1. William Walker was certainly of the type – the Barbaric
yawper, the opportunist, the man who made mistakes out there in the territories
– who could have been included in William Carlos William’s Plutarchian attempt
to get down the American grammar of character, In the American Grain. It was
always a bit too reductive: grain. For such a pesticide treated, multi-wood,
laminated, two by four thing as America.
Williams was aware of the trickiness of going about poetry
under the aegis of history.
“But history follows governments, and never men. It portrays
us in generic patterns, like effigies, or the carving on sarcophagi, which say
nothing save, of such and such a man, that he is dead. That’s history. It is
concerned with only one thing: to say everything is dead.”
Walker, the most famous filibuster, didn’t make Williams’
cut. Sam Houston was the closest he got to that. Daniel Boone’s zen, that was
something Williams’ saw. And after the Grain book, in his Imaginations, he
nailed it for good and all, however problematically:
The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth…
The rascality of the American product, its galumphing lack
of dignity even as it made orotund and dignified gestures, this was a bit too
Mencken-ish for Williams to put in. William Walker was just such a type of
young American hoss.
2. I take from Williams words at the end of the Houston
chapter a manifesto like notion that we can look at what is happening, on all
fronts, in the present American dissolve, from the perspective of the American
grain and its secret, libidinous dynamics.
“However hopeless it might seem, we have no other choice: we
must go back to the beginning; it must all be done over; everything that is
must be destroyed.”
The do-over – we all, good householders, know this urge!
Throw out the old wedding presents, repaint the rooms, find the new job, move
to another state, stop answering the phone and the emails, seek company among
lowlives or revolutionaries, do something to stop the appalling, encroaching
staleness!
However, that something at the moment might be much quieter.
The woke metaphor that our era of reaction is all coiled about is, partly,
waking up the beasts, those seemingly dead things that actually still exist in
the very air we breathe. We can see the beast of Calhoun, the “Marx of the
Master Class”, as Hofstadter called him, or more simply our proto-Nazi
theorist, our Alfred Rosenberg sprung from old planter schemes, as it presides
over the Roberts Court, just itching to
reinstate the Dred Scott decision, to
which we still bow (but for how long, Lord?). And we see the filibusters, those
arrogant, masculinist, pirate imperialists, weaving into being an ad hoc
foreign policy under Trump. Foreign policy’s a piss-elegant name for robbery on
a global scale. The robbers this time come unmasked and full of thief’s jargon.
Trump is a great channeler of American history – he knows so
little about it that he is a perfect blank through which the malevolent spirits
move. Republicans have an addiction to the type. Warren Harding, George W. Rotarians,
ignorant shitkickers, reality tv stars. We get what we deserve.
3. Walker - I can see
his type. When I was a kid, it was the leader of the playground. The boy who
the other boys somehow always ended up allowing to organize things. Who all the
other little boys loved, in their way. Love, fear, wanting to be the best
friend.
The playground leader is often the athlete, but not the best
athlete. He’s that boy follows out his reflex arc with the superb confidence of a born imposter, and this
is his visible sign of grace. But further than that arc – into techne, a
skill to be taught, - or what amounts to being against his “nature”, his liking – there he
cannot go. Or at least he goes reluctantly, against his grain. Into the field
of questions. To be taught means to submit, to let that ego, that reflex arc,
go. Suspend it. Drop the imposter. And this is a drama.
The playground boy is against teaching and teachers as a
policy and instinct. He’s all recoil.
In the American character museum, the playground leader is
connected by a thousand threads to the Jack of all Trades. I’m from a Jack of
All Trades myself. Pa. Farmer, carpenter, airconditioning man, small business
owner, builder of his own house. And the spell got into me. I oriented myself
by writing, but have never settled down to the little matter of earning money,
and now I’m in the retirement years. It happens.
4. Once, when America
was mostly farm and woods, the Jack of all Trades filled a great space. Now, of
course, America is all apps and buzz, and the Jack of all Trades lies bleeding,
here an obscure rocker, there the guy who knows how to fix computers in your
apartment or neighborhood, who you call on. The proto-professional, the amateur
with the Youtube channel, the explainer. Once though the Jack of all Trades did
a stage on steamboats, sold lots in Florida, mined in California, shot
buffaloes on contract for the U.S. army in Wyoming. The Jack of all Trades was
manifest destiny on two scratched up legs.
The types exists way past frontier’s close in our popular
culture. For instance, Paul Newman’s Brick. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, paired with
sizzling Elizabeth Taylor, both in their physical superbia. Brick, who has
numbed his reflex arc and its approaches to reality with drink. Who has met his
nature (supplied by Tennessee Williams, of course) in Skipper, his best friend,
a suicide for whom Brick has felt the reflex arc in his groin, but never followed
through. And now can’t follow through with all Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor’s)
superbia to help him find the Dao. Brick,
who never figured his reflex arc was going to steer him into this kind of
territory.
A fifties movie, with the American Freudian notion of the libidinal
as our crackable code. But we need more than a view of the character as so many
detours to a fuck to get us to the Americanness of this. I’d propose here we
are encountering, on the verge of the Sixties and its New Frontier rhetoric,
the social etiolation of the Jack of all Trades position. The adventurer on his
crutches, the playground leader with a repressed longing for his suicided
football teammate – this seemed, at one time, the end of the figura.
Ending as tragedy, returning as farce – don’t we know the
routine?
5. William Walker was Tennessee-framed, which meant
something in the antebellum imagination. It meant a six foot tall talltaler,
all forest furs, long rifle, Bowie knife at his belt. Crockett and Bowie, in
fact, died as quasi-filibusters in the defence of that useless warehouse, the
Alamo. The whole Texas enterprise was Tennessee-framed, a matter of carving out
slave territory under the name of freedom.
But in fact, Walker was small, smooth. Robert May observes
that he was “five feet six inches tall and weighing about 115 pounds; besides,
his smooth, freckled face lacked the whiskers and rough features of so many of
the day’s military adventurers.” He was a banker’s son, born in Nashville and
educated at private schools, trained to be a physician, even making the
traditional tour of Europe under the idea that he was going to come back a
doctor. But he didn’t live up to his Dad’s ideas – William Walker had ideas of
his own. He went to New Orleans to study law. There, he ended up a journalist,
and part owner of a newspaper, the New Orleans Crescent. But it was no go, and
in the autumn of 1849 Walker had to find some other way to make his money.
Tennessee-framed. Cormac McCarthy is dead right to start his
anabasis, Blood Meridien, with a Tennessee boy. And with a band of freebooters,
scalphunters, who are whipped into shape by characters like Walker, drunk on
rhetoric and high ideals, under which they idealize themselves, disasterously.
An anabasis of atrocity, in which the instruments that move the enterprise
undermine the principles under which the enterprise was launched, until it
became largely atrocity for atrocities sake, hide and seek among monsters and
victims. As it was, and as it will always be. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.
The instrument, the drone: such a clean way to shed blood: Obama’s little helper.
But Trump, a man who is has a love of dirt for its own sake,
a copraphile in spirit, has gone back to the bombardment. We know all to well
how taking a shit and dumping bombs equate in Trump’s old brain.
And so we come to the awakening of Walker, with the news of
gold being discovered in California, and the beginning of his real life. At 30.
It is to California he goes, by boat.
But not before one characteristic, Tennessee touch: according to his biographer,
William O. Scroggs (whose book, Filibusters and Financiers (1916), bears the
mark of that Americanist style, half Mencken,
half muckraker): ‘Before leaving New Orleans,
however, he showed something of the fire that smouldered under the quiet
exterior by seeking out one of the editors of La Patria, a tri-weekly Spanish-American
paper, and giving him a severe flogging
on account of the publication of an article at which he took personal
offence.”
6. In a memorable
essay in Orion Magazine, September, 2006, Rebecca Solnit showed how the San
Francisco Bay and the watershed of the Sierra Nevada, including the Sacramento
River, are still affected by the Gold Rush. Its geological aspect. 7600 tons of
Mercury were dumped in those waters. Mercury was the element used to bind to
gold particles in ore, creating an amalgam that is then heated to free the
mercury as fumes and leave the gold. “Overall, approximately ten times more
mercury was put into the California ecosystem than gold was taken out.” A ratio
one might metaphysicalize as a standard to measure American rapacity versus the
products of Manifest Destiny. The mercury is still in those waters.
“The volume of mercury-tainted soil washed into the Yuba was
three times that excavated during construction of the Panama Canal, and the
riverbed rose by as much as eighty feet in some places. So much of California
was turned into slurry and sent downstream that major waterways filled their
own beds and carved new routes in the elevated sludge again and again, rising
higher and higher above the surrounding landscape and turning ordinary Central
Valley farmlands and towns into something akin to modern-day New Orleans:
places below water level extremely vulnerable to flooding. Hydraulic mining
washed downstream 1.5 billion cubic yards of rock and earth altogether.”
The past isn’t even past. Gold rush or rush to conquer
Mexican, Central American or Caribbean territories, the same Dramatis Personæ
populate the scene – the rascal, the commander, the troops, native or American,
the villagers (shot or “freed”), the steamboat, the navies of imperial powers.
Walker fell in with this or that group of chancers until, in 1852, he and some
others struck upon the idea of an American colony in Mexico. They were
following in the footsteps of other chancers, such as a Frenchman, Count Gaston
Raoul de Raousset-Boulbon, built on the lines of Louis Napoleon (who was behind
the expedition of Maximilian to Mexico, which led, at least, to Manet’s very great
painting of Maximilian’s execution), who arrived in San Francisco for whatever
treasures beckoned and mustered some troops to take Guaymas, Sonora and see
what came of it.
7. There’s a detail, here. A historical anomaly. The
scalphunters in Blood Meridien bumped into it solid. In 1804, a report was
filed by a Habsburg official named Merino who was reporting from the frontlines
on the pacification of the nine groups of Apaches. He accords them respect a
chronicler owes to a minor kingdom: “This nation inhabits the vast empty expanse lying
between 30 and 3degrees of latitude and 264 and 277 degrees of longitude,
measuring from the island of Tenerife, extending from the vicinity of the
presidio of Altar in the province of Sonora near the coast of the Red Sea [Rojo]
or Sea of Cortes, to that of La Bahia del Espiritu Santo, which is seventeen
leagues from the bay of San Bernardo, in Texas.”
A vast territory, and of course absolutely empty to the
snake eyes of the white predator. Edward Dorn also stopped in Apacheria, after
it was broken, after Geronimo was captured, after Olson, counterculture, and
his own conversation with Blake’s America. Dorn discovered how the Apaches were
captured and shipped by the Americans, under the command of General Miles in railroad
cars, chained up, to Fort Marion, Florida. 1886.
Dorn’s verse:
As the train moves off at the first turn of the wheel
With its cargo of florida bound exiles
Most of whom had been put bodily
Into the coaches, their 3000 dogs,
Who had followed them like a grand party
To the railhead at Holbrook
Began
to cry
When they saw the smoking creature resonate
With their masters,
And as the máquina acquired speed they howled and moaned
A frightening noise from their great mass
And some of them followed the cars
For forty miles
Before they fell away in exhaustion.
8. Telling a story like this, we want bold iconographic
scenes, neat bits of landscape and event. We want some flat method, something that
is not perspective at all, something that is more like putting your nose to a
body.
Walker failed in Sonora, after the French nobles had done
their worst; but undaunted, that pale man with the hair greased over to the left
side in the Brady photograph tried his hand again, in Central America. The
famous one, the one success, at least for a time, in Nicaragua. He managed to
capture a city, Granada. He founded a newspaper that immediately proceeded to
praise the “grey eyed man of destiny” - for like any wrestler, he knew
the value of a cool sobriquet. In 1855, at 35 years of age, he could look
around the precincts of the capital (one of two) of a divided Nicaragua and dream
of the canal that would connect the Atlantic and the Pacific, from which he’d
get a fabulous cut.
“On October 13 Walker’s troops took the enemy capital of
Granada; and days later Walker executed the secretary of foreign affairs in the
Legitimist régime, who had been taken into custody, after news arrived that
Legitimist forces had fired on American civilians crossing Nicaragua, killing some of them. The seizure
of Granada and Walker’s threats of more executions induced the Conservative
general Ponciano Corral to agree to a treaty ending the hostilities and
creating a fourteen-month provisional, coalition government…”
Walker’s luck lasted for two years. In 1857, other Central
American powers, backed by the British navy, put an end to Walker’s venture.
Like the detritus of the gold rush, the detritus of these
adventures still comes to us – as “illegal immigrants” that must be stopped or
hunted. There is something fun and funny and funky in the higher, prophetic
sense (from fonne Middle English fool or stupid) that these prey are
bringing down the American house in its current zodiacal configuration.
9. But fast forward is the way this history goes. Walker
took up an amazing amount of space, during these years, in public opinion and
its correspondent, the newspaper. Walker’s adventures took up almost as much
space as the conflict between the slave states and the free. The Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave laws,
the John Brown raid, all in the other columns. His next venture, in Honduras, gives us
this:
He's brought to Truxillo, Hondurus, on September 12, 1860. His
troops had done badly, and to save himself he’d surrendered to the British, who
were represented by Norvell Salmon, Commander of the H.M.S. Icarus. Walker
relied on the British sense of fair play. Bad mistake. Instead, chained in his
prison cell, he was informed that his execution was imminent. No sooner said
than then a squad of soldiers came, marched him out of town, stood him by a tumbledown
wall, and divided into two. The first squad shot him; the second squad shot him
again, to make good and sure he was killed.
The business was completed, but in the papers there was
other news of succession threats and election business. The Walker chapter was
closed.
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