In Fès, I have breakfast at the Cinema Café, a little street-side diner with movie posters on the walls and indoor and outdoor tables; a cheese omelet, half an avocado sliced on top, hummus with a tomato garnish, fresh-squeezed orange juice, tart black olives, café americano with a dash of sugar, and sliced and toasted khobz (traditional Moroccan bread) with jam. Most days, Ouissal or Mohammad are my waiters, Kenza is the cashier. They’re all in their twenties and pretty in that slim, stunningly beautiful dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes Moroccan way. They speak fluent English (as well as Arabic and French and they greet their customers from Spain in their language, too; my embarrassment in this multi-lingual city never gets a break). Two or three cooks wearing hijabs work the kitchen.
I wend my way to the café between ancient stone walls rising straight up on either side of the narrow cobblestone streets, a sliver of deepest blue sky just visible above. My route takes me past feral cats shopping the gutters, ornately carved and varnished wooden doors leading into homes (just inside the doors, beautiful tile stairs with potted plants on the landings curve up and away to doors, patios, gardens and mysteries above, I peek inside with the morning comings and goings), the corner store where I buy my bottled water (often with a donkey cart parked in front making a delivery), three tiny tailor shops carved into the stone walls each worked by a man with muscled fingers pushing fabric through a humming sewing machine, a hotel and spa, a fancy restaurant that serves beer (unusual in this Muslim country), a tiny sfenj shop (deep fried bread dipped in sugar, too hot to hold and so served hanging on a knotted ribbon of palm leaf to protect the fingers) with a couple of dozen high school kids in uniforms waiting in line shoving and laughing and fussing with their phones, a barber shop, an old woman begging (I make my morning contribution), mothers leading small children by the hand, a smoky putt-putt construction buggy or two filled with bags of concrete or debris squeezing past pedestrians, our backs pressed against the wall, half-a-dozen day laborers with pushcarts smoking cigarettes and waiting for work, a cop, sometimes two, dressed in blue and carrying a gun, people in hijabs and kaftans and trendy western wear hurrying to work, and all the rest of the every-city, every-morning bustle and hustle. Except here in the Medina there are no cars or trucks, the streets are too narrow, the cobbles were laid and the walls built a thousand years before cars became a thing. I say bonjour and tap my heart with my right hand as I pass the shopkeepers, the tailors, the barber, the beggar lady and everyone else and they smile and return my greeting, it’s their custom. I laugh with the school kids as I push my way through.
The barber shop is behind rusty double steel doors. It’s small, maybe six feet by eight feet, dirty white tile walls, the single chair facing an ancient mirror. There is a bench along the wall behind the chair where a customer can wait and where I throw my jacket. The back of the barber chair is broken and sags so that and he has to prop me up with a pillow for my beard trim and shave.
A shave with a straight razor provides a moment of clarity. It’s a time where you look in the mirror and say to yourself, I am trusting this man with my life. Is he mentally stable, is he having a good day, is his marriage good, are his kids well-behaved, is there something in his past that I can’t know that would cause him in a movement requiring no greater effort than flicking a light switch to slice through the skin of my neck, my trachea, my jugular so the blood pumps onto the towel covering my shirt and leaves me gasping in the smudged mirror as shiny red rivulets soak through the towel and flow onto the floor under my feet and my life ebbs?
As I consider my Berber barber and the various slights that we of European-extract have brought to the various peoples of the African continent, I think about character; does he have the character I can trust with my life? I reflect on that as he heats his straight razor with his cigarette lighter to kill off bacteria from the last throat he didn’t cut and sharpens it on his strop and lays it on the cluttered cabinet beside him as he trims my mustaches with his scissors and comb and whips up the shaving lotion in a cup with a brush and daps it ear to ear while I contemplate the razor lying next to his hip.
When finally he picks it up, he holds it between thumb and forefinger with a practiced care, visibly cautious in the way he handles it, the way he brings it to my throat. As the blade touches my skin and he begins to scrape at the stubble, I think about character, how success in life is so much a matter of judgement, of recognizing risk and the ways in which the ability to judge character mitigates risk. His motions are slow, practiced, efficient, painstaking in every sense of the word. I close my eyes, not because I can’t bare to watch but because I want to savor the moment, the moment in which my life is completely in the hands of someone who’s character I assessed through pantomime and smiles and a dozen words of a language I don’t speak. The trim takes half an hour or so and cost thirty-five dirham, about three and a half dollars. I give him forty, just to be safe.
That, it seems to me, is how much of life’s success is gained; through the careful assessment of character and the way that assessment is used as a tool for managing life’s risks. As my barber strokes his razor against my neck, I’m caused to think about the people who voted for the little man, about their judgement, about their ability to assess character and so control the risk in their lives. Never mind their barbers, how do they buy a used car?
I’m in a city that was founded twelve-hundred years ago. It’s lasted this long at least in part because of judgement, people making accurate assessments of other people. The United States is 248 years old. We’re not going to make it to twelve-hundred. We’re just not good enough judges of character.
The annual murder rate in Morocco is 1.7 per 100,000 people; in Canada, that number is 2.3, in the US it’s 5.8, in Mexico it’s 24.9, in Denmark it’s .98. So, while Morocco is more dangerous than Denmark, you’re considerably more likely to get murdered in Canada, the US or Mexico. I thought about that, too, as my barber laid his razor against my throat.
A friend told me that I was being apocalyptic in my view of America.
In the late 1800s, a French painter by the name of Georges Seurat created a style of painting called pointillism. Pointillism is the aggregation of thousands of tiny dots that in their entirety create an image. That’s the way we need to look at America today; the thousands of incidents of corruption and hubris, of lies and self-dealing that have been in the news for decades that, if you stand back and look at them in their entirety, create an image of a failing empire, a failing America.
Our painting has been taking shape over many years, certainly since Franklin Roosevelt; Eisenhower gave speeches about it. And so when a friend tells me that I’m overreacting to the little man’s election, I wonder how he can’t see the portrait before us, how the thousands of details indicating our demise aren’t readily apparent. The outline’s been clear to the interested observer at least since Reagan and has grown ever more obvious since.
This is not just a Republican or conservative failure, although Republicans have certainly been the driving force that’s gotten us here and its primary beneficiaries (from a political perspective). It’s been equally a failure of Democrats, us liberals, to create a compelling counter-narrative, to show Americans a viable alternative that makes fairness less threatening. Liberals have stood on nuanced intellectual arguments that people don’t have the time or patience to consider while conservative have hammered fear and religious imperative (the same thing, really).
I spent my career in the construction industry, an industry where people arrive at the job site at six in the morning and work all day in the cold and the heat doing physically exhausting work and go home at four and collapse with a beer in front of the TV and don’t have time or energy to consider the subtle and complex arguments about guns, race, abortion, healthcare, immigration, climate and all the rest. The Republican arguments are immediate, visceral and readily understood: Buy a gun, be safe from people who are different; abortion kills pretty white babies.
Republicans (and a lot of Democrats trying to stay relevant), make the argument that government should be run like a business, with efficiency and cost as the measures of success. Do we really want efficiency to be the yardstick? How would it be if government picked up the phone when you called and took the time to understand your concern rather than have you wade through a computerized voice menu that specifically doesn’t include your concern and then has you spend hours on hold as a reward? How about elementary and high schools that the private sector can’t compete with because, how could they? How about a healthcare system where your doctor talks with you for an hour about whatever ails you and you never see a bill? How about a system of higher education that was cheap and easy to get into and graduation a notable accomplishment? How about a system of education that taught the building trades (I’m a builder, so that’s where my sympathy lies) with the same demands and focus as a college education and rewarded with a similar status and income? How about an immigration system that welcomed immigrants as the physical and creative force that they are? How about a social welfare system that took people off the street, fed them, housed them and gave them the attention they need to keep both them and society safe?
How about a tax system that prevented the Elon Musks, the Jeff Bezos, and the Mark Zuckerbergs of this world from accumulating so much wealth that they compete with our elected government for power, power that is taken directly from our votes, yours and mine? How about if we taxed those people like we taxed them under Eisenhower and used that revenue to fund wellbeing for all of us? Conceptually, it’s just not that hard. But it’s not going to happen; we’ve already given our power to the fine fellows listed above, and they’re not giving it back.
We celebrate at the alter of capitalism as though it’s a higher order. It’s not. It’s simply a way of ordering productivity. But in late-stage capitalism, that’s where we are today, it deliberately stratifies society to the ends of owners, rewarding them at the expense of the people who do the actual work. And we don’t question it. We look around and mumble our mantra, America’s the greatest empire that ever was and one day I, too, will be rich enough to buy fancy houses, sports cars and politicians while the little people do my work. Meanwhile, they’ve already stolen your future.
This didn’t have to happen. If only we’d put together the dots and seen our portrait sooner.
I thought I did my bit. I served in the Army. I went to college. I started and ran a successful business. I raised two kids and sent them to college. I bought houses, cars, furniture and paid my taxes. I walk my dog. I love my wife of thirty-two years.
I wasn’t blind or naïve. I recognized our hubris, our weaknesses, our failures. But I believed in us, I believed the stories we told ourselves; I believed in justice and equality, in dignity and truth; I believed in smart people doing smart things to protect and advance those ideals. I understood that progress is hard and slow and occurs in starts and fits, that sliding back is part of going forward. I understood that I wouldn’t always agree with all that we did.
I was sure my fellow Americans shared my ideals, not in the details, but in the grand scheme, the big picture. I thought we all believed in the purple moutains’ majesty; I thought we all valued honesty, respect, expertise, not that those things were always there, but that they were always important. I thought we were leading the world to a better place.
I’m in Africa, the continent we all call home. I came here for perspective. Looking back across the ocean, I can see clearly that we are no longer the iconic land of myth, the home of the free and the brave; we are most certainly neither. We hum our hymns now, because we’ve forgotten the words.
I came to Africa because I wanted to see what America looked like from outside the long, dark shadow of our hubris. And what I see is poor and lazy thinking shorn of ideal. We cite the myths created by our forebears and have feasted at the table they set. But what have we done but get fat?
I no longer walk the streets of a non-American city proud of where I come from, proud of the blue and gold book in my money belt. I no longer believe in who I am and where I’m from, I no longer look at local peoples confident that they recognize me and my America for our ideals. I no longer pull out my identity with a flourish and hand it over with pride. I’m ashamed now, of my country. And I’m ashamed of myself, for having believed what I believed about the country I adored for so long. And because I did so little to protect it.
I look back across the Atlantic and I don’t like us. The America I see from here is fat, shallow, materialistic and dishonest, and lacking entirely in introspection, wisdom and decency. We fail to extrapolate; we fail to see that the actions we take against others, we take against ourselves. Our daily news continues to blare the story of who we once were. But we’re not that anymore.
It’s not the little man. It’s us, it’s you and me. We didn’t fight the good fight when it was our time. We sacrificed our beloved country because it was easier than insisting, than arguing with neighbors and people we love, than calling out the lies, the hypocrisy, the greed, the degeneracy, the unfairness of it all. And pitchforks are dangerous and messy. We were too focused on the important things, the things we’re entitled to, the money, the guns, the pronouns, to dirty ourselves in battle. We live in his world now. And it’s because of us.
