POLITICS
Even the Republicans have to woo Americans who go to church and do not lock their doors
BRUCE ANDERSON
The book opens with a powerful insight: 'The country is so barbarously large and final. It is too much country . . . alterna- tively drab and dazzling . . . so wrongfully muddled and various that it is difficult to conceive of it as all of a piece.' Though Brammer was merely referring to his native Texas, his judgment is even truer of the whole nation than of the Lone Star State — with one exception. There is nothing final about the United States of America.
Every time the USA elects a president, much of the rest of the world recoils from the process in horror, and many sensitive Americans share that reaction. Apart from the demagoguery and vulgarity, two complaints are perennial: time and cost. The current presidential campaign was under way by July 1999, yet the serious electioneering is only just about to begin. By the time all this year's ballots are counted, around $3 billion will have been expended: more, no doubt, than the GDP of several countries which ought to rank among the deserving poor, if you listen to aid agencies.
And yet, for the last 100 years, this bar- barously large and dazzling country has not merely been the home of the brave. It has been the land of the tallest, the biggest, the most extravagant — and it still is. The evidence for this does not just come from the projected budget surplus: $4 trillion over the next decade, equal to three times Britain's annual GDP. It comes from the casual sums thrown up in a day's news. An additional $1.4 billion is to be spent on improving security at US embassies, while the Republicans are to spend $100 million on boosting voter turn- out: that from a party which has tradition- ally benefited from a low turn-out.
The era of the horizontal skyscraper may be over; these days, American cars look like normal ones. But in every other respect the United States is built on a larg- er scale than other countries. Only a roar- ingly excessive political process could do justice to America's magniloquent gross- ness. I reached that conclusion in paradoxi- cal surroundings, for there is nothing gross about the Brandy Wine Valley in Pennsyl- vania. During the War of Independence, it saw fierce fighting while still a wilderness, thus ensuring that embattled manhood had to contend with implacable nature as well as with human foes. Since then, however, the Brandy Wine has been tamed to a Cotswoldian extent, and even by the 19th century it was attracting painters. But alas, none of their talents was worthy of the landscape, so the legacy is wall after wall of lush, banal twaddling.
The true Brandy Wine school did emerge later, in the person of Andrew Wyeth: is there a finer living painter? His predecessors were lush; he is spare. His subject-matter is a dead leaf on an autum- nal branch, a bleak barn, a house at twi- light, the frozen earth. There is a Flemish intensity and intellectual command in every millimetre of the canvas. In his por- traits, the influence of Van Eyck is mani- fest; even after six centuries, few painters could embrace that discipleship without foundering. Mr Wyeth uses an austere, wintry palate and his romanticism is the more effective for being under restraint. In all of his paintings, there is joy in the con- quest of light.
If there is a weakness in the Wyeth oeu- vre, it is his nudes. He paints them against a characteristic background, as if to locate their place in nature. But this may not work. Stripped nature is natural; not so, stripped humanity. To paint in the nude is to invest the subject-matter with an emo- tional significance well beyond that of a ploughed field or a dead tree. In striving for assimilation, Andrew Wyeth ends up with discord. But nudes apart, this is a painter with a luminous technical mastery who knows what he wants to do and does it. On a lesser scale, that is equally true of his neighbours. Brandy Wine is a place where people go to church and do not lock their doors. They take time to talk to their neighbours and look out for each other's kids. In Brandy Wine, 'community' is not a politician's rhetorical trick. It is how peo- ple live and always have. They know no other.
As patience is not one of my vices, I usu- ally find that the genial inefficiencies of the boondocks arouse nostalgia for the astrin- gency of Manhattan. There, a girl is asking for directions. After brief, rebuffing exchanges with two passers-by, she turns to a third: 'Can you tell me the way to the Rockefeller Center, or do I go 1— myself, lady?' But in Brandy Wine, in the after- glow of superb paintings and an excellent luncheon, peace comes dropping slow. The locals have a mellow and gracious way of life, drawing on the traditional strengths of the American republic. They may be wear- ing shorts and T-shirts, but their moral garb is not so distant from the Founding Fathers'.
There is nothing in modern Brandy Wine to make General Washington regret that he fought his battles. We were asked what had brought us to these parts. `Oh, of course, the Convention' — but their 'of course' was insincere. Suddenly, one realised why the Republicans wanted to spend $100 million on encouraging the turn-out. Only 50 per cent of Americans will vote, and though many of the abstain- ers will be the inner-city poor, who are beneath politics, there are also a lot of prosperous Americans who feel that poli- tics is beneath them. Pennsylvania is a marginal state. Those to whom we were talking were all natural Republicans, but few of them were certain to bother to vote.
When George W. Bush invited his fellow Americans to rise to the challenge of the rising road, he could have had the voters of Brandy Wine in mind; that is their lan- guage. Content with moral rectitude they would happily be accounted as drab, in Billy Lee Brammer's terms. But Brandy Wine is not the whole of America. Many other vot- ers expect the dazzle and the razzmatazz. So how can the two be reconciled?
`Goddam,' says Governor Fenstemaker at one stage, and a staffer inquires anx- iously what is the matter. 'Nuthin, son, I'm just goddamin,' came the reply. If one was an American politician, one could see the governor's point. This is too big a country for a tame and uncomplicated democratic process.
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