September 15, 1963, a bomb explodes in Birmingham
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) .
Read More“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) .
Read MoreSeventy-seven years ago yesterday, at four in the afternoon, the first wave of German bombers, 348 in all, flew without warning across the English Channel to bomb London and other cities in England. This was the beginning of the Blitz, which went on nightly for eight months and left 43,000 British civilians dead. Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle . . . this fortress built by Nature for herself” turned out to be little protection “against infection and the hand of war.”
Read MoreJeannie Rousseau de Clarens died last week at her home near the Loire River in France. She was 98. During World War II, she served as an interpreter for a French business association during the German occupation – and also as an amateur spy whose charm, flawless German, and incredible courage enabled her to gather and pass along information on the development of the V-1 and V-2 rockets that saved thousands of English lives.
Read MoreThe National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency created in 1965. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States.
Read MoreAs entire groups of his former supporters abandon him in waves – business leaders who have pushed for both economic and environmental deregulation, military commanders, a growing number of Republicans in Congress – Donald Trump hunkers down and lashes out. He shows no interest in bringing us together, in healing our wounds. He seems a man, a president, wholly without empathy, and without that he is no good to us now, for he cannot, he will not, heal us.
Read MoreTo combat a vision as malevolent as that currently hovering over America, it’s not enough to counter it with a series of bland policy bullet points aimed at attracting disparate groups of people by offering each something that won’t drive the others away – the way the Democrats keep trying to expand their coalition by appealing to just one more identity group.
Read More“The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America,” a joint exhibit of the Brooklyn Museum and the Equal Justice Initiative, opened at the museum. Two days later, not far away on Long Island, President Trump gave a speech to law enforcement officers in which, to “significant applause,” he gave a nod and a wink to police brutality.
These two events are part of the single story of America. The first confronts us with truths we seek to evade in the belief that “great art and courageous conversations contribute to a more just, civic, and empathetic world.” The other, the one Donald Trump tells, aims to drive us further apart.
Since the end of World War Two – and its lesson of what happens in a country where groups of people are dehumanized – America has, slowly and against much resistance, broadened the definition of our community.
But today we have a new kind of bully pulpit, from which the president goes after the vulnerable, the marginalized ones, because that’s what bullies do, and suggests that organizations that have struggled to be more inclusive don’t need to do so anymore.
Many are pushing back: the military declined (at least for now) to enforce the transgender ban; the boy scouts apologized for Trump’s speech; the police resisted his call. But many are also cheering. I fear that those who resist will grow tired, while those who cheer will grow bolder, and democracy will erode.
America cannot have an honest, unifying conversation with a president who speaks in divisive, deceitful code. It’s time to join the resistance.
Think like a mountain, Aldo Leopold exhorted us 68 years ago in A Sand County Almanac. But how does a mountain think, I wondered one recent peaceful morning in Acadia National Park, as I climbed Brown Mountain (elevation: 852 feet)?
Read MoreSome things you just can’t get out of your head.
In yesterday’s Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor discussed the “largest recorded swarm of locusts” in American history, which took place on July 20, 1875. Locusts have been a plague at least since the time of Moses whose god set them on Egypt where “they covered all the ground until it was black. They devoured … everything growing in the fields and the fruit on the trees [until] nothing green remained on tree or plant in all the land of Egypt.”
Still, it’s hard to imagine that the Bible-reading farmers of the Great Plains were prepared for what came out of the sky: a swarm 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide, as 10 billion insects descended as one giant organism and devoured everything in their path – every stalk of grain, the bark off trees, laundry hanging out to dry, tool handles and fence posts. They even ate the clothes right off farmers who tried to scare them away.
And then, when they had eaten everything, they disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived. No Rocky Mountain locust has been found alive since 1902.
Nobody has missed them very much, other than some entomologists for whom the fate of the locust remains a mystery to be solved.
For me, the mystery is how quickly the world we take for granted can be upended. I’m not suggesting that Washington is filled with locusts, but as I read the newspaper each morning, I realize that we can no longer assume the continuity of government on which we have, for better or for worse, up to now, relied.
Some years ago when my daughter Gayley was in preschool, her friend Niles would assume the characters of his favorite Saturday morning cartoon villains and terrorize his classmates, for whom the distinction between reality and television cartoons was not yet fully developed. Since we didn’t have a television back then, Gayley had no idea what Niles was doing; and when she told him to stop being so silly, he seemed relieved to drop his tough-guy facade and just be a four-year-old again.
I thought of this story as I read about the role three Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Shelley Moore Capito, played in the final collapse of their party’s healthcare follies, which had come down to repealing Obamacare and replacing it with nothing.
“We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it,” said Donald Trump, washing his irresponsible hands of a matter that seems to him little more than a way to score political points. “We’ll let Obamacare fail.”
Compare that with Capito’s “I did not come to Washington to hurt people.”
Capito, Collins and Murkowski are no fans of Obamacare. But they also seem much less afraid of bullies than so many of their male counterparts – perhaps because they see through the persona of the locker-room lout and perhaps also because they see their roles as actually trying to do something to help their constituents.
Maybe gender has nothing to do with it. And maybe it’s just a coincidence that 169 years ago today the first Women’s Rights Convention met in Seneca Falls, N.Y. and condemned the “history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.”
One of the problems raised by the Trump creation story I wrote about last time is that America already has a creation story of its own. It begins in Boston Harbor in 1630, when John Winthrop counseled his parishioners to build “a city upon a hill.” His was an exclusive vision, his community included only the Puritan elect, but over the course of our history that vision expanded in response to an increasingly diverse America.
Read MoreTwo questions kept recurring to me as I returned briefly to western Pennsylvania where Donald Trump won overwhelmingly in November.
Read MoreBob Hollick and Larry Maggi are Democrats, one a local officeholder, the other, a current county commissioner, is the biggest vote getter in Washington County, Pennsylvania. Both enthusiastically voted for Donald Trump in November, and they’re frustrated the constant sniping and bickering that has become its aftermath.
Read MoreIt was raining heavily the morning I drove into Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which gave me pause as I drove down the steep gorge where, 128 years ago, 20 million tons of water breached the South Fork dam, gathered force as it surged 14 miles down Little Conemaugh Creek, and hit the city at 40 miles per hour. Ten minutes later, Johnstown was gone.
Read MoreAlthough it’s a traditionally Democratic region, with a strong labor history and an 8.5% edge in Democratic voter registration, this is Trump country. Donald Trump crushed Hillary Clinton by 25 points in the county, and he remains hugely popular here.
Read More“The simple truth is this: America is the only major democracy in the world that allows politicians to pick their own voters” (David Daley, Ratf**ked).
Read More“I have heard this with Boston hockey fans too, being pretty racist towards PK Subban when he played for the Canadiens,” my son Daniel wrote me reflecting on the racist slurs recently shouted at Baltimore Outfielder Adam Jones at Fenway Park. “Dad, is the city really this notoriously racist?”
Read MoreEarly in 2001, Alan Greenspan,the 20-year chairman of the Federal Reserve, worried publicly about future federal surpluses so large they would wipe out the national debt, pour billions into the economy, and strangle private markets. So he proposed a tax cut as “a pre-emptive smoothing of the glide path to zero federal debt.”
Read More"If at first you don't succeed - call an airstrike."
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