Sunday, July 21, 2019

The Certain Result of Uncertainty

I grow old… I grow old… Do I dare to eat a peach?
—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot


Get a grip, people. You’re not growing old, you’re growing soft. You’re wishy washy. You’re indecisive. Oh, my, you just don’t know what to do.

Well, this is your lucky day. I’m here to tell you. Get out and vote.

This is not the time to be worrying about whether a peach might upset your digestion. You’ve got cancer. You need to cut it out. Or it will kill you. Do something about it or sit around wringing your hands and die. Those are your choices.

I don’t have to tell you what the cancer is. We all know. Some of us think it’s the political left, some the right. I know what I think, but I’m not going to try to convince you. I can probably count on one hand the number of people whose opinions I have been able to influence in the course of my life. I have five fingers and five children. I got them young, like the religions do, so that was a big advantage. I overplayed my hand occasionally, but mainly I’m happy with the character and intelligence they have as adults. They were my disciples. Pretty much no one else has ever listened to me unless I had something they wanted and they had to put up with me to get it. And once they got it, they reset.

We have crises in this country in the form of political and cultural clashes all the time. Some of them have been pretty nasty. Burning witches (ok, not technically America then), slavery, Jim Crow, civil rights movement. There was a rough ten-year span when I was young when we killed JFK, MLK and RFK and damn near burned down the country over civil rights and the Viet Nam war.

Maybe I’m just getting old and overly sensitive (although I love peaches), but this time feels very bad. Civil War bad. Jim Crow bad. You may think it feels more like the fear of communism in the fifties, with socialism standing in for the hammer and sickle. I don’t want the state to take over the means of production either, but I think there’s room for us to do more to help one another without running the risk of becoming Venezuela.

But if you disagree, I’m not going to convince you, so I’m not even going to try.

What I am going to tell you is the same thing I want to tell everyone. Vote.

Let’s all put it on the line and see just who we are. 

And don’t waste you vote on something you call principle. In 2020, a vote for anyone but the Republican or the Democrat is a wasted vote. It will count exactly the same as if you don’t vote at all.

I think all of us can agree that we have fought hard over the years to protect our right to vote. So use it. Go to the polls and vote the way you would go to the doctor and take the cancer treatment she said could work. Don’t take some homeopathic cure that doesn’t have a chance of helping you. And don’t lie in your bed curled up in a fetal position hoping it will just go away. It won't.

What will go away is the way of life you would choose but are too lazy or frightened or cynical to speak up for.

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Flyovers

Donald Trump rolled out the military hardware for his July 4 celebration. I hated it.

I’m in Paris now. It’s Bastille Day. I walked with Meg to the Pont des Arts to watch French fighter jets stream les tricolores over the Louvre as part of their military parade. I loved it.

Why is that?

Am I just so anti-Trump that anything he does, even in the name of celebrating our founding, rankles me? Probably. I wish he would test me by doing something good—you know, humane—but I’m not holding my breath.

Maybe it just that the French, unlike the U.S. under Trump, seem relatively harmless. Their parades are like the ones in small towns with fire engines and kids pulling red wagons with puppies (credit to one of my sons for that charming image).

The French have learned to live in peace as part of the world community. They are still in the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran nuclear deal. They are loyal to NATO and the European Union. They have their problems domestically, but no one feels threatened by the French.

Not so my own country under its current leadership. We have become international bullies. We’re bullies on matters of defense (pay your NATO dues or maybe you can’t count on our help when you get attacked), bullies on trade, bullies on climate, bullies on immigration. Bullies against women. Bullies against our own citizens who aren’t white. Even the white ones who, along with everyone else, want decent health care.

It’s discouraging, and embarrassing. When people here ask me where I’m from, I say California, not America. Like the charming woman Meg and I met at a tiny neighborhood wine tasting on Boulevard St. Germain who is British but has lived in Paris for twenty years and considers it home. She hopes Macron can succeed with his economic reforms—she had several amusing stories about frustratingly desultory navigations through French bureaucracy—but she loves France and is worried that after Brexit she might not be able to stay. She visibly relaxed we we mentioned were weren’t Trump fans.

There are many reasons to love Paris. The food, the wine, the Seine, the shopkeepers, the markets. America grew up on the road, so we have McDonalds. The French staked out their way of living hundreds of years ago. Localvore has always been in here. It’s just a different sensibility.

It’s not as dynamic as Silicon Valley, where we live. It isn’t cutting edge. America does that better than anyone. Still. 

We are the best at so many things, we don’t need to keep reminding the world of that. We don’t need to threaten. We don’t need to bully. We don’t need to be the boor raised in privilege with no conception of the moral responsibilities that go with that birthright.

To anyone who might now be thinking of telling me “America, Love it or Leave it,” I say this: I don’t want to be an expatriate. I just want my country back.