though his angle has changed as he’s moved from environmental activist to homesteading Eastern Orthodox family man. He looks around, and up, at the looming towers of glass, steel and concrete with a grimace, as if it can’t happen soon enough.

“I like New York City,” I said, and I do, much to the surprise of many of my friends. “It’s like the craziest kids built the most amazing fort in the woods here.” He wasn’t buying it. I thought of another First Things offering, Peter Thiel’s essay I read a few years ago Against Edenism. The New Jerusalem might come down from heaven, not up from the earth (As PK reminds me), but it is a city.

We walked into the Union League Club where he was staying and speaking. It glows with mahogany, brass and silver hair. I like it. I’m tired of conference centers that look like hospitals and people dressed like they just rolled out of bed. This feels old and serious, Grandaddy would have liked it. Kingsnorth and I know we don’t quite belong. He’s proud of it; I’m not so sure. I’m in a three piece tweed suit and he even has an english accent so we’re safe. In a large room with high ceilings all the seats are filled and many of us are standing in the back.

“The last time I was in your country, which was last autumn, I visited the battlefield at Little Bighorn,” he began. “Standing in the snow, looking up the ridge at the monuments and the graves, I tried to imagine the psychic reality of living through the end of your culture.” He goes on to introduce Ohiyesa, a Dakota Sioux writer, and compare him to his contemporary, Oswald Spengler. He quotes the former “I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable, and the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same.” He even goes to quote Rene Guenon, that we are living in the “darkness between worlds.”
“If you want to transform the world,” he says near the conclusion, “you must turn your back on it," and he quotes C. S. Lewis: “The little knots of friends who turn their backs on the World are those who really transform it.”

At the end the crowd gave a hearty applause. We all seemed moved, if unsettled. I huddled up with my little knot of friends who all met worlds away at the Wagon Box: Max Foley and John Spiezio, Justin Lee, and a few others. There was a heaviness in the air, and not much to say. I was wondering what it means to “turn your back on the world.” I thought of Lot’s wife. Maybe she’s misunderstood. Why did she look back? Was it, as we’re often led to believe, that she missed Sodom? Or was it that she hated it? Maybe wanted it to burn, wanted to see it burn, wanted, perhaps, to burn with it?

I left the city Halloween night, driving through the crowds of costumed revelers, out onto the highway through the suburbs, until I got to a stretch of upstate wilderness where I could park and sleep out under the stars again, only it soon clouded over and I awoke curled up in the car.

At dawn I drove and drove, mostly in silence, and finally Dakota country, Ohiyesa’s old hunting grounds: a whole lot of nothing. And then I was back in the Rockies. I stayed there through the election, and afterward spend a day fishing with my friend Jonathan Keeperman, aka internet personality Lomez. We cast our lines in the sparkling Yellowstone waters and talk of broad political changes, tectonic shifts, upcoming tensions. While I was at the First Things event he was at Hereticon, a Thiel funded conference in Miami put on by what could be called right wing progressives. One presenter spoke of their ability to raise fetuses without brains for organ harvesting. We fished in silence for a bit after that. Interesting times ahead.

Like I said, I had to get back home to try to figure things out. At Grandaddy’s house there’s time to read, in the sun room with Dad’s canary, Boaz, singing in the corner. I read Lomez’ essays on Neo Conservatism. It takes me back to the peak neocon era, when I spent many hours here in this house, with Grandaddy and Daddy, watching Crossfire, listening to Wolf Blitzer and Charles Krauthammer. Grandaddy and Grandmother were big supporters of Israel; Southern Baptist, Hagee-pilled. Everything was about to end. It made perfect sense at the time. Sometimes everything does. Sometimes it doesn’t. Why did Grandaddy work so hard to build this beautiful place if it was all about to burn?

I listened to Pogue’s Good Ol’ Boyz podcast episode, “The Revolution,” recorded just after the election. They discuss the end, in some ways, of the American empire, that wave that brought Grandaddy up from poverty to this castle. By 1964, the peak of Americans’ trust in Government and societal trust in general, he lived here, a Marine officer, a successful businessman, a pillar in his community, his son (my dad) graduating and headed off to college and ROTC, Barry Goldwater on the ballot. This whole world that seems so timeless to me must have been a nearly unimaginable dream come true to Grandaddy. He grew up in a cabin he helped build in the woods of east Texas. He and his dad shared one pair of shoes: he wore them to school and his dad wore them to church. They made it through the depression growing peanuts and sweet potatoes in a patch of sandy soil they cleared of pines.

I watch through the glass as a barge moves slowly along the intracoastal waterway. I read the first chapter of Paul Kingsnorth’s One No, Many Yesses that starts in the ‘94 with the rise of the Zapatistas, NAFTA, and the emergence of resentment toward the global Machine: “What may turn out to be the biggest political movement of the twenty first century” his book opens. It was also around then I got my first C, on a history test. The next morning Dad walked with me outside and said “see this beautiful house, this great place? If you don’t take things seriously, someone who is not getting Cs in history will come and take it from you.” I studied harder, got a laptop, started daytrading during lunch break using dialup over a phone jack in the high school cafeteria. Now I pay the taxes and insurance here. I bought Dad an El Camino.

I close the book and go out into the yard. The air is filled with the noise of leaf blowers and weed eaters: workers cultivating the yards of the mcmansions that replaced the old brick houses on either side of us. I walk down the trail to the pier where it’s quiet and stare out over the waters, still thinking of Grandaddy. How did he look back on his hardscrabble time in east Texas? How did he look at this property?

I remember one night during a family reunion, all my cousins were there and were having a fun time playing volleyball in the yard. We were visiting, still living in the woods then, and I didn’t know how to play volleyball, I didn’t fit in. Grandaddy took me aside and we snuck off with a Coleman lantern and waded into the shallow waters, walking along the edge of the marsh grass. He told me to walk slower, real slow.

“Look,” he said, and gently moved his gig to point under the lantern’s glow at the faint outline of a fat flounder hidden on the surface of the mud. “Get it” he whispered with a smile, “before it gets away.”

And I did.