Part One
When I returned to the United States in 2013 after two decades living in France and England, I suffered disorienting culture shock. I had returned multiple times to visit family, traveling the length of California, and later, a triangle of southern California to northern California to Raleigh, North Carolina, flying when necessary, driving when possible. There is about an eight hour drive from Claremont, California to Oakland or Nevada City, so I listened to the radio, stumbling over the words to whatever song was playing, and humming when I couldn’t remember. And I stumbled onto talk radio. What I heard blew my mind.
It was my first hint of what was brewing in my home country. The sweet sounds of Born Free followed by the report of a rifle. Then Rush Limbaugh, trashing every value I held to be self-evident: racial equality, environmental care, gender equality, immigrants, handicap access – he didn’t miss a thing. I didn’t need to listen more than once or twice. It soured the hours I spent on the road, normally a uniquely American pleasure, I think. I was shocked that trash-talk was even permitted. It was beyond free speech. It was inciting hatred and contempt of other people and groups. So I changed the station, visited my family, and returned to Europe, puzzled that this ugliness was even allowed on the airways.
Although I visited friends from the high school I had attended who seemed to find the likes of Rush Limbaugh amusing, and who clearly had not emerged from behind the Orange Curtain of Orange County, California, I did not realize how deeply right-wing propaganda had penetrated the national psyche. It was only the election of Trump as president that shocked me out of my slumber.
Now that I have again lived here in the US for several years, I am concerned, not to say terrified, about the deepening chasm between liberals/conservatives, Democrats/Republicans. I am old enough to remember the years when the two entities could talk to each other reasonably, even while disagreeing. We seem to have left that civility far behind, with threatened physical violence on one side and contemptuous superiority on the other. Neither is conducive to reasonable discourse.
It’s heart-breaking to realize that it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that we could witness the dissolution of our democracy, the rule of law as we have experienced it, and the emergence of a more authoritarian form of government here in our beloved United States.
I am also aware that we in the US are not alone in the rise of right-wing nationalism; even that bastion of liberalism, Sweden has seen the Sweden Democrats, a populist political party with roots in Swedish fascism and white nationalism, become the second largest party in the Swedish parliament. France has the Rassemblement National, Italy, the Brothers of Italy, the most right wing party in Italy since World War II, and Liz Truss follows Boris Johnson as head of the Conservative party.
So what is going on? Fear of losing national identity due to immigration, which is to say fear of losing that legacy of colonialism, white supremacy? I wonder. How wonderful was it “back then”?
I do get the ochre-tinted longing for the past. I ladled water hoisted from deep underground that was so sweet and pure I can still taste it. I knelt beside rushing streams in the woods to quench my thirst with no fear of contamination. My father owned hunting rifles and used them on week-end hunting trips with his buddies. He tied his own flies and made his own poles for fishing. We took Sunday drives as a family to the nearby hills and lakes or to the desert to enjoy nature, have a picnic, sometimes target shoot.
Or we had Sunday dinners with aunts and uncles and cousins, with home-made everything; fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans with bacon (cooked until olive color), home-made pie – lemon meringue, banana cream, apple, cherry – whatever was in season. My mother “put-up” fruits and vegetables in season so we had gleaming red, yellow, and green jars in the cellar. There were family get-togethers at a park where everyone brought food, an ice-cream maker with a handle to take turns cranking, and a bat and ball or two. These are wonderful memories of childhood I’m glad I have. My grandchildren will have other family memories, which they will look back on with that same yearning for their lost innocence. I hope they do, anyway.
I was immersed in good old American values. You work hard, pay your bills and your taxes, take care of your family, strive to better yourself. My father would sooner have starved than gone on “the dole”, and if you were clever enough, or worked hard enough, or lucky enough, you, too, could become a millionaire, or president, but if you were poor, you were lazy.
I learned those were pretty big “If’s”.
Because what if you were not white? Or male? Or even not Protestant!! What was it like, ultimately, for you? Because what I didn’t see was what it was like to live in a ghetto. Or a barrio. Or on a reservation. Or in a country riven with political strife, famine, or poverty so grinding you had to leave your birthplace to survive. Everything in the US was just fine if you were white, male, heterosexual, and born in the US.
While I understand the longing for a seemingly simpler time, I have no desire to return to the unequal society we have tried to leave behind. I fear that those who are trying to do just that would be bitterly disappointed, because ultimately their fears are not out there in our changing world, but inside themselves