Positive
My view of America is an overall positive one. Why is that?
First of all, I live in America now. It would be pretty bad move for me to have made if I thought the place sucked.
For someone like me, where my family and I call home is a fine place to live on a day-to-day level. I have access to a wide variety of products and services, including solid medical care and excellent childcare facilities. We have good schools and healthy food available to us.
My area and my family’s ability to afford to live here is a big part of that equation. If we had less, we would not be able to afford our healthcare, our childcare, or our property taxes. We might have to live somewhere which has poorer quality schools or is less safe.
And I know that the color of my skin, and my wife’s skin, probably makes life easier for us (a thought that makes both of us physically ill).
Things like that pop up a lot when I think about America. It is a land of greatness and travesty. At its founding it held both that all men were created equal, and that some men could be enslaved. It is a land of contradictions.
The mistake is to run away from these failings, or whitewash them in the name of defending America’s greatness. The task is to learn from them, and to pursue greatness, healing the wounds as best we can. That is not something that can be left to someone else; it is incumbent on all of us here to strive towards this.
But what would this better America look like? Events of the past, and how they are viewed today, provide a guide.
At My Lai, helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Junior intervened against the massacre:
Thompson and his crew continued flying over the scene and they saw a group of civilians running toward an earthen bunker with American soldiers following them. So, according to multiple accounts, Thompson did something that went against his military training and against the traditional concept of friend and enemy in war. It also took unthinkable courage. He landed the chopper directly between the advancing Americans and the bunker. He told the Americans that if they fired on the Vietnamese civilians--or on him--his crew would fire on them. He ordered Colburn and the helicopter's crew chief Glenn Andreotta to cover him with their weapons. Then he motioned for the civilians inside the bunker to come out and he arranged for their evacuation with other helicopter pilots who were his friends. The C Company soldiers looked on but thankfully held their fire.
Thompson is nowadays considered a hero. He received the Soldier’s Medal in 1998, and his actions began to be taught by the Army as a model of good soldiering.
What is not remembered is that, at the time, he was shunned and insulted. He received death threats over the phone, and mutilated animals on his porch. A senior congressman made a public statement of “if anybody goes to jail in this My Lai stuff, it will be the helicopter pilot.”
What is remembered is the myth. The helicopter pilot is lauded as an example of American greatness, and what is forgotten is the response to the heroism of him and his crew.
The second sentence of the Declaration of Independence reads:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
These words are now widely seen to apply to all and women. But four of the five drafters of the declaration owned slaves, and a section of their original draft denouncing the slave trade was stricken by Congress before it was signed.
Additionally, one of the main components of participation in a representative democracy, suffrage, was heavily restricted even among white males in the states. Some states required property ownership as a condition of voting until 1856. Black people were prevented from registering and practicing their right to vote through a variety of overt segregationist tactics up until the mid 1960s, and suppression of voting rights through racial gerrymandering and targeted voter roll purges continues.
So it is clear that many of the freedoms considered quintessentially American were not part of the country until late in the 20th century, and there are widespread measures against these freedoms even today. But even the defense of these suppression tactics is rarely done in a way that opposes the American *concept* of liberty. The “quiet bit” is rarely said out loud (although I admit that it sometime is).
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So what does it mean that America maintains a myth of its own greatness, one that is frequently contradicted by its own history? It’s easy to dismiss this as mass delusion, and there is some truth to this. To me, this seems correlated with the division between nationalism and patriotism. Orwell, in Notes on Nationalism, wrote that nationalism is
[…]the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
Like a someone incapable of introspection, a nationalist might argue that America is and always has been great, that where fact and history may show otherwise, then the truth is a lie. They stand before the mirror, dissolved into this idea of the nation, and cannot understand its wrinkles or pores, are blind to its scars, and attest against all evidence that it is without blemish—and that you’d better accept it, or face the consequences.
Whereas a patriot is not dissolved into the nation, and look upon it with love despite its scars or history. They will seek to help it realize its best self.
Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur, and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me - take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever - but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man's success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity - the Declaration of American Independence.
He exhorted a return to that ideas held in that declaration, even though these were not the lived experience of the nation. That appeal to greatness, the appeal to pursue it in earnest, is one borne out of love.
So what do I believe about America?
I believe that the founders of this country based it on ideals that burn bright, that these ideals exceeded their ability to comprehend, and that America is at its best when it advances towards a fuller realization of those ideals.
And I believe that a country incorporated (albeit unintentionally) around the realization of human rights, rather than a particular ethnic group, is worth a damn, and worth defending.
Optics
From Surrogate Angels of Death by Rhona Garelick:
Imagine this: A shooter has entered a public place, where you are walking with your family. You have but a minute to realize you can save your 2-month-old by using your own body to shield him from the bullets raining down around you. Mere days later, your baby, the youngest survivor of the El Paso massacre, will appear on television with the very man who inspired the terrorist who killed both you and your husband. A photograph is taken, for posterity.
In the photo, your baby wears a bowtie and tiny jacket; someone has dressed him up for this occasion. He gazes off to the side (toward his aunt, who stands beside First Lady Melania Trump), his body stiff, his face solemn. He is not at ease in this strange lady’s arms. How could he be? Your child has just gotten out of the hospital, where he was treated for broken bones incurred when you desperately threw yourself over his little body and took the bullets that seconds later orphaned him and his two siblings.
Neither the president nor Melania so much as glances at Baby Paul. Oblivious (as ever) to the solemnity of their occasion, they smile broadly, matching veneers on full beam. Your husband came from a family of Trump supporters. Perhaps, in a different world, you might even have wanted to meet Donald Trump, or take a photo with him as he gave one of his signature thumbs-up gestures — everything is A-OK here.
Imagine this, then look at this photo again.
Well worth the read, along with the article Trump’s El Paso Photo Is Obscene by Graeme Wood.
Expansion
I think it’s worth pulling at what I hinted in my last blog post.
The arguments of many Republicans in favor of Trump are on their face laughable. Let’s take a look at Representative Louie Gohmert’s questions at the recent hearing of the Judiciary Committee:
Gohmert: Well listen, regarding collusion or conspiracy, you didn’t find any evidence of any agreement—and I’m quoting you—among the Trump campaign officials and any Russia-linked individuals to ‘fere with our US election, correct?
Mueller: Correct.
Gohmert (his voice beginning to shake): So, you also note in the report that an element of any of those obstructions you referenced requires a corrupt state of mind, correct?
Mueller: Corrupt intent, correct.
Gohmert: Right. (Gohmert begins to shout passionately) And if somebody knows they did not conspire with anybody from Russia to effect the election, and they see the big Justice Department, with people that hate that person, coming after ‘em, and then a Special a-Counsel appointed who hires dozen or more people that hate that person, and he knows he’s innocent, he’s not corruptly acting in order to see that justice is done, what he’s doing is not obstructing justice, he is pursuing justice, and the fact that you ran it out two years means you perpetuate injustice.
What actions might this include? From [Representative Cedric Richmond’s questioning of Mueller]:
Richmond: So it's fair to say the President tried to protect himself by asking staff to falsify records relevant to an ongoing investigation?
Mueller: I would say that’s, ah, generally a summary.
Richmond: Would you say that, that action, the President tried to hamper the investigation by asking staff to falsify records relevant to your investigation?
Mueller: I am just going to have to refer you to the report if I could for, ah, ah, review of, ah, that episode.
Richmond: Thank you. Also the President's attempt to get McGahn to create a false written record were related to Mr. Trump's concerns about your obstruction of justice inquiry, correct?
Mueller: I believe that to be true.
In other words, Gohmert’s argument is that someone can ask their staff to falsify records, in effect lying to investigators, if they know they are innocent–and indeed, this is part of some noble effort “pursuing justice”.
This is obviously ridiculous. Given Trump’s high approval rates among Republicans, and (as shown in my previous post) his viciousness towards his in-party enemies, it’s easy to see why a Republican would want to be seen as supporting the President. But presenting an argument in defense of someone does not mean that the argument itself is sound, nor does it mean that the argument itself is the point.
Christian apologetics are often assumed to be means of defending the beliefs of Christians to external actors, but they have often been used by Christians to shore up their own beliefs—and it is not just in Christian circles that this occurs. There is nothing wrong with this if the arguments are sound. But statements like Gohmert’s are so intellectually brittle that, if you look at them seriously for but a moment, they crumble. When a weak argument is used as an apologetic, this is only of use for those looking for an excuse rather than a reason to continue believing what they already believe.
Arguments like those from many Republicans today are a simulacrum of reason. They are constructed not to illustrate the truth, or assist in the search for the truth, but instead both to provide this excuse to the “witch hunt!” crowd and, accompanied by the emotional outburst brought by Gohmert, an impassioned declaration of support for the party’s leader.
They might as well be chanting “Long live the party! Long live Saddam Hussein!”
Purge
On the 1979 Ba’ath party purge, from the article For dictator, a ravenous rise to rule:
With 1,000 top Baath Party leaders gathered at short notice in a Baghdad auditorium, Hussein told them somberly that a plot against the regime had been uncovered.
”We used to be able to sense a conspiracy with our hearts before we even gathered the evidence," he said. "Nevertheless we were patient, and some of our comrades blamed us for knowing this but doing nothing about it."
Then he called on stage a top party officer who had been arrested and tortured after daring to protest Hussein's seizure of power. Brought from prison, where he had been threatened with the rape and murder of his wife and daughters, Muhyi Abdul Hussein Mashadi confessed that he had plotted with Syria to overthrow the Iraqi regime - and that his co-conspirators were in the audience.
Then a security official read the names of 66 miscreants, who were led from the hall as relieved survivors began to outdo one another with chants denouncing the plotters and declaring, "Long live Saddam Hussein!" Hussein sat quietly, wiping away tears at one point, as if saddened at the perfidy of his former friends.
Twenty-two of those arrested were executed with shots fired by Baath leaders offered the chance to prove their fealty. Hussein made sure footage of these "democratic executions" was added to the tape before copies were distributed to Baath activists across Iraq.
The black dog
I haven’t posted on this blog for a while, at least not in length. This is partially down to our family moving home, but also that I’ve wanted to write about a particular topic, and once struck the bell cannot be unrung. Others have been braver than I, and shared their own struggles, but it’s taken me quite some time to be ready to share my own.
I’ve suffered with depression for as long as I can remember. It has nearly cost me life more than once. For a long time it was more of a constant in my life than anything else.
My earliest memories of it are as a weight that hung on me that I couldn’t shift. It’s common to confuse depression with sadness, but one might as well confuse climate with weather. I felt happy (sometimes excitedly so) while still feeling that cold ball in my chest pulling me down.
My mind twisted itself around the problem. Why did I feel this way? Along with being both aware of my own exclusion from social life in school, and completely unaware of what was causing it, I started to believe that there was something *off* about me at a much more fundamental level than suffering an illness.
There’s a page from the comic Supreme Power that struck a chord.
I took the pain that I felt as a guide. I had to try to get rid of it, and anything that helped me forget it was worth pursuing. I didn’t fall into substance abuse or the like as some people have but, at its worst, I hoped that relationships might fix the problem—because even if I didn’t accept myself, at least I’d know that someone else did. Given that this is too much to expect someone else to solve, things never worked out, and when they failed I fell back into the pit. I was certain that they finally saw the flaw in me, that I still couldn’t identify, and ran from me.
I asked friends for what was wrong with me, and they told me that there was nothing wrong with me that wasn’t wrong with a lot of people. But I “knew” that I wasn’t right. That I needed to change something fundamental about my nature. And I could never figure out what it was, so I could never fix it. So what to do?
Once I found myself on the edge of a roof terrace recalling every single step that brought me there, but having no idea why I would do so. It took a great exertion of will to pull myself back. It took medication and the enormous help of my now wife to get me to the point where I could function properly.
The only fundamental problem I had was in accepting that this is an illness.
If any of this seems familiar to you, please seek help. I have a life now I would never believe living before my illness was treated. I still have depression, but it’s managed. Speak to your doctor and try find something that works for you.
Deeper horror still
At a rally this week, Trump supporters chanted the obviously racist “send her back”, mirroring Trump’s own racist tweets on Omar and other congresswomen of color.
But I want you to look carefully at the video. Specifically, in the bottom right. A young girl stands behind the president and, as the chant begins, you can see her mouth along.
This is chilling. I don’t particularly blame the girl (her being so young), but to see such a repugnant wave of bigotry be mimicked by a child is deeply unsettling.
I’ve been feeling sick in my stomach, ever since those tweets and the ensuing shitfest that has been their defense. This is the America of slavery, Jim Crow, and the internment camps, still living and still strong in 2019.
TERF
There's been a lot done over the years to advance the rights of trans people over the world, and this is on the whole a good thing. Trans people attempt suicide at rates far exceeding the population at large. LGBTQ young adults have a 120 percent higher risk of reporting homelessness compared to youth who identified as heterosexual and cisgender. Trans people deserve dignity, respect, compassion, and fair treatment under the law. The Trump administration has been working against this on many levels, proposing to repeal protections that prevent doctors from denying trans people general medical care on the basis of them being trans.
It is undeniable that trans rights need protecting. What is not certain is how that might be best achieved, and I’m concerned about a roadblock here.
Many who are agitating for trans rights insist that one should use a person’s preferred pronouns and current name, and will claim that “trans women are women” and “trans men are men”. While the pronouns and names are matters of ordinary politeness, the last points cause me discomfort and I have yet to be convinced of their accuracy.
For most of my life, the terms “man” and “woman” meant “adult male” and “adult female”, respectively, and I had no particular prompt to consider otherwise until recent years. But here is where the roadblock exists: I’ve found myself hesitant to discuss this, out of a fear of being labelled transphobic or a TERF. Conversations about this on Twitter appear polarized to say the least, and so this fear seems a reasonable one.
Here are my questions:
If gender is a social construct, why is self-identification sufficient? Surely one’s gender is a function of both society at large and the individual, and not something that a person has sole agency over?
Why (for example) are trans men part of the group “men” (which contains cis men and trans men) instead of some new superset, keeping “cis men” as “men”?
The idea of “trans” seems to assume a gender binary instead of a wider set of categories. Why is this?
I am not making any particular claims as to what is true here, but I wonder: where can such a discussion can be had in good faith? Honest ignorance should not be inescapable.
Obviously, there are plenty of bad-faith pricks out there, and it is not the responsibility of anyone to educate me. But both the idea of staying ignorant of this, or pretending to believe something (instead of simply not knowing) for the sake of avoiding confrontation, are repellant. I suspect I am not alone in this.
The warning light that is fear
I read a review of an old episode of The Leftovers today. Of the many things that struck me in the piece, what stood out most was this paragraph:
Ripley is the only human being to get on her ship at the end of “Alien”; She is alone, but the ghosts come with her. (And that movie is one of my all-time favorites not for showing that Ripley was brave, but for showing that she was afraid, so very afraid. And she did it all anyway.)
Of course, Ripley was brave. The flaw in this analysis is the confusion of bravery with a lack of fear. But to be brave is to overcome one’s fear—and fear is not intrinsically bad.
I've been accused of bravery at times when I was not afraid. Sometimes for something as banal as buying a woman I liked flowers. Another time because, after seeing a dog run over by a car and killed, I dragged it off the quiet road so it would not be subject to further indignity in death.
In one of the many times of recklessness on a bicycle (and one of the few on a public road), I cycled between a bus and a flat-bed truck. As we turned a corner, the bus and truck moved closer to one another until there was less than a foot separating me from both of them. I was surprised, in real danger, and totally without fear. I remember telling some friends about this, and being accused of boasting about my own bravery, but my intent was instead to tell them of my worry that there was something fundamentally broken about my fear response.
We treat fear as this thing more than it is. We berate ourselves for feeling it. But fear is a valuable thing. Ripley was right to be frightened of the xenomorph. Imagine how invincible or delusional she would have to be to not fear a creature that could kill her in an instant.
In our own lives we have much to be fearful of. A car might knock us down as we cross the road. A live wire might fry us if we touch it. A hot pot might scald us. Fear can serve as a useful tool, an instinctual evaluation of one’s circumstances that forces our consciousness to further evaluate our next course of action.
And if you think of it, what is there to praise if bravery is simply the absence of fear? You might as well praise someone for having a nose as for being fearless. It is no accomplishment. But bravery is to take that fear and to say “you will not stop me!”
When I see this young girl stand up and plead her case for her own humanity, and I see her fear but still she speaks, there she shows her clear and commendable bravery.
Sometimes the warning light can malfunction, and we can be afraid of things that are of no threat. But that does not eliminate either the value of fear generally or the bravery of overcoming those specific fears. We give each other such a hard time for being afraid that we miss the countless acts of bravery we and others achieve in spite of it.
A neighbor’s flag
In September, my family and I moved from Dublin to a town in Connecticut. It’s been a mostly positive experience here, though I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to the heat or the mosquitos. A friend from South Carolina thought this was amusing but, if her description of her home state is accurate, South Carolina is a dense, blisteringly hot fog where the small part of the air that isn’t water vapor is instead those irritating bloodsuckers. She may be exaggerating.
Our neighbors have been universally welcoming. Some of them have bumper stickers on their car (or door), and the occasional banner for a local political candidate. This is another change. Perhaps on game days (match days to the Irish) the odd person might hang their team colors from their windows, or put up a poster in their window. Otherwise, homes remain silent as to the loyalties of their occupants. Here, on the streets that surround our own, flags for various college and high school teams hang permanently from doorways, joining the ubiquitous stars and stripes.
One flag surprised me, at least in my reaction to it—a large Trump 2020 flag, hanging off a house a few streets over.
I won’t ascribe motives to the person who put up the flag. It’s certainly a brave thing to do in Connecticut and, for all I know, this person could be a prankster trying to get someone’s goat. Or they may be entirely sincere. I don’t know.
What I do know is that the flag, MAGA hats, and other signs and symbols of the Trump administration, remind me that I am not entirely welcome in this country.
I moved to the United States with my American wife and our two Irish-American children. Though my dealings with USCIS and the State Department were always polite and professional, processing times for immigrant visas rose sharply under the Trump administration. These processing times are also somewhat misleading—there were many other delays, additional processing times at different departments, etcetera. For example, there was a gap of five weeks between USCIS stating that the application was sent to the State Department, and the State Department recognizing it as received. All in all, it took 13 months from the submission of our application to receiving my visa.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association has characterized these delays as “crisis-level”, and they seem set to continue with the shuttering of 24 USCIS offices. Despite claiming to support legal immigration, the Trump administration seeks to dramatically reduce it. Famously, the administration rejected a 25 billion dollar funding deal for the wall, with protection for DACA recipients, because it did not include “massive cuts to legal immigration”.
The positions and actions of the administration here betray a deep distaste for immigrants, legal or otherwise. I don’t think that every Trump supporter feels this way, but I do know that they don’t care enough to severe their ties. And to wear a MAGA hat on your head, or to fly a Trump flag outside your home, is to proclaim at least your acquiescence to ostensibly racist policies.
I can only imagine how much less welcome those immigrants with darker skin than mine, or who are undocumented, must feel.