CHASING AUTUMN SOUTH
A Non-Chronological Diary of a Road Trip a Year After Trump's Re-election
By the time I got to Brunswick, Georgia I was severely under-caffeinated. My daily jolt had been reduced to a sporadic one and I needed a hit. A billboard outside the Best Western read “Guns and Coffee” in bold face with the word “artisanal” scrawled in red like an editor’s note just before and slightly above the word coffee. The juxtaposition of artisanal food culture — short-hand for Blue America — and gun culture — similar for Red America — stuck in my mind and as the place was a 150 yards away I stopped in.
Best double espresso I had in the month I’ve been away.
Guns and Coffee is not the name of the shop. The place is called The Facility. That word explains the “guns” part of the branding. It is an indoor shooting range and combat training facility.
It was mid-morning, 10’ish. Outside the building a couple of fellows, early middle-age, similar amounts of gray in their neatly trimmed beards, flannel shirts — a cold front had swept way south and the temperature was 37 degrees. They stood around jawing, holding tote bags for their various weapons. Inside there were a few local cops standing at a table drinking coffee and a few others seated in the warehouse-like space.
The walls of the coffee seating area were lined with quotes from the Founders about the rights of citizens to bear arms and their importance in staving off tyranny. To the right of the baristas was the firing range. A few people were getting in some mid-morning target practice.
A young man, late twenties or so, was working the counter by the range. A day pass is $35 and pistol rental was $15 bucks an hour. Lessons were possible. I asked him if this was a chain — Guns and Coffee sure felt like a franchisable concept — and he explained no, it wasn’t. This was the only outlet. Brunswick is a center for training law enforcement like the US Marshals and other groups (not the FBI who have their own facility at Quantico Virginia) and now the fellow told me ICE has come to town.
They tried to recruit me.
What did you tell them?
No.
Smart move.
Around then another squarely built middle-aged man with a beard, frosted at roughly the same level of grey as the guys I’d seen on the way in, walked by cradling an AR-15. He gave us both a suspicious look
The Boss Man?
Yeah, the kid nodded.
Boss Man walked through a door and onto the range. Soon the distinctive pock-pock-pock sound the AR-15 makes was underscoring our conversation.
You ex-military?
How did you know?
And here I had a choice, out myself as a hack who had spent quite a bit of time in the vicinity of American soldiers in the Balkans and Iraq, or just remain a guy passing through, curious about the Guns and Coffee concept. I opted for the latter.
Well, you’re standing erect, are in good shape, and you’re looking me straight in the eye. A lot of guys your age, talking to someone my age don’t really make good eye contact.
The Facility is run by a private military company called Telluric with this mission statement, according to the company website
We provide resources
to help you prepare
for whatever comes along
We strongly believe in the idea of a prepared citizenry (as enumerated in the US Constitution), so we are doing our best to make our resources available to the local community
In retrospect I should have hung out longer. I enjoy shooting and it’s been a while but I was already running late for my next stop. I was due at an old friend’s place in Vero Beach Florida, a four-hour slog down I-95. Missed an opportunity.
On the other hand, what I’ve learned on this trip is that Americans are still willing to talk to a stranger but decades of blackguarding the idea of journalism has made it more difficult to do the kind of reporting I do when on the road in the US. Tell someone you’re a reporter just traveling around trying to get a feel for the country and they run faster than they would from an unbathed panhandler asking for spare change (no pennies, please, it was announced last week pennies are no longer being minted).
It is also more difficult to find the kind of small towns where you can have these conversations. Especially in the South. The strangulation of small town shops by the relentless development of malls near interstate junctions has killed the possibility of the casual human encounter right off.
Brunswick was different. It was the luck of the road — sheer chance — that I decided to stop there. There is a strip by the interstate of course, I was staying near one. But five miles away was a historic downtown area that was reasonably lively.
Brunswick is a harbor town in the southeastern corner of Georgia. Its early history was tightly bound-up in the slave trade although I was only vaguely aware of it when I arrived. The place was the scene of a mass suicide of Igbo people brought from what is today Nigeria and it played a key role in one of the last big slave auctions before the Civil War. Over two days in March 1859, 436 people were put up for sale in Savannah Ga around 80 miles up the coast from Brunswick. Most were sold to plantation owners on the islands around Brunswick to work the rice fields and pick sea island cotton.
The scale of slavery in and around the town can still be felt in its demographics: the African American population is nearly double the total of the white population.
But I learned this after my visit.
This month chasing autumn down the East Coast began in New York, the city of my birth, on assignment for the BBC. The weather was great, the work ultimately went well, but the visit put me into a foul mood. It wasn’t just how ludicrously expensive the place has become. The old line: “if you need to ask the price of a yacht, you can’t afford it” can now be applied to day-to-day things like going to an ordinary neighborhood restaurant.
Too many of my fellow Jews are wringing their hands about the election of Zohran Mamdani, in their view, a (pick any three and make your own combo entree): anti-Semite, anti-Zionist, pro-Hamas Islamist, Socialist, Communist, Woke radical.
Mostly, he’s an ambitious, charismatic young man who understands the city’s new ethnic mix and its biggest problem: the rent’s too damn high and other issues related to the clunky term “affordability”.
I was in New York to make a BBC radio program pegged to the upcoming 50th anniversary of Taxi Driver’s release but spent a lot of time thinking about another 1970s classic about New York: Saturday Night Fever. Most people remember that film for John Travolta’s dancing but the plot revolves around his character Tony Manero’s desire to leave his dead end life Bay Ridge, a neighborhood in the outer borough of Brooklyn, by moving to Manhattan. What holds him back is the deep social pull of his working-class neighborhood. Today what would hold him back is the fact that Manhattan is a fortress held by billionaires, as it is today. Today Tony Manero couldn’t dance his way to the city. He’d need to run a fraudulent crypto-exchange so he could afford to buy an apartment near the river and not on a particularly high floor. He’d never see the sky.
50 years ago this autumn, I moved back to Manhattan, to the East Village as it is depicted in Taxi Driver, and was driving a cab to make rent. Four nights a week, I made rent in the first week of each month. That’s a good definition of affordable.
40 years ago this autumn I left New York for London for what has turned out to be forever. The city was already on its long march to the affordability crisis and I was priced out.
The New York where I was born, and spent the first part of my adulthood, was still a city of rough democracy, a place where the little guy could shout at the big guy and occasionally be heard. On my return visits over the decades I could always find pockets of that feeling and relate it to my own life there, as a young man and aspiring actor and later journalist. On this trip I could not find a single trace of it. Even factoring in my age and the objective understanding that no place can remain the same for 50 years, something precious is gone, irrevocably disappeared, and as I headed on Amtrak south to DC I realized I will probably never go back.
Then work got really good.
I had to go to Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello Virginia to work on a series the BBC is planning for next year to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and America’s birthday. I also had a final interview to do for the Taxi Driver documentary. It was with a man named Jeff Kamen, a former local television (and he would insist I remind you, NPR) reporter in New York who now lives in Yogaville in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
When I left Yogaville I drove into the mountains, the fall colors were hallucinogenic. My routine was log the interviews I had been doing in the morning and then find a walk in the afternoon
Hours of driving in the Blue Ridge, many small towns and hamlets, showing signs of recent depopulation. Connected thoughts back to my New York departure.
The German word Heimat. Literal meaning: home, or home town but its actual meaning goes deeper into abstract ideas of a place of belonging, identity, a place where you feel safe, you feel extended into the bricks of buildings and the pavement beneath your feet and into the people you see, even if you don’t know them. It’s something closer to Robert Frost in Death of the Hired Man:
‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’
The back roads of the Blue Ridge are filled with small towns devoid of business and a disconnect between local people and incomers retiring into the area.
There are many reasons why America got to Trump but the loss of Heimat for many — not all of them as old as I am — is part of it. Grapes of Wrath. The Joads lost their Heimat and end up in a less friendly world in California. After the war other left the midwest for better paid work in the defense industry in Southern California. Loss of Heimat. Harvard professor Lisa McGirr’s book Suburban Warriors looks at how this displacement to Orange County gave rise to the new American Right in the 50s and 60s. Her book came out before it metastasized into MAGA.
It is easy to say MAGA is racist or nostalgic for an America that never was. But you cannot dismiss the decades long process of de-industrialization leading to dislocation after dislocation. Dislocation from Heimat also happens in the abstract, in the sense of what family relationships should be and then suddenly they aren’t. This is more difficult for society to deal with.
What has replaced home and belonging? Staring at social media, not human contact. True for people of all ages. Even I’m not immune. My work method for years was to sit in a restaurant, diner or any kind of eating establishment, on my own and eventually pick up a conversation. Now I walk into a place take out two phones (a local cell for US and British mobile ) and look at social media. Just like everybody else in the place.
Coming down from the mountains into the Piedmont plateau of the Carolinas I had to get off the backroads with their empty towns and drive the interstate highways. The roads were in better condition than I remembered them and there was a lot of work going on to make them better still. Along the highways new housing developments were going up.
I stopped in Columbia, South Carolina for a night and in my never ending quest to never spend a triple figure sum in pounds sterling £ for my accomodation found a place that was a mere 60 quid!!. Of course it was first right turn after the highway, 20 minutes from downtown Columbia. The building wasn’t old but it felt beat down. Carpets covered in white dust which was obviously plaster and road dirt. Most of the residents were working on them. All of them were Hispanic. At 5 a.m. I was awakened by doors beeing rapped on loudly up and down the corridor and people being awoken in Spanish.
Most of the road crews and a lot of the construction crews building new suburbs I saw were Hispanic. With ICE roaming the country I wondered how many of these guys were completely kosher with their paperwork. Then I realized that ridding America of Hispanics — the real intention of the white supremacists around Trump, like Stephen Miller — is simply not possible. It’s like bailing out the Titanic with a bucket.
Then it was down to the Low Country in South Carolina where the light is soft and the vegetation abundant
And the pace of life is ridiculously relaxed
A detached world, heavily MAGA. No surprise. Insurrectionist politics is a deep tradition in South Carolina. It was the first state to secede from the Union. The Civil War started just up the road in Charleston Harbor where Fort Sumter sits squat in the sea on a manmade island. But change comes even here. There are more than a few anti-Trumpers scattered round about. But when people socialize, politics is most definitely not up for discussion. Decorum, good manners. It’s the South, after all, a place Professor Jim Cobb of the University of Georgia reminds people that is,”the most hospitable region in the country, and the most homicidal by far.”
Hospitality and Homicide, an unbeatable combination.
Then on to Brunswick.
It was a Monday when I arrived and after walking the pleasant downtown I noticed a sign offering Happy Hour cocktails for 6 bucks. Unbeatable price. Walked into the Driftwood. Modern interior, not Southern roadhouse. Ordered an Old Fashioned, because when in the South …
Bartender asked what kind of bourbon. What’s in the well? He pulled out a bottle of Old Forester. My brand. Settled back on my barstool, took out my phones and went into the 21st century routine of shutting out the world around me and going on social media. But a woman walked in and after a chat with the bartender started talking to me. Her name was Sunshine. Really, it says so on her business card. She owns the place.
She explained her concept: no television, staring at phones is discouraged. The Driftwood is a place for conversation and human interaction. She has a huge stock of board games and does game nights on Monday. I told her what I’ve already told you in this piece about the isolation of people in public spaces. And we agreed that social media was the devil and I tried to explain to her a concept I still haven’t quite put into clever words about the triangular perception of reality. Three points of the triangle: Person to person to what you see on your phone, with what you see on your phone — which isn’t “real” — seeming to be the more intense reality.
Her background was in nursing and before that the military where she met her husband who was now working in law enforcement. She told me about Fletc, a big employer in town. That’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Center where the Marshals and ICE train recruits.
I can’t remember whether I asked her directly about her politics or she just volunteered that she was “probably an independent.”
But the more we spoke it was clear she was MAGA, albeit an unusually thoughtful one. She thought Trump was ok. I told her January 6th is a dealbreaker for me. (there are many others but in this conversation that was the important one to challenge her with). She dismissed it.
If Biden hadn’t been certified on January 6th it would have happened on February 6th or some other day.
She added with pride,
My son’s just been sworn in as a Capitol Hill police officer.
The conversation reinforced a theory I have that when people tell pollsters “I’m an independent” they really are MAGA, but not doctrinaire as in the case of Sunshine, or perhaps too ashamed to admit what their politics really are.
The next morning I had that great cup of coffee at the Facility. And it really is an excellent franchise-able concept. Someone should open a branch along Mass Ave in Cambridge Mass. The folk there really love artisanal coffee and maybe they could be encouraged while enjoying a latté to overcome their phobia about the 2nd amendment.
It won’t make a difference to the coffee and guns crew at The Facility. Not only are they armed and ready to fight for their idea of America, they are wide awake and buzzing from that good strong coffee.
Thank you Michael, as always. A bittersweet piece, just in time for that bittersweet event, American Thanksgiving. I too, am leaving these shores after a 7-location, six-week East Coast visit including Brooklyn and NYC (my family came from Queens) and my own birthplace, Detroit. Also many thoughts similar to yours. Frightened for cousins, nieces and nephews in Florida and the Carolinas. Frightened for the future of the country I once thought I knew. But with a new project in my back pocket gifted to me by former colleagues, that might offer hope and engagement, prep for a better time that might eventually roll around....
60 quid is $79, or close? Pretty hard to find lodgings for that, certainly in the Orange County, CA I got stuck in, due to my editing job in Del Mar, San Diego County, and husband's near Pasadena. That McGirr book Suburban Warriors is right on. And John Wayne's place is just over the bay, maybe a mile as the proverbial crow flies. Keep up the reporting, the writing too! Just today I was telling someone about Napoleon's freeing the ghettos, and a few days ago, about the sad life of your friend Shawkat (sp?) during the fall of Saddam!