First, a note to the reader about wood. “Lumber,” a word that we now associate with the Home Depot and deforestation, once denoted the contents or printed products of the mind, which, in turn, was sometimes known as the “lumber-room” (see, for instance, page 54 of Tristram Shandy ). The title of my column, then, is meant to serve as a modest attempt to resuscitate the lost sense of this sadly degraded word, and to suggest something of the ungainly mental labor required of me to salvage and sculpt the unhewed thought-timbers piled up in my mind’s lumberyard.

Not so very long ago I had occasion to spend an afternoon sipping from the green mouths of a series of Rolling Rocks at a party in Williamsburg, amongst a congerie of artists, writers, poets, and other plucky, earnest, (and unemployed?) persons. Knowing no one but the cousin who brought and promptly abandoned me, I stayed close to the walls, sipping beer and hovering at the periphery of several groups engaged in various and strange conversations about lives, friends, and relationships about which I knew nothing. In spite of the pleasures of drinking free beer in the early afternoon, I felt little connection to or interest in the people or the talk until one of the conversations turned to the old typewriter one of the hipsters had famously placed on a milk crate before the commode in the bathroom of her apartment. Recorded on the scroll of that writing machine tucked away in that most private of spheres was a long, peculiarly thoughtful, and digressive conversation, perpetuated and sustained by the excretory ruminations of the apartment’s occupants and anyone else who might have spent time asquat before the typewriter in their ceramic and tile salon.

The unexpected beauty and pertinence of this image, so Jack Kerouac-y in its way, has stayed with me, and I’ve often thought about what it is that makes it so compelling to me, this woman’s transformation of her bathroom into a kind of ad hoc public sphere, a place where ideas are expressed, exchanged, and contested. In part, I think, it has to do with the successful integration of two sets of seemingly opposed desires and spaces that are rarely brought together harmoniously: the desire to express oneself publicly from within the safety and quietude of the private sphere, to fuse solitude with sociability, to link the personal and the public.

The pastoral ideal has long been an important way of ordering meaning and value in American culture; the desire to move from the sophistication of our urban centers to the simplicity of country life (to “light out for the territories”) has provided a cardinal metaphor and powerful symbol for organizing the contradictions of American life. In the 1960s, Literary critic Leo Marx offered his notion of the “middle landscape” to explain how the peculiarly American desire to retreat from civilization is often reconciled with the opposing desire to benefit from industrial, technological, and urban developments. The middle landscape, symbolized by his image of the “machine in the garden” (and visually encapsulated by George Innes in his 1855 painting of the Hudson River Valley), contains the possibility of balancing the opposing forces of technology and nature, sophistication and simplicity, city and country. Many have considered the emergence of suburbia as the modern manifestation of the middle landscape, which makes sense, but I’d like to propose an alternative candidate for middle landscape: the bathroom.

Although generally neglected as a fundamental space of everyday life, the bathroom, like the middle landscape, is a space where social and psychological contradictions are made most manifest. It is the scene of what Julia Kristeva called “abjection,” a site where the intricacies of contemporary plumbing technology saves us from having to confront or acknowledge the material symbol of our own carnality (“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” as Prospero once said in a different context); where our social and natural selves commingle, where the dream of pastoral peace, simplicity, and contentment coexists with the technological infrastructures of industrial design.

(A strong case could be made, by the way, for the bathrooms at the DIA Beacon as the nearest physically existent approximations of the Platonic ideal. Situated in hard-to-find and rarely visited nooks in the sprawling exhibition space of this lovely museum, which is itself encircled by the still-fresh green breast of the Hudson River valley, their pristine loos offer a perfect zen-like enclave for the pensive, art-addled museum-goer. Unlike, say, the cans at the Met, these are quiet, secluded, clean, and peaceful….)

The Japanese seem to understand and accept the centrality of the bathroom to psychic, social, and biological life, as evidenced by their awesomely superior toilet design. (There are, for instance, toilets equipped with delicate temperature control jet sprays, with glow in the dark seats with sensors that automatically open in the presence of an approaching human subject.) Canadian poet of the Yukon, Robert Service, author of the magnificent “Cremation of Sam McGee,” and a man well-acquainted with the exigencies of the body, is one of the few poets to have taken up the subject of the bathroom. His poem, Toilet Seats” is not particularly good but mildly amusing and well-worth a read as a singular instance of bathroom poetry. Aside from that, there is, to my knowledge, scant acknowledgment or representation of this most basic of mental spaces in literature. This seems to me both strange unaccountable.

Within the complex contemporary social landscape, irradiated by the importunate forces of our vibrant consumer culture, exerts a thousand pressures on the individual who might wish to maintain an independent existence. The bathroom exists as a privileged site of quiet contemplation and thought, a space where much of our best thinking takes place, a space even of occasional revelation. It is with a modicum of embarrassment that I awkwardly express my own fondness for this most neglected of spaces, this bastion of mental life. So I continue to scan the literary horizon for a writer bold enough to take up this most marginalized of middle landscapes. In fact, I think I’ll grab a book from the shelf and resume my search presently….Nature calls.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

After sojourning in Tuscany and Karachi for the summer, we have returned to the East Coast, to Cambridge, for the fall. Upon arrival, we spent the afternoon under the pigeon infested trees outside Au Bon Pain, leafing through the Boston Phoenix and the Weekly Dig. We overheard a woman in a white summer hat remark, “If the weather were always like this, Boston would the most popular city in the world.” Although her premise is tenuous, on days like these, there’s a sense of occasion here, an almost pagan celebration of nature. Lucid, incandescent skies had brought the denizens of Cambridge out in their Sunday best. We observed pale, lanky limbed academics in revealing skirts; teenage punks in torn leather and grimy boots; and fresh-of-the-boat families sporting tight pants and fanny packs, gawking at the spectacle: old men playing chess for money, bold panhandlers soliciting funds, the jazz band strumming “Take Five” in the Pit.

Although we participated in the festivity, come evening our vigor waned and we felt hungry. We realized, however, that our options were limited: Harvard Square may be a melting pot but it offers lackluster ethnic dining, whether Chinese, Indonesian, Italian, Indian or Arab. (To be fair, there are two exceptions: Smile Café’s chicken larb is excellent and the menu of the Tibetan place in Central Square features this delicious minced meat and turnip dish.) And suddenly, we felt pangs of nostalgia – nostalgia for nihari, for Karachi.

In Ha Jin’s next novel, the protagonist is a poet, a Chinese immigrant to America. In one of his poems, he writes about the handful of the dirt from his backyard that he carries around with him in his portmanteau. In a way, the poem and sentiment is a response to Cavafy’s “The City”:

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore;
Find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
And my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here,
Where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
The city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old In the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll end up in the city.
Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
There’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
You’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Home might mean a few hundred circumscribed square yards to many; dirt. It might mean a bed to others – a threadbare chair, a red wheelbarrow; it might have to do with family and nation and tradition, with shared history, collective memory; it might be an idea; or it just might be a filet. Indeed, there is substance to the adage, “You are what you eat.” We may not carry dirt around but when traveling from Pakistan, we do carry carefully wrapped cellophane packets of various powdered spices in our suitcase. Wherever we are in the world, then, we can feed and nourish our self; wherever we are in the world, we can feel at home.

In It Must be Something I Ate, Vogue’s food critic, Jeffrey Steingarten maintains that “In all of Nature’s Kingdom, only mammals, female mammals, nourish their young by giving up part of their bodies. For us, food is not just dinner. Our attitude toward food mirrors our feelings about mothers and nurturing, about giving and sharing, about tradition and community…” We agree. Being Pakistani, we associate savian with Eid, korma with weddings, mangoes with summer. Furthermore, those who fancy themselves cosmopolitan, boulvadiers, men of the world, associate dining with culture, even civilization. They have sushi at Nobu, truffles at Da Silvano, lamb chops at the Grammercy Tavern.

Simply put, food defines us as we define food. The Guardian’s Lisa Hamilton avers, “Frankly, I’ve never had good sex with a vegetarian. I like men who eat properly, who like their steak bloody, their eggs Benedict runny. Fastidiousness is as unappealing in the kitchen as it is in the bedroom; there’s something emasculated about a man who let’s himself be faced down by escargot. Logically, someone as obsessed b the food/sex correlation as I am would select lovers accordingly; but as with crème brulee, I never quite had the discipline to resist what I knew would turn out badly (hence the vegetarian. He had little round glasses and did yoga. Really.) However, experience did prove that whether or not a man knows his artichoke from his elbow, when it comes to cooking, if not to sex, the clichés of national stereotypes hold true.” We’re not sure if Ms. Hamilton ever got it on with a Pakistani. Rest assured, we are carnivores. We make meat.

The following is a proprietary recipe for a dish we call (and have presently coined) Killer Karahi Masala:

Ingredients (and other materials)
1 chicken (or a packet of drumsticks and filets)
2 large onions, chopped
1/3 cup of vegetable oil
10 dried red chili peppers
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of red chili powder
1 teaspoon of garam masala (available at any Pakistani grocery store)
1 teaspoon of coriander powder
2 large tomatoes, diced
1/2 teaspoons of garlic paste
1/2 teaspoons of ginger paste
1 clove of garlic, chopped
1 thing of ginger, chopped
One of those plastic lemon things with lemon juice inside it
1 Corona
1 Dunhill
“Carlito’s Way” Soundtrack (not the original score)

Instructions:
Close your eyes. Summon primal hunger. (You cook better when hungry.) Play first track on CD, Rozalla’s “I Love Music.” Pour oil into a casserole with diced onions and dried red chili peppers and turn up the heat. Strip and wash chicken. When onions become translucent, add chicken. (Wash your hands.) This should be around the time of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way I like It.” Add salt, red chili powder, coriander powder, garam masala, garlic and ginger paste. Throw in a diced tomato. Stir together and cook for half an hour on medium heat. Keep stirring. Then add chopped garlic and ginger. Have Dunhill, drink Corona; celebrate, you’re almost done. Fifteen minutes later, add the second diced tomato and squeeze the lemon thing over the dish as a sort of garnish. Serve hot (with tortillas as chapati proxies). “You Are So Beautiful” should be winding down in the background.

In our depleted state, however, we couldn’t venture to Broadway Market for groceries. We didn’t have it in us to make Killer Karahi Masala, or even a runny eggs Benedict. We somnambulated to Pinocchio’s for a steak-and-cheese and then, in this small corner, slept, full but incomplete.

Other Critical Digressions:
Gangbanging and Notions of the Self
The Media Generation and Nazia Hassan
The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National
Dispatch from Karachi
Live 8 at Sandspit
Chianti and History

They say that spring is the season of love, and they may be right. April’s days may be soaked in the hormones and pheromones of a renewed reproductive cycle, and in this we are undoubtedly biology’s sensual puppets. But let us firmly agree that we will have no truck with biology here. On the streets of New York, biology is perhaps useful as metaphor, but quite beside the point and ridiculously unsophisticated for our purposes. So we will dispense with eggheaded myopia, and in that spirit we will also reject the modern world’s most egregious conceit–love. This cloying trope may be appropriate for the foil covers of paperback novels and the illustrated pages of children’s books, but for a teeming metropolis it is a quaint notion, a rumor to sustain the lonely and unattractive.

They say that spring is the season of love, and they may be right, but on the streets of New York, spring is summer’s ragged doormat and love is a faintly Midwestern excuse for the gluttonous satisfaction of lust. 

Cruelty
Suggested by such details as the curl of a lip and the severe line of a jaw, cruelty is at the heart of sex, though you’d never know it to hear people talk. That cruelty is inextricably woven into the sexual experience disturbs many, largely because it doesn’t jibe with the civilized construct of love. But of course the mechanics of sex demand a certain precise violence, and often the quality of our sexual experience is indicated by kabuki-like displays of pain and heartlessness. Despotic New York is, in its concrete miles and Darwinian efficiency, cruel’s storied hometown. Just watch the summertime girls on Wall Street and in Times Square as they distribute their weight on nail-thin four-inch heels, and applaud the steel in the eyes (and the pants) of the conquering businessman, whose rigorous assessment of the physical merits of these very same girls is a feat of conscienceless objectification unmatched since stalwart American traders arrived on Africa’s Gold Coast. Even the City’s visual parameters signal cruelty’s central role: Who will be kind in a city without a sky? It speaks to New York’s defiant self-sufficiency–to see nothing but what we made with our own hands, to observe the struggle that plays out daily in the rippling heat of our walled streets. It prepares us to fuck.

Flesh & Heat
For a city where sunbathing is essentially limited to fire escapes and rooftops and the odd patch of park, skin is surprisingly ubiquitous. In spite of or in concert with the pronouncements of New York’s own fashion vanguard, flesh is the order of the summer season, and, for better or worse, there is a democratic quality to this ritual of exposure. Imperfections of the body are courageously displayed, plumped and framed in elastic and cotton, and to hell with sensible shame for the homely. Our women fear nothing, and no matter your wishes you will witness the shiny rhythms of their flesh. Many visitors make the mistake of assuming that New York’s men will not bare their chests, that urban settings don’t lend themselves to traditional demonstrations of virility. These naifs are shocked in high summer, when the articulated pecs and corrugating abs hit Seventh Avenue in force. (That a substantial number of these men are gay is of little moment here, and only serves as further testament to the city’s simmering carnality.)

Density
There are no secrets in this city, no privacy in the stacked lives of our high-rises and tenements, where we gain sonic (if not visual) access to the perversions and loneliness of our neighbors. New York can reasonably claim the concentrated libidinal force of six million–a deeply conservative estimate, given the total commuting population of the metropolitan area, the relatively low birth rate, and our seniors’ migratory tendencies. This vast sensual endowment transforms the city’s public space into a hothouse for various strains of latent sex. On subway platforms, where skin candies in seconds, we pace and seethe, preparing to press our glistening flesh against the glistening flesh of strangers. We are accustomed to the tight quarters of this vaginal system, which provides us a durable metaphor for the sublimation of violent desire. Although the train’s arrival is a small ecstasy, discreet relief from the pressure of restraint, it’s not nearly enough. Anyway, etiquette is a precious gloss here, an exotic curiosity for the foyers of Park Avenue apartments. By the humid height of July we have all but forgotten our modesty, and no longer do we draw the traditional distinctions between bodies. Instead, the perceived intrusions of eyes and limbs subside, and we become a single damp mass. Millions writhing as one.

Ambition
Gassy fumes of ambition stifle the breath of this city. Without some method of burn-off, some practice to spend its propulsive energy, New York would unmoor itself from the continent and take flight like a lost balloon. Thankfully, the city’s sexual black hole siphons ambition from our lungs daily, granting us peace enough to sleep some nights. The same vigor with which we pursue innovation and growth is just as easily blown on the swollen implication of sex, and so in the summertime, on radiant streets and when business is slow, ambition finds its satisfaction in exhibitionistic displays of power and availability. Mincing and posing, we pout for one another, we straighten our backs and expand our chests, and the sport becomes an end in itself. Ambition’s casualties–those who are stepped on and surpassed in their attempts to live up to this vertical city–find relief on the same streets, obliterating their professional disappointment with the easy dominance of sexual reduction.

Finally, it must be said that the spell of the sexual finds fuel in death. Confronted with incomprehensible violence, we revert to our simpler selves, manufacturing comfort from the appeasement of our bodies’ appetites. There is nothing wrong with this. But we would be wise to monitor our devolution closely. One day we may find ourselves so taken with the reductive ecstasy of the sensual that we have forgotten the creative dynamism it displaced. Considering New York’s global stature, this would be a tragic loss, even for those insensible to the city’s genius. This tiny patch of islands and shorelines on the East Coast of the United States is a vital asset, worth far more than the product of its sensual economy. It would be a terrible shame to suffocate under the oppressive cover of our lavish fantasy life.

Lives of the Cannibals: Rage

Iraq, Katrina, and the war on terror (or is it now “war on Islamist extremism”?), displaced the G8 summit’s and Live 8’s stated focus on poverty in the Third World, especially in Africa. Perennial problems never bring a sense of urgency, only occasional bursts of concern which then quickly subside like one’s conscience when others stop looking.  Of course, many do work on the issues regularly and in sustained ways. And by and large, global poverty has been on the decline—largely due to rapid growth in India and China.

The bombings in London among other things managed to abort what could have been a fruitful discussion of global poverty, even if both the G8’s agenda and Live 8 had cast it in terms that avoided perhaps one of the deeper causes of global poverty—agricultural subsidies for farmers in the developed world—in favor of solutions that could be categorized under bourgeois charitablism, even if some of these have merit. 

The link between farm subsidies in the West and poverty in the Third World is fairly straightforward, even if many don’t quite see the linkage. It’s no secret that farms subsidies in the West are enormous. Excluding subsidies in the form of research and development, food inspection and welfare support for poor citizens (mostly, the food stamp program in the US), subsidies in the OECD averaged 30% of farm receipts, meaning 30 cents of each dollar of revenue from farming in the West comes from state transfers, on average. Nearly, US$290 billion was spent by OECD member in direct support to farmers.

The funny-disturbing figure in these discussions is $2.50 a day in subsidies per cow in Europe; compare that with this one–nearly three in four people on the African continent live on less than $2 a day. And the connection is more than coincidental.

Subsidies, especially on these scales, encourage considerable over-production, allowing farmers, or agro-business, to effectively dump food in poor economies. (Yes, people are made poor because there’s too much food in the world.) Local farmers are unable to compete with the (subsidy distorted) prices of imported foodstuffs. In the last decade, major crops, such as sugar and cotton, have seen a fall in prices by as much as 40%-50%. Sugar subsidies, for example, make it difficult for Mozambican producers to compete with European or American ones. (Moreover, quotas and tariffs in the West add additional costs to poorer producers when they try to export to the West.) Commodities prices fall below the costs of production in many locales. In most of these places, local farmers are among the poorest; pushed out of the market by subsidies, they are often unable to gain a livelihood. And more than 2 billion people on this planet depend on agriculture for their livelihood.

Delegations from poorer countries to talks on trade regularly point this out, and politicians and trade representatives in the West are hardly ignorant of the dynamic. Nor are they so callous as to be indifferent to poverty on this scale, or at least I’d like to think that they are not.

Occasionally, someone makes the case that a nation doesn’t really want its food supply to be at the whim of global markets, and subsidies insure that it preserves the capacity to produce at home. Others treat it as a way of having their nation’s farmers command a larger share of the world’s food market. Of course, it’s unlikely that agriculture in the West would disappear without subsidies and further impoverishing millions in the world’s bottom tiers is a rather sickening price to pay for market share.

For most governments in the Western world, electoral politics makes it difficult to end farm subsidies. Rural, agriculture-dependent populations may be small, but they are a strategic voting block who feels the issue intensely. Moreover, the rest of us benefit from cheap food. Even if it is the case that very large producers, and not small farmers, benefit most, the symbolic power of the Japanese rice producer or the French farmer (or the American one, for that matter) is considerable.

Not too long ago, I was having a discussion with a friend who has worked for a long time in developmental economics. Her work mostly concerns Africa, and she’s extremely critical of the subsidy system in the West, but entirely for the havoc it wreaks on the poorest in the world. But she asked a question: what’s wrong if a society tries to maintain a way of life for cultural reasons? (The Japanese and French often give this answer when criticized for providing lavish assistance to their farmers.)

And make no mistake, we are taking of ways of life here and not merely support for a job. Farming brings with it more than simply income. Various aspects of life are tied to it: extended family structures, communities, schools, and broad elements of what we would call culture. My grandmother, a small farmer in the rural backwaters of India, continued to work the land into her 80s, long after her children did reasonably well.

When entire ways of life are under threat, people do make strong demands on their societies and governments that these ways of life be maintained. When the company-towns along what became the rust belt (and is now post-rust belt) fell into economic distress, others felt the pull of their demands to have their communities preserved, and preserved through the maintenance of the companies that were the integrating and constituting force of the communities and culture.  The reaction is understandable.

There are two objections. First, even if we choose to help maintain these modes of life, there is no good reason why we should permit the consequence of the impoverishment of millions. But second and perhaps more important is the fact that we don’t owe others the maintenance of their way of life. This is as true of the farmers in the Third World as in the first. (I do think that we should provide assistance to those dislocated in our economy so that they can adjust themselves to new circumstances.)

But it’s clear that despite the reduction in some farm subsidies over the last decade or so, farmers in the Third World will not be enjoying a leveled economic playing field anytime soon. And as much as many people in the West want the end of subsidies, the strategic voting position of farmers makes it unlikely that subsidies will disappear, though some Western societies have managed to get rid of them. Perhaps then it’s time to focus energies on how to keep much of the food produced in the First World off of local markets in the Third World, or to allow tariffs that raise the price of Western foodstuff to market levels. But it is most certainly time to discuss how something this seemingly innocuous is immiserating some of the world’s more vulnerable in ways that are not about making us feel good and which also take into account that (at least some) farmers in the West have more at stake than their income.

I just started in on the third volume, Master of the Senate, of Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. I read the other two over the last six months or so, between a number of other obligations. The problem is that once you really get going on them it’s hard to do anything else. I find myself missing subway stops and glancing at the clock expecting to see midnight and realizing that it is 4:00am (at least I know Abbas is still up).

That in itself is, I guess, something of a tribute to how amazingly good the volumes are. I’m not the first one to say this. They’ve been lauded to the skies; compared, rightly, with the works of such world historical notables as Gibbon and Tacitus. They’ve been recognized as an amazing fusion between high level scholarship, top notch writing and some less tangible quality. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just a feel for what is important, for the way that the story of Johnson is both a story of one particular, strange, compelling, monstrous, brilliant, singular individual and also the story of a nation and a time period and all that kind of stuff too.

That is really why he is being compared to the Gibbonses and Taciti. Who knows what the exact formula is, but some history writers get kissed by their particular muse, I believe it’s Clio, and manage some kind of fantastic fusion of the particular and the universal. The more they tell us about this one thing, the more the thing they are talking about touches on everything else.

There are things that Caro keeps going back to and as he weaves them through each volume the impact of one man, one family, one little place in the Hill Country of Texas takes on global proportions as Johnson gains more and more power. That’s an old story, probably. There’s a version of it for Napolean, or Alexander the Great, or Suleiman, or etc., etc. But it’s another thing entirely to be able to suss out all the most relevant particulars and show them, to reveal them in such a way that they become obvious and clear in light of their greater implications. The very first page of the very first volume starts like this:

On the day he was born, he would say, his white-haired grandfather leaped onto his big black stallion and thundered across the Texas Hill Country, reining in at every farm to shout: “A United States Senator was born today!” Nobody in the Hill Country remembers that ride or that shout, but they do remember the baby’s relatives saying something else about him, something which to them was more significant. And old aunt, Kate Bunton Keale, said it first, bending over the cradle, and as soon as she said it, everyone saw it was true, and repeated it: “He has the Bunton strain.” And to understand Lyndon Johnson it is necessary to understand the Bunton strain, and to understand what happened to it when it was mixed with the Johnson strain—and, most important, to understand what the Hill Country did to those who possessed it.

In a way, the entirety of Caro’s book is spun out from those few lines. The fact that “Nobody in the Hill Country remembers that ride or that shout” isn’t a side note. It’s central. Because it’s a bold faced lie. Johnson was one of the most lying sons of bitches, seemingly, ever to live. He lied and he cheated and he stole his way out of the Hill Country. He made up the story about his grandfather because he was already creating the aura that he would use to make it true retrospectively. At the same time, in order to truly escape the Hill Country he had to make the Hill Country disappear. He had to make the Hill Country into something new so that it could be a platform for his own ambitions.

And in doing that he accomplished something remarkable, and whether it was as an ancillary to his quest for power or not becomes irrelevant. He worked with a mad, driven abandon as a nobody Congressman and he tried to gain every advantage for his county that he could from the New Deal. For the Hill Country, it meant electrification. Caro writes about it thusly:

As late as 1935, farmers had been denied electricity not only in the Hill Country but throughout the United States. In that year, more than 6 million of America’s 6.8 million farms did not have electricity. Decades after electric power had become part of urban life, the wood range, the washtub, the sad iron and the dim kerosene lamp were still the way of life for almost 90 percent of the 30 million Americans who lived in the countryside. All across the United States, wrote a public-power advocate “every city ‘white way’ ends abruptly at the city limits. Beyond lies darkness.” The lack of electric power, writes the historian William E. Leuchtenberg, had divided the United States into two nations: “the city dwellers and the country folk”; farmers, he wrote, “toiled in a nineteenth-century world; farm wives, who enviously eyed pictures in the Saturday Evening Post of city women with washing machines, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners, performed their back breaking chores like peasant women in a pre-industrial age.” . . .
But then one evening in November, 1939, the Smiths were returning from Johnson City, where they had been attending a declamation contest, and as they neared their farmhouse, something was different.
“Oh my God,” her mother said, “The house is on fire!”
But as they got closer, they saw the light wasn’t fire. “No, Mama,” Evelyn said. “The lights are on.”
They were on all over the Hill Country. “And all over the Hill Country,” Stella Gliddon says, “people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson.”

Real power grows from little episodes like that. And episodes like that were part and parcel of the real transformation of American life. And the transformation of American life happened in the specific way it did because, in part, particular mad, power hungry, odd and gangly political geniuses like Lyndon Johnson clawed their ways out of places like the Hill Country with insane dreams in their heads. He cheated his way to the Senate partly by being the first man to ride around in a helicopter from town to town and partly by buying every vote he could. What a strange sight it must have been to see LBJ descending, arms agoggle, stupid smile on his face, from a whirring mechanical bird onto your front lawn. He couldn’t pass anybody up. He was an asshole. But he understood people.

The beginning of the third volume, Master of the Senate, is an amazing short history of the powers of the Senate up until the mid-twentieth century when Johnson arrives. In a relatively brief dash, it gives one a greater sense of the institution than probably ninety percent of the specific studies of the Senate one could pick up. Which brings me to my last point on the subject. America is a pretty interesting place, really; grand and dumb, inspiring and depressing all at once. Given its immense power in this, our era, there is probably something like a vague global civic duty to understand it as best we can. And so it’s pretty frickin great that we have Caro.