Bunch of Amateurs Page 3
“Plenty of people were capable of crossing the Atlantic. They just didn’t make a big deal about it,” Gordon said. He argued that what really marked the Age of Discovery was not so much that Columbus sailed the ocean blue but that it also coincided with the Dawn of the Book. Unlike the previous era’s illuminated manuscript, with its labor-intensive efforts making it suitable only for extremely valuable texts like scripture and maybe a little science or history, this new book medium was faster to produce and more easily distributed. In its own time, the book’s impact on culture was not unlike our Internet’s. A lot of things could be published, and new stories could get told. Columbus, for instance, published his letters after his voyages, as did most of the name explorers. This new medium was drawn more to stories of individuals and their great achievements. If and when Brendan returned, he had to wait for an epic poet to compose a saga. That’s some serious lag time in publicity (although one that bitchy authors nowadays believe they can understand). And sagas weren’t written down but existed in the oral tradition, a second-rate venue back then, the tabloid media of the Dark Ages.
When Columbus returned, Professor Gordon told me, he “practically held a press conference, that’s all.” And there were publishers there to take it all down.
Gungywampers hold that there were plenty of accounts of people sailing to America. It’s just that we don’t read sagas the right way anymore. Brendan the Navigator has his poem too. Eventually it was written down and called the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (The Voyage of the Abbot, Saint Brendan). It’s a ripping yarn of a band of Irish monks who left home around A.D. 500 in leather boats called currachs. They sought to escape European corruption by sailing west in search of a remote place they called the “Promised Land of Saints.” As the poem goes, the monks endured the frights of a moving island, a giant who hailed fire down on them, and a dangerous sea of crystal pillars—very colorful images, clearly the fictional embroideries of a poet. But what if they were metaphorical descriptions of a whale, an Icelandic volcano, and icebergs? the Gungywampers argue. Suddenly the story can be read somewhat journalistically, too.
Although Brendan was a historic character and the Irish monks of that era were known for their maritime talent (currachs can still be found among Atlantic fishermen, and National Geographic sailed one from Ireland to America in 1976 for a TV special), few historians agree with the Gungywampers that there was a voyage. But it’s no longer absurd to try and prove with solid material findings that it did happen. And the era that preceded Columbus looks a lot less dark and far more interesting than it once did. Adventurers did sail and improbable journeys did take place, and it just might be that one of them sought out the Promised Land of Saints and found it just off I-95 not far from the Foxwoods Casino.
This is a book called Bunch of Amateurs because that last word most accurately captures this essential quality that runs through these stories. I also call it a search for the American character, because there’s just something fundamentally American about heading off to one’s garage to reinvent the world.
Amateurs are often wrong, crazy, fraudulent, or twisted. There is typically a pomposity among amateurs that, well, one just has to get used to. They are often nerds, if younger; cranks, if slightly mature; eccentric, if aged; and—it should be said—at just about any age they can be total jackasses. But these are just the characteristics of people obsessed with a new idea, following their bliss, in love (amo, amas, amat—amateur) with one true thing.
Who cannot love amateurs like the gungywamping David Barron? Not merely because these people are loopy and fun in a knight errant sort of way, but because even the amateurs who have it all wrong but are obsessed are typically on to something. It’s just often not the something they think they are on to.
I’ve hung out with a lot of amateurs who were misguided or, for now, lost in a world defined mostly by their own private conspiracy theories. But their views of the larger profession or frontier against which they were pushing usually led to some cool thoughts. What I always liked about hitching my own curiosity to someone else’s amateur passion was that it granted me access to a world, like a travel writer, in a way that few others get to see. Think of this book as a hitchhiker’s guide to amateurism. In each chapter I get in somebody’s car and go somewhere, and often no place near where the driver thought we were heading.
I sought out the venues where amateurism seemed to be thriving—those multimillion-dollar contests and those weekend hobby clubs hoping to break out into something important. Some disciplines are just teeming with amateur passion right now and long have been—astronomy and paleontology, for instance. It’s probably not a coincidence that both fields take us into the biggest questions. If you’re going to fiddle around on the weekends, why not solve the secret of the universe or the mystery of life? I hitched a ride on the ongoing controversy of Kennewick Man in part because the amateur anthropology in that case drove so revealingly off the rails. And I couldn’t resist the story of the ivory-billed woodpecker because no amateur pursuit takes us so far afield, lost in bureaucratic thinking, the drama of experts failing, the hidden history of Dixie’s postwar destruction, and the very American fantasies motivating the restoration of the land.
In this book, there is a search for the original American amateur and the baptismal moment of defining this country as a nation of garage invention and second acts; the story of a fortress of expertise under attack by banshees eager to bring down the walls; an expedition into the world of weekend warriors meeting in their clubhouses plotting scientific revolutions; an intermission of error and total amateur fiasco; and, finally, a visit to one of those perpetual frontiers where amateurs continuously have (and always will) come to discover—in this case, literally—new worlds.
It’s a series of stories that glimpse the ongoing American experience, the one told repeatedly throughout our pop culture’s sacred art, such as The Wizard of Oz. Just who is the Wizard? A cranky old expert whose breakthrough achievement occurred long ago (during the Omaha State Fair, if the balloon is to be believed). He is no longer certain that his expertise will sustain his reputation, so he hides out in his fortress and engineers a mighty façade of smoke and fire he can belch at others who challenge what he has to say.
And who challenges him? Rank amateurs improvising their way through the deep dark forest. Their roundabout journey is a way for them to discover their own emerging capacities as unfinished creatures of intellect, compassion, and courage. Sure, that story might have been a metaphor for the qualities needed to get Americans through the Depression (what I always heard growing up). But The Wizard of Oz is also an American narrative about self-invented outsiders overwhelming the domain of professionals.
What does happen in the finale? The Wizard is revealed to be merely a washed-up blowhard who’s been dining out on the tattered remains of a dated and jejune credentialism. And what is it that the Wizard offers the three great amateurs—the scarecrow, the tin man, and the lion? Emblems of expertise: a diploma, a testimonial, and a medal.
“Back where I come from we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers,” the Wizard tells the Scarecrow, assuring him in most un-European terms that he’s as smart, if not smarter, than any credentialed thinker. “And when they come out, they think deep thoughts—and with no more brains than you have.… But! They have one thing you haven’t got! A diploma!”
The adventure’s the thing, of course, but it’s always nice when a self-made pioneer winds up with, say, a genius grant—something that happens all the time in our culture. We’re Americans. We love that stuff. This is our temple and our American idol. We’re Gungywampers all the way down.
2
ONCE MORE, TO THE GATES
I. The First American Is Born
t’s spring in Paris, 1778, and I have always pictured this particular moment happening in front of the golden baroque gates of Versailles. One of the weekend rituals of King Louis XVI was the for
mal reception of arriving ambassadors in order to chat them up a bit and get a sense of just what kind of new men were in town. That day, His Majesty was scheduled to meet the latest American envoy—John Adams, the Yosemite Sam of the founding fathers.
By Yosemite Sam, I don’t mean that Adams was a short, barrel-chested, overly suspicious, fuming hothead with a fondness for flyaway hairstyles and a taste for poofy neckwear. That’s a given. Rather, I mean that Adams, like Sam, spent a great deal of his life aggravated that the world would not conform to the story line he thought should be playing out around him. Adams was a man of protocol and schedules, reasoned decisions and a disregard for foolishness, all work and no play—the kid who always did his homework on time.
When he was twenty-one years old, he set down a schoolwork plan in his diary that would last a lifetime: “I am resolved to rise with the Sun and to study the Scriptures, on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings, and to study some Latin authors the other 3 mornings. Noon and Nights I intend to read English authors. This is my fixed Determination, and I will set down every neglect and every compliance with this Resolution. May I blush whenever I suffer one hour to pass unimproved.”
Adams rarely blushed. Life was a homework assignment to John Adams, and the right answer to every question was always self-improvement leading to virtue: “I will strive with all my soul to be something more than Persons who have had less Advantages than myself.”
Impressed by his improved self, Adams got distraught if he thought his moral achievement wasn’t properly recognized. When it wasn’t, which was often, Adams would plunge into the colonial version of a pity party and unload to his diary or his wife, Abigail, just how unfair it all was.
“The English have got at me,” he wrote to Abigail regarding British press coverage of his reputation in Paris. “They make fine work of me—fanatic, bigot, perfect cipher … awkward figure, uncouth dress, no address, no character, cunning hardheaded attorney.” When he witnessed others getting ahead by cunning or luxuriating unpunished in debauchery, he flipped: “Modesty is a virtue that can never thrive in public. Modest merit! Is there such a thing remaining in public life?”
Adams had this vague sense that others had figured out how to get ahead without all the homework, and he felt clueless and even injured when he found himself in the shadow of such shrewdness. It was all so horrible, especially because no one was noticing Adams’s magnificent virtue and his strict adherence to the rules. In fact, people seemed to prefer the company of insufferable wretches who swanned about town and grasped at popularity. And he despised it all as a cheap trick, as he explained to his wife, Abigail: “A man must be his own trumpeter—he must write or dictate paragraphs of praise in the newspapers; he must dress, have a retinue and equipage; he must ostentatiously publish to the world his own writings with his name … he must get his picture drawn, the statue made, and must hire all the artists in his turn to set about works to spread his name, make the mob stare and gape, and perpetuate his name.”
Here’s the problem, though: This trumpeter Adams grumbled about was Ben Franklin. And Franklin was the reason Adams was in Paris, ostensibly to work as his partner in the war effort to get French support for America’s struggling armies in 1778. Already the rumors of Franklin’s boozing and womanizing were legendary. How could he party all across Paris and attend to the business of salvaging the failing American Revolution? The Continental Congress had sent Adams there to watch over this old and famous man whom many of the founding fathers had come to see as America’s very own Falstaff, a mead-guzzling, woman-flirting raconteur, handy with the pithy one-liners but not very efficient at getting the hard work done. As a result, Adams simply mistrusted Franklin. Yet that was the man Adams was slated to meet at Versailles on that May morning to make proper introductions at the Court.
At the time, an appearance before the king was a highly ritualized affair. One had to dress the part of a formal gentleman, which meant a stylized version of a knight pledged to the chivalric code—i.e., clean breeches, fine boots, laced cuffs, a sword, and a powdered wig. There were actually shops nearby to Versailles that catered to this getup, just as teenagers attending the prom today can rent a tuxedo. Near the gates, one could even find a sword-monger to rent you a fine-looking cutlass with gold hilt, an essential piece of the entire costume. So, picture it. There is John Adams in formal French court clothing, standing around, expectant. He has his sword and powdered wig. His cuffs are perfectly set to reveal the stitched finery of rich lace. Slay me, Percy, if he isn’t a dashing pimpernel. Don’t say John Adams doesn’t know the rules! His perfumes are an exquisite blend. His breeches are fresh and pressed, his over-jacket cut just so, all according to court protocol as pronounced by the effete chamberlains who literally looked you up and down and vetted the costume of each man approaching the king’s personage and/or his representatives.
So Adams is feeling quite good about himself. He is here to meet the King of France, win over more support, and do his fetal nation proud. And now, here comes his partner’s carriage. I like to imagine the horses halting, the wheels braking, and Adams’s moon face tilting slightly to catch a partial glimpse of the, even then, world famous hangdog eyes and sly smirk of Ben Franklin. The carriage door’s iron latches turn with a tiny crunching sound and the door opens wide.
But I’m not going to bring Franklin, the notorious trumpeter, out of the carriage just yet, because, at this point, you won’t get the joke. (This is always the problem with history, so much huffing and puffing.) You can’t really appreciate the unbearable lightness of the moment until you have a sense of the petty soap opera playing out between these two crucial Americans and the broader quarrels that dominated French society at that time. Along with the mud, Franklin stepped from his carriage into all of that, too.
More important, what happens here is one of those great moments in American history, specifically in the way our nation comes to be thought of as a bunch of amateurs. We often apply that word to garage inventors or athletes who can’t make the cut. Or we think of it as a broad word that implies poor quality or mediocre talent. I want to argue that the word took on several meanings when it crossed the pond and that together they form a kind of story, an American story. And this story often involves, at the beginning, an act of fraudulence, of assuming a new name or donning a disguise, of pretending that you are something that you are not. This story gets repeated over and over again and far more often than people might think. It constitutes a hidden history of America. And while there are many places in our past where one could say it began, I am going to locate it right here, with Franklin’s exit from the carriage, because it was an instant in history as daring as it was hilarious. With nothing but a bit of ad-libbing on Franklin’s part, a fresh figure is about to be born: the New World amateur and the soul of the American character.
II. Bowling Alone, Colonial Style
During the Revolutionary War itself, few really understood just what Ben Franklin was up to. From our point of view, we see him as just another founding father. But the other revolutionaries didn’t see him that way at all.
At this time in Paris, Franklin was seventy-two years old. John Adams was forty-three years old, Thomas Jefferson was thirty-five, and James Madison was twenty-seven years old. They had not yet earned their bones. Franklin already had one gouty foot in the history books. He was not just famous. He was world famous. The subject of his fame—the taming of lightning—had about it a kind of pre-Darwinian grandeur. He had demystified one of the last natural phenomena widely perceived to be God’s direct and immediate interferences in man’s events. Some felt he had overstepped the bounds of humility. Others thought that, having literally stolen God’s thunder, some of it had rubbed off on Franklin himself. In many quarters, he was considered not simply a scientist, but perhaps the greatest scientist since Isaac Newton. It’s a role every century or so assigns to one individual.
Consider how the twentieth century elevated Albert Einstein as
scientific genius who rose from patent clerk to fuzzy-haired icon with twinkling eyes and mischievous sense of humor. By the time I got into college, that ideal of intellect was yielding to the computer and so our new icon would become a great mind literally bound inside a machine. We see it every time Stephen Hawking’s crumpled body is wheeled out into a lecture hall to talk to us. Withered and slumped to one side, his face a human rhombus, Hawking flashes an elfin smile as his B-movie metallic voice explains his central idea, so monstrously big it is actually called the Grand Unified Theory of the universe.
Ben Franklin was this character in his time. All the world saw him as both the most mysterious and the perfect creation of the New World. He had not only bottled lightning, he had cranked out hundreds of inventions. With his stringy hair and Buddhist paunch and sly grin (the puckish sense of humor seems to be the common denominator of genius), he looked the part as it was conceived then.
Given the generational difference and his insurmountable greatness, no one quite knew what to make of Franklin’s conversion to the Revolution. Especially John Adams. So how perverse was it that destiny would throw these two opposites together at so many crucial moments—they both were chosen to edit Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration, they parleyed with the French about wartime alliances, and later they went to Paris to negotiate the end of the war.
The two men had a history, long before they ever got to Paris on this trip, and they would have a history long afterward. Think of them as the twin poles of the American psyche. They show up at nearly every crucial event of our founding, two cartoon figures standing on Lady Liberty’s shoulders, whispering in her ear.