Origins

Love on the Gringo Trail

~ John ~ Leave a comment
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A dust-mote among all the personal rearrangements we’re are all having to suck up, given the bigger things going on right now, is that today Beret and I were scheduled to embark on a seven-week pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, walking 500 miles across northern Spain. 

I’m not Catholic, or even much of a Christian, but pilgrimage has always held a romantic appeal for me.  Beret and I met in college in a literature class on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  The class was tedious; we spent almost the entire semester laboriously dissecting small piece of the text.  But I remember fondly Chaucer’s Middle English wit and cadence, chronicling the ancient ritual of travelers taking to the road as March turns to April, seeking the “holy blissful martyr” who “holpen them when they were seeke.”  And along the way, they rested at inns, passing the time by telling each other tales.

Few of us are on any physical roads at present, but we are nevertheless on a kind of journey.  So to pass the time, I’ll tell you a tale of Mexico, the place I first learned to love.

In 1982, upon graduating into the Colorado oil recession, I headed down to El Paso and walked across the border.  I arrived a brittle young man, spouting Marx and Joyce but underneath it all afraid of my own shadow.  Mexico broke me open.  I first found my way to Tulum, in those days an empty stretch of beach with a few thatched huts clustered around a soapy communal well, next to a Mayan village just beginning to cater to the trickle of tourists arriving by bus from the barely-opened new resort of Cancún, a hundred miles up the coast.  I stayed there two weeks, sleeping in a hammock.  Once a Mexican policeman patrolling the beach caught my friend sunbathing nude – he had to pay a $7 bribe from a wallet he’d buried in the sand.  Only then would the cop let him put his swimsuit back on.  But otherwise we felt utterly safe.  I spent the next four months wandering the ruins in Yucatán and Chiapas, knocking around bookstores and cafes in Mexico City, taking an ancient Pullman train from Mazatlán to the border, and sleeping in the desert south of Mexicali before crossing back at Calexico.  I’d spent less than $1000, learned basic Spanish, kept parental expectations at bay, and let Mexico work its medicine on my gringo soul.

But the next year was when the charm truly took hold, when Beret and I were first in Guadalajara together.   Of course falling in love is intoxicating.  But Mexico smelled of everything my world did not.  Cinnamon and tortillas, diesel smoke and newspaper, shoeshine and forgiveness.  You could walk all evening on the cobbled and cloistered streets until the rats gorged on your footsteps.  And the city’s great public buildings featured, not the old cloistered portraits of Catholicism, but the towering murals of Orozco.    

Mexico has always celebrated “mixture” — of food, of races, of cultures, of ideas – but that word does no justice to the actual process.  To truly “mix” the heart is to break apart, to surrender one’s self to the stone and slab of greater forces, and to emerge as someone else.   Mexico has been ground, like a good chocolate mole, from indigenous, Spanish, French, and gringo influences for hundreds of years, into one of the world’s richest cultures.   We who disrespect – even fear – Mexico have no concept of our loss.  

Still, when you’re in in love like I was, that March in Guadalajara 36 years ago, you don’t really grind.  You burn.  Every time I looked out my balcony window overlooking the old square and saw Beret come around the corner in her sky blue blouse, watched her cross the cobbled street, heard her voice echo in the stone entryway below, I burned.  Like Orozco’s “Man on Fire”, below.  I burned.   

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Impeachment as Soulcraft

~ John ~ Leave a comment

Well, it’s all over but the shouting.  And it turns out that shouting is all it would ever be.

In the view of many, impeachment was a fool’s errand, useless or worse, further emboldening the president, forcing his party to demonstrate the depth of its feckless fealty, and supercharging our polar politics to the point of electrocution.  With a result so starkly bleak, and so quixotically foretold, what can we possibly have gained?

Surely not knowledge.  Everything we saw on display we knew, or should have known, already.  Our politics are marketed so precisely as mold to us like second skins, which once worn, are impossible to peel.  As a result our democracy, once a contest of ideas, is increasingly one of identities.  The political implications of this are ruthless and dire.  When majority rule is no longer a matter of persuasion but of population, its ideal type is no longer Athens – it is Rwanda.

So there is some symmetry to the warring tribes ringed around the pugilists of the impeachment trial. But as I listened to them – and to the nightly reverberations from MSNBC, CNN and Fox – of course I heard different versions of the facts: but beyond that, contrasting stories about America.  Around the turn of the millennium, Eric Foner published “The Story of American Freedom,” which traced the concept from the days when colonists yearning for “freedom” described their relationship to Britain as “slavery” even though they themselves owned slaves.  Freedom has always been a contested, crooked, broken thread weaving through the fabric of American history. 

In the post-World-War-II era, two divided paradigms of freedom have dominated our politics: the conservative ideas of freedom as free enterprise and American international supremacy, and the liberal ideas of political liberalization, civil rights, and economic justice.  These paradigms have been our yin and yang, always in contention, sometimes — at our moments of greatest achievement — in alignment, but never truly at war.  Until, perhaps, today.

Today Republicans openly embrace an authoritarian leader and a lockstep party structure on the grounds that it is good for the short-term economy.  They champion native-born privilege at the expense of the historic immigrant narrative, thus reserving American freedom as a privilege for its citizens only and sacrificing the universalistic concept of America as an idea.  They enable and excuse a president who admires and emulates dictators.

Democrats, in turn, champion a politics of identity that emphasizes difference over unity, regulation over opportunity, centralization over autonomy, taxation over economic liberalization.  The farther Donald Trump moves to the right, the American left moves in equal and opposite reaction.  The more conservatives fuel economic inequality, the more Democrats demand a wealth tax.

And between them, a small group of civil servants.  Members of the national security establishment, the diplomatic corps, the administration itself.  Professionals who have served the nation under Democrats and Republicans, and who have seen how these ideas grind together where the rubber meets the road.   Who know that, to keep the struggle from turning into complete chaos, there are boundaries to be respected.  Rules of law.  Norms of integrity.  Standards of practice.  And if these are lost, so are we.  They stood up and objected to Trump’s Ukraine dealings, not out of political calculus, or because they thought they could win.  But because they had to.  Because they knew that the boundaries were at stake, and if they didn’t defend them, nobody would.  I supported impeachment because I stand with them. 

We are entering a phase of our history in which there will be less and less middle ground.  I deeply value free enterprise and individual autonomy.  But if forced to choose, I value democracy and justice more.  And if forced to stand up and be counted, I will do so, because the alternative is to accede to the twilight of authoritarianism that is eclipsing the globe, country by country and year by year, as we speak.   

The impeachment trial, and the election this fall, are ultimately about those differing ideas of freedom.  The Senate ultimately succumbed to the idea that whether presidents should be subject to rule of law and justice is now a question open for debate, to be decided by the electorate.  American voters will be asked the question again and again, through the primaries and the general election.  I don’t think there’s any such thing as asking the question too often right now.  If the current trends continue, we may miss it.

God Bless Us Everyone!

~ John ~ Leave a comment

For those not already convinced of my hopeless sentimentality, here’s the most damning evidence yet: I’m a lifelong Charles Dickens fan.  My defense is that – especially at Christmas – we historicize Dickens as this smarmy old chap like something from a painting of dogs playing billiards.  In fact, he was the Bernie Sanders of his age.

So on this unquiet solstice, let me conjure three of Scrooge’s ghosts that Dickens might select, were he alive to consider our world at the turning of this year.  For the ghost of Christmas Past, a President laid out for his state funeral; for Christmas Present, a child starved to a leathered skeleton in a Yemeni hospital; and for Christmas Future, the blue-gloved hand of a rescue worker protruding from a charred sedan in Paradise, clutching fragments of bone.

Even in death, Dickens wouldn’t romanticize the presidential policies of Bush the Elder.   George the First would get the sharp end of a merciless caricature no Dana Carvey could touch.  But in old age Bush’s personal decency would be sticking out like the knobby elbows and kneecaps of an old man in a nightshirt.   As a ghost, he’d rise from his coffin, an Uncle Sam from the old recruiting poster, his long bony finger pointing, pointing, pointing everywhere, so many things askew to point at, so many missions overlooked, unstarted, bickered to a useless draw.

As Bush’s coffin is drawn off on a caisson hauled by a spectral team of black horses, the Yemeni child limps into view, her skeletal fingers reaching up to take my fleshy hand.  “Where are you leading me?” I ask, as we walk into a featureless horizon filled with blinding white light.  “This is the place of no more choices,” she responds.  “Every choice is the cancellation of another choice.  Every road has been traveled. They all lead here.”  I look around.  Everything is sunlight, but there is no sun, no shadow, no direction.  Only more and more children, starving, looking at me.  They are whispering the words “never again”, over and over, in many languages, Yiddish, Khmer, Spanish, Rwandese, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and a hundred thousand dialects lost to time, syllables blending like a breeze, then a wind, screaming at the top of their voiceless lungs the single word forever. Then silence, and dark.

Out of which comes a blackness, of which Dickens himself wrote: “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, as one might imagine, for the death of the sun.”  Dickens roamed London by night, and if he were to walk the streets of Paradise he would smell its ghosts rising from the sooty mud.  And a thousand other smells: collections of 1970s LPs, burned; dashboards of old cars, burned; bookshelves filled with “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Atlas Shrugged,” burned; leveraged home equity and inadequate 401Ks, burned; a generation raised to believe its works would be the flower of civilization, burned.

Because the real point of “A Christmas Carol” is to force us — the Scrooges of the ruling class — to stare on Christmas Eve into our own graves.

And for what? At the pealing of bells, Scrooge rises from his bed to send the largest turkey to the home of the Cratchits and then walk out to greet his neighbors on a bright Christmas morning.  And here’s where the book makes its delicate pirouette, so often confused with smarm.  The thing that saves Scrooge’s soul is the mere delight that he is alive — the pleasure in life itself.  And realizing this, his gratitude overflows, and he cannot stop laughing.  “For he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter at the outset; and knowing such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms.”

You could say that, having conjured up this horror, to conclude with laughter is an offense, if not a sacrilege.  But laughter, honestly found and felt, is the orgasmic eruption of a deeper human love.  And that’s my best hope and wish for you, at the turning of this year.