Reclaiming our Country

Like many others, I experience the tension that Welsh poet Edward Thomas noted between the desire to ‘go on and on over the earth’ and the desire ‘to settle for ever in one place,’ words I recently came across in Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane’s extraordinary book about the intimate connections between language and place. The words struck me because I have reached an age when wandering is increasingly difficult and often lonely, but settling forever seems like giving up. So on I go. Lately I’ve been musing about where I might go if Donald Trump should get elected president. I find the idea unthinkable, and yet I realize it’s possible, despite the fact that each time the man opens his mouth he discloses an emptiness of spirit, a disdain for truth and a capacity for self-glory that is simply unfathomable – reminiscent of Mussolini, “the master of make-believe,” in the words of Luigi Barzini, who “could not help being corrupted by his own spectacle.”

Mussolini once asked an ambassador who had just returned from a conference on poison gas, which gasses were the most dangerous. “Incense is the most lethal of all, your excellency,” the old man answered.

I’ll keep wandering. But the Trumpean spectacle – its bombastic language so alien to the America I want for my grandchildren – has reminded me how strongly rooted I am in this land. That we have enabled a man so unfit to get so close to the presidency is a testament to our carelessness. It’s time to reclaim our country.

Colin Kaepernick and Me

Colin Kaepernick didn’t stand up for the national anthem Friday. Now he’s told to find another country. I was teaching middle school when I stopped pledging allegiance to the flag. I didn’t make a scene. I stood up straight and faced the flag, for I have nothing against the flag (except when worn mindlessly on politicians’ lapels); it’s the pledge I don’t understand.

It all began at a Rotary breakfast, when our new president told us we were saying the pledge all wrong. “It’s not,” he explained, “one nation (pause) under God. It’s one nation (no pause) under God.” And he had us practice it until we got it right.

I knew this was baloney. The pledge had been written in 1892 (by a socialist minister, no less), but the words “under God” weren’t added until 1954, when we were in a global war with godless communism, and God was on our side.

Our Rotary president, as it happened, worked for our state representative (now Congressman), a staunch member of the evangelical right, and I realized that, for me at least, the Pledge of Allegiance had become a loyalty oath, something I have always associated with totalitarian governments.

“I don’t believe in loyalty oaths,” I told my students, who asked why I stood silent. “So I’ve given up saying this one.”

Kaepernick’s gesture may have lacked the grand drama of Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ black-gloved salutes at the 1968 Olympics, but in an era when corporate political donations constitute free speech, his invocation of the First Amendment is a breath of fresh air.

Instead of Blowing It Up, Let’s Fix It

In his epilogue to “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart,” Scott Anderson writes:  “On a more philosophical level, this journey has served to remind me again of how terribly delicate is the fabric of civilization, of the vigilance required to protect it and of the slow and painstaking work of mending it once it has been torn. This is hardly an original thought; it is a lesson we were supposed to have learned after Nazi Germany, after Bosnia and Rwanda. Perhaps it is a lesson we need to constantly relearn.”

Maybe it’s a matter of age. When I was younger, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, just out of the army, maybe then I was willing to “blow it all up.” Vietnam. Selma. Nixon. George Wallace. Mayor Daley. Kent State. Two Kennedys and King. It was time for a revolution. “No matter who you vote for,” read the graffiti on the Ann Arbor Bank, “the rich always win.”

On Aug. 24, 1970, a bomb set by anti-war radicals at the University of Wisconsin killed Robert Fassnacht, a young graduate student and father of three, who was working late in his lab. Blowing it all up wasn’t an inspiring slogan any more.

The fabric of civilization is more than a veneer for exploitation. It’s the guardian of culture. Not art and music only, but all the attributes of a people – their cooking, their clothes, their icons, their stories. Those who want to blow it all up want to annihilate the nuances that make us unique. They understand that diversity is the enemy of conformity, that self-expression is speaking truth to power, that our civilization, however imperfect, is our defense against the demagogue.

The answer to what ails America is not the simple slogan of blowing it all up. It’s the hard work of fixing it.

Should We Just Blow It All Up?

A reader responds to The Potemkin Don: “One could say this [emptiness] is true of all politicians in the modern era. Agendas are biased to the lobby efforts they are tied to. Look at Obama. The guy has done a decent job on many fronts but ran on an agenda that doesn’t reflect his actual presidency. Things change when you arrive in Washington because control and direction are not your own. At a minimum, regardless of how bad Trump is, this could be the only way to completely throw Congress and the Senate into a 180 and change things for decades to come. . . .I would hate to have my kids, aged 7 and 8, think Trump embodies what it means to be president, but equally, how do I explain to them Hillary and all the favors she will need to fulfill when she gets there?”

I find this response challenging and chilling – and I wonder: How many others feel the same way? Polls show two deeply disliked candidates: 53.5% of voters view Clinton unfavorably; Trump fares worse at 61.8%.

“None of the above,” I often hear. Does that mean it makes no difference who’s elected?

I disagree with the writer, and I will explain why later, but first I’d like to get input from you, the readers – and in particular, young readers.

Have we reached the point in America, where the best we can hope for is to blow things up and start again? If so, how did we get here? When did it start? In what ways is the country – or at least its political (and corporate?) leadership – so much worse than a decade ago? Two decades ago? Fifty years ago?

Look around America, and then look around the world. Is ours a failed government . . . even a failed country? What will it take to fix it? And what are you willing to risk to do so?

And how will you choose on November 8th?

I welcome your thoughts – but no diatribes, please.

There But for Fortune

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong." H.L. Mencken. Despite losing $14 million last quarter, The New York Times produced on Sunday the kind of in-depth journalism that is disappearing from newsrooms around the world. “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart,” Scott Anderson’s 18-month-in-the-making article on the disintegration of the Middle East, is a remarkable tribute to one newspaper’s determination to stick to its mission in hard times. There are a number of reasons for the decline of newspapers. Many are self-inflicted, but more dangerous now are the constant and gratuitous assaults on the press from politicians who despise transparency. We need a strong and free press.

The second lesson I took away from the article is how disastrous has been the West’s refusal to grasp the diverse histories and cultures of the Middle East’s people. We continue to lump all Muslims and Arabs together, to seek simple solutions to terrorism, like “carpet-bomb[ing] them into oblivion,” and to pat ourselves on the back for our “priceless gift” of liberation to the Iraqi people. We need leaders who understand complexity.

The third lesson is how quickly things can change. We are easily lulled into the belief that our lives are on a predictable path into a foreseeable future. And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, our familiar world is upended. For many in the Middle East that’s become the new normal – a life in which the past has been obliterated and the future reduced to getting through today. We need to take responsibility for our part in making that so.

The Fix is Out

Recently, three federal appeals courts, in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Texas, affirmed what Republican state legislatures have barely even tried to conceal – that voter identification laws hurriedly imposed in the wake of Barack Obama’s election had one purpose: the disenfranchisement of poor and minority voters whose singular offense is to vote largely for Democrats. Critics have long maintained that the laws were a partisan solution to a non-existent problem. The most comprehensive investigation reviewed one billion ballots and found 31 credible cases of fraud. “Election fraud happens,” wrote the study’s author – citing vote buying, coercion, fake registration forms, voting from the wrong address, ballot box stuffing by local officials – but ID laws aren’t aimed at preventing those things. They’re after something else.

“[B]ecause of race,” wrote Judge Diana Motz of the 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals, “the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history."

But last month’s decisions have created a new problem for at least one candidate. The system is “rigged,” announced Donald Trump. “People are going to walk in, they are going to vote 10 times maybe. Who knows?”

No, they’re not going to vote 10 times, but they are now more likely to vote once – and these are folks who don’t like the Republican nominee very much. A recent poll, for example, found him getting 1% (!) of the black vote; another pegged his unfavorability rating among black voters at 94%.

So it seems the system is a little less “rigged” than it was a month ago.

War on Coal

Increasingly absent in the bombast and bizarre behavior of this campaign is a discussion of issues that separate the candidates and their parties – issues that once defined the boundaries of political debate. I’d like to examine some of them in upcoming posts. First up: energy and the environment.

When I traveled through the Rust Belt last month, people talked of the “war on coal” in very personal terms. Since the 19^th century, coal had been the engine that drove the steel industry that provided jobs and prosperity. Now coal is under attack, the mills have closed and the jobs are gone, victims, I was told, of environmental over-regulation and cheap foreign competition. Sixty years ago, for example, the steel industry employed over 13,000 full-time workers in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, alone. Today, 500 are left.

Those jobs are not coming back, a retired newspaper editor told me. “Natural gas, not regulators, killed the coal industry,” he said, and almost three-quarters of the steel used in the U.S. is still produced in the U.S., “just not here.”

And we forget, too, the horrendous cost of coal: miners’ short lives and black lungs, dark clouds of filthy air, streams of undrinkable water – and the removal of entire mountaintops, perhaps the single most destructive industrial practice ever conceived.

We need to move beyond arguments that pit the economy against the environment, beyond treating the earth as a pit from which to rip resources and a cesspool into which to dump waste. As a nation, we need to move beyond coal, but not without investing in the lives of those people and families who produce it.