In The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, Bill McKibben wonders how things went so terribly wrong with these symbols of “American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.”
The book interweaves historical analysis with McKibben’s illuminating reflections on the past four decades of his life as an author and activist.
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Bill McKibben
Given McKibben’s prominence in the fight against climate change, beginning with his groundbreaking The End of Nature (1989) and continuing with Eaarth (2010) and other books, it’s easy to overlook that the co-founder of the climate advocacy group 350.org has written about a great many things, from watching punishing amounts of television (The Age of Missing Information, 1992), to having a one-child family (Maybe One, 1998), to beekeeping (Oil and Honey, 2013), to the looming threat of genetic engineering (Falter, 2019).
The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, McKibben’s twentieth book, explores the tension that runs between idealism and reality, hope and despair, in its three subject areas.
On the flag, McKibben is torn between visions of a nation “born in a burst of radical egalitarianism” and his discovery that one of the main reasons many colonists fought to dissociate with Britain was so that slavery could continue. “What remained of my patriotism,” he recalls, “was an illusion, and an ugly one at that.” He now finds “all that talk about equality . . . hard to take seriously in a country that has turned out to be as unequal” as ours. He supports reparations for slavery but acknowledges that people like Tucker Carlson have made this notion “radioactive” in today’s divisive political environment.
On the cross, McKibben experiences similar cognitive distress, noting that many colonial pastors held enslaved people so they could free up time to write their sermons. As he surveys a landscape in which Christianity “and religious belonging in general” are on the decline, McKibben calls for “recommitting, but to a creed more radical than we once imagined, in the hope that it could help with all the other fights that face us.”
McKibben tells of his sheltered childhood in Lexington, Massachusetts, where, at age ten, he was “shocked to find there were not two huge cities on the West Coast, one called Los Angeles and the other Ellay.” He looks back with bemusement at the essay he wrote in 1980 at age nineteen for The Harvard Crimson on Ronald Reagan’s defeat of President Jimmy Carter, in which he foresaw his future as “a life fighting battles that can’t be won.” Yet even then, he knew this was no reason not to fight.
"The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened"By Bill McKibben, Henry Holt and Co., 240 pages, publication date: May 31, 2022
Reagan, of course, removed Carter’s White House solar panels, signaling a new era of aggressive opposition to science and good sense. (In 2010, McKibben and others tried to return some of the actual panels to Obama’s White House, without success.) McKibben notes that he has been jailed countless times helping lead protests all over the world and yet “half the sea ice in the Arctic has melted, fires ravage every temperate forest, and millions of climate refugees are already on the move, fleeing ever angrier seas and ever deeper droughts.”
So is it all hopeless? Not on your life. McKibben casts our present predicament with regard to race, religion, and climate as an accumulation of debts—ones that must be paid back, surely, but that are within our ability to pay. As in the essay he wrote for the April/May issue of The Progressive, he puts much of the onus for debt repayment on his own generation, the Baby Boomers. Not to lead, mind you; that role belongs to younger generations. But it is up to the boomers to come up with the capital, broadly defined, that will be needed to settle up the debt.
It’s why McKibben recently formed the group Third Act, whose mission is to “provide a generational voice [to] collaborate effectively with the young people leading these fights.” As he wrote in the essay, it’s a way of refocusing one’s life’s energy to “open new chapters in the human story, ones that have some hope of redeeming what came before.”
The only question is: Will these new chapters fit in the station wagon?