"Nearby, the owner of an orange R.V. with a Confederate flag decal on its bumper explained the sticker's provenance: 'It started with the Civil War, or whatever. The North against the South. And then there was slavery involved. I don't know the exact whole story. They've turned it into a racist thing.'"
--Antonia Hitchens quoting a man at the Daytona 500 rally, deep in Trump Country.
"One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war."
--Abraham Lincoln, 2nd inaugural address
The February 10 New Yorker carries a sketch by Antonia Hitchens which is intriguing in several ways.
For one thing, Ms. Hitchens is not profiled under the "Contributors" section, which may be because she is officially part of the editorial staff, but Contributors are often listed as "staff writer."
So that is odd.
Because Christopher Hitchens is one of my favorite authors, and I am currently reading Hitchens's book about Thomas Paine, I googled Antonia and discovered she is his daughter. Her linked in page says she went to Columbia University and before that, Sidwell Friends School.
Fair enough.
Her piece "Trump Country: Round and Round" is prototypic New Yorker: Simple selection of detail and telling quote, without comment. It's just there and the author is simply looking at you, deadpan. She doesn't have to say a thing. You know what she is thinking and she knows what you will think.
It's Joan Didion of the telling detail. And Joan Didion never did it better than Ms. Hitchens.
Of course, Ms. Hitchens finds the perfect details amid a welter of details which may not present the picture she sketches if they were presented in toto, with contradictory details modulating and muddying the picture of what Trumpies are all about.
There may have been anti Trumpies at Daytona. There may have been people more like the obsessive engineers of "Ford v Ferrari," or liberal movie stars who love to race cars. But this is a portrait, and the painter gets to chose the lighting and details: Fair enough.
Ms. Hitchens may have taken her children to Hippo Playground in Central Park the morning she went into the office and tapped out her story. She sees the world through lenses which were shaped at least in part at Columbia, and at Sidwell Friends School.
But she does get this picture perfectly tinted.
How much is wrong with the owner of that Confederate flag decal? How determinedly ignorant do you have to be to be that clueless about the Civil War? Even if you dropped out of middle school, all you have to do is turn on TV to any of the thousand documentaries-- from Ken Burns to the History Channel. How can you avoid knowing more about the Civil War than only what Fox News tells you?
"They've turned it into a racist thing." There it is. The "Lost Cause" story direct from Fox News. It's all about heritage and the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, only States Rights and the only slave owner at Appomattox was Grant, not Lee.
But then we have the T shirt Ms. Hitchens has selected from among the presumably hundreds of T shirts being worn in the stands the day of her visit: It is worn by the groom as his bachelor-party attendees surround him and drink themselves into oblivion. His shirt reads: "Same Pussy Forever, It Had Better Be Good."
Selection is a powerful thing.
Ms. Hitchens may be accused of many things, of being unfair, but if that T shirt was there, and most especially if she quoted the Confederate accurately, you cannot escape the picture.
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| Pop Quiz: Which Flag did Robert E. Lee fly? |
Of course, for fans of "The Wire": the 5th Season character Scott Templeton, who gets perfect quotes from sources who cannot be checked, springs to mind. "I wish I had said that," one man who was quoted said. "I wish I were that smart."
Some stories are just too good to allow facts to stand in the way.
Lincoln was asked once about the remark he was quoted saying, about his most pugnacious and successful general, Ulysses S. Grant, who was dogged by rumors he drank incessantly and was under the influence of whiskey all too often: "I wish I knew what whiskey it is he drinks," Lincoln was quoted as saying. "I'd send a bottle to all my generals."
Lincoln, when asked about this said, "I wish I had said that."
But, I would bet Ms. Hitchens was quoting accurately.
It just sounds right.
I don't think a woman with an elite school education could have made that up.
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