We caught up with Jenkinson at Java Jungle, a hip espresso bar beside the Truckee River in downtown Reno. He came in talking on his cell phone, waved a greeting, and stood in line for coffee. He bought a tall cup and finished his call at the same time, fumbling in his pockets for money while holding the phone against his ear with his shoulder. He presented the perfect picture of a modern urban consumer. He seemed far from Jefferson at that moment. That was all right. We really wanted to hear what Jenkinson thought about playing Jefferson in Nevada today.

What would Jefferson think of Nevada?

One thing I’ve noticed is that Nevadans don’t really want to hear this. If ever there were a community in America that doesn’t have Jeffersonian integrity it’s Nevada.

This state has based its economic life on a series of highly questionable economic choices, from Jefferson’s point of view: mining, gambling, prostitution, divorce.

Jefferson was against gambling, he wouldn’t allow dice or cards at Monticello. He thought gambling was ruinous. He saw it ruin many aristocrats of his time. So Jefferson hated gambling.

He knows that mining is important, but in Jefferson’s time mining was a guy with shovel and a shallow lead mine. We’re not talking about gigantism. And Jefferson was more interested in agriculture anyway

Jefferson was actually an early advocate of easy divorce. One of the bills that he wrote for the Virginia legislature was to make divorce possible, because up to that time you couldn’t get a divorce without a legislative act in Virginia. The whole state legislature had to decide whether you were permitted to get a divorce. Obviously that’s not a progressive enlightenment system so he tried to reform it. He failed. But even if he thinks divorce is a fact of life and should be made possible, the idea that a state would create divorce as a cash cow of some sort would clearly offend him.

Jefferson didn’t have any moral distaste for prostitution. But I think he believed that love and sexuality should remain outside of Mr. Hamilton’s economy. So you’ve got all of that which is a first blow.

Second, it doesn’t rain here. There is no part of the Great Basin that I know of except the mountain pastures which can support agriculture without irrigation. Unless you mean by agriculture grazing. And even grazing is a pretty dicey operation out here. And my opinion is that grazing in the way that it has been done has actually been ruinous to the Great Basin. So that it can’t really support grazing in any significant numbers. So not only does Nevada base it’s economy on moral perversities but there's no agriculture, there’s no rain.

Finally, there’s the issue of citizenship in Nevada.This is essentially tax refugee land. People come here basically to escape citizenship. Citizenship means having a stake in the community and paying your taxes and wanting the infrastructure to exist. People come here wanting to pay the absolute minimum and grumbling about that and not wanting to support the Jeffersonian institutions, libraries, schools, museums, science, in our time public television, public radio, etc.

If you add all that up there could not be a more profoundly anti-Jeffersonian place in the New World than Nevada. When I give these talks I say a little about this in a jocular kind of way, because as Jefferson I don’t want to preach, especially out of my time and place.

I’m not here to begrudge the state its economy. I think there’s a kind of zany, interesting, wonderful quality that comes from living on the edge. But don’t ask Jefferson to praise it. Jefferson is going to praise Iowa. He’s going to praise Arkansas. He’s not going to praise the Great Basin.

There is a core of Jefferson’s message that echoes what a lot of people in rural Nevada believe. How do you feel then when you see the audiences taking a lot of comfort from what Jefferson says in being anti-federal government, anti-Hamiltonian, anti-urban?

We’re all Jeffersonian. Even if we’re Hamiltonians by practice, we’re all Jeffersonians in myth. Their myth is that they’re the real Nevada and that’s a sustainable Nevada. It’s not a sustainable Nevada. The old Nevadans, the mining, ranching community, they have a kind of picaresque charm. But they’re not any more sustainable than the cities. I think that’s an illusion and it creates a false tension.

On the other hand, they are agrarians. I think they have rightful link to Jefferson in that. I do think that a ranch is a Jeffersonian enterprise, badly managed, but nevertheless a Jeffersonian enterprise in a way that a casino could never be, ever, ever, ever.

There’s a paradox there. They love the second amendment. They hate taxes. They hate big government. They like decentralization. They believe in local control. They believe that life elsewhere is corrupt. There’s that whole Jeffersonian package. That virtue is in rural decentralization and ownership of guns. I think that’s all true. But it’s a very selective reading of Jefferson. Nevada like the rest of the country reads Jefferson in a very self serving and selective fashion.

It is true to a degree that Nevada is a harbinger of one aspect of the Jeffersonian legacy. That kind of get off my back aspect. But remember this, those ranchers who spout this philosophy are among the most subsidized Americans. They don’t want big government. And yet the minute we talk about raising the grazing fees to market price they howl. They do want government. They want government to protect them from the market even though all of their other rhetoric and every aspect of their lives is market rhetoric.

So that’s a paradox bordering on hypocrisy. If they really meant what they were saying, they should immediately demand that the grazing fees be raised to market price and that the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service offer them no benefits whatsoever. But they don’t really mean that. They know that they could not make it economically if they had to compete in the market.

So how do you feel as a citizen, who wants to be part of creating a good community, when you find that the Jefferson that you’re portraying is giving comfort to people who are not?

It’s frustrating. But it’s only mildly frustrating because what I’m doing is not that important. I’m just a guy dressing up like a dead man. I’m not trying to change the world. My mission is to be historically accurate and let you decide. Jefferson was different things to different people even in his own time. So it’s not for me to say you got me wrong. I don’t mind that people choose what part of Jefferson they want. But if you don’t choose the four or five things that really matter in Jefferson, then you are misusing him historically.

I don’t find it particularly annoying. I find it amusing. Because this is America. America has always been a nation that resisted facing the truth and preferred to live in illusions and no character in our history is more pregnant with illusion than Thomas Jefferson. He’s part of the problem as well as part of the solution, so I can’t be annoyed by that.

You seem to share a lot of Jefferson’s idealism. What is your personal dream?

Jefferson is a secularist. And I think we’ve reached the end of the secular paradigm. I think the next phase is going to be a different kind of phase. I think the next paradigm is going to be a modest earth spirit paradigm.

My own little utopian dream is that there will be a new spiritual movement in America and people will sort of wake up one day and discover that saying “no” to the industrial consumer paradigm is actually a wonderful, liberating, soul enlivening kind of thing. And it will just happen kind of spontaneously. People will start doing organic things without a lot of fanfare, and without profits, and without biblical texts, and Celestine prophecies. People will just say, “You know, the quality in my life seems a lot higher when I grow some flowers.”

We all know that we cannot continue to live this way. It just can’t be done. If everyone lived this way, the earth would die. So we can’t continue to live this way in terms of distributive justice. And we can’t continue to live this way in terms of resources. And now we’re learning that we can’t continue to live this way if we want to have full souls. Virtually everyone knows that this juggernaut has to stop.

We have to say “no.” We have to get simpler. We have to consume less. We have to shut off some of the media. Everyone knows this. And yet we all still do it. Because we’re addicted and we’re confused.

You know what would happen if there were a neutron bomb for television and every TV set in America blinked off this afternoon and could never come back on and that technology could not be replaced? Within days community would flourish in America.

You see it all the time when the Hamiltonian grid fails in any way. People go out of their houses and into the streets and they get along. They might not be able to get along really well, but they work at it.

People would read more books. They would sleep more. They would make love more. They would talk to their neighbors more. They would garden more. They would do all of that if you took the three or four big technological drugs of our culture away.

America has reached a kind of high water mark of industrial consumerism and the future is careful choices about how we retreat from that into a more sustainable system. How are we going to do it? But I don’t think it will happen here. Nevada is not going to do it. Nevada is going to be one of the last places to do it.

Do you feel like a stranger in a strange land in Nevada?

I think everyone in Nevada feels like a stranger in a strange land. I think that’s why we’re here. I like Nevada. I like it a lot. I’ve never found a community that’s more open, tolerant, energetic than this one. But even though I enjoy it and have been here a long time and will probably stay a lot longer, I know that it’s not my home. And it’s not my home because it chooses deliberately not to do the things that civilization requires. I don’t think that Nevada has the stuff of community.

What can Jefferson teach us about creating it?

Jefferson and the founding fathers no longer have much to teach us because we live in a world that is so utterly different from theirs. We have to face this world. Nevada does exist. We want this to be a community. And if you keep going back and saying what would Jefferson’s critique be or what would Jefferson’s suggestion be, that’s a fruitless enterprise. You have to face this world.

But I buy Jefferson to this extent: You can’t legislate enlightenment. I see the future as experimental niches to show us what can be done. I’d like to see several neighborhoods in Reno, new neighborhoods, zone themselves voluntarily in advance to have certain types of park land and to be auto unfriendly and things like that—so that in every possible way the alternatives were voluntary and people selected their own community.

Instead of saying cars must go, to legislate them out of existence, I would rather say let’s create a little community in Las Vegas or Reno that is car free, voluntarily. And see what kind of people turn up. See what kind of life they lead. And see what kinds of problems they get into. Or say a suburb that said, “If you live here you have to chose not to have a television set. You can live in any of the other 10,000 suburbs but this is a television free suburb.” And then people came there and the quality of life was good, and children got into better schools, and everyone seemed happier and so on, the roads were better. Then I think other people would say, “Well maybe this is possible. Maybe we’re not living in the best of all possible worlds. Maybe these alternatives have some validity.”

Do you ever feel trapped in Jefferson?

Yeah. I want out. I mean I love Jefferson and I love to do it and all that. He’s still interesting to me. I’m not done with him by a long ways. He clarifies everything that I do. But it’s a dead end. It’s clarifying and then you reach this cul de sac. And the next step is the interesting step.

So what will Clay Jenkinson do now?

I want to write things in my own voice. My pretentious dream is that I’d like to write a book that has the impact of something like Walden, I know that’s not going to happen but I’m going to set my goal that high so whatever I do is on that road instead of a science fiction novel about Area 51. I don’t really think that I can pull it off. But I know that if I don’t move in that direction, that when I’m 82 I’ll be lying in a bed with tubes up my nose and I’ll be thinking I lacked the courage to try to live my life. That’s my biggest fear.