Politics

Me, Two

~ John ~ 6 Comments

In the “where were you during the Kavanaugh hearings” sweepstakes, I’ll have a unique entry: sitting in our AirBnB in Chiapas, Mexico, clawing like a crazed rodent at the crappy signal on my iPhone.  The Mayan cybergods did grant me a short window to watch Dr. Ford’s testimony, and to profoundly identify with her story.  But my reactions did not end there.  There are things about Judge Kavanaugh’s story too that paradoxically resonate with mine.

First, Dr. Ford’s story.  For her imprecise surrounding details, my shrouds of misty memory clouding that bright summer when I was five.  For her sudden island of crisply focused memory as she climbed the stairs and was pushed into the side bedroom, an itinerant gardener’s invitation for me to enter the little shed in our side yard. For her noise of the turned-up stereo, my smell of potting soil and spiders.  For the hand smothering her mouth, the wood grain of the workbench a half-inch from my eyes, the press of it against my cheek and nose, just before the blinding pain.  For the ring in her ears of the boys’ uproarious laughter, the man’s voice warning me not to tell anyone about our “little game.”  For her decades-later need to build a second front door, my angry run-ins with the gardeners I’ve hired, those few times I’ve brought myself to hire them at all.

Beyond this wrench of recognition, I took in the hearings with the weary disgust I imagine I share with other survivors, as yet another public man’s private abuse comes to public exposure.  While some predations were open secrets committed by powerful brutes, other deeds were truly concealed, done by men of outward virtue, progressive champions, people whom “you’d never think would do it.”  When exposed, like Judge Kavanaugh, they advance the principal defense of their outward “good character”, evidenced by the belief among those around them that they are incapable of such crimes.

I don’t believe it for a second.  For there is a third layer of experience I felt watching the Kavanaugh hearings, that is perhaps less common.  Mixed with my fury and disgust, there lurks in me a sad understanding of Kavanaugh’s cornered rage.  I think he suffers from a pathological case of one of the more common traits of the male psyche: the divided self.  I know something about this.  Although I’ve done none of the deeds of which he, or any of the other parade of recent perpetrators, have committed, I’ve lived with the pain of a split psyche for much of my life.

In my case, it was the trauma of the rape that did it.  The manipulative bastard who cleaved my little body also cleaved my young mind.  From that moment forward, I was not one person.  I was the sweet boy who remained innocent, who got good grades, was never angry, and remembered nothing.  And I was the angry, ashamed boy with dark thoughts, whom nobody knew.  As the years went on, my selves grew more distant still.

I’m no psychologist, but I can see less extreme variants of this divided male self all around me, not necessarily induced by trauma.  Boys are routinely shamed into rigid gender roles at very young ages.  Whereas girls are now encouraged into a broad spectrum of healthy gender manifestations, boys too often are forced to confront a narrow path of masculinity, from which deviation is punished and ridiculed.  Those aspects of the self which do not conform – perhaps, the feminine aspects of one’s personality that cannot be owned — are hidden, rejected, despised.  And a host of institutions, from the Catholic Church on down, offer prayers, rituals, codes, societies, sects, and traditions, to bring the “good” to light and keep the “bad” in shadow.

When threatened with exposure, the controlling, outward self will fight tooth and nail, because he perceives his survival to be at stake. Not only the survival of his career, or reputation, but of his core. I know something about this too.  A major obstacle to my recovery of the memory of my abuse was the tight grip my outward self kept on the explosive rage inside me, and the fear that if I let go I would be annihilated. I was nearly thirty before I finally broke through.  And I would be over fifty before I finally excavated down to the crucial memory, of a bathroom in the basement of my childhood home right after the rape.  I remembered standing there, looking in the mirror, and thinking, What do I do now?

In that desperate moment, a separate me emerged.  It was as though another boy was standing next to me, looking at me sorrowfully. A voice, that said, Give it to me. I’ll take it. And then vanishing like a woodland deer.  I don’t remember knowing what “it” was, but somehow I felt I could cope. And so I did.  I went on being the good boy who must at all costs remain blameless, and not remember. And my disappeared twin went on being the bad one, who must have done something to deserve what had happened.

Until finally, in my decades-later moment of remembrance of that moment in the basement, the wall between my two selves collapsed. From that time forward, I have no longer been two.  I have been one.   As a single self, I have felt a power, and a love, that up to that point had been denied me.

So now I am trying to hold some love and compassion for Brett Kavanaugh, and for those scared, brittle, fulminating old men who surround him.  Not for the damage they have done, nor for the decades of damage they will do if they succeed in embedding their poisonous brand of denial into our Supreme Court.  But for the struggle they would face – and the true public service they could do — if they were ever to move beyond their fear.

Islands in the Storm

~ John ~ Leave a comment

24 years ago this October, my wife Beret and I were living on the Micronesian island of Saipan, waiting for Category 4 Typhoon Wilda to make landfall.  Everyone had hunkered down and stocked up on spam and beer.   Our windows featured “typhoon glass” rated to 150 mph; but predicted gusts were higher than that, and there was a huge spreading tree just outside our apartment, with branches liable to come through the living room window if it toppled.  I figured we’d move to the back bedroom if that happened, or, worst case if all hell broke loose, the bathroom.  Just before the power went out, CNN International announced: There’s a big typhoon out in the western Pacific, but it isn’t threatening any populated areas.

Excuse me? I sputtered. Wilda was on a direct track to whack us in 12 hours.  So we waited.  Our daughter Paige, not yet 2, tottered around the dim rooms in her batik-print gecko dress, babbling the new syllables she had just learned: ty-FOO. The living room window bowed against a strong gust.  Beret suggested we move into the bathroom.

I was reminded of that experience last week, as the US media whirled incessantly about the possible storm track of Hurricane Florence, still days away from arrival, while at that same moment 217,000 US citizens on Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands were bearing the brunt of Category 4 Typhoon Mangkhut, completely unnoticed.   “We are now in Typhoon Condition I,” my friend Cinta Kaipat posted on Facebook last weekend from Saipan.  “Pray for us.”

We should do more than pray.  We should remember that the storms we rightly worry over when they hit our shores — and whose climate-change-fueled intensity owes largely to our own carbon-consuming profligacy – are far more lethal when they hit less-developed places.  On Saipan, locals admonished us to stay indoors during typhoons, not just for the reasons you’d do so in the US, but also because houses built of corrugated tin turn into flying guillotines.  When Donald Trump dismissed the official death toll from Hurricane Maria – statements that must have felt to Puerto Ricans like utterances of Holocaust denial — he showed no concept of what would make Maria so much more deadly than a hurricane on the mainland.  The average Puerto Rican household went 84 days without electricity, 68 days without water, and 41 days without cellphone coverage after Maria.  People couldn’t get necessary medicines or reach hospitals. On the mainland, you can travel to an unaffected area, get away, or get help.  The seriously ill can be moved to a place with power to run their life support equipment. But on an island, there’s nowhere to go.  And so, a lot more islanders died.  The death rate went from 8.8 per thousand before the storm to 14.3 per thousand afterwards.

In days of yore, a major disaster in a developing country would engender an outpouring of international aid, led by the US and a host of multinational agencies.  Now, we are failing even to provide adequate storm recovery assistance to US “possessions” – that strange euphemism for our neo-colonial empire — the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, or the Marianas.  For foreign countries the coffers are mighty shallow; the USAID Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance has a budget of only $1 billion to address a panoply of disasters worldwide.

As a matter of global environmental justice, this isn’t nearly enough, especially when you consider that the people who have contributed the least to the atmospheric carbon causing these superstorms and rising sea levels stand to lose the most — in some cases, to lose everything — from them.

So when a truly catastrophic storm — like Hurricane Mitch, which killed 11,000 Central Americans in 1998 – devastates another country to the point that it is unable to support its population, a wave of migration occurs.  Those whom we fail to aid will end up coming to us, seeking refuge and new life.  As storms intensify and sea levels rise, our national borders will become soaked and diaphanous with suffering.

Back 24 years ago, Typhoon Wilda decided not to smack us after all – it stalled menacingly off Saipan’s shores for a few hours, and then veered away.  Another bullet dodged.  Last week, Mangkhut too tracked south and largely spared Saipan on its way to the Philippines.  The neighboring island of Rota, a tropical gem where the islanders traditionally survived typhoons in caves, took the biggest hit.  The game of roulette goes on; one place gets lucky, another gets nailed, with the stakes a little higher each time.  But as the planet warms, in the end we’re all islanders.  And there’s really no place to go.

Coins of the Realm

~ John ~ Leave a comment

So what is an American?

People of diverse political stripes have lately invoked the ghost of Sen. John McCain — which has barely had time to escape his mortal remains — to bless one agenda or another.  Then last Wednesday, an anonymous senior White House official turned NYT editorialist joined the chorus, asking in McCain’s name for “everyday citizens” to shed their partisan labels “in favor of a common one: Americans.”  Reading these words on air the other night, Rachel Maddow pronounced herself perplexed: “I mean, being an ‘American’ does not exactly come with a set of instructions.”

My high school required a tenth grade civics/history class called “What is an American?”  It featured eyewitness accounts of the American Revolution, contemporary racist justifications for slavery, and original sources on the Civil War.  The question in the course title wasn’t meant to have a single answer, or perhaps any answer at all.  It was the 1970s, and everything was, you know, relative.  A conservative might argue that this cultural relativity was exactly the problem leading us down the path to Rachel Maddow’s peaked eyebrows.

Still, relativity is baked into McCain’s patriotism, in the same sense that it’s minted into every coin we carry in our pockets, with the words E Pluribus Unum.  The phrase derives from Cicero: “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many (unus fiat ex pluribus).”  Of course, the actual practice of such selfless love is as common in today’s politics as, well, quoting Cicero.  In the original Latin.  While wearing a toga.

It’s more common to understand the phrase as celebrating diversity: the elixir of our one-ness flowing from the fountains of our many-ness.  It’s a change from the original Latin meaning, but not really a stretch from the Founders’ rallying cry, as they tried to pull together a nation state out of diverse colonial enclaves. Nowadays liberals will stress the pluribus while conservatives stress the unum, with the net result that as a nation we fail at both.

Still, there’s one aspect of the Founders’ gloss on E pluribus unum in which McCain always believed, but with which other conservatives have long disagreed: that the unum of America is a universal set of ideas, and not a territorial birthright.  The difference between these two ideas about where rights come from traces from a philosophical clash between the conservative icon Edmund Burke on one hand, and the revolutionary icon Jean Jacques Rousseau on the other. Hannah Arendt, whose Origins of Totalitarianism grows more relevant by the day, sums up this conflict as “the Rights of Englishmen versus the Rights of Man.”  She points out that once you conclude that rights derive, not from your humanity, but from where you were born, it is a short stride to believing that races of humans originating from other places have no rights at all.

These two contradictory strands of belief have fought a silent war inside the word pluribus for over 200 years.  Our democracy has thus far survived.  Now, though, there are 7.6 billion people on Earth, and fears over mass northward migrations have sharpened this conflict to a dangerous edge.  Changing US demographics are bending our politics to the point of inflection into a new world.  Leaders are rewarded for gunning our economy past the redline, regardless of long-term consequence. Scrambles for resources, environmental and food crises exacerbated by climate change, and worsening income inequality are all likely to challenge the next generation in ways that will further stress our political institutions.

It is therefore understandable that many Americans want to retreat into the safe harbor of Burke’s “rights of Englishmen” mentality, and to restrict the entitlements of the American idea to those born on our soil. But John McCain, who was, after all, born in Panama and spent his most formative years in Vietnam, believed that America is more idea than place.

Our generation has reached a fateful moment in history, for we can no longer have it both ways.  We can choose universal rights, and keep our democracy. Or we can choose lifeboat ethics, and let it go.