I was thinking. The America we grew up in won’t survive the next few years. The broad destruction of the federal government, the gross theft of public resources, the broad dismissal of expertise and experience, the greed, the disdain for law, the self-serving quality of the little man, his sycophants and fellow Republicans and, most significantly, the rage and naivete of their voters and the entitlement and irresponsibility of the ninety million people who didn’t vote. The people we elected are in way over their heads and the results of their incompetence and greed are going to be horrific.
When, in several years, we look around at our failed state and what’s left of our planet, we will be ready for a new American ethos, one that isn’t promoted by our oligarchs, our industries, our military, our technologies or the Kardashians; I propose that our new ethos be that of Universal Wellbeing, a national guarantee of food, housing, medical care, education, safety, and contemplation for every American (by “contemplation,” I mean the time and opportunity to pursue a spirituality); an America that takes pride in the wellbeing of its citizenry and is offended and embarrassed by a citizen deprived.
Merriam-Webster defines freedom as “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.” We Americans talk about it as though it’s unique to us, as though citizens of Denmark, South Korea, Australia, England, Japan, Norway, France, Canada, and a whole bunch of other countries spend their lives in chains. They don’t. But the poor in America, our fellow citizens, do. Our fellow Americans struggle for food, housing, medical care, education and physical safety. We need to redefine those things as necessities, as the foundational rights of every citizen. Without them, by definition, our fellow Americans are not free; because poverty places constraints on choice and action. Today, forty million American men, women and children are living without freedom. That number is growing and will continue to grow.
I envision an America that takes offense at poverty and takes responsibility for it; an America that recognizes that poverty is a danger to all of society, a waste of human talent, and a waste of money spent in response to the effects of hunger, lack of housing, lack of medical care and all the rest. America needs to treat lack of wellbeing like a house fire: trained professionals show up, put out the fire and treat the injured, and that help is paid for and is the responsibility of the state, of all of us. Our future success as a society and as a country, if it is ever to occur, demands that we reconsider our ethos, that we spend our tax dollars on people. We can afford it. We’ll simply tax the rich like we used to do.
We, as a society on the road to ruin, need to start thinking about what’s next, after the criminals and sycophants are dead, in prison or otherwise removed from seats of power, and the millions who voted for the little man are looking at the wreckage of their country and replaying in their memories the lies, tinny arguments and easy solutions they voted for and with that reflection, reconsidering the role of the state in assuring wellbeing. Because they, like the rest of us, are going to need it.
Morocco is the most honest place I’ve ever been. Many years ago, it gave me a dozen stitches and a broken arm. There are few things more honest than a broken arm. I likely killed one of my assailants. That was honest, too. I think killing someone is probably as honest as you can be.
We liberals need to be honest about violence. The cliché that the mighty pen bests the sword is a lie repeated by people with fancy educations and big vocabularies just before tucking into a hearty dinner. They are people who lecture us with tired and unoriginal arguments that have earned them a good living and kept them safe, and achieved very little for the rest of us. Honesty is recognizing the value that violence has wrought. Wars, strikes, vandalism, fire bombs, riots, assault and broken windows cause change. Little else does. Certainly not clever hands on the keys; our liberal elite craft books, letters and stern editorials from their comfortable lives and change little or nothing.
If you want to have a conversation about police brutality, burn down a police station. You’ll get your conversation. To be sure, there is no joy in broken glass or burning buildings. There is no joy in stitches, fractured bones or death, but there is the satisfaction of having been honest, of being acknowledged, of causing people to think about you, your life, your wellbeing, of knowing that your hunger is not without recourse, not without purpose. Admittedly, there is a passion to violence, a physical and spiritual lust, the deep satisfaction that comes from settling a score, of showing people with power what true power is; the power of material destruction, the power of bodily injury, the power of death.
For a liberal to call for violence is out of character. The liberal credo is much like the Hippocratic oath; “First, do no harm.” Except that the Hippocratic oath doesn’t say that (ironically, the Hippocratic Oath does forbid abortion, but that’s not this conversation). Likewise, we liberals should look at our beliefs and our history and ask ourselves, why is violence off the table? We every day accept violence brought by the society around us, the violence of poverty, the violence of poor education, the violence of inaccessible health care, the violence of bigotry and stigma, the violence of a failing climate, the violence of law enforcement, the violence of unjust incarceration. Why is this state-sponsored violence, which has caused the misery and early deaths of so many for so long, so acceptable? And why is a violent response so taboo?
There is no power in stewing and chewing the gnawed bones discarded by the wealthy. The power’s in the taking, in the wresting of wellbeing from those who would not give it freely; the power’s in causing the wealthy to reflect on the thin and delicate branch of their perch. It’s in acknowledging that there is such a thing as wellbeing and that we are all due wellbeing; we are all due food, a roof, a bed, a doctor, a teacher, an opportunity to celebrate the fact of our being.
The pursuit of wealth beyond wellbeing is a fool’s errand. It’s a pursuit for people who don’t comprehend the marvel of life, nor its brevity, nor their unearned good fortune in living it. These are people without the intellectual capacity or sense of irony to recognize life for the remarkable moment that it is. These are people without empathy, people who mistake owning for success. That their eighty years of life, never to be repeated, will be best observed through the crap they surround themselves with; toys, mansions, sycophants and genuflecting politicians. They’re dupes and fools, the bunch of them. But the wealth they’re taking is yours and mine, it’s our wellbeing. We need them to stop. And they won’t stop by asking them nicely.
On my flight home from Morocco, the long leg, Casablanca to Montreal, I had a bulkhead seat and 370 movies to choose from. Bridget Jones’s Baby, Alien, Batman Returns, Back to the Future II and III, A Bug’s Life, Forrest Gump, Glory, Million Dollar Baby, The Green Mile, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery; they were all there, just waiting for me to point and press.
It’s a seven-hour flight and I read my novel as long as I could stand it and then I scrolled the movies. Besides the movies, there were 650 “shows;” that’s over 1000 ways of piloting yourself through the airplane noise and stink, your sore butt and cramped legs, and the silent wrestling match with the person in the seat beside you over armrest justice. I’d smile and brace my elbow when I passed him his coffee or his chicken taco and he’d smirk back, pressing my arm for advantage while I was off balance.
The movie Casablanca was an option; it’s my favorite movie. My favorite scene takes place in Rick’s Café: Yvonne, a young French woman with her heart beating for Rick, proprietor and our American hero, waltzes into the scene and allows German Soldiers to buy her drinks to court his jealousy. A German soldier sits at the piano and bangs the keys while his fellow countrymen, led by Major Strasse (the perfect evilist), thump the piano with their clenched fists and sing Die Wacht am Rhein. In response, hero and idealist, Victor stands in front of the band and commands they play La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. The scene becomes a North Africa battlefront, the Germans in their synchronized male voices and well-cut uniforms arrayed in a tight battle group against the trombone, trumpet, drums and guitar, the many mouths open wide in shared song, the suits and long dresses, the white police uniforms, led by the idealist in his white tuxedo, overwhelm the Germans in beauty, numbers, volume and passion. As the tears run down Yvonne’s cheeks, they run down mine. Viva la France!
The problem with Casablanca is that it is a celebration of a war-besieged 1942 America and was shot when the outcome was unclear. The main character, Rick, outcast and rejected lover, damaged but tough, represents an America of ideals and courage in the midst of war, an America that stares into the future confident and unafraid. It’s an America that doesn’t exist anymore; we’ve become instead the fist-pounders belting out our nationalism, bullying the world, and using the tools of state to shut down resistance (the next scene in the movie). I wish we liberals were playing the part of Yvonne, that we were the resistance. But we’re not. We don’t have her tears. We don’t have her courage. We don’t have her passion. We don’t have her voice. We certainly don’t have her acting ability. Nor are we the tough idealist that is Rick, the courageous Nazi antagonist that is Victor (who can’t contain his outrage over even a bar song), or even the cynical yet patriotic French policeman, Captain Renault with his bemused smile and peccadillos.
Instead, I watched American Graffiti. The actors, the cars, the street scenes, the dialog, it’s the safe, confident, pretty America I grew up in; it’s who we used to be. The questions the movie wrestles with are the questions of of an idyllic youth; what should we do tonight, who’s dating who, whose car is faster, college or no, where do we get some booze; all with Wolfman Jack as our narrator and conscience over a playlist that includes Only You, Party Doll, Peppermint Twist, At the Hop, The book of Love, Do You Want to Dance, Why do Fools Fall In Love, Goodnight, Well It’s Time to Go, and all the rest. The fights and wrecked cars, the money stolen from the pinball machines, the teenage stunt that wrecked a police car resolve themselves quickly and neatly and don’t derail the narrative; they are instead absorbed as the unremarkable antics of youth. It’s a movie about ideals, confidence and identity; the answers to the existential questions are obvious and go without saying. In 1962, American young people believed in America. I watched it again when I got home.
In Fès, every morning 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.
