Sweet Reason (9781590209011) by Littell Robert

Author:Littell, Robert [LITTELL, ROBERT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC031000/FIC006000
ISBN: 9781590209011
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2011-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Everett Oakwood Partain’s Curriculum Vitae

North Carolina’s senior Democratic representative was sixty-two or sixty-three years old, he didn’t know which. His father, a small-time still operator who had worked the reaches of the Catawba near Asheville in the Great Smoky Mountains, could never remember whether Everett had been born before Lucius and after Calvin, or before Calvin and after Georgina. “Ah reckon it was ’roun’ the time that this heah Willum Bryan lost out to McKinley,” was the closest that the old man could come when his son tried to pin him down.

“Don’t mattah none,” the Congressman always told reporters. “Ah had horse sense afore Ah was knee-high and that’s all that counts in mah cornah of God’s green earth.”

Partain, who had gone on record recommending the use of nuclear weapons to end the war, was one of the best friends the military services had on Capitol Hill. He was, accordingly, wined and dined and toasted and chauffered around in air force jets and army limousines and navy yachts; in the course of three decades in Washington, he had developed backslapping relationships with practically every flag rank officer in the Pentagon. Yet during all those years nobody ever quite figured out what made Everett Oakwood Partain run. “Ah had to hustle to stay alive when Ah was a mite,” he once explained. “Why do Ah keep a-hustlin’? Ah guess you-all could chalk it up to force-a habit.”

He believed in God and country and free enterprise, that much was clear, but there was considerable controversy over what order he put them in. He grew up with the notion that competition was a law of nature, and meandered through adulthood more concerned with the pecking order than the social order. “If’n theah was no peckin’ ordah,” he told a local chamber of commerce group, “everybody and his uncle would be a-pushin’ and a-shovin’ ’roun’ the barnyard. Now in some cornahs of the world that theah goes undah the name of chaos.”

Economically, Partain leaned toward the belief that the United States was a meritocracy in which success was determined by strength of character and hard work. When pressed, he allowed as how the basic unit of American life wasn’t so much the family as the factory, as how the essential institution of American life wasn’t so much marriage as the marketplace. To critics who argued that the marketplace was no longer relevant because the country had turned into an uncontrollable corporate state, Partain replied: “Bull.”

Above all Everett Oakwood Partain was a firm believer in America, a bouillabaisse whose ingredients he identified as “radio evangelists shoutin’ ‘Glory be to Jay-sus’ and Rural Free Delivery and plain folk rockin’ on the front porch and dollah watahmellons and bullfrogs and collards and ‘C’ for colored after names in the phone book.”

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