Spectacularly Thrashing About

It was my good fortune
to return to graduate school in 1964,
to the University of Chicago,
when I was in my early thirties.
I was not to be trusted:  remember,
"Never trust anyone over thirty!"?

It was the undergraduates who set the agenda.
We graduate students--old men like me, and a few women--
learned from those who were prime military fodder.
We learned what really rotten wars were about.
We learned how the government lied to us
and how our learned, principled universities helped them lie,
and how genuinely perverse our own government could be.

What in grade school I had been taught that "The Monroe Doctrine"
really meant not just that Europeans should stay out of the Americas
but that the United States would do all the meddling,
and we did, all through, but not only in Latin America.

All the hell of hundreds of years of racism and slavery
came down on our heads in the Sixties and even our naive good intentions
burned like fire and brimstone on our backs.

Conservatives hated the Sixties
because it scorned what they were,
and the liberals tried to cheer for
what they really did not understand.

When I left Chicago in 1969,
I could see smoke in my rear view mirror
from the fires in the city.
What I did not know then
was that we were burning down
our trust in each other, too.
We properly scorned our own political system
and have only recently seen the damage
not just to us as people, but to our ability to governing ourselves.

Donald Trump is part of the damage.
The Republican refusal to work at governing is part of the damage.
We elected our first Black President, and hated that we did it,
refusing to see what a good man he is.
"Let us shun him!", the Old Guard said.  "He is illegitimate!"
"He is African!  He isn't a Christian!  He isn't what we have been!"

I am fascinated by how many programs there are on TV about Alaska.
Not just crab fishermen, but white refugees seeking wilderness,
building log cabins, wanting to live forever far from neighbors,
hunters and gatherers with chain saws and wood stoves and frostbite.
Gold miners in muddy bays.  People falling trees
who are damned lucky not to kill themselves doing it.
Finding some kind of elemental virtue in not being
where there are schools and towns and government.

I know it did not all start in the Sixties.
It started in the Sixties for many of us
but it is a very old story of racism and sexism
and religious self-righteousness and cowboys and Indians.
Today it is scorn for any kind of government.
It is flirting with fascist attitudes--
a strong man with slogans to lead us,
and scorn for almost everyone else.

It is not just Donald Trump, who says he is the answer to everything,
but who has no answers for anything other than himself as a hero
who will take care of everything:  walls, China, women, and immigrants.

On the liberal side, Bernie Sanders sees the same mess that Trump sees,
but Sanders says the solution is to rebuild the middle class
instead of pretending that if we make some people really rich
everybody else will get rich, too; magically, trickling down.
No, he says, when the center of the nation is doing well,
then everybody will do well.  It isn't trickle down:  it is
jobs, health care, housing, food, education, roads, bridges, clean energy.
We have to arrange our society that way; make it that way.

I am not at all sure we, as a people, are ready yet
to govern ourselves sensibly.  The distrust is bone deep,
and there is no consensus about what it is we want to be.
We are still living on the slogans and articles of faith
we have chanted for too long about how great we are,
how white we are, how macho we are, how Christian we are,
how intelligent and decent and noble we are.

Baloney!  On nearly every scale of sensible achievement--
education, health care, poverty--we run behind in the pack.

Until we want to work together to genuinely make ours a great society,
we will do what we are doing now:  making a spectacle of ourselves.