Miscellany #5: Memorial Day

"America the Beautiful," David Hammons (1968)

1. From "An Address Delivered by General John Coburn on Memorial Day, May 30, 1905"

Almost half a million able-bodied men, fit to bear arms, perished in this way. Their hallowed dust, scattered upon distant battle-fields, or where ships foundered in the silent waters, or gathered in National cemeteries; the people would crown this day, with flowers, and praises and blessings. 

Their toils and sufferings have not been in vain. The cause they espoused was successful; the die has been cast; the great American Nation is one, and is foremost on earth. Did man ever die for a nobler purpose? What gratitude can ever repay the cost of such a sacrifice?  

[...] 

Sergeant Brow, of the 85th Indiana, with his life current streaming away, said, "Oh, Colonel, save me for my wife, but it is all right if I go." Colonel Gilbert of the 19th Michigan, mortally wounded at Resacca, said to me, "Farewell, I am going; write to my wife that I did my duty and died for my country." Sergeant Anderson Winterowd, of the 33d Indiana, on the field of Peachtree Creek, falling and dying, sad: "Boys, the rebels have got me, but it is all right." 

What is all right? Is such a death; such agony, all right? Oh, no. But the result will be all right. Victory will come and peace will come, and both will come to stay. And somebody will live to hail the mighty day, and ten thousand glad hearts, all over the land, will rejoice in the happy beams of that splendid dawn, and call down blessing on the memories of those who freely shed their blood that it might be.

2. From "Memorial Day 1936," by the Middlebury Peace Council

Eight million five hundred thousand men of all nations were killed in the last war. Tomorrow America will commemorate their sacrifice; not only to America but to all nations. At the same time the question will arise; Have they died in vain?

The answer lies in us: the students, workers, professionals and veterans united in a common front against the war-markers, prejudice, yellow journalism and political leaders who will not lead. Memorial Day is an opportunity to express that the unity of thought in action by showing the peoples of the world, who also morn [sic] their dead, that their dead and our own have not and will not be betrayed. 

Memorial Day 1936 has thus a deeper signifigance [sic] than heretofore. The issues are plain: a demonstration of solidarity on our part with the soldier dead who fought our fight. It is this solidarity alone which can ever check the war-mongers and reactionaries who vote ever larger war budgets in the midst of starvation; who instigate loyalty oaths and military training. 

3. From Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

Not even the chaplain could bring Doc Daneeka back to life under the circumstances. Alarm changed to resignation, and more and more Doc Daneeka acquired the look of an ailing rodent. The sacks under his eyes turned hollow and black, and he padded through the shadows fruitlessly like a ubiquitous spook. Even Captain Flume recoiled when Doc Daneeka sought him out in the woods for help. Heartlessly, Gus and Wes turned him away from their medical tent without even a thermometer for comfort, and then, only then, did he realize that, to all intents and purposes, he really was dead, and that he had better do something damned fast if he ever hoped to save himself. 

There was nowhere else to turn but to his wife, and he scribbled an impassioned letter begging her to bring his plight to the attention of the War Department and urging her to communicate at once with his group commander, Colonel Cathcart, for assurances that—no matter what else she might have heard—it was indeed he, her husband, Doc Daneeka, who was pleading with her, and not a corpse or some impostor. Mrs. Daneeka was stunned by the depth of emotion in the almost illegible appeal. She was torn with compunction and tempted to comply, but the very next letter she opened that day was from that same Colonel Cathcart, her husband’s group commander, and began: Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action. 

Mrs. Daneeka moved with her children to Lansing, Michigan, and left no forwarding address.

4. "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," by Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.  

Miscellany #4: Steinberg, Neruda, and More

1. Saul Steinberg, 1978

2. The Assistant (1970)

This most interesting part of this blurb about Elliott Gould from the February 1970 issue of Playboy (other than that they misspelled his name) is that someone was thinking of making a movie out of Bernard Malamud's 1957 novel The Assistant, and that Gould was going to be in it. I assume Gould was going to play the assistant, Frank, but I don't really see him in the role. I wonder who else was attached? (Little Murders came out in 1971. How close was The Assistant to being made?)

3. Jarrett/Corea

Keith Jarrett's short phrase at about 28 seconds anticipates the opening phrase of Chick Corea's "I Don't Know," from Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, by two years, and Corea's later reuse of the phrase as the foundation of "Times Lie" in 1973.

4. Anthony Trollope's Spoiler Alerts

From Barchester Towers:

"Then, in God's name, let him marry Mrs. Bold," said Madeline. And so it was settled between them. 

But let the gentle-hearted reader be under no apprehension whatsoever. It is not destined that Eleanor should marry Mr. Slope or Bertie Stanhope. And here, perhaps, it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his views on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes so far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers, by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage. Nay, more, and worse than this, is too frequently done. Have not often the profoundest efforts of genius been used to baffle the aspirations of the reader, to raise false hopes and false fears, and to give rise to expectations which are never to be realised? Are not promises all but made of delightful horrors, in lieu of which the writer produces nothing but most commonplace realities in his final chapter? And is there not a species of deceit in this to which the honesty of the present age should lend no countenance? 

And what can be the worth of that solicitude which a peep into the third volume can utterly dissipate? What the value of those literary charms which are absolutely destroyed by their enjoyment? When we have once learnt what was that picture before which was hung Mrs. Ratcliffe's solemn curtain, we feel no further interest about either the frame or the veil. They are to us merely a receptacle for old bones, an inappropriate coffin, which we would wish to have decently buried out of our sight. 

And then, how grievous a thing it is to have the pleasure of your novel destroyed by the ill-considered triumph of a previous reader. "Oh, you needn't be alarmed for Augusta, of course she accepts Gustavus in the end." "How very ill-natured you are, Susan," says Kitty, with tears in her eyes; "I don't care a bit about it now." Dear Kitty, if you will read my book, you may defy the ill-nature of your sister. There shall be no secret that she can tell you. Nay, take the last chapter if you please - learn from its pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there be any interest in it to lose. 

Our doctrine is, that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified.

5. From Pablo Neruda's Memoirs

 

I also recall that one day, while hunting behind my house for the tiny objects and minuscule beings of my world, I discovered a hole in one of the fence boards. I looked through the opening and saw a patch of land just like ours, untended and wild. I drew back a few steps, because I had a vague feeling that something was about to happen. Suddenly a hand came through. It was the small hand of a boy my own age. When I moved closer, the hand was gone and in its place was a little white sheep.

It was a sheep made of wool that had faded. The wheels on which it had glided were gone. I had never seen such a lovely sheep. I went into my house and came back with a gift, which I left in the same place: a pine cone, partly open, fragrant and resinous, and very precious to me.

I never saw the boy's hand again. I have never again seen a little sheep like that one. I lost it in a fire. And even today, when I go past a toy shop, I look in the windows furtively. But it's no use. A sheep like that one was never made again. 

(Translated from the Spanish by Hardie St. Martin.)

Miscellany #3: Tucker Carlson's Maine

1. MASH Mania

From Ring Lardner Jr.'s original screenplay for M*A*S*H. 

It's good that Altman followed this aside literally and abandoned any attempt at a Maine accent at all while filming the movie, just as it was good that Richard Hooker's original novel made no attempt to represent the Maine accent on the page (though it did do so for Duke Forrest's Southern accent, which Carl Freedman, in his very good essay on the TV series, calls "atrociously rendered").

Hooker was actually the pen name of H. Richard Hornberger, who wrote MASH: The Story of Three Army Doctors starting sometime in the mid-1950s, then enlisted the help of sportswriter W.C. Heinz - to make the thing publishable, I assume. It's not much of a book, even then. Hornberger was an Army doctor himself, who served in a MASH unit during the Korean War and based the book on his own experiences. He was born in Trenton, but after going to prep school in New Jersey attended Bowdoin, in my own hometown of Brunswick, Maine, and apparently liked it enough to go back after his Army service, practicing in Bremen (Maine, not Germany) and dying in Waterville. Hornberger wrote two MASH books set in Maine - the first, MASH Goes to Maine, was published in 1972, and the second, MASH Mania, in 1977. (I might write a post about MASH Goes to Maine, but don't hold your breath.)

MASH Mania is, in a word, terrible. It's also a bit like the Go Set A Watchman of the MASH franchise: we learn early on that Hawkeye, who in the first MASH novel, set in 1950, is relatively tolerant of racial difference, and in MASH Goes to Maine is only a couple steps removed from this persona, is in Mania what might be called, with full pejorative weight, "a product of his time":

Hawkeye spent most of his life in or around Spruce Harbor, where we have a variety of ethnic groups, and has chosen, as his nonmedical associates, citizens from what a local intellectual calls the rough-and-tumble element of our society. He has adopted and maybe enlarged upon the speech habits of this element. He often refers to blacks as niggers or coons, to French Canadians as frogs and lily pad jumpers and swamp canaries, to Italians as guineas, to Lebanese as camel drivers, to Jews as Hebes. Therefore he is automatically branded a bigot by certain people.

Why, how unreasonable of them! (It is worth noting that our narrator, the administrator of the Spruce Harbor hospital, calls this behavior merely one of Hawkeye's "eccentricities.") As in Hooker's earlier books, though, this racism is excused by Hawkeye's targets themselves. We learn that "the black population" of Spruce Harbor goes to Hawkeye and Hawkeye only for their surgical needs:

“Because I don't keep them waiting in my office or stiff them on weekends any more than I do anybody else. They know I want to get paid if they've got it but will work for zip if I have to. They know they ain't getting no reverse Tom action from Hawkeye Pierce. Also, as I told the Reverend Johnson after I grabbed his gallbladder, you make a hole in a nigger, even a nigger preacher, you can't tell him from anybody else.”

It's a testament to Hawkeye's views on the equality of man that at first glance I thought he was using the word "zip" as a slur. As one online review I read puts it, "This last book is sort of a 'sorry for the last ten books, here are the guys back again. But this time they’re middle aged Republicans. But it’s still funny! I swear!'" (Spoiler alert: it's not funny.)

After the enlightening passages on Hawkeye's racial views, we get a confirmation of his role as a Maine-based Archie Bunker:

In all of Maine we have about one thousand blacks, a couple thousand Indians and four thousand members (says Hawkeye Pierce) of the MCRL [Maine Civil Rights League]. Dr. Pierce believes that these four thousand include two thousand two hundred fifty Bad Hairs. A Bad Hair is anyone whose haircut extends beyond Hawkeye's crew cut. Most of the Bad Hairs are in college either as students or faculty. "The average Bad Hair," according to Hawk, "will never make as much money as any jig on a Detroit assembly line. His idea of how to bestow Civil Rights is to blow pot with the campus blacks. They're a bunch of jerks who cultivate the blacks because they hope the black cats are losing as bad as they are. They don't want to liberate the blacks. They just want to patronize them.”

Hawkeye, by contrast, isn't patronizing them, apparently. I don't know what he's doing, because he certainly isn't treating them as equals. He's a middle-aged, crew-cutted Korea veteran who throws slurs around the way he used to throw a football and sneers at the long-haired kids - in other words, he's my grandfather - and yet the book is working hard to still portray him as an underdog:

“They [the MCRL] hear a colloquial ethnic designation and they have an alarm reaction. They think that the words automatically degrade the individual. They don't understand that under certain circumstances these same words establish a bond of understanding and even affection or, for chrissake, that half the people here or anywhere else don't know that colloquial ethnic designations are a departure from what the effete snobs consider proper.”

In these two passages we get, effectively, a denunciation of the "PC police" who won't let Hawkeye use the racist language he wants to - racist language he has decided is not pejorative, but is rather a measure of respect, a simple "colloquial ethnic designation." And, what's more, these PC police aren't just people like you and me - no, they're the elites, the establishment (Hawkeye singles out organized religion and college-educated wives of executives), and they're hypocrites to boot! Those same outraged MCRL members, according to Hawkeye, would, “if they saw a nigger in the pool... drain it and start over." No, Hawkeye is the straight talker, the real underdog, because he's standing up to the hypocritical PC police with their college educations (never mind that Hawkeye went to college, too) and their patronizing attitudes.

MASH Mania puts the number of African Americans in Maine at "about one thousand." The truth is that there were almost definitely more black Mainers in 1977 than that - this Portland Press Herald graphic gives a 1970 number as 2,800 - but it's incontestable that Maine was, and is, very white. Significantly, while MASH got an endless string of sequels, like MASH Goes to New Orleans and MASH Goes to Morocco, almost all of them were solely written by a guy named William Butterworth. The only two sequels written by Hornberger - and solely by him, unlike the original novel - are MASH Goes to Maine and the Maine-set MASH Mania. I don't say this to argue that Hornberger was a racist, per se. But I do think that, besides having his own personal familiarity with the state as an incentive, setting his books in Maine, as in Korea, allows Hornberger to play fast and loose with his definition of the rebellious hero. When the only black characters in your book are your own inventions, and the audience for that book is likely to be white, you can make those black characters say - or do - whatever you want without much fear of reprisal.

For example, in MASH Mania, after Hawkeye is accidentally filmed by a TV crew calling his friend, African American surgeon "Spearchucker" Jones (the first book innocently chalks this nickname up to simple "prowess with the javelin" as a college athlete) the n-word at a golf tournament (all in fun, of course), Spearchucker happily goes along with Hawkeye's plan to, in essence, give the finger to those "effete snobs" who are demanding an apology - Hawkeye shows up on the appointed day with a whip, Spearchucker tackles him, and in due course the MCRL members flee in fear. *laugh track* Hawkeye gets to be the rebel against the straw man elite PC police, with the full approval of Spearchucker making all those slurs okay - just as in the original MASH novel, Southerner Duke Forrest's racism is also excused by Spearchucker when it's revealed that, implausibly, Forrest's slave-owning ancestors freed Spearchucker's slave ancestors.

Now, I'm all for puncturing hypocrisy. The problem of all three of Hornberger's MASH novels is that, when you look a little closer, the needle isn't always getting stuck into the right target, from (and I realize that this word is becoming a bit of a hobbyhorse on this blog) an ideological standpoint. In her 1970 review of Altman's M*A*S*H, Pauline Kael wrote that "[t]he picture has so much spirit that you keep laughing - and without discomfort, because all the targets should be laughed at." This is true, if you buy Hornberger's argument that Hot Lips Houlihan = the heartless Army bureaucracy that got us into Vietnam (and Roger Ebert did when he wrote that Hot Lips, "who is all Army professionalism and objectivity, is less human because the suffering doesn't reach her." Less human!!). But if you step back and realize the ways that Altman chooses to put almost all of that hatred for this bureaucracy into a woman instead of, say, Henry Blake, and when you start to realize the sheer amount of misogyny in the film at large, it gets harder to laugh at Hot Lips' various humiliations, dumped on her as they are by a bunch of jeering men. The same is true of Hornberger's racial episodes, especially in Mania. Yeah, it's nice to pop the balloon of PC hypocrisy - until you realize that a black man named "Spearchucker" is cheerfully helping a middle-aged white guy with a crew cut defend his right to say the n-word, or whatever other slur he wants to use, from the moralizing "kids these days." Is it really worth it? This tendency to laugh, in the name of individualism and rebellion, at certain (nonrandom) targets while actually reinforcing a dominant ideology reaches its apotheosis later in MASH Mania, when Hawkeye and the boys drive a rape counselor out of town with false accusations. The episode is telling as a demonstration of how Altman's film of MASH, which turned Margaret Houlihan from a minor character in the novel into a scapegoat for every evil, bureaucratic, zealous Army action of Korea or Vietnam, was not a departure from Hooker's vision, but rather a divination of his true feelings, as yet unexpressed. It is also a great example of the kind of anti-PC straw man behavior so common on the internet these days, where something abstractly positive - the need for rape counselors to help victims of sexual assault - is perceived (who knows why, one wonders...) as a personal attack on a particular group's values - "We don't have any rapes here, but by coming here at all you're accusing us of rape" - and is then attacked out of all proportion - "We're going to engineer false rape accusations to discredit your entire mission, and then we're going to act all rapey towards you until you leave" - the departure of the rape counselor seen as a moral victory for individual freedom, with Hawkeye & Co. blissfully ignorant of how they went from a community pretty unconcerned with sexual assault to one essentially committing it simply to make a point. It's nuts.

Hawkeye's reactionary attitudes in MASH Mania are really just the logical endpoint of the first MASH novel. Hawkeye has never been a true rebel, because in all of his rebellious actions lies a reinforcement of a somewhat toxic status quo. He fights against Army bureaucracy, sure, but only because it gets in the way of his drinking or other personal freedoms. While Altman introduces some empathy and politics into the story - additions which allowed audiences to see some kind of protest message in the film - the story has no politics at all. Hornberger/Hooker was pro-Korean War, a conservative who detested the way Alan Alda twisted his central creation into a progressive, and the original story never takes a stance on the war, the many casualties who come through the doctors' surgery either a way to excuse their bad behavior or just a real bummer that must be escaped by visiting a brothel in Seoul.

The real fly in Hornberger's ointment, and the reason why MASH Mania is so much nastier than MASH or MASH Goes to Maine, was specifically Alan Alda and the way MASH was adapted for TV. Tellingly, Hornberger liked Altman's movie, which does erase some of the racism but only in favor of heightened sexism and misogyny. But Alda had different goals for the show. If, by 1977, Hornberger's conception of Hawkeye Pierce was essentially a middle-aged blue-collar rural doctor with a crew cut and a chip on his shoulder because minorities and women can't take a joke, Alda was like that Hawkeye's college-aged kid - young, progressive, long-haired, and ready to have some arguments around the dinner table. By all accounts, Hornberger, who (it's generally accepted) modeled Hawkeye on himself, was enraged by the TV show, and it's easy to see MASH Mania as specifically a response to the way Alda's liberal values had changed the character, as well as, perhaps, a desire after five years to reclaim some of the character in the public eye (M*A*S*H the TV series was developed after a film adaptation of MASH Goes to Maine failed to get off the ground).

In the context of all this, it's interesting that Hornberger kept pulling Hawkeye back to Maine. Hornberger went to Bowdoin, and it's generally accepted that Hawkeye's alma mater, Androscoggin, is a ringer for Bowdoin. Hornberger came to Bowdoin from the Peddie School, and left it for medical school at Cornell, and this is the way the movie and the TV show seem to conceive of Hawkeye - a well-educated, privileged guy with an authority problem. But Hornberger's books seem to indicate that he had a very different view of the character. After all, the first novel makes it clear that he didn't have a lot of money while at Androscoggin, and he doesn't come from a wealthy background. Lardner's original screenplay for MASH was on to something when it gave Hawkeye a Maine accent  (which, while it can sound Kennedy-esque, is usually only heard in blue-collar conversation), just as Altman and Alda were right to ignore it as they changed the character's orientation.

Altman's film ends in the MASH camp, immersed in images of Korea, as Duke and Hawkeye leave for home. Hornberger's novel ends at the Spruce Harbor airport, as Hawkeye's wife and children watch him return from the war:

[T]he valedictorian of the class of 1941 at Port Waldo High School and two small boys watched Dr. Benjamin Franklin Pierce disembark from a Northeast Airlines Convair in Spruce Harbor, Maine.

The larger of the two boys jumped into his father's arms and inquired, "How they goin', Hawkeye?"

"Finest kind," replied his father. 

But it is Lardner's screenplay, which removes the detail about Hawkeye's wife even in its directions, which perhaps best sums up Hawkeye's relationship to Maine. Maine is the place where Hawkeye comes into himself. As he says to a New Jersey doctor in MASH Goes to Maine, "I'll pick your brain and take your shit for a year and go on my way and you'll still be here when I'm back in Maine doing what you're doing and living like a human being in the bargain."

2. Tucker Carlson's Maine

In the above thoughts on MASH Mania, I wrote that the book serves as

a denunciation of the "PC police" who won't let Hawkeye use the racist language he wants to - racist language he has decided is not pejorative, but is rather a measure of respect, a simple "colloquial ethnic designation." And, what's more, these PC police aren't just people like you and me - no, they're the elites, the establishment (Hawkeye singles out organized religion and college-educated wives of executives), and they're hypocrites to boot! Those same outraged MCRL members, according to Hawkeye, would, “if they saw a nigger in the pool... drain it and start over." No, Hawkeye is the straight talker, the real underdog, because he's standing up to the hypocritical PC police with their college educations (never mind that Hawkeye went to an elite college, too) and their patronizing attitudes.

Sound familiar?

Interestingly, Tucker Carlson - who rails against a hypocritical, patronizing, effete, PC-obsessed elite determined to take away regular Americans' right to say and do whatever racist thing they please - has a strong connection to Maine. Tucker's regular summer home is in Bryant Pond, which despite being further inland from Bremen, sounds like it could be one of Hornberger's rejected alternatives for "Spruce Harbor."

Carlson is fond of crediting his time in Bryant Pond with giving him insight into the social and political woes of America at large. Kelefa Sanneh writes in his excellent, though now sadly outdated, 2017 profile of Carlson for The New Yorker that "[h]e was influenced, too, by talking to people in Maine, where he spends his summers (in the rural northeast of the state, he is quick to add, not on the wealthy coastline). 'It changed my politics more than anything,' he says." Stephen Rodrick's GQ profile of Carlson, also from 2017, actually spends some time with Tucker in Maine (Andover is a town very close to Bryant Pond): "He accuses the elites of having 'contempt' for the population of the country they govern.... He calls his time in Andover 'the pivotal experience of my political life.... It’s been a longitudinal study of the same place. It had stores and a barbershop, and a car-repair place, and I used to get my hair cut there as a kid.' Carlson pauses for a second and sighs. 'And I’ve watched the town collapse.'" Notably, as Rodrick notes, "The town is nearly all white."

Carlson's insistence that Bryant Pond/Andover is representative of the country allows him to extrapolate wildly from his own limited experiences of the town - no one gets married anymore, everyone's on drugs, there are no jobs anywhere, everyone is white - while holding a trump card to show to anyone who argues with him - "Do you live among the common people, as I do?" In English 101, we call this, pejoratively, "anecdotal evidence."

Jay Nordlinger wrote in a pretty cringeworthy 2014 National Review article that

You can find an idyll here in Maine: a Maine where life is the way it should be, as the slogan says. Scrappy kids romp through blueberry patches, go for a swim, and scarf lobster. Did you ever read Blueberries for Sal, the classic Maine children’s story?
Life can be idyllic, sure, but there is also the “other Maine” — the Maine lamented by the man at the Houston luncheon. Maine is not to be romanticized, romantic though it can be, especially if you’re on the coast.

Nordlinger's point is intended to dovetail with Tucker's: as he writes elsewhere in the essay, "[S]adly, this is not a state overrunning with major industries," and quotes a friend (who grew up in Maine but has since lived elsewhere) as saying, "The state has experienced a sad decline. There’s a host of problems: drug addiction and family breakdown and all the rest of it. Today’s Maine is more like Appalachia, I think, than like the Maine of old." The funny thing is, this is a kind of romanticization in itself - instead of painting the city-dweller's fantasy of an idyllic, E.B. White-esque Maine as a state of lobster traps, quaint locals and pine trees, it paints Tucker Carlson's fantasy of that previous fantasy destroyed by drugs, overseas production, immigration (remember when Trump tried to tell Maine they were being invaded by evil immigrants?)*, and a decline of family values.

It serves Carlson's purpose to sum Maine up as "like Oregon: a poor, rural, conservative state, dominated by Portland" because a) both Portlands are young, trendy, liberal cities who, in Tucker's view, have overshadowed the authentic working-class heart of their states, and b) making almost everyone in Maine a victim makes Carlson their savior. Mainers become a prop in the larger conversation Carlson is trying to have - a prop both to wield against his straw man liberal elite class, but also to shore up an idea of himself as connected to the common man. In reality, of course, Carlson doesn't live in Maine, nor is he from there. He summers in Maine, a phrase which one of my best friends from Maine tends to spit out disdainfully. This is not to say that his fantasy Mainer is not also a reality, and it's certainly not to say that Maine doesn't have problems. It's simply to reinforce the idea that Carlson comes to the state with preconceived notions, and is able to preserve them by experiencing the state selectively in forays from his summer home.

Summer homes are sentimental places, and summers are powerful times. My impression is that Carlson's feelings about Maine are inextricably bound up with his own family history there. In 2000, he wrote an article about Maine for conservative political magazine The Weekly Standard called "One Man's Treasure." In The National Review, Nordlinger quotes Carlson as saying, in regard to the Somali immigrant population in Maine, "Racial strife is the only problem we didn’t have in Maine, so we had to import it.” Nordlinger also makes clear that it's the immigrants who are causing the problems, by refusing to assimilate. Carlson writes in "One Man's Treasure" that as he prepares to leave his Maine home at the end of another summer, "[s]uddenly I felt emotional. Next year, I thought, this place will look exactly the same, because it never changes. But we do. When we come back, the bricks and rocks and hunks of rusted metal will still be here, just where the children left them. I wonder if they'll still consider it treasure." Of course, underneath Carlson's claim that "racial strife" didn't exist in Maine prior to immigration from Somalia, a claim which slyly implies that Maine was some kind of racial utopia, is the fact that Maine is still one of the whitest states in America - almost 95% white in 2016, with the next highest percentage being African Americans at 1.2%. So what Carlson is saying is, in effect, that when Maine was all white, there were no race problems, but as it becomes more diverse, those problems increase. That Carlson perhaps sees this increase in diversity as a negative is less surprising when viewed through the lens of his own relationship with the state: "this place" no longer "looks exactly the same," and "the children" - many of whom are to be found in Portland, not Bryant Pond or Andover - seem not to be concerned that the Maine Carlson grew up visiting is being altered.

When Carlson writes in "One Man's Treasure" that "[s]ummer houses are like time capsules," one wonders if he doesn't think of the state of Maine as his summer house, and resents the way it has changed for the same emotionally resonant reasons he fears his children will lose a connection he has felt to the house. Maine has changed because of the loss of jobs for lower class white workers, but it has also changed to be more diverse. Carlson sees in the liberal elites, who in their push for more diversity and inclusion threaten the traditional seat of power sat upon for decades by J. Press-wearing, C-student, silver-spoon-fed white men like Carlson, a threat also to the romanticized blue collar worker of Maine, whose jobs have been stolen not by the inexorable forces of capitalism seeking cheaper and cheaper labor overseas but by the "effete snobs" who undermined our national strength in vaguely/elusively defined ways.

The fact is, despite the political reading it invites in hindsight, "One Man's Treasure" is a nice, sweet little essay that it's nearly impossible to imagine Carlson writing today. Like Hooker and the MASH series, Carlson has grown more bitter and more antagonistic over time. When Hawkeye sat on top of the world in Korea, he could afford to be generous to a Spearchucker or a Ho-Jon; when the times they were a-changin' in the late 1970s, he had to dig in and fight to hold on to his right to be racist and sexist. In the end, it isn't Maine that refuses to change - it's Hawkeye and Carlson.

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* In 2017, Nordlinger wrote in another National Review article question-begging the impossibility of immigrant assimilation in Sweden, "A few years ago, I did a little report from Maine — where there is a Somalian population. Problems abound." He didn't elaborate there on what those problems were or how he knew about them, but in his "Maine Journal" from 2014, he writes that Somali immigrants "have brought with them some of the maladies of the Old World. These include gang warfare and brutality toward women. The Somalians are stressing the police, the welfare system, and everything else." This is not really true. As the 2016 Press Herald article linked to above notes, "Lewiston’s acting police chief, Brian O’Malley, said there was no correlation between Somali immigration and increased crime, and if anything, the opposite is true." In my own personal experience, the only problems caused by Somali immigration to Maine were because of people like Jay Nordlinger, i.e. those who assumed immigrants could never assimilate and acted accordingly. I personally went to school in Maine with lots of kids from Somalia, and suffice it say none were in gangs.