Annals of surveillance i

For all the fuss engendered, by daily reports of identity theft on a rapine scale, the gathering efficiencies of surveillance probably owe less to chic new search engines than to the extin-guishment of our dissimilarities. Whenever these happy circumstances are discovered and their origins, marvel-lingly sought, the path of spiritual conformity and intellectual obliter-ation is less likely to lead to the Cotton Mathers of the AM dial than to the spiralling oligopolism of Hobbes, whose hounds were unleashed under Mr Reagan, never to let go of our ankles again. Where, in the 1930s, it required 4 full-time employees of the WPA to spy on the entire watershed of the Shenandoah River, the eradication 

of small towns, native trades and characterful callings, in favour of the consumer's divine right to the shabbiest offshore manufactures at very little more than the indigenous price, has allowed internal espion-age to downsize payrolls by 75 percent, simply by concentrating commerce at the nearest Sleazemart. Artisans now sweep floors on the swing shift, without benefits worthy of a Bob Cratchit, and schools are sold for scrap as the brain drain from Dixie accelerates its flight from the menace it spawned. Mean-while, a spy's only recourse to the society of like minds is exhibition in the arid sidewalks of the web.

Bubbled Southern guyfeet respond to the intrusive new surveillance regime irrepressibly, even with unflagging elation, despite the enervation of their underlying myth. Much more than the glossy beast of equine affectation (Thackeray's impression of Virginia), buffed and burnished guyfeet like Phidippides' have carried the news of Dixie through more literature than we've seen from any other corner of the continent. Always vulnerable to replacement by the pick-up truck, Southern metatarsals have their work doubly cut out for them now, to coax narrative nuance from an aisle of Asian brooms at the box store 10 miles away. If it's there, they'll find it.

In a region where dissembling counts for half of every act, until the degree of a stranger's Yankee-ness is ascertained, the custom of seeming to place oneself under surveillance, by feigning exhibition, is well established. If one were to observe this conduct, say, on a boardwalk at Asbury Park, it would be unambiguously unseemly. But in Dixie it is only routine to run into a friend, playing the Prince of Denmark to investigate a new-comer. Moreover, the concentration of national espionage installations in the Old Dominion, alone, is less a residue of the late Occupation than a tribute to sportive curiosity. We see it in what's left of the schools, in every rural corridor. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would understand.

Beyond doubt, the front porch remains Dixie's formative cradle and bulwark of surveillance practice. No idle play distracts the front porch sentry. Enter any leafy street below the Potomac, and you will find yourself under surveillance from rocking chairs to floorboards, the squint of xenophobia furrowing the placidest brows, like trenches in the Petersburg campaign. Where once their forebears may have waved Crosses as voodoo dolls, to hustle a Yankee on his way, any youth's dexterity with multi-tasking texting can alert a village without his missing a trick. Best not to stop for lemonade today.

But we stray, perhaps, to address techniques of surveillance at the expense of its latent Southern purpose: the sustenance of literature. The fine line separating that nourishment from gossip and its gathered mass, memoir, has never been more poignantly navigated than by our young friend from the delta garden.

Our Antaeus, to concede that his gift was never the same when lifted from his ground, is not to ignore that it was attuned superbly to it. There can't be a better insight into Capote than Cartier-Bresson's, or a more promising sign, than that his garden's still in use.  

Works Progress Administration
US Department of the Interior
  Shenandoah National Park
1937


Henri Cartier-Bresson
  Truman Capote
Magnum, 1947©


Marshall Bartholomew
  & James Erb, arr.
Shenandoah
San Francisco Chanticleer
Chanticleer Records, 1994©