Thursday, September 27, 2012

Monday, September 24, 2012

TFTD

Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

— D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Four More Years

A little over four years ago, I sat on the edge of a bed in a Guadalajara hotel room and watched John McCain introduce Sarah Palin as his running mate. Less than a minute into her thank-you speech, I said aloud, to the TV, "Barack Obama just won the election."

In light of the videos that came to light last night, in which Mitt Romney speaks disdainfully of half the people he aspires to govern, I say, with even greater confidence, the same thing: "Barack Obama just won the election."

I say this with a degree of sadness. This country desperately needs a serious, intelligent debate about its future, about the various roles of the federal government, about taxation and debt, about foreign policy.

With many conservatives, I'd hoped that both Romney and Paul Ryan would elevate the quality of our national conversation.

Sadly, Ryan, for his part, at 42 years old, with an opportunity to explain to the nation how conservatives see the world, opted instead to structure his entire Convention speech around what he knew to be a gross distortion of Obama's (utterly correct) "you didn't build that."

Romney's incompetently run campaign has been equally disappointing. He has combined miscues with evasiveness and left many of the voters he hopes to persuade convinced of little but that he's an unreliable cipher.

From the beginning of this election cycle we've been treated to a parade of Republican fatuousness: Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich. That's to be expected: every village has its idiots. In Mitt Romney I hoped for—frankly, I anticipated—a legitimate candidate. But Romney's most recent comments—which, at some level, take that parade to its apotheosis—have no basis in fact, grossly misrepresent both liberalism and the dynamic between individuals and their government, and, worst of all, show a frightening degree of contempt for nearly half his fellow citizens. They end my hope for a real debate.

Like McCain, Romney won't win the election because he doesn't deserve to. Democracy—speaking generally, generously—works.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Standoff

At the end of the dream I was on your couch. Sam was beside me. He pretended to ignore us. But his presence made us—made what was happening—real.

Both of you wanted to leave; you wanted out of the room. I wanted both of you to stay. These different desires were all forms of love.

Noises from outside—the encircling world—prevented us from resolving our standoff.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

In Defense of Everyone

When I was very young—five, six years old—my family lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, and a couple times a year we'd visit our cousins in Alabama. My uncle Forrest worked in Huntsville as an aeronautical engineer for Boeing.

Among my cousins, I was most in awe of Tim—a tall, slim, handsome boy, a few years older than me, who struck me, in a manner typical of middle sons, as warmer than his cool brother Dave and cooler than his warm brother Todd. I followed him around a lot during our visits, trying to learn how to be a boy. In memory, he's forever the handsomest of the Treanor boys, and, despite his meek name, the most admirable, combining a Treanor's congenital interest in the life of the mind with an athlete's physical ease.

It's been at least twenty years, I'm guessing, since Tim and I have seen one another. But a minor family crisis this summer involving Chik-Fil-A, my mother, and my gay brother Nathan sent me to Tim's Facebook page, where I learned something of his life today. He now lives in North Carolina, where he works as a chiropractor. The Western diet, as with tens of millions of other Americans, has softened his slim handsomeness. And—now to my purpose—he's become a staunch, activist Republican.

I took some time perusing his posts, which I could read despite the fact that we've never become Facebook friends. Many of them were about me: a progressivist liberal who, for the most part, votes Democrat. Yet they weren't describing a person I recognized.

Nor did they describe a president I recognized: a "communist," who wants to "destroy the family, destroy private property, destroy religion, destroy the nation." For a while I considered attempting to disprove his claims—but I quickly realized that I'm about as unlikely to change his views as he is to change mine, and there wasn't much summer left, and only an idiot begins an un-winnable war. Especially against family.

But Tim's Facebook page has stayed with me. And alongside its catalog of crimes and misdemeanors I've considered the way some of my liberal friends talk about Republicans: as anti-intellectual, racist, xenophobic, gay-hating, Bible-thumping, patriarchal, anti-science reactionaries working to drag us back into a 19th century, Gilded Age dystopia, where unregulated corporate magnates collaborate to steal the nation's wealth, overheat the planet, and destroy the middle class, all in the name of some Darwinian, Ayn Rand-ish individualism that replaces community with the Law of the Jungle and tolerance with the Law of God. And don't bother asking whose God.

Something is wrong with these pictures. Most people I know, Democrat or Republican, are, speaking generally, equally decent: equally compassionate, equally patriotic, equally smart, equally happy, equally devoted to the future of America and equally devoted to the safety of their families and their neighbors. Republicans, in my experience, do tend to be a bit more insular and frightened of otherness, particularly if it comes packaged in poverty. Democrats, on the other hand, do tend to be a bit more starry-eyed, a bit too indifferent to tradition, and a bit suspicious of wealth, particularly if it comes packaged in a suit and tie.

Which brings me, like most of my experiences these days, to James Baldwin:
What you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessities, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I'm not describing you when I talk about you; I'm describing me.
So I turn this wisdom upon myself. Many of the most astonishing people in my life—including my own mother, who walks on water—are dedicated Republicans. Like many Democrats, they genuinely worry that America—which is inevitably their idea of America—is losing its way. They fear for their future and for the future of their children; with good reason they look back on the 20th century and proclaim that the single greatest threat to freedom is the tyranny of the State.

In fact, this fear is as old as the country. DH Lawrence saw it with an artist's acuity when he wrote of American immigrants:
They came largely to get away—that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.
'Henceforth be masterless.'

[. . . ]

In America this frictional opposition has been the vital factor. It has given the Yankee his kick. Only the continual influx of more servile Europeans has provided America with an obedient labouring class. The true obedience never outlasting the first generation.
According to Lawrence, that refrain—"henceforth be masterless"—captures something essential in the American temperament; and I think he's right. Yes, Lawrence has plenty to say about the self-delusion that accompanies our cries for masterlessness in American life. It's the same self-delusion that liberals point out when they note the hypocrisy of Tea Partiers who simultaneously call for government to get out of their lives and, in the next breath, threaten any politician who wants to cut Medicare. It's the same self-delusion that conservatives point out when they note that Occupiers are organizing against corporate power by using iPads. There is always, says Lawrence, a master.

For many Democrats these days, Mitt Romney embodies, down to his toenails, their idea of a freeedom-destroying master: a monied corporatist, archetypically white, who has enriched himself by financial sleights-of-hand, exporting jobs, and tax evasion. He's not an embodiment of American ingenuity but an amoral crony-capitalist whose trickle-down economics and commitment to deregulation will only accelerate the collapse of the middle class. Never mind his well-documented philanthropy, his dedication to his family and his faith, his years of unsalaried public service. Talk to a Democrat and he'll make it clear: "Mitt Romney isn't the solution. He's the problem."

And for Republicans, Obama perfectly embodies the freedom-destroying master they fear: of uncertain—possibly foreign—provenance; a foreign-educated, multi-racial, multi-religious "community organizer" who rose to fame not through merit and hard work but on the wings of Marxist utopian conspirators and a healthy dose of liberal guilt. Never mind that coming out of college he took his Harvard degree to Chicago's South Side, or his own commitment to faith and family, or, as president, four years of historically low taxes, robust militarism in the country's defense, and, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, a level of frugality while in office unmatched by any president since Eisenhower. Ask Tim: Obama isn't the solution. He's the problem.

Contrast these views with how each party sees its own candidate: for Republicans, Romney isn't a usurping master but a fellow traveler who will help them build a road to their idea of the American Dream. Ditto for Democrats: Obama isn't a usurping master but a fellow traveler who will help them build a road to their idea of the American Dream.

In other words, American Republicans and American Democrats—Tim and I—are two sides of the same coin. Our distraught response to each other's politics, our habits of impugning each other's motives and attacking each other's common sense, simply reflects back to us what we most fear: a master-tyrant, who has tracked us from the nightmares of the past, even to here, where we thought we'd finally be free.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

No Thank You, Please

If one learns theology before learning to become a man, one will never become a man. —Ludvig Holberg
I still remember vividly the afternoon I told my Mormon bishop that I wanted my name removed from the records of the LDS Church. Utah sunlight, coming through a large window to my left, lit up his office; portraits of Mormon leaders and Jesus and Book of Mormon heroes decorated the walls of his office; photographs of his family cornered his desk. During an earlier meeting he'd told me with enthusiasm of the happiness he and his wife experienced singing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He had mementos on the shelves behind him of their travels.

He received my news with sadness. He tried to get me to explain my decision, but I refused to do that, and he soon gave up. With grim professionalism he told me how to proceed; he also told me what I'd lose, which amounted to everything: the assurance of life at God's side in heaven, with my family, forever.

While he talked I thought mainly about him. I couldn't help but see him as a projection of myself 30 years from then: soft-spoken and wise, silver in every respect, kind, and harmless, and maybe, I thought, vaguely angry. He seemed to abide, like many religious leaders, in a kind of patriarchal self-assurance that I found both enviable and scary. What he no doubt meant as compassion I experienced as condescension. He seemed sexless—or nearly so: too sexless, anyway, for me to trust. His assiduously combed hair and clean-shaven cheeks both saddened and frightened me; but adult innocence, or an adult's ambition to appear innocent, is always sad and is often frightening.

After a while he reassured me of God's love for me and sent me on my way.

I have never, not for one day, regretted my decision to abandon Mormonism—not because the church is evil or its theology incoherent but because from adolescence I'd used religion to avoid becoming an adult. Yes, I can provide a mildly sophisticated repudiation of Mormonism on philosophical or rational grounds. But the truth is simpler: I left the church because I was tired of childhood. I yearned for messy complexity, for the bewildered authenticity—the earned blue happiness—of adulthood.

~

Watching Mitt Romney reminds me of that bright April day, because Mitt Romney strikes me as a version of myself, had I allowed my life to unfold differently. I see him as many things, some of them good, but mostly I see him as miserable. He carries his misery in his body: his smile is miserable; his laugh is miserable; even his notorious hair is miserable. He's embittered by innocence, by obedience; he's crushed by the myths of superiority and chosenness that have been pounded into his head since he was a toddler and which, in some gleaming corner of his consciousness, he knows to be false.

That knowledge haunts his life; his vast ambition, including his quest for the presidency, is little more than a tireless battle against his misery.

And it's not just his misery: it's the misery of anyone who has only been obedient. Romney was told to be good, and hardworking, and conscientious, and self-reliant, and god-fearing, and tolerant, and compassionate, and obedient, and honorable; and he's been all of those things. But to have been only those things—to have never known disobedience, and rebellion, and secrecy, and drunkenness, and dancing and swearing and fucking—precludes the possibility of growing up. And a man who never grows up is a miserable man.

In Romney's cruel unhappiness I see the future I could have had, if I'd been obedient to my destiny. Of course I would have been less wealthy than Romney, and less handsome, and less ambitious and less renowned. But I would have been similarly miserable. And, like Romney, I would have asked the people around me to collaborate in my misery by pretending that it was happiness and worth emulating.

Romney now seeks my collaboration by asking me to vote for him. Instead, I'll vote for the adult, with his blue happiness, his easy smile, his hard-won, complicated calm. I'll vote, in other words, for the man I wanted to become, long ago, when I took a last look at the dreams of my father, and told them goodbye.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

TFTD

I'm going to take your brain out of your head and wash it and scrub it and make it clean.

— Dirk Diggler, Boogie Nights