Notes from the Field

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Sometimes I think God sent Donald Trump to help me get comfortable with my mortality. He has poisoned the civic discourse in ways from which we won’t soon recover. But I’ll be shuffling off this mortal coil far sooner than the younger people who will have to clean up his mess.

That’s just one statistically irrelevant thought from my last few days canvassing in the field.

Another is that many people like me – old, white and male – don’t like Hillary Clinton very much, and they’re not very civil about it. “She should be in prison” has become their reflexive refrain. If you call them on the phone, they just hang up. You get kind of tired of old white men after a while.

Especially compared with my conversations with immigrants, often voting for the first time. They’re excited to be citizens, to be Americans, and to vote – although several were afraid of being challenged at the polls.

This didn’t seem a future to fear. It seemed the future that has always defined America at its best, a future I’d actually like to hang around for.

What a contrast to those who can’t get past our imperfect choices, as if we have ever had anything else in politics – “I’m voting for Donald Duck,” a man said yesterday. Great.

Finally, those who will vote for a third party might consider what the Libertarian vice-presidential candidate told CNN yesterday:

“I do see a big difference between the two other candidates,” said Bill Weld. “Trump . . . is totally unfit to be president, [while Clinton is] is a perfectly reputable, professional, responsible candidate for president of the United States and deserves to be treated as such. . . . Frankly, I think Mrs. Clinton has been receiving a pretty raw deal.”

In the last few days I’ve seen the past and I’ve seen the future. I like the future better.

The Real Fall Classic

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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

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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

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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

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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 13th 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!

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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

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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

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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.

Reviving the Public Commons with Private Incentives

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Two reasons I believe the market system can play a vital role in building a better economy are: (1) it spawns entrepreneurs – the loner in a garage, the small group in a laboratory, the back-to-the-land organic farmer – in a way no other economic system ever has; and (2) incentives, economic and otherwise, work for most people, and I believe they can work for the common good.

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Instead of Blowing It Up, Let’s Fix It

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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.

The Gerrymander and Other Embarrassments: Readers Respond

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Gerrymandering is still around, and several respondents to my last post point to it as one root of our current problems. “Only thing we need to blow up,” wrote one “are gerrymandered congressional districts.” Others named the corrosive power of money, the deadly sin of greed, and the enormous power of lobbyists over the entire legislative process. Some pointed to the two-party system itself.

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