Competing protest groups shared the same square, hurling vitriol and insults at each other, with what almost amounted to gleeful banter. Many of the protests had the air of well-rehearsed theater, although it takes only a tiny spark to ignite a fire. And Ohio is is an “open carry” state.
Read More“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois wrote that line 113 years ago to demonstrate that Black lives matter. Well into the 21st century, how far have we come?
In the wake of Dallas and Minnesota and Louisiana, I believe we can still become what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth” – a far nobler ideal than to make America great again.
I believe it because the language of equality is in our DNA. And although we have lived a lie – exterminating Native Americans, enslaving Africans, abusing immigrant laborers, imprisoning our people – we have never abandoned the language of our American creed. And while that makes us exceptional hypocrites, it also gives us the foundation for joining together.
We have said it over and over again.
John Winthrop said it in 1630: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
Thomas Jefferson said it in 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Abraham Lincoln said it in 1863: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. said it in 1963: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’"
Barack Obama said it in 2009: “The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”
How many times do we have to say it before we make it come true?
The moons have mythical names: Calisto, Europa, Io and Ganymede, whom Homer called the most beautiful of the mortals, the four largest moons orbiting around Jupiter. Last night they were joined by Juno, the solar-powered spaceship NASA launched almost five years ago, which went into orbit a few minutes before midnight. After traveling 1.7 billion miles at speeds up to 1650,000 mph, Juno arrived at the precise spot the scientists in Pasadena had programmed. Sometimes it’s easy to feel discouraged about the fate of the earth and the future of its people, who treat both the earth and each other with such carelessness. Where America is embarking on an ugly election campaign to elect a leader the majority of voters abhor. Where we build walls and fences topped with razor wire to keep out the undesirable, and where ISIS celebrates the slaughter of innocents.
But think also of the things of which we are capable when we set free our imaginations, follow our sense of wonder and expand our horizons. When we come together around a project – which will take years to complete – to explore the outer reaches of our solar system.
None of this solves the problems we face daily. It doesn’t stop the killing or feed the hungry. It doesn’t relieve the anxieties of the fearful or open the hearts of the angry or tear down the walls that keep us apart.
But today I think of Juno, out beyond the heavens, touching what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
We don’t have time to mourn the dead. Tragedies such as the carnage in Orlando should bring us together to grieve for those who died, to pray, however we pray, for the wounded, and to support those whose lives have been devastated. But we don’t have time. Too quickly we turn human tragedies into political events, into opportunities to advance our own agendas, to reinforce our hardening divisions. Yes, I believe we must ban assault weapons and pass sensible gun laws. But I don’t need an email from moveon.org asking me to sign a petition before the dead have even been identified.
I believe we need to confront the evil that is ISIS. But I don’t think we need calls for the president to resign because he won’t say, “radical Islam,” two words that have become, like so much else these days, politically loaded.
I believe it matters that the victims were gay and that they were killed celebrating life in a nightclub called Pulse. But more importantly, they were people whose lives ended horrifically and unexpectedly.
We should stop and grieve together for those people, at least for one day, and not just rewrite Monday’s speech to score a point. This is a time to put our differences aside and come together.
Today is the birthday of William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet and revolutionary. On this morning’s Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor read a Yeats poem. It’s called The Sorrow of Love; its last stanza seems applicable to today.
And now the sparrows warring in the eaves, The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky, And the loud chanting of the unquiet leaves, Are shaken with earth's old and weary cry.
Harambe spent his entire life in captivity; his sole purpose – from our perspective, if not from his – was to entertain paying tourists. His death was a tragedy, and so was his life. Perhaps some good will come of it, if we re-examine life in captivity and seek to understand what the world looks like from inside a cage. He is the hero of this story.
Read More“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate,” Cool Hand Luke. “I’m so glad I would kiss the captain’s feet . . . now my child can actually play in the park.” Eukeysha Gregory, after the arrest of 120 gang members in the “largest gang takedown” in New York City history.
In a speech a friend sent me, conservative writer Heather MacDonald excoriated the Black Lives Matter movement for “the current frenzy against the police” and the ensuing rise in urban crime, calling it a smokescreen to evade the “taboo topic” and “uncomfortable truth” of black-on-black crime. Since Macdonald can be a poster woman for the unapologetic right – opposing food stamps and welfare, minimizing campus rape, defending religious profiling and torture – I was reflexively prepared to dismiss her arguments.
But I can’t.
Yes, there’s much to disagree with. She paints with a broad brush, simplifying and vilifying a complex movement. And she ignores the personal experiences of a legal system riddled with racial injustice described by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow) and Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy).
So who’s right? For Eukeysha Gregory, black-on-black crime is not a taboo subject. Nor was it for my late friend, Charity Hicks, who witnessed “a generation of young [Detroit] men so marginalized they would kill you without thinking about it.”
If we talk only to those with whom we agree, we end up choosing sides and standing in judgment above the fray. Our political purity is intact, although our neighborhoods may be burning. If we really want solutions, we need to open our minds and our hearts.
Should a man be held accountable for the actions of his valet? This 19th-century question is hardly one I expected to be asking in the 21st – until I read Anthony Senecal’s Facebook rants, in which, among other things, he called for the president and first lady to be dragged from the “white mosque” and hanged. Senecal, who was recently the subject of a bizarrely fawning profile in The New York Times, was Donald Trump’s butler at Mar-a-Lago for years; and many of his Facebook themes – demonizing Muslims, Obama’s citizenship, incendiary language, racism – resonate with the boss's campaign.
Trump’s spokeswoman disavowed Senecal’s “horrible statements,” saying he “has not worked at Mar-a-Lago for years” – apparently overlooking that, at Trump’s insistence, he gives daily tours at the mansion and serves as its unofficial historian. Trump has yet to tweet on the matter.
These revelations came simultaneously with news that George Zimmerman will auction off his Kel-Tec PF-9 pistol. What he advertises as “a piece of American History” is the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin in 2012.
In the war against political correctness, the pendulum has swung way too far; it’s time to reflect on what gave rise to the movement in the first place. It began as an effort to address the offensive stereotyping long endured by minorities and the powerless. Whatever its excesses, it arose out of respect and empathy, two traits now in short supply. It is, as Jeeves, a wiser, more civil butler, understood, a matter of good taste.
From a talk this week by David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee and former British Foreign Secretary:
With states collapsing, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, the increase in horrendous violence and disrespect for humanitarian law, and “the absence of legal routes to hope and dignity,” this is a crisis no wall can contain. Globalization isn’t just a political policy, it’s an international reality; and “America First” code language is not the answer – particularly if you consider these numbers from Steve Phillips’ Brown is the New Black:
Clearly these are unsettling numbers for the dwindling white majority – even if they are a fulfillment of America’s self-image: a melting pot; a nation of immigrants; a land where all men are created equal and anyone can grow up to be president. Maybe it’s a cause for celebration instead of fear. And it seems a good time to recognize how much we have in common with the rest of the world.
The $20 bill just got more valuable, not, to be sure, as a measure of exchange, but in its intangible value for America – because yesterday Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that a likeness of Harriet Tubman will replace that of Andrew Jackson on the bill’s face. An escaped slave who was cruelly beaten as a child, Tubman returned frequently to the South and guided so many slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad that William Lloyd Garrison dubbed her “Moses.” During the Civil War she became a Union spy and an armed scout, leading an expedition that freed over 700 slaves. Jackson, the nation’s seventh president, was considered one of its greatest in the history books of my youth. But his star has rightly dimmed, particularly because of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which forced tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands to Oklahoma along the deadly “Trail of Tears,” one of the saddest, most shameful events in our history.
There will, no doubt, be cries of political correctness, as we replace a white man, both president and general, with a black woman – laments that, in our efforts to conform to multi-cultural demands, we are rewriting our history.
Well, good for us. We are recognizing a part of our history we have too long ignored. We are honoring a woman of courage, faith and accomplishment who dedicated her life to equal rights and women’s suffrage. And maybe we are insisting, in a small way, that our money reflect our values.
I remember thinking, while stationed many years ago at SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) in Belgium, that my European friends seemed disappointed in me for not living up to their image of an American: a big, jovial man in a ten-gallon hat, a little crass, largely unread, and out of his depth in Europe – but good-hearted, a figure almost larger than life. It was an image straight out of the movies, but grounded in the enormous gratitude Europeans still felt for their American liberators 25 years after the end of World War II. By contrast, my New England understatement and diffidence made me seem like a junior-varsity Englishman, although without the English arrogance that so annoyed the rest of Europe. To many Europeans then, America was a magical place – perhaps even “a city upon a hill.” An Irish emigrant, who set sail from his homeland long ago, once said to me, “I actually believed New York’s streets were paved with gold.”
A friend who has lived in Europe for many years and is an astute observer of cultural nuances recently told me he thought the European romance with America ended for good in 2003, when a faux Texan with a twang and a cowboy hat invaded Iraq and put the last nail in the illusion of American exceptionalism. Now, he said, Europeans are watching, with a combination of horror and disbelief, as Hollywood’s good-natured cowboy morphs into a snarling demagogue who inflames his followers' basest instincts. They have seen it before.
“American Exceptionalism” is the belief that the United States has a unique history and a special calling. Founded as a “city upon a hill," America was destined to be a beacon to the world. Noted first by Alexis de Tocqueville, belief in American exceptionalism has lately become a political litmus test for the far right – like defunding Planned Parenthood, open carry and wall construction. But consider this: the U.S. is the only nation, so far as I know, whose motto celebrates a union created from diverse parts. For the Continental Congress, E Pluribus Unum meant a union created from “the countries from which these United States have been peopled.” It has long been America’s defining myth: a “nation of immigrants,” a melting pot or patchwork quilt that will “tear anywhere sooner than in the seams.”
We have not lived up to our national ideal, and too often we have used it to conceal an uglier reality. Yet we have never quite relinquished the dream. It remains the measure by which we judge ourselves – even for those to whom the dream has been denied. “I still have a dream,” said Dr. King in 1963, “to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” However much or often we fail, we are still called back to what Lincoln deemed “the better angels of our nature.”
“But especially the people,” sang the blacklisted Paul Robeson, “that’s America to me.”
More than greatness, we need to restitch our exceptional quilt.
Why is it that only Donald Trump seems to have any fun at the Republican debates? Unlike 18 million of my fellow citizens, I listened to Tuesday’s debate on the radio, and without the glitz of the Las Vegas background and the body language of the performers, I was struck by how humorless and wooden were the performances: Ben Carson’s impersonation of a schoolboy reciting recently memorized foreign policy facts; Chris Christie morphing into Rudy Giuliani and trying to scare everybody; Ted Cruz doubling down on carefully targeted “carpet bombing” (“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”).
Yes, we live in dangerous times, which demand seriousness, but we are also looking for a human behind the mask – which brings me back to Donald Trump, who seems to actually be enjoying running for president and whose off-the-cuff retorts contrast so sharply with the others’ carefully calibrated responses. I think part of his appeal, which has endured far longer than anyone thought, is due to his apparent openness, which gives one a glimpse into what kind of president this man would actually be.
What it has revealed, of course, is a man whom only Vladimir Putin could love – a man who insults all his Republican opponents but praises Putin as a strong leader whose poll numbers are more than twice those of Barack Obama.
His candor is good for us. Let's hope it sinks him.
Correction: in Wednesday’s post, the remembrance of Doug Tompkins was written by my son, Jake. The editor apologizes for the oversight.
The day after the San Bernardino murders, I read Hanna Rosin’s sad story of teenage suicides in Silicon Valley. With two lethal epidemics, both invoking the name of suicide and each inspiring others – almost all of them young – to follow, I wondered if there were any connections. Almost every culture glorifies suicide in some form – suicide missions in wartime, protesters publicly immolating themselves, Romeo and Juliet. Still, when suicide bombings erupted in the early 1980s, they seemed to me unsustainable, as, by definition, the number of volunteers must diminish. Clearly I was wrong: according to statistics compiled by the University of Chicago, since 1982, when 15-year-old Ahmad Qasir drove a truck bomb into Israeli Defense Forces headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon, there have been 4,814 suicide attacks in 48 countries, leaving 48,465 people dead and 122,606 wounded – 4,814 martyrs for an act the Qur’an considers a grave sin, and many more signing up.
On the surface, suicidal murderers and suicidal victims have nothing in common. We think of those who die by suicide as despondent and lonely, intent on ending their own suffering, inflicting violence only on themselves – the antithesis of the murderous lust for martyrdom that drives suicide bombers. Yet, many suicide bombers – a surprising number of them “mild-mannered members of the middle class” – are also marginalized and alienated, vulnerable to mystical or cynical calls to martyrdom that promise their short lives meaning and gain them entry into paradise.
Maybe better understanding what causes young people take their own lives could shed some light on these murderous sprees.
I happened, the day after the Paris attacks, to pick up an old copy of The New Yorker and find James Wood’s remarkable review of the works of Primo Levi. “Evil is not the absence of the good, as theology and philosophy sometimes maintained," Wood writes of Levi’s Auschwitz memoir, If This is a Man. "It is the invention of the bad." Levi's "clarity is ontological and moral: these things happened, a victim witnessed them, and they must never be erased or forgotten.” Primo Levi never became 17451, the identity tattooed on him at Auschwitz. The insistence on remembering, no matter how horrific the memory; the assertion of one small human voice in response to unspeakable evil; the affirmation of the significance of each one of us – this, for me, is the legacy of the holocaust. And it is this that ISIS is intent on obliterating. Look at its short and ghastly history filled with: the destruction of antiquities and cultural icons; the extermination of the Yazidis and other peoples; the enslavement and rape of women; the mass executions in Tikrit, the bombings in Beirut, the killing spree in Paris. Each of these acts is intentionally indiscriminate, aimed not just at physical murder but at eradicating memory, destroying cultural identity, denying our common humanity.
We must not become complicit, either in demands for indiscriminate retaliation in which innocents are killed or in retreating from the world. “The business of living,” wrote Levi, “is the best defense against death, even in the camps.”
Next time we will return to the Climate and Energy series.
This morning I sit on a rock at high tide, watching the pyrotechnic dance of the sun’s rays on the water.Looking out the Western Way, between the Manset shore and Great Cranberry Island, I watch lobster boats glide soundlessly in the distance and wonder at the ability of gulls to float sideways in the air.
Soon I will pack my car and leave this place. It’s time. Solitude begets, at least in me, the need for the energy of city life. That, in time, will produce again the need for the quiet place I’m leaving, and I’ll return. Perhaps a congenital discontent has bred this errant life, but I think it’s simply the natural pull between action and reflection, between immersion and refuge, between the search for adventure and the desire to be safe.
“In a world inclined toward chaos,” wrote Kenneth Lockridge of 17th-century Dedham, Massachusetts, “the most men could hope for was a stable life in a small community.” But one man’s chaos is another’s opportunity, and the ensuing 400 years of American history can be read as the tension between our two most powerful myths: the quest for community, where neighbors watch over each other; and the pull of an individualism that calls us to flee the suffocating conformity of those places and “light out for the territory ahead of the rest.”
“And the end of all our exploring,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Who wrote the following? A. “Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. . . .These insurgents are incompetent at governing and unwilling to be governed. But they are not a spontaneous growth. It took a thousand small betrayals of conservatism to get to the dysfunction we see all around.”
B. “For Putin, it’s clear where the weakness lies: in the White House. . . . the cost of [Obama’s] Doctrine of Restraint has been very high. How high we do not yet know, but the world is more dangerous than in recent memory.”
The answers are:
A. David Brooks, The New York Times’ thoughtful conservative columnist, wrote The Republicans’ Incompetence Caucus, a sharp criticism of the current GOP.
B. Roger Cohen, the paper’s thoughtful liberal columnist, wrote Obama’s Doctrine of Restraint, a strong critique of the administration’s foreign policy. He followed it with Obama’s What Next?, in which he wrote: “Syria is the American sin of omission par excellence, a diabolical complement to the American sin of commission in Iraq – two nations now on the brink of becoming ex-nations.”
While three columns do not make a trend, I sense a shift in press commentary from reflexive partisanship to more reflective analysis, an effort to reclaim the media’s role to stimulate serious thinking, rather than whip up parochial prejudices. A good columnist isn’t always predictable.
Despite all the rumors of its demise, America is still “a city upon a hill,” which, at least until recently, proudly called itself a nation of immigrants.
Read MoreQuestion: What's the difference between a refugee and an immigrant?
Read MoreIn his famous 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin used the metaphor of a pasture in which all farmers are free to graze their cattle. “Each man,” he wrote, “is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” Six years later he produced “Lifeboat Ethics,” which is unflinching in its misanthropy and yet has been much on my mind. Using the metaphor of a lifeboat, Hardin argues that it is suicidal for those in the boat to respond from the heart – because those still in the water will eventually overwhelm and sink the boat. “Complete justice. Complete catastrophe.”
While Hardin would surely resonate with many of our presidential candidates, it is in Europe where his argument and his imagery seem most poignant – where images of boats crammed with desperate people and a small Syrian boy dead on a beach have moved many to tears but, with hundreds of thousands in or heading toward Europe, produced few ideas about what to do.
As Germany prepares for 800,000 refugees and Hungary builds a 110-mile fence, we watch, from afar, the unfolding of one of the most agonizing stories of our time. For someone who has recently been in a lifeboat, Hardin’s image will not go away.
Now that we’re making progress on the flag issue, let’s turn to the gun: a .45-caliber Glock, probably the Glock 37, which “delivers power-packed performance in a standard framed handgun.” It’s one of 300 million guns in America, the world’s most heavily armed nation. Dylann Roof, who would have been carded for cigarettes or alcohol, had no trouble getting a Glock. But the political outcry against the Confederate battle flag has had no counterpart in guns. Indeed, as an NRA board member pointed out, there weren’t enough guns in that church. "Eight of [Clementa Pinckney’s] church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church,” wrote Charles Cotton, “are dead." That pastor has blood on his hands.
This is the same NRA, Steven Rosenfeld wrote, that, before it got hijacked by fanatical absolutists, not only supported rational gun regulations but actually helped write them. I can’t be sure because unlike Justice Scalia I wasn’t there at the time, but it’s hard to imagine that today’s gun-brandishing vigilantes are the founding fathers’ idea of “a well regulated militia.”
In his absurdly hilarious video, Jim Jefferies, the Australian comic, noted that, after the 1996 massacre at Port Arthur, which left 35 dead and 23 wounded, his government got serious about gun control. Before Port Arthur, there had been a mass killing every year for a decade. There haven't been any since.
But our politicians aren’t afraid of guns; they're scared of the gun lobby. So they’re keeping their heads down.