Ron Rash short story Neighbors reverberations for this Trump Moment

  Ron Rash and I are contemporaries and regional neighbors by 15 miles though we weren't formally acquainted till our fifties. He was raised in Boiling Springs NC and I just across the state line and the Broad River in Gaffney, SC. You can check my archives on main page for Sept 2010.  Click on that, a worthwhile interview and read.

     Yesterday I read his short story Neighbors that kicks off his new collection, In the Valley. It is set in Shelton Laurel just outside Marshall NC, a Civil War location that haunted his novel World Made Straight, the movie adaptation of which had a scene in which Steve Earle's rendition of Just as I am would give Billy Graham the Willies.

    But that is beside the point for this blog. Lately I have been trying to square Isabel Wilkerson's new book on Race and Caste with Robert Jones latest on White Religion, with the Reel South documentary on Confederate Flag Removal in New Orleans and the BLM march in Clemson SC where Trevor Lawrence said he came down with the Saints Drew Brees in the twitter dustup with Trump re patriotism etc.

    And I have considered recent notions in the cancel culture to erase Faulkner and Saint Flannery Oconnor which I think is a bridge too far, or in the Smoky Mountains of Rash and my Grandmother Mary Alice Helton, The Back of Beyond. She was 2nd grade educated on the Tennessee side and I was born in Newport.

       So come back to this as I got to do some thinking hopefully with an email response from Rash himself. In my mind Rash comes down with the great Baptist Marney, and the Episcoplain preacher Fleming Rutledge when she explored the axis of evil a few years ago in a sermon a few weeks after 43 announced his adventure in the Middle East. Willimon liked it and put it in his Duke collection from the Chapel.

    If I understand Rash's art, he is siding with Meghan Daum of the Problem with Everything re the excesses of identity politics and left wing shaming. To categorize folks without giving them the benefit of their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity.

    Still I think Rash agrees with me, whatever the question is Donald Trump is not the answer; more specifically Mark Meadows was not good for Western NC much less the country. I got stock in that cause I was baptized in Hayesville. Doug Jones is better for Alabama than Tommy Tuberville and Biden Harris is leaning in a better direction than Mitch McConnell.

    Rash hasn't said that. Like my Daddy preaching the Gospel and reaching for the transcendent, Rash does the same with his fiction with considerably more eloquence than my Dad but it doesn't matter for this blog. Let me consider this further and come back next week to see if I'm gettin by with a little help from my friends. 

    Read Rash's stories. If not a blessing, is good for the soul, Third Testament material for the American canon, part of the Now that follows the Old and the New Testaments.