By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
History buff and civics nerd Sarah Vowell said in Dowagiac Wednesday that her historical tourism "collects evidence that it could always be worse."
She explained to Union High School students prior to her lecture that she has no desire to write a novel because non-fiction can be more unbelievable.
"Some of the things I write about," Vowell said, "if you put them in a novel they would seem ridiculous and outlandish" – contrived almost.
She couldn't make up real history, where the freaky is commonplace and drapes her world in "magical things," like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying on July 4, 1836 – the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
"There's more of a burden on fiction to exist," she said. "For radio I was in charge of finding short stories. I read hundreds and so many seemed pointless. It's one thing to write a pointless non-fiction story, but to actually bring something boring and made up into the world, that seems slightly more egregious to me."
"I love fiction," she said, "and I love consuming it. It probably comes from I never wanted to be a writer. I wasn't one of those people who was writing stories. I got into writing studying art history, writing term papers and then as a critic."
National security should not be partisan. "Keeping the American people safe wasn't in the president's oath," said the Democrat, who recounted attending the 2001 inauguration and slipping into the National Archives to make sure the Constitution was still there.
"His oath is to defend the Constitution and to keep our ideals safe and our beliefs intact," she said to applause as a person "who lives a stone's throw from the Empire State Building, which I assume might be a target."
Vowell also said, "Even if torture keeps me safer, I don't want to be kept safe that way. I would literally rather die, which I can say because I'm not a parent. I don't know why parenthood is seen as the be-all and end-all of citizenship. They're basically anarchists because they would kill to protect their child. I'd rather be bombed than have horrible, evil things done in my name. I don't mind (torture) on '24,' which is an awesome show. Jack Bauer can shoot a guy in the leg to get information out of him and I'm with that. I just don't want it in real life, and I can make the distinction."
"The objective of historical tourism is probably to collect evidence in support of my motto: It could be worse. 'It could be worse' is how I meet every setback, though nothing all that bad has ever happened to me," Vowell said. "Every time I've gotten my heart broken, or gotten fired or watched an audience member at one of my readings have a seizure as I'm standing at the podium trying not to cry, I remind myself it could be worse … I whisper mantras to myself like 'Andersonville' or 'Texas School Book Depository.' Andersonville is a code word for 'you could be one of the prisoners of war dying of disease and malnutrition in the worst Confederate prison,' so calm down that the movie you wanted to go to is sold out. Being stuck in the Boise airport for 10 hours while getting hit on by a divorced man with major financial problems on his way to his 20th high school reunion is irksome, but not as dire as swinging by the neck on Salem's Gallows Hill."
"If I've gleaned anything useful from reading and day-tripping through the tribulations of the long dead," Vowell said, "it's to count my blessings, to try to quit bellyaching, buck up. Gallows Hill and Andersonville, it could be worse. On the first day of school when I was a kid, a guy wearing a lot of brown teaching history would talk up if we failed to learn the lessons of history, we would be doomed to repeat them. That's true if you're going to grow up to run things, but not if your destiny is a nice, small life. For example, from my 10th grade world history textbooks chapter on the Napoleonic Wars, I know not to invade Russia in the winter. This information would have been been good for an I-told-you-so toast at Hitler's New Year's party in 1943, but for me knowing not to trudge my troops through the snow to Moscow" is not useful in daily life.
"The more history I do learn, the more the world fills up with stories."
At a coffee shop it occurred to Vowell, "To drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the new world, from the Spanish exportation of Aztec beans to the invention of the chemical process for making cocoa on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, Pa., and Seattle's Starbucks. The modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much."
Students heralded her arrival in the choir room with a recorder band singing and playing "Hot Cross Buns" in homage to her "Music Lessons" essay.
Though she played baritone and xylophone in marching band, Vowell at 14 joined the American Recorder Society and ordered baroque music with her baby-sitting money. Performing on recorder with two older women "was the first time – the only time – I actually enjoyed playing music."
Newsweek magazine's 1997 non-fiction "Rookie of the Year" has published four essay collections – a one-year diary "Radio On," "Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World," "The Partly Cloudy Patriot" and "Assassination Vacation" about Civil War-era presidents and their killers – Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and William McKinley.
A multi-faceted media celebrity from Montana by way of Chicago, the humorist is a contributing editor to NPR's "This American Life" and a frequent guest on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, "The Late Show with David Letterman," "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" and "The Colbert Report," the voice of Violet in the animated film "The Incredibles," a "3-D actress" with a bit part as a public defender in the "Six Degrees" series premiere and an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, although it was the San Francisco Chronicle that predicts she will "continue to be one of the most important voices of her generation."
Unless, of course, you encounter her at a Berkshires B&B, then she is the "black hole of breakfast, a decided void of gloom sucking the sunshine out of a New England day. … They probably didn't want to think about presidential gunshot wounds, but when I'm with strangers I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet. Old-guy loners build cabins on the slopes of my silence. Then poof! It's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota."
Vowell, who said her fifth book will be about the Puritans, certainly left the Dogwood Fine Arts Festival audience at the middle school Performing Arts Center laughing reading from her essays and discussing religion, politics, airport security and her belief that when her generation came of age "gardening would just stop because it's so boring. Not me, but people I know still garden."
The strangest historical place she's been might be Mormon headquarters in Salt Lake City with its wall-sized mural "like a Yes album cover."
"I realized I'm a monotheistic atheist," she quipped. "I don't believe in one God. Salt Lake City and Las Vegas are one-note company towns that rose out of the desert by the sheer will of true believers, like presidents and their assassins. Both figures have way too much self-confidence."
"I'm a history buff," she said. "I'm never more than a 1-800 number away from ordering the Time-Life World War II series off the TV. I have set my alarm so I wouldn't miss a morning C-SPAN live remote from the house of Revolutionary War pamphleteer Thomas Paine. I celebrated my 30th birthday at Grant's Tomb. The historical periods I like to learn about aren't so much costume dramas as slasher lit. The French Revolution is a favorite because it features the beloved plot of carnage in service of democracy, but I prefer American history.
"If I had to pick my pet domestic bloodbath, nothing beats Salem or Gettysburg. I'm a sucker for Puritan New England and the Civil War because those two subjects feature the essential tension of American life – the conflict between freedom and community, between individual will and the public good, which is a fancy way of thinking that sometimes other people get on my nerves. Puritans inspired some of the greatest American writing, scary sermons and Lincoln speeches."
Besides the fact "it's really fun to write about an America with no president," Vowell said she's writing about the Puritans "because there's so much at stake in those sermons, like eternal damnation. The most bizarre episode in Puritan history is the Salem witch trials. Twenty innocent people were executed during the witchcraft hysteria of 1692 … three centuries later, blood-thirsty tourists sip their life stories from souvenir shot glasses. The local ice cream parlor goes by the name Dairy Witch. The high school football team is called the Salem Witches.
"There are few freakier moments in cultural tourism than when a site tries to rewrite its past," like her boat tour up the Hudson River to a 17th century Dutch farm where slavery was softened by calling them "enslaved Africans" because "it was something that was done to them instead of what they were. Slavery was not their fault," a tour guide informed her.
"Isn't the whole point about being a slave is that you don't have a choice to be anything else … 'Enslaved Africans' sounds nonchalant, like 'jolly leprechauns.' "
Recalling the short-lived CBS sitcom "Thanks," Vowell described its setting as a cross between Plymouth and Boston. "They were like the first settlers of New England and the main character's name was Winthrop and he gave speeches like John Winthrop would have given. Everyone else is so cold and hungry and they think he's a windbag. All they want is to go home where it's warm and there's food. At one point the first supply ship comes from England and the Winthrop character gives a grand speech about creating a new world in a new place. Everyone runs to the docks" to flee. 'We're not going to let a 50-percent mortality rate get in our way of our vision.' They're like, 'Screw you' as they run to the ship."
The show convinced her "how much humor there is to be mined in idealism or the lack thereof," she said. "They're so devoted to the word of God, they're relentless pursuers of literacy. I think there was a higher literacy rate in 17th century Boston than in 20th century Boston. They were obsessed with words and scholarly, though I don't think they're seen that way. They had barely hewn together kitchen tables out of logs and they were building Harvard. They so valued education and knowledge."
Puritans were also "obsessed with what is right to a kind of comical degree." Vowell said. "One thing I love about Winthrop is even though he had all these grand ideals, he was a very practical, Christ-like Christian. They were so judgmental," but trying to hold the settlement together he was willing to let the banished linger until spring so they wouldn't have to ride the high seas by winter.
"When a newspaper says, 'Puritan nation,' I don't think people know what that means," Vowell said. "I hate sociology because it talks about some group like it's a monolithic person, like the stereotype of an uptight prude. I'm terrified of people who believe too much in something. I have beliefs, but I don't want to go overboard. It's fascinating to me when people's belief in good leads them to do evil."
Pat Gibson of the Visiting Author Committee introduced Vowell.