Into The Heart Of America

Sheet 1:
The New Puritans
First off, I have to say I wasn't trying to make any kind of crude literary statement by pissing all over Emily Dickinson's back yard that sub-zero New England night in 1994. I had merely stepped off the road to answer the call of nature - quite uncomfortably I might add, given the inclement weather - and didn't even find out whose property I was urinating on until I got back to my mother-in-law's house, where she and my wife told me I'd had a lucky escape. The bookworms and poetry buffs of Amherst, Massachusetts, of which there are many, would have hung me by my gender from the nearest flagpole had they caught me in mid-leak.

You get my snowy drift. The good burghers of New England still have plenty of that old pilgrim lynch mob spirit left in 'em. Why, the morning after Bill Clinton looked straight into the eye of the camera in August 1998 and told those momentous porkies about never having stirred the baby gravy with Monica, the townland was bristling with righteous indignation. "Even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked," Bob Dylan sang in 1965, and it's been proved many times since.
You get a lot of people quoting Bob around these parts. Amherst is a small college town about the size of Gorey, but with a substantially bigger population: the nearby University of Massachusetts campus (commemorated in The Pixies' song 'U-Mass': "It's educational!!!") is one of the most densely populated areas in the northeast. Certainly, the half dozen skyscraper dorms give it the look of an unfinished megapolis. Beer kegs and televisions regularly fly out of those dormitory windows, and jumping from the sky-rise library remains a popular way of shuffling off this mortal coil.
My wife and I have been visiting Amherst for the last six years. Doodle spent her teenage years in school here, and her mother Peggy teaches Irish Studies at U-Mass. I have never known any other part of America than this small town, but I think in many ways all America exists in its small towns.
Amherst is but an hour or so from Salem, and these Pioneer Valley folk still enjoy a good witch-hunt. The dark demons of Poe and Hawthorne's tales may have gotten burned off by the fake light of a secular age, but New Englanders have invented a whole slew of new devils in the form of federal agents, tobacco merchants and corporate operatives.
America, as William Burroughs said in his 'Thanksgiving Prayer', is a land where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. In Amherst, unlaundered lawns, rusty car wrecks in the front yard, no-shows at emergency Millennium Bug meetings - these all inspire the kind of herd paranoia Tom Waits parodied in 'What's He Building In There?' off Mule Variations.
Needless to say, this is also the PC capital of the east coast. Here, a spade is never a spade; it's a Soil Dispersal Tool. There are people who walk the streets making a profession out of being offended, rarely for themselves, but on behalf of real or imagined minorities - one might be forgiven for thinking the local dialect is composed exclusively of euphemisms. Check your sense of mischief in at Logan Airport and collect it again on the way home: the ball-hopping, banter and friendly insults that are part and parcel of Irish public life will get you led out of CVS in handcuffs.

Sheet 2:
Freak Power
In The Boonies
So, at its worst, Amherst can seem like a leftie town indoctrinated with a right wing sense of fundamentalist manifest destiny. This is what happens when you get a community run by the worst kind of hippies - respectable ones.
Well, mostly respectable. One local legend-in-his-own-out-to-lunchtime is the Woodstock survivor who actually partook of some of that infamous brown acid, and for the last 30 years has blundered about town in a perpetual state of flashback, exclaiming, in a voice like a stoned Jim Henson puppet, "I can hear the music, but I can't see the stage!"
What you can still see is impressive numbers of Aquarian stragglers gathering on Amherst Common at the weekends for tie-dye parties and bongo-bashing competitions, chowing down on veggieburgers and Cherry Garcia ice cream.
Naturally enough, New Age quackery is big business here - local free papers such as Wisdom feature articles on Accessing Energy (The "Magic" Of Tesla's Purple Energy Plates), Nutritional Alternatives For Stimulating Hair Growth and Finding Your Joyful Inner Child. The November issue also carried ads for Tranquillity Mats ($19.95), the Now & Zen Tea Set ($39.95) and Zen alarm clocks, which wake you up with "a gradually increasing Tibetan bell-like chime" ($99.95).
Back on planet earth, The Valley Advocate is the main local rag of choice, immortalised in song some years ago by punkers The Mill Rats (descended from local legends Angry Johnny and The Snots, who later morphed into The Killbillies): "Valleeey Advocate," the tune goes, "didn't know hippies could type!" Angry Johnny himself is also a prominent artist, and painted the cover of local legends Dinosaur Jr's mighty Where You Been album.
These opposing poles of baby-boomerism and slacker apathy somehow manage to keep the town in some kind of karmic balance, and for every five-mile-long shopping mall full of Gaps, Taco Bells and Disney Stores (where the assistants are all blonde, wear baggy shorts and smile the rictus smile of people who've been taken over by Bodysnatchers) there are quirky little joints too, knick-knack shops with names like I Used To Be A Tree or Let's Save The Corporations From Themselves.
At the same time, Gen X is not some outdated media catchphrase here - you can still see Kurt Cobain's lost doppelgangers around the town, sporting that Jesus-Manson stare, holding down a job in Kinko's while crafting the song or book or computer virus that will deface America.
Then there's guys like Chad Robertson, who once turned orange from taking too much beta carotene, or the amazingly named Kurt Fedora, who has a false leg on account of getting run over by a train, and who played rhythm guitar (right speaker, track 7) on Where You Been. Or Gus, the emaciated spacer who once confided in me after too many beers in The Spoke that he planned to open a comic shop in Guatemala to "try and put something back into the economy, dude".
My wife has known all these characters for years, since the days they used to sit around nodding sagely to old Metallica albums. In fact, she remembers Dinosaur Jr. founder J Mascis as a stringy-haired hippy eating granola from a bowl for five years. The same bowl. J is the closest thing to a local boy made good, the godfather of slacker culture, even making the cover of Spin magazine in 1992 - much to his mortification - under a headline that read, "J Mascis Is God".
I once spent a night watching a basketball match and glugging beers at God's house, located deep in the south Amherst woods. According to legend, J chose the property because it afforded the best protection against alien abduction. At the time, one entire wing of the house was given over to a friendly but drool-centric bulldog called Bob. J even named his home studio after the mutt, and More Light, his new album with The Fog, was recorded there with a little help from My Bloody Valentine genius of noise Kevin Shields. Fellow noiseniks Kim and Thurston from Sonic Youth live just seven miles up the road in Northampton, Amherst's somewhat looser sister town.
Come to think of it, in many ways Amherst folk are a lot less uptight than we are in Ireland. No one dresses up much or applies layers of face-filla just to hit Bruegger's Bagel Deli, where you might get served by a girl wearing braids suspended horizontally from her head with wire and sporting a nametag that reads 'Pippi Bagelstockings'.
Of course, New England in the fall is legendarily beautiful, with its million shades of auburn, but really, in any season, you feel like you've walked into a Bruce Springsteen song; the interstate stretching off into eternity, the swinging traffic lights, the fields of almost supernatural corn like something out of a Stephen King yarn (the man himself lives in a gothic mansion in Maine, one state away). Also, this is Indian country, confirmed by local place names like Hockanum or Agawam. It doesn't take much imagination to conjure images of shadow-eyed savages canoeing down the Connecticut river, paddles flashing in the sun.
Matter of fact, the town never got over being named after Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the 18th century scumbag British general who conquered Canada and pioneered biochemical warfare, giving the Pontiac Indians the gift of smallpox-infested blankets. Maybe that's why Amherstians are so sensitive about cigarettes: the injuns' revenge is still being dealt with in courts across the land, as lung cancer victims attempt to sue the tobacco corporations. Harsh maybe, but poetic justice.

Sheet 3:
Yet More Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail
Amherst's outrage at Bill Clinton's own private Hamlet two years ago was nothing compared to the foaming at the mouth being done last month when it became ever more apparent that George W. would triumph in The Never Ending Election Of Ought-Ought. Rao's coffee house, situated near the polling station, became a de facto Gore/Lieberman campaign headquarters and debating house, with laptops being fired up at a rate of knots and e-mails flying.
The local democrats didn't know who they were madder at; Green Party candidate Ralph Nader (cover star of election week's Advocate, and who looks for all the world like a Chicago newspaperman with a bad stomach ulcer and 50-a-day Camel habit) for splitting the leftie vote nationwide, or the Bushwhackers for insinuating that the democrats down in Florida were too dense to comprehend a butterfly ballot and differentiate between a vote for Big Al or Pat Buchanan: "Imagine, that George Dubyuh - he's calling us stoopid!"
Speaking of stoopid, sometimes it was hard to tell whether Fox News, CNN et al were running election coverage or remakes of old Three Stooges episodes, prematurely "calling" every state south of Kansas - most notably in the two time zones of Florida - resulting in no end of nervous anchor jokes about eating crow, plus a blanket lampooning from professional cynics sick to the back teeth of it all being Too Close To Call, of blue and red coloured flashing maps, of endless explanations of the difference between the popular and electoral college vote.
By the weekend, the liberal consensus was that, whoever won, the Presidency was now a poisoned chalice, and any prospective leader would be hamstrung by the narrow margin. Even hardcore liberals in tie-dyes and Timberlands could be heard muttering "Give it up, Al" into their triple-shot-skinny-grande-lattes-to-go.
Me, I paid a visit to Food For Thought, a non-profit workers collective book store, and paid my $25 for a hardback copy of Greil Marcus' latest opus Double Trouble - Bill Clinton And Elvis In A Land Of No Alternatives. (The writer, coincidentally enough, was in town the same time as I was, presumably visiting his friend and Wisconsin Death Trip author Michael Lesy, who lectures in Hampshire college.)
In Double Trouble Marcus focuses on a pivotal point of no return when Bill Clinton was facing his own election Gethsemane eight years ago. Everything sucked, so Bill decided to blow, staging his own '68 comeback special, donning shades and playing saxophone to 'Heartbreak Hotel' on the Arsenio Hall show. It was a damn-the-torpedoes move that convinced the electorate Clinton had one quality his opponents lacked: humanity. At that moment, Marcus contends, Elvis took the form of Bill's guardian angel, except this friendly ghost would desert the president almost immediately after taking office. Bill must've cried, "Elvis, why hast thou forsaken me?" more than once during the Whitewater and Zippergate debacles, dogged by his very own Albert Goldman in the form of Kenneth Starr.
And in the cold light of 2000, as Tennessee fell to Bush, it became apparent that it was The Bad Elvis who was on duty, the drug-addled, Corinthians-quoting TV-shooting Republican lackey who once offered his services to Nixon as an anti-drug officer.
I woke up on the couch at about three in the morning of November 8th to the news that Florida had apparently fallen to the Republicans and Gore had conceded the election. However, as the democrat masses waited for the official towel-throwing ceremony, news came through that Al had changed his mind and retracted his concession to GW over the cellphone. According to the New York Times, Bush responded with a my-brother's-Governor-of-Florida-and-he-says-I'm-president type tirade. When Gore reminded Bush that his brother was not the ultimate authority here, the Republican replied, "There's no need to get snippy". Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels couldn't have played it any more dumb and dumber.
The argument had still not been resolved as we left the country, although at the time of going to press it looks like Bush for the White House. Bush - who resembles nothing so much as the idiot midget who hides under the boardwalk during the gunfights in Clint Eastwood westerns - as the leader of the free world. Good Jesus.
Two days after I got home, Greil Marcus' Devil-Elvis had seemingly morphed into a vampirically lit George W. on the cover of the Daily Mirror dated Thursday November 16. Under the headline LETHAL the sub-head said:
"George W. Bush tomorrow sends his 150th person to the death chamber in Texas, smashing all records for an American state Governor. His latest scalp has the mental age of a six year old. Mr Bush has spent an average of just FOUR minutes deliberating on these decisions. By the end of this week he might have his finger on the trigger of the world's biggest army."
Inside was a six-page catalogue of executions, including individual profiles of each of George's victims.
Meanwhile, apocalypt-ecologists disgusted at the recent breakdown of talks between Europe and the US at The Hague are even more pessimistic about saving the planet from gas-guzzling Uncle Sam at the Bonn meeting next spring, given that America will then have a corporate puppet for a president.
Ye shall know him by the number of the beast.
And ye shall know him by the trail of dead.

Amherst's finest J. Mascis and The Fog play the Temple Bar Music Centre on Saturday December 9.