Mud-puddle has always been a word or word contraction that I have always liked for some reason. It was the great novelist Sinclair Lewis, America’s first Nobel Laureate for literature as well as Pulitzer Prize writer, who won those accolades “for his vigorous and graphic art of description” when he described in his first and most famous novel, Main Street, the confines of small town American life, with its “mud–puddles and ragged weeds by the road”. Sinclair Lewis was a man well ahead of his time by my reckoning. Main Street is both about small town life, but also about the repressiveness of the conservative rural life and especially its stodgy and misogynistic ways. He wrote the novel just as the 19th Amendment got passed and ratified, giving women the right to vote. Then Lewis went on to write a few political and cultural satires about American life that hit on Middle Class conformity (Babbitt), the role and uptake of science in medical education (Arrowsmith), the hypocrisy of fundamentalist and evangelical religious fervor (Elmer Gantry), intellectual elitism (Dodsworth), and finally, the false prophet of fascist dictatorship in America (It Can’t Happen Here). What started as an exploration of a simple mud-puddle has turned into a realization of just how poignant and relevant the century-old works of Sinclair Lewis may be to the societal machinations that we are going through today. If he had included a novel on immigration and border protection, its fair to say he would have hit all of our current day issues.
This all makes we many to go back and reread Sinclair Lewis and his brand of political and cultural satire. I have always thought that only Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck really captured the mood of that turbulent era in American History, but now I am wondering how many other writers of that time were feeling what we are feeling today and asking the questions that we find ourselves asking an re-asking these days. The thing about mud-puddles is that they pop up for all the right reasons. A nice refreshing rain on a well-traveled road is what makes them take shape. If a road gets overused it becomes a washboard and that makes it almost impassable as your car bounces along until something falls off. But a mud-puddle is a shock to the system. When you hit it, you bottom out and empty the contents of its dirty, stagnant water all over whatever is nearby. A mud-puddle is a mess. Its the place where little boys and girls who either lack for toys or have a primordial need to get wet and dirty in their play go to splash around and play in. The wonder of mud-puddles is that they never cease to exist. You can have a dry spell or even a drought, but just one good rain later and the mud-puddle has returned. If you think I am building to a metaphor, at least you’ve been paying attention. At this point in our collective lives on this planet, we seem to have returned ourselves to the mud-puddle, which is particularly ironic since we are in the midst of a global climate crisis that is having all manner of climactic change ranging from rising seas and flood-prone events (hurricanes both of the coast and far inland) and yet at the same time a dryness and drought across much of the land that is causing tinder sparks to ignite in wildfires that sweep across our lands. All of the natural disasters do what they have always done…make man look weak and insignificant. So what does man do when all this happens, he returns to play in his mud-puddle and seeks his revenge on Mother Nature in the only way he can, by splashing and bringing about his micro form of destruction on his little mud-puddle.
Sinclair Lewis seemed to have suggested that mud-puddles were like ragged weeds. They grow and exist everywhere and are signs in the subtlest of manners that you can do what you want as humans, but nature is prepared to show you that your best efforts are no more permanent than any weed or mud-puddle by the side of the road. Nature is scruffy and messy and man’s attempt to bring order to the universe will only ever get so far because the forces of nature that create weeds and mud-puddles will always be just around the corner once you drop your guard for a moment. If you are like me and have grown to appreciate mud-puddles and weeds but do not want them any more than I have to on my property, then you have to work at keeping them under control. It takes constant care and maintenance to eliminate them from your daily life. That may be a worthless effort to some, who would be happy to live amongst them and do their best to ignore them in their daily existence, but to me and people like me, we consider it our obligation to civilization to reserve mud-puddles for a more distant place in our lives and not where we need to look at them or, worse yet, step in them unaware.
There is a YouTube clip running around today with Jimmy Fallon interviewing Pete Buttigieg on his nightly show. Fallon asks Pete how he feels about the President of the United States comparing Pete to Alfred E. Neumann of MAD Magazine fame (think, “What, me worry?”). It seems typical of Donald Trump and much of his renegade gang who seem to enjoy playing in and pushing people into mud-puddles to lower the dialogue by commenting on someone’s looks rather than the content of their character or the good work they have accomplished. Pete had the perfect reply to Fallon when he replied that we all want to see the level of the dialogue elevated so if he has inspired Donald Trump to use a literary reference in his commentary (something he may never have done before), how could that not be a good thing and a step in the right direction? Of course, that sort of tongue in cheek humor from Pete is exactly why he is one of my heroes. If you can laugh at yourself and not make yourself the center of attention, but rather equally poke fun at your assailant in an offhand and witty manner like that, you have put the emphasis on the right issue (the elevation of our dialogue) while making it all too clear that Trump and others like him do not have the wits or wisdom to get themselves out of the mud-puddle and are doomed to inhabit it, all the while wondering why the rest of us don’t find their sophomoric ways humorous. Touche, Pete Buttigieg.
I happen to have been a big devotee of MAD Magazine and I read it quite religiously in my youth. I even enjoy a humorous reference to someone being like or even looking like Alfred E. Neumann, but denigrating a serious person with a crass reference to their looks while the wind is blowing your hair plugs and coif down the street, seems hardly adult-like behavior, much less presidential. The mud-puddle crowd undoubtedly found it all very funny, but they are standing there in the mud up to their knees wondering how guys like Pete are staying so clean. I suppose its like wrestling with a pig…ultimately the realization that the pig kinda likes it overwhelms the reality and the mud. While Trump tries to drain the swamp, I sense that someone should be trying to work at draining the mud-puddle as well.