Disposable Lit Reviews

Fromm International, 1998/2000
276 pp.
ISBN 0-88064-220-3

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You know me; I love the good old-fashioned freakshow of the fringe. Give me Charles Fort, give me Diane Kossy, give me accounts of the bizarre and inexplicable things people bring themselves to believe. When I read the cover of America’s Back Porch, I thought that maybe I had found another such treasure, as it advertises itself as a trip “beneath the surface of the mainstream of America.”

And it could have been that. But Briths ex-pat Daniel Jeffreys can’t resist the editorial lure which poisons the book entirely. A good book on the fringe doesn’t need to ridicule the outlandish beliefs and actions it chronicles; it just needs to describe them and let the reader come to appreciate them on their own.

Jeffreys, though, can’t help himself. He has to make the book political.

No, he never states a party preference. But it’s political all the same. His editorializing disdain presents itself in direct relationship to how far to the right his targets lean, and as a Brit in America, his definition of “leaning to the right” pretty much includes everything outside the urban centers of New York and L.A. Not that those cities get off without some of their eccentricities noted, but Jeffreys’ treatment of sophisticated lunacy is consistently kinder than the weight of rhetorical contempt he aims at those whose socio-political leanings spring from a different base than his own.

Thus, when recounting the views of the founders of Dead Serious, Inc., a nationwide network of anti-crime vigilantes:

[Darryl Frank says,] “A gun is an essential part of being an American. Gun ownership is our most fundamental right. It’s the basis of the constitution.” That is actually bullshit. Contrary to Charlton Heston and his National Rifle Association, it is one of the great myths of the US constitution that it guarantees the individual right to bear arms. It simply does not. When I mentioned this to the Franks, they look at me as if I had spoken in tongues whilst spewing green vomit.

I hope Jeffreys will forgive me if I don’t immediately assume that a foreign national can cut through over two centuries of judicial exploration of the Second Amendment and declare How Things Are without needing to back his contention up.

But these contentions are never backed up. They’re Jeffreys’ assumptions, which he apparently considers so self-evident that any right-thinking reader will automatically agree with him. It’s not that Jeffreys has a political slant that makes him so infuriating, but that said slant is so assumptive and unexamined. His book wants all of flyover America to be the “back porch,” with only the NY/LA poles populated with his intellectual equals.

And so at least three-quarters of the book is comprised of Jeffreys spending time with people whom he holds in the uttermost contempt. Alabama chain gangs? Their existence is so obviously wrong that he dwells almost entirely on the redneckedness of the guards. Bounty hunters? Retentive adolescents who cotton to America’s fetish of violence. It’s quite simple: If you disagree with Jeffreys, you’re not only wrong, you’re one of the people he pokes fun at.

And he’s not above salting the mine so his disdain can stick better. In describing an Idaho county whose sheriff has decided to enforce existing laws against fornication:

The sheriff has the full backing of the courts and the local prosecutor, Doug Varie. “The law has it in black and white,” says Varie, picking up a copy of the Idaho state statutes, as if it were a document that really meant something to panting adolescents who can watch soft porn on afternoon soap operas any time they please. I tell Varie this. I can see he is wondering for a second if there’s something he can arrest me for.

Most writers, they confine themselves to what people actually do and say; it takes a rare talent, I suppose, for someone like Jeffreys to clue us all in to what his interviewees are really thinking. It’s a trick he employs several times through the book, and it gains no more credibility with each use.

His other tarring tricks are just as crude. Wanna know what all those stupid Red Staters who aren’t as as smart as Jeffreys have in common? They’re all fat. Really. He’ll remark on the weight of anyone he thinks is a moron — the circumference of their waist, the flesh around their necks, the meatiness of their fingers. Whereas those who do the decent thing and agree with him are rarely described physically. Even the sometimes-naked hordes attending the bacchanal of the Burning Man Festival get do physical descriptions aside from cursory counts of tattoos; apparently that’s the kind of anarchy toward which Jeffreys is willing to suspend justice. But just let his airplane seatmates begin discussing Masonic conspiracies, and immediately we get all the details of how much their bellies spill over their seatbelts.

The quotes in praise on the back cover are all from British periodicals, which obviously enjoy the occasion to feel superior to all of those wrong-headed Americans. But after its initial British publication in 1998, the book was issued in 2000 in the U.S. of A. I picked up my copy at a dollar store, which means that the print run had eventually been remaindered by the distributor, sold off by the pound, one step above shredding and mulch. A track record like that can make it awful hard for an author to sell the U.S. rights to subsequent books. I guess somebody forgot that for a book to succeed in America, it needs to sell to all those “back porch” people too.

Nathan Shumate