As I look at the Republican primary with fear and loathing and the Democrats with unenthusiastic resignation, it’s tempting to retire from the field and throw darts from the sidelines, to become mesmerized by the media coverage and disengaged from the process.
Read More“I am an invisible man . . . invisible, understand simply because people refuse to see me” (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man). On the train heading north beneath Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, the woman slumped across two seats, clutching her belongings in her arms, three more paper bags on the floor below. She wore a ragged winter coat, and her eyes were closed as she slept, oblivious to the rest of us in the crowded car. It’s an all-too-familiar sight on New York subways, particularly on winter nights when the cars provide refuge and a little warmth for some of the city’s homeless. Standing above her, a tall African-American man prepared to get off at the next stop. When the doors opened, he reached over, put a $20 bill inside her coat and wordlessly left the train. No one saw his act except me. The woman slept on, and I imagined her waking up, perhaps at the end of the line, and finding the money hidden in her coat.
I don’t know whether this single act of kindness made much of a dent in the woman’s life, let alone in the matter of New York’s homelessness, now at its highest level since the Great Depression, with an estimated one in every 147 New Yorkers currently homeless. Nor do I know how many other acts of kindness were happening across the city. All I know is that the world seemed a kinder, more hopeful place.
Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He that showed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise (Luke 10:36-7).
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.
Really?
On New York’s Upper West Side, just beyond the 392-foot bell tower of Riverside Church, two graves watch over each other. One, Grant’s Tomb, is the largest mausoleum in North America. In it lie the remains of the 18th president and his wife Julia. Ulysses S. Grant was the victor in the bloodiest war in American history. Above the tomb’s entrance are the words: “Let Us Have Peace.”
Read MoreBecause Donald Trump is a buffoon does not mean we should continue treating him as a joke. I’m no longer interested in trying to plumb the shallows of his mind. We don’t need to know the causes of his psychopathic narcissism, nor should we care what turned him into a bully. He is a man who will say anything because he believes in nothing – and takes no responsibility for his words. Like every aspiring demagogue, he feeds on scapegoats and thrives on the damage he begets.
Neither he nor his message is new in American history. Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 to protect us from immigration and free speech, and three decades later, passed the Indian Removal Act, which led to the Trail of Tears. We have endured Know Nothings and Dixiecrats, the Palmer Raids after World War I and George Corley Wallace. South Carolina gave us “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, a rich Populist who built a mass movement of “Red Shirts” with his message of violence and racial terror; and Wisconsin gave us a cowardly, prevaricating, destructive blowhard named Senator Joe McCarthy.
But no one has come so close to being the presidential nominee of a major party, whose leaders are now debating whether to oppose him or embrace him. They’re worried he’ll destroy the party. But what about the country?
“Make America Great Again.” How’s he doing so far?
To paraphrase the man who brought McCarthy down, “At long last, have we no sense of decency?”
Buckminster Fuller, an enormously influential thinker in the mid-20th century has fallen from view in recent decades, but a reader thinks he can, at least philosophically, help us understand the issues around energy and climate change: After reading an old New Yorker profile of R. Buckminster Fuller, the following Fuller insights seem particularly relevant to bridging the current divide over climate change and formulating appropriate local and global responses.
Any justice who upholds my right to burn the American flag can’t be all bad, and, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg showed us, Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday, could be your personal friend even as he was your ideological foe (“I love him, but sometimes I’d like to strangle him”), which is exactly how it should be in a republic. A man of great intellect and wit, who defended with integrity what was in truth a very narrow vision of the Constitution and the country, Scalia also bears some responsibility for the partisanship and incivility that are strangling the public discourse. I think his embrace of “original intent” (the belief that the meaning of the Constitution was set at its creation) was more nuanced than either his apologists or his critics contend, but in the end it simply underestimates the founding fathers he claimed to revere, men trying desperately to hold together a confederation on the edge of dissolution. They disagreed deeply about the composition of the new nation – and since they didn’t agree, it’s improbable they thought they could speak with certainty for unborn generations. They had lived through times of tumultuous change, and when they looked around America, they did not yet see heaven on earth. They knew that some issues could only be resolved when the nation had matured. One – the “slavery question” – would take the Civil War to settle.
“[T]he multiple ambiguities embedded in the Constitution made it an inherently ‘living’ document,” writes Joseph Ellis in The Quartet, his exceptional collective biography of Washington, Madison, Hamilton and John Jay. “For it was designed not to offer clear answers to the [state or national] sovereignty question (or, for that matter, the scope of executive or judicial authority) but instead to provide a political arena in which arguments about those contested issues could continue in a deliberative fashion. The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution. For judicial devotees of ‘originalism’ or ‘original intent,’ this should be a disarming insight, since it made the Constitution the foundation for an ever-shifting dialogue that, like history itself, was an argument without end" (p. 172).
The Constitution, Jefferson insisted, is not “too sacred to be touched.” Its brilliance is that it provides an architecture for governance and a process for resolving issues deliberatively and reasonably. Judging by Saturday night’s debate, it has its work cut out for it.
If you’re wondering how a socialist who touts countries with the world’s highest tax rates and a demagogue who appeals to people’s ugliest instincts continue to be their parties’ presidential frontrunners, consider this: The United States ranks dead last among well-off countries in income and wealth inequality and close to the bottom in job creation and economic mobility, according to a just-published report by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. Among its findings, the U.S: “has a distinctively anemic safety net and distinctively unequal distribution of wealth;” “performs poorly in domains that have historically been regarded as its strengths,” such as job creation; “fails to deliver on its long-standing commitment to . . . high mobility;” and “is starkly at variance with our reputation as the land of opportunity.”
This is not the America we venerate at Super Bowl games and Rotary Club breakfasts; nor the one we learn about in schoolbooks. That exceptional America has left the building, replaced by one “where the birth lottery matters more. . .than in most well-off countries.”
And yet we’re still inside, clinging to the myths on which we were nurtured, wearing our American flag lapel pins, cheering patriotic speeches, thanking veterans for their service, asking God to continue blessing us – and dismissing the possibility that Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump could ever get nominated, let alone elected, president of the United States. While millions of Americans, across all spectrums, are experiencing the gulf between the America of their dreams and the reality of their lives.
Some things are worth waiting for. My son Jake sent me an announcement of the successful efforts of 26 indigenous tribes, five timber companies and four environmental groups to protect the magnificent 12,000-square-mile Great Bear Rainforest on British Columbia’s Pacific coast. The negotiations were arduous, and they took 10 years.
Read MoreWhen I last visited Flint, Michigan, in 2012, I wrote in American Apartheid: “Flint belies our image of urban decay. With no high-rise projects, it is a city of tree-lined neighborhoods of single-family houses where 200,000 people once lived, and half that number remains. But on those streets are hundreds of abandoned and burned-out houses, which remind you that Flint is the most violent city in America.” Flint is back in the news, this time because, in April 2014, its state-appointed emergency manager switched the source of the city’s water to the Flint River to save money. The water was cheap because it was filthy, and the complaints began immediately. Soon the city was telling its residents to boil their water before drinking it, and General Motors stopped using it altogether because it corroded engine parts. But the state government ignored the growing health crisis until it became a full-blown political disaster.
Flint is where environmental degradation meets social neglect. For over five decades the city, the birthplace of General Motors, has suffered the all-too-familiar urban pattern of disinvestment, depopulation and decay, unemployment, poverty and crime.
For a long time in this country, the environmental and social justice movements ran on separate tracks, focusing on different wildernesses. But it’s increasingly clear – from climate change to Flint’s water supply – that the first victims are the same: the poorest and most vulnerable, those who can neither move nor get out of the way. When governments deliberately abandon those people, it seems a betrayal of democracy.
• Sir: I read with interest your report that Jeb Bush is paying $2,888 per vote. I work among men who have long provided those services for free, and we’re wondering if Mr. Bush pays that sum for each recorded vote, or just once per person.
Sincerely,
J.D. “Digger” Blagden, Jr.
Cook County Cemetery
• Defenders of James Buchanan and Bush 43 objected to my singling out the two gentlemen for censure (one pointing to Bill Clinton’s “thievery, lasciviousness, abuse of power and deceit”). First, I didn’t mean they were the only bad presidents. One thinks of Chester A. Arthur, Warren G. Harding and the two Andrews, Jackson and Johnson – and what to make of Millard Fillmore? – all of whom America survived. But I do believe that at least one criterion for evaluating a president is the state of the country at the end of his tenure – and on that score it would be hard to do worse than 1860, as Buchanan dithered on slavery while the country hurtled toward war, and 2008, after the work of the Bush-Cheney domestic and international wrecking crew. (Well, maybe there’s also a place for Mr. Hoover.)
• Dear Gillespie, wrong Epistle: 1 Corinthians 15:52: “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”
• II Corinthians 3:17: It’s not two Corinthians, moron. It’s eleven Corinthians. @realDonaldTrump
Correction: A reader noted that my number of Democratic caucus goers was off by 171,109, which is embarrassing. Iowa Democrats, however, do seem to have an odd way both of counting voters and recording votes.
Such is the state of Iowa, where 183,410 Republicans and 1,398(!) Democrats just reset the entire 2016 presidential race.
Read MoreIt’s a story of courage and kindness, friendship and competence.
Read MoreFast forward to 2018. President Trump is giving a tour of his new wall. Surprisingly, he decided to build the northern one first. “We call it ‘Cruz Control,’” he said. “No more Cubano-Canadian presidential candidates sneaking down here. Everybody hates them.
“We’ll deal with the Mexican border later,” he added. “Right now we need the workers because of my huge business boom that's coming.”
Trump Construction, a subsidiary of The Trump Organization, built the wall, and much of its 5,525-mile length sits on land Trump Real Estate acquired through the recently expanded power of eminent domain.
“I couldn’t wait around for the thousands of pathetic negotiations,” Trump said. “I’m a leader. I do deals, and I needed to get this deal done.”
When Canada declined to pay for the wall, the Trump companies filed for Chapter 11 under the newly expanded bankruptcy law provision known as “the billionaires’ bailout,” which provides government-backed insurance for investors deemed too great to fail.
“That stupid kid [Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau] wouldn’t even negotiate,” fumed Trump. “What a loser.”
Trudeau noted that the logo-emblazoned Trump Tower Tollbooths make it harder for Americans to cross into Canada to get affordable health care.
Asked why he hadn’t put his business holdings in a blind trust – or at least stepped down as Trump chairman – the president responded, “Are you kidding? I’m a businessman, not a politician. I'm not missing out on the greatest eight business years in history.
“What conflict of interest?
“I put the me in America.”
Let’s review this morning’s news. In Harney County, Oregon, Ammon Bundy, his brother and six other people involved in the 24-day occupation of Malheur Wildlife Refuge were arrested; one man was hospitalized; and LaVoy Finicum, the Arizona rancher who had announced he wouldn’t be taken alive, was killed. The heavily armed Citizens for Constitutional Freedom came to the facility, which Bundy called “the tool to do all the tyranny” (it's managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) to demand the return of federal lands to “local control.” It’s probably worth noting that none of those arrested come from Harney County. In fact, none even live in Oregon. Governor Kate Brown, the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association and most local residents told the protesters to go home.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has pulled out of Thursday’s Republican debate because Megyn Kelly doesn’t like him. But he's found someone who does: former state Senator Jake Knotts will endorse Trump later today in Lexington, SC. Knotts is the guy who said of then-candidate, now-governor Nikki Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, “We got a raghead in Washington, we don’t need a raghead in the State House.”
It’s time to speak up against people brandishing guns in the name of freedom, wrapping themselves in the Constitution to commit crimes, and spewing racist hatred to protest political correctness – and it’s time to stop treating the politicians who fan these flames as a joke.
The silent majority, I keep hearing, stands with Trump. I’m betting the silent majority stands with me.
“Anthro-Skeptic” raised some hackles by questioning the human impact on climate change. Remember, though, he wasn’t denying either the reality or the severity of climate change (that's reserved for Republican Congresspeople and office seekers); and he was arguing from science, however much a minority view, not polemics. He may be wrong, but one of the primary obstacles to discussing this issue is that ideology seems inevitably to trump (if you’ll pardon the expression) science.
Read MoreWith the announcement that 2015 was by far the hottest year on record – soaring past defending champion 2014 – it’s time to check in on our “Climate and Energy” series. To refresh: the series seeks to foster a discussion that rises above the heated rhetoric “to define the issues and, more importantly, propose solutions.” I am not, as they say, a scientist, but I have long worked with scientists, and it seems clear that something is happening up there. The great majority of scientists believe that humans play a major role in the problem, but I have an old scientific friend who is not convinced.
“It should be remembered in all the flak, rhetoric, and hand waving now with us that the assortment of mechanisms and their mutual interactions that drive these cycles is still far from clear. It is also far from clear the extent to which anthropogenic activity over the last 250 years has exacerbated the process.
“No question about global warming, but it is sun-driven, not man-made. The big question is how much anthropogenic CO2 produced compared to terragenic CO2 produced as oceans warm, reducing solubility of CO2 in water. I am swinging to idea that anthropogenic is a butterfly belch compared to terragenic.”
This is no small difference of opinion, as it demands that we focus on adapting ourselves to inevitable warming, rather than on bending the natural world to our will.
Join the conversation.
Find this series on my website, where you will also find the other two 2015 series, “Rescue at Sea” and “Refugees.”
“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away” (Psalm 90, verse 10). Last evening a woman offered me her seat on the subway – the #2 uptown express, which I had pressed onto at Times Square.
“Would you like to sit down?” she said, standing and coming forward as if to help me to her seat. It was impossible to pretend she meant someone else, although I didn’t have a cane, I wasn’t wheezing and I try not to stoop.
“No, thank you,” I murmured, gripping the pole, with a look that led her to say, “I hope I didn’t offend you” as she retook her seat.
She had features and an accent that could have been out of the Middle East (or southern Europe), and she was of an age, although younger than mine, that I still dream about dating, a fantasy I am now reexamining.
When she went back to her iPhone, I looked furtively at the window. I didn’t think I looked that old.
“How did I get to be so old?” my mother once asked me, and the answer, of course, is because she was lucky, although, at the time, she didn’t see it that way.
Aging is a funny business. We know it’s coming, and yet we aren’t ready for it, and the truth is that, while we are all one day closer to our death than we were yesterday, we also have one more day to live.
I’ll likely never see that kind woman (and her New York immigrant values) again, but I’m standing taller today, and grateful I still can.
“So teach us," the psalm continues, “to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (verse 12).