Pretty Fly for an Old White Guy

I just saw a headline saying President Biden has rolled out the most aggressive climate change agenda of any president. Other headlines have noted his plans to deal with racial and economic inequality. He wants to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure. He wants to rebuild our relationships with our allies. 

If we progressives aren’t cheering, I don’t know why. We may have feared Biden would be a milquetoast, but in his policies he’s roaring like a liberal lion. And he’s staffing our government with experienced, smart people who can make his plans happen. And he’s doing it all fast.

I didn’t even mention his COVID response. He’s doing what the federal government should have been doing all along. It’s just that we got so far off course with you-know-who in charge that ordinary competence seems like a miracle.

It’s a great relief to believe again that our government is doing the right thing.

Biden will be a good technocrat, to use a popular term I don’t particularly like, but I think he’ll be much more than that. In his first week in office, he has shown himself to be humane, determined and decisive. All without polemic. 

Remember the old saying that only Nixon could go to China? (He was on record as strongly anti-communist, so when he traveled to China and restored our relations with it, no one could say he was soft of the Reds.) Well, maybe only a man with well-established moderate leanings could act so boldly now on so many progressive fronts.

It’s early days. Mitch and his gang are still going to be obstructionists. They hated deficits before they loved them, and now they hate them again. Congress will do what it always does when it’s so evenly divided: as little as possible, and that grudgingly. But president Biden is running the Executive Branch, and he will run it for the benefit of all of us, including especially those who have not had their voices heard for too long.

For the first time in four years, I’m going to stop worrying about my government and return to pursuits that are more personal and, though perhaps no easier to achieve, make me feel like I can accomplish something again, and that it won’t be a waste of time because at any moment I might have to flee the land of my birth where for the last four years I'd heard the drumbeats of fascism that Europeans heard in the 1930s as Hitler rose to power and began to marginalize and purge anyone he didn’t like, all to the enthusiastic salutes and rapturous cheers of ordinary Germans seduced by his cult of himself above all else.

The Way We Were

I want my country back.

I’ll admit I’m not completely certain what that means anymore. 

Am I longing for the white-male-chauvanist orderliness of my youth? No, we have to get past that, and we are, and of course rearranging our political and social norms on the scale that we are now engaged in is going to upset some people, maybe most people, but we have to persist. The people who have not had a voice must now be heard, and we must listen.

That’s not what is going on at this moment, though. The anger boiling into our streets, and into our Capitol, is not a cry for mercy and justice. It is the death rage of a group who are losing their grip on power and are digging in to keep it. White supremacists is not too harsh a label for them. Not just for the Proud Boys among them, but as well for the huge number of ordinary citizens who have been quick to pour out their hatred on social media and in public squares, who are ready to take up arms to protect their increasingly marginalized place in America.

They have been inspired and encouraged by our president. He is our very own modern Jefferson Davis. 

Without an actual civil war, he has been defeated. But he leaves behind an angry mob that must be sent back home, or if they won’t go home peacefully, jailed.

We have to stop tolerating the hatred our president has encouraged.

He should be impeached. I doubt he’ll be convicted (even though I think he should be), but he should be barred, under the 14th Amendment, from ever holding federal office again.

Those who rioted in the Capitol should be arrested and tried.

The members of the House and Senate who on January 6 challenged the certification of the presidential election, after those results had been certified by the respective states and all judicial challenges dismissed, should be barred from serving in Congress.

Insurrections must have consequences. Any governor and any parent can tell you that.

Social media must stop allowing itself to be a bulletin board for hatred. 

We have to calm down and go back to striving to be a nation of mutual respect and cooperative industriousness.

That’s the country I want back.

Friends

When we were in college together, one of my oldest friends and I dated girls in the same dorm. They said they would look out the window and see us coming across the quad, he swaying from side to side as he walked, me bouncing on my toes. They said it was comical.

He greatly expanded my vocabulary and taught me that A-1 sauce is brilliant on french fries. We hung out together, dropped out together, resurrected ourselves separately, lost touch, and finally reconnected a few years ago.

One of my newest friends and I walk together too, or did pre-Covid. He taught me about Asia, both past and present, beginning with my attendance at his defense of his master’s thesis on early trade in China, something he undertook late in life. Such a thing would be way too ambitious for me—I still have test nightmares (see above about dropping out)—but his scholarship introduced me to his deep knowledge of the area and his charming way of imparting it.

So: a much better vocabulary at a young age and an appreciation for the varied uses of A-1 sauce from one friend; knowledge of half the world I knew little about from another. Pretty good bookends for me.

I have other friends I’ve learned from, lots of them, but not many I’ve stuck with. Sometimes that’s just my bad luck. I’ve changed jobs or locations. Sometimes the learning became too tedious.

A friendship is like a good long book. It’s comfortable, you enjoy it, and you learn something every time you pick it up. You need all three elements for it to last.

Good dinner-table repartee can be stimulating, occasionally even exhilarating, especially after a few glasses of wine have fortified your views and loosened your tongue, but it’s not always comfortable for the long term. Indeed, the thrill and tension of it make it a rich emotional diet. It’s a Gran Marnier soufflé: delicious in the moment, but too much trouble to make and too many calories for daily consumption.

I have common ground with these two friends, one old and one new, but we’re not in an echo chamber. They’re curious about why things and people are the way they are. Being curious is pretty much the opposite of being certain.

Sure, we kid around about what morons some people seem to be, especially lately when discussing politics, but they would welcome the opportunity to look into the hearts of those on the other side of any issue. They aren’t afraid of what they might find there.

There’s not a whole lot of looking into hearts going on in broad social and political discourse these days. We’re mostly left to deal in generalities and caricatures.

Friends are the opposite of generalities and caricatures. They are specific and nuanced.

I have no illusion that the way I relate to two friends works on a broader, more anonymous scale. Maybe that’s all there is to it. We learn from and grow with our friends and navigate the rest of the world the way one navigates a mountain trail: watching our footing, alert to danger, enjoying the scenery, but not really anxious to camp out full-time in the wilderness.

Born Again

How about that! 

Democrats stole—sorry, won—another big election in Georgia yesterday. Now we have the White House and majorities, albeit slim, in both houses of Congress. It’s been a long time since we've been in that position.

Joe Biden is no firebrand progressive, but he’s the right man for the task before us. He’ll make a sincere effort to heal divisions. If there is anything everyone agrees on about him it is that he is empathetic and sincere. He won’t try to use his congressional majorities to adopt sweeping liberal policies. He’ll be moderate. We need liberal policies for the future, but right now we have to restore faith in government. Half the country voted for Trump and his stingy, nativist platform. We’re not going to win them all over right away, or even ever, in many cases—there are plenty of folks still fighting the Civil War, or the “Lost Cause”, as they call it—but we can do better than Trump did at bringing the country together.

There is so much hard work ahead that we will do well to just make a start on the things that most of us, even most Trump supporters, know we need. Infrastructure repairs, for a start. The economy runs on roads and bridges. The electric grid runs on wires and generators and software. Our water supply runs through underground pipes. All of those are out of date, some dangerously so.

The other area where most of us, as individuals, feel the need for better protection is healthcare. Repairing the Affordable Care Act will be a good start. If we get a chance to do things like add a public option to Medicare, or reduce the age of eligibility, to test how well those kinds of expansions work, so much the better. State aid to the poor through Medicaid expansion is still missing in many states; that is literally killing a lot of people. The Supreme Court ruled that Medicaid expansion under the ACA had to be voluntary for the states, but maybe there is something we can do with a change in the law to push, or coax, reluctant states to get on board.

There are plenty of other sensible and humane policies that we can move forward on now, like immigration reform. Not to mention the power of the President to restore our place in the world as a policy leader and beacon of hope.

I had become a little cynical and pessimistic watching Trump and McConnell and their followers run roughshod over the country. I don’t like that in myself, so I am relieved to feel a new lightness of being, a new hope. 

One might say I am born again. 

I never thought Jesus was a white man, being from the Middle East and all. And now I know he isn’t even a man. With her resurrection of the black vote in Georgia, the role of our savior is now being played by Stacey Abrams.