Monday, April 30, 2018

Going Home

I’ve been in Europe for two months now. In two weeks and two days, I’m going home. I’m not looking forward to it.

There are good friends at home I’ve missed. (Hi, dear ones; you know who you are; see you soon). And even though we talk and text often, I feel a little disconnected from my children; you know, like I couldn’t rush out on the playground and save them from a bully, even though they are all adults now.

And my roses. I’ll be happy to see them blooming. Mother’s Day roses, Meg and I call them, because they always bloom then. They, like Meg, bring unearned beauty to my life.

Okay, I haven’t watched tv this entire trip, so I need to catch up on a few shows, especially Game of Thrones.

The rest of it…meh.

Europe is always like a tonic for me. I see the world as a bigger place. I see Europe’s triumphs and troubles, and I see its history, which is both inspiring and depressing. Inspiring because—well, just look around at the art and culture—and depressing because even these noble souls are not that much better at learning from the tragic mistakes of their past than those of us in our very young nation.

I can see Europe from afar. Objectively, I think. Coming here is like a study in civilization. Old walled cities, old cathedrals, modern high-speed trains, street-corner food markets, labor strikes, and yes, migrant crises.

But I can’t see America objectively. I am blinded by my hopes; and lately, we have been dashing them. There’s no other way to put it.

After the civil-rights movement, I thought we would continue to be less prejudiced and offer more opportunity to all. It coincided with post-WW II economic prosperity, and I assumed that if Jim Crow was dead, everyone, black and white, would be able to take part in the American Dream. For me, that dream wasn’t of a welfare state, it was of upward mobility achieved through hard work.

Now, years later, I’m having to face the fact that Martin Luther King did not kill old Jim Crow, he only wounded him. The legacies of slavery and segregation run far deeper than I realized. Blacks do not have equal opportunity with whites. There is still a lot of work to do to achieve that. Not only for blacks, but for Hispanics and our other growing minorities as well.

But instead of building on the work of MLK, we seem to have entered a backlash phase of tearing it down. There are many signs of this, but new restrictive voter ID laws are the most blatant and strike at the most essential freedom of democracy: the right to vote.

Not long after the civil-rights movement, we almost passed the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which said women had to be treated as equals. Not only did we fall short of codifying what should be a bedrock principle of how we live together, but we have been backsliding ever since. Abortion rights have never been on shakier ground, not since Roe was decided. Planned Parenthood is broadly under attack, even though it helps prevent many many more abortions than it performs. We just elected a president who has no respect for women. Not just those who want abortions, all of them. “Grab them by the pussy,” he says.

That’s the part I’ve been trying to understand. How did he get elected? There have always been men like Trump. I’ve known dozens. I’ve gotten up and left many a lunch table to avoid having to listen to their racist and misogynist jokes. I see now that I should have done more than excuse myself; I should have called them out. But at those tables everyone was laughing. I thought it was just them, a small minority of fat cats. I see now I was wrong.

I suppose I’ve answered my own question. Trump got elected because a lot of people agree with his darkest urges, his racism and misogyny. Sure, some of them may have felt left behind economically and hoped he would bring back their coal mines and steel mills. But that wasn’t the driving force behind his support. It was fear that the world is changing, that the old order of white male supremacy is crumbling. The very thing that gave me hope when I was a young man—a broadening of opportunity for minorities—struck fear into the hearts of enough voters to put Trump over the top. They weren’t the only reason he won—there were plenty who just wanted tax cuts for the rich and an end to Obamacare—but they were the deciding factor.

I live in California, which is putting up a spirited defense to the worst of Trump’s policies on climate change, the environment, healthcare and immigration. But California can’t do it alone. And Trump is doing all he can to undermine my state’s efforts to continue to protect our habitat and our vulnerable residents.

Being on another continent gives me emotional distance and historical perspective. But they are just a palliative, like morphine for a cancer patient. They are not a cure. And now I must wade back into the melee. I want to fight for what I feel is right, but it is discouraging to have to start at the bottom again on issues I thought were well and finally decided. It’s like a game of chutes and ladders, when you hit one of those places that sends you back to the beginning.

There’s nothing to do but stay in the game, keep rolling the dice. But I do wish those trap doors weren’t there. And I do hope the people who put them there, those who voted for Trump and revanchist politicians like him, will find something more humane to do than cheering when someone tumbles down the chute to the bottom below them.

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Monsters and Other Fairy Tales

Children believe in monsters. To reassure them we hold up the covers and shine a light to show them there is nothing under the bed. We tell them fairy tales about creatures who adore them: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy. These are harmless fictions, we think, because we understand that soon enough our children will outgrow them and enter the real world of no magic, no illusions about what is real and what is not.

That passage into adulthood is bittersweet. One cannot live as a child, with a child’s fantasies; still, once lost, the innocence and credulity of that time are gone forever.

Or are they?

Sometimes when we grow up we find new fantasies to hang onto. We have a powerful, instinctive urge to believe in something magical, something that will bring us gifts not because of anything we have done, just because of who we are.

This is why we are credulous both as children and as adults. This is why when we grow up we bet on the lottery. Why we accept things people tell us that may seem fantastical but that we want to believe, things that hold out the promise of presents under the tree and coins under our pillows.

We know our children must grow up. We have all suffered through it ourselves. We think that an adult who still believes in Santa Claus is not playing with a full deck. But is he really that unusual? How many of us still cling to fairy tales? 

There is the one about how everything will be all right if we can just get the monsters out from under the bed, or at least keep them on the other side of the border.

And the one about how if we give our tax dollars to the rich man selling magic beans we will get a beanstalk that we can climb to a basket of golden eggs.

Don’t build your house of straw, the wolf will blow it down. Put a wall around it.

Hop up on the fox’s back and let him carry you across the stream. 

What could go wrong? After all, it’s only a fairy tale.

Thursday, April 12, 2018

America's Atlantic Wall

I’m hiking the coastal paths of Brittany, France, skirting granite cliffs that fall away a hundred meters into the sea. I pass the occasional lighthouse or medieval fort, but more often I come upon the bunkers of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. There are huge concrete troughs for big artillery guns, smaller bunkers for anti-aircraft and machine guns, and warrens of underground tunnels and caverns for the German soldiers who manned the guns. 

Many of these fortifications are overgrown now, but once you start noticing them, you see them everywhere, stretching in a line across the cliffs overlooking the English Channel. The big guns were brought in to destroy ships in the Channel, and the other fortifications were dug in to defend against an invasion to liberate the countries Germany occupied. Hitler called it his Atlantic Wall. It stretched from the northern tip of Norway and down the coast of France to Spain. A million Frenchmen were drafted for the work.

Hitler wasn’t the first to try to wall off Europe. Almost every European city of any importance had a wall around it. Those old walls are now tourist attractions. Hitler’s Atlantic Wall was breached just two years after he built it. 

The lesson to me is obvious: walls don’t work. They may seem like a good strategy for dealing with hostile neighbors, or for securing ill-gotten gains, but they invite attack. They will be breached. It’s just a matter of time.

I can imagine a time when walls may have seemed like the only way to protect ourselves. I can certainly imagine an enemy so bloodthirsty that he can’t be reasoned with, an enemy who must be defeated if we are to live. Hitler was one of those. As was Japan in WW II. Today, there may be newcomers to that unsavory club: North Korea is an obvious candidate. Perhaps Iran. Perhaps Russia. Perhaps even China.

But Mexico? Central America? I don’t think we are in much danger of being taken over by our neighbors to the south. Yes, many of their people want to come here, for the economic opportunity or to escape the violence in their homelands, but they do not want to conquer us. For the most part, they just want a chance for a better life.

That is what America has always offered the world. We have been more welcoming at some times than others, but for the most part we have opened our arms to immigrants. Now, with the fear of “the other” that still lurks in our ancient base brain being inflamed by a nativist president, we are thinking about building a wall. Or, more accurately, he and his base are.

Most of us know what Europe has learned over and over in its centuries of civilization: walls don’t work.

Not physical walls, like the one Trump wants to build on our southern border. Not economic walls, like the protectionist tariffs he’s rolling out. Not cultural walls, like the ones he creates when he calls Mexican immigrants murderers and rapists.

The world is still a hostile place. It would not be smart for us, or anyone, to be defenseless. But America, with by far the strongest military ever known to man, is certainly far from defenseless. We have nothing to fear from people clamoring to come here to escape poverty and strife. Indeed, we need immigrants to continue to prosper economically. We can afford to help them, and thereby help ourselves. And doing so is probably a lot cheaper than building a wall—a wall that’s not going to work over the long term, anyway.

Saturday, April 7, 2018

Viva la France

Education and healthcare are free in France. The trains are fast, ubiquitous and punctual, and lovely. Baguettes fresh out of the oven cost a dollar. Good wine is inexpensive, and even more ubiquitous than trains. In Paris, every corner has a bookstore.

What’s wrong with that picture?

It’s a goddamned socialist country, that’s what’s wrong!

Well, true enough. France is socialist, at least compared to the United States. It’s not socialist in the old meaning of that term—a top-down planned economy—but those that are are autocracies that have, by and large, fallen prey to corruption at the top and poor quality of life at the bottom.

France, though, and a few other countries nearby, seem to have mastered a kind of socialism-light melded with democratic elections. Every time I come here, I begin to wonder if my lifelong allegiance to the fierce capitalism of my country is wrongheaded. The question is this: what are we each gaining as a result of our different approaches, and what is being given up? A useful addendum to the question is: by whom?

The United States is the innovation capital of the world. We owe that to the profit incentives of relatively unfettered capitalism. Social welfare is not really our thing. Carry your own weight, make your own way, that’s our heritage and our moral credo. Government aid to even the poorest among us is a fight to secure, and even taking that aid carries a social stigma. People look at you like you could do better if you tried harder. We judge ourselves that way. There is a lot of shame in our national psyche. 

France is not unimaginative or unprosperous, but it doesn’t have the productivity power of the United States. Some say it doesn’t even want that. Someone is always on strike here. It’s the trains now. (Still, I’m riding on a comfortable one as I write this, slipping in between strike days.)

I’m a fervent capitalist. I believe capitalism is the economic model that best harnesses human greed to the yoke of prosperity. I’m also a redistributionist. Not everyone is, or can be, successful in the arena of capitalistic combat, so out of humanity, we need to tend to the wounded warriors, or even those who never had a chance to strap on their armor and pick up a sword.

I think the French probably enjoy making money as much as we do, but perhaps they are less obsessed with money as the final objective of their endeavors. If true, why is that, do you suppose?

Perhaps it is because they have had longer to consider their options. They lived through the Dark Ages, through feudalism and monarchies, and now they have come out into a kind of sunshine of democratic socialism. Really, after millennia of struggle, where they are now must seem like utopia.

The United States, on the other hand, was founded by people who didn’t choose to throw off the yoke of servitude but who ran away from it. We came to our continent, took it away from those who were here before us, spread out so as to not get in each other’s way, and commenced laboring like so many beavers in a big pond. With that personal freedom, and all those natural resources, of course we began to think of ourselves as hearty and self-reliant. It didn’t hurt in nurturing that strict moral code that our rootstock was Puritan.

So we come to this moment in the early twenty-first century, America and France, with perhaps fundamentally different views of who we are and how we got here. We see ourselves as exceptional. The French may see themselves differently; I’m not sure what the right adjective would be: Enduring? Patient? There is certainly plenty of personal and national pride in France, but it seems more directed toward their triumphs over adversity and economic inequality. We in the United States have faced adversity from time to time, but our country has not been overrun by foreign invaders multiple times, or ruled by kings with guillotines.

It’s possible that coming from such different backgrounds, we just have different priorities. For a couple of hundred years, Americans tilled and smelted a rich life from scratch. We seem to be having trouble accepting that we have succeeded. Fear of the next famine or other calamity is deep in our DNA. And if you aren’t part of the group working toward prosperity, we don’t have much time for you.

The French, on the other hand, lived so long in scarcity, both of the basics of existence and personal freedom, that they seem committed to never going back there, individually or in the aggregate. They have structured their society to be a place where all enjoy basic benefits of food, health and education. They don’t seem to want to crawl over each other to get to the top of the income heap. They just want to make a good life for as many as possible.

And so I return to my first question: What’s wrong with that picture?