In February of 1992 I, accompanied by Bancroft the History Dog, blew into a frozen Fargo, North Dakota, determined to shift my energies to a land grant university on the plains, even at the price of serving a sentence as an academic dean. One of my first new friends in Fargo, the poet David Martinson, immediately told me I must read a remarkable new book by Kathleen Norris, entitled Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. I read it; we invited Kathleen to read and lecture at NDSU; and thus I contributed to the minor literary sensation swirling around her book.
Even though I fundamentally disagreed with Kathleen’s take on the state of the country. Coming home to Lemmon, South Dakota, and assuming the status of oblate at Assumption Abbey, Richardton, she fashions an equivalency of life on the plains with the spare asceticism of the desert fathers. Life on the plains is hard, a self-imposed deprivation, but it’s good for us, she says.
Whereas I have always considered it a sensuous experience and a fascinating one. Kathleen, too, situates this spare life on the downward-declensionist trajectory of the prairies, gently mocking her neighbors who say everything was better in 1960.
1960, the dawn of the decade that produced, from the manual typewriter of Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show, the basis of a sombre, black & white portrayal of decline in a small town in northwest Texas. “Lovingly dedicated to my home town,” McMurtry says.
I remember when the movie theater closed its doors in my old home town in western Kansas. I feel like I knew Sonny, Billy, Duane, Ruth, Lois, Jacy—and Sam the Lion, speaker of the greatest cinematic soliloquy since Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath. Its subject is regret, and languishing decline.
I didn’t pick poor Billy’s crushed body from the dusty street, as transpired in the final scene of The Last Picture Show, but I witnessed some young lives lost to small-town despair. And yet I still love the country, am an active partner in a 152-year-old family farm, walk comfortably into the American Legion or my home town LCMS parish, teach college courses and graduate seminars on the Great Plains as though they matter. Mine is not the Boomer generation. It is the Last Picture Show Generation, it was life all over the plains in the late twentieth century, and I’m trying to figure it out.
I introduced this subject of Great Plains declensionism—the idea that our best days are behind us, and there’s nothing much we can do about it—here on Prairie Public a few weeks ago. By the time this piece airs, I will have gone to Bozeman and presented an extended scholarly paper on the subject. Because what we think about our past will shape our future, if we let it. I’ll come back to the subject again, but for now, consider this.
The Last Picture Show Generation in North Dakota, if they studied the state’s history, read it from the classic text by Elwyn Robinson, of the University of North Dakota. Many of our best and brightest, indeed, studied with Dr. Robinson in Grand Forks, and became fond of quoting his aphorisms. Robinson famously discerned six governing themes in the history of the state (the Too-Much Mistake being the most famous), and every one of them is negative. It’s hard to imagine a boy or girl from North Dakota staying here if so informed. And yet, Prof. Robinson closes with the assurance that all this suffering has made us better people. That just isn’t enough for most of us.
