A puzzle: “close to home”

Lisa, a volunteer with an anti-drugs group, circled over and over again to the topic of the local nuclear battleships base during an interview with me:

Another interviewee, Carolyn, lived closer to the base. A chemical plant just upstream from her had had a huge spill a few months earlier; oil lapped up onto her house, which jutted out on stilts over the bay. “The beach was covered with oil. You could see it on the rocks and in the water. It was sad, ” she told me as we sat at her kitchen table with her eighteen-year-old son, in front of a picture window with an eye-level view of the nuclear battleship base and the glimmering bay, under a big sky of rainclouds streaked with sunlight. Every twenty minutes or so a battleship slipped by.

The private people were not the only group at the country-western clubs. Another group usually sat together, went on outings together, and generally formed a subgroup at the clubs. Considering how continuously this second group of friends made morbid, despairing political jokes, and how much detailed political knowledge they exchanged, and how strong and bitter their opinions were, I was puzzled that they managed not to get involved in doing something about the problems that they so attentively, lovingly catalogued. Clearly, these Buffalo members did engage in political debate, in a potential context of the informal public sphere, but the point of their conversation was always to convince each other that they were smart enough to know that they could not do anything about the problems.

The point of including this comparison case is to show a range of methods for creating politically disengaged public conversation. Making such a strong effort to convince oneself and one's friends of citizens' powerlessness is a way of taking a political position, but it is one that closes off avenues for involvement that go beyond expressions of vehement disengagement. Thus, in the “cycle of political evaporation,” such bitter cynicism enters the potential contexts of the public sphere, but only in order to neuter feelings of political engagement, to keep politics at bay. Ironically, this group, that talked about politics more than any group I encountered, was also the most actively distant from politics.

Examining everyday political conversation reveals an often ignored dimension of public engagement and disengagement, rebellion and acquiescence, curiosity and complacency. This seemingly shallow dimension is the intangible realm of unspoken political etiquette, where citizens delicately but very firmly establish a sense of what the public sphere itself is – of what can be questioned and discussed, where and how. In the contemporary American public sphere, paradoxically, what marks a context as clearly “public” is often precisely the fact that the talk there is so narrow, not at all publicminded. Civic etiquette made imaginative, open-minded, thoughtful conversation rare in public, frontstage settings. The more hidden the context, the more public-spirited conversation was possible. Politics evaporated from public circulation.

The people I met wanted to create a sense of community, but did not want to talk politics. Though they did gather together, they missed a chance to ignite that magical kind of power that can sparkle between people when they self-reflectively organize themselves. Such reflection does not necessarily entail ignoring local, individual suffering or abandoning local hands-on projects. In the process of alleviating real people's suffering, citizens could wonder aloud about the political forces that may have helped create that suffering. While building the playgrounds and selling tickets to the local Halloween fair, parents could casually talk about whatever came to mind, including politics. People could learn to use their collective imaginations to improve what they can improve – to lend a hand, but also an imagination.

Sherry's speech came out in a jerky, halting rhythm when she told me, in an interview, that the issue of nuclear war was “not close to home”:

Sherry knew it was a problem, but did not want to know.

Volunteers strenuously insisted that all of their efforts were motivated by self-interest. Over and over, they repeated that all people, themselves included, get involved in community affairs only out of “self-interest,” “for their own children,” on issues that are “close to home” and “affect them personally.” In appearing self-interested, volunteers seemed at first glance to confirm the theory that people are “rational actors,” that is, people who will bestir them-selves to community action only when they think that time invested will be worth the personal payoff, and only when they cannot hitch a “free ride” to that personal payoff on someone else's back. But, as we heard in the last chapter, volunteers wanted to do more than live in a paradise engineered by someone else; they wanted to reassure themselves, through their own actions, that the world makes sense because good citizens really can make a difference on issues that matter. Volunteers were, above all, “moral” – in the sense of meaning-making – actors, rather than “rational” actors. The phrases “close to home” and “for the children” worked hard; they were pivotal in allowing volunteers to maintain that feeling that the world made sense.

Part 1: “Is this a tangent?”: activists in meetings

Since the “private people” at the country-western clubs so rarely talked politics at the clubs – where they spent nearly all of their free time – members had little or no companionship in developing methods for analyzing politics. How do people like the Buffaloes, who had so little opportunity to talk politics, ever learn to think about politics? Interviewing them showed me just how risky and strange it was for most members to talk politics. This chapter reports on ten interviews and backstage political conversations with country-westerners. What most overwhelmed me in the interviews with this group was that their political worries, though often strong, were far-flung, even eccentric, not overlapping with other members' concerns. For example, Charlene had been so worried about nuclear war in the early 1980s, she read a book about how to grow potatoes in underground caves and live in the Yukon, “because of wind patterns making it a place fallout wouldn't land”; another member devoted a large portion of our interview to his worry that we receive radioactive rays from light bulbs and toasters. Another “would fear for [her] health” if she were to become politically involved, giving as an example a popular docudrama about whistleblower Karen Silkwood, killed by the nuclear power company whose crimes she exposed. These varied worries almost never made it to everyday conversation. Country-westerners were worried – sometimes devoured by worries – but they did not talk about their concerns, and so experienced them as purely unusual, personal fears that demanded purely personal strategies to vanquish.

Distinctions

Anthropologists and sociologists rarely study people whose identities are constructed in distinction from, in opposition to, to their own: country-westerners dance to a song that proclaims, “I ain't no doctor, don't got no Ph.D., but when you talk about lüüüüv, come to me!”; I, in turn, was jealous that they could so easily and straightforwardly lay claim to being “typical red-blooded Americans,” while no one would ever call me a real down home, plain-folks American. I worried that I was the wrong person to study regular Americans. Even if the Buffalo Club was not “really” cowboy culture, it was all foreign to me, an urban, bi-coastal, bespectacled, Jewish, Ph.D. candidate from a long line of communists, atheists, liberals, book-readers, ideologues, and arguers. I could not trade on my unwholesome background if I were running for political office. Some of my earliest fond memories are of my communist grandpa telling me about the joy of unalienated labor as we carefully made beds and cleaned dishes, or railing about the Vietnam War, or sitting at his little desk writing letter after letter to his local newspaper.

Theoretically, I know there is no such thing as a “mainstream American” – mainstream by ethnicity, class, race, region, religion, and everything else – and if there were, the mainstream would either have to be broad enough to include someone like me, or else it would represent only a small minority of Americans. Nevertheless, whatever the statistical reality, the people portrayed here laid a more firm claim on normalness than I.

One typical kind of sociological argument examines a causal link between individual members' class background and political engagement. It would show how hidden structural forces inexorably work on people, steering them toward this kind of group, away from that. Such research would look at members' class, look at their political participation, see how they correlate, perhaps correlate these figures with some other “objective” measures, and call it a day (Verba and Nie's 1972 classic, for example). If I had focused on class, I would have shown how or if groups take on class-linked characteristics, and then how members interpret their class positions, as another “relation to authorities and institutions.” This would have been one good way of doing this study.

I had empirical and theoretical reasons for not doing that. First, empirically, it is impossible to control for class in real civic groups in the US; I had originally planned on doing so, and then decided it was impossible, and then, in a way, inadvertently succeeded in doing so, anyway. Class differences between the different types of groups were minimal, especially between the activists and volunteers. Volunteers in the schools and anti-drugs groups included: three schoolteachers, one corporate scientist, one local realtor, two full-time homemakers (both with two years of college), some pink-collar workers. Activists in the anti-toxics group included, among others: two schoolteachers, one corporate scientist, one local realtor, two full-time homemakers (neither with college backgrounds, though one started going to community college to learn about environmental issues after a year in the group – being in the group helped change her class ethos), some pink-collar workers; in other words, if we lined up activists and volunteers, we could couple off a Noah's Ark of paired occupations.

Reading the local newspapers in Amargo and Evergreen City did not help citizens make connections between politics and everyday life, did not help them learn about the art of political debate, and inadvertently discouraged them from speaking out in a public-spirited way. Far from the sober gray world of national news, the world of local news is simultaneously lurid and down-home. The news in local Amargo and Evergreen papers was a rushing stream of unpredictable, curious, and scary events that happen to other people, usually elsewhere – lost children in other states, Siamese twins some-where who ride a bicycle built for two, freak poisonings, the random, and the weird – and advice about cholesterol, dogs, yard care, consumer advice on brands of cough drops and local shopping. That is, the local papers were mainly tabloids with tamer headlines (Bird 1990) plus consumer gazettes.

Still, they did cover many local events, using serious local reporters, and they devoted two pages per issue to national and international news. And they were most people's source of news, aside from TV – everybody I met who read newspapers read either the Amargo Herald or the Evergreen Country Times. Every now and then, a few activists and cynics read nearby city newspapers, but those papers rarely had news about suburbs. No one read national newspapers such as The New York Times, Washington Post, or Los Angeles Times.

Part 1:Trying to create a community of private people

Regulars at the Silverado Club and Buffalo Club's country-western dance classes usually greeted each other with warm hugs and exclamations of “Hey, there she is – at last!” and “Where've you been?” Many participants in the clubs' country-western dance classes said they wanted the place to have “a real community feel,” and to be “not just a bar, but a community center, a family place,” as one member put it.

Part 1:Trying to hide the public spirit

Volunteers were poised to combat the specter of futility and to convince all newcomers that “You really can make a difference!” and that “Everyone has something to offer,” as they often put it. They hoped to communicate that message through the very act of volunteering; and tried not to pay attention to problems that might undermine that message of hope. So, they tried hard not to care about issues that would require too much talking to solve, and tried to shrink their concerns into tasks that they could define as unpolitical, unconnected to the wider world. These citizens thought they could inspire feelings of empowerment within that small circle of concern; and they implicitly believed that helping people feel empowered was, in itself, doing something good for the community.

Advocates of democracy have long looked to groups that work on small, local issues as potential schools for wider political concern. Volunteers shared faith in this ideal of civic participation, but in practice, paradoxically, maintaining this hope and faith meant curtailing political discussion: members sounded less publicly minded and less politically creative in groups than they sounded individually.