The American home is the seat of our democracy. Today’s gilded, shame-filled halls of power are not.
The word "Constitution" was pressed into the sidewalk outside columnist Max McCoy's home in Emporia. (Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
Paint rollers and used brushes and wooden stir sticks crusted with a cheerful shade called “morning blossom” are in a pile on the wooden porch, waiting for the job to resume come daylight.
Every so often I peer out the narrow panes of the front door to catch a glimpse of the tools, anxious for the work to resume. My painter friend and his family of helpers have been doing all the labor, standing on ladders or bending low to the ground. They have chipped and scraped and wire-brushed the cracked and peeling walls, making them ready for a new coat.
This simple but labor-intensive task of maintaining a century-old house has made me think of changes to another historic structure, much older and farther away in nearly every sense. The transformation of the White House into a gilded temple to power is increasingly alarming. It has become an American Versailles, fit for a king and not a president, a monument to a dictatorial ambition.
I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 musing on democracy, a note apparently written to himself: “As I would not be a slave, I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”
I’m thinking about democracy as I return to my own work.
It’s the first Wednesday night in August, and I’m at my desk in the center of our house on Constitution Street, fingers hesitant over the plastic keys of a computer keyboard. Sweat runs down my ribs. I type a phrase and delete it, then repeat. There seems to be no way to start the damned column.
We’ve been without air conditioning for a week.
The heat seems to have gathered behind my eyes in a thermal prose-killing cloud. The haze is irritatingly coffee resistant. I can find nothing, not even an ice pack wrapped in a towel and held to the back of my neck, to relieve my discomfort.
The repairman we rely on to keep the air warm or cool, according to the season, came out and took a look. He always brings his dog with him, a naturally curious collie that roams at will and often has be called from ranging too far afield. After calling for the dog to come back from across the street, our repairman said the compressor was shot. He delivered the bad news in a tone meant to remind me of all the times during the past few summers he’d managed to keep the unit running, despite it being 25 years old. He’s also hard of hearing, so his conversation is a notch or two louder than what could be considered normal. Now the old unit had finally defeated him, he fairly shouted, and we needed a brand-new, three-ton unit. Then he bellowed for the dog to get out of the neighbor’s yard.
He could have a new unit delivered and ready to install the next day. OK, I said. But there was some mix-up with the shipping and our unit was misdirected to some town far away — seems like it was Death Valley, but I’m probably imagining that. Because it was the time of year when AC units were in high demand, he couldn’t promise when it would arrive. It might be a week, or perhaps more.
So we waited.
The first few days weren’t so bad. While not exactly cool, the highs were in the 80s and sometimes at night the lows dipped into the 60s. We opened doors and windows and left them open. I found myself standing near the window in the kitchen, feeling the night air through the screen, and thinking of how much it felt like summer nights when I was a boy in Baxter Springs.
We had no central air on Cleveland Street back then, just a huge machine jammed in a window of the living room attached to a garden hose that dripped water on a big rotating fan. It made things damp, if not cool. But the air that came in through the window in my bedroom was pleasant and carried the scent of grass and river not far away and the promise of dawn.
Back in the present, the days on Constitution Street became warmer. The heat index was well over 100 during the day, and the nights were sweltering.
Late Wednesday night is my usual time to compose my Sunday columns, and when things go well the hours dissolve until I have a passable draft of a couple of thousand words. I’ll print out the pages and leave them on the dining room table, beneath the big map of the United States we use for reference as well as decoration.
Then I’ll sleep.
Before dawn, Kim rises and has her coffee and feeds the cats and eats her homemade bran muffin and does her five-mile walk. Then she’ll go through the pages with a green pen. She will circle words and suspect passages and leave sometimes hard-to-read notes in the margins — rw? tense? awk. — and then we’ll talk about it, and I’ll revise at least once.
When the writing doesn’t go well, the hours become a weight.
That first Wednesday of August seemed like a double burden as I attempted to pull the column together. There was no draft on the dining room table for Kim to read when she got up. I managed to finish it later that day, after another three hours of work, but the rhythm had been broken and I felt oddly unsynchronized.
The next day the AC unit arrived, having been retrieved from Death Valley or Kathmandu or wherever it had been. Following an afternoon of work and calling for the dog to get out of the neighbor’s business, we had cool air blowing out of the vents downstairs again.
There are those who live without air conditioning, by necessity or choice. In Kansas, 93% of homes are air conditioned, according to a report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But because air conditioning contributes to outside heating and changes human perception of seasonal discomfort, some like Stan Cox avoid the A/C altogether (although he concedes in a New York Times essay that he’ll turn on the central air on the hottest days of the year). The AC also separates us from the outside, so much so that I hadn’t realized how much I missed the evening song of the cicadas.
I am generally heat tolerant and am comfortable at indoor temperatures that have Kim racing for the thermostat. But the older I get, the greater a burden the heat becomes. I also increasingly leave chores that I used to do myself — such as the painting — to others.
My contribution is a little carpentry work here and there, like fixing the treads on the wooden steps. Ladders are not for me. But I’ve experienced an unexpected satisfaction in seeing the progress, in going to the hardware store and buying paint to match the original color, in selecting a new shade for the trim — “nice tan.” It is nice, I suppose, but if asked I would simply describe the colors as yellow and brown.
The satisfaction comes not from doing some badly needed maintenance, after years when I was either too busy or too broke to have it done, but in making a statement. A stand is being made, a commitment to an old house on a working-class street in a town that is experiencing economic distress. The unemployment rate is now 6.5%, according to the Kansas Department of Labor, the highest in the state for cities over 25,000. We are painting the house not to sell, but to live in, although should we get out? was the subject of many heavy discussions over the dinner table.
For the foreseeable future, this historic Kansas neighborhood will remain our home. Kim and I discussed moving to Missouri or some other state, debating the merits of a new location as we studied the map on the dining room wall. But she fears if I moved away from Kansas, I would lose my identity.
She may be right.
The choice of staying or going was not something to take for granted. Too many Americans don’t have a choice of staying or going — and many of them don’t have a house, apartment or other suitable place to live. Our first gratitude, besides loving and being loved, should always be for food and shelter.
Our home will never be a showplace, but it’s lousy with history.
The house is an artefact of a time when this neighborhood, near the heart of Emporia, was rather higher on the social ladder. Inside there is stained glass and oak floors and other reminders of the apparently comfortable life, in the 1920s, of a Latin professor and his family. Bill Holtz taught at the local teacher’s college and he walked the same sidewalks. On the corner, across a brick pavement in desperate need of repair, the name of our street is stamped into the concrete, along with a date: 1916.
The weather has been especially hard on the house during the past couple of years, including roof damage, an upstairs window that was blown in during a storm, and a favorite maple tree in the back yard that fell and landed on the roof of the garage. The yard floods in heavy rains and so will the basement if the sump pump fails. The kitchen pipes freeze in winter. Critters get into the attic. We went through an odd period when yellowjackets infiltrated the upstairs and tried their damnedest to build a nest on the shaft of a ceiling fan. I received a nasty sting on my right hand during that episode, but luckily the hornets haven’t been back.
Now is a time of rebuilding, even in the face of uncertainty.
We are, as a nation, in the most chaotic period of the last 50 years. Anybody who claims to know what will happen next is either a prophet or a fool, and I’m afraid I’ve met damned few prophets in my life. We are at an extraordinary inflection point in history, a time filled with both peril and promise.
The peril is that Lincoln’s government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” may indeed perish from the earth. The promise is that American democracy may yet achieve the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., who glimpsed a day when we all would be free at last.
The turbulence of the events we now live through are not adequately described in any news report, but can only be fully appreciated at the breakfast tables and front porches of homes in Kansas and across the country. The consequences of decisions that have made most Americans feel helpless are realized not in the gilded corridors of power but in the small places in which we live, the tables where we eat, the bedrooms and sometimes the sidewalks where we sleep. Many desperate conversations are being held at this moment over a range of what ifs. What if I can’t find a job? What if we can’t afford groceries? What will we do if federal agents, their faces masked, come to take away our friends and neighbors?
Or us.
There are federal troops on the streets of Washington, D.C., ostensibly for law enforcement, and a protestor was recently arrested for assault on a federal immigration agent — for hurling a sandwich.
It is, as I type, another Wednesday night.
It’s quiet now, but when my painter friend and his helpers come tomorrow there will be scraping and wire brushing and more painting. The cracked and peeling paint of our house on Constitution Street will slowly give way to a fresh coat of “morning blossom.”
With resolve and paint, there are now a couple fewer questions on Constitution Street. We will stay. The trim will be “nice tan.” This will remain our home — as America is our home — and the talk of relocating to another state or even Canada is over. There will be columns written on Wednesday nights and tweaked on Thursday mornings. Cats will be fed and yellowjackets battled.
The gilding of the White House may continue, but no amount of gold leaf will hide the stain of authoritarianism. Our home’s honest yellow and brown paint is an investment in ourselves, a hope for our community, and a dream for America.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.