Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

On multiculturalism… “You know, there are certain inescapable books that I really do feel all of us should read as early as possible. What does education mean if it does not expose children and young people to Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dante?…But unfortunately what is called ‘multiculturalism’ in the United States never means Cervantes. It doesn’t mean replacing a writer in English by Cervantes…It means fifth-rate work by people full of resentment, who happen to be women, or who happen to be Chicano or Puerto-Rican, or who happen to be African-American, and they are by no means the best writers who are African-American, or women, or so on. They are simply the most resentful and the most ideological. The function of an education is not to make people feel good about themselves, or to confirm their sense of division, of being in one group rather than another.”

Excerpted from “Harold Bloom Interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel” Queen’s Quarterly v102, #3 (Fall 1995) PAGES 609-19.

On victimization… “We have lost all our standards. We’re afraid to be called racist and sexist. I am not racist or a sexist…This myth of victimization produces African-American students who are under pressure to segregate themselves, peer pressures not to study, peer pressures not to read. I think the myth of victimization is more of a danger now to black and Hispanic students in the U.S., but of course I will be called racist for saying that. Surely it is a social tragedy that there is enormous pressure on the African-American not to mix and mingle with other groups. This is peer pressure not placed on Asian Americans. My best students are Asian Americans. These students will work and will brood about literature and will think about it at night and will take care to write very well. This (debate on the canon) is an intellectual and perhaps a spiritual matter. Authentic literature doesn’t divide us. It addresses itself to the solitary individual or consciousness.”

Excerpted from “Choice interviews: Harold Bloom interviewed by Terry Farish” Choice v32, #6 (Feb, 1995): PAGES 899 – 901.

On teaching “Blood Meridian“… I will probably teach Blood Meridian another half dozen times or so. In the rest of my career I don’t think I will come to the end of it. I would like one conversation with McCarthy, though I am sure he will always keep a good distance away from me. One would want something to help solve the mystery of why this astonishment was possible for him only that once. He is a great puzzle, I think, aesthetically, because Suttree was a marvelous book, though so close, at times, to Absalom, Absalom as to be almost embarrassing. It is true that there is a whole series of major American novelists who have only the one great book. There are very few who have more, like Henry James, or Faulkner, who had one great phase which lasted ten years, during which the five really top books were written. James is able to go on for thirty-five years and there are masterpieces at every point.

Excerpted from “Tragic Ecstasy: A Conversation with Harold Bloom about Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’ by Peter Josyph in Southwestern American Literature Vol. 26 No. 1 Fall 2000

(From chapter 2 of “American Civilization” by CLR James, titled “American Writers of the Nineteenth Century)

Chapter three of Moby Dick, titled “The Spouter Inn”, contains one of the most famous scenes in American literature. The narrator Ishmael awakens to find the heavily tattooed, South-Sea Islander, harpooner and sometime cannibal Queequeg in his bed. In a few days he and Queequeg have overcome their initial shock and have become good friends. Chapter thirteen, titled “Wheelbarrow,” is not as well-known, but deserves to be since it is very relevant to contemporary discussions of multiculturalism, western “civilization” and other hotly contested issues.

This chapter begins with the two men making their way to the docks where they have booked passage on a packet schooner. The small ship will bring them to Nantucket, where Ahab’s whaling-ship, the Pequod, awaits them.

Queequeg has borrowed a wheelbarrow, which is loaded with the two men’s gear, including Queequeg’s harpoons. As they make their way to the docks, Queequeg lets Ishmael in on his comic mishap with the first wheelbarrow he ever saw. Now that the South-Sea Islander feels comfortable with his white companion, he doesn’t mind letting him know about his occasional difficulties with white civilization.

One time, after Queequeg had just arrived in the port of Sag Harbor, his captain lent him a wheelbarrow so he could get his heavy chest from the ship to the boarding-house in town. Queequeg didn’t quite know how to use the contraption, so he loaded his chest on the wheelbarrow and then carried both the wheelbarrow and its contents into town on his head. Ishmael says, “Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn’t the people laugh?”

This leads Queequeg to tell him another story. On his native island of Rokovoko, there is always a ceremonial large calabash at wedding feasts that is filled with the fragrant water of young coconuts. One day a large merchant ship docked at the island on the occasion of Queequeg’s sister’s wedding, to which they invite the captain. The feast began with a ceremonial blessing of the calabash, which includes the tribal high priest dipping his fingertips into the bowl before passing it around so people can fill their cups with the blessed nectar. The captain, who is seated next to priest, views himself as being more powerful than the priest and consequently takes it upon himself to wash his hands in the bowl. “Now,” said Queequeg, “what you tink now?–Didn’t our people laugh?”

Once Queequeg and Ishmael are on the deck of the packet schooner, Ishmael notices the other passengers gawking at Queequeg. Some are so rude as to make disrespectful gestures behind Queequeg’s back. He catches one of them out of the corner of his eye and throws him bodily into the air. When the startled young man lands on his feet, he goes running to the captain crying out, “Capting, Capting, here’s the Devil,” referring to Queequeg.

The captain approaches Queequeg and lectures him for nearly killing his tormentor. Queequeg explains that the young man he threw in the air was a only a “small fish-e” and that he only kills big whales. At that very moment, the mainsail boom become unlashed and begins swinging wildly back and forth. Not only does it throw the crew into a complete panic, it knocks Queequeg’s tormentor into the water. Everybody is frozen in panic.

At this point, Queequeg goes into action. He grabs hold of a rope and secures one end to a bulwark. With the other end, he fashions a lasso and tosses it on the wayward boom which he brings under control. As soon as this is done, he jumps into the water in the general direction of the man overboard. Melville writes:

“A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.”

Queequeg took all this in stride and didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. He didn’t seem to think that he deserved a medal. He only asked for some fresh water to wash the brine off with. Once that was done, he put on dry clothes and began to smoke his pipe. Ishmael thought that the expression on Queequeg’s face seem to say “It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.”

Melville was a very careful, deliberate writer who chose words carefully. Why would he have the cannibal describe the world in these commercial terms? Doesn’t joint-stock seem to describe the world that Ishmael was fleeing: the isle of Manhattan, “belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs–commerce surrounds it with her surf.” The words “joint-stock” are chosen in irony. Melville was very familiar with the South-Sea island societies and knew that stock ownership of any sort was alien to such peoples.

Melville was no social scientist, but his alienation from American capitalism was clearly expressed through his fiction. Moby Dick was written in 1851 and by this time there could be no mistake about the direction of the country. It was becoming wealthy through slave labor, subjugation of the Indian and domination of the world’s oceans, just as England had done before it. This would very likely explain why three of Moby Dick’s most sympathetic characters are Doggo, an African, Tashtego, an American Indian, and Queequeg.

It would also explain why Ahab and his fellow Christian profiteers are so villainous. I have never understood why American literary critics equate the great white whale with evil, when it seems so obvious that what disturbs Melville is commerce itself and not the hunted animal. We must remember that nobody has really analyzed the system at this point. European novelists and poets simply regarded it as the “factory system”, but didn’t quite understand what made it tick. Meanwhile, America’s greatest writer takes as his subject the whaling factory of the open waters. It is not an oppressive place, but nonetheless there is something about the single-minded desire to kill whales that troubles the writer. Perhaps Melville understood the final logic of such expeditions–they would lead to the extinction of one of the world’s noblest creatures. Since Melville wrote literature rather than propaganda, we can not be sure. This ambiguity, of course, is what gives Moby Dick so much power.

The slaughter of whales, like the slaughter of beavers and buffaloes, were key elements in the development of American capitalism. In the final fifty years of the 19th century, capitalism in the United States became better understood as a social system. European socialism was imported into the United States as the labor movement took root. In the next fifty years, from 1900 to the mid-century mark, this system gained hegemony all over the world. The American Indian had been herded into reservations; the South-Sea islanders–from Hawaii to the Bikini Atolls–had lost their land and way of life; the African-American had been freed from slavery but still faced Jim Crow. For the past fifty years, these kinds of people–the ones who had suffered the most when American world domination was being born–have been taking important steps to regain their rights. Reading works like Moby Dick will prove useful in understanding how such peoples were viewed by a sympathetic writer. Melville’s writings are like hieroglyphs that can uncover the secret, brutal and evil origins of the American system. Since we need to understand our history better in order to change society today, works like Moby Dick are essential reading. At a certain level, they tell us something that the social scientists can never tell us and that is who we really are.

While Herman Melville never achieved the sort of superstar status of Dickens or Twain, he too attempted a career as a public lecturer. Part of his repertory was a talk on the South Seas. Although the full text is not extant, we do have notes from a “phonographist” from the Baltimore American newspaper on February 8, 1859.

Melville recounts Balboa’s discovery of the South Seas: “The thronging Indians opposed Balboa’s passage, demanding who he was, what he wanted, and whither he was going. The reply is a model of Spartan directness. ‘I am a Christian, my errand is to spread the true religion and to seek gold, and I am going in search of the sea.'”

Melville wonders if the Europeans will begin to tour the charming isles of the South Seas? His reply:

“Why don’t the English yachters give up the prosy Mediterranean and sail out here? Any one who treats the natives fairly is just as safe as if he were on the Nile or Danube. But I am sorry to say we whites have a sad reputation among many of the Polynesians. They esteem us, with rare exceptions, such as some of the missionaries, the most barbarous, treacherous, irreligious, and devilish creatures on the earth. It may be a mere prejudice of these unlettered savages, for have not our traders always treated them with brotherly affection? Who has ever heard of a vessel sustaining the honor of a Christian flag and the spirit of the Christian Gospel by opening its batteries in indiscriminate massacre upon some poor little village on the seaside–splattering the torn bamboo huts with blood and brains of women and children, defenseless and innocent?”

The final paragraphs are the phonographist’s own words and it is too bad that we don’t have Melville’s. They deal with the colonization of the South Sea islands:

“The rapid advance, in the externals only, of civilized life was then spoken of, and the prospect of annexing the Sandwich Islands to the American Union commented on, with the remark that the whalemen of Nantucket and the Westward ho! Of California were every day getting them more and more annexed.

“The lecturer closed with an earnest wish that adventurers from our soil and from the lands of Europe would abstain from those brutal and cruel vices which disgust even savages with our manners, while they turn an earthly paradise into a pandemonium. And as for annexations he begged, as a general philanthropist, to offer up an earnest prayer, and he entreated all present to join him in it, that the banns [public announcements] of that union should be forbidden until we had found for ourselves a civilization moral, mental, and physical, higher than the one which has culminated in almshouses, prisons, and hospitals.”

This is an exchange from Stan Goff’s Feral Scholar. It was prompted by a post there from “Malooga” of the Moon Over Alabama blog that originally appeared as a comment on my own blog about Cormac McCarthy. John Steppling is a partisan of Cormac McCarthy. DeAnander is not.

John Steppling:

Well, it dissapoints me that the response here is so predictable. The complaint that no progressive voice is heard in the film, or book, is really the basic problem of leftist critics these days…..maybe always. Art is not here to lecture. Lectures do that fine, and essays. The questions McCarthy raises are about personal identity and the chain of relations in bougeoisie society that implicate everyone in the violence around us. The dialogue in the film (and the film has several big problems…..most clearly in how Chigurh is depicted) is straight from McCarthy, so to call it southern fried homilies suggests a rather bad ear on the part of the listener. Im curious what people here think of as good art these days? Im serious in this…….because for me McCarthy is perhaps, along with Pinter, the best living writer in English. The narrative reflects the world as it is, not as it should be. Thats not what art is meant to do. The pathologies of modern society, the inequalities and contradictions of advanced capital find expression in the wholesale sadism of these characters — and the sheriffs slowly dawning awareness of compassion and more importantly his own complicity. Alientation operates this way. Adorno certainly understood this about culture……as did Horkheimer and Marcuse. So the quote above is almost ironic given the comments so far.

* * * * *

DeAnander:

Steppling: “The narrative reflects the world as it is, not as it should be. Thats not what art is meant to do.”

I was thinking about this contention, which is routinely invoked by everyone from pornographers to propagandists — er, what am I saying? by pornographers and other propagandists — to claim that their work is not propaganda, but is somehow “objective” (ah, the good ol’ Objectivity meme).

Here I’m inclined to quote (or misquote) D Jensen: “every writer is a propagandist — including me.” every piece of literature is a kind of propaganda in the sense that it has been filtered repeatedly through authorial, editorial, and publishers’ agendas.

C McCarthy chooses — in the tradition of H Ellison and other horrormongers of the literary world — to focus narrowly on what is worst and most brutal in the human condition. except for a less absurdly clunky prose style I am not sure how far different he is from a Bret Easton Ellis.

At any moment in time, the human race is busy committing atrocities and cruelties, and also, maybe right next door, committing acts of great courage and altruism. the first act of non-objectivity is the choice, from among an infinite number of historical or contemporary subjects, of a particular story to tell. it could be the story of the Chiapas uprising or the Mondragon co-ops or the Maquis. or it could be the story of a Mafia family or a serial killer. a decision has to be made, and someone makes it.

What narrative the writer chooses to narrate, and whom he chooses as protagonist, is relevant; it serves the writer’s agenda, it demonstrates the writer’s position, it is not “objective.” even an allegedly fact-based book like one of Junger’s (The Perfect Storm was his big hit), or a biography, still serves the author’s intent and presents us with a moral-of-the-story which is meant to instruct us.

When people hotly claim that Art need not and should not represent a moral agenda, they forget Zinn’s dictum that you can’t be neutral on a moving train 🙂 art is not reality; it is a highly filtered cartoon of reality, and that cartoon is always a political cartoon, one way or another. the story, and the moral the story tells, will always be pointed and selective. it will humanise some characters and dehumanise others, internalise some points of view and externalise others, tell us that some things are believable and some things are unrealistic, some things are possible and some things are not, some behaviours are rewarded and some are punished.

And it will tell us what matters in every line and paragraph: the choice of narrative, cast, which interactions are described in full and which are left in the background, which objects and artifacts and settings are described and how they are described, will tell us repeatedly (whacking us over the head repeatedly with, in fact) what the author thinks is important and relevant and therefore, by mirror neurons or whatever mechanism you want to blame or credit, what we as the reader will — temporarily — also accept as important and relevant for the duration of our suspension of disbelief and our immersion in the experience. if the book is a very powerful one, or if we have a habit of reading in a specific genre with consistent narrative rules (boyshit suspense/adventure, for example, or girly supermarket romances), the repeated messaging about what is important and what is not important may eventually become permanent programming. and isn’t that what propaganda aims at?

When this is done flagrantly and clumsily, especially in service of an agenda that may not even be the writer’s own (i.e. paid PR flacks, professional black-ops myth-makers, and other salaried liars and spinners) we do call it propaganda — and sneer at it. when it’s done flagrantly and clumsily in earnest service of a worthy moral agenda, like tediously predictable “racial reconciliation” movies or quaint Victorian or Edwardian morality tales for the kiddies, we also sneer at it a bit and call it preachy; sermonising often spoils a good story, at least if you’re an adult (kids can probably overlook, for example, the heavy handed Christian symbolism of C S Lewis’s kid-books, but for an adult reader it gets to be a bit much after a while).

But when the sermonising or preachiness upholds an agenda that we are not allowed to name (like, say, heteronormativity or male supremacy or capitalism or neodarwinism) it passes for “objective” just because our literary feelers aren’t calibrated to scan the bar code on the agenda; we come up against a Laingian void — the Unmarked Category — be it neoliberalism or masculinism or US exceptionalism or whatever, and have to resort to unfamiliar “left-specific” jargon, clumsy locutions, and “argh can’t quite put my finger on it” unease to identify it.

Imho there is an established ideology of despair regarding the human condition; nihilism, cynicism, anomie, whatever you want to call it. and it has a powerful literature of propaganda conveying the moral lesson that life is meaningless, people are stupid and cruel, everyone is our for him/herself, no one can be trusted, the most you can hope for is to grab some bling while the grabbing is good. this moral lesson greatly serves the imperial/capitalist system… first, it defines ugly, greedy, grabby, and violent criminal behaviour as perfectly normal and only to be expected — indeed, as all that is possible or reasonable; next, it defines altruism, loyalty, compassion, and so forth as unrealistic, fictional, mythical, not to be attempted or expected in the “real” world (else the attempter will meet with severe negative consequences); third, it seeks to instil despair and a loathing for our fellow humans, just as flagrantly and overtly as chirpy feel-good kiddie stories seek to instil hope or good dental hygiene or kindness to elders. it is essentially a propaganda for the normalisation of sociopathy, and in a sociopathic and elitist economic and political regime it is — predictably — a preferred and encouraged literary and artistic form.

Above all, superaccumulator elites (whether they be pharaohs or kings or CEOs) need to convince the people that another world is NOT possible: that justice is a chimera, loyalty and commensality are a pathetic delusion, there is nothing to be done and nothing to hope for or strive towards. the literature of despair serves this agenda well.

Literature that blissfully denies the potential wickedness of human behaviour is no more preachy or biased or unrealistic than literature that denies the potential goodness of human behaviour. the literary school of the Unrelentingly Grim and Ugly (not to be mistaken for the Cautionary Tale as in Swift or Sinclair) should not be accepted passively, w/o critique, as some kind of objective form outside politics and ethical discourse; it is a sermon in its own right, just a sermon for a different creed.

Much of contemporary pornography is, I would say, the distilled essence of the nihilistic school of literature, w/o any highbrow pretensions to cloak the sermon: it openly celebrates cruelty, greed, and hatefulness, and expressly denies that any sexual relations other than instrumentality and exploitation are possible.

And now we get to the big weaselly area: under what circumstances is a deeply dystopian, grim, dour, and hopeless piece of literature a cautionary tale, i.e. a warning against the worst excesses of our human nature, rather than a normalisation of them? satirists and cautionary fabulists have often been accused in their day of undermining moral fibre, being too shocking, too graphic, too negative, stripping away the decencies that make human society bearable. was e.g. Lord of the Flies a cautionary tale, or just a cry of despair? I’m not enough of a lit crit to pinpoint the distinctions but I would say that in most cautionary tales there is at least one character or group of characters who represent the other world that is possible, i.e. altruism, decency, kindness. they may or may not “win” (the story could have a happy or tragic ending) but they do exist and their moral qualities are not derided as illusory (though they may not be sufficient to carry the day).

I’ve got a relevant quote or two somewhere around here…

This one will do…

What encourages me in this process is the “delight” that I take in the human struggle. Delight in mankind [sic] — that was the idea launched or rather relaunched in the twelfth century by the forces of humanism as they woke society from its Dark Ages.

The Roman poet, Terence, had said long before: “I am human and nothing human is foreign to me.” It was an attitude the humanists embraced in what they saw as a struggle between delight and self-loathing — delight in your fellow man and woman, sympathy for them; in other words, a sense of society.

— J R Saul, The Unconscious Civilisation, peroration of ‘The Great Leap Backwards’.

I could pick quite a few nits here; the glorification of the Enlightenment and the glib dismissal of a very rich and varied historical period as “Dark Ages”, for one. A big dose of Eurocentrism, for seconds… but JRS imho is onto something in his analysis of the difference between a stance of loathing for one’s fellow human beings, and one of delight and/or sympathy. We will not build a society of sharing and mutual aid if we believe that none of the people around is is decent or deserving of help, that they are all a bunch of greedy dirty ratfinks. The very concept of “society” (the very existence of which neolibs like Margaret Thatcher openly denied) presupposes a kind of mutual regard, interest, and trust for our fellow human beings.

So (winding up this overlong comment at last) I agree with Malooga’s analysis that literature/movies which present us (people) as uniformly self-interested and/or helplessly trapped in structures which prohibit the expression of our human sympathies and empathies are — whether expressly intended to be or not — a very effective propaganda for the new right and the new corporate/financial aristocracy.

Gold versus Bullshit

Herman Melville

a
Cormac McCarthy

A Lexis-Nexis search containing both “Herman Melville” and “Cormac McCarthy” returns 116 articles. As you can probably guess, most of them are in effusive praise of McCarthy, hailing him as the second coming of my favorite author. This is typical from John Banville, a steadfast member of the McCarthy cult:

The Crossing is not an easy book. The prose is stark and densely muscled, the punctuation eccentric. Much of the dialogue is in Spanish (though it is surprisingly easy to follow). There are long philosophical digressions which frequently topple over into pathos. Despite all this, the book is an astonishing achievement, admirable for its nerve as much as for its persuasiveness. McCarthy has his precursors – Melville, Hemingway, Jack London – yet he is unique in contemporary writing.

(The Irish Times, August 27, 1994)

Keeping this comparison in the back of your mind, let’s take a look at a sample of Melville side-by-side with McCarthy:

From chapter 36 of “Moby Dick“:

All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even more intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was separately touched by some specific recollection.

“Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick.”

“Moby Dick?” shouted Ahab. “Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?”

“Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?” said the Gay-Header deliberately.

“And has he a curious spout, too,” said Daggoo, “very bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?”

“And he have one, two, tree – oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain,” cried Queequeg disjointedly, “all twiske-tee betwisk, like him – him – ” faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle – “like him – him – “

“Corkscrew!” cried Ahab, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen – Moby Dick – Moby Dick!”

“Captain Ahab,” said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder. “Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick – but it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?”

“Who told thee that?” cried Ahab; then pausing, “Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,” he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the horn, and round the norway maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”

“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: “A sharp eye for the White Whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!”

“God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless ye, men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what’s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?”

===

From chapter 3 of “Blood Meridian”. McCarthy does not enclose his dialog in quotes, a breakthrough–I suppose–that ranks with Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness in the eyes of his cult followers.

How old are you, son?

Nineteen.

The captain nodded his head. He was looking the kid over. What happened to you?

What?

Say sir, said the recruiter Sir?

I said what happened to you

Robbers, said the captain

Not no more I aint.

Where was it you were robbed

I was comin from Naca, Naca Nacogdoches? Yeah.

Yessir. Yessir.

How many were there? The kid stared at him.

Robbers. How many robbers.

Seven or eight, I reckon. I busted in the head with a scantling.

The captain squinted one eye at him. Were they Mexicans?

Some. Mexicans and niggers. They was a white or two with em. They had a bunch of cattle they’d stole. Only thing they left me with was a old piece of knife I had in my boot.

The captain nodded. He folded his hands between his knees. What do you think of the treaty? he said.

The kid looked at the man on the settle next to him. He had his eyes shut. He looked down at his thumbs. I dont know nothin about it, he said.

I’m afraid that’s the case with a lot of Americans, said the captain. Where are you from, son?

Tennessee.

You werent with the Volunteers at Monterrey were you?

No sir.

Bravest bunch of men under fire I believe I ever saw. I sup­pose more men from Tennessee bled and died on the field in northern Mexico than from any other state. Did you know that?

No sir.

They were sold out. Fought and died down there in that desert and then they were sold out by their own country.

The kid sat silent.