What Kind of Country Elects Donald Trump?

A country that has transformed its primary and secondary schools into dreary exercises in standardized test-taking.

A country that has transformed its colleges and universities from schools of rhetoric, science, and the arts into job training centers that leave new trainees with no guarantee of employment and often with crushing debt.

A country whose most recognizable heroic role models come from comic books written for newly pubescent males.

A country that eats, as its primary diet, addictive fake food, and, as a consequence, has tens of millions of citizens who are chronically ill.

A country that regularly advertises and airs human cage-fighting on its major television channels, during primetime family programming.

A country that enjoys, as its definitive leisure-time entertainment, a grandiose art-form that regularly propagandizes fascist values—the glories of violence and militarism; the sexiness of centralized corporate-nationalist power; the moral goodness of physical beauty—and that regularly stylizes, to its delight, images of its own apocalypse.

A country that has re-labelled decency, civility, and kindness as "political correctness."

A country that has been erotically dulled by the newly ubiquitous presence of joyless, loveless pornography.

A country that claims as its favorite sport a brain-destroying gladiatorial battle, run by a multi-billion dollar corporation, in massive arenas, between drug-enhanced, heavily-armored, faceless members of its poverty class.

A country that no longer turns to professional journalists for news and information but relies upon a single corporation's personalized "newsfeed," which has been specifically designed to reinforce the particular beliefs of each reader.

A country that refuses to see a commonly-organized, commonly-shared defense against illness and accident as a social good.

A country that uses science to create vast wealth, extraordinary luxury, and unprecedentedly long lifespans, while openly and unapologetically dismissing the most important scientific discovery in its history: that its lifestyle is rapidly destroying the global ecosystem.

A country that represents 4.4% of the world's population yet incarcerates 22% of its prisoners—and that, as a matter of legal practice, regularly executes some of those prisoners.

A country in which its college-aged population spends, on average, eight hours a day looking at a cellphone screen.

And, lastly, ironically, a country that rejects, for the only political office beholden to the general population, the actual vote of the general population, and relies instead upon a Constitutional gimmick put in place at its founding to secure the support of those citizens at the time who practiced human slavery.

Selma

Among Selma's achievements: to evoke the burden — more than that: the exhaustion — that Dr. King felt doing battle with America's theretofore unassailable myth of white innocence. He spends much of the movie exhausted and—we see this in his eyes—in flight from his calling. But on occasion, invigorated by the people around him (by a grieving 84-year-old grandfather, for instance, who has never cast a vote in his life) Dr. King drinks from his Fountain of Truth, known for centuries as Christ's Love, and summons the strength to change the world.

Which struck America then and strikes me now as some kind of stupefying miracle.

We haven't lived up to that miracle, needless to say, but it is part of our inheritance. It has made possible other miracles, including the one I witnessed at the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company on November 4, 2008. That miracle was earned, like Selma, by decades of suffering, and likely occurred—like Selma—in part so that white America could restore for itself the myth of its innocence. Regardless, it occurred, and I witnessed it and will never forget it.

I was raised to ask for miracles by praying. And it was nice to think that miracles could come from prayer. But prayer, when it plays any role whatsoever, is basically the singer warming her voice. In the end, miracles are earned by hard work and good thinking. Dr. King, to our great good fortune, knew how to think. He understood that to "lift white consciousness," it was necessary to deploy white America against itself. The myth of white innocence could not tolerate the sight of white cruelty. Innocence Lost mandated Innocence Restored. Fair enough, Dr. King said: If your myth is important you, it could use some defending in Selma.

When the march finally happens, after blood has run in the streets, the film rewards us with archival footage of the real-life marchers. One is struck by the joy in their faces. It is, dare I say, divine joy. Dr. King was tired and would soon be dead. But his marchers were not tired and perhaps—Hands Up, Don't Shoot!—still aren't.

Yes, Please

A note to friends & family who are California voters:

A couple of weeks ago my dean at Chabot College informed me that my classes are on the chopping block if Prop. 30 doesn't pass. The district will be eliminating classes for over 2000 students, which means it will be eliminating the teachers who teach them. In all likelihood, I will be one of those teachers.

A week ago, Lincoln applied to Cal-Poly. But if Prop. 30 doesn't pass, the CA State schools will cut the number of incoming freshmen that they'll be accepting by 20,000 students—which might include him.

No, I don't want to pay an extra quarter of a percent in sales taxes for four years. But the long-term cost to the state—and to my family—will be far higher if we allow six billion dollars in cuts to education THIS YEAR ALONE.

We can debate how we got here until we're blue in the face. But the public education system in our state is in crisis. I urge you to help save it. Please join me in voting YES on Prop. 30.

"They Are Not Takers"

Why write it when it's been said?

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.

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.

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.

Bad Math?

Romney refuses to share his tax returns = if we knew what he did in his tax returns, we wouldn't elect him = we shouldn't elect him.

The Laughter of the Doomed

A few days ago I was at Vivace, the only decent restaurant within walking distance of my place. I'd ordered one of their Happy Hour margherita pizzas; I was sitting alone in a booth for two, not far from the bar, watching a Giants game.

At the bar itself two men, one of them about my age, the other at least a decade older, were laughing, talking, drinking. Their laughter made them impossible to ignore. Also I found the face of the older man intriguing. He had dyed his graying hair black; it was swept away from his fleshy, gleaming forehead—away from his nose, too, which dominated his little eyes, his thin mouth, his recessed chin. It was a tremendous, beautiful nose: the nose of a character from Bellow.

I quickly discerned that the two men were talking about money.

The older man was turned toward the younger man as if flirting with him. I envied their laughter—their camaraderie.

At one point the older man acted like he was pushing a button on bar. "$10,000!" Dink. "$10,000!" Dink. Again the laughter. A bit too cliche, I thought.

The younger man said, "They ask me what I do, I say, 'I provide liquidity to the markets.'" [Laughter.] "I provide liquidity to the markets!" The older man, holding his gin & tonic, nearly fell out of his chair.

After wiping his eyes the older man said, "Get up, push a button, back to bed!" More laughter. It went on like that for a while, and only stopped when the Giants scored, which the two men celebrated—this behavior, at least, I recognized—as if they'd scored the Giants' runs themselves.

Anyway, when I was leaving I took some consolation in the fact that they seemed to find their lives—their money—as absurd as I did.

~

Wendell Berry has written an essential essay—the essay of the year, an essay for our time.

"It All Turns on Affection," which takes its title from Howard's End (a novel I've never read), argues that the fundamental orientation of our civic and economic lives must change, that we're doomed if it doesn't. Yet Berry manages to make this argument with the same generosity, resolve, and transcendent tranquility that has defined his writing—his sensibility—for decades. "It All Turns on Affection" offers hope for the rest of us—not least for the discouraged man, still hungry after eating his little pizza, who stepped from Vivace's luxurious bar into Belmont's early evening sunlight and headed for the place he's supposed to call home.

Against Despair

On Monday I read "Africa's Dirty Wars"—an article in the New York Review of Books that managed to convince me that Africa, in the short term, is more or less beyond hope. The article ends with a scream. I set it aside with a sigh.

But then I saw this film today—consider giving it 29 minutes—and it reminded me that it's possible to do something about barbarity; that despair isn't the only response to monumental evil.

(On occasion you might need to remind yourself that ultimately the film isn't about the beauty of its hero.)


KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

Update: This video has now gone viral, which makes its presence here redundant. I guess I'll leave it up as an historical artifact.

The Sky Actually Is Falling

Find here a succinct summary of why the global warming skeptics are wrong.

Update: Find here a response to the article by some of the scientists it eviscerates, and a response to their response.

Mad Man

The Eye shills for Chipotle.

The Eye celebrates the 21st century mainstreaming of 19th century—18th century—small-farm America.

The Eye delights in plaintive Willie.



Of course this ad—which aired during the Grammys—had nothing to do with McDonald's announcement, less than 24 hours later, that it was going to eliminate the use of gestation crates in its pork supply line.

Gestation crates being a pretty phrase for animal torture, as can be seen here.

Goodbye to All That

"At the length truth will out." —The Merchant of Venice.

Thanks to the Ninth Court for helping it along. Today, in California, my brother—at least when it comes to marriage—is finally as free as me.

"I'm not concerned about the very poor."

Romney's suggestion that people who are very poor are doing just fine, that it's not the destitute but the the middle class that's struggling, disqualifies him for the presidency. Anyone who can make an argument so disconnected from simple logic and so devoid of empathy represents a danger to the republic.

Frankly, it's going to be a pleasure watching him self-destruct time and again over the coming months. A character flaw so glaring—and so intrinsic to his worldview—can't help but manifest itself more or less daily.

Equally telling is the indignation he exudes when someone challenges his incoherence. A profoundly unpleasant human being—

Obama's good fortune continues. Once again he'll face an opponent who cannot win.

(A personal note: I find it both sad and unsurprising that a Mormon—a man educated by the same faith that defined the first 25 years of my life—can even formulate these thoughts, let alone announce them to the world as his political platform. I couldn't care less if some pastor in Dallas claims that Mormons aren't Christian. But any Mormon who hears what is now the public face of Mormonism in the United States saying what Romney says might ask himself if that pastor in Dallas isn't onto something.)

A "Times" Pick

A couple of weeks ago my comment to a David Brooks column entitled "Where Are the Liberals?" was selected as an NYT Pick, which will both delight and perturb my parents. Risk the column at your discretion. Here's my comment, which strikes me now, a couple of weeks later, as oddly non sequitur:

     The best answer is most likely the simplest: we're getting older. And as people get older, they tend to become more conservative. Not because conservatism is correct about the world, but because change frightens us as we age: now past 40, I find myself increasingly resenting a world I no longer recognize, and yearning for the world of my youth.
     Yes, I'm keenly aware that contemporary American conservatism is a moral and philosophical catastrophe. But I feel the allure of conservatism's moralistic resentment, the comforts of its pervasive racism, the decisiveness of its flagged-up militarism. Getting older now, and feeling myself to be increasingly irrelevant, I wonder, for the first time in many years, if I don't want a Romney to lead me—an anachronistic, pseudo-religious greedmonger: a man like me, who will watch out for what little power I still retain.
     I can only imagine how the baby-boomers must feel. The world they knew is gone. Conservatism promises to bring it back. It's a tedious, destructive fantasy, grotesque with injustice. But who among us doesn't understand its appeal?

Huck Finn, C'est Moi!

Yesterday my father said: "Sometimes I feel like what I'm going through isn't even my problem—like it's a problem that doesn't actually belong to me. But suddenly it is my problem, and now I've got to deal with it. Even though I don't know where it really came from, or who caused it. But it's got to be fixed, and I guess I'm the one who has to fix it."

Immediately I ran with the idea—I've been running with it since—because it reflects how I often feel about my own life; also, because it reflects my experience as a reader and the connection between literary characters and the world. Huck Finn's problems don't interest us because they're his problems but because he embodies a moment in time—post-Civil War America—and through him we contemplate the process by which we, as a nation, kind of grew up. The problems he negotiates weren't his but ours. It fell to him to try to sort them out, in his life.

So narrating myself into existence I become aware that my problems aren't so much mine but the world's, right now. And, as with Huck, it falls to me to live them out, with everyone else.

Part of the appeal of this idea, I suppose, is that it permits me to transfer the responsibility for the difficulties of my life to the larger world. But that falls in line, for the most part, with my politics and with my understanding of the relationship between myself and society.

Because let's be real: I don't exist. The we is the real I.

Frightening? Not really. Far less frightening than the deluded narcissism and, inevitably, the crushing loneliness of individualism.

MItt Romney Cannot Win

Below I've embedded Newt Gingrich's infomercial attacking Mitt Romney, which is running right now in South Carolina.

If Romney's Republican opponents can construct this kind of devastating attack on Romney's career at Bain Capital, one can only imagine what the Obama campaign machine will come up with.

As I see it—I don't think this is just wishful thinking—Romney can't win the presidency, given these stories, his (all-too-familiar) tendency to behave like a sanctimonious prick, and the country's current political and economic climate, wonderfully modified by OWS.

I don't expect much street-dancing this time around, but it looks to me like four more years.

"Shame on you! . . . You can go!"

Amen.



Update 11/20: I awoke this morning still reeling from this video—and its implications for the country.

On occasion certain images present themselves that clarify where the moral authority in a particular debate lies. With that idea in mind, I resolved to write a longer note, arguing that this video gives us that kind of imagery and adding some thoughts on how the police are dressed, their casually sadistic attitude (recognizable to anyone who's interacted with contemporary American police officers), and the students' spontaneous—and wholly successful—search for the language with which to respond to authoritarian cruelty.

But before doing my own writing I read this note from James Fallows at the Atlantic. Which makes all of my points.

This video makes it clear that our choice is simple: either we acknowledge where the moral authority self-evidently lies in this debate and proceed with the changes the occupiers demand, or we permit the United States to continue on its path toward a fascist plutocracy.

I find myself braced by the dignity and moral sophistication of these students. The Occupy Movement will triumph. It is our time's Civil Rights Movement. From what I see in this video, I'm now convinced that this country will not return to the moral desolation, the systemic injustice, the gleeful selfishness that has defined America during my generation. Change has come to America.

Bloom Springs

In this week's Sunday Times, the inimitable Harold Bloom says in one article—"Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?"—what I've been trying to say with two years of blogging.

Disgrace, by the Seattle Police Department

Photo: JOSHUA TRUJILLO / SEATTLEPI.COM