Issue #03/84, February 29 - March 10, 2000 
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THE ARTIFICIAL HICK, or Emile In Appalachia
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For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today |
Every single thing about this creature is an affectation, starting with its name. "Jedediah Purdy"...sounds like something a scriptwriter invented for a tearjerker about Appalachia, doesn’t it? Well, it is. Jedediah, author of this throwback essay, is the son of upper-class hippies who moved to West Virginia in 1974, just in time to give birth to Jed, whom they bred as a weapon. They knew if their boy-weapon was to be effective, it couldn’t be born in their native haunts--Beacon Hill, New Haven, Martha’s Vineyard--so they sped south to the deepest, most wretched corner of Appalachia as this bucolic Damien’s hour approached. Jed’s mother was probably barking like a seal in her tenth hour of labor when their VW van zoomed through Trenton on the Interstate, with her hirsute spouse screaming at her, "God damn it, maintain! Maintain! You want the little brat to be born in New Jersey, for Christ’s sake?"
And Jed’s mom, Spartan woman, clenched her teeth and legs and relaxed only when the van screeched over the river into West Virginia; then Jed came forth in a stream of long-pent folly and lies. They named the boy "Jedediah" so that it would be clear he was a son of the hard West Virginia earth, a real son of toil. Which of course he isn’t. He is a poorly-constructed golem, magicked of dirtclods and coal tailings to fight his parents’ lost battle. They raised the creature on a farm, no doubt purchased with the dividends of their discreet trust funds, and began pursuing their quaint, economically absurd agriculture: Ivy-League oligarchs plowing with horses and giving every goat a quaint name before they home-butchered it. This is Jed’s own account:
"My parents came to West Virginia in 1974, the year I was born. They meant to live with few needs, to raise as much of their own food and do as much of their own work as possible...As my father once said to me, they intended Ôto pick out a small corner of the world and make it as sane as possible.’ They chose a little more than a hundred acres, mostly steep, eroded pastures and second-growth oak woods..."
In other words, they picked a quaint, agriculturally useless plot of land in the most wretched of the fifty states and began playing Ivy-League Waltons. Quaint, maybe; but "as sane as possible"? Hardly. How their neighbors, the native West Virginians, must have hated them! The only sane attitude toward finding oneself in West Virginia is the one so memorably preached by O’Connor’s hero Hazel Motes: "Where you are ain’t no good except to get away from." Real coalminers who dreamed of making it to a city with heated toilets, who devoutly prayed that their children might someday obtain indoor jobs with no heavy lifting, must have dreamed of burning the Purdys’ Appalachian Trianon to the ground. But, stayed by the peasant’s instinctive dread of even the maddest aristocrats, they let the Purdys carry their cultural-vengeance project, Jedediah, to term.
Ah well; it’s too late for regrets now.
They raised Jedediah without TV, without movies, without pop music-without a single link to the glorious cascade of our culture in its finest years. And he’s proud of it! He boasts about not knowing anything of the culture in which he was born, and from which his parents kept him til he was too old to help! These people should be arrested for child abuse!
Jed’s own account innocently reveals his parents’ gross hypocrisy. He tells us that his mother joined the local West Virginia school board, an example of grassroots political involvement he holds up as an example for us all. In the same breath, and without the least indication of embarrassment, he tells us that he did not attend the public schools his mother was serving: "Our parents taught my younger sister and me at home." And at fourteen, after this careful homeschooling, Jedediah (full name: "J. Cabot Getty-Dupont Purdy") went off to school.
Where, you ask? Perhaps to the high school his mother had made into a shining example of public education? Did our Jed in fact ride the yellow bus to Drowned Rat Valley HS in Drowned Rat Township, W Va? Why no. Jed went off to a different school. You may have heard of it: Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
When he finished at Exeter, did Jed-Boy Walton go home to follow the plow, get hookworm and pick a banjo on the front porch? Why no. He went on to another humble institution of learning beloved of coalminers’ sons: Harvard.
Well, OK--but after Harvard, THEN he went home to eat possum around the family table and steal coal scraps to keep warm, right? No again. The inside back jacket informs us that Jed is "studying Law, environment, and social values at Yale."
This is where you begin to think: they must be kidding. This can’t be true. Not even East-Coast American conservatives are this stupid.
Welp, folks (here I spit a chaw of nicotine-free tobacco into the spitoon at the New Haven General Store and nod at Miz Dworkin as she comes in to buy some man-traps for the huntin’ season)--Wal, folks, them Preppie boys IS that stupid, I plumb reckon. Ayup, (I interrupt myself to take a sip of alcohol-free corn liquor lite, leaning on the ol’ apple barrel)--Ayup, I do believe they is. They published Jed’s durn book, ain’t they?
Jedediah, to his credit, does have some dim sense that his childhood of sensory-deprivation in West Virginia might not be exactly typical: "In some ways, my experience...is anomalous." Uh...yeah. But in the very next sentence, he simply takes back the concession: "In another way, though, I think it is typical....we nearly all have the sorts of experiences and memories that West Virginia gives me."
Well, that’s true enough. I sure do fondly remember those snowy mornin’s in the suburbs--ol’ bucolic Pleasant Hill, California. Yup, come the big freeze, we’d go down to the millpond to skate and make maple syrup, then get a ride in Robert Frost’s sleigh over to the Quaker Meeting House to hear Mister Thoreau preach.
The truth of it is that most of us have no experience whatever of the two places Jed knows: an artificially primitive farm and an Ivy League school. Jed is very clear about the fact that these two settings are the only ones he considers real: "I have had more than a few conversations," he informs us, "on evening-shaded West Virginia porches and over crowded Harvard dining tables...." Yup, Jed, that’s where to get your highminded finger on America’s pulse. Ever been to a mall, Jed? I’m sure that if asked, Jed would answer, "What’s a mall?"--and he’d be proud he didn’t know.
Jed spends the first part of this book telling us how exceptional his childhood was, claiming that it entitles him to speak in Thoreau’s voice--then he adds this idiotic claim that he’s also typical. This is the sort of intellectual rigor which suffuses Jed’s little white book. He consistently cites Emerson’s extreme individualism as the true voice of American culture, then bemoans every manifestation of it in what he pompously calls "the modern world."
Purdy writes about "the modern world" as if he’s never been there (as, perhaps, he hasn’t). He writes like Tonto speaks: in an artificially simple but correct style that must have made the pederasts who taught him at Exeter just quiver: "Our hope is to try to draw out in words a hope [sic]..., trusting that another will say, ‘Yes, you are not alone in that.’"
If any contemporary American actually spoke the sentence, "Yes, you are not alone in that," they’d be laughed out of the room. But that laughter would be exactly the sort of regrettable levity which Jed, who couldn’t get a joke if it hit him over the head with a mule, finds so deplorable in "the modern world." Purdy is proud that he knows nothing about it, and to remind us of his ignorance he writes about it in a parody of heavy Johnsonian prose:
"Several years later, MTV presented Beavis and Butthead, a cartoon whose eponymous antiheroes spend their time watching MTV...." "eponymous antiheroes"! As the "eponymous antiheroes" would put it: "Heh-heh--He said ‘eponymous’!"
Indeed he did. He’s got a million of these gouty harrumphs, the sweepings of newspaper opinion pieces at their clunkiest. The closest he can get to describing Clinton’s blowjob is "a leader’s philandering." Jed worries about "recent centuries" and fears that "neoliberal policies...often make a Procrustean bed of economists’ beloved supply-and-demand curves." They do, don’t they? That’s why I got a Posturpedic. Jed uses words which should be a felony for anyone under eighty. He introduces Ken Kesey as "...a literary character of sorts as leader of the madcap Merry Pranksters...." "madcap"? Jed, son, they warn’t "madcap"; they was on DRUGS! (Has Jed ever taken a mind-altering substance other than self-righteousness? No. And he’d deny it if he had; his kind are great liars.)
But my favorite among the mangled phrases is Jed’s solemn allusion to "the year before scandal hamstringed [Clinton’s] presidency." "Hamstringed"? I bet the grammar check burned itself out on that one! Jed must’ve sweated in the New Haven library over his laptop: "hamstrung"? "spammed"? "strung up"? But in the end he went for the very worst alternative, the true West Virginian option, "hamstringed."
You have to admire the integrity of a genuinely stupid man who’s at home with his stupidity. Jed, the voice of America’s idiot class, has no ideas whatever; he is the vessel of every wellmeaning middlebrow who taught him at Exeter or Harvard. When his critique of contemporary American culture makes any sense at all, it’s because he’s lifted Tocqueville’s thesis about the centripedal tendency of American culture; but when it suits him, he implies without evidence that this tendency, which Tocqueville realized was basic to the culture, can simply be washed away if we all do like Jeddie’s mom and run for the school board. (While, of course, keeping our own precious children far away from those hellholes.)
This book is two hundred pages long, but the primitive, reactionary argument occupies only about ten pages, the length of an undergraduate essay--which this thing clearly was before Jed inflated it. To make it book-length he’s inserted a whole unrelated article on the destructive impact of stripmining coal, and another on Montaigne, with the odd nod to Rousseau.
It’s only fitting that Jed should pay homage to Rousseau, that grand lunatic, because Jed’s whole life and works derive from a single work of Rousseau: Emile, ou de l’Education. In Emil, Rousseau describes the ideal education of a boy kept ruthlessly away from the company of other children, popular culture, cities, and mass culture. This ideal pupil should be educated at home, by a single stern, Spartan teacher. By this regimen, Rousseau believed, a youth of natural goodness, free of the corruptions of society, would be created. It was this project which Jed’s parents undertook, two hundred years later.
This pitiable little book reminds us of an important truth: Rousseau was an idiot.
Check out Dr. Dolan’s new book, "Poetic Occasion From Milton To Wordsworth" published by St. Martin’s Press, or order it on amazon.com .
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