The Real Fall Classic

We have heard a lot lately about what disasters our cities are, particularly the old industrial centers that were once the backbone of American manufacturing. Often the stories are told by people who don’t go near the places they describe, as if our inner cities were foreign and far away and easily forgotten. This discomfort with urban America isn’t new. “They use everything about the hog except the squeal,” wrote Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, his 1906 exposé of Chicago’s meatpacking industry and its impoverished immigrant work force. And Time magazine once wrote of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, so overloaded with industrial waste it used to regularly catch fire, that it “oozes rather than flows.”

The two cities are back in the news. At 8:08 this evening, the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians will open the 2016 World Series in Progressive Field in downtown Cleveland. As you undoubtedly know by now, this is an historic series. The Indians were last world champions in 1948, when Larry Doby and Satchel Paige became the first African American players to win series rings. The Cubs haven’t won in 108 years.

They are two of the original major league teams. Cleveland began in 1900, the Cubs two years later. They play in inner-city parks within walking distance of the neighborhoods, and Chicago’s Wrigley Field was built over a century ago.

I’m rooting for the Cubs because they have been cursed for so long, but in truth I’m more excited by the resurgence of two old teams and their two gritty cities, bright rays of hope in an often-gloomy fall.

I Didn’t Know It Was an Option

My life has not been the same since Grover Cleveland stole the election from James G. Blaine in 1884. It was a close campaign, “marred,” according to Wikipedia, “by exceptional political acrimony and personal invective,” something quite unusual in American political history. Cleveland, it turned out, had sired an illegitimate child, while Blaine had some unfortunate issues with a few railroad bonds. This led partisan zealots to call a man, long known as the plumed knight, “the continental liar from the state of Maine.” This was not good for the brand. Nobody got a majority. Spoilers from the Prohibition and Anti-Monopoly parties combined for almost 3% of the total vote, and the election itself came down to New York, which Cleveland (who just happened to be governor) carried by 1,047 votes out of 1,171,312 cast. That’s less than one one hundredth of one percent.

Ah, we have witnesses to the nefarious activities that took place in New York City’s heavily Irish neighborhoods, where Tammany Hall ruled with an iron fist, doling out jobs and liquor in exchange for votes – where the air was rife with stories of men literally rising from the dead to cast a vote for Cleveland.

Blaine gracefully accepted his narrow defeat, as that was the custom in those days, and Cleveland went on to govern well. I don’t think it occurred to Blaine that he had another option. He had devoted his life to government and to a political system in which he believed – and 19 years after Appomattox, he also knew how fragile that system could be.

Threats and Issues

It was 80 degrees in New York City last evening, which probably shouldn’t come as a surprise since 2015 was the hottest year ever recorded and, said the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “2016 has really blown that [record] out of the water.” If the history of this presidential campaign is any guide, global warming – or any environmental issues, for that matter – will not be the subject of much discussion in tomorrow night’s debate. This would be unbelievable, given the worldwide focus on such issues, except the campaign debates so far have been pretty much devoid of any issues.

Hillary Clinton’s website lays out her policies on climate change, which she calls “an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time. It threatens our economy, our national security, and our children’s health and futures.”

Donald Trump’s website, on the other hand, not only has no policy position on climate change, it has no position on any environmental issues whatsoever. He is, however, on record as saying that "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."

This would be laughable had it not been tweeted by the Republican candidate for president. I’m not suggesting that we all must agree on issues. On the contrary, democracy is based on the free exchange of competing ideas. Trump’s campaign, however, doesn’t traffic in ideas. Instead, insults have been substituted for issues and thinly veiled threats have become the response to disagreement.

This is dangerous territory.

A Good Man

In all his adult life I don’t think my stepfather ever voted for a Democrat – and he lived in Massachusetts where Republicans have long been hard to find. He was conservative in almost all things. He wore gray suits, button-down shirts, and ties with regimental stripes. He became a stockbroker when he married my mother and only invested in blue-chip stocks. He was shot down on his 13^th mission (which made him superstitious forever after) and spent the last year of World War II in a German prisoner-of-war camp – the same camp where The Great Escape had earlier taken place. But by the time he got there everyone was close to starving, including the guards. Back home, he was presumed dead. After the war, he took almost no part in public affairs and was deeply unsettled by the radical changes that came over the country in the 1960s.

He disliked big government, which he associated with the Democratic Party. And every April when he sat at his desk to do his taxes, he grumbled about the IRS and its exasperating forms. But he never complained about actually paying his taxes, nor tried to pay less than he owed. I asked him about that once, and he said simply that he was grateful to have the money to pay his taxes and it was his duty to do so.

He died at the age of 70 after a painful five-year battle with cancer, and not once during that time did I hear him complain about his misfortune.

Dispatch from Mexico City: ¡Ponga esa Pared!

Put up that wall! Pronto! Deeply anonymous sources are suggesting that the real reason for building the wall along the Rio Grande is to keep Americans from fleeing a Trump presidency. In addition, Mexican immigrants, at least some undocumented, continue to “pour” across the border, heading south. Many of them are probably not the best people – “people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us (sic). They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” As a result, Mexico is reportedly considering paying its share the costs.

Numbers tell the story: according to a study by the Pew Research Center, a million Mexicans went home from America between 2009 and 2014, while only 870,000 came north. In addition, American citizens now make up 75% of all documented foreigners in Mexico, and they are increasing faster than Mexicans in the U.S.

“It’s one thing when they come to our beaches and stay in our resort hotels,” said Jorge Rodriguez, sipping coffee at a sidewalk café. “But now they’re refusing to go home. We need a wall. ”

In other news, the FBI is reportedly looking for a 400-pound man or woman as a “person of interest” in last summer’s hacking into the DNC’s emails. The person is believed to spend a lot of time in the bedroom and be a computer whiz.

Meanwhile, carbon dioxide passed the 400-ppm threshold, probably for good. Since we are in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, hardly anyone noticed.

A Wandering Mind: Thoughts on Language

My mind wandered during Monday’s debate, as I grew weary of listening to one man’s rambling refusal to recognize any source of knowledge or wisdom beyond his “gut.” Doing so is the purpose of education – and Donald Trump seems to have missed a few classes. A friend of mine believes that this election is payback for a public education system that no longer turns out students grounded in civics, history and literature. The result is millions of voters unable to see through the hologram that is the Republican candidate.

I believe the current educational insistence on quantitative inputs that produce quantifiable outputs a computer can grade denies children a vast range of possibilities to explore the world with their imaginations. Robert Macfarlane writes that the Oxford Junior Dictionary now includes “MP3 player”, “voice-mail” and “chatroom” but has dropped “heron”, “otter” and “pasture”. Instead of “blackberry” we have “Blackberry”, a change the editors justify because modern children spend so little time outside.

“Technology is miraculous,” writes Macfarlane in Landmarks, “but so too is nature – and this aspect of the world’s wonder seems under threat of erasure in children’s narratives, dreams and plots.”

But there are seeds of hope. My local paper’s lead story tells of opening day at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Elementary School on Great Cranberry Island, closed since 2000 due to a lack of students. Reopening a 13-student school is not the conventional notion of progress, but perhaps these kids’ intimate explorations of island life will save more words from extinction – and so provide a small step toward reinvigorating our civic discourse.

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.