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You who build these altars now
To sacrifice these children—
You must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision,
And you never have been tempted
By a demon or a god.You who stand above them now,
Your hatchets blunt and bloody,
You were not there before,
When I lay upon a mountain
And my father’s hand was trembling
With the beauty of the word.Leonard Cohen / “The Story of Isaac,” 1969
CHARLES TOWN, West Virginia—Here on the not-at-all-mean streets of Charles Town, West Virginia, where there are antiques shops and upmarket coffee places with pop-Christian praise music on the stereo and advertisements for nice apartments in the shop windows on the main street and fine old municipal buildings, and blocks of sturdy stately Victorian homes, the sidewalks are far from deserted, and if not exactly teeming or bustling with pedestrian traffic, then certainly far from abandoned as they are in so many other Appalachian downtowns, and so walking around on a bright brisk weekday morning with your cappuccino past the Abolitionist Ale Works and Pour Choices Wine and the storefront missionaries handing out food to the needy who already are lined up outside, you can observe a fairly generous and representative selection of both kinds of white people—yoga-mat whites and Marlboro Light whites—while the smell of fresh and no doubt optionally gluten-free baked goods in the air can be understood as the olfactory aspect of the literal air of gentrification settling over the place, which is only about an hour’s drive from the prosperous Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, the federal megapolis that is slowly but steadily incorporating bits and pieces of West Virginia into the asphalt sprawl of what I guess we can just go ahead and start calling Leviathan, the officers and agents of which require new bedroom communities with a CVS and a Starbucks and surely a Whole Foods not far behind however much the locals complain about the newcomers driving up the cost of living, the same old exurban thing, all of which is starting to make me think that maybe I have chosen the wrong place to go hunting for the ghost of John Brown.