The Great Schism

Listening to the Other Side
Without a Jealous Mind

            So he did it. I thought for a little while he was playing his “art-of-the-deal” game, keeping everyone on tenterhooks while he pretended to be considering an extreme position. But no. He’s out for revenge on all the environmentalists and the people who believe science is right about climate change because he knows none of them voted for him and hate the sight of him on their television and internet screens. So now he’s going to screw them, and he’s going to rub it in.

            That’s my left wing response. Here’s my right-wing response:

             I believe God takes care of us, not the government, and I am sick and tired of all these intellectual Ph.D.s and pseudo-scientists and so-called educated college wimps acting like they know what the good Lord is up to with this weather business when all they learned in college was atheism. The government thinks it’s God, but it’s just a tool of the Devil.

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            You see, I decided to listen to the “other side.” I don’t mean where my dearly departed Mother and Dad are, but where the right-wing lives. Guided by a friend, I watched a video by “Coach” Dave Daubenmire, a prophetic right-wing figure whose most recent hour-long diatribe calls on Christian men to become more violent.

            I get the logic. They hate liberals. Who are liberals? Candy-assed feminist men, Jews, blacks and browns, journalists, and the highly educated—Democrats, mostly, or out in Left field with the Greens and sometimes the Socialists, giving our country away to Them.

            What I don’t get is how taking up violence against the liberal enemy is Christian. In my understanding of the Gospels, Jesus never advocated violence against an enemy. But Coach Dave apparently sees a different Jesus than I. He has his Jesus and I have mine. And you have yours, and she has hers, and on an on , etc, etc. We all have our own idea about how this world runs and who should be in charge, and Coach Dave proudly brays when Trump pushes Montenegro Prime Minister Duško Marković aside to get front and center among a crowd of world leaders posing for a photo. That’s how a POTUS should act, he says. Show them who’s The Man.

            He also stoutly approves of Republican Greg Gianforte’s response to the Guardian reporter who asked him about the American Health Care Act. Gianforte threw the reporter, Ben Jacobs, to the floor, cursing him and breaking his glasses. That’s what a real man does to these girlie boys who stand in the way of God’s Kingdom. And he still won the election! Montanans know what’s up, they’re not fooled by this communist crap.

            Coach Dave assures us that the Lord Jesus Christ was not passive. He was a real man, a Man among men. He stood strong against the Powers That Be. How many Christian men today will do that? But that’s what Coach Dave charges his Christian men to do. No more Mr. Nice Guy. It’s time to get real with these sissy liberal punks, give them the taste of a knuckle sandwich.

            Coach Dave would like Ezra Pound’s poem about Jesus, “The Ballad of the Goodly Fere.”

                        “No capon priest was the Goodly Fere,

                        But a man o’ men was he!”

            Ezra Pound, of course, was a fascist sympathizer who backed Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy. Some people theorize Trump is a lot like Mussolini. So is this a pattern? Do admirers of manly saviors, like Coach Dave’s and Ezra Pound’s versions of Jesus, tend to be fascists?

            I was raised to see Jesus as a non-violent pacifist. Coach Dave instructs his Christian men to be warriors against the desecrators of their religion. We each can justify our interpretations by the Bible. Is the Bible bi-polar? This is not a frivolous question. Is Coach Dave’s preferred Jesus who drove the money-changers from the temple with a whip the same prophet who said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you”?

            Who’s correct, which path is the true one? I personally prefer the latter. Though I’m not a nominal Christian, I revere the Christ spirit and the man whom we’ve determined embodied it. But how do I explain the cleansing of the Temple? How does Coach Dave explain the Sermon on the Mount? These are 2,000-year-old arguments, at the least.

The Real Issue

            Leaving them aside, then, I don’t think the central question here is who’s the true American or whether Jesus was a pacifist or a  warrior, calling us to turn the other cheek or fight back. I think the real issue, less important but more urgent, is the survival of the United States of America.

            At present we are obviously not “united states.” After Trump’s announcement to pull us out of the Paris Climate Accord, the governors of New York, Washington, and California announced they were voluntarily and independently signing on to the Accord. Immediately something like 100 cities agreed, and more states, municipalities, and even major corporations are expected to follow.

            It looks like “the great American schism,” which my Facebook friend Stephen Schwartz has warned about for years, advances now apace. But how can we carve two nations out of the present United States when the two sides, who may speak the same language in name, are so divided geographically? The blue states will resemble the Palestinian non-state, with their territories separated by hostile forces except perhaps for the blue islands of Colorado, Illinois, and conceivably one or two others. And perhaps there will be city states, as well—Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte, Albuquerque, and hopefully Norfolk.

            My opinion, of course, is that pulling out of Paris is sheer madness, inadequate as the agreement may have been in relation to the gravity of the climate problem. But everyone on my side of the fence knows that, while on the other side, while they gloat over my side’s anguish, they want nothing to do with remedies that will change their lives. They want coal to come back for them. They say, “My grandfather, my father, and all my uncles were coal miners, and I’ll be damned to hell if I’m going to take a job in a pussy industry like solar or wind when all my people for generations have mined coal.”

            It’s hard to argue with people attached to family and clan traditions where “progress” is seen as a betrayal of your ancestors. Those roots go deeper than the concept of a general good and, of course, include “dat ol’ time religun.” But not for me.

            I frankly love the idea of “the United States of America”—United being the operative word. That idea to me is bigger than either side, and it’s rare if ever in U.S. history when it’s been in full operation, where everyone, however grudgingly, agrees. But to me it’s the one big idea we have as a people: A union of totally disparate groups around the idea of Union.

            It’s like a marriage in which the parties are determined not to fail. That alone can cause parties eventually to love one another.

            (The reason for that is a secret. It’s because all people are lovable. Shhhhhh! Don’t tell!)

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            Coach Dave is a man who’s quick to tell you his age—mid-sixties, I forget which digit. He sits as if at a sportscaster’s desk with an aerial shot of an empty football stadium as his backdrop. From there, he rants, his stubbly white beard and ball cap identifying him as an angry white man, a proud redneck who also, he assures us, is a devoted disciple of Jesus Christ. 

            He’s saying Christian men have got to toughen up, stop shying away from violence, and take the fight to the liberals, man-to-man.

            Really?

            I’m sorry, but isn’t this a little ridiculous—a man, no more than ten years younger than I, about to hit his first heart attack, cancer, or stroke—actually challenging me (for example) to a fist fight over politics and religion and who’s the real American? 

            I saw two old black men get into an argument in Thomkin’s Square Park in New York City one afternoon in 1968 or ‘69. They were both obviously inebriated, staggering as they faced off, fists up, taking ineffectual swings at each other as if waving away flies, until one of them got out his pocket knife and threatened to stab the other, who became enraged and resumed swinging while the other man poked at his fists with his knife. At that point a third man jumped up from a nearby bench and intervened, talked some sense to them both, and, with an arm around each, walked them back to the bench, where they sat down. After all, it really wasn’t worth the effort—two old fools too dumb to know they’re both standing on the steps of the Exit. Someone—a friend to both—has to remind them.

A More Perfect Union

            I grieve at the thought that we might relinquish the great idea of a United States of America. Say it to yourself and tell me you don’t feel something, even if it’s bitter.

            I think of Thomas Jefferson, my favorite founding father, as the architect of that idea when he wrote The Declaration of Independence and also successfully pressed for a Constitutional Bill of Rights. (His only indisputable crime against humanity was owning slaves, which he knew was wrong but couldn’t give it up. I like to think it was because he was afraid he’d lose Sally Hemings, who he loved in torment. For that I offer more pity than condemnation.)

            Jefferson conceived of a Union of disparate elements and Lincoln—to keep the chain going for a moment—insisted on preserving that Union. It takes my breath away that we now see two sides determined to tear it apart rather than admit the other side is American, too. Who will keep the name if the schism really comes? Or will we just fight over borders for hundreds of years like the Europeans have?

            Jesus Christ, men! What the hell! 

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            Here’s my take:

            We’re all human first. And then we’re Americans. Americans don’t have to love each other or even want to know each other. But for Americans to argue among themselves over who’s the true American is like those old black men, probably in their ‘80s, trying to settle an argument going back so far they can’t remember what started it. 

            No one can win this red-blue/right-left stand-off. But as Americans we all can lose if we don’t put United first and States second. To me that means we’ve got to have the oversight of a national government. We’ve got to have Washington to be our ultimate safety, our referee, assuring justice in our Union among all Americans.

            An American is a person born or naturalized in the United States. Period.

            So if we give up the United States of America, as so many are calling for, we surrender the Great Idea of “out of many, one,” which is printed on our money as a reminder of our deeper truth.

            It’s not just about accepting “the other,” either. It’s also about accepting ourselves. We are the United States of America. The United States. Unless we cast that name aside, we’re bound by honor to meet its demands.

            So I say to Coach Dave, on the very outside chance he’s reading this, that though we stand on totally opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, I know we share enough as Americans that we could have a few laughs over beers in a country bar or stand together in a moment or two of awe at a July 4^th fireworks display. And I’m sure there are many other examples where we live in a common America. Isn’t that proof enough that we’re both Americans? Do we have to be mortal enemies because we have different ideas about Jesus and how much government we should have overseeing our lives?

            And more to the point, why do we get so angry that we’d like to saw each other apart? That just doesn’t make sense. Are we having a mental health problem here?

            “What are you afraid of?” you ask your Christian men who don’t step up to fight. But one could just as easily ask, “What are you afraid of, Dave, that you won’t sit down and make peace?”

            We’re going to need a third alternative, a peace-maker who understands the great Jeffersonian idea of the United States of America—“out of the many, one”—and brings both sides back together to the park bench to sit down and remember the good times. Otherwise, a lot of people are going to get hurt, before and after we understand what we’ve given up by forgetting our one big idea.

Trump Abroad

Reviving the Boorish American

            The spectacle of Donald Trump abroad last week reminded me of the portraits of Americans abroad in the late 19^th-century novels of Henry James. James consistently contrasts the naive optimism, the crass commercialism, and the clueless social behavior of his countrymen and women with the sophisticated, culturally rooted, class-conscious societies of Europe where the American nouveau riche was regarded as vulgar, unmannered boors with an uncanny ability to destroy their personal reputations.

Henry James

            The problem with that: The Europeans needed the excessive wealth these American boors were looking to invest because their own exhausted economy was buckling under centuries of war.

            Not much has changed since that gilded age, except that the boorish American has become President and is now toasted and feted among oppressive regimes who appreciate his nihilistic vision of arms for dictators and nothing for the people, ignoring existing western democratic values in favor of a militarized,  authoritarian regime—the Trump Regime.

            Meanwhile, in Europe, they see that kind of a Trump Regime as a dangerous threat to the world order which America has led since the end of World War II. The Trump Regime will spend billions for arms in the Mid-east but will significantly cut what it spends to defend our democratic allies in Europe and elsewhere.

            The New World (Democratic) Order of the alliance between Europe and the U.S. is over, it seems, or greatly modified.

The American World Order

            I’ve lived all my life under that American world order. It’s not utopian by any means, but it’s based upon democratic principles developed in the eighteenth century by European philosophers and the American revolutionaries who took the emerging Enlightenment ideas and ran with them to found the USA, soon to become one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, thanks to free enterprise, including slavery.

            That untethered freedom to pursue wealth became part of the unwritten understanding of what American democracy meant. In Europe old aristocratic families were the arbiters of social relations. Everyone learned the aristocratic way of holding a knife and fork. But in America there were no old families to govern taste. There were just wealthy families, who were the first to claw their way to a generous helping of the newly developing American Dream. They were the ones who went abroad, offending the delicate tastes of the Europeans at every turn.

            Jala and I encountered that phenomenon when we traveled in Europe during the summer of 1964. At that time the New (Euro-American) World Order was just beginning to take off as thousands—probably millions—of young Americans traveled abroad and got the taste of other cultures. For us it was a transforming experience, simply because, as unrealized artistic souls ourselves, we were blown away by the art and architecture everywhere on display and available to the public.

            Our life together as artists and writers and dabblers in ancient wisdom began that summer of 1964 when the consciousness of our distinct identities woke up. We ditched the American clothes we brought with us, picked up some European styles in an Italian open-air market, and hitch-hiked our way from outside Naples to Calais, stopping at every site where great art was on display. It was a tremendously illuminating liberation from the bourgeois consciousness of practical survival which permeated our backgrounds. With my college French retrieved from memory and Jala’s pidgin Italian picked up from her elderly relatives, we obscured our identities as Americans and were greeted in many places as international citizens whose country-of-origin was not immediately apparent. Like the man who sold us tickets to the carnival rides in Calais, where we were enjoying ourselves exceedingly:

            “Quell nationalité,” he asked.

            “Americain,” I said.

            “Americain!” he cried, as if astonished.

            “Oui,” I said, proud of not being recognized as an ugly American.

            We saw one of those in real life on our Channel crossing from France to England on the very day after we’d enjoyed ourselves at the carnival.

            We were on the deck of the ferry watching the weather and the water when our attention was drawn to a guy sitting on one of the deck chairs—tipsy if not drunk—who announced to all assembled that he was an American enjoying himself immensely here in Europe. He wore a semi-conservative, green-and-gray checked sport jacket—collar open-no tie—and was about forty-five. He had his left arm around a pretty young blonde in a mini-skirt, who sat on his knee, and in his right hand—God’s truth, I swear—he held up a fat wad of American bills. “It’s easy to get along here in Europe,” he said—indicating his blonde trophy, who smiled on command—“when you’ve got enough of these,” holding up his wad of American money.

            So the boorish American still existed in 1964. We saw others, but that guy won first prize.

Cultural Shock

            The cultural shock came home more vividly, however, right after we returned to America after twelve weeks abroad. Before heading back to graduate school we stayed briefly with my in-laws on Long Island, giving us the opportunity to see Michelangelo’s Pieta at the New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows. We’d seen his other three in Europe and wanted to complete our experience of the series.

Pieta del Duoma

            Our favorite, which we went back to nearly every day of the total two weeks we spent in Florence, was the Pieta del Duomo di Firenze, the Pieta housed in the spectacular Duomo cathedral, which dominates the cityscape of Florence, Italy, like a huge watch tower.  Also called The Deposition and sometimes Christ Lowered into the Tomb, this masterpiece sat not far from inside the main entrance of the cathedral. There may have been a rope or chain holding the public back from touching the sculpture, but otherwise we were able to get close enough to see the chisel marks Michelangelo left in the marble. It’s awesome to stand that close to such a work of artistic genius and admire it at your leisure. 

Vatican (and New York) Pieta

            The fourth Pieta, transported to New York from the Vatican that summer, is the critics’ choice for world favorite. The poignantly realistic sculpture portrays a limp, very dead Jesus lying over the lap of his mother, whose face, with closed eyes, expresses a serenity so subtly combined with grief that one stands transfixed at how life-like cold stone can be made to seem. But I can’t say I got close enough to the Pieta in New York to have seen that.

            To view the American display we stood on a conveyor belt which took us into an enclosed, chapel-like environment bathed in blue lights with sacred music—think Mormon Chapel Choir—piped in from above. Twelve or fifteen yards in front of us, at an angle of perhaps twenty degrees below our level, the Pieta was displayed as if it were a sacred object in a Hollywood vision. Giving us perhaps a minute to spend with the sculpture, the belt then spit us out into the crowd again at the other end of the display.

            And did I mention the solid pane of bullet-proof glass mounted between the Pieta and we who passed by on the conveyor belt?

World's Fair Pieta
Viewed from conveyor belt

            (For the record, the Florentine Pieta is no longer in full public view but has been moved to the adjoining Duomo Museum, where it may be seen, along with other timeless art and objets d’arts, for a small fee.)

            It seemed to Jala and me that we were in a sense forced to leave behind our new perceptions and perspectives on this enormously wider world we’d discovered just so we could assimilate back into American life. And we never were entirely successful in accomplishing that. Fortunately, though, American life has transformed in the decades since 1964. Diversity, globalism, expanded civil rights to groups once not only excluded but despised, have especially advanced citizen sophistication in many areas.

Repealing the 20th Century

            But with Trump we see a backlash to an age before any of this happened. The Trump Regime is working to create a new gilded age which, in a way, seeks to reverse the entire twentieth century, at least when it comes to equitable distribution of the world’s resources. The idea that the Earth belongs to everyone who lives here is some sort of heresy that enrages the regime’s supporters. The supposition that personal freedom needs restraint to achieve the greatest societal good evokes disturbing outbreaks of red-faced rage. The suggestion that the Trump Regime is the worst of an uncivilized rogue element in the American character—descendants of the criminals who poured over here en masse to make a fortune from stolen land—is not welcome in our current dominating political environment.

            But it’s all true. All that’s missing is the realization, not that America is at a critical choice between full democracy and some sort of oligarchy or authoritarian hybrid, which it is, but that America is about to lose its claim as the hope of the world because the foundations of our much-vaunted and admired system are rotting and collapsing under the weight of every person’s inalienable right to get rich, as Ronald Reagan so transparently articulated.

Trump at NATO last week

            Trump is the personification of America’s love affair with wealth, as our European allies look on with varying degrees of pity and fear, not because wealth puts them off but because Trump is vulgar, crude, and hostile in his display of it. As others have pointed out, his admiration for the Saudi princes, Netanyahu, Erdogan, the despicable Duterte, and of course Putin and Xi Jinping is striking compared to his tense relations with our allies in the one-world international order we’ve been committed to protecting and pursuing in agreements supposedly cemented fifty, sixty, and seventy years ago.

Is Democracy Sacred?

            It’s fair to ask, “So what? Is Democracy sacred, a best of all possible societies? Why should any of us be worried if it changes into a dictatorship?”

            I worry because it seems to me that Democracy, particularly a liberal Democracy such as America became, despite increasing counter-pressures, between the late 1950s and the election of 2016, provides an opportunity for all souls to grow and develop according to their own lights. And that, it seems to me, is in accordance with a Divine Plan, if there is such a thing, to evolve life forms with increasing ability to live in harmony with each other rather than in a state of Nature which the predatory and ostentatious capitalism of the Trump Regime is pushing as a social philosophy.

            We couldn’t be more out of step with loftier principles of human activity than we are with Trump, whose regime glorifies cash over character, popularity over substance, and who is greeted everywhere with false smiles currying favor in the hope that the rich, boorish American will drop a bundle of those coveted American dollars before he leaves for his next stop on his historical tour of our allies, European and Mid-eastern.

            By the time he comes home we understand that American interests have shifted. Our rulers are no longer interested in preserving and carrying forward an historical tradition dating back at least 5,000 years. Like the radical groups that blow up cultural icons of competing religions, we as a society have given permission to a rogue regime to explode the democratic ideals I’ve seen growing over a lifetime.

            The underlying vision directing history after the disaster of World War II was toward cooperative unity among nations. One day--perhaps we might even live to see it--humanity would become one race of many cultures connected to everything we are, from the single cells that emerged from “nothing” to the greatest souls who ever walked the planet and taught us how to cope with our single-most common problem which we share with everything that lives on Earth—mortality.

            That illusion of unity is gone with the Trump Regime. But what are we replacing it with? So far, amidst all the bluster and noise about fake news and pity for poor picked-on Donald who’s way too terrific for the jealous to endure, all we’ve got now is an inferior culture with a huge arsenal of deadly weapons to blast anyone who tries to contradict us in the claim that we are still the best country in the world.

            Seems like we’re not in the mood to play with our old friends. We’re tired of them. We like the idea of a strong man. Maybe a King. Or an Emperor? Why not a competition among dictators for the role of Emperor of Earth? We could hold televised auditions, online voting, and pick the Ruler of the World like we pick winners on the Amateur Hour by who gets the highest reading on the virtual applause meter.

            Donald Trump would win. Believe me. And it’ll be terrific.

            But the art! What will happen to the art when boorish wealth takes over the world? Will it disappear into private collections, even in Europe?

            Sometimes I feel most grateful for living in a prosperous, cultured time, which I realize is rare in history. Sometimes I want to weep to think that this era of privilege for others like me is ending, when the treasures of culture were readily available to any student who could afford a $250 round-trip plane ticket to Brussels. Sometimes I want to fight against the wave of cultural ignorance that has gathered like a tsunami bearing down upon the Age of Enlightenment, which enemies call a failure.

            Maybe they’re right. Maybe history moves in circles, not in a line. Maybe there’s no culture, however beautifully portrayed in art, which compensates for human weakness and stupidity. Maybe life is a matter of a few winners, who we admire, and many losers, who we dismiss with contempt. Maybe we live, after all, in a state of Nature and Man is just a successful species of primate whose time on the planet is short. Maybe we shouldn’t defend people who don’t pay us for it. That’s what any minimally rational animal in the jungle would decide.

            Or maybe we’re just passing through “the Trump Hump,” as Jala named it, when progress toward an interdependent world must pause, must wait for those who don’t yet accept global inclusion to get over their anger and insecurity, change their minds, and come along willingly. If the Trump Regime falls under its own weight of inefficiency, corruption, nepotism, lies, and dictatorial tendencies, we’ll have another chance to rethink what we’ve done to our Democracy by electing this shrewd but Ugly American as our President.

            But if the Regime somehow survives and succeeds, in its own terms, we’ll be in a new era where Democracy loses ground to authoritarian control and a huge majority of us become serfs in a new feudalism.

            It’s too early to tell which way, if either, it’s going. But if I had to choose another place to live to escape an ugly regime, I’d choose southern Europe for the weather and for the art. 

            In the meantime, welcome home to America, Donald, where culture has yet to fully penetrate. I know you don’t feel it quite as we did back in 1964, but, as someone once said, it takes a lot of history to make a great civilization. We’re obviously not there yet. Hopefully you’re a wake-up call, not a trumpet sounding Taps.