The Partly Cloudy Patriot

Author: Sarah Vowell
Started: 1.11.2012
Finished: 1.15.2012
Format: ebook

This was my initial take on The Partly Cloudy Patriot:

You know how when you’re at a party and the music switches from, say, Johnny Cash to the Beach Boys with no transition? That’s known as a bad mix.

After reading two heavy books – the Kurt Vonnegut bio and Anne Frank's diary – I was in the mood for something lighter. I decided to go with Sarah Vowell’s The Partly Cloudy Patriot. It’s been a bad mix.

I’ve read a lot of Sarah Vowell – Assassination Vacation, Unfamiliar Fishes, The Wordy Shipmates – and thoroughly enjoyed her quirky, irreverent take on history. But coming off Anne Frank, it is a little hard to take Sarah’s inability to entertain her family for five days without bitching and moaning. That’s the subject of the second essay in this book.

It’s not just that though. I fell in love not just with Anne’s story, but with her writing itself. And Sarah Vowell’s writing, in this instance at least, doesn’t hold a candle to Anne’s. Everyone complains about spending time with their families over the holidays. And Vowell’s take on this is comes off as whiny and grating, rather than fresh and interesting.

So much for my first take. It did get better. Vowell is at her best when she’s not writing about her family. Her view point on other issues, specifically politics and history, is lively and entertaining precisely because it is fresh. She seems to see things from a somewhat different angle than other people (or at least, other than I do), and that is what makes the writing interesting.

The best essay in the book, IMHO, is “Democracy and Things Like That.” It’s a story about a talk Al Gore gave to a media literacy class at Concord High School in Concord, New Hampshire. One of the students asked how Gore how high school students could become more involved in politics. In his response, Gore talked about a letter he had received 20 years earlier from a high school student in Tennessee about the funny taste of the water from the well her family used. Her father and grandfather were mysteriously ill. Gore called for a congressional investigation and a hearing, and “I looked around the country for other sites like that.” one of the sites he found was Love Canal in New York State (my home state). That led to a major national law to clean up hazardous dump sites, “and it all happened because one high school student got involved.”

In a New York Times story about the event, Gore was quoted as saying, “I was the one that started it all.” That one misquote led to Gore being perceived as being grandiose, as taking credit unduly. It’s a shame because I think Gore is an honorable man, and he would have made a great, or at least good, president. We’ll never know.

I also liked Vowell’s take on her own patriotism. She is not one of the sunshine patriots so derided by Thomas Paine, but a partly cloudy patriot. And that I can understand.